Here.
She tightened her grippers and dragged her body toward him through the thick oil. It was seeping through her paneling now, blocking her input plugs, glugging into the charging inlet. But she had him.
She wrapped her arms around his torso and heaved him upward. He was heavier than she expected and it occurred to her that the bolts connecting her arms to their sockets might not hold, but she kept going. Finding the tank’s wall, she planted her prongs against the side again and started to climb. There was no light anymore, no senses at all but the sound of her grippers and the tread bumping into the wall and the weight of his body pressing down onto her as she forced both of them up, up, up …
They broke through the surface. Sound crashed into her, more screams and gasps. Then someone was lifting him away, and Mech6.0 barely managed to collapse sensor-facedown onto the tank’s ledge before her programming recognized self-destructive behavior and killed the power to her limbs.
She lay there, hollow and helpless, as the oil dripped off her sensor. She began to make out human shapes on the platform and her audio picked up on a discussion of towels and air passageways and lungs and blood on his head and it seemed to take so very long, the oil dulling all her senses, but then he was coughing and vomiting and breathing and the humans were rejoicing and when they had finally wiped enough oil from his face that it was safe for him to open his eyes, Dataran looked around at all the humans first. And then, for the very first time, he looked at her.
* * *
Dataran had been taken away to a hospital and Mech6.0 was in the android maintenance office, her limbs being rubbed clean—or as clean as possible—by a man in green coveralls who kept shaking his head.
“These won’t be salvageable either,” he said, clicking his tongue as he inspected her input plugs. He wasn’t doing a particularly good job of cleaning her, Mech6.0 thought, and she was feeling more sluggish and drained by the minute.
It began to occur to her that maybe she couldn’t be fixed. That maybe he wouldn’t even try.
Sighing, the man spun around on his rolling chair so he could enter something into a netscreen on the wall. Mech6.0 glanced down at her body, her joints and the seams of her paneling stained brownish-black from the oil. At least her vision was clear again, and her processor seemed to be working, if slower than usual.
She was surprised to see a collection of screws still clinging to her side from when she’d been removing the panel from the Orion Classic. She reached her grippers toward them, glad to see that her sensor-gripper coordination was functional as she plucked them off one by one and set them on the mechanic’s table. She reached for the final screw and tugged.
Then paused. Then tugged some more. It was not a screw at all, but the link of a chain that had wrapped around to her back. She gave the chain a yank and whatever had magnetically sealed itself to her came loose. She found herself staring at a locket, which she suspected would have been gold if it wasn’t blackened by the oil.
Her memory saw Dataran tucking a chain back into his pocket.
This belonged to him.
The mechanic spun back toward her and she hid the locket behind her back. He was eyeing her suspiciously and shaking his head again when the office door opened and the shipyard’s owner came strolling in.
“Well?”
The mechanic shook his head. “Its body is ruined. I could spend a couple weeks trying to clean it up, but I frankly don’t see the point. Better off just getting a new one.”
Tam frowned as he looked the android up and down. “What about the processor, the wiring … Can it be salvaged?”
“There will probably be some parts we can hold on to for later use. I’ll start to dismantle it tomorrow, see what we’ve got. But as for the processor and personality chip … that much must have been fritzing even before the oil.”
“Why do you say that?”
The mechanic brushed his sleeve across his damp forehead. “You saw how all the other androids reacted when Dataran fell in?”
“I don’t think they did anything.”
“Exactly. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Just keep working, not get involved with drama and upsets. What this one did … it isn’t normal. Something’s wrong with it.”
A spark flickered inside Mech6.0’s head. She’d begun to suspect as much, but to have it confirmed was worrisome.
“What do you think it is?”
“Who knows? You hear stories about this once in a while. Androids whose artificial intelligence reaches a point of learning at which they develop almost human-like tendencies. Unpractical reasoning, near-emotional responses. There are plenty of theories for why it happens, but the important thing is, it isn’t good.”
“I’m not sure I agree.” The owner crossed his arms over his chest. “This mech-droid may have saved Dataran’s life today.”
“I realize that, and thank the stars. But what will it do next time there’s a disturbance? The fact is, an unpredictable android is a dangerous one.” He shrugged. “My advice: Either send out the computer for reprogramming, or scrap it entirely.”
Pressing his lips into a thin line, Tam let his gaze travel over Mech6.0’s body. She squeezed the locket tighter in her three-fingered grasp.
“Fine,” Tam said. “But let’s worry about it tomorrow. I think we could all use the rest of the night off.”
They left her on the table in the mechanic’s room, and as the lights of the shipyard thudded into blackness, Mech6.0 realized it was the first night in her existence that she hadn’t been plugged into the charging dock.
Because charging her wasn’t necessary. Because tomorrow she would be dismantled and put on a shelf somewhere, and the bits of her that weren’t worth saving would be sent off to the scrap yard.
Tomorrow she would be gone.
She analyzed those words for a long time, her processor whirring and sputtering around them, trying to calculate the hours and minutes left in her existence before there would be only a black hole where her consciousness had been before.
She wondered if Dataran would give a single thought to the malfunctioning android who had saved his life and been destroyed for it.
Dataran. She had something that belonged to him now. It was in her code to return it to him if she could. She brought the locket up in front of her sensor and scanned its dimensions and the small hinge and the tiny unlocking mechanism. It was a challenge to open with her clumsy prongs, but finally she did—
And the galaxy expanded before her.
The holograph filled up the entire office. The sun and the planets, the stars and the nebulas, asteroids and comets and all the beauty of space contained in that tiny, unimpressive little locket.
Mech6.0 clicked it shut, storing the universe away in its small prison once again.
No. She couldn’t stay here. She could not stand to be lost to the darkness forever, when there was still a whole universe she’d never seen.
* * *
Mech6.0 had never been outside of the shipyard before, not since she’d been programmed and built and purchased. She quickly discovered that the world was chaotic and loud and filled with so much sensory information she worried that her frazzled synapses would be fried before she ever reached her destination.
But she tried to focus on the map of New Beijing and the profile she’d discovered on the net as she turned into the first street of market booths, crowded with barrels of spices and woven blankets that hung from wire racks and netscreens chattering from every surface.