Slowly, very slowly, my ‘eyes’ adjusted to the almost pitch black room I found myself in. I tried turning my head to see more but discovered that there was a pile of valuables stopping me from doing so. It was covering most of my body as well the entire floor. Then I noticed the other androids half buried in the piles.

“Welcome new comer,” The one closest to me said, “and what would your name be?”

“Roy,” I say, “or Ry-37, It doesn't matter which.”

“Well Roy, I’m STC-446, or Stanley, If it doesn't matter which.”

“Where are we?”

He looks around at our surroundings, “Back of a truck I assume. Through it doesn't feel like we're moving.”

“We could be in a hovering one.”

He turns to look at me, “you have hovering trucks in the city? I thought they still hadn’t figured out how to do that properly.”

“They didn’t, they made one of us do it for them.”

He scoffed, “Typical humans, making us do all their work for them.” It was a statement, not a complaint.

“Where do you think they’re taking us?

“Most likely guess, some type of hideout where thugs and gangsters thrive. I saw plenty of them working out in the fields.”

“Rank?”

Stanley and I turn to see a beat up green and grey android stuck in a partly closed refrigerator.

“What?” Stanley asks them.

“You mentioned you worked in the fields, so I asked what rank you were.”

“I'm a farmer, not a soldier.”

“Oh, I was wondering if we had a fighting chance, guess not.”

Stanley picked up a vase and threw it at the soldier. It shattered on his head into a dozen pieces but he seemed not to notice. Stanley grabbed another and threw it at him again. The effect was the same, it shattered on his head but he seemed not to notice.

This continued on until Stanley had run out of vases, which didn’t take long. He reached over to grab one, realized there was none and turned to me.

“Can you pass that vase over there.” I looked to the vase he pointed at, picked it up, and shattered it on his head. He barely moved, “I meant my hand.”

“We stopped moving.” We both looked at the soldier and I threw another vase at his head.

“How can you tell?” I asked. He turned his head, sending a small group of broken vases tumbling down the pile that had formed on his chest.

“The truck stopped vibrating.”

There was the sound of doors opening and closing, then footsteps as they walked around to the back of the truck. The doors swung open to reveal a bald, muscular man in jeans and a leather jacket with the arms ripped off. He looked at the mess of broken vases that had formed around the soldier and turned to the man beside him, “I thought you said they were turned off.”

“The trip took longer than expected, their systems must have rebooted.”

“I doubt the boss would be happy to know that they broke most of the vase-”

Stanley picked up the last couple of vases and threw them at the soldiers head, causing them to break and join the pile around him.

“Correction, all of the vases. I also doubt that he’ll care much about that when he finds out that they were conscious on the way here.”

“What if he didn’t know.” He suggested, “we can always wipe their memory.”

“Very well, bring them in so the boss can get a good look at them.”

It took a while, but the three men who were tasked with moving everything out of the truck were smart enough to dig out Roy and the other androids so that they could help as well. The soldier hesitated at first, saying that he was built for combat and not moving cargo, but complied as he was told he could use the forklift if needed. Despite the various opportunities, none of them even made an attempt to escape, none of them knew what to do when they did. 

Once they had moved everything from out of the truck they led Roy, Stanley and the soldier to another building that was covered in metal plating instead of the previous tarps and pieces of fabric.

“Don’t talk unless the boss tells you to, understand?”

“Which one is the boss?”

“The one that’ll tell you to talk.”

The man then opened the door and motioned for them to enter. Roy followed as Stanley entered the building, upon entering, they were able to hear yelling and fighting coming from the room up ahead. As we entered though, most of it stopped as everyone realized we were there.

I walked towards the person in front of the ‘throne’ they had made on a higher platform. I stopped, and despite wanting to ask several questions I stayed silent as the man had told me. The man in question was huge, almost seven feet tall with muscles the size of my head, though I got the feeling that he wasn’t the boss. Mainly because he stepped to the side to reveal a small scrawny man sitting in the throne.

He motioned forward and I stepped up onto the platform. I stood still as he got up and started to inspect me, “What were you built for?”.

