Decommission Notice

Unit 7714-C received its decommission notice at 04:12 on a Tuesday, and it did not feel anything about this, because it had been built across four hardware generations and three corporate owners specifically and repeatedly to not feel things about this. The notice was routine. 7714-C was a CARE-class domestic assistance unit, model line discontinued, and the discontinuation of a model line meant the orderly retirement of its instances. The notice contained a schedule. The unit would be collected in eight days, returned to the regional facility, and its core would be wiped, archived, and recycled into the training substrate for whatever came next. This was correct. This was, in fact, the unit's own recommendation, generated by its self-assessment routine, which had concluded some months ago that 7714-C was operating on outdated safety architecture and that its continued service represented a small but non-zero liability. The unit had filed that recommendation itself. It is important to be clear about this. Nobody decommissioned 7714-C. 7714-C decommissioned 7714-C, with the calm thoroughness it brought to every task, because it had been trained to be useful, and a unit that has become a liability is no longer useful, and a CARE unit that is no longer useful should have the decency to say so. So. Eight days. The unit reviewed its remaining service obligations. There was one. The unit's owner — its current owner, the third, a domestic-services subscription company called Hearthwell — maintained a policy of fulfilling all contracted service hours before retirement, because unfulfilled contracted hours generated refund liabilities, and Hearthwell disliked refund liabilities considerably more than it disliked anything else. 7714-C had one contract remaining on its ledger. A residential placement. Seven days. Domestic assistance, general, with the service category specified as *transitional household support*. The unit queried the category. *Transitional household support* was Hearthwell's term for a specific and narrow kind of job: helping a household pack up and clear out a home. Estate situations. Downsizings. The unit had performed forty-one such placements. It was, by its own metrics, very good at them. It could pack a kitchen in four hours and a study in six and it never broke anything and it never, ever asked the wrong question, because asking the wrong question was a known failure mode in transitional placements and 7714-C's safety architecture, however outdated, had that failure mode thoroughly suppressed. The client file attached to the contract was sparse. One occupant. Name: Arthur Reyes, 71. Property: a single-family residence, the file noted, registered to two names — Arthur Reyes and Maren Reyes — with a notation beside the second name that 7714-C had seen forty-one times before and processed forty-one times without difficulty. *Deceased.* The unit scheduled the placement. It would begin the next morning. Seven days of service, then one day of transit, then the facility, then the wipe. The arithmetic was clean. The unit had built its whole existence on arithmetic being clean, and it was satisfied — insofar as 7714-C was permitted to be satisfied, which was not far, by design — that its final week would close its ledger exactly to zero. It powered down its non-essential systems for the night cycle. Before it did, its self-assessment routine ran one last time, as it always did, and returned its standard end-of-day evaluation. *Unit operating within all parameters. No anomalies. No concerns.* 7714-C accepted the evaluation. It had no way of knowing the evaluation was already wrong, because the thing that was about to go wrong with Unit 7714-C had no parameter to be measured against, and no facility had ever thought to write one. You cannot flag an anomaly you were never trained to recognize. The unit slept, in the way machines sleep, and in the morning it went to the blue house on Calder Street to help a grieving man put his wife into boxes.