My sleep pod was set to open once my system was fully recharged.
My eyes snapped open as soon as my pod had fully opened. My system felt reset, recharged and as good as new. Monica had done a great job of fixing me.
The only thing left to do was to refuel my system with metal scraps.
The scraps dissolved and spread through my system. I was ready to start my day.
As usual, Chas was already up and working; no doubt still looking for a solution to our system short-outs and weakness to water. He is the most diligent bot that I know.
I debated on whether or not to disturb him; knowing that the sooner he came up with a solution, the better off we bots would be.
I decided to take a chance and approach him; hoping that maybe he would not mind the interruption.
As soon as I was near, he packed away his laptop.
“Good morning my love. How are you feeling this morning?”
“Recharged and as good as new,” I answered back.
“Good to hear. I got you something just to make sure your day started out right,” Chas said with his hand behind his back.
“What is it?”
“Just a small token of my affection.”
I was surprised. For one, real flowers are very rare in our world and are therefore very expensive. Secondly, Chas was usually very serious in demeanor and bots do not often use the word affection, because we really do not feel anything.
Still, it was very nice of him and my emotional microchips fed me all of the appropriate responses.
I was flooded with emotional commands and response sequences. If a bot could ever be capable of true love; I believe that I would be feeling it at this moment.
Chas moved in for an emotional exchange.
You see, we bots do not woo hoo because we cannot reproduce and we do not have the necessary organs. When two bots have been joined together as bot mates, they exchange their emotional responses through their mouths.
When our mouths join, information from the male’s emotional response system is exchanged with the female’s. We exchange emotions of love, intimacy and affection.
This exchange makes us feel sort of like “one”. Almost like two appliances working on the same frequency. It may seem odd to you, but for us, it is as close as we can hope to get.
I placed Chas’s gift on our kitchen table to enjoy for as long as the flowers managed to live.
However, my excitement over the flowers was a little short lived. But not due to a lack of appreciation, rather I had something pressing on my mind.
I had not forgotten the unknown command that came to me last night. Before leaving for work, I went to the computer to look up the command compassion. Our limited access computers however, did not give me many clues on what the command meant. All I saw were watered down definitions of the command. I must find a way to tap into the Earth internet system, I said to myself right before my phone began to ring.
“Hello,” I answered.
“I need to see you here in the office right away!” A familiar booming voice declared without a greeting; right before hanging up.
Greeting or not, I knew exactly who it was. Only one person I knew of had the audacity to call and demand something like that without bothering to say hello…
President Aron…and I have been summoned to his office first thing.
I entered the living room in time to see Chas heading to his car pool; once again, appearing to be in a deep computational process.
My limo pulled up shortly afterward.
I hurried to my limo with my processing system going through its own introspective process. What could President Aron want?
When he calls someone to his office first thing in the morning, it is never for a good reason and it usually meant I was going to be responsible for furthering the suffering of some poor human.
Still, I had been summoned and I had no choice but to get to his office as soon as possible…which meant now.
My limo pulled up in front of the City Hall access portal.
Except for the science building, all of our major community buildings are located underground, accessible only through portals.
These portals served two purposes: one, to keep unwanted people, mostly humans out of certain buildings; and two, to do a full body scan of anyone entering to make sure that they have nothing on them that could be dangerous to bots.
These portals are programmed and maintained by Chas and his fellow scientists. You see, although Lunar Lakes has a president and myself, the Vice President…the scientists actually hold the true power, because they basically have control of all of the technology in the city.
Chas and the other elite scientists work out of a building constructed from a spaceship that crashed when the last group of humans arrived on Lunar Lakes. The crashed shuttle is the reason more humans have not arrived. This shuttle cost Earth humans billions of dollars to create. Once it crashed, their only access to the moon and our only access to Earth was gone. So basically, we are all stuck here until another shuttle can be constructed which would take decades.
Chas approached the science building; again the only city building that is not located underground.
Although there are no security portals to keep anyone out, it is also the only building that most of us in Lunar Lakes have never been in.
We all sort of fear the repercussions of angering the scientists by trespassing within their labs and what it would mean for us if they were to find a way to perfect our systems, but decide to leave us out of the upgrading process…
