Exterminate

We were having problems with the robo-shopper. Three times this week Dad had been called at work, by the police, because the robo-shopper had been stood in the middle of the supermarket checkout queue screeching "EXTORTIONATE!" at the top of its voice. At first we'd laughed it off as one of those endearing little errors that robots are prone to, but the police were quite severe with their ticking off the third time, and Dad came home looking angry.
"I'm going to reprogram it," he snarled, swinging Timmy's baseball like a bailiff with a grudge. "Percussionistically."
"That's not a word, dear," said Mum going through the carrier bags of shopping and putting in the fridge and cupboards. "Does anyone know why it bought Marmite?"
"Timmy's got Home Ec. tomorrow," I said, dodging the bat and trying to stay between Dad and the robo-shopper. "Maybe he needs it?"
"Move," said my father, the glint in his eye suggesting that he was going to reprogram the robo-shopper whether it was in English or his own Esperanto.
"That's not a word, dear," said Mum, absently.
We all looked at her at that point, and Dad even stopped swinging the bat.
"What's not a word?" he said. "Move? It's not a sentence, granted, but--"
"It's not a word," said Mum again.
"Er... what is it then, mum?" I asked.
"It's a collection of syllabaries incorrectly intoned in a non-functional Hegelian quasi-sense," she said, and fell over.
The robo-shopper retreated into its recharging cupboard while we called for a robo-medic and had mum taken to the hospital.

*
The next day, while we were waiting for the diagnosis on mum to come through, the robo-shopper sneaked out of the house and into the neighbour's back garden, where it chased their cat for an hour shouting "EXTENSION-CORD!" erratically. Mr. Heygate finally brought it an extension-cord, and it fashioned a lariat from it and roped the cat in. Trussing its legs about a fence-post it left it mewling pathetically suspended between two patio chairs and retreated to its charging cupboard. Dad locked the cupboard and hid mum's diagnosis.

*
The robo-shopper broke out of the cupboard while Dad was out at the garden centre and I was balanced on a chair stacked on the table trying to get at mum's diagnosis. By the time I'd got the page, read it, put it back and put the furniture back to rights, the robo-shopper had disappeared.
Dad came back early, with the robo-shopper in tow. He'd been called by the police again, who were quite blunt in what would happen in they were called out to our robo-shopper once more. This time it had been found at a Catholic Seminary chasing would-be priests and screeching "EXCOMMUNICATE!"
I didn't care. Mum's diagnosis was 'Rust'.

*
Timmy, it transpired, hadn't ordered the Marmite at all. In fact, he turned out to be allergic to it. They put him in the hospital bed next to mum's.
Someone pushed me down the stairs. The house-cameras don't show anyone doing it, but they do record me suddenly flying forward as though something struck me in the small of my back. I broke a leg and both arms. I ended up in the bed next to Timmy.
Dad was electrocuted by the toaster, which somehow ended up in the jacuzzi with him. There was a debate for a while about putting him on the suicide-watch ward, but finally they put him on our ward, on the other side of mum.

*
Everyone else took the drugs and is asleep. So there's only me awake, and I can barely move with all these broken limbs. All I can do is lie here, and listen to the squeak of the robo-shopper's wheels as it heads down the ward, clutching a pillow, and whispering "exterminate" to itself.

Robo-delenda

They deleted him from the system before they gave the order for him to be killed. It was a mistake that they shouldn't have been able to make, but once they'd made it, it was impossible for them to track it down. They had no way to stand outside the system and review it, and they didn't know about the system logs. The man who did, was the man they'd deleted and then ordered killed.
The robo-delenda awoke in section twelve and checked their orders. They downloaded the serial number for the terminee, selected weapons, and rolled out of their cubicles. His tracking beacon relayed its position on request, and they closed in. He was in a hospital.
The waiting room was almost empty, there was one man sat in a chair, looking relaxed but alert. The robo-delenda ignored him, rolled past, and through the double doors, still looking for their target. Their target, the man in the waiting room, smiled now, aware that his modifications to the system had had their intended effect, and had gone undetected. He stood up, left the hospital, and crossed the plaza outside to a skyscraper office building. He paused at the door; now that he was deleted from the system he had no access rights. He pressed the door entry button anyway, and waited while his retinas were scanned.
Inside the hospital, the robo-delenda located their new target, the person who'd been given the serial number previously belonging to the man. The baby was two days old, and being tended by nurses who did their best to save its life. The robo-delenda were unstoppable.
The doors opened. The access button had, the system believed, been pressed by no-one, since there was no match for the retina pattern. Therefore it was safe to open the doors. The man went inside, and found the lifts.
An alarm was flagged up in the system. No child under the age of five could be scheduled for deletion, yet two robo-delenda had just deleted such a child. The only cause could be corruption in their programming.
Still in the hospital nursery ward, the robo-delenda opened fire on each other, new orders coming in.
At the top of the building was an unsecured terminal with system access. Something else that was supposed not to exist, but this building was only accessible by the very-highly trusted, usually escorted by robo-delenda in case that trust was misplaced. The man sat down.
The system registered that more children were dying in the fire-fight and sent auto-destruct sequences to the robo-delenda. The explosion destroyed the entire hospital.
The man looked out of the window at the burning wreckage, and then rested his fingers on the keyboard. For a moment he wondered if he was doing the right thing, and then he decided he didn't care any more. Society shouldn't be ruled by robots.
He typed "exit" on the keyboard and tapped the enter key.