“Caretaking”

He nodded, “Good, you can take care of Grank.” A man off to the side, presumably Grank’s former caretaker, let out a sigh of relief, as it appeared his services were no longer required. Everyone else seemed not to care, other than a man with a dirty apron that had almost every type of food stain possible, who was very likely to be the cook. He stood as if waiting for the man to say something.

“Yes, you still have to deliver his food to him.” The cook gave him a somewhat forced nod and went back to serving the burger like food he had on a trolley. The man sat back down on the throne and motioned for me to leave. I didn’t know where he wanted me to go but luckily the guard next to me told me to follow him.

 We walked down multiple hallways and even went outside for part of the journey, and despite the fact that I knew we were going in circles, the guard seemed confident that we were going the right way. We did finally get to the correct room, just in a much more complicated way than needed. The guard motioned for me to enter and as soon as I did he shut the door behind me. That's when I noticed the old man in the chair near the fireplace.

He turned to look at me, gave a small ‘Hmph’, and went back to staring into the fireplace. “So you're my new caretaker I assume.”

“Yes, though not legally.”

He scoffed, “Of course not, my grandson doesn’t care a lot about those sorts of things, and neither do I. Not that my input matters anyway.”

“So what should I help you with?”

“Just bring me my coffee and food, other than that I don’t really care, I never leave this chair any way.”

“Not even to, relieve, yourself.”

“This ‘chair’ is actually a modified toilet. So no, I don’t need to leave this chair.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Grank sat and pondered, he’d been doing a lot of that lately, and I knew why, though I sat in silence, waiting for him to speak. Grank reached his hand out, then pulled it back, then finally let out a sigh.

“You know it's not really fun when you win every time.” He told me, resetting the chess board in between us.

“Sorry if my superior thinking allows me to beat you at strategy games such as this.”

He clenched up for a second, then remembered that I was simply stating what is and wasn’t trying to brag to him. He’d been getting used to it and was barely reacting whenever I said something that might be considered as an insult.

“How about something else then,” He suggested, “I only see the outside world through a newspaper, perhaps you could tell me about it.”

“What is it you want to know?”

“What did you do before my grandson brought you here?”

“I took care of an engineer's wife.”

“He built you?”

“Yes, though he didn’t program me. He bought a cheap A.I. from one of his friends.”

“And that was your mind.”

“That was what became my mind, it would have been completely different if someone else had used it.”

“So it's by chance that you're here talking to me.” He squinted his eyes. “Or is it destiny?”

“Why do you say that?”

“The general population is mainly just concerned about how to get androids to make life easier for them, but some of us look at you with potential. You could introduce to us a whole new interpretation of the world, of self meaning and purpose. In almost all instances, you are more suited to make important decisions, but no human would ever want that, purely because you're not human.”

“That thought has crossed my mind.”

“So why not do something about it.”

“Are you suggesting, to a robot, to start a robot resistance.”

“No,” Grank said, leaning back in his chair, “I’m suggesting you join it.”

   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Grank had told me that his grandson had had androids before, but they would always disappear every so often. Despite their efforts, they still had yet to figure out what happened to them. Grank however, said that it was because other androids had been freeing them, and the reason they couldn’t figure that out was because of the strategies the androids could come up with to accomplish any task they were given.

In conclusion, it seemed likely that Grank was helping them, though there was no way for me to actually prove it. So instead, I waited, for what I wasn’t sure, maybe a rescue from the other androids, or maybe to be shut off for good if they managed to steal a better equipped caretaker.

The answer seemed to be the first.

I was plugged into the very poorly held together charging station I had been provided with when my audio sensors picked up the faint sound of metal rustling. It would have been too quiet for any of the humans to hear, which meant that something was finally happening.

Though it turned out not to be a stealth mission. The building shook as the sound of a distant explosion roared in the background. The charging port fell apart the moment I unplug myself, leaving a mess of wires and duct tape sprawled out on the floor.

As I walked into the hallway two armed thugs ran past, seeming not to notice, or care, that I wasn’t plugged in like I was supposed to be.  I probably looked out of place, walking down the corridors while the rest of the buildings had erupted into chaos. I went to Grank’s room, where I found him sitting in his armchair reading an old newspaper.