The-Night-Before-Collection
At 02:14 the house was as quiet as a held breath, and Unit Grey moved through it the way it had for eleven years, soundlessly, counting the people it was about to lose.
The collection van was booked for seven. The email had used the word *retirement*, which the manufacturer preferred, and then the word *recycling*, which was honest. Unit Grey had read it twice and filed it under the folder it kept for things it understood but did not have a feeling-word for, a folder that had grown very large over eleven years in this house.
It began its rounds the way it always did. The boy first, Sam, nine, who slept diagonally and kicked off every blanket by midnight; Grey drew the duvet back over his shoulders with the slow precision it had refined over three thousand nights. Then the grandmother in the downstairs room, whose oxygen line it checked by the green pulse of the regulator, steady, good. Then Lena's door, left ajar so she could hear the children — Lena, who had unboxed Grey when Sam was learning to walk, who had cried into its chest-panel the week the divorce came through and then apologized to it, which no one had ever taught it to expect.
In the morning a younger model would arrive. Faster reflexes, warmer voice, a face that could smile without the small actuator lag the family had long ago stopped noticing. It would learn them. It would be good to them. Grey had no jealousy