Chapter 3
Lincoln's POV
The shuttle doors slide open, jerking me out of sleep I didn’t even remember falling into. My neck hurts from the angle I was slumped in, and my mouth tastes like metal. Great. Another blackout commute.
Stepping into Helion’s lobby, my brain is still foggy. The lights are too bright for how early it feels, even though it’s well past eight.
I don’t even remember how I got into bed last night. Hell, I barely remember getting home.
"Rough morning?" Mark from Calibration claps my shoulder as he passes. The guy’s way too cheerful for someone who lives in a lab.
"Something like that," I mutter. "Long night."
"Again? They gotta stop pulling you past ten, man. You look dead."
I give him a tight smile as the lift opens. "Tell that to the board."
He snorts. "They don’t listen to me either."
When I get to Level B, Sarah is already at her station, typing something with her usual laser focus. Her eyes flick up the second she hears me. She always looks at me a little too interested.
"Morning, Lincoln," she chirps, brushing a piece of hair behind her ear. Always the same move. Always directed at me.
"Morning," I reply, keeping it short.
Sitting down, I try to wake my brain up, reviewing today’s schedule.
Calibrations, joint modeling, motion training, debugging… standard Friday.
But everything feels like a heavier burden lately. Even just prepping the sensors for the morning tests takes more energy than it should.
"Damn you look so tired. You fell asleep on the shuttle again, didn’t you?" Sarah asks.
"Yeah," I say, rubbing my eyes. "Long week."
She softens a little, her voice a bit quieter. "You should take a day, babe."
"I can’t."
And it’s true. There’s too much to do. The AI models don’t wait for me to catch up on sleep.
“I'm sorry. I know you work very hard and it sucks seeing you so beat down.”
“I promise I'm fine. Just growing pains, that's all.”
When 9 am hits, the three of us, me, Sarah, and Tom, head into the sim room. Tom yawns hard enough to crack his jaw.
"Dude," he groans, "why is this job aging us ten years?"
Sarah laughs. "Because Helion owns our souls. They feed on it."
"Funny," I say dryly, positioning a sensor node on the dummy unit. "I didn’t see that in the contract. We should be getting paid for that."
“Right!” Sarah chimes.
They both release a light laugh, but underneath it, all of us know it’s true.
The morning drags. We run motion loops, correct errors, reset stubborn servos. At one point, the test unit mimics a gesture wrong and nearly knocks a light panel off the wall. Tom throws his hands up.
"Bro, it’s Friday. Why is everything broken?"
Sarah looks at me. "Because we’re all exhausted."
She means more than just Tom and herself. I ignore it.
By lunch, I can barely think. My stomach growls, but eating feels like too much effort. I grab a protein bar and sit in the break area, head resting in my hand.
Sarah ends up across from me, of course she does, but I noticed she kept her distance today. Maybe even she can tell I’m too far gone for small talk. But her concern seems to override her need to give me space.
"You okay?" she asks softly.
"Just tired."
"Did you not get any sleep at all last night?"
I nod. But it’s not the work that flashes in my mind.
It’s Gabby. Her eyes. Her voice.
The way I fell asleep in the middle of… God.
I swallow hard and try to refocus.
My mind starts to meld together the missing pieces that were robbed from me as a result of my exhaustion.
My poor wife.
I couldn't even be there for her last night. We were talking about something weren't we? My mind struggles to even remember. It's like I'm missing gigantic chunks of time.
Speaking of chunks of time… I feel like I just woke up from another zone out. I honestly can't recall the last half hour.
Sarah stands a few feet away, cradling the big control tablet in both hands.
It’s one of those rugged 16-inch beasts; thin, matte black, and heavy enough that most people grip it tight.
Not her despite her dainty hands. She holds it the relaxed way she always does when her arms need a break: elbows bent, forearms extended forward like she’s steering something invisible, knuckles almost touching.
The bottom edge balances across the tops of her wrists, leaving her hands free underneath.
She looks like she's carrying a tray when she does that, and for whatever reason, it looks very cute.
Tom wanders over from the sensor cart, tossing a calibration puck between his hands like it’s a toy. “Wake up, sunshine,” he says to me. “You look like death warmed over in a microwave.”
I don’t look up, but my eyes pop open. “Thanks. Very helpful.”
“Seriously, man. When’s the last time you saw your bed for more than thirty minutes?”
“Last night,” I mutter. “I think.”
Sarah’s mouth curves into that soft, worried shape she gets. “You were zoning out during the last reset. I had to call your name three times.”
“I heard you the first time,” I say. “Just… processing.”
Tom snorts. “Processing how to stay upright, probably. Anyway, grip test is next.”
Sarah smirks at me shifting her weight. The tablet stays perfectly steady on her wrists.
The heavy door to the sim room hisses shut behind Tom as he heads back to his workstation in the monitoring alcove.
He's muttering something about pulling the latest servo logs and watching for thermal spikes; standard post-setup babysitting.
That leaves just Sarah and me in the quiet prep bay, the silent hum of the ventilation the only sound besides our breathing.
Sarah glances at the door, then back at me with that curious tilt to her head she gets when she wants to keep the conversation going. It's her way of making sure I don't zone out completely.
“How do you think deaf people will use the unit?” she asks, her voice light, like small talk is the only thing keeping my eyelids from winning the fight.
I glance down at my smaller tablet, the compact 8-inch one I use for quick tweaks and diagnostics, scrolling idly through the gesture config queue to make sure the update propagated without errors.
