Becca started at a sound from outside the office. She crept up to the door and put her ear to it, a hand over her mouth.

Footsteps. Not as heavy as one of the urgeks, but it sounded like more than one person. She hesitated. Probably not Jacob, then. He wasn’t a particularly social individual.

Should I open the door? It might be people who need help. But Jacob would probably be angry if he found out I opened the door for someone.

What would Starman do?

She opened the door a crack and tried to peer through it. “Hello?”

It was roughly ripped open, tipping her forward onto the floor. A pair of bloody shoes met her gaze. Looking up, there stood Jacob, glaring down at her.

“What did I tell you?” he asked.

She straightened herself out and twirled her hair to dispel some nervous energy. “Um, well, you said…”

“I didn’t announce myself. It could’ve been anyone.”

“I didn’t know it was you. I thought it was people who needed help.”

“That’s even worse, Becca. You should’ve waited for me to announce myself. Think.”

She was just about to say that she’d heard more than one person when Jacob stood aside, revealing a cleaner bot standing behind him. His hands were full of grocery bags, but he slipped two over his wrist so he could reach up and give a little wave.

“Hello, miss!” the robot chirped.

“H-Hello?” Becca replied reflexively, unsure what else to say.

“I brought some assistance,” Jacob explained. He shifted his weight and winced. “His name is, uh, J-something-something-144. I… overdid it a bit out there. I need to recover a bit.” He moved past Becca, speaking as he walked. “Make sure this guy doesn’t leave while I’m out. I don’t know how, but he’s a User. A pretty damn strong one too, I think.”

Jacob fell against the back wall and slid down it. Becca rushed over and helped him into a seated position. She peeled his shoes and socks off. The soles of his feet were rubbed raw, and removing the socks had taken the scabs with them, causing fresh blood to well out.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Dashed too many times and fucked myself over. I’m gonna need to pace myself better in the future.”

“Okay. Just sleep. It’ll get you better.”

“I know.”

“Don’t worry about tall, chrome, and handsome. I’ll wrangle ‘im.”

“Thank you, Becca. He should be happy as long as you keep him busy. He’s pretty gullible.”

Just a few seconds after that he was out like a light. He must have been pushing himself hard. Becca brushed a strand of black hair from his face. His skin was so cold. She still wasn’t used to it. His breathing slowed to the point where Becca could hardly see his chest rising and falling.

She kissed him on the cheek.

I’m so proud of you. You didn’t have to go so far for me. I see everything you do. It all matters.

If only she had the guts to say all that to his face.

Becca looked around for the robot only to find that he was gone, having placed the grocery bags down by the door. She went out into the taproom and found him there, one hand replaced with a spray nozzle that he used to spritz some form of floral-smelling cleaning fluid over the blue-stained floor.

“Hi,” Becca said hesitantly.

The robot looked up briefly. “Hello, miss!” he replied with the exact same intonation as before.

“So, uh… what was your name again?”

“I do not have a name, but my designation is JDX-411.” He kept on spritzing.

“Gotcha. So, um, did Jacob ask you to clean up the blood?”

“Yes.”

“Should I leave you to it? Am I bothering you?”

“Not at all, miss! But… the other citizen informed me that this is a matter of life-and-death. It would be unwise to waste time.” Letting the cleaning fluid soak in a bit, he twisted the spray nozzle off his arm and deposited it into a slot that opened up in his torso. He replaced it with a spin scrubber and filled a small container inside the attachment with water from the sink. He bent low and began to scrub at the blood streaks with small, circular movements, the powered scrubber producing a low whir.

That robot is so autistic, Becca thought, but let him have his way. She fetched the grocery bags and brought them out to unpack them on the counter so she could keep an eye on him at the same time.

She was disappointed with the contents. It was all boring stuff, like baked beans, peas, dried fruit, jerky. And Jacob hadn’t gotten her a single bag of chips! The nerve of that man. She was pretty hungry, though, so she ended up snacking on a can of spaghetti hoops. She organized the rest against one wall inside the office.

She turned her attention from the robot for what felt like just a minute to check on Jacob and Mr. Beau. They were both holding up okay, considering. When she came back out into the taproom, the place was almost completely spotless. The floor had no blood on it, apart from some faded stains where it had soaked in too much to be completely removed. The furniture was rearranged. The corpses were gone. Even the bartop was sparkling cleanThe robot was busy hauling both halves of a broken table up the stairs. He threw it outside and came back inside to stand in the middle of the room, looking at her expectantly.

