Rebirth: An Automaton's Journey

Chapter 9

"No!" Mary Addams screamed, desperately waving her hand over the blank bulb of the holo-cam. "No! No! Lily!"

"Honey, she's an engineer," John Addams tried to reassure his wife—though he appeared to be barely holding back his own panic. "Surely she can fix it."

Not reassured, Mary turned her huge, pleading eyes on the retired pilot in front of her. "Sir...she will be okay, won't she?"

McCrea waved his hand gently. "No need to 'sir' me, Mary. It's Bartholomew McCrea. As for Lily, the Axiom is equipped with back-up power generators to keep the life support systems functioning in the event of a failure in the main core."

John's face scrunched up in a pensive manner. "What was that robot-sounding voice saying something about a power failure in the left main core?"

"That was the warning system," McCrea lied. Of course, he'd recognized Auto's voice immediately, but he didn't want to burden Lily's parents with the knowledge that their daughter was trapped onboard a spaceship with Auto the autonomy-seeking automatic pilot. They already had enough to worry about as it was.

"There's an instruction manual on board the ship. It's just like this one." McCrea held up the red book with the plant in the center. "I can't believe that Lily hasn't found it by now. She can read the book to figure out how to fix what's wrong."

"But it's pitch black in there," Mary fretted.

"I'm sure Lily has a flashlight," McCrea said, his mind completely elsewhere. Deep inside, his temper was bubbling up, threatening to boil over. That little punk was wearing his uniform, sitting in his chair, and using his transponder to call home. Just who did Auto think he was!

Not to mention that Auto had managed to get a bolt suit somehow. McCrea didn't know or care how, but it infuriated him just the same. His uniform did not belong on some ridiculous droid, even if the droid did have the shoulders and chest to fill it out.

Especially not if the droid had the shoulders and chest to fill it out.

No, seriously. It wasn't fair that Auto could tailor his body conformation with a flick of a screwdriver, while McCrea couldn't keep the weight off no matter what he tried. Or that McCrea had been required to shave every day while Auto's face had been designed to never need a razor.

"Buddy?" John prodded him. "You OK? You've been staring a hole through that wall there..."

McCrea pressed a hand to his aching temple. "I'm sorry, John, it's just...it's an awful lot to process."

*0*0*0*0*

"Do you expect me to lead you to the main reactor core without any light?"

"Well, that glowing red eyeball of yours..."

"Is insufficient," Auto cut her off. "Besides, I would have expected you to have a flashlight."

"I do have a flashlight. It's back in my cabin. You know, down the hallway and up three flights of stairs and turn right and it's the fifth door down the row."

Figures. Only a human would be stupid enough to leave an emergency help device in some place that they would struggle to access during an emergency.