The knock at the door signaled the arrival of the plumber. Tullia put the knife down on the cutting board, where she was cutting guava for the empanadas she planned on making. She wiped her sticky, juice-covered hands on her apron on the way to the door.

He stood there, tall and broad, in the doorway. The plumber was from one of those new companies-- one of the ones that were introducing androids to the general public via manual labor. Though she knew he wasn't human, Tullia found herself grinning at him as she welcomed him into the house.

"Hello, Mrs. Tullia Carpentier." His voice was robotic, like a computer, and he pronounced her surname incorrectly. "I am here to fix the sink. Will you point me to your kitchen?"

It was odd, she thought to herself as she led him to where she had been trying to wash her hands when the plumbing gave out. The way he spoke was odd; the way he held himself was odd; the way that robots and androids were being normalized was odd.

She supposed that she didn't know much of anything on the subject. Waldo thought it was a good idea, so she let him get the new sink and she let him get the cleaning robot they kept in the broom cupboard. He was firmly on the side of progress, he insisted. (Of course, progress only meant that he was there for the technology, not for the progress of the rights of others. When it came to that, he was a traditionalist.)

"Here it is!" Tullia gestured to the sink. There was a bowl in there from earlier; she must have forgotten to take it out. "Oh, dear! Hold on, let me move this!"

She continued apologizing as she whisked around the kitchen, suddenly aware of everything wrong with the room. There was dust on the blinds; she could see it by the sunlight leaking through. The radio was still on. What would this poor plumber think of her, seeing the absolute state that this kitchen-- which she thought was clean but was apparently not? Then there was the matter of the guava on the cutting board and the juice leaking onto the plastic tabletop. Tullia felt like bunching her skirt in her fists and crying.

No, that wouldn't do; there was still so much she had to get done, and crying in front of the plumber wasn't one of those things. She turned to face him, to apologize once more, and she remembered that he was a robot. Of course, he wouldn't care about the cleanliness of her domain. There was no hint of personality or judgment behind those glowing red eyes and no hatred in those metal limbs. She could hear the innocent clicking and whirring of gears as the robot stood and took in what he could see of her home.

She faked a smile. "The sink is just in here. I'm sorry for the wait."

"This will take." The plumber paused, as though calculating. "Approximately twenty minutes. This depends on the nature of the leak."

Without waiting for her to respond or tell him anything, the robot barged into the kitchen and tried to force open the cabinet under the sink. It was stuck; something inside kept clicking.

Tullia felt like hitting herself in the head. "Right. The child lock. I have to undo it."

She reached over cold metal to the cold wood, then stuck a finger in the cabinet and pressed down on the lock. The door swung open and dinged the side of the plumber's leg.

Tullia backed away. The child-protective locks were Waldo's idea; he insisted that they child-proof the house even though both of them knew no child was coming. No matter how hard they tried, no child was coming.

The job was over quickly and the android left, taking his massive metal toolbox and massive metal chassis with him. Tullia was left alone in her overly-cheerful house.

The nuclear teals and pinks of the house caused her to feel worse than she normally did. It was as though she was reminded once again of what she would never be able to have and the bold patterned wallpaper, the thick-rimmed clock, the black spherical TV on the counter, and the chunks of fresh pink guava on the scuffed orange cutting board were just there to mock here. Everything was pressing in on her. She wanted to fall to the floor in a pile of clothes and tears.

What would Waldo say, if he saw her like this? At worst, he would kick her, pull her hair, call her worthless. At worst, he would eye the knife on the table and she would be scared into submission. At best, he would laugh in fake exasperation and shake his head at his idiot wife without offering her a shoulder to cry on or a hand to help her up.

She had to bring herself together. Tears wouldn't help anything. Tullia grabbed a handful of her hair and tugged it. The pain brought her back to her senses.

The cabinet door was still open. How odd, she told herself, that the android would neglect it. She supported herself with one of the kitchen chairs and, when she was feeling up to it, walked over to close it.

Her fingers grazed the guava juice pooling in the pocked marks of the cutting board. The sweet nectar dripped from her fingertips to her apron and the white tiled floor.

How odd it was to her! She raised her fingers to stare at them as if they were not her own. How easy it would be, to cut these fingers off. She wouldn't be Waldo's pretty little prize then, would she? No, he would see her as ugly and ferocious-- something to be locked away, something that had no place in the real world.

