The Uncluttered Lime

He found that he could rarely predict what a human might be thinking. Most of the time, he simply performed what was required of him, and since it take very little to accomplish, he retreated back into the recesses of his inner processors to round out the rest of it. He was very used to this by now.

Since he weighed very little, even though he had been built into the approximation of a typical human, he could perform the tricks very easily, especially when the pilot got the crop duster swooping in exactly the loop necessary to not only give the crowd the show it expected, but what he himself needed to make contact again with the wing, which he would leap off of and perform a somersault, or whatever else might look interesting. He did this with tedious repetition, and that's all his owner could think of to do with him. At least he had the understanding that other robots were treated much the same, though there weren't as many as someone from the distant past might have thought, when the idea of his existence had seemed so exotic.

He was aware that he had not been the originator of this routine, that when mistakes happened, it was the robot who was scrapped, if an accident hadn't already irrevocably damaged them. There were few robotics shops. When one was damaged, it was casually discarded. He thought on this with what he believed to be detachment, but he thought about it often. When someone wished to examine him, his owner never could explain the look in his eyes. They assumed it was natural. He might have assured them otherwise, if he'd thought of it, or if speech were required for the occasion. Mostly, though, the observer gave him a glance, and walked on, impressed with how mundane his existence was to them.

He often wondered if the robots that had come before him truly had left their posts at random, or if indeed by design...