Robots can Dream Too

[Aello]

Buried in some cramped corner of Tier Four stood a shoddy repair shop. It was the kind of building that was more rust than actual metal. Heaps of scrap and discarded parts laid in sagging piles around back, and the front had a smoker post that was always a few cigarettes away from being too full. Every now and again the staccato scream of an impact driver or some other power tool would light up the air. A single massive garage door sat open during warm days. When it was cold the door would be kept shut and only opened when necessary since opening it let all of the heat escape. Atop the entrance flashed half of a neon sign that read “Jill’s Cybertec Repair Center”.

Out back, straddling one of the aforementioned scrap heaps, stood a robot. Largely humanoid in construction the bot held a sword made from cobbled together scrap. Yellow paint clung stubbornly to his scratched chassis. He wore a sleeveless shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. Not that he had anything to cover up, but he liked the style. The robot’s head was reminiscent of a welding mask with a single rectangular slit to serve as eyes and no mouth to speak of. Surrounding this king of scrap was a ring of latchkey kids, each of them watching with barely contained excitement.

“And so, our brave knight Corius climbed the Mountain of Despair for he knew that the evil wizard Gillandrahall had hidden the fair princess within its morose peaks,” the robot exclaimed with a tinny reverb filled voice, “alas our courageous knight knew not the dangers that awaited him, for you see the Mountain of Despair was home to a vicious and bloodthirsty rust dragon!”

The robot tapped his sword twice against the outside wall of Jill’s shop. In response a small shock-white drone came buzzing out through an open window. This drone was little more than a sterile white cylinder with a propeller on top. A set of built in speakers played several stock dragon roars while tin cans duct taped to strings dangled menacingly from the drone’s body. It dove and swooped past the robot who swung his makeshift sword in response. The children ooh’d and ah’d as the drone made another pass. This mock fight carried on for a minute or two, and finally came to a head as the robot scored a clean blow against the strings and sent the tin cans clattering to the ground. A horrid death rattle escaped the drone’s speakers before it buzzed back inside.

“With a thunderous blow, Dragonslayer Corius brought the beast low,” the robot exclaimed as it leaped from the scrap heap and squashed a fallen can. He raised his sword in victory and continued to speak, “with the dragon slain and the peak in sight, Knight Corius continued his jour--”

“Hey! Cori! Quit dinking around and get in here,” Jill shouted, her voice carrying outside through an open window, “I need you to help me.”

If Cori could have smiled he would have been beaming. What ending could have been better than a cliffhanger? The children groaned as Cori staked his sword into the scrapheap and walked towards the shop’s backdoor. Their disheartened faces tugged at his metaphorical heartstrings, and with a sigh he turned back to face them.

“Sorry kids, but duty calls, and a knight never forgets his duty,” the robot said, “don’t you worry though, the adventures of Knight Corius will continue tomorrow.”

The inside of Jill’s shop was not much better than the outside. Tools and random assortments of futuristic parts were scattered around in haphazard heaps. Cybernetic limbs and implants in various states of disrepair hung against one wall. Grease and burnt oil filled the air with a grungy scent; not that Cori minded, he couldn’t smell anything anyways. At the center of this nest of rust stood an impressively large construction mech. Temporary scaffolding wrapped around its depowered frame and its right arm hung completely detached and suspended by a crane built into the ceiling. Cori scanned the area for Jill, but found no trace of her.

“Jill,” he called out, “where are you?”

“Over here,” she responded.

Cori followed the sound of her voice and found her nestled away in a far corner of the shop. Grease marks stained the woman’s already dark skin and somewhat obscured the sleeve of tattoos along her arms. The drone from earlier buzzed around her head, staying far enough away to not get tangled up in her tied-back dreads. She waved him over to the table she was standing at. A rectangular bundle of wires and metal sat half-disassembled on the workbench. Jill pointed at the piece using the soldering iron in her hand.

“Needya to hold this access door back while I resolder a few connections,” she said.

“Sure thing, Jill,” Cori said.

The robot sidled up to the table and pried back the spring-loaded panel. Jill closed one eye as the pupil in her other one dialated. Hidden implants magnified her vision and turned her eyeball into a hyper-focused magnifying glass. Sticking her tongue out she set to work. Little fingers of smoke drifted off the connections as she melted the solder.

“So how is the great knight Corius?” Jill asked.

For a moment Cori didn’t respond, “he’s fine.”

“Just fine?” She probed.

“Just fine.”

Jill stopped for a moment to look at a wiring diagram before coming back to her work.

“Well, I don’t mind you playing make-believe out back, but can you try and leave BB out of it?” She asked, and added, “she’s impressionable and I think all this is rubbing off on her in a bad way.”

In response the drone replayed the sound clip of the dragon’s roar before zooming off around the shop. The faux dragon completed a few laps overhead while playing roar after roar.

“BB, calm down!” Jill shouted, “I’m not saying you guys can’t play together, just that you should make sure you keep fantasy, well, fantasy.”

