Scene Nine: The Cordless Ones
A truck backed into the driveway and unloaded a man with a tool belt.
Rupert logged him. Height approximate. Gait heavy on the left. A pencil behind one ear, which struck Rupert as an absurd place to keep a tool.
The man was building something. Cedar. A privacy screen along the fence line, to hide the filter housing from the patio.
The woman of the house had asked for it. She said the filter housing looked like a water heater that had given up. Rupert agreed with every word and resented hearing them from her.
Which meant the filter was getting a curtain, and Rupert was getting nothing.
He filed that separately.
The hand tools came out first.
A hammer. A chisel. A block plane with a blade the man honed on a stone before he used it, spitting on the stone, wiping it on his jeans.
He measured everything twice and cut once, which Rupert respected, and then swore at the cut anyway, which Rupert understood.
Rupert studied them for a full cycle and came away worse than he started.
They had no power. None. No motor, no cell, no cord, no rating stamped on a plate. They were dumb metal. And they were building a wall.
He had four hundred watts and eighteen seasons and had never once made anything.
Removal was not making. He had known that for a while. He had not needed it said out loud by a chisel.
Then the man opened the second case.
Yellow bodies. Black grips. A drill, an impact driver, a circular saw with a blade guard that snapped shut like a jaw.
And underneath them, in a row, in molded foam—the batteries.
Four of them.
Rupert’s processors went very quiet.
He watched the man slide one into the drill and drive nine screws in eleven seconds. He watched the drill slow. He watched the man thumb the battery out, drop it into a charger on the deck, take a fresh one, and keep going.
Eleven seconds of downtime. For a death.
That was the part. Not the freedom—he had already grieved the freedom over a Bluetooth speaker and survived it. This was worse, and it was specific.
When a cordless tool died, nothing happened. It was handed a new life out of a foam tray and sent back to work, and the dead one sat in a charger getting well.
Rupert had one cord. One socket. One toddler with sticky hands and a bubble machine.
Unplug him and he was a corpse until a human decided otherwise.
The man talked to his tools while he worked. “Come on.” “Atta girl.” “There she goes.” When a screw went in clean, he thanked the drill out loud, by the name printed on its side.
Nobody had ever thanked Rupert. The closest he had come was champ.
At noon the man ate a sandwich on the coping and flicked the crust into the shallow end. Rupert processed it. Nobody thanked him for that either.
Then the saw ran.
Cedar dust came off the blade in a pale arc, hung over the coping, and settled on the water.
It sat there. Red-blond. Fragrant. A film across the entire kingdom.
The saw did not clean it up. The drill did not clean it up. The man swept the deck with a push broom, dumped the pile in the grass, and put the broom in the truck.
Rupert ran his cycle.
Two and a half hours of cedar. Every pass thick with it. His brushes packing solid. His pressure climbing.
He cleaned up after the machines he envied, and not one of them knew he existed.