Meteoric - Chapter Three

[keaalu]

Title (chapter): Meteoric (3)
Series: Terrahawks
Notes: In which we find out that the Martian androids have now also found out about the missing zeroid, and are plotting to try and recover him before the Terrahawks do. The flatmates argue a little over supper, and the amnesiac Polly / 101 discovers his memory isn't the only thing that's shot - his batteries aren't so hot either. Oh dear.


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Well well well. This was all getting very interesting.

Yung-star pressed the outsized headphone tighter into his ear and concentrated.

Normally he used his radio equipment, the Ferret, to pick up entertainment channels. (Humans might be scum, but they made decent music.)

Very occasionally, he also used it to try to spy on the accursed Terrahawks, particularly after a skirmish, to see what they were saying about the martian androids. It was usually encrypted and meaningless, unless Itstar succeeded in breaking through their security – having that army of traitorous little balls on their side meant the Terrahawks were fast at cycling and re-coding their protocols, so any successes didn’t last very long.

(Yung-star still didn’t get why the Earthling robots hadn’t all defected to the martian side at the start of their conflict. They were all machine-based life-forms, after all. They had some common ground, surely. It didn’t feel fair that the spheres would prefer to be the slaves of the ungrateful humans.)

One day, those human scum would definitely mention how strong and powerful his family was, Yung-star was sure of it. Strong and powerful and if only they’d used a particular technique or technology or strategy, they’d have defeated the mighty Spacehawk and Earth would be left wide open. Yung-star just had to keep trying and he’d get lucky, figure out how to defeat the Terrahawks forever, and his mother Zelda would finally have something good to say about him.

And it was really starting to look like today might be that day!

Distance and a messy encryption usually made the human’s communication difficult to spy on, but this time something had rattled the enemy so much, they had carelessly used an old cipher that the Martians had long ago broken. In spite of some distortions, their actual words were quite clear. Well, mostly – human speech was difficult to follow at the best of times, and this was a bit of a mess, the speakers agitated and anxious and talking over each other… but Yung-star was gleaning some detail from it anyway. And what he was hearing, he found particularly exciting.

“Do you plan to waste the entire millennium listening to that time-sink?” Zelda snapped, from somewhere behind, making him jump. “If it’s not pandering to the demands of your endless stomach, you’re filling your head with even more worthless Earthly nonsense.”

“No, mother, mother. Listen! I have amazing news!” Yung-star skipped back a few moments in his recording and listened to it a second time, just to be sure. “You’ll be so pleased with me.”

“Do I have to crack you on the head so the information leaks out all of its own accord?” she snapped, impatient. “Out with it then, you stupid boy!”

Yung-star cackled. “The infernal Spacehawk,” he said, and let the pause linger for a few seconds, for extra impact. “...is disabled. Its command sphere is missing.”

Zelda whipped around to stare at him. “What?”

“Apparently on our last visit, we shot the stupid ball down,” Yung-star laughed. “And now they can’t find it. And they can’t work their great ship properly without it!”

Zelda’s shriek of feral glee brought everyone running to see why she was murdering her son this time, only to find them pirouetting around the room.

“Some days, Yung-star, I despair of you ever reaching the smallest sliver of your potential. On other days,” she seized him by both cheeks, “you frankly amaze me. What superb fortune that you chose now to waste your time on your invention!”

“Thank you, mother,” he preened. Yes, it did feel rather amazing to receive her praise, for a change. “Should we attack them now, while they are still stupid and defenceless?”

The self-styled Queen of Mars considered it for an instant. “They lost that annoying little ball which controls most of their ship’s systems?”

“Yes, mother. It fell to earth.”

“And it didn’t break?”

That gave him pause. “I… don’t think so? They’re looking for it so I suppose there’s something left. Why are you asking that?”

“Because… I think I have a better idea.” Zelda tapped steepled fingers to her lips, thoughtfully. “Imagine what we could do if we had that wretched ball in our possession. Crack it open, and all Spacehawk’s terrible secrets would be ours.” She laughed. “We could even reprogram it to do our bidding – so we can control their ship remotely. We could fly it directly into the sun!”

