set in Novi Sad, Serbia
16 September 2026
It’s a pleasantly chirpy and fairly un-noteworthy day in his suburb of Novi Sad. The autumn leaves are falling onto the rooftops of the houses on the other side of the road, making subtle piles on the lawns, and it’s making Father sit here and think, why am I here right now, on the computer? Soon it’s going to get cold. Real cold. Snowing and sleeting all over. And when it gets like that, it’s not going to be any fun to go out.
But it’s also nine in the morning, and it’s a bit chilly at this hour. The sun’s only just starting to come out.
Still, Father’s feeling restless. There’s nothing really interesting in his emails, and when he starts reading the news, it either sucks him in or makes him feel depressed about the state of the world.
What’s wrong with enjoying his backyard, as though he were a little kid? He goes to his wardrobe and puts on his winter jacket. He’s going to leave a little earlier today to enjoy the outdoors while it’s still relatively enjoyable.
He lets his computer idle, with the room lights off. He’ll return to it later in the day. Little pieces of lint and dust fly in the air, landing on the keyboard and the monitor.
As the computer idles, programmes continue running in the background, such as the screensaver slideshow of pictures from Father and Mother and Son’s earlier days that will come on after ten minutes.
4 June 2077
The house has been sold. It’s about time. No family has lived here in decades. The wood planks nailed over the door are starting to fall down. The tiles in the bathtub are getting a whitish stain. There’s the smell of something rotting, with a strong faecal odour to it. It could be a raccoon that has gotten stuck somewhere, or vegetable products that the previous owners forgot to dispose of.
Who has bought the house? That’s a good question. For the last half century the Radna Zona in the north of the city has been developing, much like the other industrial zones of Serbia. In order to truly improve the city of Novi Sad, it was decided that the entire four zones of the north merge, and all of its houses, Orthodox churches, and humble roadside eateries and fruit markets to be demolished, to make way for giant transport facilities that will help with the construct of bigger and quicker aviating vehicles, as well as the battery park that the androids and electric grids require. And of course the Stojanović family house would be of one of such houses to be zoned for destruction.
Two androids have been tasked with its assessment They are ргпит-41 and Ргпит-23. Ргпит stands for радна група за продуктивност индустријске технологије -the Industrial Building Technology and Productivity Taskforce. Though the models are stylised to be feminine or cute, to make the regular people see them as any other women, unthreatening, the androids are blunt and ruthless, a team designed to serve the country of Serbia and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina. It is hard to know what their lives were like before their human brains were installed into their robot bodies and most of them do not care. They know their purpose and they live with their purpose, like any other Serbian citizens.
Though, like any other human, each Ргпит has a personality, most likely a remnant of who they were before they were adapted to the machines.
‘What a dump,’ Ргпит-41 complains as she opens the door and sees the maggots in the furniture and the cockroaches scampering everywhere.
‘Now, now,’ Ргпит-23 says. ‘It’s been ages since a family has lived here.’ She presses a button in her temple where the human sinus would have been. ‘Exactly twenty-three years, seventeen days, twelve hours, twenty-one minutes, twelve seconds. That was the exact moment when Yana Stojanović succumbed to an aneurysm, leading to her hospitalisation, and then her death thirty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds after.’
‘Spare me the details. We’re here to mark the house for demolition. I could care less about who lived here.’
Ргпит-41 runs the scanner embedded in her glasses. It traces all three floors of the house at once. There are far too many cockroaches, millipedes, spiders, termites, and flies. There are seventeen rats and one stray dog that is feasting on a rotting raccoon in the basement. Otherwise, there are no other life forms in the house. The stray dog has to be let out, as well as the rats. She will fumigate the insects. And then there will be nothing alive left in the house.
Ргпит-23 in the meantime will look for anything that can be reclaimed by the government, as well as documents or memorabilia that has to be returned to the family. Yana Stojanović has only one descendent, a grandson who lives in Canada. If anything is found, it will be shipped to him. She scans the living room, the guest room on the ground floor, the kitchen, and the dining room. She finds some coffee rinds that look to be decades old, some sweaters that were probably purposefully discarded, some picture frames and vases that look intentionally unclaimed, a Bible written in Russian with its pages covered with mould.
As she goes to the second floor, the first thing she notices is the workroom. There is an old computer on the hardwood desk, a library stocked with books, and a sofa which has been dressed in a plastic cover.
She wonders why all of this has been left in the home.
And she can’t just get rid of the computer. She has to boot it up, search it for pertinent information that belongs to the family, wipe out the remaining irrelevant data, and then mark it for clearance. For if the computer is tossed out and someone discovers later that it contains bank information or documents that could aid in identity theft, the government of The Autonomous Province of Vojvodina could get embroiled in legal trouble.
Ргпит-23 turns on the computer. There are three accounts. Jovan Stojanović, Yana Stojanović, and Nikola Stojanović. A father, mother, and son, most likely. She authorises the overriding of the password and hacks into the computer so that it is nulled.
Actually, Jovan Stojanović’s account had no password set. She probably didn’t need to override anything in the first place.
She starts the scanning process.
Or she thinks she is starting the process. For whatever reason, despite this computer being almost a century old, it boots up, and immediately a picture opens on the screen. Perhaps it is a glitch, or perhaps it is something that the scanning programme was triggered to do. The picture is of three people. A man with balding hair and slanted eyes in a red shirt and khaki shorts, a woman with curly short hair in a flower dress, and a boy, his eyes even more creased together as he smiles with all of his teeth, holding a LEGO police car in his hands.
