Chapter 4: Theory only Goes so Far

Celia looks over at her holographic design as Tabby goes back to sleep, trying to see what might’ve gone wrong with it.

Well… the arm broke when he tried to adjust the metal plating on its hands, so maybe it’s something wrong with how the palm is connected to the forearm? She picked up the robotic arm, giving it a little shake and moving it around the 3D space before bringing it closer to examine the connection between the palm and the forearm. She gave the metal platings on the hand a few gentle pokes, but since the CAD program couldn’t emulate physics perfectly, nothing useful came out of doing so.

She gave her head a little scratch, wondering what she should do, before deciding to rip the metal platings off to see if there was something wrong with how the wires were connected. However, even upon closer inspection, everything looked fine.

“You’ve been staring at that for a while now you know,” a voice says from behind her. Celia turns around to see the blonde haired girl who had been piloting the butterfly drone from before.

“Haha… have I now…?” she murmurs sarcastically as she slumps her head on the table.

The girl smiles and introduces herself. “The name’s Leah, by the way,” she says as she examines the prototype Celia was building, “I don’t know much about robot limbs since I’m an Aviatics Engineer, but this looks fine to me.”

An Avian Robotics Engineer huh? That sounds a lot more complicated than the engineering I’m doing, she thinks to herself as she lazily stares up at her prototype. Now that I think about it, she realizes, we see each other every week but never really got to know each other. We should at least know each other’s names by now right? College life can be so weird…

“My name is Celia,” she mumbles, her voice muffled by her arm around her face, “this prototype looks fine, but it’s bound to break. I know it will. There was another guy over here who had a similar design to this, and it ended up breaking while he was adjusting the hand. I didn’t realize I was building the exact same thing as him until I finished it up, and the guy left before I could ask him if he had any idea what could’ve gone wrong with it…”

“Hmm…” Leah thinks, “even though I don't know much about General Robotics Engineering, I do know one thing that’s for certain; theory can only ever go so far.”

She pulls a controller out of her pocket and flies her little blue butterfly drone around Celia.

“I thought that this little guy wouldn’t do very well either, but as you can see, he ended up flying just fine. The important thing to remember is that Computer Aided Designs are mostly theoretical. You can apply all the basic knowledge and whatever engineering theories you want to it to make it work, but at the end of the day there will almost always be mistakes you can’t see using the CAD program alone. Even though you might waste materials in the process, it’s better than just staring at a prototype and getting nowhere with it.”

Celia’s eyes followed the little butterfly as it flew around her head.

“Well I am on a time crunch,” she finally says, “I suppose you’re right. Thanks Leah.”

“No problem,” Leah replied, “we engineers should help each other out when we can. I remember being a rookie as well and staring at a CAD screen for hours on end. I don't want someone to fall into that same trap.”

Rookie? Celia winces on the inside as if the word itself punctured through her heart, I’m in my second year already, but I guess that does classify as a rookie mistake…

“Well, I have to go now,” Leah says, “my time slot is almost up and you know how stingy they can get about too many engineers being in a single room.” She powers off her drone and waves goodbye before going to pack up her stuff.

Celia gets up from the table and cracks her knuckles before taking a deep breath to steel her resolve.

She walks over to the giant metal synthesizer and begins to dump the pieces of scrap metal she had in her backpack. The metal synthesizer was a giant machine that worked similarly to a smeltery and was mainly used to synthesize the specific parts engineering students might need to build their projects. There were two options for obtaining the metal; you could either pay the machine through the online interface to synthesize it from the molecular level or feed it worthless objects to salvage the metal from them for free.

Typically, most students choose the former option because it didn’t cost too much and it was much more efficient than running around collecting trash, even if the molecular synthesizer took a whole day longer to process than salvaging from pre-existing items. However, Celia’s apartment was close to a landfill, just along the borders of the city. Technically, it was illegal to take the metal from there, but through extensive testing, she secretly realized the area was not being monitored. As long as she wasn’t stealing too much junk from the landfill, she wouldn’t get caught.

Once the metal synthesizer finished processing her metals, she looked at the interface to check how much metal she had available.

13kg of aluminum, she read while trying to imagine what she could do with that amount, that’s barely enough to even construct the arm, and that’s not considering the fact that the arm is supposed to fail.

She sighs as she proceeds to press buttons on the holographic interface to select how the metal should be molded for the project. Looks like I’ll have to go back to the landfill again, she thinks to herself, not that I hate it though. Running in places where I’m not supposed to be is kinda fun.

After the materials were generated and had cooled, Celia wasted no time. She began assembling the pieces of the arm, following the design she had planned out from the CAD program. Soon enough, after about an hour of assembling her design, she was out of materials.

Crap, she said looking at her unfinished design, I knew this would happen but still… What the heck is this???

The ‘arm’ looked like a mess. It was a weird mix of gears of varying levels of tightness attached to a long, black, metal piston with rubbery, stringy, blue, tube-like wires protruding out from it, kind of like what a raw chicken drumstick looks like after cutting into it.

Well… hopefully it’ll look better once I finish it… I just have to keep in mind that this thing is meant to break in the end anyway, she reassures herself as she checks the time. 18:34, she reads, I still have a little over an hour left, but there’s nothing left for me to do in here… I guess I should head home early and collect the metals for Wednesday before it gets too dark.

She begins to pack up her things, stuffing the ‘arm’ into her backpack as she walks over to Tabby.

“C’mon Tabby, let’s go,” she says, waking him up. He gently opens his eyes and slowly detaches himself from the window, hovering closely behind Celia as the two of them leave.

On the elevator ride down, Celia takes a moment to appreciate the sunset in the distance. The golden light gleaming and reflecting off of the buildings and skyscrapers on the horizon was a beautiful sight. It was one of the few reasons why she decided to take the night classes, along with the fact that she wasn’t much of a morning person.

After exiting the elevator she begins walking towards the subway station. As she strolls across campus, she passes by different groups of students chatting away with each other, zooming past her on hoverboards, or playing in the open sports fields. Seeing everyone else in their friend groups makes her feel a small sense of sad envy. It wasn’t like she was bad at talking with people; she can get along and communicate with them just fine. The only problem was that it was hard to become friends with others who didn’t share the same interest as her.

Most bonds she felt with other students at the school felt superficial and conditional on her academic status. She couldn’t really share her interests with anyone besides Tabby and a few of her relatives anyway. After all, what was she supposed to tell them? “I want to launch a rocket into space one day, which is totally illegal, but it would be fun to try anyway!”? Surely she’d sound insane, and it would make others feel like they were talking to a soon to be wanted criminal.

She did have a small interest in making robots and repairing stuff, but she didn’t really care about it that much, and the university she was attending wasn’t known for their General Robotics program anyway. Even if she really wanted to make friends that way, she should’ve attended the newly opened Technical University of Amsterlin near the capital sector — a university that was actually known for their General Robotics program.

Am I just a boring person?  She wonders, trying not to let the loneliness overwhelm her.