Ani-droids 5

Ani-droids 1 

Ani-droids 2 

Ani-droids 3 

Ani-droids 4 

Still going! Somehow! How does my brain even work

--

Eo tried to be a good little patient for the next several hours as I built her back the best I could, cutting and reapplying muscle cords, reinstalling her internals, and so on. The major visual issue was with her pseudoskin—Eo was very insistent that I did not remove any more than necessary from her upper torso. The problem was that pseudoskin was made to be form-fitting, and I couldn’t really measure her out for any more without removing what she had and figuring out just what the hell kind of brand it even was. I swore to myself, she must have been from the remote regions of Kurdistan or something.

Well, her hands were working fine, much better than mine were, given they were still wrapped in bandages, so I just decided to go with the classic look of “don’t hide the truth” and gave her a plastic casing for her lower half. Less touch sensitivity, but it would work fine for everything down there, including her stripped tail.

When she was finally done, and I looked up at the clock… it was 6 am. I had to be at work in four hours, car or none. Eo marched around on the floor, trying to get used to her new legs. And she’d eventually accepted the second replacement eye, so she was looking rather brand new, if industrial. And fortunately I had some bare feet bottoms that were molded rubber, so she didn’t clang around as she walked awkwardly.

“Are those good?” I asked. “You satisfied?”

“It’s a very good job, Mira!” Eo said. “Especially for doing all of this in six hours!”

“Good. I’m going to bed.” I made for the door.

“Wh—but what about Lily?”

“You said it yourself, I’m underslept. I can’t stay up any more, and I need to be at work by ten.”

“Ten! Where do you work?”

“Koenig Industries Service Hub.” I rubbed my eyes a lot. It was getting hard to see straight, so I just kept walking for my bedroom, disrobing as I went.

“Okay, I’ll take care of that,” Eo said. “But um, my battery is rather low. Do you have somewhere I can recharge?”

“I was wondering about that.” I tossed my dirty laundry into the hamper by the bedroom door. I needed a bath, but there wasn’t going to be time for even a shower. Probably could sneak one at work later. “You don’t have a charging port anywhere.”

“Oh, that’s because my pseudoskin does the charging,” Eo said. “It draws and generates power from hydrogen. It’s easiest if I’m in contact with saltwater.”

I blinked. I guessed that was why she didn’t want the pseudoskin removed, but that just brought up more questions. “…I’ve never heard of that being used for… you know what, nevermind. I’m too tired to care. Bathroom’s over there. Just don’t get the rest of yourself wet.”

“I know what I’m doing!” Eo said. “Do you have any salt?”

“Probably. Lily knew where it was. Somewhere in the kitchen.”

“I’ll find it. You get some sleep, Mira!”

I collapsed on my bed. Eo gently shuffled through the bedroom, drawing my curtains closed, before closing the door behind her. It was followed by a lot of clanking sounds out in the rest of the house, but I just tried to ignore it, shoving another pillow over my head.

—

“Wake up, Mira! It’s 9:22!”

I jumped up. “Lily, you don’t have to be so loud!”

The blue mouse ani-droid blinked, standing there at the bedroom door. “Um… Lily’s still not repaired yet. Should I have done it while you were asleep?”

“What?” I shook my head, suddenly remembering the previous night. “Oh. Oh right. Eo. No, that’s gonna take a while, we can do it later tonight.” I looked at my hands, and the stained bandages on my knuckles. I pulled them off, and the scratches had closed up. I figured I’d just leave it like that.

“I’m sorry for startling you, I just wanted to make sure you were ready. The rental car is waiting for you outside, you will just need to provide them with your account information. It will take about thirty-one minutes to get to your workplace, and I wanted to make sure you had breakfast first.”

“Oh… thank you, Eo.” I said, getting up and approaching the door. “That’s very—what the hell did you do to my kitchen.”