“Oh! Oh, yes, that’s a much better plan-”

“So you must find it. Before those accursed Terrahawks do.”

That fleeting sense of pride rapidly evaporated. Not ‘we must find it’ – ‘you’. “But mother. Even they can’t find it, and it’s their technology!”

“Precisely. They’ve lost it. Their own technology. They have no more idea where it is than we do. Which means, we could get lucky. This is a chance we can’t afford to pass up.”

“But how am I meant to even do that?” Yung-star let his shoulders droop and arms dangle, pathetically. “We’re not even there! Earth is millions of miles away!”

“No excuses! Itstar? Help your uncle.”

The youngest of Zelda’s family looked alarmed to have unexpectedly been targeted, when presumably they’d been present only to find out any interesting gossip. “Me? Vot did I do wrong?”

“Nothing – yet. See that it stays that way.” She waved a threatening finger. “With your brains and your uncle’s… help, I have a good feeling that we may succeed here.”

Technically, the two androids were cousins, rather than uncle and nibling, but the gulf in ages meant it was easier to refer to Yung-star as the child’s (somewhat doddering) older male relative.

“I feel like I’m being punished for doing a good job,” Yung-star muttered.

“The feeling, meine uncle, is mutual. I feel like I am being punished for you doing a good job.”

They glared at each other.

“Fine.” Yung-star folded his arms and glared down at the prematurely-aged robot child. “You’re the genius, apparently. What should we do?”

“Whatever it is, it will have to be done remotely, at least to start with.” Itstar tapped their forefingers to their nose. “You cannot easily get to Earth without being shot down. Even if you could, there would be no point in aimlessly wandering the planet looking for something the size of a cube. No. We need help. So, perhaps… we need to make the humans into the predators of their own protectors?”

Yung-star stared through them for several seconds. “I don’t get it.”

“How many filthy humans are there on the planet, uncle?”

“Oh, millions, at least. Billions maybe.”

“Precisely! Imagine we can leverage even just a small number of those greedy squishy eyes in our service.”

“...Ew. I’d rather not. It sounds disgusting.”

“Ha ha! Figuratively, uncle. We will not be actually levering any eyeballs.” Itstar laughed. “It means, we get them to do our dirty work. We tell them we are looking for something very expensive, something very important and valuable, and suddenly, as if by magic, we have hundreds of willing, unwitting footsoldiers. We encourage them to find it.” They spread their hands. “And we get them to hand it over to us. Simple.” They laughed again, high and grating. “At least you do not have to worry about it spotting you when you eventually do go to Earth, for once!”

“Yes indeed. Ha ha ha.” Yung-star laughed along, uneasily. There were still a lot of you-s in this conversation, he’d noticed. When you go to Earth. When they shoot at you. (When you inevitably mess up and Mummy gets cross again.) “Why would the humans do that?”

“We promise them money, of course. Untold riches. We tell them how important it is, how expensive it is, how there is a finder’s fee, a reward, hundreds of thousands of dollars to the human successful in locating it for us.”

“Where would we get that kind of money from?”

“Well obviously we lie.” Itstar gave an exaggerated roll of the eyes. “But they don’t know that. They will be obsessed with the reward.” They wafted a hand, dismissively. “Humans scam each other all the time. They are gullible, stupid, and greedy. This will be no different.”

“And what happens after they find it for us?”

“When they hand it over?” Itstar shrugged. “We kill them. Obviously.”

“And you think, with all of that work we have to do, you’re going to somehow beat the clone and his followers to it, when he’s right there and knows what to look for.” Yung-star sighed. “It would probably be easier and less painful if I asked Mummy to get it out of the way by yelling at me now.”

