Nanny for the Alien Lord by Tammy Walsh
Tauas
The smile wasthe same no matter who wore it.
Thin and pointed at the corners, so subtle you had to look closely to figure out if it even was a smile.
The trick was to look past the gritted teeth and ugly sneers first.
It was incredible the emotion people could put into a smile when they didn’t really mean it.
They imbue something as happy as a smile with their own unique veneer of poison.
I should know.
I mirrored the same fake smile back at them.
We made little witticisms and laughed at each other’s jokes… none of which were funny and made even less sense.
They threw back their heads and downed the overpriced drinks I’d shipped in to ensure they chipped in with their donations to the charity.
My charity.
No one was stingier than a rich man—it was how he got rich in the first place.
The business leaders would make wild predictions about where the next big company would come from, blissfully unaware that they would miss the opportunity just as they had missed the last one.
My company.
Choer Robotics.
You always hope for the best when you start a company.
Most of the time, dreams don’t come true but when it does, it’s a wild shot in the dark.
They’re known as phenomenons for a reason.
Because no one expects it.
No one but the people who began the company right at the beginning when it was just the two of you and a basement office that had to double as a living space because we couldn’t afford to rent both.
We didn’t “come out of nowhere.”
It happened because of all the hard work and effort we put into it.
Later, there would be an auction where we sold off part of our robot memorabilia collections and they got something for their money.
Not for the first time, I wondered what I was doing there.
Oh yeah, I was the chief sponsor.
It was my party.
I bankrolled this whole shitshow, not that it could ever be my idea.
“Just show your face,” Freas, my personal assistant, had told me. “You’ll have a good time and get to know some key players who can help take your business to the next level. Besides, you need to get out. It’s not like you do this sort of thing often.”
Doing this event once a year was just enough time for me to forget what it was like… and have to do it all over again.
Events like this stopped being interesting a long time ago.
Who was I kidding?
They’d never been interesting.
At least then it’d been tolerable with the lithe female creature clinging to my arm.
She’d been the social one.
She’d been the one to make the necessary business contacts.
And she’d been gone three years, two weeks, and eighteen hours.
My one, my only, the light of my life.
My darling wife.
The space beside me seemed to open up like a swirling vortex where she ought to have been standing.
The sawing emotion swelled up thickly inside me, and despite the years that’d passed, I still couldn’t bring myself to attend events such as this without recalling our lives together.
I checked my watch even though it’d been less than ten minutes since I arrived.
I waved a hand at the robot bartender.
“Get me a drink. A big one.”
The robot filled the tallest glass and handed it to me.
“Your drink, sir.”
I took it from him with a curt nod, threw it back, and smacked it down on the bar.
I felt it burn down the back of my throat as it made its long, winding, slow descent into the pit of my stomach.
Coming here had been a mistake.
I never should have listened to Freas.
“Another, sir?” the robot bartender asked.
“No. But give everyone else one. Maybe if they get blind drunk, they’ll forget I was ever here.”
“Very good, sir,” the robot bartender said.
I made a mental note to give the bots a sense of humor.
Drinking men needed not only a drink but an understanding ear to listen to their troubles.
I turned to face the crowd of partiers.
The music was loud and the lights flashed from powerful lamps that cast long beams across the open space.
Inside the beams, a pair of figures danced as trees sprouted and carried them into the sky.
It was a reenactment of a popular fairytale.
It told the story of children waking up a sleeping giant who chases after them.
He saw the love they shared with their tiny hearts and couldn’t understand why he couldn’t feel it with his own larger one.
He loved the children so much that he smothered them, extinguishing their flames of love and life, so he was left with nothing.
My company made robots, but I don’t think I’ve ever made a model with less heart than my own after my wife died.
My heart stopped beating and might have been replaced with electronic parts every bit as fragile as those we plugged into our electronic devices.
Between a throng of guests, a man looked up and a flicker of recognition lit his eyes.
He turned to his wife—girlfriend? mistress?— and marched in my direction.
It was Turok, one of the original investors of our company.
I bought him out last year so now the entire company belonged solely to me.
It put me in the hole but it was worth it to take the company in the direction I wanted rather than the one he did.
He was one of the very last people I wanted to speak with.
I weaved through the crowd toward the exit and only stopped when somebody lurched into my path.
I said, “Excuse me—”
It immediately became clear it wasn’t another hanger-on intent on stealing valuable minutes from my life.
A young woman in her mid-to-late twenties yanked her narrow arm from the sweaty hands of an unpleasant media mogul called Uzik.
His beady black eyes drilled into the human female, his slick tongue slurping at his thick lips.
The onlookers watched, fascinated yet scared, as the scene took place.
They were rich and famous because of Uzik and had no intention of burying their careers within the next five seconds by coming to the girl’s aid.
“Please let go of me!” the human female wailed, yanking harder to free her arm.
She never should have said the word, “Please.”
It was a purple flag to a buiffat like Uzik.
Sure enough, Uzik sneered sadistically and descended with groping hands for the woman once more.
