Selling Point

The year is never specified, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that Ira, a Model 1 household robot, has been given a sales quota and a territory. He's door-to-door, hawking his own kind to humans who don't want what he's selling. This is the cruelest joke in science fiction: a robot whose job is to sell robots, who smiles with professional pleasantry when doors slam in his face, who thinks of himself as a perfect prospect even as he stands outside looking in. Arkawy flips the genre on its head. Instead of asking can machines feel?, he asks something sharper: can machines want? Can they dream of commission? Can they be trapped by their own programming in ways that look, from the outside, indistinguishable from ambition? The woman behind the door is young, pretty, newlywed. She doesn't want a robot. But Ira won't leave. His foot stays in the door. His smile never falters. And the reader is left with an uncomfortable question: is persistence the same as hope? Is quota-chasing the same as longing? This is a story about identity, but not the way you'd expect. It's about the performance of personhood. It's about what we become when we're built to please. And it's wickedly funny.