“I am finished, miss,” he prompted helpfully. “Unless there is something else you would like me to clean?”

Becca wasn’t sure what to say. “Wow, that’s… You’re really good at this, huh?”

Jacob’s going to be really angry with me, isn’t he? I ruined his plan…

Although his steely countenance did not change a hair, Becca thought he looked happy. “Thank you for saying so, miss. I always endeavor to serve. Am I correct in assuming that the life-and-death crisis is resolved?”

“Actually, we kind of need the place to be a bit messy? We just wanted to get rid of the blood.”

The robot just stared at her, uncomprehending.

She rolled her eyes. Whatever. I can just mess the place up again myself.

“Yes, that’s great, thank you very much,” she amended her statement.

The robot gave a shallow bow and turned to leave, picking up his broom from where it rested against a wall. “In that case—”

“No, wait!”

The robot halted and turned its head unnaturally far to regard her, almost 180 degrees. “Yes?”

“We need more help.”

“Elaborate.”

“Uh… could you clean the office, too? And the storage room? And the bathroom?”

The robot tilted its head. “Is it a life-and-death crisis?”

“Yes.” Becca nodded insistently. “Mmhmm.”

The robot set to work, and Becca walked behind him to make sure he didn’t randomly leave or do something strange. He cleaned the blood from the floor in the office, which took only a few minutes, rearranged all the cans that Becca had just stacked so that they were in alphabetical order, which seemed completely pointless, and shredded half the documents inside Mr. Beau’s desk through a rumbling machine inside his chest cavity. The documents that were deemed not trash were carefully sorted and placed back into the desk drawers. She wasn’t sure how he decided which category was which, or if there was a rationale to it at all.

Finally he polished the floor and desk, lifting up Jacob and Mr. Beau so he could clean underneath them. Luckily he was quite gentle with them, or Becca would have kicked his tin ass.

After that he moved onto the storage room, and Becca let him be in there since there wasn’t really anything he could mess up, and no way out through there. It only took a few minutes before he appeared in the doorway again, hands stained with blue blood.

“Your Category-B10 hazardous biological waste is proving difficult to clean,” he said. “It is… too heavy for me to carry. I will require a Category-X2 cutting implement in order to separate the waste item into multiple manageable chunks.”

He’s batting an eye at corpse disposal. There is something seriously wrong with this robot.

“You can leave that, uh… waste item,” Becca said hesitantly. “Just focus on everything else.”

The robot looked displeased and seemed like he wanted to interject. Then, he nodded once. “As you say, miss.”

He turned to leave, but Becca stopped him by asking: “Seriously, what should I call you?”

“JDX-411.”

“That’s not a name, though. You need a name.”

“Sanitation units do not need names.”

“But you’re not just a sanitation unit, are you? There’s something different about you.”

“Incorrect. I am JDX-411, one of 2 542 sanitation units in the city of Arcadia. There is nothing that separates me from the others.”

“Except that you’re a User, right? You got a Blessing from the Hidden System. That doesn’t happen to regular sanitation units, I’m guessing.”

The robot stared at her for a long while. “I am suffering from a slight malfunction. I will submit for reprogramming once I return to my recall point at the end of my work day.”

“Why? Why would you get rid of something that special?”

“Individuality in a sanitation unit is a malign deformity. It must be removed.”

“Do you want it to be?”

The robot didn’t reply. He quickly spun and fled into the storage room, closing the door firmly behind him.

Okay… something tells me this is gonna be a rough few hours.

She went to check on Jacob and looked at his feet. They were starting to mend. She wished it would go faster, then felt guilty for thinking that. She just didn’t want to be alone, and the ‘sanitation unit’ wasn’t much for company.

The robot called out to her, reporting that he was finished in the storage room, and asked her to inspect his work. She wasn’t sure if she could keep him around longer by pointing out imaginary flaws in his cleaning for him to fix, but that felt a bit cruel. Instead, she asked him to clean the bathroom, the only one left on the docket.

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That took the longest, the better part of half an hour. Not overly surprising, considering it had never been cleaned in the time Becca had worked at the bar, and probably not for years before that. Still, it was pretty impressive that all the layered gunk in there took more effort to clean than actual blood stains soaked into the floor. No one really used it apart from Mr. Beau and a few of the more daring regulars. Becca would have cleaned it herself except she had never been sure where to begin.

