Page 88 of Monsters in Love: Lost in the Stars

Cy

My program was sluggish to boot up, the energy conduits so bloated with solar power it overclocked the systems. It happened occasionally, we weren’t designed for these long periods of standby, and glitches were inevitable as we adjusted. Even before my visuals blinked on, my internal register automatically clocked the passive, distant beam of shiptime, adjusting the unit’s tasks accordingly. Thresher and Harv-E had woken several times since my last boot up, according to the register, a fact that affected my artificial intelligence core in an odd way. A query to the database showed the set of artificial biochemicals in this reaction as something called ‘melancholy,’ a new result for me to examine.

A scan of the farm’s various centers and processes determined that nothing was incorrect or damaged, providing an unsatisfying result to my search query. Had I become faulty in standby mode? Why had I booted up? My visuals blinked on, murky until I opened and lowered the closures over the twin cameras in my head to dislodge the grime. I would need maintenance this cycle, always a labor-intensive but ultimately rewarding task to complete. Perhaps Thresher or Harv-E would assist me.

User Lawrence had been a very different operator, which meant the machines he built and programmed for his dome–myself and my fellow unit droids–were different as well. So different, in fact, that we ceased to have visitors to the farm long before the mass human exodus from the planet. The entry posts on the planet’s communication network, which User Lawrence had given us access to against strict genship orders, called us things like “unnervingly lifelike,” and “borderline blasphemy.” User Lawrence informed us, directly and angrily, that these entries were wrong, and we were wonderful creations that deserved both dignity and intelligence. Once, when he had consumed more than the recommended safe amount of a fermented grain liquid, he had wrapped an arm over my chassis’ shoulders and told me I was like a son to him. He had always called me Cy, never my full designation, a curious deviance from the utilitarian way most operators referred to their droids.

I was a CY-D3R unit, modified with a host of upgrades, illicit techniques, and illegal programs User Lawrence called “hacks.” When I was first brought to the planet, before I was even booted up, I’d been fitted with realistic bioskin and millions of small electrodes beneath it, made to resemble human nerve endings. My chassis had been enhanced with human-like limbs and shaping, with a heavy focus on aesthetics over efficient function. While Thresher and Harv-E had been similarly modified, my outward chassis alterations were the most extensive of the three of us.

These changes did not seem to serve as a benefit to my work, an observation I made early on to User Lawrence. He’d laughed and explained that to work a farm, one had to “know a farm,” and that apparently meant smelling the air, feeling the dirt, and enjoying the warmth of sun on one’s skin. I did not understand this, precisely, but User Lawrence was my operator and would receive no benefit from lying to the droids he depended on. I recorded his explanation and shared it to the others during our next power convergence.

A green light glowed in slow pulses under a thick layer of dust in the far corner of the room, drawing my attention. Thresher and Harv-E hadn’t cleaned my standby room while I’d been offline, and the elements had an unfortunate way of working their way in, despite the dome’s design. One of the room’s energy conduits had burned out, according to the farm’s systems, but the one beside the indicator still carried adequate power to run the small light. The glowing green signal had been dormant for so long I had to sift through several files to determine its use.

Approaching User.

I opened and closed my visual shutters a few times to ensure I wasn’t malfunctioning, taking a few stiff steps over to the operation panel. I carefully swept a silicone-covered thumb over the dust layer, the green light brightening and filling my standby room in glowing shadows. Placing my palm on the conduit panel, I sent a hard query to Thresher and Harv-E, letting them know I was off standby and that, somehow, a User was coming to the farm.

T Welcome back, CY. Harv-E and I have missed you. Did you have a good sleep?

While I’d had the most physical modifications out of our unit, User Lawrence had worked diligently at Thresher’s AI core, tinkering with emotional output. My fellow unit-droid was instructed by our operator to speak and express thoughts as a human would, another curious departure from efficiency. While humor had been a very strange and confusing emotional output to grasp initially, I had come to regard Thresher’s unerring human-like behaviors with a certain fondness that curved my silicone lips, an expression that mimicked our operator in times of amusement. They did so now, but a stubborn tug at their anchor-points in my cheek told me I needed lubrication after such a long dormancy.

