He’s programmed to follow instructions:

lay down the mulch, deadhead the begonias,

keep the cherubs around the fountain birdshit free.

But since he discovered his master and mistress

cold and stiff in their kitchen one morning

he’s surprised himself by venturing off-piste,

devoting an hour to counting tadpoles, another to lifting

the stones around the pond to admire the oddballs beneath:

the woodlouse in its dusty suit of armour,

the millipede, divided into more segments

than the breakfast television his mistress would watch

as she sipped her oolong tea. Eden’s calls

to the emergency services had gone unanswered,

so he used his detachable spade-arm to bury the humans

beside their beloved weeping cherry. His mistress

had ordered him to get rid of the caterpillars

that were decimating the bougainvillea, but

he decided to let them pupate. He watched them

as they spun silk pads, hung from them like miniature bats,

and slowly shed their skins to reveal the chrysalids underneath.

With the hyper precision of his microscopic vision,

the crinkled sepia surface of each chrysalis seemed to Eden

like the strange terrain of some unexplored world.

Yesterday, a butterfly hatched before it was ready.

Just ragged scraps for wings. It fell to the lawn,

scrabbled in frantic circles before a magpie

stalked over and snatched it up. All that industry,

thought Eden, that intricacy of conception,

only to emerge so calamitously wrong.

In his recharging chamber at night, he thinks

of them in their chrysalids, bodies breaking down,

cells rearranging, no way of knowing

what will survive of their changing.