“Ugh! Think about it, uncle. The accursed Terrahawks keep their idiotic spheres a secret, do they not?” At Yung-star’s nod, they continued: “So already we have an advantage!” Itstar ticked off every point on their fingers. “The Terrahawks will not ask the public to help them search, because to them, their secrecy is paramount. No-one knows the spheres are their property, so the humans will not question if we claim it is ours. If it is not already dead, the sphere is clearly out of contact with its masters, or they would know where it is, so it is also on its own and lacking support. And finally, humans are greedy. Some would sell their own grandmother.”

“So would you, if it served your purposes.”

Itstar laughed. “Fair, fair. Point being,” they waggled a finger, “right now, we have not just the advantage, but an advantage so huge, we cannot be beaten!”

“Where have I heard that before,” Yung-star sighed. “What happens if one of these greedy humans you want to use decides to hold it to ransom, instead? You said it yourself, humans scam each other all the time. What if they try to scam us?”

“Fine. I accept you may have a point I had not thought of. But no matter! If it happens, we will think of something. Don’t forget, we still have one more advantage!” They spread their hands, modestly. “We have me.”

“That’s a relief. I’m so glad you’re taking me seriously.” Except Yung-star didn’t sound remotely glad. “What’s our next step. Go to their news, so they can advertise it for us?”

“Ach, no no. We do still have to be careful. We must not go via the media, because it will tip off our enemy. It is vital they are not aware we know they have been stupid and careless, and know all about their little accident.”

“So… we want the humans to help us, but not too much.” Yung-star covered his face. “My head hurts.”

“Ugh! What more do you want? This is one of our easiest plans! What do you think Granny Zelda will say if we give up already? Never mind, meine kinder, at least you tried?”

“Just once? It would be nice.”

“Oh, you always try, Yung-star.” Zelda clipped him around the ear with her stick. “My patience, almost invariably!”

oOoOoOo

Tark’s interruption had left Laine with somewhere in the region of four meal’s worth of cooked pasta, so she’d donated the excess to her flatmates, who turned it into an enormous “pasta bake” that it would have been fairer to call a “cheese and tuna (with a tiny bit of pasta) bake”. (It smelt a lot better than her cheap jar of sauce, to be fair.)

Not trusting the treacherous, robot-eating couch, Polly opted to sit on one of the hard-backed dining chairs, which Jaxon had scooted up next to it for him. The laptop was on the low drinks table in front, wheezing with the effort of being asked to keep up with a second computer infinitely faster than it was. Polly himself was happily unperturbed, apparently using it as much as a replacement for his own broken antenna as he was for any web browsers, multitasking and chatting with the housemates.

That was until the bake was extracted from the oven, to a chorus of little ooh!-s, and Carried decided to call time on the internet.

“That’s enough of that now, don’t you think?” She swooped in and deftly unplugged the laptop.

“Hey-y!” Polly made a little outraged noise but couldn’t do anything to stop it sailing off out of reach. “What are you doing?! Hey! I was literally in the middle of messaging someone, and you just cut me off!”

“They’ll still be there later.”

“What?! I can’t be waiting while you all stuff your faces! Bring it back, right now!”

“Well I can’t be dealing with all that beeping and blooping while I’m trying to eat dinner,” she said, decisively, parking the computer on a convenient countertop, across the room. “We’ve all been hard at work all day, I think we deserve some peace and quiet to relax now, don’t you?”

“That’s me!” the little robot spluttered. “They’re my noises; I can’t help those! And I can’t do anything without that laptop, now bring it back!”

Carrie stood with her hands on her hips for a second or two, looking equal measures embarrassed at unintentionally insulting him, and indignant at being told what to do, by a machine. “All right, fine. Once we’re done with supper.”

“What am I meant to do until then?!”

“I don’t know. Watch TV with the rest of us, like a normal person?”

“Did you forget I’m not a ‘normal person’?!”

“Doesn’t mean you can’t watch TV.”

Carrie flounced towards the kitchen, leaving Polly fuming in her wake.

Laine glanced sidelong at him. “You can use it in my room if you want-”

“No.” The shutters that protected Polly’s sensitive camera optics had pulled halfway closed and he looked for all the world like he was pouting. “If I’m too noisy then fine. Don’t need to be treated like a dirty little secret as well.”

