Who do you trust more to drive you to a destination? Who do you trust more to defend your civil liberties on the field of combat? Man or machine? That is the question that dominates the current landscape of technological innovation. Tony Stark seeks...
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Jo Kimble hunched over the 'operating table' as she rummaged around inside her 'patient'. The serial on this unit was VFPA P1Alpha. She crinkled her nose as she noticed that the coolant tank was ruptured, in turn leaking goop all over the generator. The coolant seeped into the power supply via its exhaust grills. It looked like the stuff eventually worked its way out, but the initial reaction caused an emergency forced-shutdown. "Found the problem. Coolant leak."
"Is he gonna be alright?" Officer Birch sighed, removing his helmet.
Without a word, the engineer simply unfastened the fixings that kept the tank locked in place. Laying these bolts out in a neat line on the tray next to the table, Jo, who was kneeling on top of a wheeled office chair as she worked, kicked herself over to a rack in the corner of the room. The rack was lined with spare coolant tanks. There was a problem across the whole batch with brittle plastics being used for the tanks; she'd have to specify exactly what material she wanted for the construction of the next iteration.
The small woman snatched a coolant container up, pushed off the wall with her other hand, and came rolling back to the table. She slowed to a halt exactly where she needed to be then proceeded to refix this new replacement tank. "Did it take any immense impacts in the last few days?"
Birch nodded awkwardly "Y-Yeah. Yeah, sure did. Alf got rammed by a fleeing vehicle down at Soho yesterday. Was fine until we got back to the station; even then diagnostics didn't say there was anything wrong."
Jo was delighted that the police officer felt so attached to the drone that he gave it a nickname, but she wasn't one to broadcast her feelings. "Alf?" She asked monotonously.
"Well...yeah. Y'know, as in 'Alpha'. I've set him to recognise it as an alternative designation."
In the seconds that it took for Birch to answer, Jo had tightened the new coolant tank into place. "The damage was most likely caused by blunt force to the outer hull; in this case, that fleeing vehicle. Come." She said, ushering Birch over with a hand.
Birch moseyed over to Jo and peered over her shoulder. She raised the cracked tank. "The impact cracked the coolant tank, since it sits flush against the inner frame. It then leaked into the generator. In case it breaks again, use a spanner to release the bolts holding the tank in. The rest should be self-explanatory."
"Wow...thanks, ma'am."
Jo slapped a button on the side of the table. The bed slowly tilted, until the humanoid machine on its surface was in a standing position. Then, she picked up her diagnostics tablet and input a few commands. A second later, a whirring and clicking noise began to emanate from Alf, signalling that its generator had been rebooted.
Eventually, it spoke with that signature text-to-speech flavour. "MetCon VFPA online. Unit P one Alpha, power cycle complete. Synchronisation with control suite complete. Ready for operation."
