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Three strangers sat around the fireplace in the common room of the Flaming Troll Inn.
The first was a large and impossibly muscled man, the sleeves of his shirt rolled tightly over triceps the size of canned hams. His eyes were steely and distant and fixed on the flickering of the flames on the hearth. His coffee sat neglected in front of him, its once-thick clouds of steam now diminished to a thin white ribbon snaking up into the air.
The second stranger was also a man, different from the first. He was small and meek and wearing eyeglasses that he would remove every once in a while to clean with a nervousness bordering on compulsion. He clutched a mug of hot chocolate, timidly sipping from it and wincing at its heat.
The third figure drank nothing because it was a robot. More accurately, it was a Personality Core, but people had called it "robot" so many times that it seemed as good a word as any.
In a while, the three of them would consider retiring to their respective rooms (assuming one of the men was willing to help the Core, which had no legs). For the time being, however, they sat and enjoyed the warmth of the fire as they listened to the rain on the windows, the steady rolls of thunder overhead, and the frenzied whirring of the Personality Core's servos as its giant eye darted around.
“Oo, this is nice,” the Core said after a while. “Three guys sitting around, storm outside, fire on. It’s cozy, yeah?”
“It sure is,” said the small man, wiping a bit of melted marshmallow from his lip. “I’m always moving around, so it’s nice to just sit sometimes.”
The large man grunted.
“Yeah,” the Core continued, “just a bunch of guys guyin’ about, doing guy things…I’d spit if I could, but I’m pretty sure I'm not capable. Just as well, probably. I imagine I’d love spitting quite a bit. Wouldn’t be able to stop me once I’d started. What other guy things could we do?”
“I work to end nuclear proliferation,” the small man said.
The Core looked expectantly at the large man, who offered nothing.
“That sounds pretty good,” the Core said. “Are there any nuclears proliferating around here?”
“Nuclear proliferation is a global concern,” said the small man. “Ever since the end of the Second World War, the global superpowers have–”
“Uh, sorry to interrupt,” the Core interrupted, “but that sounds like more work than I had in mind. Are there any guy things we could do, you know, in this general area? Say, this room? Possibly from where we’re sitting right now?”
“Well, it’s a rainy night around the fire. We could tell ghost stories.”
Mechanisms clicked and buzzed inside the Core and its "eye" grew large and began to twitch.
“Brilliant!” he cried. “Ghost stories around the fire, huh? Good stuff. Oo! I have one! Let me go first please please please please–”
“Be my guest,” the little man said.
The large man continued to stare into the fire.
The Core activated a part of its speech synthesizers that approximated the sound of a human throat clearing, looked around the room for dramatic effect, and began.
“It was a dark and stormy night. Just like this one but 15 percent darker and 32 percent stormier. Actually, don’t quote me on that, because I can’t quite see out of the window from here. But based on the ambient light and the rainfall pattern I can assure you that it was at least eight percent darker and stormier. Or nine. Eight or nine. Ballpark figure, subject to review.
“Two service bots sat in an access tunnel, where they’d gone for some…alone…bot time. Look, it’s personal. But little did they know they were not alone.
“All of a sudden, they heard something scratching on the access hatch beside them. Scratch, scratch. Scratch, scratch.
“‘Oh I’m scared,’ said the first service bot.
“Scratch, scratch, went the scratching. Scratch, scratch.
“‘It’s nothing,’ said the second service bot. ‘Probably just a timing issue in the hatch actuator.’ But the first service bot knew that the Model 57-T access hatch’s actuators had a 99.8% functionality rate and wanted to leave.
“‘Okay, fine,’ said the second service bot, and he opened another access hatch and they went out.
“But when they looked down at the first access hatch, they couldn’t believe what they saw. Hanging from the little handle-y bit…was the manual attenuator of a B700-Series cleaning droid.”
The room fell silent, save for the slight popping of the burning log and the humming of the Core as it looked expectantly at its companions. Neither of them said anything.
“See, the cleaning droid had just been going about its business when its attenuator got stuck on the access hatch. It happens more often than you’d think. But it couldn’t get the attenuator unstuck no matter how hard it tried, so eventually it just disconnected the attenuator and toddled off to Central Manufacturing to get a replacement. So actually, it was all a big misunderstanding but for a few seconds? Really quite scary.”
“That was a…nice story,” the small man said after a while.
“Now you go!” the Core cried, wiggling in its chair.
“I only know one ghost story. But first, do you know what would be really good right now? A candy apple.”
“Candy apple?” the Core asked.
The small man laughed. “Candy apples are a nice treat on nights like this. A candymaker in Newark, New Jersey named William Kolb invented them in 1908 by dipping apples into a mix of red cinnamon candy. You can also make them by boiling a combination of sugar, corn syrup, water, and cinnamon until the mixture reaches about 300 degrees and then dipping apples into it. Caramel apples are more common today, but I prefer the hard candy coating to sticky caramel.
“During the 1960s and '70s, rumors arose that candy apples given out to trick-or-treaters at Halloween had pins or razor blades in them. Some hospitals even offered X-rays of the apples to make people feel safer.
“Research into the matter concluded that most reports of tampering were hoaxes, but the damage had been done. It’s too bad that candy apples got such a bad reputation, because they really are the perfect snack for a rainy night.”
“That’s fascinating,” said the Core with a bounce. “Razors in the candy? Chilling. I can only imagine what your spooky ghost story will be like.”
“Oh!” the small man gasped. “I’m sorry, but I can’t remember my story. Sometimes I get so excited about things like candy apples that I forget what’s going on.”
“Oh. Well…?” The Core looked with hope at the large man.
“I have a story,” he said, the words thick and flat.
“Outstanding! I can’t wait. Actually, let me get a little more comfortable…okay, ready. Please continue.”
“A few years ago, my team and I investigated some bizarre occurrences in the woods outside our city,” the large man began.
“Oh, nice touch,” the Core interjected. “First-person narrative. Make it more immediate. Personal-like. Well done.”
“Monsters attacked us and we took shelter in a nearby mansion, but the horror didn’t stop there. It was the longest night of my life…when I wasn’t fighting freakish biological experiments, I was stumbling over the corpses of the team that went in before us. None of them went quietly…I saw people ripped apart. Poisoned. Mutilated. One of them was pecked to death by birds.”
The Core recoiled.
“Did you say…birds?”
"Yes. Zombie birds."
“No more, please.”
“What happened next?” the small man asked.
“Did you not catch the part about the birds?!” the Core shouted. “What else do you need to hear?”
“Some of us survived,” the large man continued, “but the nightmare never ended. Our fight against bioweapons continues and our enemies just keep getting bigger and stronger. Things got so bad in the city — my home — that the military decided to just nuke the whole thing.”
“A nuke?” whimpered the small man. “No…all those p-people….” He began to sob.
“I move from place to place," the large man continued, "tracking down the real, human monsters behind all of this and stopping them. I’ve lost more friends than I can count, cheated death more than I deserve, and for every head I cut off, two more emerge from the darkness. I often find myself wondering if it’s worth fighting for, but I’ve got a job to do…and I’m going to see it through.”
He rose and left, his heavy steps creating circular ripples in his long-cold coffee. He would sleep fitfully, but what rest he got would keep him going for another day of fighting for both his life and a world without fear.
The small man would not sleep at all, his mind racing with images of missiles loaded and fired and of mushroom clouds blooming on the horizon. The Core, who required no sleep, would spend the rest of the night alone in his chair in the common room while watching the fire slowly die out and imagining a deadly bird in every tap of the rain upon the roof.