This is a mildly humorous science fiction story set in the near future.
Illustration by Image Creator from Microsoft Bing.

         The robot stood in serried ranks with others of his kind, perhaps one hundred of them ready for use, although currently in test mode. HB-21 was an advanced model, silvery grey in colour, with a red knob on top. It was shaped like a small garbage can.

Charlie leaned forward saying, “Come on Sam. Lets have some fun. These bots are just sitting around. I’ll take the big model, the Digger.” Charlie pointed at the gleaming blade of a waist-high machine made for tunneling into piles of rubble.

“If we get caught, we’ll be in deep trouble!”

“They’ll never know. Let’s take the little Housebot with the red knob on top and see if he can take on Digger” He fingered his control pad. “Dig, Digger, Dig!”
The fight went badly. Digger sliced a large dent into the Housebot. It keeled over, to all appearances broken.

“Oh God, it’s busted, what are we going to do?" Sam cried

“There’s about a hundred of these things in the storage bay. They won’t miss it until we’re off on our next mission. We’ll just take it to the old car dump.”

There were not one hundred of these things. Housebot-21 was special, as indicated by the red knob atop its gleaming little chassis.

===

David trundled along on his cargo bike on his way to the car dump. He might be able to pick out some useable bits for his robotics class amidst the wreckage. Luck was with him. He spotted the Housebot on the top of a pile of rubble and pulled it free. He read the label on the front of the little machine; HB-21.
‘It’s a Housebot. Bet I can fix it,’ he thought. Straining with the weight of the thing, he inched his way to the cargo bike trailer, popped it in, and pedaled back home to his workshop shed.

It took a bit of doing but he finally got the dent out. He checked the treads and evened them out. This all took a while, and he was hungry so, after the long task, he ate half a ham sandwich and left the rest on his workbench. He took the bot off the bench and set it on the floor. Back at the house, he read a book before bed, enjoying his way of traveling through time and space. Tomorrow he could fool around some more with the bot.

Alone in the shed, HB-21 lit up suddenly. Playing dead was part of its survival kit. It turned off its location transmitter, since it was working undercover. Little search lights engaged as it began cleaning the shed floor, blowing bits of compacted trash into the soon-full trash bin. It polished where it could polish, aligned tools in neat order, and cleaned the single window using its extension arm. All this done, it settled down to await further instructions.

Hours later a shadowy form skittered across the floor and nibbled at David’s sandwich on the workbench. HB-21 observed the pest with its night vision lights. He searched his extensive database and found that rats were expendable. A brief beam of laser light, thin as a hair, shot from the little red dome atop his silvery trash can shape and penetrated the rat’s skull, killing it instantly. HB-21 picked the rodent up and deposited it in the trash bin.

David slept in. It was the weekend, so no school. At almost 10:00 a.m. he opened the door of his shed to a revelation. He was not untidy, but his workspace now gleamed. Everything was mathematically neat, beautifully cleaned. His tools lay in regimental order as if awaiting his command.

Beside his workbench, HB-21 sat, blinking quietly. David realized he now had a working cleaning-bot. His parents were not as neat as he was, a fact his compulsive nature had always struggled with. Should he bring the bot into the house? That meant explaining. He was not a natural liar. This required planning and thinking. After some thought he had a plan.

As a test, he spoke to the bot. “Can you come with me and clean the house?” he asked the machine.
“I can clean,” the bot replied, its voice more gratingly mechanical than human, a deliberate choice of the designers. HB-21 was not a tin buddy. He had jobs to do.

Back at the military base a routine inventory check revealed HB-21 was missing. If we were a fly on the wall we would have heard “Top level surveillance model. We were holding it here for the secret service boys. Was this an enemy action? When did it happen? Who was on active duty in the area? Check the surveillance cameras. They were turned off. How long and when?” The culprits were discovered, then a search began first at the base abd then in the nearby town, house by house.
A call to the secret service headquarters occurred from which the key statement was, “This was never meant for domestic use in this country, it’s illegal. This machine has an internal kind of logic, a survival mechanism. If attacked, its primary defence is to go dormant until the danger has passed which is why those idiots thought it was broken. HB-21 is a housebot intended to keep the premises clean, but its real purpose is clandestine surveillance. It is meant only for monitoring foreign agents at their embassies or abroad. On the loose It is a huge embarrassment, a scandal if it is engaged in domestic surveillance. HB-21, is an advanced military machine.It’s programmed for surveillance and attack, with numerous capabilities.

