Page 16 of Chaos Theory

SIXTEEN

The second I get back from the bathroom, I know something is wrong.

Kobi and Shane are the only ones in the dead zone. Everyone else has vanished. Shane is standing in front of Kobi, looking him up and down. Kobi is silent, arms dangling, bent forward a little at the waist. A dishevelled, human-like pose. Like he’s had too much to drink. Only robots don’t drink.

I start pressing buttons on his control panel, but I don’t really know what I’m doing. ‘What the feck, Shane? What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t see.’

‘I thought you were keeping an eye on him! I left you alone for two minutes.’

‘I’m sorry. I must have got distracted. No one would tell me what happened.’

The frantic button-pressing is having no effect. That’s when I notice it. Droplets of liquid. I pat Kobi down. ‘He’s wet.’

‘That doesn’t seem good,’ says Shane.

‘You’re unbelievable!’ But it’s not really Shane’s fault. I know that. Kobi is my responsibility .

‘Wait, maybe he just ran out of juice?’ says Shane. ‘He kept talking about that, remember?’

But his battery display indicates he still has a few hours of charge left.

Oh, Kobi. Why didn’t I listen to you? Why did I listen to Shane instead?

I have so many regrets but can’t process them because of the avalanche of consequences barrelling through my mind.

What if Kobi is kaput? What will JP think?

What will Josh say? What will Ron Tron do?

I try to imagine JP explaining this to Ron.

‘Yes, that’s right, Ron. We brought your multimillion-dollar robot to the pub.

It’s the way we do things around here.’ Obviously I’ll be fired.

Maybe Shane will be fired too. Maybe Ron will try to sue Go Ireland. Or JP. Or me.

I’m spiralling. I slap myself in the face.

‘Hey!’ says Shane.

‘I need to think !’ I hear how desperate I sound. I take a deep breath. ‘Let’s get him back to the office. I’m going to have to call Josh.’

We get a cab back to the office. I leave a voice note for Josh, asking him to meet me here. I don’t go into detail, but I do say that it’s an emergency, that Kobi had a ‘liquid encounter’ and is currently unresponsive.

Shane has keys to the building because he’s been working in the gift shop all week. We bundle Kobi into the Liffey Room, prop him up in the middle of the space.

I snatch a Blue Roll from a shelf, start wiping down Kobi’s surfaces. I call up Kobi’s documentation on my phone, search for every word I can think of related to moisture. Zero results. This obviously isn’t a scenario Josh had anticipated.

I crouch down in front of the forlorn figure of my robot colleague. What would Kobi say if he could speak right now? He’d probably tell me to focus on finding a solution. I wish Josh was here, but I also dread what he’ll say. Is there any way in hell I could fix this before he gets here?

I exhale and stand up. Try to muster up some confidence. ‘Shane, I am going to try to fix Kobi.’

‘Great! Let me help you. This happened to me recently actually – my phone fell into the toilet.’

‘Do you think that’s what happened?’ I clasp my mouth in horror. ‘Kobi fell into a toilet or…was he pushed?’

‘No, no! At least, I don’t think so. I just meant I was able to dry out my phone that time. Maybe the same technique will work now.’ He whips out his phone.

‘I think Kobi is a bit more sophisticated than a smartphone, Shane,’ I say. ‘He’s not just here for your entertainment.’

Shane sits on the floor, cross-legged. He speaks in a quiet voice, his words a little slurry. ‘The irony is, things seemed to be going quite well, up until…’

I tune him out. I circle Kobi, looking for answers. A surgeon trying to save a car crash victim, but it’s their first day on the job. Think .

‘That time when your phone got wet – how did you fix it?’ Kobi is a machine, after all. And I have no better ideas right now.

‘I’m trying to remember what I did,’ he says from the floor. ‘Let me look it up.’ He messes around with his phone while I continue pressing Kobi’s buttons uselessly. ‘Okay, I found something.’

‘What does it say?’

‘Gimme a second, I’m skimming it here. Let’s see. It says “act fast”.’

I make a growling sound in response.

‘Okay, eh, step one – turn off the device. Well, then, it’s good that he’s off already, isn’t it? It says to leave it turned off for at least forty-eight hours. So maybe you should stop pressing buttons?’

I release my breath, run my fingers through my hair for something to do. When I went to the bathroom in Phelan’s, I shook out my hair and covertly took off my bra, thinking that maybe I could relax for the rest of the evening. I hope Shane won’t remark on my appearance.

‘Okay. What’s next?’

‘Step two – remove the battery. Do you know how to do that?’

I have a vague memory of a diagram from Kobi’s documentation. And Module 1 of the MIT course, which I started last night, covered battery maintenance.

‘Um, I’ll give it a go. I’ll need tools though. Let me look in Kobi’s maintenance kit.’

I retrieve a black holdall from the shelf next to Kobi’s sleep pod and rifle through it. ‘I hope the battery’s not in an awkward spot.’

I hold up a small screwdriver and address the patient. ‘Kobi, I’ll try and be gentle. I don’t want to damage anything else while I’m getting it out.’

‘That’s what she said,’ mumbles Shane.

‘Really not the time.’

‘Sorry.’ He returns to his phone. ‘It says to do this as soon as possible. Also says – feck – liquid is one of the worst things that can happen to electronic devices.’

‘You don’t say.’ I raise an eyebrow at him.

‘Maybe I should stop reading.’

‘Be quiet for a minute – let me concentrate.’

I locate the battery compartment on Kobi’s back. It’s secured with a series of tiny screws. I brandish the screwdriver for confidence.

