“I think the phaser needs a new molecular generator,” I said, digging a screwdriver into the control panel and prying it open. “I definitely don’t have enough money to buy one. Do you think we could steal—?” I looked over my shoulder. “Elio?”
Saturn’s rings, not again.
Roo had called Elio’s beeping at the treasury a malfunction. But the twitching he was doing now—frozen mid-step in the doorway—was the real problem. If the universe were a fair place, then I could say that this was the first time Elio had glitched. But it wasn’t. And he had glitched too many times over the last few months for me to count.
“Hang on. I got you, I got you.” I maneuvered his body, which felt as heavy as a sack of bricks, across the room and deposited him on my bed. While he lay motionless, I stumbled over to my desk and ripped open one of the drawers, dumping out a tangled pile of wires. A few screws and a stray bolt rolled across my path, but I kicked them under the bed, diving for a thick purple cord, frayed at the edges from years of use.
One end of the cord plugged into the side of my computer, while the other popped into the charging port at the base of Elio’s neck.
I picked at an old scar on my palm while the computer ran a diagnostic test, feeling the contents of my stomach swirl up into the back of my throat as I watched a hologram of Elio’s body spin above the screen. A red light pulsed over his head. Same as always. The source of his glitching—and the reason for my current money problems—was hidden deep inside Elio’s robotic brain.
I hated thinking about it, because thinking about it made me nauseous, but his memory core was depleting even faster than usual. The computer pinged with his test results. Only 79 percent functioning. Last week it was functioning at 87 percent. The week before: 91 percent.
I dropped my head into my hands.
Elio had always been a bit … off. A bit more human than the other bots my parents had owned throughout my childhood. Even for a bot, he was small. When we stood side by side, his dented head barely reached my hip, but that wasn’t the only reason he was different.
Elio was originally built to be a servant bot, until something in his programming chip warped. He was supposed to be able to cook gourmet meals, but everything he made ended up burnt beyond recognition—except for his cookies, strangely enough. He was also supposed to be able to clean an entire house at top speed. But whenever he tried, the rooms ended up messier than before. My parents had attempted to fix him numerous times, but no repairs ever worked. If anything, he got messier. More human. Eventually they got tired of trying and gave him to me to play with when I was six or so. Eleven years later and he was still my best friend.
I wasn’t going to lose him.
I knew exactly what would fix him—he needed a new body. His was too old, too small, and his memory core had grown too advanced to be compatible. I wiped my hands on my pants before turning to my computer and flipping through pages of data, re-reading everything I already knew.
Elio’s brain was too human, and now his body was rejecting him for it.
Heaving a sigh, I tapped a few times on my keyboard, sending a pulse of electricity down the cord straight into the back of his neck. Elio jolted, slamming my bed against the wall. The fan near his front-end processor whirred angrily, but still he didn’t wake.
“Come on, you stupid piece of junk, come on!” I pounded the keyboard again, sending more electricity into his charging port. When in doubt, a good insult always roused him. It was like he refused to die out of pure spite.
A third pulse of electricity. Another jolt on my bed.
And then …
“Ouch!” He pulled the cord out of his port, mouth agape with horror. “I am not a stupid piece of junk.”
“Welcome back, Elio.”
He grimaced and balled up the cord before dropping it back on my desk. “How long was I out this time?”
“A few minutes. Not too terrible,” I lied. Right before he disconnected himself from my computer, the capacity in his memory core had jumped back up to 83 percent, but it was likely falling again. He had too much knowledge and not enough space to contain it.
“Can I see?” He scooted next to me, flipping through the data from his diagnostic test. I couldn’t read his aura—being mechanical, he didn’t have one—but during times like this I really wished that weren’t the case.
After a minute, he shut off the computer and busied himself with picking up the wires I’d dropped on the floor. Somehow, he managed to twist them into a ball of knots in five seconds flat.
“My name is Elio,” he recited slowly. “My favorite thing to eat is cookies—”
“You can’t eat,” I reminded him.
“Not yet. Just wait until someone builds me a body that can.” He screwed up his eyes and continued. “My favorite thing to eat is cookies. There are one hundred and ten species of bullfish in the lake on west Condor—”
“One hundred and eleven.”
“What? No, there’s one hundred and…” A pause. “Eleven. Cora, how did I forget that there are one hundred and eleven species of bullfish?”
“Relax. That’s such a minor fact that it’s basically insignificant.”
Every time Elio glitched, he temporarily lost a piece of information from his memory core. It could be anything. Something trivial (like the common lillybird migration patterns or which of the one hundred and eleven species of bullfish was most vicious during mating season), or even something critical, like the friendaversary party I’d thrown him every year since I was eight. Or his favorite cookie to bake. Or the worst glitch yet—when he forgot his name for five whole minutes.
I promised myself—and him—that last instance would never occur again. I was no seamstress, but I’d sloppily sewn his name into every article of clothing he owned—because in his quest to be human he’d purchased two closets full of Condor’s most fashionable outfits—so he wouldn’t forget. I’d even sewn it into his underwear.
Especially his underwear.
“If we don’t get me a new body, then I’m toast,” he said quietly.
“Elio, we’ll get you a new body.”
If only it were that easy. Stealing a fresh android body was out of the question. I’d never accomplish a heist of that magnitude by myself.
I dug through one of the larger drawers at the bottom of my desk, removing a steel box weighed down by a lock as thick as my fist. I punched in the combination and started counting the money, even though I knew exactly how much there would be: ten thousand gold ritles. My life savings from working for my parents. It was nowhere near the kind of money I would need to buy Elio a new body. And my mother wasn’t exactly big on giving me loans.
“I have enough to fix up some of your patches,” I told him as he abandoned his attempt to tidy my room and sat back down on the bed.
“I appreciate you trying to make me feel pretty, but they aren’t what I’m worried about.” He rubbed a hand over the paneling covering the side of his neck. Most of it appeared normal, a bright silver that never once hinted something was amiss. But a large square along his throat was wearing away more and more each day, a hole forming to expose the translucent coating that covered a mess of wires and gears along his man-made spinal column. He had similar patches on his face and arms, and while he found them unsightly, they wouldn’t harm him the way his memory core would.