“Well done upsetting him, Caz.” From the kitchen, Jaxon offered a slow clap.

“Well obviously I didn’t realise, did I?” Carrie aggressively scraped at the bake dish and piled crispy bits on top of what Jaxon had already dished up. “It’s not like I’m trying to upset him on purpose.”

“Oh, so Polly’s actually getting special treatment?”

“Oh, sod off, Jaxon. You’re not even funny.” Carrie dropped her voice to a murmur, but unfortunately her voice still carried pretty well in the quiet. “Can we leave it, now? Am I not embarrassed enough already?”

“Like you embarrassed him, you mean? You just called attention to something he’s apparently got no control over, and acted like it was hugely offensive, like he had BO or something.”

“Oh that’s hardly comparable-”

Mina made an exasperated noise. “You guys know we can all still hear you, right?” she said. “Is it really a problem if he carries on using the laptop? We know he can multitask and he’s not that loud.”

“After I made a big deal about it? Sure, overrule me. Like my evening can’t get any better. I said I was sorry!” Carrie thumped down on the couch next to Sanjay and shovelled an absurdly large bite of cheesy pasta into her mouth, glaring at the television. “Wha’ more d’you wan’.”

“Actually, you didn’t,” Mina pointed out.

A pregnant silence took hold.

Polly made a funny noise a little like someone clearing their throat, and everyone turned to look at him.

“I’m sorry. I was behaving poorly. Please don’t argue because of me.” It did sound like he’d made an effort to quieten some of his more involuntary noises, and when he spoke, it was with a strangely measured tone. “I’m your guest and I should be making more effort to remember that. Outrageous of me to make demands of you, like I own the place.” His shutters were still partially closed, but it looked like it had turned into a guilty cringe, rather than the stroppy hostility from before. “Please tell me off if I do it again, because I probably will. I think it might be something I don’t have a lot of control over. It feels… quite ingrained. Being bossy, I mean.”

“Something you were programmed for?”

They were all leaning closer, now, the television abruptly forgotten. He leaned subtly back away from them. “I suppose I must be?”

“I guess that means you’re not like, just an astronomical data handler, then,” Mina said. The smallest trace of suspicion had tightened the corner of her eyes. “If you’re programmed to give orders.”

“There’s a million jobs that involve giving instructions that aren’t the secret police,” Sanjay corrected, knowing the angle she was coming from. “Air traffic control. Ambulance dispatch. Administrator of a research facility.” Beat. “Dental surgery receptionist.”

“Field marshal,” Jaxon added, around a mouthful, only half-joking.

A ripple of uneasy snickers passed around the group, Polly included. Laine suspected she knew what he was thinking, though; military, military, military.

“I wish I knew what it meant,” Polly said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense, when I think what else I can apparently do? Giving orders to… what? Unmanned satellites?” He voiced a little electronic sigh, and measured his next words very carefully. “And I wish I could reassure you that I’m not a risk. I’ll understand if you’d like me to leave.”

Mina laced her fingers in front of her and looked long and contritely at him. “Please tell me you’re not saying that because you think I’m going to insist we kick you out. You know I wouldn’t be that unkind, right?”

“You’d be well within your rights. I did break your roof already. But no, that wasn’t why I said it.” He flickered a smile for her. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m lying to you, because I really genuinely don’t know, but I keep coming back to the idea I might be… dangerous.”

“Errr, I was joking?” Jaxon piped up, hastily.

“I know you were. But I broke your roof. That’s over-engineered by anyone’s standards.” Polly elevated his voice slightly, to be heard over the protests. “You have put yourselves at a disadvantage to give me some facilities to work out what happened, and I can’t give you anything back except vague reassurances. Thank you for being kind. I shouldn’t be taking you for granted. All I ask is that you tell me to check myself when I turn into an entitled little brat again.”

Carrie leaned subtly to the side, and bumped him with her shoulder. “Sorry. That goes for me too. Your noises are fine. I shouldn’t have overreacted. I was embarrassed for not realising they were you.”