‘Okay, let’s do this. Righty tighty, lefty loosey.’

He laughs. ‘Oh wow, you’re really learning a lot on that robot course, aren’t you?’

‘Well, I haven’t got to the module on “How to Cope When Your Idiot Friend Suggests You Do Something Incredibly Stupid with Your Multimillion-Dollar Robot”,’ I say through gritted teeth, rotating the screwdriver.

‘So you’re saying we’re still friends? That’s good.’

I shoot him a look that I hope says, I don’t know what we are right now, nor do I care .

‘Sorry, I’m just trying to break the tension,’ he says.

‘Battery is out!’ I say triumphantly. I hold the slender shiny cylinder aloft like I’ve just won an Oscar, then place it carefully on the shelf. ‘Next?’

‘Next, remove all the liquid. ’

I make the growling sound again.

‘Wait, wait, it says…there are two steps to removing the liquid, or is it two options? It’s not clear. Sure maybe let’s just do them both, to be safe. Number one, use a hair dryer.’

I look up. ‘I don’t suppose you happen to have a hair dryer to hand?’

‘No. But I bet I know who does. I’ll be right back.’

He hauls himself up, wobbles a bit, then lopes from the room. He reappears a few minutes later, a miniature pink hair dryer in hand.

‘Who owns that?’

‘Imelda. Keeps it in her drawer. For those last-minute touch-ups she’s always going on about. Here.’ He hands it to me. ‘Do your worst. And I’ll refrain from making any jokes about blow jobs.’

‘Very mature of you.’ I switch the device to high and start blowing air all over Kobi.

‘Wait!’ he says. ‘It says cool air only. Oh, and don’t blast it – low air flow is what it says here.’

‘Sorry, Kobi.’ I adjust the settings and undulate the device, gently blowing air all around Kobi’s parts, pointing it into grooves and crevices.

I do not currently own a working hair dryer – my one blew a fuse six months ago and I never got around to replacing it.

I mostly wear my hair up anyway so I don’t need to spend much time styling it.

I wish it was tied up now. It bounces around every time I move the dryer.

‘You look good,’ says Shane. He’s resumed his position on the floor.

‘Don’t distract me.’

He can definitely tell I’m not wearing a bra.

Men are so obsessed with breasts, I bet they’re always aware of the proximity, status and aspect of the nearest ones, no matter what else is going on at the time.

It must be like knowing if it’s warm or cold, or sensing an atmosphere.

Probably so automatic that by the time a man reaches his early twenties, the task has been outsourced to a division of the subconscious brain.

We need this information to be available at all times, just in case, but we don’t want it up here, cluttering up the frontal cortex.

Let’s store it in the medulla oblongata, shall we?

Safest place for it. Handy for dream time also.

I clear my throat. ‘Okay. What else?’

‘The last step is “cover the device in drying agents”.’

I rack my brain but come up empty. ‘What exactly are drying agents?’

‘It has a picture here… Silica gel. It comes in these tiny little pillows. Where have I seen these before?’ He holds up the phone so I can study the picture.

We both think for a moment, then simultaneously say, ‘Shoes!’

‘I’ll be right back.’ He scrambles to his feet again, almost tripping over the hair dryer wire on his way to the door. He soon returns with four shoeboxes.

‘Thank God for my Nike obsession, eh? Bet you think it’s money well spent now.’

He stacks the boxes and opens the one on top.

It yields two small bags of silica gel. He repeats the process until a small pile is formed.

I grab some sticky tape and get to work.

Each tiny assemblage is like a cotton ball on a plaster for a patient who’s just had an injection. I tape them to various parts of Kobi.

‘It’s not enough,’ I sigh. ‘We’d need, like, hundreds of these.’

‘You know what I used?’ His voice is suddenly loud. ‘I’ll be right back! And you can call me a genius then.’

I examine Kobi when Shane has left the room.

He looks somewhat pathetic. This is my fault.

I didn’t do enough for Kobi. I failed him.

All he wanted was to be accepted, and to be useful.

That’s all many people want, deep down. Is this to be the end of him?

And what a way to go, too – suddenly and in a strange place.

I know he’s just a machine, but it doesn’t seem right.

I make a decision and a promise. Kobi, if you make it through tonight, I’m going to do my best for you. We can make this work, together.

‘Hang in there, buddy,’ I say gently.

‘I will, thanks!’ Shane says as he bursts into the room, holding what appears to be a paper coffee cup with no lid. ‘Stand back! You’ll thank me later.’

Before I can move, he strides across the room and with one wild gesture jerks the cup into the air. A hail of uncooked rice rains down on Kobi and me.

‘Ow! What are you doing ?’ I yell, covering my face. ‘It’s not a wedding!’

‘Rice!’

‘Ow! I know.’

‘I put my phone in rice!’

The rice skitters across the floor, outlining my feet like chalk around a corpse. I gesture at the whole nonsensical scene. My tone turns to ice. ‘And what part of this resembles putting your phone into rice?’

‘Sorry,’ he falters, his confidence evaporating. ‘Uh – I might have gotten a bit carried away there. There’s more in the kitchen though – bags of the stuff. Maybe we can, I don’t know, tape it to him somehow?’

He picks up the tape, but I swat it from his hand. It hits the floor with a dull bounce and rolls away to hide under a shelving unit. He means well, but Shane’s help isn’t what I need right now. I need a grown-up.

‘I think you’ve done enough. I can take it from here.’ My phone buzzes. ‘That’s probably Josh now. I told him to message me when he was outside. Can you let him in on your way out?’