Suddenly Ргпит-23 feels an emotion. It’s not often that she feels an emotion. Her programming is coded to block against emotion. But sometimes when the emotion is strong, especially this strong, she has to sit down. She keeps her body contracted so she can allow the programme to run without interruption. The problem is that as she sits on this hardwood chair that was probably once used by these family members, she is still staring at the picture. Her breathing is getting discombobulated. The programme is running, but something in her brain wants it to do something else.
It’s such a hard thing, being of a human mind in a robot body with computer chips and all sorts of programmes run into it. What if what the machine wants and what the mind wants are completely different, in a state of contradiction?
‘All clear?’ Ргпит-41 asks. She has noticed Ргпит-23 is not working efficiently and wants to check to see if anything has come loose in her programming. She notices the picture Ргпит-23 is looking at and rushes to her side. ‘You’re not supposed to look at their personal information.’
‘I’m not looking. It just came up.’
‘You are supposed to let the programme clear the computer and then go.’
‘I know.’
Ргпит-41 presses a few buttons and starts to erase the data on the machine.
Ргпит-41 continues to berate Ргпит-23 as the computer screen runs green.
‘It’s not good for me,’ Ргпит-23 finally agrees.
Ргпит-41 notices that Ргпит-23 has stabilised. She has other work to do, but before she gets to her tasks, she repeats, ‘You are not supposed to look at their personal information. It can be very unsettling.’
23 November 2080
Since that day, Ргпит-41 continues to work as a Ргпит unit. She likes seeing houses demolished. She sometimes records videos of it and then replays the videos of the destruction when she is idle. Something about seeing devastation invokes something in her.
And that is a something she is unable to understand, because her programming doesn’t allow her.
Ргпит-41 still remembers what happened with Ргпит-23, and how the picture on the computer affected her so deeply. Once in a while, she wonders what happened to Ргпит-23. She likes Ргпит-56 and Ргпит-88, her new partners, but she felt very bonded with Ргпит-23 until the day she was disbanded from work and sent somewhere else.
Where is Ргпит-23 these days?
Ргпит-41 would look into it, but her programming doesn’t allow her…
23 November 2080
Today is the day Ргпит-23 has been scheduled for termination. She has been a good android, but she has also been a very bad android. After seeing that picture of that family, something in her subconscious mind started to override her programming. It was subtle. At first she would remember small things, such as the day when she lost her mother in a bombing, or the day when she was raped by the soldiers who held her in captivity. She was sold to the Serbian government as an experiment, and her mind was meant to be completely wiped clean.
But the conscious mind and the subconscious mind are different, and then there’s the matter of the spirit.
Ргпит-23 kept at her work and did it well, but once in a while she’d find herself stealing the candies she found in the homes, in the same way she used to hide morsels of food in her pocket in a bid to not starve as a little girl. She’d suddenly shout random sentences in her mother tongue, Arabic, and when people stared at her in confusion, she’d blame it as a glitch in her system.
Ргпит-23 was also a mother at some point to one of the kids who was born from the rape, but she didn’t know who the father was, and she didn’t know where the child was.
Why did she look at that family picture?
And why did that family trigger so much emotion in her?
Perhaps it was because despite the fact that they were all smiling, she could make out in the tension within. It was in the body language, the forcedness of their smiles. There was a sense that things didn’t go as planned, especially given the state of their home.
She felt a sense of connection with this family, a sense of identification, a sense that they were like her in some way, or the person she was before Ргпит-23 was built, and her past life thrown away.
It wasn’t that Ргпит-23 completely remembered. The chips were too strong for that. She could never fully remember. But she continued to act up and took up smoking for no reason, and she started to sleep with human men.
One she castrated, and that was when the government stepped in. The government wanted to not get sued or have its reputation defamed.
Who would want that?
Ргпит-23 finished her hearing yesterday. She is going to have the chips in her mind removed tomorrow. Then they are going to electrocute her. Perhaps in those few minutes between the removal of the technology and the electrocution, Ргпит-23 will remember something of her homeland and original name.
She would very much like that.
Perhaps those few minutes before death will be happier moments than her entire life as an android. Perhaps she will remember the horror of seeing her mother raped in front of her, the anguish of watching her entire village burst into flame in front of her eyes, but she will also remember the joy of eating a persimmon for the first time, or hearing her mother’s lullabies when she would fall asleep. As Ргпит-23 she felt nothing and for decades, and in a certain way, to feel nothing all the time is worse than having to feel pain.
Ргпит-23 sits in this holding cell, staring at the grey concrete floor on the other side of her bed. She is handcuffed at her ankles and wrists, and her mind has been disabled from the network. She can function, but she cannot access any information, visual programming, or games.
She is bored, so she simply remembers that picture over and over again.
She wonders what happened to that family, the family she never met, but whose moment of connection with her through a photograph completely changed her destiny.
She wishes that this grandson, whoever he is, is well, and as she decides to lie down and stare at the ceiling rather than the floor, she finds herself hoping that, for better or for worse, this family found peace and happiness. In that one moment of looking at that picture, she lived a life with them. And without having lived a life, in both the most pleasant and most horrid meanings of it, a life that is being lived can feel as though it amounts to nothing.
