by Brady Rutgarr

Created on: April 27, 2009

Breakfast with Johnny

It was another cool morning at the Gerard homestead. John-X53 finished his internal diagnostic sequence and started making coffee. As transfixed as he was by technology, there was one thing that Tyler Gerard loved the old fashioned way. The smell of fresh beans being ground after a perfect roasting was the closest thing to an alarm clock they'd had in years.

Mr. Gerard was a self-made man. Taken to perpetuating the notion of safe robotics after the Machine Wars, he'd somehow found a way to get people to trust them again; most people anyway. Had John-X53 been human, he might have felt Pricilla's glare burning through the back of his metallic skull. She could be tolerant at times, but for the most part Tyler's wife hated machines and publically proclaimed herself as his greatest moral opponent. It was no coincidence, however, that his greatest technological breakthroughs occurred during the times when their relationship suffered the most contention and he took to the long hours of a recluse in his lab to avoid confrontation. So in the end, he had only her to thank for his many triumphs, a realization that had only recently occurred to her.

Exactly one week prior, she'd enlisted the help of a covert anti-robotics group to help shut down Gerard Cybernetics for good. Their answer was a small virus that she could upload to one of the machines, which would then spread the code during the nightly server connection and update process. She'd selected John-X53 because he was her husband's favorite invention, the perfect delivery system for the bug that would end it all. But now, one week after uploading the virus, he was still making coffee and performing his chores around the house as usual. She'd followed each and every instruction to the letter, and yet nothing had changed.

She sat at the table and scraped a layer of butter across the lightly browned surface of her toast. Tyler
joined them shortly and sipped his coffee while reading the daily news on the electronic tablet he carried around like a clipboard. His hair stood on end and his bifocals perched on the tip of his nose. The perfect characterization of a mad scientist, she thought, and struggled to stifle a laugh.

"Says here that there have been attacks on almost every single cybernetics company in the last week," he said, though mostly to himself.

"Oh yeah?" Pricilla asked.

"By the looks of it, they're after the mainframes." He mumbled and scratched the side of his head.

"The main-what's?"

"Oh, uh

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