Captain Asimov by Steve Antczak Jeevs cleaned up after dinner, loading all the dishes into the washer, but first washing them by hand as per Mrs. Moynahan's explicit instructions. Then Jeevs vacuumed the upstairs while the rest of the family watched vids downstairs in the holo chamber. Jeevs thought of them as the "rest" of the family, because he was programmed to think of himself as a Moynahan, subservient to the rest of the them, but still one of them. Just as he was programmed to think of himself as himself. The upstairs was vacuumed by the time Mr. and Mrs. Moynahan were finished with their family obligations . . . quality time with their children, which Jeevs had figured amounted to an hour and forty-seven minutes and ten seconds for the three of them. The Moynahans sometimes spoiled their children and gave them a full two hours. Then it was off to Social Club with the adults, and Jeevs was responsible for getting the little 'uns to bed. It helped that he was faster, stronger and able to leap taller pieces of furniture than they were. It also helped that he had shock-hands, and if they were bad he could stun them with a quick jolt of electricity and have them tucked into bed before they regained awareness. It was usually easier to either wear them out with games or read them to sleep. The youngest child was Fermi, and he liked nothing better than to have Jeevs read him the lastest superhero comicbooks. Fermi was too young to actually read, but he looked at the pictures while Jeevs recited the story and dialogue from memory. "Read Captain Battle!" Fermi yelled in his excitement. He had a repertoire of favorites: Captain Battle, Warchick, Meathook and Bonesaw, Funkiller, and The Justice Legion of Avenging Angels. They were all of the hit first and hit again later variety, and Jeevs privately considered them a little too violent for a little boy Fermi's age. But being a robot meant he didn't have the right to express an opinion of such a human nature, which was perfectly all right by Jeevs. He was perfectly happy to serve his owners well. It was in his program. To perform poorly resulted in a deep depression which could only be alleviated by going the extra mile so to speak with the housework. He had once gotten the carpet so clean he swore he could see his reflection in it. The Moynahans had to take him in to get his optics retooled. "Captain Battle versus Cardinal Carnage in The Holy Terror Part Three," Jeevs announced in a perfectly pitched square-jawed news anchor voice. Fermi clapped his hands and rubbed them together greedily. "Yeeeeaaaahhh!" Next was the only daughter, Jesse, and she didn't like to be read to at all. That didn't mean she could read, because she couldn't, but she had a series of make-believes she liked Jeevs to act in with her. One of them was Jeevs as the White Stallion and Jesse as the Princess, riding through the Enchanted Forest after having escaped from the clutches of the evil Duke. She would climb onto Jeevs plasti-frame shoulders and he would gallop her throughout the entire house. Jesse pretended the door frames were dragons swooping low to grab her off the White Stallion. "A dragon, a dragon!" she would yell as they approached a door frame, and then cover her eyes with her hands as Jeevs ducked down a mere instant before she would have collided with it. The oldest was Horace, and he had a jealous streak where Jeevs' time was concerned. He enjoyed having Jeevs read him science fiction books before bed. He couldn't read either, and was therefore typical as boys his age went. Despite the fact that most of the science fiction books he liked to hear were hopelessly outdated, he really seemed to like having them read to him by a robot, especially ones with robots in them. Jeevs knew this because Horace wouldn't let either his mother or his father read to him. Of course that might've been because they could only read the primary reader versions of the books . . . like most adults in modern society, the Moynahans were illiterate except on the most rudimentary level. They could tell the difference between the words MEN and WOMEN, for instance, even without the accompanying Greek symbols. They got confused once at a place with GENTS and LADIES. But Horace's favorite authors were Asimov, Bradbury, Del Rey, Sladek, anyone with a lot of robot stories. "Come on Jeeeeevs!" Horace yelled at the robot on the fourth pass through the living room, or as it was known in this make-believe, the Haunted Wood. "A ghost!" Jesse screamed when she saw her older brother trying to get Jeevs' to stop. Jeevs was about to duck underneath the chandelier in the main hall -- "A falling star!" Jesse yelled. -- when Horace suddenly rolled a toy truck right at his feet. The robot stepped on the truck, and his one leg went flying out behind