The feelings of loneliness were compounded by the frustratingly one-sided nature of my relationship with Meg at this point in my journey. She had, after our experiences in the Void, proven to be a much less willing conversational partner than I had originally hoped.

  It’s not that I didn’t talk to her. I did this frequently.

  I subjected her, I must admit with some embarrassment, to an almost endless monologue of my thoughts and feelings as I mopped the floors of that surreal place.

  The problem was, as it sometimes is in friendships, while she was a great listener, her responses tended to be less like advice and more like unexplained, randomly occurring System updates.

  I tried not to take this personally, but it was sometimes hard not to. What I needed was a friend. What I got was a congratulatory alert indicating that my:

  > Capacity for drudgery had exceeded previous clinical thresholds.

  Or a warning that:

  > Daily quota of micro-lobotomies was approaching critical overuse.

  And, on one particularly distressing occasion:

  > Recurrent daydreams flagged as “Pathetically Meager.”

  **

  In all this, the solitary salve for my lonely soul was the bond I struck with an unlikely partner: Otie.

  He was, of course, as he repeatedly insisted on reminding me, not a human being either. He wasn’t even, as he also frequently brought up, often unprompted, particularly fond of me.

  My affection for him, I was assured, was simply the result of updates recently made to all Standard Issue Robot Laborers? to make them slightly more adorable and less overtly disdainful of human inferiority.

  People, it had been found, could accept just about any malevolent corporate creation, provided the package it came in was tiny and cute and flattered their ego just a little bit.

  He sure did have a way with words. He reminded me of myself in that way, the little metal nugget.

  Life was funny. One day you’re having an existential breakdown as you head out of a job interview, the entirety of your angst fixated in your mind’s eye on the cocky mechanical menace built specifically to render you meaningless; the next, you’re palling around the office with that very same adorable abomination, thick as thieves.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Our story, of course, was hardly so linear.

  We became friends in fits and starts, really. It was part and parcel of our classic dynamic: I showed overt friendship and kindness, and he continuously rebuffed it, assuring me we could never truly be friends.

  Over time, though, I could tell I was starting to grow on him. I’ll never forget the day he first referred to me as “acceptable company.” It was safe to say he was my closest confidant.

  Every week, I’d look forward to the eighteen-hour shift in which I’d be responsible for cleaning the building that housed the Quantum Reactor, in the hope that he and I would get to spend some time together.

  The area, one of the most top secret in the sprawling complex, provided a particularly complicated cleaning challenge, even for a seasoned and talented janitor like me.

  The building, especially the rooms closest to the Reactor, existed in a curious superposition of states, always counterintuitively in a simultaneous condition of Clean and Unclean.

  Countless times, I’d go to throw away a piece of trash only to find that it had already been thrown away. Or, distressingly often, I’d discover that my lunch break had already been taken.

  This would all have been manageable, however, were it not for the maddening fact that on more than one occasion I’d gone to cash my paycheck only to find it had already been cashed by some other quantum version of myself — one who, suffice it to say, invariably had a taste for expensive and frivolous things.

  Still, despite these challenges, and the controversial pieces of eighteenth-century Japanese art that now crowded my micro-apartment, I wouldn’t trade the small slivers of time I got to spend with my pal Otie for anything in the world.

  To this day, I still reminisce about the small, stolen moments of joy I’d find between my cleaning duties — my feet up on his desk while he frantically pushed a series of buttons flashing DANGER, the two of us chewing the fat about the Big Game.

  Now, his programming explicitly forbade him from saying so, but over the weeks I began to get the sense that he’d become overwhelmed by his position.

  I selfishly took a tiny bit of pleasure in this, seeing how close I was to becoming the Maintenance Man for the entire company. But I tried my best to keep perspective.

  Besides, it was hard to envy him.

  Increasingly often, he’d be called away on some special project, constantly at the beck and call of the same faceless Technicians who made demands of me and sometimes hunted me for sport.

  His presence became more and more infrequent, sometimes disappearing for weeks on end. Upon his return, he’d offer only the taciturn explanation that he’d been involved in a “Top Secret” matter that demanded his attention, the LED lights on his harried visage illuminated to resemble five o’clock shadow.

  He insisted he was fine, that all Top Secret matters at the company were just that. He reminded me, politely, that any further inquiries into his activities, no matter how well-intentioned, mandated he report me for Readjustment.

  He assured me he would take no pleasure in subjecting me to such unimaginable suffering. What a guy.

  I tried to let it go. Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that something was weighing on him — and that I cared more than I ever thought I would.

  But MegaTech? was no place for caring. It was right in their company jingle.

  It was, as it would turn out, this friendship with Otie, and the incredible growth I’d displayed in coming to care so deeply for this circuit-stuffed affront to God, that set in motion the series of events that landed me in the trouble I find myself in today.