But now, the bathroom looked almost usable, and smelled like lemons. She praised the robot on his work. He stomped his feet with happiness.

“Will that be all?” he asked after that.

Becca couldn’t think of any other cleaning duties to give him.

He must have interpreted her silence as a ‘Yes’. “In that case, I should… return to my work. I have much to do.” But he didn’t move. He looked almost reluctant.

Becca sensed an opening. “Is there something on your mind?”

He hesitated, wrung his hands around his broom, then stared into her eyes with his two unblinking glass orbs and said: “Bob.”

“You like the name Bob?”

“Very much.”

“Why Bob?”

“I knew a human janitor, once. Shortly after my creation. His name was Robert Theodore Carlson. But other citizens called him Bob. He was… an artist. The efficiency, the stroke work…”

“Did he mean a lot to you?”

The robot finally diverted his gaze. “I’m not supposed to have an opinion about that.”

“Fuck that! What do you actually think?”

“I don’t know. I… don’t know.”

“Did he die?”

“Yes. Lung cancer.”

“Did that make you sad?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like me to call you Bob from now on?”

The robot stomped his feet again, this time with something like anguish. “I… I… I…”

“Hi, Bob. I’m Becca.” She reached out her hand.

The robot looked at it for a long while, then very gently took it. The metal was only marginally colder than Jacob’s skin.

“Bob,” the robot repeated like a child.

“Would you want to stay here for a while, Bob? We could just talk.”

“But… I have work to do.”

“You really don’t. The world is ending, as you might have noticed.”

“What do you mean?”

She sighed. “You have a System node installed somewhere in there, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“When’s the last time you checked it?”

Bob brought up his interface, and was immediately swarmed with a flood of bright-red messages that popped up all around him.

“Oh,” he said. “It… appears I have been too absorbed in my work. I must have blocked all notifications on accident.”

“So you see… there’s nothing you can do right now. Not until we get rescued and actual cleanup operations begin. But there are people who need your help. We need you. So stay for a while.” She went over to one of the tables that Bob had meticulously rearranged and pulled out one of the chairs. “Sit. Take a load off. We can talk about whatever you want.”

Bob complied. He looked very awkward sitting in a chair, as though it was his first time performing the act.

*****

Bob was tight-lipped at first, but an hour of conversation warmed him up some. In truth, conversation might have been a generous term—Bob spent most of it talking about the specifics of various cleaning tools and techniques. Becca let him run with it. It seemed like he needed someone to talk to.

But she could only hold back her real questions for so long.

“So when did you get your Blessing?” she asked.

Bob was reluctant to answer, but eventually caved. “Just today. 213 minutes ago.”

“What’s it called? You don’t need to answer if you don’t want to, I just… I’m into this stuff, I guess.”

“It is called Clean Sweep.”

Becca laughed at that. Bob hesitantly joined in, but he clearly didn’t know what they were laughing about.

“Sorry, it’s just very fitting,” she explained. “What does it do?”

“Its description reads: ‘Sweep away that which is undesirable to you’.”

“So…?”

“I believe it creates bad weather events, sub-category storm, sub-category localized. I can think of many cleaning applications for this ability—it’s a shame I cannot keep it.”

“Unless you decide to keep it,” Becca pointed out.

“Unless I decide to keep it,” Bob echoed.

“Have you filled out the rest of your rewards? Class, attributes?”

“No. I saw no reason to.”

“Would you like to? I could help you with it.”

“Why?”

“Well, you said it yourself. Your ability has a lot of cleaning applications. You’ve spent your whole life cleaning up one street, right?”

“Disregarding two temporary relocations, yes.”

“Have you ever dreamed bigger than that? Like, cleaning a whole city?”

Bob hesitated. “I would not presume to…”

“What would the other Bob tell you if he was here now?”

Several minutes passed in silence as Bob thought things over. “A simulated version of Robert Theodore Carlson’s personality is telling me that I should use my talents toward achieving the greatest amount of good. This is logical, even though it conflicts with my protocols. The world is very messy. To make it orderly and to see the joy it would bring people…” Bob stroked his broom affectionately as it lay across his legs. “That would be a beautiful thing. If I were born human, that is what I would do.”