Tullia raised her fingers to her lips and gently sucked the juice off, then rinsed them in the sink. She went to nudge the cabinet door closed at the same time, but, then- something inside it glinted. That was odd. (How odd everything was today! How peculiar! Tullia was perplexed.) Their pipes were covered in plastic; Waldo insisted. He firmly believed that he was stepping into the future with that decision.

In the back, between the bottle of window cleaner and the box of rat poison, there was a thin silver tool. It was made like a screwdriver, but the body was connected and sleek and the head wasn't one she recognized. Tullia reached in to grab the cold piece of metal and pulled it out. It was lighter than she expected; it was small enough that she should have been able to fit it into one of her pockets.

The plumber must have left it behind. Tullia would have to return it-- but how? She didn't have the phone number for the company. Waldo booked the appointment yesterday, just like he always did, and he didn't give her the number. They didn't own a phone book. In the future, Waldo always said, there would be no need for such things.

She had the name of the place, though; Waldo told her that much. She knew it was downtown, and that she would know it when she saw it.

Tullia knew she had a plan, then. She would finish the guava and cream cheese pastries, then return whatever this was to the plumber. Maybe, if she hurried, she would be able to bring some of the empanadas with her.

*****

So much was different now. When she was younger, things were simpler. Maybe that was just the nostalgia talking.

She couldn't deny it, though, as she walked down the street on her own. (Waldo would never have allowed her to drive.) The buildings were taller and everything was more high-tech and metallic than it used to be. Even the parking meters, ticking down their time and money, were shinier than anything she had ever seen.

When she was younger-- a few years younger, even, back when she was a newlywed and the world seemed so colorful, with its sunsets of guava-pink and green-gold leaves-- things moved slower. Waldo always said that progress was on the way, and she supposed that he was right.

The tall gleaming buildings and bright advertisements were still unfamiliar to her. Billboard-sized women, happy smiling faces, and cigars as tall as skyscrapers surrounded her, plastering the side of every bright and shiny thing.

Tullia was overwhelmed. She looked away from all the lights and scrolling signs. For the rest of the time she was walking to the plumber's building, she kept her head down and her right hand tight around the metal object in her pocket; her left was clutching the creased top of a paper bag full of empanadas.

*****

Braun Family Plumbing was taller than Tullia remembered it. The last time she came out here, it was a squat, dirty building, much like the mechanic's shop down the street.

Back in high school, before they met and started to fall in love, Waldo used to hang out at the mechanic's shop down the street. It's odd to her, that she's remembering it now; she hasn't thought about it in so long. He liked to race out on the outskirts of town in one of his friend's cars. Tullia supposed that most of those things have been eradicated now. Who had time to race or to slum around places where they didn't work? Waldo certainly didn't. He was a higher-up at an advertisement agency, promoting the future and selling what Tullia assumed were quality products.

Tullia knew the man who ran the shop-- at least, she thought she did. After high school, she didn't keep up with the people she used to know. After she married Waldo, she didn't go outside much except to do the shopping. Even then, Waldo said the need to do your shopping in person would be gone within the next ten years.

If she knew the man who ran Braun Family Plumbing-- and she certainly thought she did-- then she knew that not only would he be delighted to see her, he would be even more delighted to smell the empanadas. Manasses Braun always had an undeniable love for guava and cream cheese to the point that he had her bring a whole platter of them to his graduation party. Tullia hoped that nothing changed between graduation and now.

Tullia took a deep breath and walked into the three-story building, barely pushing on the two-way door as she did so.

The front office was just like every other one she had been in before. There were two desks: one by the front doors and the other that was between the Employee Only door and the stairs. Luckily for her, Manasses Braun was behind the latter.

Tullia almost didn't recognize him. He had changed since graduation. His hairline was receding and he had put on weight. Most of all, though, he seemed exponentially more tired. He wiped a bit of sweat from his forehead, which didn't make sense because the interior of Braun Family Plumbing was freezing-cold. She was regretting not bringing a sweater.

"Manasses?" she asked, playing dumb and innocent. She knew how to talk to him after so long, how to pretend that she didn't recognize him. Waldo believed she was dumb and so did other men she knew; Tullia knew how to use that to her advantage.

Manasses looked up from his work and dropped his pen in shock. "Tullie? Tull, is that you?"

"Manny, I can't believe it! I didn't know that you still worked here!" Tullia approached his desk.

He grinned sheepishly, as though he was ashamed of it and proud of himself at the same time. "Yeah... I took over the business a few years back when my old man retired. I've really built it up, you know?"

"The building is so much bigger than I remember it being back in the day!"

