This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2019 Spring Print edition. It was awarded the 2019 Best Fiction Prize by Guest Judge Emily Gould.
Illustration by Lalitha Maduri
Dad came home from the hospital and now he is a robot. His brain is a MedCorp PlatinumCerebroTM Model 6.3.
Robot dad is a little strange but we love him anyway. He was watching football just the other day when he began to scream, like he always does, but the things that came out were a little odd: “ducking pieces of shit!” he yelled forcefully. Someone fumbled a pass: “jesus’s fucking crisps alright tea!” An interception: “I can’t take this to store!” Later, we were informed by the doctors that autocorrect was the default setting on dad’s robot brain. Dad was not happy about this, and our mother reluctantly took him for an appointment so they could reconfigure his settings.
Dad does not like it when we call him Robo-Dad. We also tried The Bot-Father but he began to sweat and get red so we stopped. Little brother had to fan him with a sheet of paper just so he could get back to standard operating temperature.
One day Little and Middle brother were in their room playing VR soccer when Middle knocked over a pottery figurine someone had painted at a birthday party. “My puppy!” Little shrieked, trying to piece together the figurine’s shattered remains. “You broke him!”
Middle shoved his hand over Little’s mouth to stifle his screeching.
“Shut up!” Middle said. “If you don’t tell anyone, I’ll give you ten bucks.”
Little grinned behind Middle’s hand. “Okay!”
“I’ll give it to you tomorrow,” Middle said with a wave, and darted away to find the Roomba 12.0 to clear away the mess. After some time, he found the Roomba sitting on the side table in our father’s study. Dad was sitting in his leather armchair, one of his hands holding a book while the other stroked the cleaning device.
He did not seem to notice when Middle entered the room.
“Um, dad?” Middle said.
“Hmmmmm?”
“Can I maybe use the Roomba? Little broke something.”
“Of course,” dad said, turning to Middle and smiling. He looked over at the Roomba he was still lovingly petting and jerked away from it, as if he had not known it was there or what he had been doing. “Here, just take it!” he said quickly, shoving the Roomba into Middle’s arms.
From then on dad and the Roomba kept a wide berth of each other.
Dad did not go outside as often as he did before he became a robot. Gone were the Sunday morning donut shop runs, and we oddly missed the embarrassing jogs he used to take around the neighborhood clad in obscenely tight red spandex running pants. Instead, dad sat constantly in his study, attached to his charging port while staring at the oscillations of his desk fan. We were convinced this self-isolation had something to do with embarrassment over having become a robot.
“It’s so normal,” Older sister assured him. “Pretty much everyone will be a robot in the future. My friend at school burned out his retinas in the VR machine and they replaced his eyeballs. He says he can see through everyone’s clothes now but I don’t believe him.”
Little began to cry. “But I don’t wanna be a robot!”
Middle whacked him on the arm. “Stop that, you’re making daddy feel bad! There’s nothing wrong with being a robot!” But Little was still crying. “Would you rather daddy have died? Is that what you want?”
“If the choice was between Robo-Dad or Dead Dad, I’d pick Robo-dad any day,” Older sister said.
But Little cried on, and dad began to get hot again.
“That is enough!” mother declared. “Your father is still your father, robot or not. We will have no more of this talk!” Then she sent us to our rooms while she poured our father iced tea and helped him attach to his charging port.
The fact that our father was a robot did not come up again until Middle asked if he could bring him in for show-and-tell at school. This came on the heels of a comment from Older, who said proving to everyone that he had a robot dad would greatly increase Middle’s street cred.
Mother was very upset at this request. “Your father may be a robot, but he is not a spectacle!”
“I want to do it,” dad said, surprising us all. “I do not want to hide in this house anymore. I want the children to see me with my robot brain so that they will not be afraid.”
Middle was ecstatic. He asked if he could paint dad’s face silver, so the message would really hit home. This request was declined.
The day Middle brought our father to school was hot one. The A/C in the classroom was very weak. Dad was sweating profusely and everyone could hear the whirring of his robot brain inside his metal skull.
“So, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?” the teacher asked him. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He blinked very slowly. “Is everything okay?”
In response to the teacher’s question our father’s robot brain exploded.
Bloody wires and molten, steaming skin flew about the room. The children began to scream. With pieces of our father’s metal skull stuck in his hair, Middle cradled our dying robot father in his arms. “I’m sorry, daddy!” he sobbed. “Please don’t die.”
“Someone call 911!” a person yelled from the back. Another asked: “Does anyone have rice?”
Soon an ambulance came and took our father to the hospital.
When he was returned to us he was much the same as before, except that now he had a MedCorp PlatinumCerebroTM Model 7.1. It turned out that we had overlooked a notification that our father’s old robot brain had been recalled due to being too prone to overheating.
We all hugged Robo-Dad close. “I love you, robot daddy,” Little said. “I was so scared when you exploded.”
“I was scared too, little man,” dad said. “When I was sitting in that classroom, half-dead, most of my brains spewed out, all I could think about were dogs. All sorts of dogs. Big, massive, giant dogs. Small, yappy, fluffy dogs. Even stuffed dogs. They were all standing in a circle, staring at me, watching me. Like they wanted something. Something from me....” We exchanged concerned looks, but decided not to read too much into it. Robo-Dad had said strange things before.
Later that night we went to the study to bring dad some ice cream. He was sitting there like always, reading a book in his big chair. The Roomba was in his lap. From the doorway we could hear it whirring.
Quietly the three of us crept away. The ice cream, we decided, could wait.