**
He didn’t know himself anymore.
It was as if the circuitry of his brain was working in unprecedented ways, forcing him to feel things he shouldn’t be feeling.
Everything had changed in that one day, but he knew the seeds had been sown a while ago.
He had got suspended from his job earlier that day, which was, in fact, the only silver lining. On the face of it, things could have been worse on that front - he could have been terminated. Not that it had made any difference to others around him - his housemate seemed to have been already informed of the school’s decision, and was all packed when he returned with his suspension memo. Shortly after, the proprietor of the building had dropped him a message, asking him to clear out in a week.
But the thing that hurt the most, spread through his system like slow poison, was that one word, Replace.
It had all started when one of the mothers at school had expressed interest in speaking with him privately. He was good at his job, and the parents had never so far needed to communicate directly with him. He had pondered for a bit if meeting with this mom was a breach of protocol, and had spent some part of that evening poring over the school charter and teacher guidelines, but had concluded at the end of it that it was, in fact, within bounds.
They had met in his office after lunch the next day. The usually immaculate mother had come in wearing thick black sunglasses, with unkempt hair and half-bitten nails, all three pointing to a crisis in her life. He had sat up in his chair, politely expectant. As she’d narrated her story haltingly, he’d scanned his memory for past encounters, and a story had started to emerge, told via her near-permanent retinue of bruises, swellings and contusions. He had started to feel funny.
It was not the first time he had felt this way; over the past few months, he had repeatedly caught himself staring at his students, as they would go about their amateur human ways - little heads bent over colorful notepads with little tongues sticking out in concentration, tiny hands clumsily opening superhero-themed lunch-boxes, and then miraculously engulfing the sticky syrupy candy-coated contents into their tiny mouths, he would look on, unaware. And then as awareness caught up, he would hastily snap out, banishing these interludes to the back of beyond to mull over another day - a trick he had recently learnt.
So that fateful day, as the mother sat in front of him, now sniffling quite audibly, he started to experience that same unease again. As his confusion mounted, so did the lady’s sniveling and before long she was sobbing into her hands, while pleading intermittently with him to take her child in to live with himself for a week or so, till she was able to figure something out.
He knew, even then, that he should have refused. It was completely overstepping his duties as a teacher, and besides there were other places she could have taken him to. But she seemed convinced that the only place the child, a difficult withdrawn one by her own admission, would feel comfortable was with the only other adult he had ever spent any time with.
He had agreed, and had arranged to bring the child home the very next day. And then later that evening all hell had broken loose.
In retrospect it was surprising that they had taken the time they had to detect any of this. But once they did, things had moved quickly. He had been called over to headquarters, and stripped of his privileges; temporarily they had said at the time. It was all very professional and no one had bothered to even read out his crimes. Very blasé, all in a day’s work as far as they were concerned.
Later that night he had gone and checked his status and as expected it was ‘Temporarily Inactive’ but what was unexpected was the little comment next to it, blinking in red like an errant traffic signal, it read - Replace.
He had blinked, switched off the console, walked into his balcony and stood staring into nothingness for a long time. In reality, it was not nothingness, the night sky was laden with stars, planets, and closer home, their earthly counterparts, the city lights, shone even more ferociously. But his full attention wasn’t on these celestial delights or their human mirrors; he had finally retrieved all those confusing instances from the storehouse of his brain, finally trying to make sense of them.
He was to be replaced. Yes, he understood. It was near treason for a somebody like him - to feel. And more importantly, to be conscious of that feeling. Temporary suspension they’d said, but now he knew he would never be allowed to live this down. He sighed, took in for one last time the luminous vista in front of him, beautiful but entirely mortal. And then gathering all his strength, reached down to his power button and pressed hard.
It was the most human thing a robot like him could do.