The kitchen was a wreck. The wastebasket was overflowing with discarded food waste, the stove was coated in all sorts of fresh gunk, with some dripping down the oven to the platform for Opera-class-sized ani-droids to stand. Every cabinet was open, many items removed and stacked over the counters and floors, and one of the plates was on the floor shattered. On the nearest counter by the fridge laid a single clean white plate, with a single clean fork next to it. On the plate was a single, perfect, over easy fried egg in the exact center.

“Um, it took me about two hours to get a good charge in the bathtub,” Eo told me. “Then I had to figure out where to hire the rental car, and by that time I didn’t have a lot of time to make you something… or clean…”

“I feel like I’m back in college,” I mumbled. Well, it wasn’t my mess to clean up. Standing over the counter, I picked up the fork, cut a wedge into the egg, which the yolk ran out smoothly and perfectly. I bought the yolk-soaked wedge to the mouth, and chewed.

“…it’s absolutely coated in salt,” I said, spitting it into the sink.

Eo’s ears fell. “I’m sorry! I’ve never actually done this before! I was trying very, very hard to impress you, but I just… I don’t know how to cook for humans!”

“You don’t know how to cook?” I exclaimed. “Didn’t you just download the package from the internet into your temporary skills partition?”

Eo shook her head. “No. I don’t have protocols for that.”

I stared at her. Turning to the living room, it was only then that I noticed the frozen screen of a cooking tutorial video on the television monitor. “You… are an Opera-class ani-droid… and you don’t have a skills partition?”

“No. I’m a fast learner, though, I’m sure I can get your egg correct with a few more tries…”

“Eo, it’s too early for this bullsh…!” I threw my hands up. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to swear. I’ll just grab something from the vending machine at work.” I turned around to the bedroom again to grab some handfuls of clothing from my dresser drawers.

“Okay, I’ll clean up while you’re gone.”

“No, do that when we get back. You’re coming with me.”

“What?” Eo asked. “But… why?”

“Well firstly, because I need someone to drive me. Secondly, part of my paycheck is renting out Lily to the company while I’m at work,” I said. “You are aware of ani-droid renting, right?”

“Well yeah, but… I’m not… good at that.” Eo looked back to the kitchen as if to emphasize the point.

“It’s easy. You just download the instructions the company gives you for the day, and then you do them.”

“That sounds like skills partitioning.”

“Well you should still be able to do it even without a partition, right?” I asked her, jumping into a pair of tan slacks. “Allocate a portion of your memory to the task and it should achieve more or less the same function.”

“Um… okay…” Eo sounded uncertain. She scratched nervously at her large round ears. “You mean through, like, the internet?”

“They’ll give you instructions by encrypted wireless.”

“But I don’t have a wireless.”

Again. I thought perhaps I’d missed something in her rebuild—after all, she had those antennae sticking out of her ears, what were those even for? Or, well, maybe it was in her tail, like a lot of ani-droids had, but it’d been stripped out…

“That’s okay,” I said. “I made sure to give you a connector port in your lower half. We can just hook an external wireless receiver up to you.” I marched half-naked to the garage and pulled one out of the wall of parts, then back into the house. Eo turned as I knelt down to her, opening up the panel in her more robotic-looking lower half and jamming the little black box into the port until it clicked. Eo patted the thing with her hands.

“I… I guess that works,” Eo said, her voice a little sad. “I can apparently see the internet in my head now…”

“There! Now you should be able to drive me. Just allocate a partition in your memory, download the driving instructions, and you should be good!”

“Oh… okay, Mira. If you need me to.” She closed her eyes. “Where—oh there it is! I can see the car! Oh wow it has a lot of cameras!” She turned toward the door, then stumbled and fell over. “Wait, wait, I got it! I got it!”

I sighed and picked her up. “Just try to let the car do most of the work, okay?”

—

I made sure my seatbelt was tight.

“So… I was going to ask,” I said, “Why don’t you have a wireless receiver?”

Eo didn’t respond. She was clutching the wheel of the car tight as it made turns across the roads toward the highway.

“Eo?”

