Blue Star Enterprises

Yulia returned a few days later. He didn’t ask why she hadn’t shown up the prior day, and she didn’t offer. She just sat back on her stool and started talking like nothing had happened.

Initially, when the girl first showed up, Alexander didn’t want her around because he assumed she would disrupt his work or injure herself. There was still that chance, but the more she talked, the more he was glad for her company.

It didn’t take him long to realize why. He hadn’t had a proper conversation with anyone since waking up. The only people he conversed with were his customers. And none of them were much interested in sitting and chatting with a robot.

He wasn’t sure if that was because they didn’t buy his story of being sick and having to use the robot as a surrogate, or something else. And he certainly wasn’t going to alienate the few customers he had by asking about it.

In the lulls between Yulia’s ramblings, Alexander asked her questions while he worked. She always beamed in pride when she was able to answer them, but when she didn’t know, she would just scrunch her face up before eventually shrugging. “Dunoh,” was her go-to answer for those.

On her next visit, she brought in a beat-up-looking tablet with a worried look on her face.

“Good morning, Yulia.”

“Umm… morning, Alex…” The girl fidgeted as she set the tablet on the desk without taking a seat. Which was impressive because the desk was rather tall since he had built it to suit his much taller frame.

He had noticed the girl tended to get antsy and fidget when something was bothering her. Usually, it was when she was hungry or bored.

“I- I dropped my tablet… Can you fix it… please?” That last word came out with so much pleading that if Alexander was in his old human body, he probably would have bent down and consoled the poor child. As it sat, he just sighed and put down the customer request he had been working on. He reached over and slid the plate of resin, that passed for tablets, in front of himself.

There was a faded label attached to the side that read ‘Property of Petrov Station Orphanage’. He turned to the little girl who quickly looked away. “Your tablet?”

“It- It’s the one the orphanage makes me use for study time.”

“And how exactly did it get broken?” he asked as he inspected the device. Alexander had seen similar devices around. They were not like the fragile tablets from back in his day. On one occasion, he had seen one of the automated loaders run a similar device over after someone dropped it. The guy simply picked it back up, brushed it off, and gave a rude gesture to the loader before going back about his work.

“Dunoh,” she responded without looking at him.

He sighed again before returning his focus to the electronic device. Surprisingly, he hadn’t dealt with much in the way of futuristic electronics. Oh sure, there were electronics built into most items he worked with. But they weren’t much more advanced than back in his day.

It seemed old methods worked well enough for most things that nobody seemed all that interested in making things even more complicated just for the sake of it.

Alexander picked up a thin plastic tool he had printed for popping the plates off of control boards. He ran the thin tool around the edge of the tablet until it hooked against something. One nice thing about the technology of this time, it was built to be fixed. With a slight push, he slid the locking stud up and out of the groove, allowing the two halves of the tablet to separate.

Seeing as there were no physical signs of damage on the exterior, other than the wear of age, he figured something inside the device had been knocked loose.

There was a small spark as the back half came free, making Yulia jump. “What was that?” she asked, more out of curiosity than fear.

Alexander smiled internally. “Dunoh.”

The girl stared at him for a bit before she realized what he was doing. Then she pouted. “No fair.”

He allowed his avatar face to laugh at her expression. “Two can play that game,” he responded, and the girl relented.

Truthfully, he had no idea what that was. He set the screen part down and picked up the back to inspect it. He found a small set of metallic contacts. There was also a bunch of technical information printed on the inside.

He read it. “It’s the battery.” It was rather ingenious. The entire back of the tablet was a solid-state battery. No need for a cover or anything. Now that he thought about it, he had never seen anyone plug any devices in for charging. A battery of this size could probably power something this small for weeks on end. When he looked over the device, he didn’t see any external connection either. It had to be using some form of ambient or passive charging to keep it charged. Not really anything all that groundbreaking. They had induction charging technology back in his time.

A few fine filaments broke free from one of his fingers to touch against the metal connections of the battery. As much as he was loath to admit it, Yuri was the one who had discovered this little trick built into this body. And while Alexander couldn’t get the exact reading off the battery, thanks to the damage in his mind-space, he did watch for the flicker that registered the input. It wasn’t hard to see since it flashed a color that none of his other data streams ever showed.

He nodded and placed the battery down on the desk. It was still good. Then he looked at the mess that made up the processor and screen side of the device and frowned. He could tell where the power came in, and that it had a screen, but everything else was alien to him. He would need a microscope just to see… or did he?

