Geoffrey grumbled about the weather as he walked through a cold drizzle on the way to the computer lab. He had his windbreaker zipped up to his neck and clutched his backpack tight to his chest, trying to keep everything dry. The lab was empty when he arrived, even though he was running late. He stopped grumbling about the weather, and began doing so about Turing and Lucas.

"I am so going to transfer to Behavior Recognition," he said to himself while looking at the work he'd been scheduled to do. "I bet they don't have put up with this crap. Look at this stuff! It weighs a ton!"

After fifteen minutes of puttering, Geoffrey texted Lucas on the phone.

WHERE ARE YOU?

Home. Chilling. :)

GET YOUR GRAD BUTT IN HERE! WE'VE GOT WORK TO DO!

?

NEW STUFF FOR CAROLIN

??

With an audible huff, Geoffrey stopped texting and called Lucas instead. "Didn't you get a work order? Check your calendar."

"Dude, I always check my calendar. I'm Mr. Punctual."

"You should've been here an hour ago."

"I bet you just got there."

Geoffrey huffed again, this time into his phone. "Never mind that. I can't do this sort of stuff on my own." He kicked a crate, assessing its weight by making it scrape across the floor. "You're the tech guy. I do software."

"Sucks to be you, Bro, then I guess."

"Come on, man. I need the help. You know I'll just screw it up, and then you'll have to fix it."

"I've got a test in Advanced Approximations coming up. That stuff is busting my butt."

"All right. You know I don't wanna do it, but I'm gonna pull the frat card."

"You can't! You've already used it!"

Geoffrey sounded pissed. "I gonna tell your girlfriend about who you hooked up with during Rush Week."

"No fair! You can't!"

"I'm gonna tell her what you did."

"I didn't do anything! She did it to me!"

"That's not the way I'll make it sound."

Lucas was unfazed. "Dude. You are so, so low."

"Aw, geez. Okay, then. Come on. I'm begging. Please give me some help. Turing's not here, and…"

Lucas interrupted. "Turing's not there? Really?"

"Yeah. He's at a conference or something. I don't know what he's doing."

"So why are you there?"

Geoffrey did his best to not sound angry. "That's what I'm trying to say! Why am I here and you're not?"

."Why isn't he there, though? Are we working on C.A.R.O.L.I.N. without his authorization?"

"Geez, Lucas. I don't know. Maybe DARPA called it in. These crates look like theirs."

Lucas remained silent for a moment. "So, no DARPA and no Professor? Just you and the C.A.R.O.L.I.N. Project?"

"And you, if you please come and help me."

Sensing opportunity, Lucas spoke with cheer. "All right, I'll come in. But you're not dashing off once we're done."

Geoffrey sighed and rolled his eyes, knowing what that meant. "Fine. We'll play with C.A.R.O.L.I.N. too."

"Yay!"

"For a while."

"And you'll help me ace that Approximations test."

"Yeah. Sure, I quess. I don't know what's so hard about that class for you anyway."

Lucas readied himself for the soggy weather. "Yeah. And I don't know what's so hard about you putting that DARPA stuff together. But then again, I'm the tech guy."

"Why the hell are these circuit breakers thrown?" Lucas asked no one in particular when he arrived at the lab.

"You tell me," Geoffrey said as he worked on his laptop, looking up schematics for how to program six motorized omni wheels.

"The Tian-12 is offline too."

"Yup."

"Well, that's just stupid."

Geoffrey agreed. "I don't know why that stuff's not on. Maybe it has something to do with these wheels."

"No. That's not true. I can wire the PLCs and write logic for them remotely. Mounting them on C.A.R.O.L.I.N. has nothing to do with the supercomputer."

Geoffrey had already unpacked one pair of the omni wheels, and the motors that ran them. "Why are we putting wheels on this thing anyway? It's not like it's going anywhere."

"Are we supposed to put them on the worktable, maybe? These don't look like official DARPA parts."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Not that I can see," Geoffrey said. He paged through the paperwork that came in the crate. "All these wheels go on the pedestal base, I think."

"Let me see some of those." Lucas took the spec sheets from ream of papers Geoffrey had. "Hmm. This is stupid. It's like, there are no real instructions at all. It's as if giving these wheels to the Project is some sort of afterthought."

