Street Science: Part 3

Two days later, Ariag was still at work. She'd taken occasional food or bathroom breaks, but other than that she remained glued to her workbench. This was, to her, the most fascinating project of her life. It wasn't built like a normal android. 

What she'd thought at first were decorative grooves were actually fold lines. The outer plating was one solid piece that had somehow been origami-folded into the shape of a person. Once she figured that out, she was able to painstakingly remove it to expose the robot's chassis. 

The inner workings were equally strange: no sign of batteries, an engine, or any other conventional power source. Everything else was in surprisingly good condition, though, and had clearly been well made in the first place.

 The biggest surprise was that it still had a full memory chip. It was the size of her palm, thin as paper, and made from the same strange, flexible metal as the outer layers, embedded with tiny iridescent crystals. 

Gingerly, Ariag finished lifting the chip out with a pair of tweezers. Now, finally, she could hook it up to her tablet and see what kind of programming the robot had. That might give her some clues as to what it was used for and how to wake the thing up. 

She connected the last wire, turned the tablet on, and hit the icon to “download all files”. Images flashed across the screen, way too fast for her to make out what was going on. Then, the wires attaching the tablet to the chip started to crackle and smoke. Ariag yelped. 

“That’s not good!” 

She yanked the wires off of both devices, burning her fingertips in the process. As she stuck them in her mouth to cool, an alert popped up on the tablet screen.

Reading between the lines of the full-page error report, Ariag’s jaw dropped. The gist of it was that there was too much information on the chip for her tablet to process. So much in fact that the tablet was now broken. 

“That shouldn’t even be possible.” She grumbled, cancelling the download. “This thing’s brand new, highest processing capacity on the market. I ought to know, I stole it myself.” 

She turned to the lifeless android and sighed. “You are just one enormous mystery, aren’t you?” 

It didn’t reply. Ariag rolled her eyes. “Fine. Be like that, then. But once I find a power source and get you working again, I will figure this out.” 

The only problem, she thought as she put the chip back in its place, was that she had no idea what kind of power this thing used. Well, that was a problem for tomorrow. After two days of no sleep, she was exhausted. Ariag barely had the energy to make it to the nearest pile of cushions before she collapsed and started to snore. 

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