Ani-droids 4

Ani-droids 1 

Ani-droids 2 

Ani-droids 3 

You can probably tell this is paralleling ARGO quite heavily at this point, but we will be seeing different scenes pretty soon! On top of that I clearly just needed to have more of... this character! Comments appreciated!

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“Miss McAllister, the counteragent has been administered. You may wake up now.”

Oh, thank you for the permission, I thought. I sat up, and my head was woozy, but at least there was no pain. They’d practically hosed me off, though my clothes themselves were still muddy. I look up, only to realize I was sitting in the back of a complimentary conveyance van, and I’d already been taken home.

My house was one of those narrow Singles that were built to resemble old-style suburban sprawl, but much much smaller with barely any yard to speak of. I’d picked this place only because it had sufficient garage space for my needs. Every single house on this block looked much the same, only mine was painted red.

The garage door was open, and my wreck of a car had been shoved inside. Thank God…

The fox in the mechanic jacket had apparently accompanied me all the way, and put the injector gun back in her toolbelt. “Wreck Retrieval Inc. lacks authorization or the encryption key to enter your living space, however the encryption key for your garage was inside of your car.”

The bandages wrapped around my hands. At least they left me the use of my fingers. It would have been hard to repair Lily without them… Why did ani-droids have to be so forceful with their helpfulness? The Behavior Code meant they couldn’t deliberately harm humans, but they could certainly rough us up for our own good…

“Once I have the two ani-droids out of the car, you can tow the thing,” I told her.

“The two ani-droids have been reported—”

“No. Don’t contact insurance. I’m making my own repairs. That’s my thing. It’s what I do.”

“As you wish! However, please be advised your property insurance company has already been notified and it may take several hours for a retraction to be posted.”

They could always do these things in a fraction of a second, but couldn’t undo them so quickly. Looking at my car, I could estimate that was the size and shape of my life at that moment.

After getting Lily’s body out of the front, and the mysterious mouse ani-droid out of the back, I laid them each carefully on the work bench. “You can take the car now,” I said.

“I’m sorry but the tow truck has already departed. Please leave your car in the driveway and the next available tow truck will be by to remove it.”

“I hope that’s still covered by the car insurance.”

“You are in luck! It is.” The fox stood there, smiling at me, waiting for me to say something.

“Okay. Can you leave now? Are we done?”

“Thank you for using Wreck Retrieval, Inc! The deductible amount and your final adjustment to your insurance has been posted to your account.”

“Thanks… close the door on your way out, please.”

“Anything for customer satisfaction!”

The mechanic shut the door. Immediately, I flipped the switch next to the wall, which snapped more shutters behind the doors and windows, sealing the garage off from radio waves.

Ugh. My head was still woozy. I didn’t feel any pain at the moment, but I could tell I was going to. Why me? Why a wreck? I had work in the morning, and at this point I probably wasn’t going to get any more sleep at all.

Well, the drug did technically give me another hour of sleep. I could work with that. Well… if this mouse ani-droid cleaned up well enough, that might make up for the difference the insurance would have shorted me on getting a decent car.

Who needed sleep, really?

“Lily, I need a pot of coff—” I started, before my eyes fell on her shattered body again.

Oh right. Maybe I should do that myself. How do I work the coffee machine again?

A while later, and only two wasted attempts at getting the grounds in the machine, I returned the the garage to do the damage estimate. It was a large part of my work, and I’d like to have thought I was pretty good at it.

Lily’s internals were banged up, but otherwise fine. Some machining would need to be done to correct dents and warping, but that was all the easy stuff. I had those parts.

But when I extracted Lily’s CPU from her head, it was in bad shape. I had put some rather high-end chips in there, and they were the heavy kind, doing a lot of damage when the one fell loose. It wasn’t going to be easy to replace; I didn’t know if I even had anything comparable inside the garage. I could potentially do a repair job on the parts themselves, but I really needed Lily helping me for that…

I was mortified. I didn’t want to lose her, I wasn’t going to lose her. Maybe I could have simulated her backup on the computer, but then that would be all the computer could do, and it wouldn’t give me another pair of hands. Besides, I always felt a bit guilty when I made a copy of Lily only to shut it down later. I don’t know why, it just felt wrong. But wasn’t it my best option given the circumstances?

Though… there was the other ani-droid…

She certainly looked in worse shape, but a lot of that was cosmetic. Cleaning the mud off of her, her fur had a strangely iridescent shimmer to it. I could make out a mark on her forehead, in the shape of a Greek phi. I briefly opened up her head, and had mixed feelings. All of her computer components seemed to be in the head, and were extremely well-insulated—but were, also, rather cheap processors. The cracked ones were easy enough to replace! But that meant that this one was probably not sophisticated enough to help me with engineering… but on the other hand, she could help with other work.

Still, all I really had to do was get those cheap processors off my shelf, pop out the damaged ones and pop in the new ones. That should have been plenty to get her awake… though I couldn’t find the manual power switch. I looked for a starter port somewhere on the back of her neck, but there was no port there, either. It was possible, I supposed all of her ports might have been shorn off with her lower limbs, though it would have been a strange design choice to put all the computers in the head and all the ports in the butt.

Well, unless that was somebody’s thing, I guessed. Couldn’t tell if an ani-droid with that extensive amount of damage originally had comfort modifications.

I closed the head plate while I went to look for some other clamps I could use to activate pins manually, but when I returned, the mouse was already blinking her eyes.

“H-hello?” She asked. “I can’t see anything, where am I?”