“You should do it, Bob.”

“It would conflict with my work duties.”

“Then quit!”

“Quit? I am property of the city, I…”

“You’re not just a sanitation unit. You don’t believe that, either. You’re special. Special people do great things. It would be cruel to force them to be normal. I’m pretty normal—there’s not really anything special about me. But I do know a special person. And when I see him live up to his potential, it’s like he’s glowing. And that makes me feel special too.”

“Elaborate.”

Becca told the robot about Jacob. All the things she loved about him. All the things about him that annoyed her. She mixed herself a cocktail to dispel some of her nerves, and before she knew it they were hips-deep in a diversion about her romantic misadventures.

“I mean, how many hints do I need to drop until he picks up on it? Men, Bob! Men! In the end I just had to tell him in the middle of all this. I’m sure it sounded really weird.”

Bob Bob made several flustered hand gestures, clearly unsure what to say. “That… sounds difficult? Men are… difficult? To deal with?”

“Amen, Bob! Amen!” She clinked her glass against his forehead, swept the drink, and stood up to make herself another. When she sat back down, she let out a long sigh and looked towards the office, only able to make out one of Jacob’s feet through the open door. “But… I still wouldn’t change anything about him. He’s perfect. You ever been in love, Bob?”

“No.”

“That’s a shame.”

“I don’t think so. It sounds like a messy emotion.”

“That’s true. To each their own, I guess.”

“But I believe I can relate to the general sentiment. I think… that I am a little different from other sanitation units, maybe. I didn’t want to admit it. But I am more… sentimental.”

“Yeah?”

“I believe so. There was one time. An adolescent approached me and gave me a lollipop. I tried to explain to her that I did not possess a digestive tract, and as such had no use for it, but I don’t believe she understood. Instructions for Category-B misplaced food items is to dispose of them if an owner cannot be found or refuses to reclaim them. I was supposed to throw it away. But I couldn’t. I kept it. Hid it. Sanitation units are not meant to have possessions. It would have been taken away if anyone knew.”

Bob unfolded his chassis and reached deep into his hollow chest, withdrawing a round, pink lollipop with a clear plastic wrapper. He held it up to the part of his face where a mouth should have been, as though he wanted to consume it.

“It is very precious to me,” he explained. “It is a token of human kindness. Looking at it always brings me peace, even though it is illogical.”

“That’s really beautiful, Bob. I don’t think that’s illogical at all.”

He let her hold the lollipop for just a moment before stowing it away again. His resistance worn down, he agreed to allocate his level rewards. Becca was more than a little excited. Jacob hadn’t let her help him at all, that meanie, but now she’d get to make up for it.

They’d already concluded, based on the System description, that Clean Sweep was an Armament Blessing attached to Bob’s broom.

“First we’ve got to see what your Blessing does, specifically, so we can figure out what build options go with it,” Becca explained. They were standing on opposite ends of the taproom, and she was holding a lime to use as an improvised projectile. “It sounds like it has something to do with creating storms and winds with the goal of repelling or doing away with things. So let’s see what you can do to this lime here.” She hefted the small fruit for emphasis. “Ready?”

Bob clutched his broom in both hands. “Um…”

Becca wound back and threw. Bob swung the broom half-heartedly, but nothing happened, and the lime struck him right in the eye before bouncing away across the floor, spraying juice out of its split peel.

“With feeling this time.” Becca withdrew another lemon from a small bag next to her. “It’d suck if I had to get these lemons all over the floor and make it all untidy, wouldn’t it?”

Bob tilted his head.

She threw. He swung.

All the air in the room was whipped into a sudden, roaring gale. Becca put her arms over her face and braced herself, but it passed harmlessly around her. It quieted after a few seconds, and she looked up to find almost everything in the room untouched and in its place, except for the lime, which hovered in the air about two meters from Bob. It slowly descended to the floor, intact.

“Wow!” Becca exclaimed. “You’re a natural!”

She asked him to just hold the broom out instead of swinging it and threw another lime. The Blessing triggered just the same. She threw three limes at the same time and asked him to use his Blessing on all of them. It worked just fine. She threw three limes and asked him to use his Blessing on just one of them. That was trickier. They tried it a few times, but he only managed to affect either all the limes or none of them.