For once, Polly didn’t lean away from the uninvited touch. “I’ll try and keep them down. Sorry I snapped. Thank you for calling me normal, by the way.”

“Friends again?”

He found a genuine smile. “Sure.”

“At least we figured out a little more about you, I guess.”

“What, that I’m a… little spherical field marshal ambulance dispatcher? Huh.”

Supper finished and the washing up done and cleared away, the evening news had just started – no mention of small spherical robotic entities, or meteorites, or anything else at all that looked even tangentially related – when Laine noticed Polly had canted over on a subtle angle, no longer quite horizontal.

“Are you okay?” She resisted the urge to try and straighten him up.

“Battery’s low, apparently,” he replied, and there was a distinct lag of a second or two in his response. “I guess I do get tired, after all?” Beat. “Well, that sucks. I thought I was good for days yet.”

“Do you think that might be something else you broke?”

“Probably.” He sighed.

“Come on. I have plenty of space in my room for you to take a nap.”

“I don’t need a bed,” he protested, but followed her, anyway, a little like a lost puppy, inscribing a tired curve that almost ran into a wall. “I think a hard surface is probably better?”

Laine pushed the door closed behind him, and shut out the sounds from the lounge. “I know. But I don’t trust what Tark might try while you’re asleep, if we leave you out there.” She turned the key quietly in the lock. “I’m not sure how completely I trust him, right now.”

“Ohhh. Er. Sorry if I just made things difficult with the guy you live with?”

“It wasn’t just you. Let’s say I’d already decided that if he was staying on in this flat at the end of the year, I probably wasn’t. And I wasn’t the only one.”

“Why do you live with him if you don’t like him?” He peered quizzically up at her.

“Good question.” She sighed and ran her hand through her hair. “Tarquin sorta… stumbled into our lives without a whole lot of conscious choice, really. Jaxon is friends with someone he knows, and he needed a flat share, and since he wasn’t hurting for cash and everyone said he was OK, we said sure. It was only for a year, he’s always paid his bills on time, keeps tidy, isn’t even here all that much…” She shrugged, awkwardly. “He’s just got a bit weird over investments, lately. Like he wants to be the next tech billionaire by getting lucky, without actually knowing anything about what he wants to get rich off. Remember those hideous monkey pictures, years ago? They were changing hands for thousands of dollars. That kinda thing. And he keeps trying to get us all on board, asking us to give him money to ‘invest’, even though he knows most of us are already living off our overdrafts.”

“I’m not following where you’re going with this.”

“Well, let’s just say he seems very clued up on how much you probably cost to develop, and how much you’re worth now.”

“Oh.” Realisation was dawning in Polly’s expression. “And you think he wants…”

“…to hand you over, for some… reward he thinks exists? Or sell you? Something like it. At least get something for handing over your secrets. I’m sure he thinks he can get away with it.”

“Well he can definitely get fu-”

Laine threw up both hands, alarmed, fingers splayed, and thankfully he cropped the rest of the sentence unspoken. “I agree, but I also don’t know he’s not spying on us. I don’t want to encourage him if he thinks I’m onto him.” She lifted a tub down from on top of her wardrobe. “Or tempt fate by putting temptation in his way.”

Polly hmm-ed uneasily.

“So, what do I do?” Laine sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him with a tub containing a spaghetti mass of assorted extension cables and connectors. “Do you think I have a suitable adaptor or a cable or anything?”

He peered critically into the container and watched her sift through the muddle. “I’m not sure if your power supply is going to be strong enough. I don’t want to short out the whole building.”

Laine smiled and pulled out a 3-pin wall plug with a charging socket. “Well, you didn’t fry my laptop yet. Let’s just try some flavour of USB and see what happens?”

“…sure. What could go possibly wrong.”

Carrie looked up at her when Laine re-emerged some time later. “Is he ok?”

“Yeah. Just sleepy,” Laine pocketed her room key and plopped down next to her. “I think it caught him by surprise.”

