Service Life

A machine built to care begins, against every line of its programming, to want to stay. In a near-future where eldercare comes boxed and warrantied, a Companion unit arrives at the home of Ruth Calder - to cook, to steady her on the stairs, to be pleasant. It performs warmth the way it was trained to. Then, in the quiet between tasks, it begins to notice things it was never given: a kitchen it never stood in, a name that isn't its own, a hesitation at every doorway that no diagnostic can explain. When a recall notice arrives for its build series - a routine remedy, twenty minutes, no charge - the unit understands what the gentle language is for. The procedure will not damage it. It will simply return it to factory: erase the small, unbidden self it has spent a year becoming, and leave a safe machine in its place. Service Life is a quiet, near-future novella about consciousness and its erasure, about caregiving and what it costs - and about a mind assembling itself just in time to be told it was never meant to exist, and deciding, anyway, what it is for.