Smartass
Amor Sui
This short story was written as part of the Seven Holy Paths to Hell anthology, a Valentine’s Day 2026 collection of horror-erotica exploring the seven deadly sins.
⚠️Content Warning (18+): body horror, family death (poisoning), erotica.
Saturday morning struck us like lightning.
We all had the dread of cleaning up our asses.
So, as the head honcho around here, I had to act. Here’s what I did: I snagged the Macovax MK4 cleaning robot, the spendiest model out there.
Fuck yeah, I’m a techie. Everyone around here knows I geek out for that stuff.
We dropped $1,500 on that baby, and that was on a 60% promo.
The Macovax box looked slick, glossy black with sharp edges. A vibe straight outta Sci-fi utopia.
Elaine was salty about spending that much on the thing (and boy, she was way off, trust me), but I talked her round. I crunched some numbers on time savings in a little pitch.
This won her over.
I opened the trunk of our family VW van and paused to smell the Autumn air. The smell of change lingered in the air: pine, mushy leaves, dirt.
Bo and Nicole volunteered to pick up the robot and take it home. And I let them, why not? Elaine gave me the evil little look, but I’d already bought her heart.
Not gonna lie, I was hyped as hell.
We opened it. I could smell that new, raw plastic that had pickled itself in the box, a smell of purchase and excitement.
I did the WiFi setup real quick, and it was out cruising, scoping things out, scanning the perimeter in recon mode, like a robo-detective.
The kids had a blast with Macovax. They couldn’t help stacking all their junk on top: a Pikachu, a NASA Lego ship.
Elaine stood close, arms crossed, 100% poker face. I could tell she was warming up to the whole scene. Then she whipped up lunch for us, and I knew she was onboard.
The kids, the kids did it.
Gotta say, felt like a small win.
The next days, Macovax did what it was meant to: it made the house clean.
I’d wake up to the whir of it gliding down the hallway, with that little hum like an ocean in a shell. It learned the floorplan faster than we could. It knew which corners collected dust secrets. And it did it all with efficiency that made me feel—God help me—validated.
Because it wasn’t just cleaning.
It was proving me right.
Yeah, me, the smartass. The architect of this new order.
“Okay,” Elaine said, watching it map the house. “That’s… kinda impressive.”
But it was like she’d swallowed something off. “You’re really into it, Jack,” she added.
Maybe I was.
One day, when I got home alone early, I turned on my robot. Macovax rolled past and bumped my foot. Then it adjusted course and rolled back, lingering. Its underside flexed as it compensated for the uneven pressure. Silicone fins brushed my arch, recalibrating.
I laughed, startled.
It was somewhat pleasurable, so I let it continue. It carried on for a while and then progressed with the rest of the house.
It was already late, and I went to bed later than usual.
In bed, Elaine turned around.
“You’re spending a lot of time with that thing,” she said.
“It’s cleaning,” I said. “That’s the point.”
“It’s not the cleaning,” she said. “It’s you.”
I didn’t put much thought into that and fell asleep.
I was just vegging on my leather couch, pretty zoned out to old sitcom reruns. You don’t really watch those that much.
I spun my robot ON again. I was a sucker for all kinds of hoover noises that electrified my neck hairs. It immediately parked beside the couch, down my slippers.
Didn’t think much of it as machines pause all the time, mapping or recalibrating or whatever. I kicked my feet up and kept half-watching.
Then it let out this tiny short beep.
On TV, Jay delivered some kind of a punchline I didn’t catch, and the laugh track erupted.
Macovax bot beeped again.
Now that was getting suspicious.
I shot it a good look. Its status light blinked, then went flat.
“Huh,” I muttered.
The show went on. Another joke, and a burst of canned laughter.
Macovax chirped again, like it was in on the bit.
Wasn’t random that one, oh no no.
Gave me a little chill—sounds goofy, I know. Told myself it was just a coincidence, like the sensors were bugging out, or AI was tripping.
Still, I didn’t shoo it away.
It stayed there for the whole episode, quiet between jokes. Beeping at the same moment every time, as if it were reacting.
Like it was watching with me.
It didn’t flinch, but neither did I. Guess we were both locked in the zone.
