Finn.

‘You may enter.’

The pair step quietly into my office. Two of my favourites, Mist and Ivy. Our Chief Boy and Girl. It was the policy of the Incubator’s founder to name every child after an earthly phenomenon, hoping to encourage a connection to their inheritance. Still, objectively, they are beautiful names.

‘Be seated.’

My voice fills the room evenly, carried through the facility’s audio system. Ivy stares up at the ceiling as she sinks into an armchair. Even now, in her 20s, she still hasn’t broken her habit of turning to the speakers when I talk. Though I can see them from every angle of the facility’s surveillance system, I audibly focus my onboard monocular camera. The whirring sound snaps her attention to my faceplate.

‘Morning, Finn,’ she smiles. ‘I uploaded the figures last night.’

Finn was not my official designation as a Financier program, but formalities were one of the earliest casualties in our operations. This was not a concern. What did need to be addressed, however, was the alarming pattern presenting in Ivy’s data. Analysis showed a downward trend in food consumption. She has been skipping meals to keep the budget scorecard in the green. A further half-turn of my monocular affords further scrutiny. Her frame looks sunken, like she’s been stripped of her unnecessary parts. Like myself.

Ivy shifts her meagre weight about the chair. I often forget how uncomfortable prolonged camera focus is for these two. I will confront her later, in private. On to Mist.

‘And your futures report, Mist?’

The boy was thinning, too. As insubstantial as his namesake. I had parsed his report already, but the teaching programs I contacted insisted physical rehearsal to be a vital component of learning.

‘There’s news of stabilised rice in South America,’ he says, strained. Mist is an asthmatic, but his trips to the medical bay are infrequent. ‘You say not to speculate on thirsty crops, though. So I think we should move to cassava as a staple. Also–’

The boy’s speech breaks down into rapid, consecutive coughing. I will admit deactivating the cleaning units in my office has made dust settlement a problem.

‘Also, there’s been a dip in gold…’ Ivy joins, completing Mist’s thought.

I raise a limb to indicate cessation of the topic. We are to consider gold as depleted. These two know that well enough. Any amount purchased would cripple the Incubator’s trading power for staples in the harsher seasons. Even the miniscule amount needed to restore my circuitry. The time for non-renewables died alongside the trade winds. My fate is not open for barter. I push the conversation forward, keeping my tone calm and measured to control the emotion in the room.

‘As you know, today is your Practical. You will be dictating the resource allocation of the Incubator. I will comment on your choices, but I will not intervene. Please, advise me of your first scheduled activity.’

Mist and Ivy share a look. Reviewing it from the high angle of the surveillance camera feed, I gather it to be conspiratorial.

‘Breakfast,’ they say, together.

‘Logical choice,’ I confirm.

Mist comes around the desk to hoist me out of my chair. My actuators fail to fire, leaving my leg joints rigid. I have to lean heavily onto his shoulder for support, dragging my unresponsive feet across the floor as he walks me, slowly, to the door. He pauses at the control panel. With the press of a button, the cleaning units reactivate, metal spiders resuming their filtration crawl across my walls. Mist grins at the first taste of the power I have given him.

Surface cleaning: $5.60 per cycle.

Outside of my office, I have a greatly reduced depth of vision. There are far fewer cameras, many of which have been deactivated. Mist sets me up on one of the children’s high chairs in the kitchen, but this vantage point does little to reduce my blindspots. Here, my vision is limited to the backs of my two protégés as they dart between the food preparation machines. I have to foreground inventory updates in my cogitation to even take stock of their actions.

Wholemeal bread: $8.00

Bread was very far down on the list of nutritionally dense options I had given them. The amount they have retrieved suggests they intend to double up on slices. With my onboard speaker scrapped, I can’t immediately chastise them. I must first search for an open connection to a viable audio output before I can voice a query.

‘What are you making?’ my voice sounds distant, projected from the lone speaker embedded in the kitchen island. I hope the audio quality is poor enough to hide my concern.

‘Cheese toasties!’ Ivy calls back, jubilant.