Alexander bent his focus onto a small section of the device. The image in his mind-space seemed to bend and warp for a moment before he was soon viewing a small section in much higher detail. Like he was looking through a magnifying glass.

After all these years, he barely understood a fraction of what this body was capable of. He wanted to laugh at the discovery but he restrained himself. Mostly so he didn’t scare Yulia.

With so much time spent inside this form, he still didn’t understand how it took in light to produce an image, let alone how it even powered itself. Maybe with this new ability to zoom in, he could purchase a mirror and inspect himself more thoroughly. A thought for a later time.

The little bubble of magnified area zoomed across the device wherever he focused. It was amazing because it didn’t take away from his vision of anything else, it just enhanced that portion. He found he could focus even smaller, but after a certain point, he started to feel weird and had to pull back. No electron microscope vision for him it seemed.

But he had learned what he needed to learn. He sent instructions to the printer for a very specific set of tools. He really hoped the cheaper device was capable of printing them.

After less than thirty seconds, the printer beeped, letting him know it was complete. He walked over and retrieved the tiny tool, with an even smaller rod at the end of it. He used that hair-thin rod and gently poked it through a hole in the electronics. The titanium flexed slightly under the pressure before there was a soft click.

He did this three more times, allowing the separator plate to come free from the electronics underneath. It was no wonder he hadn’t recognized anything. The plate was some weird piece of tech that seemed to act as a thermal barrier as well as something else. Although he wasn’t sure what that something was.

It took another half an hour of removing components and testing before he found the issue. The connection for the screen had simply come loose. Once he pushed it back into place and put everything back, the tablet came to life.

He handed the working tablet back to the girl. She beamed up at him before hopping off her stool and running around the counter to hug him, smashing the recently repaired tablet into his hard form. Instead of admonishing her to be more careful next time, he lightly patted her on the back and sent her on her way.

She happily obliged, humming some unknown tune as she skipped out of his shop swinging the tablet back and forth without care.

With her gone, he turned his focus back on the paid work he needed to get done.

***

Yulia hummed a tune from her favorite cartoon as she made her way back to the orphanage. Some of the younger children were required to stay at the orphanage but now that she was eight, she was allowed outside for certain hours of the day. And like most of the older kids, she jumped at the opportunity to leave the stuffy and boring space of the orphanage to explore the station.

Most of the adults either ignored them or shooed them away. Some even yelled at them or in one instance slapped one of the older kids. She heard from Markus that the man who did that got what was coming to him after that incident. Whatever that meant. That’s why Alex was so cool. Well, other than the fact he was a robot. He didn’t seem to mind her hanging around and bugging him. She knew she talked a lot, Markus and the other kids all told her that.

Speaking of Markus, she rounded a corner of the corridor and nearly ran into the eleven-year-old boy.

“Watch where you’re going, pipsqueak.”

“I told you to stop calling me that!” she huffed.

The older boy snorted. “I’ll stop calling you that when you grow a few inches. What’s that in your hand?”

“Nothing,” She quickly responded, trying to hide the tablet behind her back. But Markus was too quick.

He snatched the tablet out of Yulia’s hand before she could hide it.

Markus put his hands on his hips and tried to look like the headmaster of the orphanage. “Why do you have one of the orphanage tablets out here?” he asked, waving the tablet in front of her.

“It’s my tablet,” she responded indignantly.

“No, it’s the orphanage's. You know if the headmaster finds out you took this out without permission, you’re gonna get cleaning duty for a week.”

She stiffened at that. Yulia didn’t like having to clean the orphanage, nobody did. But what would be worse is that she wouldn’t be able to visit Alex if she got in trouble. “You won’t tell him, will you?”

The older boy sighed, dropping his hands. “Look, I’ll help you sneak it back in, but if I get caught, I’m not taking the blame. Are we clear?”

She nodded enthusiastically.

“Why did you take it out anyway?”

She looked at the ground before mumbling a reply. “I sorta broke it.”

“You broke a tablet?” He looked at the device, it seemed to be working just fine. “But it's working.”

“Alex fixed it for me.”

“I told you that you should stay away from that robot, you have no idea what it could do.”

“Alex has been nothing but nice to me,” she stated with child-like conviction. “He even fixed the tablet for free.”

“Fine, don’t come crying to me if something happens then. Come on, we’re going to be late for the evening meal. I’ll also need you to distract the headmaster so I can sneak the tablet back into the drawer.”

She gave him a sloppy salute like she had seen in movies. “Aye aye, Captain.” Before laughing and sprinting away.

“Why you!” Markus chased the giggling girl as they hurried down the corridor and toward the orphanage.