ASCIIBotics Labs

In lonely corridor the little robot scuttles back and forth, oblivious to anything but the task at hand. Rex was always on duty, the day shift, the afternoon shift, the late shift. Rex knew the brodcast signal on everyone's badge but more than that, Rex knew their faces. Everyone called it "him", the highest compliment a robot can receive. He was thought of as the finest security robot in the office and no one ever questioned his judgement, not even when he worked three straight years without a reboot. Then came the night that Rex heard the noise from the break room. He hurried there, leaving his post. There was nothing there. Rex cursed his logic circuits and hurried back to his position. Had he been duped? He searched each room and found nothing. Then he heard the laugh. Rex's program said to call the police but he did not want to explain. He sped toward where the noise was coming from. There was nothing there. Then he heard it again, a different laugh, down the hall. He sped there and again found nothing. A third laugh, and a fourth, how many of them were there? Rex was sure a team had broken in and were looting the rooms as he strained his little sensors to locate them! A fifth, a sixth, a seventh! How were they masking their heat? How were they leaving no disruptions in the air? Rex was moving so fast he did not notice the ridge in the carpet and sped right over it, flipping himself onto his back and crushing his antenna. He could no longer send the signal. He could no longer move. He could feel them moving closer, their arms full of the valuable things he had promised to protect, closer, closer, stepping over his head to drive home his failure, closer, closer, closer...
The two repairmen closed the hatch. "There's nothing we can do," one of them told the concerned secretary. "He's overheated from running too long.
He melted his processor. We'll have to bring you a new one in an hour." "Poor Rex," she sighed. "He was always so reliable."

A little thing, a dream. Always out of reach to some, always easy for others. Men have been known to cheat or kill just to say they people once called them the best, but where would a machine ever find out of reach? Maybe at the end of that grasp is... The Twilight Zone.