Victual Perfection

• Tempest Lutton, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2014

A metallic voice grates in my ears. “Get up! You are too lazy for your own good!” I give a robotic groan as my plasma screen eyes flick open. Not again. I’ve overslept. At 6:30 every morning I, Helota have to get up and run Maculae’s Bionic Burger shop for him while he eases his bolts, and in a human word, slacks.
I feel rusty and disgruntled as I clank downstairs toward the counter and pull on a tin apron. I was exiled to the planet Coboairian for sabotaging a main computer in a McKlancled’s Restaurant because I wanted my people to know that computers are responsible for imperfections in food, and how robots could do the job much better. Well here I am.
My government decided the best punishment for me was to be exiled here and to work in a restaurant. And do I enjoy it? Well, yes and no. The work is what I always wanted to show people what was superior, but me slaving in my own cause… well, I never anticipated that. I always pictured a row of practised cuisine androids, their buttery golden paint gleaming in the hard ivory radiance of the main kitchens, tirelessly producing delectable dishes such as asteroid-crumbed spacefish, {without the black soot marks the machines usually daubed on them}, Venus-cream and crushed supernova, {with the Venus-cream in perfect helixes, not the messy pottage that those hopeless apparatuses usually blast on}
That was what I had wanted. My dream is now shattered for other robots, but now I find myself in the place that I had formulated for others. I now guess that I am rightly served, but hope still resides within my corroded frame…
Now I suppose I can make a difference in my universe, and as a replacement for other bots slaving under my idea, I will be the change. I will redefine the food class I have always wished for, and show these people that the nourishment which they consume could be surpass this garbage we have always had to choke down, and maybe some will join me in my quest of victual perfection, and eventually the universe’s food quality will be made more wholesome, and all because of a lone supporter of robotic rights… me.
But meanwhile I’d better get this apron on in time, or Maculae will skin me alive.