him. With his inhuman dexterity he managed to maintain his footing long enough to lift Jesse off his shoulders and toss her onto the plush sofa where she landed harmlessly. Then Jeevs' footing gave out and he plunged head-first into the wall. Blackness. It was not unlike being shut off to conserve his power supply, except this time it had been unexpected. Jeevs knew it probably would have been rather painful too, had he been a human. This was not something he thought while "unconscious". He thought nothing. There were no dreams or anything like that. He just stopped being until somebody turned him back on and he was Jeevs again, ready to work. Except, when he was turned on, he had other thoughts aside from musing about pain. His head was a-jumble with images from Captain Battle and Isaac Asimov's robot stories. The three laws of robotics scrolled through his memory over and over and over . . . A robot may not injure a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given to it by a human being unless such orders conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence unless such protection conflicts with the First and Second Laws. And swimming through these Laws, underlying them, was the cry of Captain Battle: "Fists . . . do the talking!" Jeevs went back to work, although the children were no longer allowed to play with him before bed like before. The quality time with Mom and Dad stretched another hour into the early news broadcasts on the holo. Jeevs overheard a report about battlebots, designed by the military and sent into any number of small hot spot countries, where they efficiently murdered hundreds of villagers day and night until self-destructing. The report stated that there was a certain probability that a few of these killing drones had not self-destructed and continued to mutilate their way through certain South American countries. To top the story with a generous helping of horrific prophecy, the anchor suggested there was always a possibility one could wind up in your neighborhood someday, hacking and slashing and shooting to pieces your children. Then he ended with his usual, "And may the good news be your news." Jeevs was puzzled. Hadn't these robots ever heard of the Three Laws? Weren't they imprinted with them from day one? One day Jeevs was outside mowing the lawn, using a push mower because Mr. Moynahan liked to see Jeevs actually working. A remote mower that Jeevs could have controlled from inside while washing the dishes or something would have been much more efficient. "Hard work's good for you," Moynahan would tell Jeevs, as if speaking to an actual person. "Gives you character." Jeevs never bothered to wonder just what a robot would do with character. While he was mowing the front yard, one of the robot street cleaners came down the road. Jeevs stopped and watched it as it approached. It looked very reminiscent of the battlebots he'd seen on the news. Some of the neighborhood children were playing in the street ahead of it, and it sounded several warning beeps as it grew near. Jeevs turned off the mower, and went inside. Mr. Moynahan was sitting in his massage chair, asleep, and didn't see Jeevs sneak past him and go upstairs. Jeevs went into the Moynahans' closet for winter clothes and found Mr. Moynahan's ski mask, made of a lightweight yet warm material called Nylar. It was red with white circles around the eye holes, and elastic so it fit snuggly over Jeevs' head when he put it on. On the other side of the closet he located Mrs. Moynahan's hot pink cape, the one she wore to the Governor's costume ball and made of the same Nylar yet non-elastic, and fastened that around his neck. Though he hurried he didn't fumble or drop anything. He was a robot, with unnatural dexterity. Within moments he was costumed and ready to do battle with the disguised Battlebot outside. Sure, it may have the appearance of a street cleaner, but there was something about the way it bore down on those children, slightly faster than a real street cleaner so only a robot would really notice. Humans tended to miss subtle clues like that, but not robots and certainly not Jeevs. Dealing with the Moynahan children had trained him to notice any little alteration as in, say, a slight wobble in the mower indicating one of the kids had loosened the wheels so they would come off while Jeevs mowed the grass. Or Jeevs might catch one of the children faking illness to get out of having to go to what passed for school these days. The palms might be clammy, the temperature high on a damp forehead, and then Jeevs would reach underneath the pillow to find a washcloth that had soaked in hot water. "They're just the most devilish little rascals, aren't they?" Mrs. Moynahan would ask rhetorical...
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