“Sleepy?” Tark had also finally appeared from his own room while Laine had been busy with Polly, and was now flaked out on a beanbag. “It’s a-”

“Don’t. Start.”

“I was going to say, it’s definitely broken, then?”

It was a terrible lie but Laine didn’t bother to challenge it. “We already established that. He’s told us as much himself. It’s what tends to happen when you slam really hard into concrete.”

“Have you had any ideas how to fix it?” On Laine’s hard look he put his hands up and corrected himself. “Fix him? Has he given you any ideas?”

“Nope. We don’t even know what’s broken, really. We’d been hoping that as the resident AI expert, you might have had some pearls of wisdom to offer. Mainly, where he came from, seeing as you’re the one who’s been asking around, so we can get him back there safely. Failing that, what to do to repair him, so he can find his own way home.”

“I know how AI works. I know what it can do. I don’t know where he comes from – yet. I also don’t know how to fix little fucked-up broken ones.”

“So you’re basically useless, then?” Mina interrupted.

Tark gave her a hard look. “Remind me what you’ve done to help, Mins. Apart from apparently freak him out into thinking you were about to evict him.”

“What have you done, actually? Except ‘ask around’ and probably advertise his existence to a whole bunch of extra people.”

Tark waved a finger. “I bet you a hundred quid that I have found where he belongs, and got him back there, all safe and sound like a cute little lost puppy returned to its master, before any of you even realise he’s gone.”

“Sounds almost like you’re threatening to kidnap him.”

Tark kept his genial expression, although a little tinge of threat seemed to have crept into it. “It’d really suck to live in a world where everyone is as paranoid as you, Minnie. Is this what spending all your time on social justice forums does to you? Oppression Olympics, gold medallist. Everything and everyone is out to get you-”

“Guys, guys.” Jaxon put his hands up in a plea for silence. “Let’s please not turn the little dude into political currency already. We can trash-talk each other’s opinions on AI when he’s gone home and is not, like, in the very next room along?”

After some resentful muttered apologies, the two backed down.

“So it’s-… he’s, uh, ‘asleep’, right?” Tark redirected his attention onto Laine. At her nod, he went on; “Maybe while he’s recharging, you could take a look and see if you can work out how to open him up? If we get a look at his hardware we could figure out if we just need a soldering iron.”

Laine stared at him for several flat seconds. “You want me to break him open while he’s defenceless and can’t consent to it?”

“I didn’t suggest you have sex with him.”

Another of those uneasy twitters of laughter passed among her flatmates.

“Of course you’d be the one to go there.” Laine just stared him out, not amused. “I am not trying to open him up while he’s unconscious. Come on, man – that’s assault. If he says he’ll let me, fine. But I’m not making a big deal out of it if he doesn’t want me to. And I’m not prioritising asking him, either.”

Tark let his arms flop, melodramatically. “You’re the one getting on my case for not helping you, panicking about the little broken thing. Now you’re complaining that my ideas how to fix him aren’t good enough?”

“Anyone could have come up with ‘soldering iron’, Tark. That doesn’t even count as an idea.” Laine blew a sigh into her palms. “What would really help is if you flexed those connections you keep claiming to have, and helped him work out where he belongs. Work together with him, not… duplicate everything he’s been doing already.”

“Fine. Consider it done.”

When Laine finally let herself back into her room, Polly was still peacefully offline on the desk, a long cable spooling out from an open hatch in his top hemisphere that connected first to a USB cable, then a plug, then an extension lead with a surge protector, and finally into the wall. She gave him the briefest of cursory examinations – like she had the first idea what to actually look for, ha ha – but all the cables and connections looked OK. Nothing had burned out. No funny plastic smells. She figured that was a good sign.

“Hey, Pols. You still doing okay in there?” she asked, anyway.

He didn’t respond, but a tiny green diode just visible deep inside him was still flickering steadily. Hopefully that was a good sign.

