Sometimes, all a story needs is a voice. The voice, (on those rare occasions) is the story. In the very act of articulating itself, it tells you everything. 

Helena Bell’s ‘Robot’ is essentially a list of dos and don’ts for the help — the help in this case being a medical ingestion device manufactured by (presumably friendly) aliens.

“You may wash your aluminum chassis on Monday and leave it on the back porch opposite the recyclables; you may wash your titanium chassis on Friday if you promise to polish it in time for church; don’t terrorize the cat…”

The lonely, sick old woman composing these instructions suspects that the robot is out to steal her dresses, the love of her rather neglectful children, her estate, and maybe, just maybe, the planet.

This last possibility is not especially interesting; it’s only here, I suspect, to keep the genre literalists happy. What matters to me — what I can’t get out of my head — is that voice: persnickerty, passive-aggressive, peremptory, and dying by degrees.

“Do not correct me in front of my friends; I have to finesse for the queen; I know how many trumps are out; I know how to play this game; I am the reason you are here, why are you so ungrateful?”

As we map the hole she’s leaving in her account of herself, the narrator’s true shape emerges. Oh, but it’s painful: never let your voice become stronger than you are.

First published in Clarkesworld no.72, September 2012, and available to read online here; anthologised in We Robots: Artificial Intelligence in 100 Stories, edited by Simon Ings, Head of Zeus, London, 2021