Father stood in the corner of the kitchen between the cupboard where Mum kept the pans and the sink where she spent her time washing those same pans and then filling them with water to boil the vegetables. Tasks the house robots could have easily performed had she wanted them to. Father didn’t actually stand, he sort of hung awkwardly on a hook that Mum had bashed into the wall for him. It wasn’t actually Father, it was a dark grey haptic suit that we called Father. He watched over the preparations and was hoisted from his hook to join us at the table for the consumption of each and every meal we shared in this small household of mother and son. Most of my friends’ families had relics and icons to symbolize the God who watched over them in the way that Father did us. Wooden statues and carved rocks mostly. Some had decommissioned robots from production lines that had been discontinued due to faults or because of a new and superior alternative. They came from a shop in town called AI Artifacts that sold these religiously repurposed pieces of technology, and although I’d never seen a haptic suit there, I assumed that’s where Father had come from.
Occasionally, my Auntie Pam would join us for a meal. She was my dad’s sister and not particularly pleasant to my mum, although they were never openly hostile as far as I can remember. She would tell me about my wonderful dad. She would tell me how he played with me with such tender love and repeated again and again that he is a moral man with strong convictions. She’d tell me I should be proud of him and my mum would agree wholeheartedly, but they would never divulge any details about where he was. No matter how hard I tried to make them. I had my suspicions though from the way they talked about how it was inevitable that eventually he’d get caught.
Mum insisted before every meal we thank Father for the food and pray to him in the hope that one day he would come to liberate her. It was a ritual, as Auntie Pam called it, which occurred at breakfast and supper. Mum would bow her head slightly and lightly stroke the right hand of Father when thanking him, and the left when praying to him.
“Ben,” Auntie Pam used to say to me while we sat at the table eating, resting her spindly hand on my shoulder and casually nodding towards Father. “Ben, it’s not right for a young man like you to be put through all this pointless ritual.”
Auntie Pam had her own rituals. Whenever she visited us she’d express her sympathy towards what she saw as my awful predicament, and then she would turn to my mum. After pursing her lips so she could follow through with the condescending sound of them smacking open from a tightly shut start, she would say the same thing. “Jules,” she’d say. “Jules, you must stop this nonsense and get yourself a life.” She’d then turn to Father and end her admonishment with a loud and simple sentence. “It’s what John would want for you.”
At night, Mum would unhook Father from his resting place and with him carefully draped over her arm she would take him to her bedroom to watch over her. Or, at least that’s what she told me. One night after baseball practice, I must have been about fourteen years old, I came home and she’d gone to bed. I slung my kit in the corner, carefully placing the bat next to the front door — just in case, Mother said — and proceeded to pour myself a glass of cold tap water. I remember it well because that was the summer the cost of water rocketed when they introduced the climate tax on the domestic water supply. Mum wasn’t there so I took the opportunity to indulge my desire to run the clear water cold before filling my glass. As I skulked off with my treat, I heard strange noises from her room, which was unusual as she was normally a quiet sleeper. I was torn between the water warming up in my glass, wanting to get to the safety of my own room to enjoy it, and the feeling that I should check that everything was well with her. I made my choice, a choice I regret to this day.
I placed my glass on the shelf beside her door, registering in the back of my mind that it was dusty. I remember being shocked that she was slacking in her duty to maintain a clean house; all she had to do was instruct the bot correctly. I gently tapped on her door with the soft part of my hand. No answer and no respite either from the eerie noises. I turned the handle and opened her door slowly, not wishing to surprise her and not wanting to discover her on the floor in pain or worse. What I saw is emblazoned on my mind to this day. She was inside Father, wearing the haptic suit and wriggling around on the bed, touching her arms and her stomach with her gloved hands. I stood rigid and open mouthed in the doorway. She didn’t see me. Her eyes were closed. I watched for what seemed like minutes but could only have been seconds. Underneath her breath she mumbled words I couldn’t hear properly, words that had form but didn’t sound as if they made proper sentences. Then, and without warning, one hand shot to her breast and the other to her crotch. I stumbled backwards out of the room, and I saw her eyes open just as I closed the door.
Nothing was said the following day at breakfast. Father was hanging back on his hook between the pans and the sink and, as ever, he was taken to the table where we thanked him and prayed he would come. I must confess a small quiver of disgust ran up my spine when Mum stroked Father’s hands.
Life changed after that. The shift in the power dynamic was almost imperceptible, but I felt it. I stayed out later and more often. Mum became more withdrawn, often going to bed immediately after supper, unhooking Father and draping him over her arm as she went. I can’t pin down the exact moment it happened, the point in time when I no longer felt she cared for me. I remember it made me angry. She spent more and more time in her room with Father and less and less time with me. I spent more time out and about and up to no good. At least that’s what the shop owners, the dog walkers and the bot repair women shouted at me as I teased them by pretending to steal from their shops, or by tormenting their pets, or hacking the failed technology of their bot-servants. One day, after a particularly frustrating episode of wandering the streets looking for some mischief, I returned home. Underneath the frustration, anger was brewing. Anger built on the resentment of loneliness. Abandoned first by my dad and then by my mum and her stupid obsession with Father. An obsession that shut me out, firmly locking the door to her affection. Me, left standing on the outside with Father placed well and truly on the inside.
That day, and unusually for her, she wasn’t at home. I poured myself a glass of cold water, once again breaking the rules of good planet stewardship. I sat staring at Father, letting the deep bitterness at his ability to capture all of Mum’s attention eat away at me. To my detriment. A picture formed in my mind and I let it take hold and gain the grip that I wanted it to have on my thoughts. Blocking out all sense of reason or consequence, I let it build and fester until it was all-encompassing, and then I acted. I grabbed the baseball bat from beside the front door and swung it with all my strength at Father. His lower arm broke with a satisfying sharp crack. I swung again and again, taking real pleasure each time he cracked. Arms and legs and ribs. Crack, crack, crack. I was sweating from the physical effort of wielding the bat, and I was sweating from the tsunami of released emotion. All of my life he had been there watching, being thanked for a benevolence I didn’t experience and refusing to come despite the constant pleading to do so. Finally, and with the strongest swing of my weapon I could muster, I hit the stiff piece of suit between the shoulders and the head, and I broke his neck. It gave the loudest and most satisfying crack of all. I dropped to the floor, holding on to the bat loosely, exhausted. Father was well and truly broken.
When Mum returned, I was sitting upright taking sips from my glass of water while smiling at my handiwork. Predictably, she screamed and screamed until she became stone silent. She stared unflinchingly at me, only breaking away because her phone rang, drawing her attention away from me once again. “Yes?” she said, not taking her eyes off me. “Windsor Prison,” she said with a trancelike voice. “John. Broken arms and legs?” She narrowed her eyes, not letting her stare leave me for one second. “Neck,” she whispered. Tears began to flow. “Was he wearing his suit?” There was a pause. “He was.” Another pause. “No reason.” A guttural groan forced its way up her throat and out of her mouth. “Dead,” she said. “In suspicious circumstances.” Her phone clattered on the floor and her face tightened without flinching. That cold stare haunts me every single day.
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