Rebirth: An Automaton's Journey

Chapter 13

11:03 a.m. the next morning:

"Phew." Lily unscrewed the helmet of the "borrowed" Buy 'n Large in-case-of-emergency spacesuit and dropped it to the cabin floor. "I'm glad that we found these suits onboard, but they're so stuffy inside. And it's hard to use tools with these stupid bulky gloves!"

"Stuffy for a human," Auto said, struggling to snap open the buckle holding his glove down. "The temperature of my suit has dropped 9.27 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of this morning."

"Oh, right. Humans give off heat, but we never gave you an internal heater, did we?"

"No."

"At least the suit gave you enough insulation to slow the rate at which you froze." Lily began opening the buckles on the front of her suit. "Have we repaired the ship enough that we can send and receive transmissions?"

"Yes." Freed from his suit, Auto dug through the pile of essentials that they'd recovered from the passenger cabin. He found the bucket and sponge, and began pouring in the parts cleaner. Although his hands were now clean, his arms and torso were still smeared with wasp guts from where they'd crawled inside his jacket and he'd smashed them.

"I would like to clean up, too," Lily remarked. "Too bad we don't have running water."

"Given that most of the pipes have frozen and burst, you may not have running water for some time."

"Ugh. Don't remind me." Lily took her hairbrush from the pile.

******

Skin cleaned, hair combed, and wearing a new jacket, Auto felt that he looked much more presentable. He began to power up the machinery that would be necessary for the holo-call.

"Have you thought about what you're going to say?" Lily asked.

"I plan to be direct. I will explain to McCrea that I need to speak with the computer science department at Urbana-Champaign. I need answers, Lily...so many answers."

"Maybe we should make a list," Lily suggested. "Item number one can be 'Why am I so annoying?'"

"No." She was trying to be funny, but to Auto this was a serious matter. "Item number one will be asking for an explanation of why I continue to think about you in such an—" What would be a good adjective here? Ah, yes... "—illogical manner."

She giggled a little. "Not everything in this world is structured logically, Auto."

"Despite that, I was still programmed to interpret it as such." He shifted his position a little in the now-hovering hoverchair. "Sometimes I think that...my interest...when you kissed me...was nothing more than...a malfunction."

"Well then, the most scientific approach to this..." Lily smiled sweetly, taking a step forward "...would be to repeat the test to see if we get the same results. You've had two full reset cycles since then; any malfunctioning code will be long gone."

He was momentarily stunned by this impressive degree of critical thinking displayed by the human, but recovered quickly. "Agreed."

His long, slender hands wrapped around her waist, lifting her into the hoverchair. She crawled into his lap, straddling him, and rested both hands on the epaulets of his jacket.