Just One of Those Customers – wewrite freewrite – Week #7

This is my entry into the wewrite freewrite contest, by @zeldacroft and @freewritehouse, for week #7. For more information on the contest, have a look at this post:
https://steemit.com/wewrite/@freewritehouse/we-write-7-the-customer

This Week's Prompt
by @ntowl

The Charged Up Cafe was dead. Not because its tables didn’t have the power to charge devices as promised, but because no sane person wants coffee in the middle of the night.

So I loitered at the cash register looking out at the emptiness. Benches lined the walls and a single line of small circular tables were set up between them. The space was small - the owner liked to call it "intimate" - but it felt strangely cavernous being there alone. Now and then I'd walk back to the kitchen to chat with Henry, the night shift cook. But tonight he wasn’t in the mood to talk and simply grunted at me in response to everything I said. Still, I kept going in since just seeing him made me feel a little less alone as the hours dragged on.

Somewhere around midnight I left the kitchen to clean the tables, again, and saw I had a customer. He wore a black business suit with a long blue tie and white shirt. His face looked like hell. It’s not that he was old, but the skin around his eyes and mouth sagged a little. It's how I imagined doctors look after long shifts in the ER. When he saw me he shuffled past the benches and tables towards me.

"I need to charge," he said. I looked at him, wondering why he was telling me. Every table had a charging station. Why didn't he just go plug in?

"Ok. Pick a table and plug in. I'll be over to take your order in a sec."

He looked at me, then at a table. After what seemed like forever he sat down. I took a deep breath knowing that this would be one of those nights. You know, the ones filled with weirdos and oddballs. Like the guy a few months ago that came in wearing pajamas. Pink unicorns and balloons on the pants and a purple shirt that said "I Believe". It was cute, but didn't match his bushy beard and mohawk. Another time a woman tried to order "fuzzy wuzzy coffee". She was rather insistent, even when I explained to her that we only served regular, non-fuzzy or wuzzy coffee. After yelling unintelligible words at me, she screamed and ran outside.

My mind tried to figure out what the dude-in-the-suit’s thing would be. I was fifty fifty on whether he was high or exhausted. I grabbed the coffee pot and went over to his table. And, of course, he's sitting half bent over staring at the fake wood pattern surface. Nothing plugged in.

"I thought you needed to charge?" I said, regretting it immediately.

"I need to charge..."

His words slurred together, like a toy when the batteries are running low. His head dropped onto the table hard, making me jump back. That's when I saw the back of his neck.

---

••.•´•.••My Part••.•´•.••

Some sort of connection port seemed to have been surgically implanted in it, but it didn’t look like any connection port that I’d seen before, and it certainly wasn’t anything that would work with our charging outlets. But it was a new one on me anyway, as I had no idea that such lifelike human robots even existed. I called Henry to come out and have a look.

After more grunting, Henry felt the guy’s head and then checked for a pulse. He said the skin was cool and he could find no pulse. Henry said that even with the thing in his neck he was still probably a human and needed emergency care. Even though I didn’t agree with Henry, I dialed 911 and reported that we had an unusual customer that appeared to be dead or dying.

The EMTs arrived pretty quickly, followed shortly thereafter by the city police, in the form of an acquaintance of mine on the force, Detective Chuck Stanford.

As the EMTs worked on the guy, Chuck asked me some questions, like how the guy acted, whether he seemed threatening or suicidal to me… that kind of stuff. Then he leans in and tells me, “Don’t spread this around Gwen, but I think this might actually be a step up from what we’ve come to know as robots. We got a report on something like this a few months ago, and I think this is the first one we’ve found so far."

Now, before you go to hating on Chuck for giving such sensitive police information to a silly, all-night waitress, you’ll be relieved to know that I am also a private investigator, and I’ve worked with the department on some of their weirder cases. I also have psychic abilities, so Chuck’s conversation with me wasn’t just a gossipy get together, it was business.

I told Chuck straight out, that if the guy wasn’t at all human, I wouldn’t be much help in collecting any psychic intelligence from the “body,” since I only deal with the living and the dead. He said that he’d taken that into consideration, but since this could be the very first actual discovery of one of the bots, he wanted me to just give it a try after the EMTs were done. I agreed to help.

Chuck asked me to get Henry because he was going to close the café for the night to complete the police investigation into what happened. Henry was more than glad to get a night off, when he could go home and sleep for a change.

Once everyone else had gone and just Chuck and I were left there, I started to go through my usual examination routine as though I was working with a human corpse. I was getting nothing at all as I touched here and there. There was no psychic residue lurking within any part I went over and for which a detectable connection to life had ever existed.

Just as I was finishing my examination, a finger brushed across the port in the bot’s neck, and I got a very weak, flash response. I gave Chuck a wink and a smile as I moved my hand directly back onto the port and got a response that, while still somewhat weak, did provide me with some intriguing information.

To say that Chuck was keen to learn what I’d discovered would be an understatement.

Sources for images used in this post:

_{The Man: Image by rawpixel from Pixabay
EMTs At Work: Image by Bokskapet from Pixabay
Psychic Sign: Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay}