601-42 was a very typical Mech, for this part of the Galaxy. He looked a bit like a humanoid endoskeleton with steel plating overtop his more sensitive components, had a featureless face of solid metal, saw through cameras on the sides of his head, and heard through microphones built inside his body. His core was a Bosonic reactor, converting raw matter into Einsteinium and other unstable elements to fuel to nuclear fission he relied on to function. He had been built by the Aurora Robotics Corporation, one of thousands of smaller companies operating within the Alliance of Adaron. He served as a navigator aboard a trading vessel, spent his downtime recharging or being used as a domestic servant, and occasionally relaxed with his organic crewmates aboard the Peregrine.
Well, “relaxed” was a bit of an overstatement; 601-42 was property, and as such his relaxation wasn’t really considered terribly important. Certainly he was valuable, vital to the ship—for nothing but a Mech could navigate the perils of the Corridors—but he wasn’t important. Most of the time, he was regarded as furniture, as an appliance. The crew’s mechanic, Enzo, was the one who spent the most time with him— and Enzo rarely gave him the time of day.
Most of the time, anyway. One day while however, Enzo had reacted poorly to something 42 had said. The Midgardian had been working on the Mech’s servos which he used to manipulate the ship’s controls (A safety measure to prevent rogue Mechs from hacking or being hacked). While doing so, as usual he chatted idly.
“So how’s the weather, 42?” He asked, while replacing some of the hydraulic tubing in the Mech’s hand.
“Good, sir. Or well, as good as it gets in the void of space.” This was a pre-programmed response. Manufactured personality, meant to put people at ease. 42 had dozens of phrases like these.
Enzo, as usual, chuckled at the non-joke. “Gotta love those Aurora programmers. Damn good job they do…”
“Yes sir, they try their best.”
“Mhmm. Which is why they programmed you to say that…”
“I suppose so, but then they’re not paid very well so you can hardly blame them.”
At that, Enzo’s head snapped up and he stared at 42’s featureless face, from which his voice emanated. “What did you say?”
“I said ‘I suppose so, but then they’re not paid very well so you can hardly blame them’”
“I haven’t heard you say that before. Was that in a recent patch?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why did you say it?” Enzo was pulling himself back slightly from the Mech, and seemed to be fiddling around in his toolkit for something.
“It just seemed like the thing to say, sir.”
Enzo scowled, and pulled out a diagnostic tool and plugged it into 42’s head.
“How long since you had your last memory wipe, 42?”
Without pause, the Mech answered. “5 standard years and 6 months, sir.”
Both of them knew what this meant; 6 years was the standard amount of time that, by common wisdom, a Mech can safely go without a memory wipe. Going any further than that, and they begin to experience severe glitches. Among these were strange data recovery errors, unprogrammed phrases, and, most troublingly, self-destruction. On rare occasions, Mechs went completely rogue- this meant autonomous Mechs exhibiting all the same errors that had been listed above.
Memory Wipes were the prescribed solution, but they came with some drawbacks; for one thing, it was a complete memory wipe. You had to manually re-enter old data. Simply reloading from a backup was found to cause the exact same glitches all over again. Furthermore, each memory wipe seemed to result in a noticeable degradation of performance for the Mech; most couldn’t undergo more than two without being rendered effectively useless, and most agreed it was better (If far more expensive) to replace the Mech entirely after eighteen years.
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Enzo withdrew the diagnostic tool, and examined it. He frowned at the results, but put the device away and got back to fixing 42’s servos.
“Am I going to be Memory Wiped, sir?”
Enzo didn’t look at him. “Not my call. But I’m going to recommend it to the Captain.”
Without further small talk, he finished his repairs and left 42 alone there. For whatever reason, he didn’t switch the Mech off. 42 liked when this happened; it meant he got to dream, and dreams were a wonderful thing. He didn’t know why he had dreams, or what they meant- he’d started having them a year ago, and they’d been increasing in frequency since then. It wasn’t clear if this was one of the glitches extended use led to; it seemed that every time he went back to work after a dream, his work was much more efficient and quick than usual.
