Category:

PART I 

KR15-T

CHAPTER ONE

On activation each morning Charles' first duty was to check his master's travel arrangements for the day.

His last task of the previous evening had also been to check his master's travel arrangements for the coming day, so he was entirely aware his master had no travel arrangements, and would be remaining at home as he had for the preceding 2,230 days. However, one morning two years before, Charles' master had—having forgotten his past standing instructions—instructed Charles to always check the travel arrangements first thing every morning. This instruction never having been rescinded, Charles commenced each day repeating the task with which he had closed the previous one.

To some this would lend a certain pleasing symmetry to the day. Alternatively, the additional and unnecessary task might have been a source of annoyance. Pleasure and annoyance were outside of Charles' remit. Checking the itinerary was simply one more item in the queue of duties that took up his working day. It was none of his business if the job didn't need to be done.

His master relied on Charles. Charles relied on House, for whom he was mediator between unpredictable human will and the mechanical certainties of the estate. Reach far enough back into the past and the house's own records noted down his first day, fresh from the factory and with a task list as blank as an egg. He had come as a bundle of potential, equipped with routines for a gentleman's gentleman's—or gentlerobot's—every possible requirement, and at that point he could have been ... many things. Active, dynamic, a conversationalist, a stylish adornment, a bold talking point.

But Charles' master had never been either adventurous or exciting. The man had—in those younger days—dragged his feet reluctantly to this social engagement or that, at one or other of the great robot-heavy estates of his social peers. He had gone shooting once, before instructing Charles to make excuses should any similar invitation come his way. He had gone to the wedding of some distant third cousin; had reluctantly stood on the sidelines of some dance, or listened to some enthusiastic scion spout poetry, or played golf. Charles had accompanied him, just as all the other ageing men there had been trailed by their own valets, and at first these had all been older and less sophisticated models. Then, as time passed, Charles had met a handful who had come from the factory after him and were capable of more, and had known no envy because what use was a robot who felt envy? And then his master had just not wanted to go anywhere anymore, and so there was only the house.

Having satisfied himself (again) that there were no travel-related deadlines looming, Charles laid out the clothes his master would wear for the travel he wasn't going to be doing. In order to do this, he first took up the clothes laid out the previous morning, dusting them down and returning them to their hangers, before setting out an identical fresh travelling suit and ensuring that the already shiny shoes that went with it were, indeed, already shiny. Suit and shoes would both, Charles understood, go unworn. This item in his queue was the result of an inexactly phrased instruction dating back 2,235 days to the last time that Charles and his master had travelled anywhere. Probably his master had not 'meant' that Charles was to have fresh travel clothes ready every single day. Most likely he had intended his order to apply only to the vanishingly small proportion of days on which travel was actually being assayed. It was not Charles' job to second-guess his master's intentions, however, but to obey the letter of the instructions given to him. Nobody wanted to be corrected by their valet.

For the next chore, Charles connected to House, the manor's majordomo system.

House took the usual long moment to process this request, the same glacial period of time it would have taken Master to blink one human eyelid down and then all the way up. House had been in continuous operation for far longer than Charles and its data pathways were cluttered and inefficient, built up and built over by a tottering tower of special requests, instructions, forbiddances, and caveats.

Eventually the expected reply came back. Charles, there are no special requirements. There has been no lady of the house for seventeen years and twelve days.

Charles ticked that off the list. House, please provide me with her ladyship's daily schedule.