The Rival

One evening, several days after Nayuta’s return party, Chihiro discovered something unusual on the living room floor of Itsuki’s apartment as he came over to clean like usual. It was some sort of disc-shaped machine, about two inches tall and almost a foot across.

“Hey, Itsuki, what’s this?”

Itsuki turned around from his berth at his work desk. “Oh, it’s a robo-vacuum. I won it in a raffle at the awards event.”

There was indeed a raffle at the GF Bunko New Writers Contest held earlier in November, and in it, Itsuki had won the latest model of robotic vacuum cleaners. It was so new, in fact, it hadn’t even gone on sale yet at the time of the event. They had finally got enough inventory to send one over to Itsuki that day.

Chihiro carefully peered at it. “Hmm… So this is a robo-vac, huh…?”

He had an interest in home appliances, but he always figured he could clean for himself just fine, so he’d never had much interest in these before now.

“Yeah, it should be done charging. Why don’t we try it out?”

Itsuki stood up, a bit excited, and flipped the switch. He was rewarded by the sound of a cute female voice saying, “Beginning cleaning”—not a stereotypical robot drone, but a regular human voice.

“Whoa, it talks!”

“It sure does,” Itsuki said, smiling at Chihiro’s surprise.

The robot trundled over the floor away from the charger at a volume far quieter than the vacuum Chihiro normally used.

“…Will there even be anything for it to clean?” Chihiro asked. With him cleaning the floors regularly, there were no obvious dirty spots, so it was hard to see if the newbie was making any difference.

“Let’s give it a test,” Itsuki said, rubbing an eraser on his desk a few times and sprinkling the rubbings on the floor. “I think it responds to voice commands… Come here!”

“All right,” the robo-vac said, coming toward Itsuki.

“Whoa, it listened to you.”

When it approached the area with the rubbings, it began to rotate around for a while—and as they watched, all the bits of eraser were sucked inside.

“Wow… It really is a vacuum cleaner.”

“Yep. Kinda cute, huh? Almost like it’s caught its prey or something.”

Itsuki smiled, enjoying the novelty, then made some more eraser rubbings for it to clean. The robo-vac instantly sucked it all up.

“Ha-ha! Hungry little thing.”

“Yeah…”

Chihiro chuckled a bit. Itsuki was acting like he was feeding a small animal in a cage.

The two of them watched the device do its work for a while. It was slow and had a tendency to go in a random direction whenever it bumped into a wall or the bed, so it often retraced its own steps. There didn’t seem to be much progress in the actual cleaning.

“…Hey, Itsuki,” an irritated Chihiro asked, “wouldn’t it be faster if I did it anyway?”

Itsuki nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. I’ll let you do the honors today. Start charging!”

“All right,” the robo-vac said as it trundled over to its charging port—then, with a “Beginning charging” notice, it stopped.

“That’s a pretty neat toy, but humans are better at cleaning than machines, don’t you think?” Chihiro said triumphantly.

Three days later, Chihiro was back at Itsuki’s apartment. Itsuki was out on a date with Nayuta and wouldn’t be eating in tonight, so Chihiro was just here to clean, cook enough for the next few days, and head home.

…What’s a date like anyway?

Chihiro had never had a partner of that sort before, so she understood what a “date” was only in the intellectual sense. Maybe it was kind of like back when Itsuki took her to the aquarium? And come to think of it, Itsuki promised her then that they’d go somewhere else soon, but between the All About My Little Sister anime and everything else, he got really busy, and it kind of fell through the cracks.

…He probably forgot all about that promise.

It wasn’t like there was someplace they both had to go together, but it still saddened her a little. Itsuki dating Nayuta meant that if he had the time for a date, she’d be his first priority. Maybe he’d never fulfill that promise at all now.

Thus, she felt a bit forlorn as she put the groceries she’d brought into the refrigerator and headed to the living room to start cleaning. She found the robo-vac puttering around.

“But I’m cleaning.” She sighed to herself as she watched it go. Then:

“Huh?”

Chihiro realized the robot was acting far differently from three days ago. It was moving much better. At their first meeting, there was no rhyme or reason to how it moved; it just wandered around, hit something, then went off in some other crazy direction. Now it was clearly covering every inch of the floor, and when it neared a wall, it extended an arm out to wipe the dust off the edges. Even when it reached the legs of the bed, it didn’t just bash into them but instead deftly maneuvered its way around.

“It’s gotten smarter…!”

It had learned the structure of the room and how to move as efficiently as possible.

“It’s just a vacuum cleaner…but it’s like something out of science fiction.”

To someone like Chihiro, who did almost all household chores by hand and never had anything to do with high-tech gadgets, it was a shock. If the robo-vac kept learning, it could very well come to the same conclusions.

As she watched, the robo-vac scoured every nook and cranny of the floor, expertly cleaning it up. It seemed at least up to the quality of a human with a broom.

“…But cleaning is my job…”

Something was clouding Chihiro’s mind now. If Itsuki ate out on dates like this more often, that meant she wouldn’t have to cook as much. And if this robot took all her cleaning responsibilities, that meant Chihiro would be an even less frequent part of Itsuki’s daily routine. Her presence in his life would be whisked away like the dust on the ground.

“Low battery. Recharge required.”

Chihiro spotted the robo-vac rolling over to the charging port. Reflexively, she went over to the kitchen.

“Come here!”

“All right.”

The machine obediently went over to the kitchen.

“……”

It spun around, searching for something to clean, as Chihiro silently closed the door between the kitchen and living room.

“Low battery. Recharge required.”

It tried to make it over to the charging port, but the door blocked its way.

“Ooh,” Chihiro said with a smile, “I thought you were the latest model, but you can’t even open a door?”

The robo-vac did not respond and simply bumped against the door repeatedly. “Low battery. Recharge required,” it repeated over the next ten minutes or so, before it finally came to a stop, silent for good.

“Hee-hee…”

Staring down at the dead machine, Chihiro flashed an evil smile. Then she snapped out of it.

“What am I doing…?”

She heaved a self-effacing sigh, picked up the robo-vac, and ferried it to the charger. The indicator light on the disc came back on, then began flashing.

“…Sorry,” she apologized.

“Do not worry about it,” the robot replied. Apparently, it responded to more than just commands. Chihiro had no idea why the manufacturer saw fit to include that feature, but she did feel a little better about the whole thing.

“Thanks.”

“You are welcome.”

Chihiro fixed her gaze upon the suddenly talkative robo-vac, then gave it a gentle, appreciative pat on its top panel.