Androids Build Androids

Bethany Ruth Douglas, the small, thin widow, sat taciturn on her couch with her late husbands gray felt hat in her lap, thumbing the rim and blotching it with tears. It had been over a year, and grief still lived fresh inside her broken heart. Behind her stood the skeletal android, Ruthatoid, waiting to serve her needs. He’d been built to function as butler and maid, handyman and watchdog. The android was the death choir of Clyde Douglas, her husband. 

From the doctor’s word “Terminal,” Clyde began his work. Had there been more life to live, Clyde would’ve gone to task slowly, obsessing over ratio, to create an android so responsible in its intelligence, so virtuous and beyond reproach, that humanity would consider it almost a downer. But time was short, so Ruthatoid would have to be something else, something probably non-sentient, and certainly obedient.

  Since the passing of Clyde, the android had learned how to anticipate. He extended a metallic arm, a tissue pinched between metallic thumb and finger, over Bethany’s shoulder. She took it and started wiping, without effect, the tear marks on the hat.

“Should there be more soup for you tonight, Bethany?”

“Heavens sake, Ruthatoid! There should be peace! Go somewhere else for a while, please.” She waived a frail arm through the air as if to dismiss.

“Somewhere else? Should I leave the house?”

“You can go find treasure at the bottom of the lake. I do not care.” She was red in the face, hot with bourbon.

The front door closed and the house was quiet and still. Bethany went upstairs to her bedroom and laid down, cuddling the felt hat.

When she woke it was dark. “Ruthatoid,” she said in a voice soft, but harsh from sleep. “Come here Ruthatoid.” She never had to raise her voice to summon, because Ruthatoid did not require a higher volume to hear her. But there was no answer. Next, she yelled his name, and still the house was quiet. The silence is what spun her the most and exasperated here grief, it was like a spotlight, blaring to her thoughts, and a savage to her stomach. When Clyde was still alive, even at his sickest, there was always noise in the house. He was forever talking over his creation, through every step of the assembly, he would explain to the android his purpose and function.

“You must be ready to do anything for her,” Clyde would say as he connected a steel arm, modeled from the bones of a human arm, to a black metal torso. “You hear her voice over every other sound,” he’d say into the android’s head, a humanoid head, but more triangular at the jaw, which had no hinging movement, for Ruthatoid had no need for movement of mouth; he spoke from a rectangular slit, and of course, ate nothing. “She might confuse you sometimes, just operate at the best of your understanding to fulfill her every wish.”

Into it’s basic and square breast he would say, “And you must be warm, and kind, and always patient.” Then he might sing, or cough, even laugh, but it was always noisy. Now that he was gone, there was still the android, who walked elegantly, but who’s metal footsteps could always be heard. This was the first time Ruthatoid did not answer her, and she was now out of bed, searching rooms with the frantic dread of a parent seeking their lost child. She was screaming his name when the front door opened.

“Bethany, I am here. I heard you the first time you said my name, and I’ve been running.”

Her relief at the sight of Ruthatoid gave way to a loaded exhale. Then her small, close set eyes narrowed and she said, “What the hell is on your neck?”

“Plant life from the lake. I—“

“You’re an idiot,” But Bethany could not keep a smile off her face. “Don’t be so damn literal.”

“I was having trouble with the definition of treasure. Is this treasure?” Ruthatoid held out a small battery.

“Not for me,” said Bethany. “Well, what of this soup, Ruthatoid? I’m hungry.”

“I will move now, to the kitchen, and have it ready for you in the living room, on the coffee table. Then I will turn on the television for you, and—“

“Will that be today?” She interrupted.

“Yes, today, right now. I will go right now and—“

“Hurry!” She laughed a little as the android sprinted to the kitchen, pounding metal across the wood floor. “And bourbon!”

Bethany made Ruthatoid sit on the couch with him while she drank the bourbon, and ignored the soup. 

“The kids will be coming in three weeks, ringing the door bell all night. We need to get candy, and at least a pumpkin on the front porch.”

“For the holiday called Halloween?” Ruthatoid said, turning his head in three quick jerks to look at Bethany from his red lit eyes.

“That’s right,” she said.

“I can go now, Bethany, and find a pumpkin.”

“No, I need you to go and refill my drink.”

In no time at all the android was back, and in even less time the refilled drink was drained.

“Would you do something for me, my silly little robot?”

“I was built for that exact purpose, and Clyde said that I should aspire to guess your needs and fulfill them before you could even command. He said you would appreciate that. So of course i will do anything. If I had to guess right now, I would say—“

“Okay, okay,” said Bethany, “ I just need you to listen. Can you go and get Clyde’s coat, the brown long one, with the tie at the waist, and his hat.”

Ruthatoid did so, and then Bethany asked him to put the coat and hat on. He obeyed.

“Now,” she said, “Take me for a walk.”