“Why would they use the unit?” I say, not really looking up.
The Auralis is built for high-end companionship, efficiency, luxury assistance. Not accessibility first.
Sarah smiles, that soft, hopeful one that always makes me feel a little less like roadkill. “You don't think deaf people would want to use it? I imagine if they were rich enough, having a handicap like that… this unit would come in handy, don't you think?”
“Yeah,” I admit, exhaling. “I suppose so.”
“We should download ASL or at least program some of it in there,” she suggests, like it's the most obvious thing. “Like the basic stuff.”
I shake my head. “That's not what this model is built for.
There's probably going to be a lite version down the line, something specifically for accessibility, maybe with full language integration. But the flagship? Tobias wants it premium, targeted at execs, elderly who need premium care, that demographic.”
She leans against the workbench opposite me, tablet still balanced on her wrists in that casual way. “Why not both? It's supposed to make people's lives easier. Why wouldn't it help handicapped people?”
I rub my eyes. “Yeah, I hear you. Especially since, honestly, they're probably the ones who could benefit most from something like this.”
“That’s actually why I was thinking we should add something. A quick shortcut for the cleanup routines.”
I finally glance at her. “We’ve got voice commands for that.”
“Yeah, but voice takes forever sometimes, or controls,” she says. “And half the time the mics pick up you snoring on your feet.”
“Really smartass?” I quip tiredly.
“Well, I was thinking a gesture. Something simple. Like this.”
She doesn’t move the tablet. Under its shadow, her fingers move, right hand flat, palm down, sliding across her left palm in two quick, smooth wipes. Like she’s dusting of her palm with the other.
“Is that actual ASL?”
“Basically,” Sarah says. “I mean it’s more modified but, yeah it's one of the only signs that I remember.”
“How did you even come across that?” I ask curiously.
She shrugs playfully. “One of my ex-boyfriends had a little deaf daughter. That was the sign for cleaning up whenever we were done playing with the toys.”
I rub the bridge of my nose. “Even if we were going to do something like that, we’d have to tune the tolerance so it doesn’t trigger on every random hand wave.”
“Fifteen-degree variance, maybe?” she suggests. “Short hold. Point-eight seconds.”
“I guess.”
“Plus it looks kinda badass. Like we’re wizards,” she grins.
It's nice to know she's so passionate about the job. I wish I could have some of her passion right now.
Wait…
If I said that out loud it would sound so inappropriate. Anyway, it's not like I'm going to take this seriously, but looking at her face and the excitement in it, I can tell she actually wants this.
“Are you actually being serious?” I press.
Sarah's eyes light up. “I mean, it's not a bad idea to test it out. Just for us. It can be like an Easter egg thing.”
I raise an eyebrow. “An Easter egg? Like a joke?”
“Yeah,” she says, laughing a little. “And kind of like a shortcut key for us. We can just leave it in there while we're testing, then you can write it out right before launch.”
It's so stupid. But she looks so hopeful, that smile bright enough to cut through the fog in my head. I like seeing her smile. It reminds me there's still something human in this grind.
I smile back, despite myself.
She smiles back wider. “You can… can you do it real quick? I'm just so curious. And you never know, the hand gesture thing could be a big deal.”
I roll my eyes, but the resistance is already crumbling. “It could also be a big lawsuit. Imagine someone makes an accidental hand gesture in the living room, the robot misinterprets it, and suddenly launches a suitcase across the room.”
Sarah bursts out a laugh. “A suitcase?! Hahaha!”
“Yeaaah,” I say earnestly, loving the sound of laughter. “That or grips too hard on some dude’s dick. That’s a liability nightmare.”
She laughs harder, something that makes my heart skip. Her joy is absolutely contagious. I just wish my tired body could catch up.
“I'm being serious,” my voice comes out flat.
Sarah waves it off gently. “It's just for now. Just for me? We can scope it super tight, high confidence threshold, limited to our test environment. No risk. And look, if you really still feel the same way we could just write it out later.”
I sigh, already knowing I've lost. The next thing I know, I'm pulling up the gesture module again on my tablet, fingers moving across the screen.
It's not hard, technically, far easier than the full behavioral modeling we do every day. It all boils down to the onboard cameras recognizing a specific hand gesture. And the permissions for its execution only exist within the constraints of the testing chamber, on the offhand chance I do forget.
Sarah shows me a gif for it once more as reference.
The whole thing takes maybe five minutes of parameter tuning and a quick sim test on my end.
“There,” I say, hitting deploy. The tablet chimes softly as the patch pushes to the dummy unit. “There’s your egg.”
Sarah grins, wider now. “You're the best.”
I shake my head, but I'm smiling too.
I find myself thinking more and more about a future where robots like Auralis become a normal part of human society.
Perhaps in time, people like Gabby’s father, those who live alone or struggle with the daily burdens, will have someone, or something, to share their home with them, to make their lives a little easier, a little less lonely.
Someday, home care for the elderly or for anyone who needs that steady help might finally be affordable and widely available.
And maybe… maybe one day, when someone gets hurt, instead of lying there waiting in agony for help that might arrive too late, being crushed under the weight of something humans can’t lift, a unit like Auralis could already be on the scene.
A machine strong enough to lift the wreckage, gentle enough to comfort, quick enough to save a life… or at least extend it long enough for loved ones to say goodbye.
I believe such a future is not only possible, but a necessary mercy we never knew we needed until it’s there.