the future is robots

It arrived with a thump on a sunny afternoon in July. Harris was so taken aback by the delivery driver’s vicious gaze that he signed for the box just to get the man off of his doorstep.
For the three hours that followed he sat gazing at the box, wondering what could be inside. He hadn’t ordered anything, and unless it was meant for next door this conundrum would keep him baffled for an undisclosed length of time.
Finally, when he decided that the box would not make the first move, he constructed his plan of action. What he would do is check the label. It was a genius plan with only one minor drawback; there was no label. How on earth had the delivery driver known that this box had been for him?
At this point his paranoia made an impromptu appearance. It often did this, just to make sure that Harris wasn’t getting too ahead of himself; god forbid he developed some undeserved sense of confidence. His mind was full of ‘what if’s. What if he had signed for somebody else’s parcel? What if it was some sort of explosives? What if it contained some top class tea? Harris liked tea. Whatever he had planned, it could all wait for a nice cup of tea.
When his mind had finally finished exploring the questions his paranoia had raised, and all of the irrelevant tangents that had ensued, he returned his thoughts to the parcel. He so hoped it was a stray shipment of choice tea, the kind he imagined Stephen Fry sitting down to in a morning.
He opened the box. There was no tea.
Instead, Harris was faced by a shiny silver shape with winking lights plastered all over its fascia. He couldn’t work out what it was, let alone what it was supposed to do. Then he saw something that made his mind up for him; the ‘ON’ button. He mulled over the idea of pressing it over a cup of second-class tea, before deciding it was probably the best course of action. If he never knew what it was for, he would never be able to decide whether he liked it or not.
He was typically British, was Harris. He never made assumptions regarding things he might dislike. Instead he underwent the thing in question to confirm in his mind that it was the act itself that he disliked and not just the thought of it. In this way, he put himself through the most dreadful activities just to confirm the level at which he disliked them.
He stuck out one of his short thin fingers and prodded at the button. The lights started flashing more than they had before, and a humming sound started exuding from the shape. It started slowly, tickling his ear drums like the drone of a thousand baritones. It was quite a pleasant sound, Harris thought, but it seemed to be growing louder. It turned from a hum to a scream; a whirring scream not completely unlike a boiling kettle whistling, but there was not the reward of a nice hot cup of tea afterwards.
It screamed and screamed, until Harris couldn’t hear himself think over the sound. He started to regret pressing the button, the button that had been the cause of this incessant screaming. He thought the scream would never end, and it would haunt him forever.
As quickly as it had begun, it stopped. Harris thought he had gone deaf from the assault of the scream. As if to replace the scream, the thing started throbbing. He couldn’t comprehend the throb while it wasn’t making a sound, the idea just didn’t work for him. It appeared to glow without actually glowing, and Harris could have sworn he saw it rising from the box with no help from external forces.
It kept rising, until it was floating at chest height. Harris could see the object more clearly now; it was the shape of an office block and looked as if it weighed twice as heavy. He could see more flashing lights on the rest of the office block’s flat almost featureless faces. Then something happened. The office block started developing grooves from halfway down one of the faces. These grooves kept developing, until eventually they were somewhat reminiscent of crouching legs. Only, they couldn’t be crouching because it was suspended. It suddenly struck Harris that this office block was floating; actually floating, hanging in the air in the same way office blocks weren’t supposed to.
He had a way of pondering at the most inappropriate moments, and this was one of them. If he’d have paid attention he may have seen something truly amazing. Unfortunately, he missed the robot’s birth. Maybe birth is the wrong word, as nothing that has ever come off of the production line at the Crab Nebula branch of the Quinton Constella Robotics Company has ever been technically born; they are generally built.
It’s legs had descended from what now resembled a body. Arms had jutted out at right angles from within. A head soon followed suit, with what appeared to be a face; a real humanoid face. May Dee 475 had begun operation.
“Hello human. I am May Dee 475 and I am here to be of service to you”
The voice dragged Harris back to reality from the grips of his ponderings. He stared at the friendly humanoid face, it was poring with warmth from all of its little lights that flashed and blipped.
“Urm, hello. Why are you here?”
“To be of service to you. You are Stephen Fry? I have been sent by the Twinings sub department of the Quinton Constella Robotics Company to aid you in any way I can”
“Oh I see. Well… How about a cup of tea?”