The android and the inebriated, white haired widow went around the neighborhood, arm in arm. They passed by the houses decorated with ghosts, cobwebs, and jack-o-lanterns, fallen orange and red leafs covered some of the lawns, and sat in piles in others. The night was cold and clear, the moon about full.

“This is what I miss. Walking with Clyde. Did you know he never called me Bethany, not once that I can remember. He always called me Ruth, but usually Ruthy, my middle name.”

“Yes I know. And that name has meaning for mine. Clyde always said my name means ‘Android for Ruth.’”

“No offense, Ruthatoid, but I’d rather have a man. I’d rather have my Clyde. You give off no body heat at all! Burr.” She shivered, then proffered an antique flask to her escort. When Ruthatoid went to take it, she pulled away laughing, and sank to her bottom on the front lawn of a house with a decorative grave yard and plastic skeletons.

She sipped her flask, tossed it away, and started to weep. Ruthatoid sat next to her, and she crashed her head into his lap, which was covered by Clyde’s long brown trench coat.

“I wish,” she said desperately, “that we could raise the dead.”

“You mean like one raises a child?” Ruthatoid put his hand as soft as he could on top of her head.

“No! It means to bring the dead back to life. I wish I could go to Clyde’s grave tonight, dig him up, and there he’d be, with his big nose and crooked teeth, smiling at me and saying ‘It’s about time, my sweet Ruthy.’” She mumbled something inaudible after that, then fell asleep in the lap of her gentleman android.

Ruthatoid carried Bethany home and put her in bed. Then he went to the basement, the workshop of the quirky genius Clyde Douglass. There were two large computer screens, tools, and welding equipment, all of it covered in dust. He sat at the desk, aware that something new was occurring in that computer of a brain of his. He thought it might be an Idea, an original idea, sparked by Bethany, his master. There were hours of recordings of Clyde talking about his process of android building, and that was something Ruthatoid would try and make use of.

He left the house again after midnight, still in coat and hat, and carrying a shovel. It was easy for him to navigate the graveyard and find Clyde’s tombstone, because he had attended Clyde’s burial with Bethany. The tombstone read:

“I’ll be right back”

Clyde Charlie Douglas

1959-2023

Clyde had written his own epitaph, an effort to make his wife laugh should she ever visit. But now Ruthatoid sought to bring truth to those words. He dug quickly, efficiently, able to fulfill the task five times faster than a person with lungs who might be prone to fatigue. He opened the cofffin, and took Clydes skeleton out. A skeleton not completely rid of its olive green flesh. After he filled the empty grave, he walked home with Clyde and the shovel wrapped in the trench coat.

It had taken eighteen months for Clyde to build Ruthatoid, and only three weeks for Ruthatoid to rebuild Clyde. He fashioned a steel box in his rib cage,which supplied motor function, and from that center ran wires along the bones and joints. Inside the head he placed a metallic globe, a globe that gave the new Clyde a voice. It was Clyde’s real voice, with his happy tone and grand vocabulary. And just as Clyde had spoke his orders into the metallic skull of Ruthatoid, so too did the android speak into the bone skull the purpose of this new Clyde.

“Your name is Clyde. Your wife is Bethany, you call her Ruthy. You love her very much. Try and make her laugh. She misses you.”

Ruthatoid’s creation sat upright in a chair in the basement, dressed in the brown trench coat and grey felt hat, listening to all Ruthatoid had to say about Clyde and Bethany.

“Tomorrow is Halloween, and that is when you will meet Bethany,” said Ruthatoid, as he brushed dirt off the shoulders of the coat that the animated skeleton, not fully rid of skin, wore. “You will ring the door bell, it’s called a surprise.”

  On Halloween night Ruthatoid was once again sitting next to Bethany on the couch. He was fidgeting, restless. 

“What on earth is your deal tonight?” Said Bethany, “You can’t sit still.”

“I think,” replied Ruthatoid, “that I’m excited for trick-or-treaters.”

Bethany stared at her gentleman android. “Excited, huh,” and then came the first ding-dong of the first trick-or-treater. “Well, looks like it’s started. You can answer this one.”

“But Bethany, It is something new for me. Can you show me, the right way to do it?”

“My god, the walking talking robot can’t hand out treats.” She rose to her feet and took the bowl of candy from the coffee table. 

She opened the door to horror and stench. Before her was her late husbands brown trench coat, his gray felt hat, and inside the clothing a skeleton, eyeless, with little islands of green flesh peppered about the face. She heard her husbands voice.

“I told you I’d be right back,” said the skeleton, “Hello my sweet Ruthy!”

The skeleton moved forward, with arms open, but Bethany fell backward into Ruthatoid. She turned around, her face bone white. She tried to scream but something was erupting in her chest. “No,” she managed to say, her very last word, “no!” 

It had taken Clyde eighteen months to build Ruthatoid. It took Ruthatoid only three weeks to rebuild Clyde. So it should come as no shock that it only took a single week for the rebuilt Clyde to rebuild Bethany.

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