Written on 7 February 2019
He was always an odd boy, Steve.
His clothes were always too big, not that that's strange in itself, but he used to only roll up his left arm, his right leg, his left sock, it was all very jarring. He always had a strong smell of weetabix. A perfectly symmetrical face, but one that looked squished and perfectly round.
It wasn't just that. He would be dead silent in class, before raising his hand, saying something completely irrelevant and howling with laughter to himself, like he was on a different intellectual plain to all of us, including the teachers. Like, Miss Campbell would ask “What's the square root of 144” or something, and Steve would be like “Chaos Theory” and then laugh maniacally. The teachers usually just ignored it.
I remember this one time he came in wearing a black and white onesie with his face painted with a white stripe in the middle and two black stripes either side. No one said a thing. Not until assembly when Mr Thomlinson asked him what he thought he was doing. Steve just shrugged, and said “I'm a badger now” like Thomlinson was a flipping idiot for asking.
What I'm trying to say was, he was odd. Too odd to bully. Even the real shits at our school gave Steve a wide berth. The few that tried were faced with a genuinely unsettling smile. I remember vividly Peter Dearborn threatening Steve, and Steve grinned and just said “if you do that, the consequences are simply unthinkable for you.” I was pretty scared of him, to be honest. He reminded me of the joker, like he was the agent of chaos.
I hadn't thought about him much until my friend Hilda sent me the link to the story. It got a lot of coverage at the time, though most people thought it was a hoax. Scientist murdered by his own robot. Robot needed to be destroyed by the army.
I knew it was true, though. If anyone was going to be the first person to make a robot that murdered it's creator it was weird little Steve.