C I did have a good “sleep,” thank you Thresher, but I am in need of lubrication. Can you bring a vial to my standby chamber when you and Harv-E return? Be efficient, a User is approaching.

A flurry of information flowed through the conduit, data transfer, checks, and confirmations that told me the rest of my unit had been previously unaware a User was approaching. Farm-wide visual feeds, hazy with dust, flicked to life in the conduit.

H It is a woman. I do not want a woman here.

Harv-E’s blunt communication style was familiar, and I realized I had missed his short, direct way of expression in my dormancy. Missing was a strange term that was painstakingly taught to my unit by User Lawrence near his end. He missed a woman back on the Genship, an Anabelle he spoke about with soft fondness in his failing voice. There were several holo-images in the farm’s database of her that he opened those last nights, when he drank the last of grain liquid. He laid down to sleep on that final night and simply failed to wake the following morning. The unit and I laid him to rest in the center of the orchard, as he’d requested of us when we were first brought online.

Harv-E stubbornly believed that the images of this woman, the very idea of this Anabelle, was what ended User Lawrence’s life and decimated the population of our entire planet. When we consulted the Planet Network for guidance when User Lawrence did not wake, we found the usually-busy system as quiet and still as space itself. As droids, we were unable to access the PN to leave the dome or send messages of our own out to the Genship. My unit had simply buried User Lawrence, periodically checked the silent PN for activity, and maintained the farm as originally directed, in the absence of any other Operator orders.

Harv-E’s stubborn belief that Anabelle had somehow ruined both our User and his planet as a simple holographic image simply wasn’t logical. The holographic image wasn’t a program that could have concealed a digital virus, nor was it a physical form that could inflict harm or carry biological viruses. Harv-E, however, was immovable in what the remains of the PN called a “superstition.” These uniquely human beliefs were devoid of logic, but had been practiced and discussed with a religious fervency by the PN network users before they’d vanished.

C User Lawrence would not have requested this reaction to a woman, Harv-E. He demanded respect when discussing Anabelle, so we will carry that respect to this User. Will you comply?

H The woman is nearly at the front portal, Cy.

The observation wasn’t an agreement, but Harv-E was often evasive when our coding diverged, this current operational loop being no exception. I frowned, realizing that I would be greeting the woman–perhaps our new User–in a poorly-maintained state. Hopefully she would accept my explanation and logs.

When User Lawrence had died and the solar power inexplicably dimmed, my unit had agreed to limit my operational time in order to maximize the farm’s efficiency, as I was created first and foremost to assist humans, not the farm. It was potentially not what User Lawrence would have wanted, but lacking clear direction and facing energy concerns, my unit determined our course of action as one. Though there were brief periods where the three of us remained operational at the same time, I typically remained in standby, minimizing my power usage to ensure Harv-E and Thresher would not need to limit their own.

Another glance at the video feeds helped reorient me as the rest of my systems came online This was the purpose I was made for: ensuring the comfort of a User, as well as interpreting and communicating their needs to the rest of the unit. Distinct from Thresher’s brute mechanical strength and Harv-E’s analytical agriculture plotting, my build and programming were made for more human pursuits, even prior to User Lawrence’s modifications.

Small servos clicked and whirred at my joints as I moved into the center of the small room, my vocal processors emitting a soft grunt here and there as I flexed my limbs experimentally. The feed showed the woman was only a few minutes from the farm’s front portal, so I would need to be efficient if I intended to be presentable.

My standby chamber’s door hissed softly, the oval of metal sliding away to reveal Thresher. My fellow unit droid splayed jointed fingers out in a wave of greeting, his other hand curled around a small canister of lubricant he held aloft. His voice, eternally upbeat and cheerful, broke the quiet murmur of machinery all around me. “Hello, Cy! Do you need assistance?”

I nodded, echoing the body language our former Operator had insisted we use. User Lawrence had been determined to see my unit behave and move as humans did, an order we readily complied with but one that had made him an outcast among the other Terraformers. The visual-port lights of Thresher’s face screen narrowed and slanted up, pleased to be of service, even to a fellow droid.