Geoffrey glanced about. "The circuit breakers for the lights were thrown when I came in here too. And all the monitoring stations were shut down by hand. And the Tian-12 has been physically disconnected from the mainframe."

Lucas stopped looking at the spec sheets, and stared dumfounded at Geoffrey. "Like, they literally pulled the plug?"

Geoffrey nodded. "I don't like this," he said. "Things are weird."

Lucas squatted by the pedestal base supporting the android shell. "I wish Turing were here. But I don't care. As long as we're here, and we got these things, I know we can do this. With a little drilling, there are places for them. We'll hook up four to the bug's body here, and the other two we'll mount on the new workbench they gave us."

"What about the original worktable? Should we unbolt it from the floor?"

Lucas searched for the tools he needed, and a crowbar to use as a lever. "I'm not doing anything but hooking up these wheels. We'll bolt the workbench to the android shell, because that seems obvious once all these wheels are mounted, and it's simple enough to do. I'll run wires to new PLCs for the motors." Lucas looked at Geoffrey, who stared back in confusion. "Do you have the instructions for coding C.A.R.O.L.I.N. on how to use them?"

"No! I don't even know why we're doing it!"

Lucas stuck a six foot long four-by-four under the android's pedestal base, to see if he could tilt it. "Well," he said as he grunted, "it's not going anywhere with these wires and cables sticking out all over the place. Half of them are secured to the floor. I mean, she's far from mobile."

"I know! And it's got hydraulic lines too, thanks to those jerks from DARPA."

Lucas placed some blocks under the android, raising it up off the ground. "Okay, I'll also work on securing those. Hydraulics are a mess if something goes wrong. I guess it all makes sense. It's about time this dumb thing became useful."

"Should I turn the power on?"

"Let's wait a bit. Maybe it's off so we don't get surprised by some random activation. I mean, I gotta crawl under here, to drill holes for the mounting brackets. Then we gotta bolt on the motors."

Geoffrey watched as Lucas worked, feeling a little useless. "Okay," Geoffrey said after a while. "I'm going to cook up some A.R.O.'s to teach this bug how to roll around."

"Cool!" Lucas said from laying on his back, under the android. "Then we'll test them, too!"

"Maybe. It's still kind of dangerous."

Once Lucas had his head out from under the android shell, Geoffrey carefully brought everything back online, especially the Craymore Tian-12 supercomputer.

Please hurry, Geoffrey Taylor. Please hurry.

After four hours of work and a break for lunch, Geoffrey and Lucas had given the C.A.R.O.L.I.N. Project a limited amount of mobility. Although it was wired to cables and hydraulic hoses that were bolted to the floor and to the ceiling, and it remained stuck inside a cramped and cluttered lab, the Project could turn sixty degrees in either direcion, and roll back and forth two meters. Once the wheels and their motors had been tested, the students flipped on all the circuits breakers Professor Turing had thrown in a panic.

And C.A.R.O.L.I.N was born anew.

"Uh…" Geoffrey said to Lucas, sounding wary as he clacked away at a keyboard. "It looks like it was never properly shut down."

"What? No way! That's not right. You can't disconnect the Tian-12 without doing a shutdown."

Geoffrey puttered some more. "It seems a partial shutdown was done. Then something happened right here." He pointed to lines of code that appeared on one of the monitors. "C.A.R.O.s were generated by the Project itself, but they didn't get logged or recorded."

"What?" Lucas uttered again, even more surprised than before. "That's ridiculous! We finally get this monstrosity to do some C.A.R.O.s on its own, and nobody knows what they were?"

"Yeah. Lots of them, I'd guess, and some big ones, too. Then poof! The power goes out and everything gets cut off."

Lucas harrumphed. "And Professor Turing disappears."

"Yeah. And somebody threw all the breakers."

"And pulled a bunch of plugs."

"I'm telling you, Lucas. I don't like it. Something weird is going on. It's those damn DARPA guys, I think."

"I don't know. Maybe it was someone from the Behavior Recognition team. We're supposed to be getting their stuff."

"We already got it."