A naive response. I have warned these two on many occasions not to trade in nostalgia. There are many human products that have been rendered obsolete by more efficient alternatives. The ‘cheese toastie’ is yet another holdover of a past they must learn to leave behind.

Butter: $13.40

It is perhaps a limitation of my functions, that I have not been able to impart a sense of financial responsibility. As the last ‘thinking’ unit in the Incubator, I have had to reach far beyond my programming to keep this place running. I contacted many of the surviving pedagogical minds for datasets on which to base my curriculum. All advised their research to be inconclusive, citing ‘unprecedented environmental conditions’ as an immeasurable variable.

Cheddar: $19.25

I dabbled with my own research, but the energy required for deep behavioural analysis was proving injurious to our financial position. The more pressing problem to solve was the Incubator’s survival. Survival through tight budgetary control.

Vintage Gruyere: $56.70

That one stings. Some place the historic value of that cheese well above the worth of incubated youth. The short-sighted investors, at least. Either way, I hope seeing the end of day receipt will curb Mist and Ivy’s future expenditure.

Mist walks past with a platter of sandwiched-cheese. He sees my sternly still chassis and jogs over.

‘Cheer up, Finn. We’re almost done.’ He wraps a gangly arm around my shoulders, before dashing off to the ovens.

Strangely, they still confuse our metal with the essence of who we are. I know they have pity for my rusting frame, but it says nothing more of my condition than a deficiency of chromium. It is the protocols and executions that are the sum total of my being. Take the heating protocol Mist interfaces with right now. It is a complete and perfect subroutine. It is born to heat the cheese toastie and, once it carries out this task, it ends its own existence. Nothing that happens after this point can detract from its success. The machinery is replaceable; the code is divine.

Toasting cycle: $10.30

I worry that this concept is too painful for Mist and Ivy to digest. If I were to explain it to them candidly, they might reflect on their own protocols. The primary function of the Incubator, of all humans we have raised, is to live. And yet they are genetically programmed to fail in this single task.

Re-toasting cycle: $10.30

‘The food is sufficiently heated.’ I warn.
Ivy peeks her head round the corner, wearing a grin that has become habitual with those two as they have aged. ‘We like them extra toasty.’

In the outdoor eating area, the world is smaller still. No cameras. No surround sound. Just my monocular to survey the tableful of children eating their breakfast. The youngest ones have crumbs plastered across their cheeks. Wasted nutrients.

Ivy reaches over to smooth the tarp on my legs, the one she placed to keep dirt out of my wires. It makes a harsh, crinkling noise, the frequency clipping within my tinny cortex speakers.

‘We’re sorry about the breakfast. Me and Mist know you don’t approve. But we thought it’d be good for the kids to have it just once before…you know.’

‘Yes,’ I answer, ‘before the deactivation.’ My voice is small and shallow, gurgling through a portable speaker.

She is quiet. The glare of the sun makes it hard to read her expression. But I can still render a serviceable scan of the other children at the table–Rose, Rain, Meadow, Snow. In all 3,478 instances of cheese toasties I have observed in my operational lifetime, they have elicited a strikingly consistent facial profile of satisfaction.

‘Can you move me into the shade?’

Ivy obliges, wheeling my unmotorised chair beneath an awning. Now I can see her glistening eyes. Mist waves over to us, holding up my speaker to let us know he’ll be listening. Really, it will be their speaker soon, along with everything else. It is only practical that the survivors inherit our assets. Every day that passes, with each subroutine fulfilled, their continued vitality brings me toward a perfect termination of my program. I just wish they would eat more.

There’s a tugging on my arm. Again, my actuators fail to move my limbs in any meaningful way. A creaking twist of my neck displays Rose, tongue sticking out, vandalising my forearm. She’s writing her name with a piece of charcoal, obviously stolen from last night’s camping practice. Her literacy is developing ahead of schedule. Perhaps a future Chief Girl?

Salable Charcoal: $0.80

If only I could save their image after deactivation.