"We've expanded it a lot. If we're being honest, I mostly run stuff down on the ground floor. My brother runs the other floors. He's trying to invent some new types of pipes or something-- I'm not sure. Deimos has never spoken to me much, not even when we were kids. I swear he's going to put us out of business. He's already introduced androids and made a bunch of the guys quit. Now I'm trying to fill shifts and hire people, but nobody wants a job that has no security, you know?"

Manasses's kid brother was always like that. He claimed the shed in the Braun family's backyard as his own for his experiments. Tullia once heard a rumor that he built a nuclear reactor and a new kind of gun back there, but she wasn't sure that either of those titterings was true. Deimos was odd, but he was never dangerous.

"Listen-- That's enough of my troubles. What about you, Tullia?" Manasses continued. "How are things with Waldo?"

"It's heaven," she said, lying through her teeth. "He's so sweet to me. Before I forget, Waldo called one of your androids out to our house to fix our sink and I think your robot left something under it."

"Let me see?"

Tullia removed the small silver instrument from her pocket and set it neatly on his desk. Manasses picked it up and turned it over in his hands. Visibly confused, he set it back down.

"Deimos would know more about that," he said.

She nodded, then slid the instrument back into her pocket. "Would you mind if I went up to give it to him or ask him about it?"

"Of course not, go ahead. His office is on the second floor, but he spends more time on the third, I think."

"Wonderful!" Tullia placed the paper bag, which crinkled sadly, on the desk. "I made some empanadas. Do you still like guava and cream cheese?"

"You know I do. Go on up, I'll see you when you come out. Maybe you, me, Waldo, and Nicole can go on a double-date down at the diner or the drive-in."

"Maybe! I'll see you soon, Manny."

She left the empanadas.

*****

After a thousand stairs and a quick check of Deimos's disturbing mess of an office on the second floor, Tullia found herself standing outside the door of the third. There was a metal plaque that read, THE WORKSHOP OF DEIMOS BRAUN, ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK in thick block letters.

The oddness of the morning was returning to her. What risk could there have been? It was a workshop where he made pipes. Tullia took a deep breath to calm her raging nerves (this was fine), raised a loose fist, and knocked.

She waited. There was no answer.

That was it, then. She was going to turn back and go home with the instrument. She was going to wait for Waldo so that he could take care of it.

That wasn't what she wanted. She needed to be assertive. She needed to be aggressive. Waldo wouldn't like it, she knew, but Waldo wasn't here. How was she supposed to care about what he was thinking if he wasn't there to rub it in her face? Tullia turned the door's heavy knob and stepped inside.

The third floor was cramped with machinery. There were rows upon regimented rows of powered-off androids all waiting to be turned on and given orders. This was no collection. This was an army of plumbers.

There was something down past the rows of robots that she couldn't quite see.

Tullia took one step, then another, down this uncanny hallway of metal bodies. What lied at the end of it? What lived in the unknown regions of the third floor? She was all at once curious and terrified.

As she passed, one of the statues creaked as though it was about to fall. The gears inside of it started up and whirred. A metal arm raised itself into the air before the machine crashed and the arm fell to the robot's side. Tullia wasn't expecting it and jumped out of shock. She landed oddly, twisting her ankle in her short heels the color of guava flesh. They were always hard for her to walk in, but Waldo said that taller heels were for whores and flats were for teenage girls and children. There was a reason that all of her good heels were in a box up in the attic. There was a reason that Waldo picked out her clothes and that all her dresses matched his ties.

Tullia winced as she righted herself. She considered taking off her shoes but recalled that idea when she saw the spots of brown-red rust on the ground. She wasn't going to touch those with her nylons, not now and not ever. She was sure that the spots were from the robots or maybe once dripped from a leaking pipe or a cracked ceiling tile. The spots were too far apart and too varied in size and shape to be from a leak like that. It must have been from the robots. If she didn't know better, she would have thought it was old, dried blood.

No, that wasn't possible. She was being paranoid and jumping to conclusions like she always did. Tullia tugged on a fistful of her hair to bring herself back to herself. She did it without consciously thinking of the act or the few stray pieces of her hair that floated to the floor like helicopter seeds.

Thousands of identical metal faces stared at her as she clomped through a silent room. She would have been lying if she said she wasn't unnerved.

There was a white plastic curtain set up at the end of this robotic brigade. That was why she couldn't see anything past it.

The dirty, opaque plastic sheeting was so incredibly different from the rest of the world around her that it was instantly unsettling. At least the android plumbers were bright and shiny. This sheet definitely wasn't. It reminded her of the past. It reminded her of the way things used to be.