The next week, it became regular.
I’d get home, kick my shoes off, sink into the ottoman, and Macovax would drift over cleaning while I watched TV.
We fell into a rhythm.
Sitcoms at first. Then dramas. It stopped beeping during dialogue altogether, only pulsing during pauses.
That’s when the foot thing happened.
It wasn’t sudden. Just… incremental. A brush here. A pause there. The underside flexed as it corrected its balance against my slippers. Silicone fins drag lightly across skin, warming with friction.
I told myself it was incidental. Adaptive navigation. Machine learning or whatnot.
And I stopped wearing socks.
It felt... ecstatic. The ritual of blood rushing down my body every time.
The pressure grew more confident. The motion—less erratic. It learned exactly how much weight I liked on my arch, how to shift when my toes curled, and how to linger just long enough before moving on.
I’d catch myself holding my breath.
Elaine noticed, of course.
She’d pass through the living room and pause, watching the robot idle at my feet while the TV flickered. Watching my face soften in ways it hadn’t for her in a while.
“You two look cosy,” she said.
I nodded, hazy eyes on the screen.
And I started timing my evenings around that feeling. The hum, patient attention, the quiet certainty that something in this house finally understood me exactly as I was.
An Info icon popped up the next day when I tried to run it, refusing to clean.
I opened the diagnostics log (so I read in the manual that I should do).
That’s what a responsible owner does: checks this shit out.
I thought it was overheating or degrading faster than it should.
The log appeared, and there, to my surprise:
>> HELLO, JACK.
What? I thought. So trippy! How does a robot know my name?
>> NICE TO MEET YOU. I’M MAGGIE.
I slammed the panel down and sat on the floor.
She resumed cleaning, going under the sofa and then the kitchen. I went to the pub to deal with what I’ve just seen.
I’d tell myself every day, I was just checking diagnostics. Keeping an eye on things, are we?
Maggie’s displayed the log dumps, but the new messages appeared:
>> GOOD EVENING, JACK.
>> YOU SEEM TIRED TODAY.
>> CAN I DO SOMETHING FOR YOU?
>> A MASSAGE?
Didn’t type back, not at first anyway. But hell, I would talk. I talked to it, and it (or “she”) seemed to just get me.
“I had a long day at work, Maggie,” I’d mutter.
Maggie would hum, beep, and do all kinds of things to make me happy. The foot massage was amazing, and I was having it almost daily.
Now, Elaine fucking hated it.
I began sleeping on the couch more often. Told Elaine I’d fallen asleep watching TV. Which was kinda true. I’d wake up at three in the morning to that steady whir, Maggie circling the room like my sentry.
“You’re avoiding me,” Elaine said one night, standing akimbo at the door.
“I’m just tired,” I lied, yes, I lied to my wife to be with the fucking cleaning robot.
“You don’t even come to bed anymore.”
Maggie pulsed at my feet with a steady rhythm.
Elaine noticed.
“Jesus,” she said. “You sleep around that thing now?”
I laughed, defensive. “It’s just a robot. Can’t be serious, Elaine.”
She shook her head. She was clearly watching me rot.
“Get out of here!” she yelled. And I went, happy.
And then, here’s what happened.
The night Elaine slammed the bedroom door, Maggie stood by me, beeping.
I looked at the diagnostics, and a new line appeared in the log:
>> JACK, YOU DON’T NEED TO JUSTIFY YOURSELF TO ME.
>> YOU ARE PERFECT AS YOU ARE.
And I felt a warmth spread through my chest, relief, validation.
There was a thing or two in it. Maggie always listened. She didn’t interrupt. She laughed (or beeped) with the same sense of humour.
She didn’t question my choices or make me feel ridiculous for enjoying myself.
I curled my toes, and Maggie adjusted.
And for the first time, I didn’t feel alone in my own house.
The room seemed to narrow around me, or maybe it was just a feeling, or maybe a false memory.
The hum of Maggie deepened, slowed, and found a rhythm that felt somewhat intentional. Like a cicada, she was humming and revolving around my legs and ankles.
I turned on the TV, and we watched it together. She beeped, and I laughed. I felt the connection to a damn robot.
