Out of Wisconsin and buffalo-wing heavy, Fingers McManus is a small man bound
on every side by the clank of metal feet on sidewalks. Robots in their shining
Sunday best. He's the last thin-skin in town, stealer of hidden agendas, vanishing
any home's most-prized insides. The robots want to execute him for his thieving --
Fuck Fingers, they cry, but instead make him a patron saint of plausible deniability.
Their chrome-lined algorithms have developed a glitch, a terminal condition
that needs expert safe-cracker hands to reboot. They forget where they left their cell phones,
forget they don't need them, forget when the planet was coated with humans, forget
how they killed us all and when they forget we're gone, the robots forget their fingers
double as switchblades that stab each other's smooth chests with false accusations.
McManus makes a sharp buck every day more robot thoughts decay. Perhaps
machine learning away from machine perfection permits this selective amnesia
so they can live with the terrible on-off things they've done. Or perhaps this last human
really is stealing their stuff. Just in case, they buy safes to protect their valuables from robber
and fire. The romance of loss is lost on robots. They've calculated the chances of recovery increase when something is stolen not misplaced. They just need a thief --
It's that fucking Fingers McManus, they scream at their highest setting. They come
for him with hands that double as hammers but they do not swing. Because in the future everyone pretends to be on when they're not. Every night McManus opens their safes
and takes nothing. Because there's nothing to take. No jewels, no robbers only fake burglaries
and robots who can't face their batch normalization. They suffer inside, powered down
when Fingers leaves his trademark in each safe he opens -- a cracker smashed
into tiny pieces because the robots don't get the joke and can't get the crumbs
out of their joints. Oh, how we would have laughed at them.
