VISION SQUAD!

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

“The man’s voice, deep and flat, seemed to come from somewhere to the side of his mouth,” said the police commissioner. “That was the first thing that we noticed. The second was that he was wearing a watch that did not belong to him. The third was that his mouth was filled with springs and screws.” The “man,” a robot built decades ago by Dr. Frederick Rodano, a former top scientist for the Kology regime, had been largely junked before being purchased by a traveling businessman who originally intended to gift it to a traveling circus owned by his ne’er-do-well brother-in-law Tommy. Tommy was inspired by the automaton, which reminded him of his own youth, when he had been a promising engineering student and, briefly, a Vision Squad team leader at the Hop Toad Theme Park, itself a Defense Department front, although it also reminded him of the years in which he had squandered the promise of that early start and become a petty criminal, mostly to make enough money to satisfy his gambling habit and the equally corrosive habit of his wife, the sister of the traveling businessman. She had been a legendary beauty in the small town where she grew up. The police commissioner concluded: “The man had been programmed—taught, you might say—to transfix people with his singing, after which he knocked them down and took their watches, which he wore, and their wallets, which he hid inside a chamber in his chest.”