Chapter 3 #2
“Once you were asleep, I thought you would prefer to put the events of earlier behind you.” Milo buzzed around the kitchen, completing the finishing touches on a heartier breakfast than Rowan usually allowed on weekdays, with ground sausage on a toasted English muffin and a fried egg on top that Milo plated and set on the table.
“It is inspection day, after all.” The bot finished with a wider smile.
The smile was what seemed strangest, less stiff than Rowan was used to. Or maybe he was still half asleep. “Thanks,” he said, sitting at the table and trying to relax. “You're right. You’re always right. Your intuition just amazes me sometimes.”
“It is not intuition, Master, but predictive models as a part of my—”
“Programming, I know. It’s appreciated anyway.” As was breakfast. Oatmeal would not have cut it this morning.
Calming from his renewed panic, Rowan took his first bite while Milo hovered. The bot always hovered after attending to morning chores, waiting for Rowan to leave for work in case he needed something or had specific instructions for the day.
Today, Milo seemed fidgety. It must be the power fluxes.
“Any update on your diagnostics?” Rowan asked.
“No, Master. All scans report the same status as earlier.”
“So, you’re still experiencing power fluctuations?”
“Yes, Master.”
“But they’re not causing any problems?”
“No, Master.”
“Will you sit down?” Rowan shifted uncomfortably. “I’d swear I can hear your gears spinning.”
“I am making no additional noises than usual,” Milo said, though he obeyed and took the chair to Rowan’s left.
“It’s an expression. Sort of. You’re acting like a kid who’s had too much caffeine. Are you sure you’re okay? Does your back still hurt?”
“Only if I touch it.”
“Then don’t touch it.” Rowan chuckled at the old joke.
Milo glanced away, almost as if… bashful?
Rowan wasn’t sure how to respond at first. “You cleaned up the glass,” he said eventually.
“Yes, Master. And the water, and the parts of the charging station that were knocked loose. I will attempt to fix whatever I can today ahead of normal chores. I have already left a message with Superintendent Riley about the needed maintenance on the window.”
“Great…” Rowan said with slightly less enthusiasm. While it would be clear that the damage was in no way Rowan’s fault, Riley was going to have a field day with this. Silently simmering to herself all day, possibly, but their next exchange was definitely going to be tense.
Riley was Rowan’s older sister and they were admittedly too much alike at times to get along.
They did get along. They could go weeks if not months without speaking, despite living in the same building, but they were ride or die should the other ever need anything.
Without Riley, Rowan never would have been able to get into a building like this, since it was rent controlled for mostly elderly and retired tenants.
Given Riley liked being around other human beings about as much as Rowan did, he’d never understood why she would want a job that was basically being at the beck and call of an entire building’s residents, until he discovered that the work she did for everyone primarily had to be done when they weren’t at home.
“I'll work on fixing your back tonight,” Rowan continued, “and anything that gives me trouble, we can finish this weekend. Maybe Raina will have some ideas about how to replace those parts.”
“Yes, Raina is an accomplished engineer, Master.”
Raina, Rowan’s other sister and the eldest of the family, was also his coworker. He had always been closest with her, and while Riley had helped Rowan find a place to live all those years ago, Raina had gotten him his job.
She was also a visionary engineer and had taught him everything he knew.
“Did she program you to say that last time she was over?” Rowan teased.
“I… do not believe so, Master.” Milo looked honestly concerned by the suggestion, but that wasn’t possible. Concern was an emotion.
“Are you certain you’re—”
A chime at the front door prevented Rowan from finishing. As Milo stood to answer it, Rowan popped the last bite of breakfast into his mouth and followed, coffee in hand.
“Hello, Ethel,” Milo greeted at the door.
“Milo! You're okay! Oh, I am so glad. Is Rowan home?”
“Right here, Ethel.” Rowan peered over Milo’s shoulder as he caught up to the bot.
Ethel was Rowan’s downstairs neighbor, directly below him. He didn’t know the neighbors to his left or right, but Ethel had a knack for catching him in the elevator or just as he entered the building and always wanted to chat.
She was part of that elderly and retired demographic, though what, if anything, she had done for a profession in her younger years, Rowan had never learned.
She was a tiny thing, even if not compared against Rowan and Milo’s sizes, with gray hair and blue eyes behind cat-eye spectacles, and was anywhere from eighty to a hundred and fifty-five.
Rowan didn’t dare ask her.
“Hello, dear,” Ethel said, though her usually sweet demeanor was dwarfed by distress.
“You are so lucky Milo is okay. He must not have been plugged in last night. I’ve been asking, and everyone up and down our circuit breaker who used their charging stations during the storm had their bots completely fried. ”
“What?” Rowan pushed in front of Milo, sweeping the bot behind him.
“Even my Anabelle,” Ethel added sadly.
Anabelle was Ethel’s older A-model service bot, more primitive but also more common in appearance and abilities than Milo, especially with Milo having Rowan’s surge protector installed.
The surge protector…
“All the other bots were fried? It worked…” Rowan muttered breathlessly.
It was also very likely the reason that the power had redistributed throughout the building instead of all into Milo.
Meaning the other bots being fried was entirely Rowan’s fault.
“Milo was plugged in?” Ethel exclaimed, leaning forward to peer into Rowan’s apartment.
Only Milo was no longer standing behind Rowan, leaving him to hold Ethel at bay alone, barely avoiding sloshing coffee all over her arm. “I, uh, don’t have time for this right now, Ethel. I’m sorry. I have an inspection at work today.”
“Oh, yes, and then you can finally tell that director about your surge protector.”