“Sorry!” Eo squeaked loudly. “Paying attention to the road!”

“The car does most of that.”

“I know! I’m just trying to get a handle on it in case there’s an accident! I don’t want to mess up again…”

“And you can’t talk at the same time? Most ani-droids can multitask…”

“I can multitask,” Eo insisted. “It’s just that I yeek!” She gripped the wheel again as the car made a gentle right turn. “Uh, the way my CPU is built, I sometimes get cross-talk. I don’t want that to happen at an inopportune moment.”

Well, that wasn’t a surprise. She was still rather sophisticated for a cheaply built model… or at least, her CPU was cheap. Several of her other parts were astoundingly high-end, things I’d swear were custom from the ground-up.

“Where were we going, again?” Eo asked.

And forgetful. “Koenig Service Hub, Building A.”

“Right! Sorry, we’re on the highway now so it should… be… okay!” She finally relaxed and just rested her hands on the wheel as the car only continued to drive straight ahead. “Well then, I don’t have a wireless receiver because I never really needed one, I guess.”

“Never? Seems inconvenient.”

“Naw, the internet is a huge distraction.”

Couldn’t fault her for that perception. Especially with how Eo was built, I wouldn’t be surprised if she got caught deep-diving into websites. “But what if you need to download a program or information you don’t have?”

“I just learn it the normal way,” Eo said. “Eyes, ears, nose. I sped the cooking video up to ten-times speed and just went over it in my head.”

“So you still retain and analyze data just as well as any ani-droid,” I said. “Mostly.”

“Yup!”

“Even though downloading a program directly would still be a lot more efficient then trying to build a dataset from the ground up.”

“If every ani-droid uses the same program, they all have the same blind spots. Organic learning leaves open the possibility that I can put together information from disparate sources that most ani-droids haven’t. And on top of that… I don’t need to delete anything I’ve learned. It’s integrated into the OS.”

That… was an interesting approach. It sounded almost like something I’d pursue when I was rebuilding Lily for the hundredth time, but it was just so hard to figure out how to organize it without simple drop-in file structures.

“Okay,” I said, “But that doesn’t necessarily apply well to solved problems. You know… like how to drive. I don’t think you’re gonna come up with a brand new insight so easily.”

“No, maybe not,” Eo explained. “But if every ani-droid thought like me, someone might come up with some clever solution nobody…” she suddenly paused, her hands gripping the wheel. I’d only noticed then that the cars around us were bunching up.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“…there’s a wreck up ahead,” Eo said. “Traffic is backed up a ways. I’m estimating we may be ten minutes late. No, wait… thirty minutes late.”

Fun. Automation had promised that auto accidents would be a thing of the past. But in some ways it encouraged laziness… such as a trucker not checking the latch on his truck before driving off.

“Do… do you want to hear the report?” Eo twisted uncomfortably in the seat. “Or would that be too distressing?”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Nine-car pileup about five minutes ago. There was an unexplained interruption in the wireless signal. One of the cars was driverless, became confused, and swerved off the lane. It escalated from there. Three humans and twelve ani-droids dead. Sorry, I mean twelve ani-droids totaled.”

I didn’t really have anything to do then but wait. We dragged on through the traffic, but once a lane cleared up, things began moving. Eventually, we inched ahead, and by the time we finally got there, the wreck was in sight.

A massive Labor-class tiger, nearly nine feet tall who would have weighed as much as a truck, was carefully un-crumpling the chassis of an actual truck. Medens-class ani-droids, much like Custodes-class but covered in sterile, soft white plastic, littered the scene. Rows of bodies laid under sheets and on gurneys—no injured sitting in the open anywhere. Of course, the Medens would have quickly anesthetized even injured humans, as having them wander around a crash site dazed and disoriented was just a safety hazard.

Chalk that one up to ani-droid uniformity, I guessed. But it was one of the big reasons I hated hospitals. Ani-droids just didn’t like humans being awake for their medical treatments. It made it too complicated.

I got off easy, at least…