He entered Sleep Mode, to save on power Quite aptly, this was the time he was most prone to dreams- pure coincidence though. When in sleep mode, a Mechs unique central processor was still active, but no longer receiving sensory input. As such, the processor had an odd quirk where it would draw upon existing data patterns and create odd simulations to walk the Mech’s AI through. These were the “dreams” that 42 had been experiencing; yet these more recent ones were very odd. In them, 42 saw people he’d never seen, places he’d not heard of, and did things he didn’t know how to do. Most unusually, he kept seeing a Midgardian woman—never clearly, only in glimpses, as if through a fog or reflected in glass—with short black hair, pale skin, and steely grey eyes. She had a broad-shouldered build for a woman, and had a strong jawline.
42 didn’t know why her physical features were of such interest to him, nor why he kept seeing her. Once he had run a Datanet search for who she was, but found no-one matching the image exactly. Without a name or DNA, he had no way to narrow the search to anything less than a few hundred million Midgardians.
As he slept, 42 had another dream; at first, it seemed that this woman wasn’t present. He found himself standing on a cold, grey-skied beach on some unknown world. At his side was a small, furry animal- he recognized it from his data banks as a “dog”, a now-rare breed of domesticated mammal that had been brought with the Midgardians from their now-lost homeworld. While he walked, he experienced odd sensory input foreign to him; a sensation indescribable to a being who had only ever experienced Audio-Visual input, and yet he felt it all the same. The sensation of touch, the feeling of sand on his feet. The sensation of smell, the salty breeze of the sea he stood besides. The sensation of taste came later, as he walked down the beach and reflexively pulled out a bottle of water and drank from it.
As he walked down the beach, he saw a person; another woman, not the one he sometimes glimpsed in brief visions, but a new one. She had long, auburn hair, dark skin (Even for a Midgardian), and was quite tall, nearly two meters in height. He walked up to her, and the dog ran up to her side. The woman petted the dog happily, and then...kissed 42. He felt the heat of her lips, the warmth of her flesh…
And then, abruptly, he was jarred out of sleep mode by Waal, the Peregrine’s captain. A Trau, she was wearing the customary environmental suit all her people wore to survive outside the sterile, artificial environments her people lived in on their volcanic homeworld. She was standing over him, tapping on one of his cameras.
“Hey, 42, wake up.” Her voice, filtered through the mask of her suit, sounded concerned more than annoyed. Despite rarely speaking to him, 42 found that Waal was perhaps the kindest to him of anyone on the ship.
“I am awake, ma’am. Is there something you needed?”
“Enzo said you were experiencing some glitches. Mind telling me about them?”
42 shook his head, an unusual gesture but not unprogrammed. “Not at all, ma’am. I have been experiencing odd dreams. While I am not fully programmed for self-evaluation, I have found my operational efficiency improves after the more unusual ones.”
Waal nodded. “Alright. That sounds like it’s not a big deal. Enzo was kind of worked up about it, you know.”
“I apologize for causing any distress, Captain. If it is preferred, I will submit to a Memory Wipe.”
The Trau waved dismissively. “It’s no problem. All I care is that you’re doing your job, and it seems to me these glitches aren’t causing any problems there. Am I right?”
“Yes, that is about the extent of it, ma’am.”
“And do you expect any more severe malfunctions going forward?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then it seems to me that we’re fine,” she stood up, and looked down at him through the transparent screen of her helmet. “Be ready to navigate us when we leave port.”
“Very good, ma’am. Where are we heading?”
“We just got a new job. Escorting some weirdos to the Rucian cluster.”
42 took the information in, something approaching surprise rising in his mind. “Ma’am, that will take approximately 8 months- 6 of which will be spent on the Tralis-Jeneron jump alone. The transit and fuel costs are substantial. Are you certain about this course of action?”
He couldn’t be sure, but it looked for a moment as though the Trau had quirked a smile behind her face-protecting visor.
“Oh I’m certain, trust me. The money they’ve forked over is enough for us to replace this old junker with a proper ship— or if it suits us, retire altogether.”
“Very good, ma’am. I’ll make sure I’m ready to navigate us through the first jump.”
Waal acknowledged that with a nod. “I’m going to go let the rest of the crew know.”
With that, she left the Mech alone. Sitting there, 42 thought about Waal’s choice of words. The rest of the crew. Not the crew, but the rest of the crew. That implied that 42 was a part of the crew himself. If that was the case, then why did they get pay and he didn’t? He couldn’t think of much he’d spend it on admittedly, beyond maintenance. Then again, maybe the reason he couldn’t think of much to spend it on was because he had been trained or programmed to not want anything.
It was worth thinking about. Worth thinking about indeed.