Has it already been five days?

Loverett and I have been fighting. I don't know why I get chosen to talk to him, but we do have certain things in common. We are both good at waiting, in fact, we serve to wait, and we are both good at soothing. I brought him my theory of gadgets and soullessness. He was not amused.

"Why!" he said, "I am more bound, more lashed down, more permanent than any human could ever be. Removing me would mean tearing up the Factory by the roots! Hundreds of younger, less conditioned gadgets would immediately give up a heartbroken cry, and many more would begin a neurotic course of self-mutilation and daredeviling. Goop would lose its way in the pipes, and would expire, unarticulated." At that he spread his luminous wings and his broad cabinets further than fifteen degrees from the vertical, and manifested his linkages in forking bolts of lightning. He took on the form of the tarantula and the wasp it fights, all wings and sprawl.

"Listen," I spoke gently. "Listen." I softly began snapping my ribs, making at once a spider and a cradle. My voice began to collect in the hollow. "I am fully versed in the course of your guardianship. I've held the shell-shocked children still starry-eyed with gratitude, still devoted to you. Everyone alive owes you." My eyes welled, sheets of pink pleura shedding from my lung-caverns. "But you mistook my proposal, one only envious, for one of accusation."

But he was bent on misunderstanding. Twisting the single wheel in the center of his chest, he set out to disprove me. "I and the Factory are one. I and the Factory and humanity are one." His liquid eyes glowed green; his voice pitched with grimness. "They may not remember my name, but when humanity is carried up, or peters out, there in that ascension or decomposition I will be, instrumentally. I am intractable!"

"But that's exactly what I mean," I cried keenly. And when I tore a tooth from his bristled mouth, he fell to the ground, silver, still and silent.