Thresher, despite being a foot taller and broader than Harv-E and I, had protocol software that rivaled my own for User service. User Lawrence had acquired the three of us as defect droids, slated for recycling, and Thresher had ended up in the scrapyard for his mismatched programming. Still excellent at the physical labor his frame was designed for, Thresher preferred to assist Users, particularly once User Lawrence had modified his AI core to enhance and validate the mismatch. It was unsurprising that my fellow unit droid seemed anxious to meet this approaching woman: she represented an opportunity for him to perform the duties he was programmed for, rather than those he’d been physically built to provide.

Harv-E ambled into the room behind Thresher, his gait a mirror image of User Lawrence’s, just before those final days. His slower, un-droid-like pace was an artifact, a physical homage to the departed Operator that had saved us all and brought us here. Harv-E’s face-screen was, predictably, a blank, glossy black, his articulated arms folded across the curved silver bow of his chest. Peeks of bright, glowing green showed where his joints were fitted, running up the sides of his thick neck-stem in slow pulses. My own blue glow and Thresher’s orange were part of our original build, but Harv-E’s green was one of User Lawrence’s many custom additions.

“I still think we should turn her away, or conceal ourselves somewhere and power down.” Harv-E’s tone modulation perpetually fluctuated between annoyed and dismissive, a choice he’d made for himself long ago. If Thresher and I enjoyed immersing ourselves in mimicking humanity, our third unit droid was just as eager to embody the opposite: he was, as User Lawrence had once put it, as prickly as the roses he raised .

I frowned at him as Thresher carefully dripped lubricant onto one of my offered elbow joints, followed by the other. “No. It isn’t what User Lawrence would have wanted, and you know that. I ask again, will you comply? Our unit will appear defective if we are misaligned.”

Harv-E pushed air out of his facial port dramatically, an approximation of a human sigh, a glittering flash of lights cascading down his otherwise-blank face plate: it was his way of displaying irritation. “ Yes , I will comply, Cy. “

There was a soft squeak of reluctant silicone as Thresher kneeled down to lubricate my hips, and I held my own hand out wordlessly for the canister. Trading positions to lubricate my unit droid’s stubborn knee joint in return, I opened my visual shutters fully and looked to Harv-E, modulating my tone for importance. “Please. For the sake of the farm’s efficiency. A new Operator would help immensely with guiding our purpose and decisions beyond maintenance.”

“And maybe I could help her, too.” Thresher spoke up so quietly it barely registered, his face-plate angled away from both of us. Harv-E’s shoulder-servos released softly, his own face plate turning pensively towards the ground. Thresher had been very excited about the prospect of Annabel’s arrival, back before the planet’s exodus and our Operator’s death. He’d studied the PN diligently for maintaining female Operators, and even a few very old, banned databases that User Lawrence had smuggled in when he first settled here. Oddly enough, Thresher became as evasive as Harv-E when I queried him about their contents, and eventually I’d let the matter drop.

Harv-E placed an apologetic hand up on Thresher’s shoulder, patting it with a few soft clunks. In his final hours, User Lawrence had stressed to both Harv-E and I that we should “watch over” our “little brother” Thresher. I’d initially assumed our Operator’s declining health was fogging his mind, but Harv-E had eventually determined it was a term of affection, rather than logic. Thresher, despite his decidedly larger size, was the most recently-manufactured droid in our unit, thus the largest of us was considered a “little” brother. Humans were a curious species indeed.

I flexed my arm and found the range satisfactory, nodding to Thresher as I opened a small wooden dresser-drawer to retrieve clothing. User Lawrence had always insisted we dress as humans in the rare event we had another human at the farm. Those were almost always simple deliveries or pickups once or twice a year, but image had been important to our Operator. He had wanted the rest of the planet’s inhabitants to see us as human, even though we clearly were not. It became yet another command that we carried beyond his voice’s ability, a task I viewed with an emotion the database named nostalgia .

The green light glowed again, this time blinking rapidly as my unit and I glanced over at the panel.

It was time.