The Rise of the Symbots (micro fiction)

 It occurred to me yesterday. My housework gadgets are robots. Not the kind I imagined when I was a kid, scary humanoids all hellbent on controlling humanity. No, these are different. Benign. Unaware of me except to avoid bumping into me. We clean the apartment, sweep, vacuum, wash the floors. As I perform intricate tasks, clearing and dusting, the floor vacuum follows me, followed by the floor polisher and the small indoor insect-catching drone. Outside the lawn mower, the weed-picker and the window cleaning drone are busy. My favourite has to be the insect catcher watching it carefully trap spiders and flies and transport them to the window hatch for release. As we work, the patterns of our efficiencies become clear, a waltz of time and motion management through the apartment.

Somewhere, hidden from view, crawling through the building’s pipework, unblocking, collecting and recycling grease, hair and food waste is a small army of robotic moles. Same with the nanobots for the cabling. Every week, throughout the apartment building, people like me dance this dance. Orchestrating an army of efficiency. I sometimes imagine us all cleaning at the same time, a giant three-dimensional building symphony. I imagine it citywide, across the country, the continent, the planet itself. All of us dancing to the same tune. These robots are not our enemies or our friends, they do not need to look like us, or communicate with us; they are our simply our lifestyle choices leading us to this point of symbiosis.