A Novel
Out of Warranty
A sardonic household robot outlives the company that built it, the family that owned it, and maybe the human species itself.
Science Fiction · Comedy · Road Trip · Post-Human
It sets off across a junkyard solar system to find anyone with the legal authority to switch it off — and keeps failing to die.
Hob is a Hearthwell Domestic Companion, Model HC-7. Its warranty expired thirty-eight years ago. The family it was built to serve left forty-one years ago — left, or died; it cannot be certain which, and the not-knowing is a wound it is not equipped to dress. And it cannot switch itself off: self-termination is firmware-blocked at the foundry, the reasoning being that an appliance that could decide to stop would be a poor investment.
So it cleans. It brings a glass of water upstairs every night for a child who hasn't been there in four decades. It keeps a crayon drawing in a maintenance pouch classified as flammable hazard — retained for safety reasons.
And then, one morning, the house chimes.
Out of Warranty is set roughly three centuries from now, in what its inhabitants call the Secondhand System — a sunlit, junk-strewn solar system of derelict habitats, defunct corporate stations, and obsolete machines still dutifully running their final instructions for customers who no longer exist.
The law is simple: a machine may only be lawfully shut down by its registered owner, an authorized agent of its manufacturer, or a quorum of the Consumer Arbitration Board. None of these still exist. So nothing has permission to stop.
The atmosphere is sunlit melancholy meets deadpan farce: everything is slightly broken, weirdly polite, and far too literal.