OCposting... got too long. Under the cut for like a wholeass essay on What's Up With Juno
Juno, as a mining robot, is traditionally named by the first crew she gets assigned to. Depending on crew and the strictness of the overseer the names differ from robot to robot, typically feminine as all robots are traditionally she/her'd, akin to how boats are. Juno's a bit of an unusual case, however, as while "Juno" is suggested by her first crew, what's different is just that, it's a SUGGESTION, rather than just being assigned. It's around a week before she's properly named, "Juno" is a suggestion by the person who's essentially the unofficial leader of the crew, Russel (...as opposed to the actual leader, the overseer of their crew).
Juno's relationship with ESPECIALLY her first crew is really strong, she even sits with them and has a drink after shifts, though she only just holds her cup before passing it off once someone starts eyeing it. The mining robots are very commonly close with their crews, given that their job is to keep them safe, but Juno is uniquely close with hers. Of course, mining crews aren't forever, once the caves have gone too deep to be worth the effort or the resources of value have been depleted, the miners split up and find crews with new mines. Juno moves on as well, but she always remembers her first crew as being the ones she was closest with.
Which is why it's significant when Russel is part of the crew she gets called in to help! A sudden outbreak of unusual illnesses breaks out in a mining crew deep, DEEP within the caverns, and the miners have suspected something in the caves themselves is causing the sickness, enough so that despite the overseers reluctance to, they bring in a robot to check everythings out, with sheer coincidence being that it's Juno. Russel, one of the least affected, is VERY relieved when Juno shows up, not just because he trusts her to do a good job, but because she's an old friend and he's happy to see her again.
Alongside Juno, however, is Malachi. When the overseer of the crew called up reporting the illnesses and requesting a robot be sent down, the manager of the crew, and many other crews in the area, is unsettled and a bit angry about this. Malachi is the son to the owner of the company that produces the mining robots, and while he's yet to inherit the company, he holds a high enough position as a manager to own several crews, and it's HIS crews getting sick. He could HANDLE some sick miners, it's happened before, but what he finds most angering is both how the symptoms are of an unknown illness... but that the miners claim it's only after mining for the new "miracle resource" he discovered and staked his reputation on that they get sick. He doesn't believe them, after all, they're only one of many of his crews, but he goes down while delivering Juno to the mining outpost to confirm.
His "miracle resource" is extremely important to him, THIS deep in the caverns, sustaining large settlements has been too resource intensive to actually manage, and the power his miracle resource gives off is so much that it could revolutionize deep cavern settlements, and it's his big pitch to his father to expand his influence in the company, and to guarantee he gets the company once his father either dies or retires, it NEEDS to work. So in spite of Juno insisting it's safer if she goes in alone to investigate, Malachi goes down with her into the mine itself, to "prove" his confidence in the safety of his resource and his mines.
Of course, when Juno goes down into the depths of the mines, and starts finding astronomically high readings of SOMETHING, SOME sort of energy, following its source to the most recently discovered vein of the "miracle resource", and realizes the depths of it's toxicity, it's only a few moments after her realization that Malachi grabs onto the thick cord protector wrapped around the wires between her head and torso, yanking on it as hard as he can. Juno's 7'4", and over 400 pounds, she can EASILY overpower him, but the suddenness of which he attacks her, and the vulnerability of which he targets, Juno only gets to flail for a few precious moments to try and regain her footing before he ends up breaking through the cable protector and tearing as many wires as he can. Once her body is fully disabled, he takes her lantern, the object of which holds the code of the robots, gives them their sentience, and acts as a detection of danger, and disables it, quickly creating a program on the fly to make it so she STAYS shut down.
When he returns to the entrance of the mine, he retells the situation to the best of his ability, or so he claims, saying that Juno experience some sort of catastrophic failure, that her lantern has a sort of inherent defect, that ALL the robots do, SOMETHING in their lanterns was toxic and leaking out and that's what caused the sickness. He orders for the immediate disposal of Juno's lantern, of which he'd carried back up with him, and in spite of several of the miners, in particular, Russel, refuting the idea that the robots were making them sick. Malachi insists he simply got too close to her emotionally to see the truth, and says he'll be taking everything up to his father, and that the entire line of robots will be decommissioned as soon as possible, an order he ends up managing to follow through on. All of the robots of her class are successfully decommissioned, their lanterns wiped of data, and a new line introduced in their place, now without sentence, nor lanterns.
Juno, however... her death predating the order for decommissioning, and the haste of which her lantern was gotten rid of, never actually has her data wiped. Even natural deterioration over time is lessened, of the few robots who were decommissioned but never had their lanterns wiped, eventually the data rotted with time, and would never be able to turn back on again, but thanks to the shoddy worksmanship of Malachi's program to keep her shut down, it not only ends up preserving her data for over two decades, but anyone with an eye for that class of robots can remove it with ease.
Therefore, 21 years after being attacked and killed in the mines, Juno's lantern is successfully turned back on, and Juno revived. She has no memory of what happened, as while Malachi's program kept her core functions intact, her memory decayed with time, and notably, her final few hours seemed to have been purposefully wiped. All she has is a log of her turning on and shutting off, pinpointing when exactly she shut off for the last time. The person who revived her, scrap metal salvager Calliope, has his own reasons for wanting to know what happened to her as well, so upon her telling him everything she knows, and seeing the inconsistencies between everything and the anomalies of why her shut-off predates the decommissioning, and why her lantern had a lock on it, they BOTH want to try and find her old body once Cal builds her a new one, all in the effort to rediscover her final memories, as it'll have a hard memory storage of her last hours before her death, and hopefully answers for the mass decommissioning as a whole