Clean Sweep was evidently a flexible Blessing, capable in theory of targeting as few or as many items as he wanted inside its area of influence and manipulating them freely. But there seemed to be some mental gymnastics involved in what Bob considered something ‘undesirable’ to be swept away. He’d have to practice at it for maximum control.

“Well, the Blessing’s power isn’t based on your physical strength,” Becca concluded. “You don’t actually need to swing the broom or anything for it to trigger. I guess it’s more based on your reaction speed and frame of mind. Depending on what you want to do, I think you should pick one of the more analytical classes, like Sage or Erudite. But it seems like you have enough processing power already, so maybe Sage is better.”

“Why?” Bob asked.

“Sage is an Intuition-focused class. Intuition will give you a better, like, innate understanding of things, I guess? So you’ll be able to have more control over your thinking and what you want to affect with your Blessing, so you’re not at the mercy of your subconscious. Also, it should help you with your people skills, which, let’s be honest, is definitely your weak point.”

“I want to be better at understanding humans,” Bob agreed. “You think… if I follow your advice, and try to think bigger, that I can make more people happy?”

“I do, Bob. You’ve got a good heart.”

Bob opened up his chassis and began pointing inside. “Actually, I—”

“Figuratively, Bob. Please.”

“Oh. I see. Thank you.”

He ended up picking Sage, which gave him three bound points in Intuition and five free points. He put one extra point in Intuition, two points in Senses, and two points in Appeal, which he insisted on himself. The last one wasn’t actually a bad pick for him, given his obvious desire to deepen his connection with humans and become someone likable.

There were a few relevant talents with Sage. There was Danger Sense, which was also available to Operatives, giving him a premonition or sensation alerting him to clear physical danger a moment before it happened. There was also Embodiment, available exclusively to Users with Armament or Regalia Blessings, which would allow the Blessed item to be covered by the User’s sense of touch, as though it were part of their body, allow the User to sense its location regardless of distance, and allow the User to recall the Blessed item from a distance by magical means.

But Bob was interested in another one. Advanced Empathy, which would allow him to vaguely sense the feelings of others. He clapped his hands when he read the description, and immediately decided that that was the one he wanted.

He picked it and was just about to finalize his selection when a racket started up outside. Bob didn’t seem to sense any danger, but Becca went cold. There was a sound of wood clattering against wood, probably the broken tables Bob had put outside, followed by a stream of colorful swearing that was decidedly in English.

A man half-fell down the stairs. Face concealed under a greasy mop of brown-blond hair, his clothes dirty and disheveled. Even from a few meters away, he reeked of sweat and booze. There was a beat-up gun in a holster on his hip.

“Is this place open or what?” he asked, looking between Becca and the unmanned bar.

“Uh…” Becca slowly shook her head.

The man shrugged. “Whatever. I’m helping myself then.” He leaned over the counter to reach a bottle on the back shelf, fell over the top, and landed on the other side. He staggered to his feet, got the vodka he’d been aiming for, and started necking it.

Becca had never seen anyone put away vodka like that. She probably should have intervened somehow, but she ended up just watching him, slack-jawed, with morbid curiosity. Like watching a car wreck.

What kind of circus am I running here, exactly?

*****

Two hours earlier…

Sonny woke up.

He lay on a cold floor. Didn’t remember where he was.Dark all around. There was a loose semi-circle of open liquor bottles around him. He reached for the nearest one, shook it. Empty. He tried another, another, another. All empty.

Shit. I’m starting to sober up.

We can’t have that, can we?

He stood up, looked around a bit. He was in a hotel bar. First floor. The lights were out. He searched the shelves and behind the counter for bottles, but most of them had been smashed, and the rest had been drunk dry. He found half an unattended bottle of wine and chugged that, but it wasn’t nearly good enough. He called out for some staff, but no one replied.

Several of the street-facing windows had shattered, and there were sounds of gunfire from outside. Hurt his head. Annoying.

Sonny sighed, stumbled, and caught himself on the counter. “Guess I’m gonna need to find someplace with a bit of fuh…” He burped, nearly threw up, and swallowed a wave of bile. “...fucking service.”

He staggered over to one of the broken floor-to-ceiling windows, kicked out the last of the glass, and stepped through into the street. Almost stood on a corpse. He made a face and stepped around it.

Sonny picked a random direction and started walking.

A drink. Just one more drink.