Situation Normal

 Mort was a thoroughly modern man.

All the tech, everything. Mort had it all.

Gadgets, gizmos, all mod cons.

Like millions more, he was obsessed with keeping up with it all and letting technology take over his life.

Every aspect of his existence had been given over to machines, programmes, apps and artificial minds.

All corners of Mort's finance, health, well-being, nutrition, transport and employment were ruled by non-animates.

But Mort was happy, the master of it all and life was sweet, as it had always been. Tech had looked after him.

 He still worked hard at the office, a regular captain of industry; he dressed well, he ate like a king and had regular sex with consummate androids. He looked great too for his age, his few health worries smoothed over and managed beautifully by ever-reliable modern means.

At 65, he was on a path to total self-fulfillment and machinery had helped him reach this zenith of humanity, this pinnacle of modernity, the very essence of what it was to be a willing and wholehearted consumer of everything the big tech companies had to offer. 

After all, it just made life better! Right?

Mort was the splendid life zeitgeist: plugged in, online, connected, googled, Ai'd, networked, covered, warrantied, bleeped, boostered and feeling uber-duber good about it.

So that particular Monday started out like any other fabulous tech-filled week. The situation was entirely normal. No fuck ups here.

Mort was awoken by his sentient household, the mind, a subtle voice telling him the time and suggesting that perhaps he'd like some breakfast and hot coffee.

A wardrobot offered him his slippers, favourite Metropolis T-shirt and Tron boxers, a urinalgorithm in the loo played music attuned to his current waking state and a Stunnah droid took him yawning gently down the stairs, where the home's greying K9 unit brought him his newspaper and post from the letterbox.

The home's mind altered the mood music slightly for calm but awake and activated the ancient skilled butcher bot to prepare Mort's favourite home-made sausages from the fresh meat store and brew fresh coffee. 

With a hearty breakfast on the table, the medi droid dispensed the neccessaries for the day: blood thinner, hearing aid oil and pacemaker pill.

The TV came on.

Today's headlines: a global glitch in wardrobot programming means that the universal mechanised valet will no longer function until further notice. All wardrobots will be deactivated immediately for reasons of safety.

Thud!

Mort heard it upstairs and knew his own wardrobe assistant had ceased functioning.

"Dammit!" he cursed, "That means I'll have to do my own damn washing,  ironing and folding now! As if I have the time! Fuck!"

"I suppose it could worse!", he conceded reluctantly watching the latest war unfold on TV, other peoples' chaos in some distant god-forsaken techless shit-hole somewhere on the globe.

He angrily scoffed his bangers and slurped two cups of Kenyan before picking up the newspaper.

Tucked away in the late news section was a roughly printed entry.

"As of today the Stunnah Mark 1 and 1.1 Stairway droids' current software will be updated. Some older units of the Mark 1 may experience a technical malfunction and in some cases total mechanical meltdown."

Bang! 

"Bollocks! That's my Stunnah! Fuck it, how am I meant to get up and down the stairs! I'll have to walk! As if I've got the time!"

Mort furiously screwed up the newspaper into a tight ball and threw it with force across the kitchen. It accidentally hit his patrolling K9 unit fully in the face and split its main console. It fizzed, hissed and sparks flew.

Fsssst!

The K9 came to a stop and it's head dropped, and smoke rose from it's steel forehead. Suddenly, it somehow reactivated and raised its head, but this time growling loudly and bearing it's sizable metal teeth. It began to motor towards the astonished Mort, quickly reaching his leg and clamped it's jaws around his thigh. It had taken seconds.

Mort screamed.

"For fucks sake, you stupid bastard dogbot!"

He hit the unit with all the force he could muster with the butcher's wooden block on the granite top and propelled theK9 spinning across the room yelping.

Blood gushed from Mort's leg, his thinned plasma pouring out like claret. He yelled for the MediDroid and the small metal nurse began to trundle from her station, bag and stethoscope in hand, when she suddenly stopped dead.

A message came over the home mind system.

THIS MEDI DEVICE IS NOW OBSOLETE AND HAS BEEN RETIRED. A REPLACEMENT WILL BE SENT OVER TOMORROW.

"No! No! No!" Shrieked Mort as he struggled to stem the bloodflow from his gaping teeth wound.

He crawled to his redundant crap drawer leaving a crimson trail behind him like a paint slug. Dragging himself up on the drawer handle he opened it and found an old emergency red button he'd worn five years earlier during illness and prayed it still worked.

The batteries were flat.

"Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!"

Mort was so furious with the way the day was turning out that he bit into the button in rage. A spark shot out and arced across his implanted and over-oiled hearing aids, which now short-circuited and exploded in each of his ears, ripping his ear drums apart and bringing on instant and complete deafness.

Mort screamed in unbearable pain till his lungs nearly burst. 

He shambled towards to kitchen counter loudly groaning in agony and slowly sprawled across it. He reached for the mobile telephone on the other side, Mort's leg bleeding profusely across the butcher's block.

Sensing the aroma of coppery blood, the butcher bot jolted into action and, mistaking the bleeding leg for a prime pig's hind it took down the meat cleaver, twirled it like a gunslinger and brought it down swiftly and skillfully on Mort's thigh. 

The cleaver went through the upper layer easily, only jarring on the femur. A second and even heftier swing made short work of the thick bone and rent the leg in two. 

The butcher bot swept Mort aside into the huge sink area and began to prepare the severed limb for a large batch of fresh sausages for the master of the house, first removing the skin for tubing, then shoving the leg into a super-sized mincer and finally stuffing the mort meat into stretchy cylinders made from leg skin. 

Done with mechanized aplomb, it had all taken less than two minutes of fantastic butchery.

In the sink Morts hand had fallen into the electric waste disposal unit, triggering the sharp blades.

 They minced mercilessly and whirled and whirled until the blades jammed on his wrist bone and the hand was no more.

In a daze of terror, Mort raised his ragged arm and stared at it in disbelief. His open leg stump pumped scarlet fluid down the colossal draining board and filled the blocked Belfast sink to the brim.

Mort wailed in excruciating pain, his face looking up at the industrial tap unit, his remaining hand flailing about. It accidentally caught the Kooka tap dial and switched it to "Boil", the water spewing out at 100 degrees and scalding off the face of the man once recognisable as Mort but not any more.

With the sink overflowing with femoral blood and his head being slowly poached, the dying man somehow remembered that he'd forgotten to take his Pacemaker WD40 maintenance pill.

"Situation normal? Yeah, right! About as fucked up as you can get!" he mused through cooking cells.

Mort laughed and laughed at this thought, soundlessly coughing through rictus lips as his straining pacemaker gave out, tried desperately to restart, sputtered a little and eventually died.

The butcher bot stopped staring into space and fed his master's sausages to the rabid K9 unit, as Mort's once stable home completely lost its fragmenting mind.