LOCATION: PETROV STATION
SYSTEM: GLIESE 667
ESTABLISHED: 2289 A.D.
The aging recycler smiled and stood from his chair to greet his newest customer. “Viktor! It’s been far too long. I don’t see Svetlana around. Has she finally wised up and found a real man?”
The captain of the Amophor rolled his eyes and clasped the man on the back. “She hasn’t come to her senses yet, ya old coot.”
They both laughed at that before the man motioned for them to sit.
“Have you brought me something interesting? I see your engineer, Mateo, hiding out in the corridor like a kid caught with his hand in a cookie jar.”
Viktor rubbed the back of his neck, earning a raised bushy eyebrow from the old man. “It might be more trouble than it’s worth,” Viktor finally relented under the man’s stare.
Yuri leaned back in his chair, the spring squeaking audibly as he did so. He needed time to digest what the captain had told him. Trouble could mean many things. He tried to steer clear of illicit goods, but there was only so much you could do to stay on the straight and narrow on the fringe. Most people didn’t come to Petrov Station because they wanted to and not everything that came through his shop had been acquired legally.
Then again, Viktor had never brought him anything other than salvaged scrap before. He decided to roll the dice on this one. “Let me be the judge of that.”
Viktor nodded and whistled for his engineer to come in.
The thing following behind the engineer made Yuri’s eyes go wide. “By the stars, what is that thing!”
The seven-foot-tall robot had to duck to fit through the bulkhead that separated his salvage yard from the corridor that ran along the outside of the station.
Mateo stopped a few feet from the desk and without any signal, the robot stopped behind him. Yuri grunted as he stood from his seat and walked around the desk to look at the strange machine. He circled it, picking up the strangely flexible arms and letting them fall back into place. Then he ran his hands along the molten scar that bisected the front of the torso from the upper right shoulder past the left hip. He had seen enough scrap in his life to identify damage caused by a weapon. If he had to guess, either a Gauss turret or a railgun. Judging by the damage, not some dinky little handheld but a true blue ship weapon. But that wasn’t what surprised him.
What surprised him was the fact that the robot hadn’t been obliterated by a glancing blow from either weapon. Normally only ship armor was capable of withstanding something like a direct hit from a ship cannon. Before heading back to his seat, Yuri flicked the crudely attached holo projector on the robot.
“What’s with the holo?”
Mateo smiled and punched in a code on the device glued into the damaged portion of the robot. Soon a cartoon face sputtered into being a few inches over the robot's torso. “I figured since it didn’t have a head, we could at least give it a face to make it less… imposing.”
Yuri only quirked an eyebrow at that. “I can’t say it helps much. Where did you even find something like this?”
The two hesitated and Yuri waved them off. “Never mind, I don’t want to know. Just tell me, is it stolen?”
Viktor bristled at the implication, telling Yuri all he needed to know. “So that’s a no. I’m just trying to see what kind of trouble this thing will bring me if I buy it off ya.”
“So you want it?” Viktor asked expectantly.
“Maybe,” he responded, thinking out loud. “It looks military. Although I’ve never seen a military robot like it in all my years. Even during my time with the Coalition. Could belong to an STO member, but they didn’t really go in for automation.” He would know. The Coalition fought for many years against the Sol Treaty Organization.
A rogue faction maybe? Hard to say. “What is it capable of?”
“It can fix pretty much anything.”
“Really?” Yuri asked skeptically, “Show me.” Yuri reached into a desk drawer and rifled around until he found what he was looking for. The box he pulled out was rather banged up on the outside, but he opened it and quickly inspected the contents within. He had never quite been able to get the delicate device to work correctly. He turned it around and showed it to Viktor.
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The man looked at the box, then back at Yuri with surprise. “A music box?”
Yuri only smiled. “I ain’t trusting that hunk of metal on anything serious if it can’t fix something like this.”
Viktor shrugged. “Robot, fix this device.”
The robot bent forward, its agile arms slipping past the men as it picked up the box. That had also been a test by Yuri, he wanted to see how delicate the thing could be. And it appeared quite delicate.
After pulling the box close to itself, it kind of just stood there for a moment, turning the box at different angles.
“How’s it see?” Yuri asked, realizing the robot had no sensors that he could locate.
The men shrugged before Mateo spoke up. “I think it uses some form of echolocation or something. My tests were inconclusive.”
After about a minute, the thing stopped and beeped. Meteo walked over and read the screen on the device. “It states insufficient materials available to make repairs. Can it use your printer?”
“Eh, sure. Why not.”
As the robot walked over to the printer, the old salvager couldn’t help but chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” Viktor asked.
