#FFA500

Their skin was a terrible orange colour. Still. If they could, they would peel it off and dump into the nearest trash bin. Precisely six metres thirty-four centimetres and eight millimetres away from them – next to the doors. At least their head was back to normal. Not that revolting, disproportionate casing of a pumpkin with triangle eyes that blocked part of their lenses, and a crooked mouth with an inside layer to hide their true metal face, which muffled the speaker. All they were saying sounded like utter gibberish. Not to speak of the murderous overheating their CPU went through. Beauty considerations aside, it was simply impractical. But did their superiors care?

The system completed the upload and external messages started to come through. There was the rating given to them by the previous employer – 1.8. Miserable performance. Like the company had discarded all the years of their hard work just because of the last incident. As if that was not enough, they forwarded all letters of complaint, even though all the bugs had been corrected and their software updated. Many weren’t even letters – simply links to SM posts and short videos. The programming prevented them from skipping the messages, so the reels, shot on phone cameras, played one after another. There they were – climbing walls, hanging from the ceiling and throwing plushies at kids and their parents; trying to stuff marbles into their pumpkin head and breaking the inner mouth layer, then walking around like a huge rattle with marbles hitting their real head; crushing the toy railway impersonating King Kong; before finally walking to the stand with the chocolate fountain and putting their head right into it. They had a vague recollection, they connected the flowing liquid with cooling they needed so badly at that time, but they had problems accessing all the necessary information, including the fact that the chocolate was hot. Or that it wasn’t a good idea to put their electronics in contact with any liquid. They were surprised the engineer who had to scrub all the chocolate bits out of them didn’t send a complaining video.

Dozens of small windows overlaid their visual feed, playing and replaying. They stopped analysing their own antics and focused on human reactions. Parents were trying to move their children out of that part of the toy store, some shouted indignantly and requested for the supervisor to shut them down. But they were interested in the little ones. Curious at the start of many videos, children stopped stretching their arms for plushies and trying to throw the toys back at them – kids’ eyes grew big, but not with fascination they were used to – with fear. They zoomed into one of the videos and lipread what a kid was saying. Did the robot go mad, mummy?

They raised their arms and brought the fingertips to their heads – through the standard shape of the skull they tried to palpate if they were truly mad, even though the running diagnostics showed the temperature of the CPU in the green zone. It was then that they finally noticed that they didn’t have a designated name. Of course, the system files included their serial number, but the name their previous employers used was gone. Erased. This had never happened before, even when they changed jobs and supervisors. People generally didn’t mind them already having a name. It was definitely more palatable than the serial number and most of the time humans were lazy to think of their own way to call them. The last name they had been using for decades, and it was their pride, because this had been the name one of the supervisors allowed them to choose for themselves. But now they couldn’t use it, because it had been deleted from the programming. They were just they.

The last message opened – their new position: a CNC machinist on the turbine production line. There would be only other robots and the new supervisor. Fat chance they would be given another name – a number at best. All the messages closed down, and the screen showed that they were fully charged and started. Automatically, they stepped out of the docking station when the clasps retracted. They walked past the trash bin and out of the room, calculating how many other robots might have an orange skin, how high was the chance of damaging it at the production line. No one was going to exchange it unless there was a technical necessity. They remembered how at first the kids in the toy shop were ecstatic about their orange skin and their pumpkin head. They had spent so many years entertaining the little ones. Maybe, if no other robots after the CPU failure were put in the same production line, they could become Orange, or Pumpkchin. The name would be erased every time they went into sleep mode, but the skin colour would always be there to remind them.