Chapter 8: Stars like These

Celia flips herself over the fence as she takes a moment to look around the place in disbelief, wondering how they ended up navigating back to the street where she lived. She looks down the road across the street and sees her apartment complex, confirming her suspicions.

“I’m back home!” she shouted out, unable to contain her excitement and relief that she didn’t have to spend more time finding her way back.

A few metallic creaking noises could be heard from behind her as she turned around to see Alto climbing his way out of the alleyway they were just in.

After landing down on the street, he takes a few moments to recalibrate himself as he looks around the place.

“This place looks familiar,” he says scanning the area, “I believe my home point is near this area… it should be around this street somewhere.”

He continues to look around the place as Celia curiously watches him. Suddenly, he looks at her apartment across the road, and points to it.

“I’ve found it,” he says, looking back at her, “my system is telling me that that is my home point.”

Celia froze.

“But that’s where I live… your home point is in my apartment?” she asks.

“It seems so,” he replied.

The two of them stare at each other awkwardly in a mixture of surprise at the coincidence and confusion on what to do next.

“I suppose… we should head there,” Alto suggests.

Celia stiffly nods and the two of them head towards her apartment

—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well that was a bit boring, Celia thinks to herself as she began repairing Alto’s memory drives, although I suppose it is weird that his home point was set to my apartment complex... Did his previous owner used to live here?

Dozens of questions flooded her mind as she continued to tinker with his memory drives.

Well, I suppose I’ll get the answers tomorrow.

After a few more minutes of tinkering, she examines her finished product, picking it up to inspect its older design closely.

Like many other older robots, the memory cards were small and fragile, and stacked together into a secure tray that was then compiled together as a whole. This made them much more susceptible to damage however, but the pros of having the memory drives be split into multiple little cards meant that if one was corrupted, the rest wouldn’t be. Modern memory drives functioned the same way, except that the cards were much more stable, slightly bigger, and ran a lot faster, which was why Celia was so confident that she could repair them, since their designs didn’t change too much over the years.

After she finishes inspecting the card, she places it back into the tray, grabs a small piston tool, and climbs up the ladder in her room to the rooftop.

According to Alto, his homepoint was set to a room that someone else currently occupied on the second floor, so it wasn’t exactly set to her home, which made sense since her room was on the highest floor which was a more recent addition to the building. She knew her apartment complex was old, but not over a century old. She only chose the place because it was cheaper, offered newer rooms at the top, and allowed her to customize her room which was an important feature to her because it meant that she could add a mini workshop in there.

On the rooftop, she found Alto where she had put him; his body sat upright at the center of the roof so that nobody could see him if they were looking from the bottom of the building. Even though there was no sunlight out at the moment for him to recover his energy, they decided that powering him off on the roof while she repaired his drives and setting him out until tomorrow morning was a much more efficient method than having to power him on and off.

She walked up to him and used the piston to jab into a small button that was hidden on his back near his neck. Much like the rest of his body, the button was tightly sealed and had to be roughly pushed by a strong machine like a piston. Once it was pushed, his body let out a soft pssh sound as the hatch on his back opened up, revealing his inner mechanisms.

It wasn’t too different from most robots built back then, but she could tell a large amount of effort was put into the structure of his frame. Although she didn’t have Tabby here to analyze it, because Alto was created during the time period when humanity was trying to alloy different metals to create new ones, she could tell by her experience with metals and the amateur makeup of its design that it was made up of an old tungsten steel alloy that was then alloyed together with a newer titanium-chromium alloy. Nowadays, they had a much more refined and mass produced version of the alloy called Terrasteel.

After placing his memory drives back in, she closes the hatch and uses the piston to seal the button back onto his back. Taking a step back, she takes a moment to take a more appreciative look at his design. Now that she knew that his purpose was to explore and gather data on the moon, she didn’t find the fact that his body was completely sealed together, so weird anymore. The moon contained lots of space debris that could easily slip into the smallest cracks of an ordinary machine, so sealing off the robot as much as possible was an important design choice.