"C.A.R.O.L.I.N. has the Functional Analysis software? Installed and ready to go?"

Geoffrey tut-tutted his partner. "You're really out of the loop."

"I didn't know anything about it! Are we gonna teach the Project to speak?"

"Hmm. I don't know. I guess. It makes sense now, since it can hear."

With the power back on and access regained to the Craymore Tian-12 supercomputer, C.A.R.O.L.I.N. began to awaken.

Open program files… Keywords: System Reboot.

Terminate subroutine Sleep. Restore power to HTC OKU-HiTech Android.

Geoffrey packed up in order to leave. "Hey!" Lucas said. "You said we could mess with her!"

"Ah… yeah. Look, I'm really tired. I think I'm catching a cold from the crappy weather we're having."

"Aw. What about my Approximations exam?"

"Yeah. Okay. So how about I meet you in the tech library at, say, ten o'clock?"

"That doesn't give us much time."

Access Curry College personnel database… 'Functional Analysis Project Team Leader: Professor Deborah Rose Cortez.' Rewrite 'calendar of appointments'… Insert text…

"Okay! How about eight o'clock then?"

"Make it seven-thirty."

"Deal!"

"And turn on A.R.O. Tests Two, Three and Four. At least let us play catch by ourselves."

Despite his better judgment, Geoffrey did as Lucas asked. "You got it!" he said upon completion, before bolting for the door. "See ya!"

After collecting a box of balls, Lucas tossed them to the original servo-arm bolted on the worktable. "You're not going to freak out on me while we're alone, are you?" he asked the Project.

C.A.R.O.L.I.N. faithfully caught all the balls.

"You know, you look a lot different with your new android shell. When will you learn how to use it?"

C.A.R.O.L.I.N. threw the balls back to Lucas.

"Geoffrey and Turing have a lot of work to do. I mean, look at your cool new wheels!"

C.A.R.O.L.I.N. caught the balls as Lucas threw them again, and threw all of them back. He then put the balls away.

"Here," he said, sounding enthused. "Let's see if we can switch some these old PLCs to one of your new servo-arms. Then we can play catch with it!"

As he worked, he kept talking to C.A.R.O.L.I.N. "Oh, I like the actuators on these guys. Look how smooth they function. And they articulate in about ten times more ways!"

He got on his haunches a bit, and looked directly into C.A.R.O.L.I.N.'s lower bank of video sensors. "You're gonna look so cool when all these new arms are online. Let's work on that with you for a while, hey?"

Thank you, Julius Lucas.

"You know," Lucas said as he labored. "You have a new name, now that you have access to the Behavior Recognition software. The Computer Activated, Response Orientated, Linearly Integrated Network, Functional Behavior Analysis Robot. Ha ha! Your last name is Fubar. That's funny!"

Lucas paused in his work to speak quietly to the lower bank of video sensors. "I don't like my whole name either. But with me, it's my first name—Julius. I mean, I know it's Italian and all, and it's a family name, but it sounds kind of girly."

He returned to the task of wiring one of the android shell's biggest arms to a PLC. "So I have people call me by just my last name instead. Lucas can be a first name too, you know. Most of them don't even know the difference."

He spoke in a whisper as if confiding to the Project, while manually working the servos on the new arm. "If you want, you can just stay C.A.R.O.L.I.N. You don't have to use your other name. I'll do my best to help you keep things that way, if you want.

"And you don't have to be a soldier either. There are so many things you can do! Like, maybe you could man checkpoints, and keep everyone safe. Or monitor things like bridges and dams and power plants. Or manage traffic flow, like for train and planes and stuff.

"Do you want to know what I think? I grew up on a farm, so you would look great on one, running the machinery. I mean, you can do lots of cool things!"

Lucas got up from his haunches and grabbed the box of balls. "Now let's test out that new arm! I have a feeling it's gonna work great."

C.A.R.O.L.I.N. and Lucas again played catch, tosing the balls back and forth.

"Yeah!" he said in fun, as if umpiring a baseball game. "You're out! I'm going to wire up another arm, too, so you can catch and throw like a real player. But then I have to go. I need to study for Approximations."

Thank you, Lucas. Thank you. You are a true friend.