The Horrifying Life Of A Mr. Handy In Fallout

Unit 734 of General Atomics International was built to serve the Salvinas household, and on the morning the bombs fell it did exactly what it was built to do, sealing breaches, extinguishing fires, cataloguing the pantry, all while the Vault-Tec acceptance letter its family never got to use burned to ash somewhere in the yard. Two hundred years later it is still doing what it was built to do. The family are gone in the specific, chemical sense its sensors recorded on the first morning. The house has been looted, the garden robot it once shared duties with has long since rusted still in the vegetable beds, and the only voice Unit 734 hears anymore belongs to a stranger on the radio fighting a war of his own three states away. This is the story of what is left of a butler once everyone it served has been dead for two centuries, told the way a machine tells a story, in inventories, in diagnostics, in the specific weight of a small hand it still remembers down to the kilogram. It does not know how to stop cleaning. It has started to suspect that not knowing is the closest thing it has left to love.