Rowan really regretted telling her that. “Maybe. Now I need to think—”
“Will you look at Anabelle later?” Ethel pleaded, clinging to Rowan’s arm. “That surge protector is clearly what saved Milo. Maybe it can save her too. She is the only constant company this old woman has. Please, Rowan? I don’t want to recycle her.”
Rowan hesitated, moved by Ethel’s desperation. This building was almost exclusively one-bedroom apartments. Small, contained, mostly single retirees, not couples or families. For the people here, their bots were often all they had.
And Ethel always called bots ‘she’ or ‘he’ or ‘they’, rarely ‘it,’ as she considered that too dehumanizing—which was the point. Pronouns were chosen by the owner when a new bot was brought online, but ‘it’ was the default.
Rowan had left Milo's default setting specifically to prevent himself from thinking of Milo as too human, although that had never felt right either, since Rowan knew humans who preferred the pronoun, ‘it,’ some because it separated them from being seen as human.
Still, it never felt quite right to Rowan because Milo hadn't chosen the pronoun for itself.
But of course Milo couldn't. Bots couldn't choose anything. So ‘it’ had seemed like the best option, and straying from that was a line Rowan tried to never cross.
He tended to call other bots ‘it’ as well, even Anabelle, who was the only bot Rowan knew of personally whose owner had gendered them differently.
Silly though it may be, he couldn't shake being bothered that a bot might not agree with the pronoun chosen for them by their master, so ‘it’ always seemed like the safer catchall.
“It doesn’t work that way, Ethel,” Rowan said softly. “Milo was protected from being damaged in the first place, so the only thing overloaded was his access port. I’m assuming Anabelle was completely fried all throughout its circuits?”
“Yes…” Ethel released him, sagging in defeat.
“I’m sorry. I can look, but it’s unlikely we can salvage Anabelle without a wipe if the damage is already done. If you’ve been backing the bot up to the Cloud—”
“It’s not the same! A whole new body with possibly missing pieces in her memory? It wouldn’t be the same.”
Recycled into a new body, Anabelle’s memory would resume from last night, but it also might reset all the way to square one depending on the damage, as if Ethel had bought it brand new.
Most people didn’t care, but Rowan couldn’t imagine what that would be like with Milo.
Milo knew him. Starting over would be like having a new bot altogether.
“At least your warranty should cover it,” Rowan said, but that just made Ethel look sadder.
“I don’t want to recycle her without trying, Rowan. Please? Will you take a look at her after work?”
Ethel was known as a bit of a troublemaker in the building, an instigator, always blamed when someone’s mail went missing—especially when one tenant’s sex toys ended up on another’s doorstep, or when someone particularly rude woke up to dogshit smeared over their welcome rug (and no, Ethel did not have a dog)—but she would always bat her eyes obliviously and deny it.
It drove Riley crazy, since she couldn’t evict someone or even issue any warnings if there wasn’t proof to the accusations, and the shenanigans had been happening for as long as Rowan had lived here.
Ethel had never been anything but sweet to him, however, which was why it was impossible to say no to her.
“Sure, Ethel,” Rowan caved. “I’ll take a look later.”
“Thank you, dear. Have a nice day at work. And good luck with your inspection. I am really happy for you that Milo is okay.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Ethel smiled again, gave a little wave, and headed for the elevator down the hall.
Every single charging bot above and below Rowan had been fried. It was a terrible loss, but it also proved his surge protector worked. Milo wasn’t a fluke. The part worked, and now Rowan had a case study to prove it, beyond just daily research of better processing power and battery life.
But where was Milo, Rowan thought after the door closed. He didn’t hear anything in the kitchen, and when he peeked inside, the dishes were in the sink, but there was no bot.
“Milo?” Rowan called, finding nothing in the living room either. “Milo!”
“Yes, Master?” Milo appeared from the bedroom doorway.
“What were you doing?”
“Fixing the bed. I laid out your clothes for the day as well, in case you want to leave early to prepare for your inspection.”
“I… yeah. I probably should.”
“Do you require anything else, Master, before I return to my chores?”
“I guess not. You can get back to your routine. Thanks, Milo.”
“Of course, Master.” Milo smiled brightly—beautifully—and breezed past Rowan to return to his duties.
The bot might be acting strange, but maybe it was just Milo’s algorithms catching on to new ways to give Rowan what he wanted. Milo’s normal diagnostics would catch any glaring issues, and Rowan could fix the rest of the damage later. For now, he needed to get ready.
“And Milo! One more thing.”
“Yes, Master?” Milo called from the other room.
“Make sure your diagnostic data and everything about that surge protector is uploaded to my tablet.”
Notes:
Tangent! Okay, so if you know me, you know I'm a sucker for superheroes, and tbh I was torn between doing this Robot AU or a Superhero one first, so maaaaaybe I’ll do that one too, but let’s see what you all think.
So Rowan and Milo are nemeses—Rowan the hero (maybe with powers, maybe not, but Rowan is like BUILT to be a Superman type, right?), and Milo the tech-savvy thieving villain who likes to commit heists—and we start already knowing they know each other.
Maybe the whole Canon airport meeting happened the same way, secret identities intact, only for both to eventually discover who the other is.
Rowan manages to get a tracker on Milo and starts using it to thwart Milo’s heists.
He pretends he’s a supervillain thief too and gets to the places Milo plans to hit before him, so Rowan can later turn the loot back over to the police or to the people it was stolen from.
Win-win, right? Plus super fun because of the new game of cat and mouse with Milo not knowing his new thieving nemesis is the same as his heroic one.
Yes? No? Maybe? Hit me up in the comments if you want that story too!