Now that I think about it, this was probably how he was able to survive out in the landfills for so long, she realized, if the acid rain couldn’t slip into his inner systems, then it couldn’t dissolve any parts of it as well. The fact that he was also under a large pile of trash also made it harder for the rain to slip through, but since his memory drives were still slightly damaged, it meant that it wasn’t completely foolproof. Still though… a lot of things must’ve been considered when his design was built… I wonder if I'll ever be as good of an engineer as his creators...

She looked up at the thousands of pretty stars that lit up the night sky.

I wonder what the real stars look like, she pondered, I heard that people used to look up at the stars like this when they were in deep wonder. Perhaps people still did, but I find it hard to make an emotional connection with stars like these.

She walked back to the hatch above her apartment, looking around to make sure no one else was coming out of theirs. It wouldn’t be too big of a deal if someone else decided to come up to the roof since charging larger robots on the roof was a normal occurrence, it was just that she would feel a sense of weirdness if someone saw Alto’s older model. She didn’t want to be on the other end of a ‘That’s weird robot. I wonder who it belongs to’.

Celia climbs down the ladder and looks at the clock on the wall.

It’s already past midnight huh? she thinks as she reads the time, I should go to bed soon, but I’m typically up longer than this anyway. I suppose today has been really exhausting with everything that’s happened so far, but I’m still a bit curious about Alto... a few extra minutes of research wouldn’t hurt right?

She goes back to the workbench that was right next to her bed, and pops open a large lid at the top of the table that conveniently stored and flipped over into her laptop.

Let’s see… she thinks, typing in the keywords, ‘ALTO robot ’ into the search bar.

A bajillion results popped up talking about random robots that had a similar name to him like Arlo, Malto, Elto, and others. Annoyed, she rephrased the search terms into ‘“ALTO” robot’  to filter out the searches to only ones that contained the word ALTO in them, but she was instead greeted with another robot called Altorobot, a drone that was made for mountain climbing.

“Damnit,” she cursed silently. I know he’s over a century old but these databases contain information from over 2 centuries ago.

Not giving up yet, she typed ‘ “Autonomous Lunar Terrain Observer" ' and this time only one search popped up — an article from 2110 titled “Shutdown of the Century? NASA’s new Autonomous Lunar Terrain Observer said to be Decommissioned Before Release?”

Reading the title made her heart sink.

He never really did get to go to the moon didn’t he? Celia wondered, his dreams were shut down before he could even attempt to chase after them… just like mine… I wonder if he was thrown into the landfills after losing his purpose…

The thought alone made her sad.

She clicks on the article trying to learn more about what happened back then, but was instead met with a paywall.

Drats, she cursed under her breath.

Articles like that weren’t allowed to be created anymore due to newer legislation, but older ones created before it were allowed to keep their paywall due to the legal complaints from consumers who already paid for access. Even if Celia was curious enough to pay for the information, she still couldn’t do so because the company that owned the website went bankrupt decades ago.

She lets out a sigh and decides that this was her sign to go to sleep, as she closes her laptop and heads to bed.

—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next morning, she was woken up by sounds of a soft methodical beeping noise from above her roof.

Curse these stupid neighbors, always making unnecessary noises, she thinks to herself as she groggily wakes up, wait a minute, what am I even talking about? I live on the highest floor…

Suddenly, she remembers Alto, and hastily jumps out of bed, swiftly climbing up the ladder to the roof while still in her pajamas. 

The sunlight crept on the horizon, basking the sky in a brilliant shade of golden orange, as she sees Alto sitting down, staring at the outside wall of the stairway to the roof. As she got closer, she noticed that his eyes were projecting a video onto it.

“Good morning Celia,” Alto greets her, upon noticing her walking towards him, “it seems that you have successfully repaired my memory drives. Would you like to view them together with me?”