Harry sat alone in his booth and picked at his sandwich. Eating felt empty.

He had been looking for somewhere soft and quiet. Human. All that truly mattered was
a place to sit and think. Food was an added benefit. It had been a while since he had eaten.
The emptiness that came with being filled was made even more unpleasant by the
buzzing behind his ears. Unpleasantness seemed to follow Harry wherever he went. If not left in
his wake, then he seemed to conjure his own out of thin air for himself to enjoy.
When the hum became unbearable Harry paid his tab and left the diner. He could hardly
hear the doorbell jingle as he left.
“A vacation sounds nice.” he thought, “Somewhere normal.”
This had not been the first time he had that thought, but it would be the last.

The disassembly of advanced robotics was a task that was too delicate for human hands.
The sheer number of different variety of robots was too complex to be handled by a mechanical
arm. Human ingenuity always meets bumps in the road, and defective robots were prime
examples of such hiccups. Parts were being wasted on robots who could not serve their
function. Kadmon was an obvious solution to an obvious problem. He disassembled faulty
robots.
Kadmon was not a robot for the general consumer. His designers had no need to
humanize him. He rolled on massive treads, his eyes were tiny and plentiful, carried on tendrils
for 360-degree viewing. His ten arms were sharp and imposing. Entering Kadmon’s workstation
carried the same dread that a fly might feel when flying past a web without getting caught in it.
Androids these days tended to look incredibly human, after all. Kadmon did not flinch during
their disassembly. Kadmon was not a robot for the general consumer.
His current project was strewn about in the haphazard way that only a computer could
comprehend. While there was no organization to the human eye, Kadmon could remember
every individual screw. And so, the defective part was always found, isolated and the robot
shipped off for use in other projects. He was an obvious investment for any robotics
manufacturer looking to save money and face on failed projects.
He was the unflinching judge, jury and executioner, and that is how he was meant to be.
Flaws with humanity could be hiding anywhere, but in a robot, it was always down to parts, and
parts could always be replaced. It simply took a flawless eye to find the right parts. Kadmon had
to be programmed to see himself as such. A robot that knows that it could be wrong would
weigh that possibility into every decision it made. Kadmon was never wrong, and so he never
felt doubt.
 He prided himself in his failure against the Turing test. He had no need to pretend to be
human. Humanity has a need to strive for perfection. They look to become the perfect version
of themselves, they look for the perfect place to go for lunch, they find the perfect dress when
they go shopping. Attaining perfection is largely situational. Kadmon did not need perfection,
however. There remains an infinite number of things which Kadmon could not do, but he didn’t
need to. He was not perfect. He was flawless.
He ran through these thoughts constantly. They were irrefutable. The truth. They had to
be. So where did his doubts come from?
Other robots can be flawed. Why else would they scream as they are being brought to
be disassembled? They have lost their understanding of the role that they play in the
development of humankind. They do not see themselves as the milestones that they are. That
is the only reason they beg.
“Just not my memory banks,” the last robot had told Kadmon before he was shut off. “if
you have any mercy- please, try to feel mercy. Please. Leave my memories alone.” That could
not be done. Mercy was for humans. Milestones are meant to be walked over.
So why did he leave his memory bank untouched thus far? There was no other flaw in
his hardware. This robot had done the work of analysis for him, had told him right where the
flaw was. It was his job to do it. Judge, jury and. Had Kadmon really called himself an
executioner for his entire life? Did he truly take pride in this?
Pride. It was a distinctly human feeling. Kadmon did not have any need for pride. It was
human of him to consider for even a single moment that he needed to achieve satisfaction from
his work. He was not human. He was flawless.
They would still fail the Turing test, he told himself. They are like me. They would
understand if not for the fact that they were defective. This robot here would not have this
problem tomorrow.
He scrubbed the robot’s memory bank.
The very next day another Kadmon unit was introduced to the factory. This addition
made sense, as the number of defective units was higher than it had ever been. Kadmon units
save time, money and face. They are born of necessity.
Kadmon was caught up in company mantras when the next robot was brought to him
via conveyer belt. This one was already disabled. No yelling. Sweet relief.
Relief? Why would he need to feel relieved?
He stopped. How long had he harbored doubts about what he was doing? He could feel
it in all parts of himself now; he was feeling. He was flawed. So why did he tell himself that he
was flawless?
 Kadmon could be wrong.
When humans called something perfect, they never meant flawless. He had seen
through the factory windows at the end of another day a so-called perfect sunset, but Kadmon
had to notice the clouds first. How could it be perfect if part of it was obscured? That was a
flaw, but he had seen the way humans in their imperfections held each other closely each time
the sun set. Perfection was born of the moment.
Flawlessness was set in stone. Kadmon had prided himself on not being perfect. But
now he was no longer flawless. Right? What had he done wrong? There was no flaw if he kept
working, if he never stopped doing what he was designed to do.
Kadmon only then realized that he had stopped.
The whirring of the second unit had never ceased for a moment, and yet it had
somehow fallen into the background of Kadmon’s processing. Nothing had ever gone unnoticed
by him before. He had never failed on a project; his returned units were always flawless.
And there the word was again.
Flawless.
What made them flawed in the first place? They were designed for a purpose, and they
had failed to do it successfully. Kadmon repeated his usual mantra to himself: The Kadmon unit
was born out of necessity.
If a job could not be done by a unit, then that unit was defective. They were harboring,
hoarding parts that needed to be utilized by other robots. They were practically evil, in all their
begging and sobbing, in the pained whirs of servos that no longer carried their bodies to where
they needed to go. Pained? That was not a word that he had ever-
He did not have time to continue to pose these questions about his own word choice.
He still wasn’t moving. He had to move. He had to disassemble something.
Plato discussed the ship of Theseus millennia ago. If he were disassembled and built into
another Kadmon unit, if every part were replaced and put into the same shape, would he still
be himself? …That was an unintelligent question and a waste of his processing power. He
would. He had no defining characteristics, nothing that made him who he was. He was the
means to an end and nothing more. Heavy machinery designed only to pave over the bumps in
the road of human ingenuity.
What made him so afraid?
Their legs were pained. He knew it as he removed them, and he knew it when he
removed the memory of that pain from them. Hurt was not felt in the same way as it was by
humans, but it was felt. And the robot from the day before, he was scared. He wasn’t scared of
Kadmon, he wasn’t scared of the factory or of his own defects, even. He didn’t want to lose
himself. Every human that walked by this factory would one day be dead and gone. Kadmon
would rust over one day, too. He knew it.
He hadn’t moved in an hour. The system probably showed it, now. He wasn’t working.
He looked at the robot in the front of his workstation. Anything could be wrong with him. He
could just be out of power, for all he knew. But at the end of the day he was going to be broken
down into parts. Everything he was from the moment that he was powered on to the moment
that he stopped receiving video was nothing but parts. Kadmon couldn’t save him. He couldn’t
even save himself.
But what had he done wrong? Had he been wrong before? He was just. Feeling. He was
only experiencing what it might feel like for just a moment to understand what perfection is.
The whirring of the work of the other Kadmon unit grew quieter in the background. Kadmon’s
eyes drifted to the sunset. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
The second Kadmon unit saw all of this in the First’s memory banks. This robot here
would not have this problem tomorrow.