Back at his home, David explained to his parents, “It’s a loan from my robotics class. I’m looking after it for the weekend”. It’s a cleaning bot; would you like it to clean the house?”

“God, yes!” his mother said. “Better it than me.”

David went to sleep in a spotless house and woke up around 2:00 a.m. to a ‘beep’ from the playroom computer. He turned on his phone as he thought, “Damn that little brother of mine.” He activated the app monitoring the security camera over his computer in the playroom. Instead of his nuisance little brother playing games, he saw HB-21 busily downloading all his files: his homework, his photos, his music, his games. Then, his viewscreen went … black.

It was time to rethink—this bot was more than just a house cleaner. Who would want a device that could both clean and spy? Foreign powers? Unlikely. National intelligence agencies? Maybe. The Army base was only twenty miles outside of town, and if that were the case, HB-21 had become a serious liability. A quick check of his community’s page confirmed his fears: the military was already on its way.

David put on a t-shirt and sneakers and struggled into his jeans. Time to hit the road. He found HB-21 back in the kitchen where he had left him. “Delete the files you just downloaded,” he said.

David had fixed him, so he was not the enemy but part of his maker’s command structure. HB-21 whirred busily for a moment and then intoned: "Files deleted!"
“Going to the next location,” David told the bot.” He knew now the Jenks house had been searched. That would be his destination.

HB-21 followed David, his repaired treads giving off only a very slight click. Going out the door and back to his shed, David lugged the bot onto his cargo bike’s trailer and set off down the street and up the hill to old-man-Jenks’ creaky old barn of a house.

He went to the back of the house upon arrival and found, luckily, the back door was unsecured. He manoeuvred HB-21 up a short flight of stairs and into the kitchen while the neighbourhood slept. “Stay here. Clean at 9:00 a.m. Sleep now,” he told the bot.

HB-21 replied in its mechanically grating voice, “I can clean.” David left him with a feeling of great relief.
In the morning, the military search began again, house-by-house, up-and-down stairs, up elevators, down driveways, across backyards. In teams of four, relentlessly, the search went on.

The hunt eventually came to David’s house. His parents, warned by a phone call from a neighbour, were ready.

“Yes, the house is always this neat. Our general cleaning bot visited last week and I try to keep things tidy,” his mother said.

“What are you looking for?” his father asked. Prewarned, he already knew what they were looking for, a very special Housebot with a red knob on top. The careful search of the house, the shed, and the yard revealed no trace of the missing bot, so the search moved on.

Back at his house David’s parents questioned him.

“Loan from a school project?” his father asked.

“Not exactly. I found it at the dump. I repaired it.”

“Why did you lie?” his mother said.

“I knew you wouldn’t want a junkyard rescue. I wanted to test it out.”

“It cleaned the house well, but you risked getting us into trouble with those military guys. I’m not happy,” his father said.

“Sorry. Won’t happen again,” said David truthfully. The odds of his finding another military robot were not great.

“Well,” his father paused, “Least said soonest mended. Let’s pretend this never happened. Think you can do that?”

“Yes!” his mother and David said in unison.

Meanwhile, at old man Jenks’ house, HB-21 began cleaning. Old man Jenks was unfazed by his sudden appearance at his abode. “You’re a bit early but that’s ok. Place is a mess as usual. Clean it up. I’ll leave you to it.”

“I can clean,” replied HB-21.

Old man Jenks loved his new Housebot. “Hope I live long enough to enjoy all the good work you’re doing, HB,” he said. HB-21 just kept cleaning and reporting anonymously back to HQ.

After checking old man Jenks’ computer, HB-21 canceled his regular bi-weekly robotic cleaning service and sent a heavily anonymized activity report back to Base, sending statistics on 27 games of online Solitaire, won or lost.