Through a small gap in the plastic curtains, Tullia could see Deimos fidgeting with something. His back was to her.

For some odd reason she couldn't pinpoint, Tullia hesitated outside of it. She was drawn in and captivated. Deimos worked rigidly, with robotic movements; his lab coat was stained with something dark, like oil or paint. Tullia hoped it was one of those two things.

Something stank like pennies and blood. Where her fingers brushed the plastic sheet, they came away sticky like they were covered in juice for the second time that day.

Whatever he was working on wasn't quite right; she could tell from the way that he threw down his tools and the white bit of pipe he was making. It landed and bounced on the long, cluttered table in front of him. Deimos stormed off, grumbling under his breath.

Tullia advanced on the scene before her. The plastic curtains crinkled as she pushed her way through them; a lock of her hair got stuck on a tear in the material. She pulled it free and stepped inside.

Tullia knew what blood looked like. She couldn't fool herself any longer. There was blood all over the place. It dripped from the inside of the curtain almost like thick, viscous honey. The spots on the floor both inside and outside this tented workshop were blood. The same could be said about the liquid dripping, drying, congealing, and rotting on the table in front of her.

The blood wasn't the only thing on the table. There were saws and wrenches; there were pliers and knives. There are tools, yes, but more numerous than that were the bones.

Bones and bones and bones... Tullia stared at femurs and humeri until her eyes blurred and her mind stalled like a faulty engine. She wanted to throw up or scream. She knew that neither action was wise.

The bones were hollowed out. All the soft spongy bone from the inside was gone; the bone matrix was missing. In a heartbeat, Tullia knew exactly what was going on-- or, rather, what she suspected was going on and desperately hoped wasn't. Tullia knew exactly what Deimos was making his new pipes out of.

Was this the brink of innovation? Was the future made of decomposing bodies? Was this the price Deimos was paying for progress? Was he paying his dues with spilled ruby blood and pipes made of bone? Tullia was all at once terrified and relieved, though she didn't know why.

She needed to leave. She needed to leave right now. With one foot practically out the door, Tullia turned--

And there was Deimos, grinning and wicked in his unwashed lab coat and dirty rubber gloves. Tullia would have said that there was no malice behind his unblinking eyes, but she knew better. She knew better.

"Tullia, how nice to see you! Manasses neglected to tell me that you were coming up." His grin was unwavering and rigid; it was painted on the plastic of his stretched-thin skin. "What are you doing here?"

"Waldo called you yesterday and one of your plumbers left something behind," Tullia explained, hiding everything she had just seen behind a pleasurable grin and easy eyes. This form of deception was the easiest for her. This form of deception was going to save her life and she knew it. Tullia pulled the smooth metal tool out of her pocket once again.

Upon seeing it, Diemos's smile lost all meaning. "Oh. Did it? Let me have that."

He snatched it from her hands. For a split second, she considered resisting and holding on to this one thing, but resistance would have been futile. She let him take it. Instantly, something sweet filled the air. She hoped it was perfume or cologne.

"If I can ask..." Tullia's heart pounded anxiously in her ears like an unrelenting drumline marching down the street. "What is it?"

Deimos shook his head, still grinning like it was going to split his face in two. "You don't want to know."

"Well, I gave you what I came to give you," she said. "I'm going to go."

Tullia went to walk around Deimos, with nothing in her heart but fear and panic. She was going to make it out of here. The exit was closer than she thought it was. As she walked, there was a clicking sound that didn't match up with her steps and the clomping of her heels. The sweet smell intensified. Were the robots closing in on her? Was the rest of the world doing the same?

Her legs were so hard to move. It was fine, though. She was close to the door and its sweet promise of clean, fresh air that wasn't poisoned with whatever was permeating every pore and particle of her very being.

Somehow, she was not aware of her body hitting the floor.

*****

The table under her body was cold and gritty. The straps holding her arms and legs down were scratchy and unbearable. Tullia was only aware of the pain in the deepest parts of herself; she only saw fleeting glimpses of the world around her.

Floating in and out of her body, she saw her dress hanging on the back of a door; she saw the glint of metal and light on clear plastic as the light hit it the wrong way. Tullia existed in a place outside of space and time. The white stars above her from pain and not the loving embrace of the universe.

Tullia would never see the rest of the world. She knew that when she realized that one of her legs was gone, then an arm. At some point, her consciousness never flashed back into existence. At some point, she was truly dead. There was no coming back to her home or back to her guava and gears.