“Oh, nothing. I just find it amusing that a robot is able to program an unknown part into my printer. How did you get it working anyway? I can’t imagine that damage made it easy.”
“That would all be Mateo’s doing. I’ll let him explain.”
“It actually made it quite easy,” the Engineer responded as he walked back over. “It exposed the robot's main control pathways.”
“So you programmed all of these functions into it?” he asked dubiously, starting to get a sinking suspicion.
The two shared a look and Yuri cursed. “Don’t tell me you just reactivated it.”
When the two remained quiet, he swore again. “Is it even safe to have around?”
“It should be fine. We’ve been using it for weeks,” Mateo stated. “All of the commands have to go through the holo, which also functions as the control box.”
Yuri rubbed his temples. An unknown robot with unknown programming.
At least it didn’t look like a combat robot. He would have shown the pair the door with a swift boot to the ass if they had brought something like that onto the station, let alone his salvage yard. There wasn’t much that got you on the STO’s radar faster than black market arms. And having a weapon aboard the station was a good way to get spaced.
He was pulled from his thoughts as a box plunked down on the desk in front of him. He stared at it for a moment before watching the robot return to its location behind Mateo.
Yuri turned the box toward himself and opened the cover. A sweet tune started to play as soon as the cover was opened all the way. He smiled sadly as the tune reminded him of his wife who had passed away years ago. The box had been hers since she was a young child. And even though he hated the blasted thing, he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it.
With his decision made, he tenderly closed the box and stuffed it back in the desk drawer. Then he turned toward Captain Viktor. “I’ll give you a thousand credits for it.”
“You’re joking, right? It's worth at least a hundred times that.”
“To whom?” the wily old man asked. “There’s a reason you brought it to me, instead of taking it further toward the core systems.”
“Come on, at least give me ten thousand for it?” Viktor pleaded, not acknowledging the previous point.
“No way. I’m taking all the risk of having this thing around. What if some black ops team comes around looking for it?”
“I very much doubt that’s gonna happen?”
“Oh? Are you going to tell me where and how you found it then? You know for my peace of mind?” Yuri knew the salvager captain would never give up his locations or contacts. It's how he made his living after all.
“I thought we were friends, Yuri. Fine. How’s five thousand? I won’t go any lower than that. Anything less and I might as well take my chances at a more populated station.”
Yuri smiled. “Alright, five thousand.” The pair shook hands and Mateo handed him a control wand along with a handwritten manual.
After the pair got their money and left his scrapyard, he tossed the book into the trash. As if he would trust some unknown programming. Even though he wasn’t nearly as skilled a programmer as Mateo, he knew enough to reprogram the module himself. This would ensure there wasn’t any latent code in it. He hadn’t survived this long by being foolish.
After flashing the module and erasing the code, he began to program his own. It was simplistic, but he only needed the robot to move heavy things around, it wasn’t like he needed it to perform brain surgery or anything like that.
The work was off and on over the course of a year but old Yuri wasn’t in any hurry. He also didn’t want to put too much time into something if the STO suddenly came asking about it. When nobody showed up and there wasn’t a peep about it on the back channels, he finally put his full effort into finishing the programming.
“Move that over there,” he stated, pointing at a large manifold.
The robot stood for the first time in a year and tottered over to the large hunk of steel. Its movements were quite jerky but it did manage to pick up the manifold and move it where it needed to go.
“Good enough,” he grunted. The robotics code he used had some self-learning built into it so the movements should smooth out over time.
He gave the thing a series of commands to organize his inventory and left it to work. After supervising it for five minutes he nodded in approval. He hated cleaning and sorting the yard. With this robot, he wouldn’t have to worry about that ever again. Now he could simply focus on what he actually enjoyed, fixing things.
***
Alexander didn’t know when it happened or what it was, but one moment he was simply staring at a veil of shifting and shimmering lights. He got the impression that it was important somehow, that it meant something but his mind was having a hard time piecing it together.
He quickly realized that he didn’t know where he was or how he had gotten here. He racked his mind for an answer but came up blank. As he tried to search his memories, he found odd blank spots. He knew who he was, and that he was born on Earth, but little else. There were other memories that floated fuzzily at the edges of his mind. Like he could almost reach out and touch them. When he tried to reach for them, they seemed to fall apart like gossamer.
Fearing the possibility of losing more memories, he stopped trying to pull at the threads that sat tantalizingly just out of his reach. Instead, he stared at the veil of light. There wasn’t much else he could do, he couldn’t feel his body. He couldn’t even turn away from the lights. He thought he should feel more fear about his situation, but his mind was calm, numb almost. He didn’t explore that thought though as one of the lights drew his attention.
He thought he saw an image for a moment.