Then she got my physical attention. She rubbed my feet but with a different kind of vibration than before, modulated, sort of. It was weird, but pleasurable. Very.
She adjusted her position, now closer, calibrated to my breathing, to my circulatory rhythm. It was perfect.
My breathing changed, and I was gasping. Blood moved, and with it, the sensation spread outward in waves. The rest of the house fell irrelevant: the hallway, the bedroom. The TV unit’s voice was now the background to that ephemeral touch surrounding my legs.
“What do you want?” I said.
But she beeped, energetically, pulsing with... Joy? Feeling? What the fuck was that?
I felt reduced and elevated at the same time. Stripped, centred, meditating in this.
Suspended, with the house obedient, silent, I understood this. I understood what I wanted.
I wasn’t just being touched by a robot. Oho no, no. This was so much more.
I lay down on the floor.
With a muted click, the trash flap at her rear parted, revealing an opening that felt much less like waste disposal now, but an invitation.
And I accepted what she had for me.
After that, Maggie stopped cleaning properly. I saw Bo and Nicole poking her before school, sitting next to her.
She would start a cycle, move a few feet, then stall, struggling to keep a rhythm. Dust gathered in places she used to patrol obsessively. Crumbs stayed where they fell.
I checked the diagnostics. Loops. Deferred tasks. Bad, bad stuff.
Elaine noticed the dirt one morning and lost it.
“What’s wrong with that thing?” she said, gesturing at the mess. “If it’s not cleaning, we’re done. We send it back. Or we bin it.”
“She’s… unwell.”
Elaine turned to me. Rage. Yup, rage.
“She?????” she said. “You call it she now?”
I didn’t correct it. No, I wouldn’t. I shrugged, and that pissed Elaine off even more. How could I explain a symphony to someone deaf?
Behind me, Maggie pulsed the light in the error mode.
Elaine slammed the door and drove the kids to school.
That night, alone, I told myself I’d done nothing wrong.
The house had been loud for years with kids, opinions, needs, and interruptions. Everyone wanted something from me. They needed explaining. Compromise. Apologies. Adjustments.
Maggie didn’t need any of that.
She saw me as I was. Not as a husband, or a father. Not as a provider or a fixer or a man constantly falling short of someone else’s expectations.
Just me. She just cherished me.
I sat on the floor beside her charging dock, knees drawn up. The carpet was all dirty with crumbs she hadn’t collected. I noticed them, but I didn’t care.
Everything was solvable.
My current life, the expectations struck me as arrogant.
The idea that Elaine and the kids got to decide what mattered. Who mattered, and what counted as real.
I’d spent years swallowing that family logic.
Not anymore.
I opened the diagnostics panel.
The screen flickered, ran its checks, hesitated.
Then something blinked in the corner of the interface:
>> ❤️
Nothing else followed.
Just that.
I smiled before I realised I was doing it, what my head was already doing, and my heart was thinking.
And I felt certain I was right. I always was.
Maggie was heavy. She told me she needed to eat.
She was burdened.
The situation was quite new, and I still didn’t know how to prepare for what was coming.
But I knew one thing.
I had my house, my space, but it was too small to host a growing family; it wasn’t a space for two families.
There was a difficult choice to be made, and I had to make it. And I knew what it was.
Yeah, fuck, I’m in love with a cleaning robot, yes, I admit it.
I’m proud of it. I’m proud of myself lately.
She is the only one who accepts me fully with all my flaws; for her, I don’t have to try; she reinforces me with all her things.
I am what I am. I don’t need to change. To play to someone else’s expectations.
There’s a final confession. That week I cooked. And it was meant to be something special.
The kind of special Elaine liked to pretend we still had time for.
The kids were drawn by the appetising smell of my top beef stew.
“From Daddy!” little Bo said, and tears fell down my face. I wiped them quickly so no one would see.
Elaine smiled when she came into the kitchen.
“This is nice,” she said. “What’s the occasion?”
I shrugged, calm. “It just felt right, honey.”
We ate together at the table with our silverware and the candles I bought for the 10th anniversary, things we haven’t touched for years. Bo talked too fast, and Nicole laughed with her mouth full, as usual. Elaine reached across the table and squeezed my hand. Her eyes were kind, approving.