Cori said nothing.

“There,” Jill said, setting aside the soldering iron, “all done, but since your in here, I need your help with a few more things, they want that mech up and running this weekend and we still have to refurbish the dampners, you know how pushy they get.”

“Yes Jill,” he said, his artificial voice staying monotonous.

Jill began to walk away, but stopped and asked over her shoulder, “you’re not mad at me are you? I didn’t mean nothing by it, I just don’t want BB flying off pretending she’s a dragon or something.”

“No, I’m not mad,” he said, infusing his voice with a bit of cheer, “I think I kinda forgot it was just fantasy for a minute, nothing to be worried about.”

“Alright, well let’s get working.”

[Aello]

Several hours passed as the mechanic and robot went about their work. Barely a word was shared between them and when they did speak it was nothing more than the bare minimum. Outside, the artificial sun began to dim as the day stretched on to its eventual end. More than a few times Cori caught himself staring at the clock and daydreaming rather than doing actual work. Jill was right, this whole knight business was just silly. Heroism was the stuff of primes, not a secondary maintenance bot. If the robot could’ve sighed he would have, but he waved away the thought and turned back to the array of bolts he was in the process of torquing down. Eventually the artificial sun dimmed to a level that better suited the perpetual nightlife of Tier Four. Jill rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and yawned.

“Alright,” she said, raising her voice just loud enough to carry across the shop, “I’m getting too tired to focus, you ready to pack it in?”

Cori set down a wrench and responded, “yeah, I need to recharge soon anyways.”

--

Not too far from Jill’s shop was what could affectionately be referred to as a shack. Four walls and a roof made from patched together pieces of corrugated iron and buried amongst a colony of similar structures was what Cori called home. Much like the piles of scrap at Jill’s shop everything here had a healthy veneer of rust and verdigris. Cori had long since removed the lock on his door; it was tiresome having to replace it every time a junkie or thief busted it down in hopes of a payday. Instead of hiding them behind a locked door the robot chose to keep his valuables on him. Cori swung open the door to his house and stepped inside. There was no need for a lamp for his artificial eyes could see just fine in the dark. He shut the door behind him and abandoned his backpack in the center of the room.

In the corner sat a large blocky object. It hummed softly and a display on the side read “READY TO CHARGE” in big neon letters. This was the only thing that Cori did not bother to take with him everyday. Not because it was worthless, but rather the fact that it was simply too heavy for anything short of a forklift to move and Cori had never heard of any junkie owning a forklift. The robot opened a compartment on the charging device and revealed a long cylindrical jack attached to a thick cable. With a practiced motion he plunged the jack into the base of his skull. Warmth, or an approximation, of warmth washed over him as the city’s power grid fed his starved electronics. Cori sighed and sat cross-legged in front of his backpack.

For a while Cori simply sat there and enjoyed the warm sensation. It was a shame, he figured, that he would never truly know how humans felt. The kiss of sun upon their skin or the comforting embrace of a soft blanket. It wasn’t that he had no idea of how those things felt, the receptors built into his exoskeleton were quite adept at approximating those sensations, but even then he knew that his experiences were nothing more than the result of millions of computations. These existential thoughts were brushed away as he reached into his bag and retrieved a tablet computer.
If he had lips he would’ve been smiling as Top Man’s intro played across the tablet’s screen. As the orange android ran through his over-exaggerated intro Cori found himself enthralled. To most Top Man was your run-of-the-mill Omnitube blogger, over-the-top and cringy at times, but to Cori he was practically a deity. A couple years ago the android had made history, and managed to actually meet with Omni himself. While the footage of his meeting with Omni was mysteriously MIA, Top Man’s body was proof enough of this feet. Originally a secondary like Cori, Top Man had transcended his mortal bonds and became a prime. This was evident in his series of videos titled “A Day in Life of a Prime” where the android performed pranks and other “social experiments” through the use of omnilium. Unfettered by any biological limitations such as sleep or hunger Cori would spend hours watching Top Man’s videos.

Cori adjusted the cable sticking out from the back of his head. Sure it was possible to have an internal charging system installed, but that kind of tech did not come cheap. Using the tablet he checked his bank account and performed some quick mental math. At this rate he’d be able to afford one in a year or two. Patience was a virtue, but Top Man’s videos lit a fire in his mechanical heart that screamed for adventure. A year or two might as well have been an eternity to the poor bot. His daydreaming was cut short as an internal alarm alerted him to the time. Work started soon. The artificial sun had not been reignited, but that was not unusual for the semi-permanent state of nightlife in Tier Four.

If he could have sighed he would’ve. The robot unplugged his charging cable and slid the tablet into his backpack. This cycle was one that he had repeated for the past year - work, recharge, and repeat. Monotony was only broken by his time spent playing make-believe with the neighborhood kids and watching the adventures of Top Man. It was with this heavy on his mind that he left his home and began the ten minute trek back to Jill’s workshop.