As he waits he fiddles with the Rubik’s Cube he’s been stuck on for twenty years. Maybe solving it will open up the secrets to the universe and life itself. “Hey sweetie,” he leans forward as M412 comes back from her scheduled run of tests. “Everything check out okay?”
“Yes. All functions are operating at normal capacity.”
“Good, good.” Of course if anything had gone wrong he’d be one of the first to know. He considers throwing her the Rubik’s to time how quickly she can solve it ( though that would mean losing two decades of progress ) when she speaks again.
“When will Doctor Grasso be replaced?”
He does not know what to say to this. The doctor’s death had come as a shock. Not even fifty and lost to a heart attack. The service had been held only the day before. “Er...sweetheart?” M412 comes closer when he beckons, and he places a hand on her shoulder. “You were told that Doctor Grasso died, right?”
“You...you know what death means?” She knows. She has no option not to. Keeping people alive is her job.
“Noun. Definition: the end of life for a person or organism.”
“Yes. Well...when someone dies the people around them feel---feel very sad.” His throat closes on his speech just as it did the eulogy. A few deep breaths and he resumes. “So it-- it may be some-- some time before Doctor Grasso---before we hire someone else.”
“Work will be completed with greater efficiency when Doctor Grasso is replaced.”
He feels his jaw gaping like a fish’s. The coding he’s created has been run through test after test to ensure M412 is capable of helping humans to survive. They haven’t even considered what happens when one doesn’t. He swallows. “Sweetheart, what’s being sad?”
“Adjective. Definition: the presence of feelings of unhappiness.”
“You...you liked Doctor Grasso, didn’t you?”
“Doctor Grasso was a presence on which much data had been gathered.”
“And you---you want him replaced to improve the efficiency of our research?”
“Do you... Do you miss him?”
For the first time since he touched her she moves. Head titling to the side as he hears the small whirrs of machinery he is too nostalgic for to let go of even when her processors don’t have anything to whir. It tells him her answer before she does.
The project overseer denies his wish to try coding emotions for her. It is more disappointing than surprising. How a technophobic curmudgeon like that got put in charge of M412 is the great mystery of the age. So he sulks over a coffee as he plugs her in for an upgrade. Not one on simulating base emotions. It’s an update for her hand-eye coordination.
𝙿𝚁𝙾𝙱𝙻𝙴𝙼: 𝙷𝚞𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚟𝚒𝚟𝚊𝚕 𝚛𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚕𝚊𝚌𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐
𝙸𝙽𝙵𝙴𝚁𝙴𝙽𝙲𝙴: 𝚃𝚑𝚘𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑 𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚘𝚏 𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜 𝚗𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚎𝚍
“That one took a while.” He says it for his own benefit of filling the silence. It isn’t the first time a simple upgrade lasts longer than expected. When M412 was first given a body it took them five tries to get her to stand upright. All they’d really done in the end was to input her height and weight ratios and she’d used them to create a center of balance and begin walking. “Everything check out okay?”
Eyes rove up and down her arms and legs, limbs turn over and she watches the way her fingers clench and unclench. She’s fidgeting. His perfect little creation that holds still as as an art piece aside from the movement of her mouth when speaking.
Oh, don’t tell him he’s screwed up her foreign object identifiers again.
“Sorry, baby. Let daddy open this up and we’ll see what he did wrong.”
There’s the sound of metal landing on the floor and he looks away from the terminal to see as she reaches up to pull at his lab coat’s sleeve.
“This one has a request!”
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