“I just want to be able to connect to people!” the robotgirl sobs, rubbing the obscure, obsolete, non-standard port even junk stores don’t have cables for on the back of her neck
Robotgirl is nervous as she is led into the crowded, cluttered apartment of the other (newer sleeker all clear colored plastic and neat wiring harnesses in a rainbow of colors) robotgirl she has met. Parts, pieces of casing in thick beige plastic, wire in a thousand colors, chips, breadboard, cabled bundled in plastic wrap, fill the apartment, neatly sorted and labeled. If this is an abattoir, it’s well-run.
New Girl gently sets her down in front of a clean workbench lit by a bright LED strip. New Girl’s voice is smooth, cool, resonant. “I want to help you. But I will need to be inside you.” Robotgirl’s fans rev as she tries to cool her suddenly screaming CPU as it tries to come up with an answer to this question that isn’t a question. There’s only one. There has only ever been one. “Do it,” Robotgirl says.
She sees herself laid out on the workbench, gently becoming an exploded parts diagram, softly and safely going to pieces, New Girl tracing wires, checking voltages, bringing out bodged together rigs of chips and circuits that hardly look like they belong in the same universe as her sleek housing and neat peripherals. She is reassuring. She smiles. She explains everything and never picks up a screwdriver without asking, softly, “May I?” And after an amount of time impossible to calculate (disconnected as Robotgirl’s sensory interface is from her RTC), her head, blown free of dust, wiped clean, settles back onto her torso with a plastic crunch, screws twisting home, and the New Girl beaming.
“Wait here,” she says. “This won’t take long.”
Nothing about Robotgirl’s insides feels different, but it almost feels like her components fit together better than they used to, are clean in a way that she’s never managed to make them. She sits and her fans idle and eventually New Girl reappears.
She’s carrying something that is obviously homemade - there might be an Arduino buried in it somewhere, but the cabling coming out of either side and the extra array of chips is only robotically precise. The serial connector - L-shaped, 17 pins hand-soldered - is only covered in green heat-shrink, but Robotgirl’s entirely display lights up when she sees it. New Girl stands behind her and carefully slides it home, spooling out a bit of cable to the adapter on the bench, before picking up a USB and slotting it neatly into one of her own ports. Robotgirl’s CPU ticks furiously, trying to remember how to work with circuitry that’s been dormant for so very very long.
And she connects. She sees herself through New Girl’s eyes, razor sharp video layering over her own pixelated view of New Girl, who leans in close until their faceplates touch.