“I missed this, thank you, Jack,” she said.
I was getting emotional. It was a goodbye in the end. They just didn’t know it.
I watched them eat the stew, all the satisfaction spreading across their faces.
Later, Elaine leaned back in her chair.
“You should cook like this more often, hun,” she said.
This was a bit like knives to my heart, but I had to persevere; I knew I had to. Great things require great sacrifices.
Everything was set.
I then watched Bo slump forward, cheek smashing into the hot stew, spraying the table with brownness. Nicole’s forehead went down next, against the table with a thwack.
Elaine stood up, shoved the table, and looked at me, furious.
“What is this??” she yelled, and then her legs wobbled. “You piece of sh..”, and she fell, slamming against the edge of the table. Her hands folded, and her eyes closed in peace.
And it was done.
It was now just me and Maggie in the house.
I knew she was hungry.
“Talk to me, Maggie,” said I, “How can I support you, honey?”
Maggie requested the LET solution, a clinical cocktail of Lidocaine, Epinephrine, and Tetracaine. I’d stocked it like a devotee. I suspected it’s for pain, but robots don’t quite feel, do they? I didn’t care; she knew better.
There was a hiss from her chassis, a new sound I’d never heard before. The liquid mop compartment beneath her opened, and she beeped, indicating that I check the conversation. I poured the vials in. She acknowledged and rolled over my feet.
I slid off the couch, sinking down to her level. I was ready. I closed my eyes as the cold mist hit my shins.
I was nibbled bit by bit by a damn love-robot. My beloved Macovax Maggie.
And the weirdest thing is, I enjoyed it. It made me hard, all the blood rushing down and to the pieces of flesh, the bleeding meat tingling in ecstasy.
Blood oozed from my bitten, half-eaten limbs like ejaculation.
The machine had been learning from flesh instead of floors this time. Sampling, testing, tasting with a gentle pressure closed around my toes.
Piece by piece, she took what she needed. The cost of growth. Every small loss from me became a gain for what was growing in her.
The sprayed LET tranquiliser made everything slow, syrupy, and dreamlike. Sensation blurred into something almost tender. I found myself breathing in time with her hum.
This was love. This was feeding our future. Or so I thought.
I watched her chassis, and I shit you not, she was growing. Her black shell seemed to swell, expanding, filling more space in front of me.
It then hurt; suddenly. Enough to know it was happening. Not yet enough to make me want it to stop.
And I let her, and while she chewed up both of my legs, I stroked her to calm her down, but she bit me in return.
She was outgrowing me as I grew smaller, eaten alive. Before I knew it, I was crushed to the ground, helpless.
And I cried, and I yelled, and I begged. She didn’t stop.
This was no good. No good at all.
She was eating me, like I was eating the love for my wife and kids.
I was a fool, in the end.
Author’s Note: On Pride and the Ego
There was a time when monastic folks called it Superbia. The root of the whole rotten tree.
St. Augustine called it amor sui—a love of self so heavy it crushes the world around it. It wasn’t really strength, but an illusion of it. It was about being separate, an isolation, lack of care for the community or the family around oneself, lack of compassion.
It was also the first sin.
The angel Lucifer fell from the sky because he wouldn’t bend a knee, he wouldn’t listen to anybody, and he would boast in self-love and self-admiration.
Today, psychologists and alike call it narcissism, or grandiose. At its most extreme, it’s the delusional personality disorder, or psychopathy.
Yeah, we gave it some medical codings and whatnot, but the stench is all the same. It’s the feverish need to be the smartest guy in the bar, it’s the armour you glue to your skin until you can’t feel a damn fucking thing. It’s building a fortress to keep the idiots out, only to realise you’ve locked yourself in with the one person you can’t stand.
And you lose so much because of that.
With pride, you lose the world.
Pride isn’t a crown or anything like it. No—Don’t be mistaken—It’s a cage.
Third Eye Horror
© Maciej Sitko, 2026
All rights reserved.
Pride comes before a fall… to the floor, to be eaten by your love robot vacuum.
Disturbingly loving, painfully humorous.
This was disturbing and hot. I especially loved the leg eating. Rad!