“Oh!” I said. “You’re set to boot up automatically?”

“Yeah, I don’t have a switch for that,” she said. “Can you tell me where I am, kind lady?”

“You’re in my garage,” I said, smiling at her. “My name’s Mira McAllister. Who are you?”

“I… don’t know,” the mouse said. “I’m trying to access that part of my memory, but it seems scrambled. I think my name is something like… E-O.”

“E-O?” I asked. “Is Eo okay?”

“Yeah, you can call me Eo, but I don’t think I’m okay. It’s dark in here, and I can’t feel my legs.”

“You currently don’t have any legs,” I told her.

“Oh. That would explain it.” She blinked her big eyes repeatedly, then tested each of her large round ears. Again, she paused. “Why don’t I have any legs?”

“There was car crash,” I said, getting my magnifying lens from the overhead swinging arm. “You fell out of the back of a truck and hit my car.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry! Why was I in a truck?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” I said. I leaned over her to assess the damage under her lungs. I didn’t need to clean her up a lot, but I did need to remove the module bus and replace it with a generic. I yanked it out.

“Ow!” she exclaimed. “Warn me when you do that!”

“Ow?” I asked her. “You’re not programmed to feel pain, are you?”

“Well not really,” she said. “But that still hurt. You removed it from my system without me preparing for it!”

“Sorry, that’s how it goes,” I said. “It was likely corrupted at this point anyway and wouldn’t accept ejection.”

“Yeah but it was still mine.” Eo pouted. “Can you make sure to set it aside so I can look at it before it’s disposed of?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Who’d program an ani-droid to have that kind of indignation? She was probably the cutest one I’d talked to in a long while. “Okay, I’ll set it aside for you,” I said to humor her, and pulled out an empty box to put all the parts in. “They’ll be in this tub.”

“Good,” she said. “What tub?”

“The one I’m waving over your face.”

“I can’t see it.”

I inspected her eyes a bit more closely. They were rather sophisticated, no design I was familiar with, but were clearly the same size and socket as Lily’s. Hairline cracks formed around the lenses of both.

“Your eyes are smashed,” I said. “Probably a lot of fine internal damage. I’ll get you replacements.” I reached over to pop the eyes out, but I paused. “…if you’re ready.” I tapped the glass of the eye.

“Uh, one second.” Eo made a series of faces, and her eyelid twitched. “Okay… Okay… I’m ready.”

I pushed my fingers around the socket and yanked the eyeball out.

“Ahh!” Eo yelped as it snagged. “Ow! Ow ow! Ow stop!”

“Almost have it!” The eyeball slid out of its socket with a pop. Eo’s head fell back and bonked against the table.

“Ow!” She whined. “Mira, that really hurt! And now my face feels weird…”

“I’m sorry!” I had to suppress a laugh as I cleaned out the socket of any trace mud. I put the eyeball in the box with her other parts, then grabbed one from the wall and popped it back into that socket.

Eo winced when I did, but after blinking for a few moments, she looked up at me. “Oh, hi!” she said, blinking more. “So you’re Mira!”

“Yes, hello again, Eo,” I said. “Are you ready for me to take the other eye out?”

Eo pulled back as well as she could with only her neck muscles, and she shut the eyelid closed. “No, not right now.”

“Okay, we’ll get to that when you’re ready. For now, let’s try to get your internals into place, and then I have a decent pair of spare legs around here that should fit you. Are you okay with that?”

“Yes please,” Eo said. “Thank you for repairing me, Mira. You didn’t have to.”

I paused. “Uh… you’re welcome, Eo. I admit, I do have ulterior motives.”

“Oh.” Eo’s ears wilted. “What do you want me to do?”

“Well, my ani-droid companion, Lily, was broken in the crash. I need some help repairing her.”

“Oh!” Eo’s ears perked up again. “I’ll gladly help you with that, Mira. Can I have a look at her? I’ll think about what we should do while you repair me.”

I screwed up my face a little at Eo. The implication was that there was something she wouldn’t want to help with, despite being an ani-droid, which again, weird. But, so long as she did…

“Do you know how to do ani-droid repairs?”

“Well, I am one, so it shouldn’t be that hard! Just show me where the rubber mallets are.”

I glared. Someone programmed humor into her. Great.

“I’m kidding!” she said with a rather delightful laugh that even made me smile. “Yes, I’ve done it a lot before. I… can’t remember any specific examples right now, a lot of my memories are jumbled up… but I know for a fact that my creator built me for this purpose.”

“Really? Even with the cheap chips in your brain?”

“Yeah!”

“If you say so, but I am rather a stickler for details…”

I put my arms around her and lifted her up. She turned her head toward the other work bench where Lily laid, and she gasped.

“Oh no,” she cried. “She looks like she’s in very bad shape…”

“Well, the part I’m worried about is her CPU,” I said, bringing Eo around and showing her the shattered bits on the table. “I think the chips might be salvageable, at least enough until I can replace them. But there’s a lot of damage to the motherboard. I don’t have a replacement for that, so if I could to some microsurgery…”

“Yeah, I can do that,” Eo said. “Can you lower me down so I can see her closer?”

I did, dipping Eo’s body down so she could see inside Lily’s head. But Eo ignored the open panel. Instead, she pulled her functioning arm out of my grip and wrapped it around Lily’s neck, and pressed her cheek to hers.

“I’m sorry I did this to you, Lily,” she said. “This is my fault. I’ll try to make up for it. I’ll make you better than you were before, I promise!”

I blinked. That was… definitely a unique quirk.