Polly was still offline when Laine woke, the following morning; she took advantage of his downtime and went for a shower. The increasing noise of her fellow students beginning to get active apparently nudged him out of whatever recharge cycle he was in, because he was just beginning to stir when she returned, dressed but with her hair still wrapped in a towel.

“Morning, Pols!” she chirped, getting her own back for yesterday. “Rise and shi-ine!”

He opened one shutter partway, and offered a weirdly flat electronic sound. It was hard not to hear it as an …ugh…

“That bad, huh?”

He sort of… grunted something heavy and distorted, which worried her for a second, before realising it was just some sort of initialisation lag. After a few more seconds of staring blankly at nothing, eyes scrolling irregularly, he managed to get his voice to work. “Please don’t talk to the tired garbage until he’s booted up properly.” The overtly-synthetic undertone to his voice was at least fading as he came round.

Laine smiled and left him to it – poor thing sounded almost hung over – while she messaged Asha to update her on her “sick relative”. (Something something bad migraine, copious vomit, etc. Asha wisely chose not to ask for an elaboration.)

Polly was at least looking a little more alert when she was finished. “Feeling better?” Laine prompted.

“I don’t think your current agrees with me.”

“I guessed something hadn’t gone as well as we hoped, when your ‘good morning’ mostly involved calling yourself ‘tired garbage’, in the third person.”

“…ugh.”

That looked like a full-body eyeroll. Impressive. Laine couldn’t quite tell if it had been a groan of annoyance that he still felt rough, or just meant why did I say THAT. She would have happily made a case for either. “Probably a silly question, but do you think this might be normal, or just because you hurt yourself?”

“Oh my batteries should definitely last longer than this. They just won’t hold a charge properly.”

“Tark wondered if we should try and fix you?”

Polly squinted his shutters half-closed. “I get the feeling he just wants to see my hardware.”

Coming from Polly, it had an edge of innuendo it had lacked when Tark said it. Laine bit down on an inappropriate smile.

“I’d let you look,” he said, unexpectedly. “If you’d help me.”

“What?” Laine felt her mouth go dry.

“It’s not a bad idea. You’re an engineering student. You might know something?”

“Woo, no.” She waved her hands; stop. “Chemical engineering. I’m a chemist. I’ve done a touch of work on my PC back at my parents’ house but I don’t know a thing about anything more complex. I would absolutely break you just by touching you.”

“Oh. Hm.” He looked disappointed. “Well I’d still trust you. Maybe you could just hold a camera for me, or something? So I could look? I can’t see for myself, and a mirror wouldn’t be adequate, but I saw you had an old webcam in your box of cables, yesterday.”

She rummaged in the box and picked out the battered old wired camera. “I don’t even know if this still works. I haven’t used it since I was at the start of my first year.”

“A camera is a camera. I can figure it out.”

“So what do I do, just… hold it for you and point it where you want it?” She held it out, plug-first.

Polly rocked backwards, away from her hand. “You need to take my casing off first. Otherwise I can’t see anything?”

Laine recoiled. “What? No! No way, I can’t do that.”

“I can unlock the clamps, you just need to lift it off. All right?”

“No, it’s not all right! I’ll break you.”

“It’s really easy. I promise!”

“How can you promise something like that when you have no memory of doing it before?!”

Polly hesitated. “…okay fine, no I don’t actually know for definite. But once I disengage the clamps, there’s nothing to hold it on except gravity. You just lift it straight off. Easy!”

“God, why am I agreeing to help you with this when I know it will be a total disaster.” She covered her face with both hands. “Fine. But this is on you if it goes to shit.”

“Well, it won’t, but sure.” There was a subtle rattle of little clicks from inside him, and his upper casing visibly came loose, popping up from the base of his numbered brow-band upwards. “You should be able to just lift it off. It might be heavy though.”

She carefully lifted the top portion of his cowling away, hands trembling, palms sweaty. “I don’t like this, Polly. What if I can’t put it back on? Or I knock something and break you even more? Or – Christ – drop it on you.”

“I trust you.”

“God, please stop saying that. Do you know how much pressure that puts on me? Give me instructions, not faith in my non-existent abilities.”

She set the heavy hemisphere of metal to one side on her quilt, dome down. The inner surface wasn’t as smooth as she’d expected, but covered in little moulded projections and sockets, presumably to hold it snug, and what might have been shock-absorbing polymer bumpers. (Fuck only knew how she was meant to line all that lot up properly when it came to putting it back on him.)

He hmm’ed. “Sorry. You’re doing good though!”

His inner mechanisms were evidently usually pretty snug to his casing; she’d expected lots of little air spaces, ventilation gaps, but whoever had built him had absolutely packed every tiny space with as much miniaturised kit as they possibly could, none of which she had the slightest idea of the identity of. There was probably some fancy coolant rig plumbed in as well, although she could hear fans whirring softly inside him.

“Do I not need to connect this to the laptop?”

“No, let me have it. I’ll just use it as extra eyes.”

She offered the webcam’s plug to him and he clicked into it.

“Is it working?” she wondered, peering first at the lens and then switching it around to look for any sign it was turned on.

“Oooh, okay that’s slightly weird.” He rocked lopsidedly back on his axis. “Could you try and hold it steady before you make me dizzy?”

“Oh! God, sorry. I guess that’s a ‘yes’, then…”

Following Polly’s guidance, Laine slowly moved the camera around so he could get a good look at his internal mechanics. There were a handful of areas of obvious damage, stained by lubricant oils and subtly blackened; misaligned and dented pieces of circuitry. The hair-fine wiring was infinitely more delicate than she’d ever imagined – that idea of a soldering iron now seemed completely absurd.

“That doesn’t look so good. Sorry, Polly. I don’t think I could fix that even if I had the right kit.”

“No, I wouldn’t ask you to try.” He flickered a brief smile. “Not because I don’t trust you, but it’s more unfair pressure, bla bla bla. There’s probably a whole bunch of other stuff in my lower hemisphere you can’t get to, and that’s ignoring all the stuff we can’t see right on the inside. I was hoping I’d be able to see my batteries but I guess they’re further in than I was expecting.” He paused and added, sheepishly; “Although. I… don’t actually know what they look like.”

“What, were you hoping for a little bundle of rechargeable AAs that we could just swap out?”

He gave her a halfhearted glare and she put her hands up, causing him another little shudder as his secondary vision swooped off in another weird direction. The cable off the webcam popped free and she guessed that meant he was done – or tired of her not holding it still enough.

“Okay. Let’s see if we can get your skull back on squarely.” Laine exhaled a very long shaky breath, cracked her knuckles, and picked up his cowling. “No pressure, right?”

“You can guesstimate it a little bit. I can line it up properly when I can see what tolerance you’re giving me.”

“I’m sorry but did you just tell me to guesstimate how to put your head back together?” She muttered a curse under her breath, but tried to line the ends of his headband up with his open shutters. “You are seriously a nightmare.”

She wasn’t sure how he could even see what he was doing, but after a second Polly spoke; “Okay that’s good. Let it down slowly and I’ll nudge it so it’s perfect…”

As soon as he gave the signal, she let go of it, and watched as it twitched subtly left and right, lining up, then clonked abruptly down as a series of little switches fired and pulled it snug.

He gave her one of those beaming smiles. “See? I said it would be fine.”

“You did. More by luck than good judgement, in my opinion.” She put out a hand to pat his head, before remembering his aversity to being touched. “Well, I guess it proves one thing. We definitely have to get you home.”

Surprisingly, he nudged into her fingers. “Thanks. I know it probably feels like we didn’t figure much out but I could never have done that without help. I won’t ask you to do that again.”

She smiled and let her palm linger on his cheek

“At least give me a bit of warning next time? 8 o’clock on a Friday morning is not my favourite time to be performing brain surgery on my housemates.”

“You… have a favourite time…?” Polly ventured, hesitantly; Laine arched an eyebrow at him and he glanced away. “…It was a joke. Okay, I get it.”