Pt. 1, Chapter. 2- “Frequency”

The main streets were relatively clear of their usual bustle when Wes left home and headed up towards the college. He estimated there was maybe a good hour of blissful, empty city before the evening vitriol began to ooze back into the streets. That gave him just enough time to slip into the workshop, grab what he needed, and get back home before the streets began to overflow with the writhing throngs of city life. He grimaced at the thought of it. Too many people. Too much noise. There was a reason he attended a good ninety percent of his classes from home.

Wes ran calculations in his head, pulsing to a subtle anxiety that accompanied him whenever he had to cross normally busy segments of the city.

Fifteen minutes to the campus, fifteen back. He told himself with a deep breath. Five minutes to get downstairs to the workshop.

Wes nodded as he walked. So far, the perfect multiples of five in his minute estimations were a good sign. It didn’t mean anything truly, but it always calmed him when the numbers worked out nicely like that. Perfect numbers meant perfect results, or at the very least, visually pleasing ones.

If my new organizational system remains intact, twenty minutes tops to find what I need.

Wes’s quick steps faltered for a moment as a horrible possibility presented itself in his mind.

But if the workshop is in its usual state of nightmarish disarray...

Wes quickened his pace. Relying on faulty, unknown variables? Had his brain been replaced with static? He pulsed the frequency of self scorn. That kind of lazy, half-assed calculation only ever added up to one thing—unpredicted results. Wes didn’t have time for unpredicted results.

What if it’s worse than I can account for today? What if they undid my perfect organization? It’ll take too long to find what I need—up to an hour, potentially.

Images of a crowded central street flashed in Wes’s mind, and he felt his pulse double down on the frequency of anxiety. At its busiest, the streets of city central could quickly swallow him in a sea of moving bodies, pulling him beneath waves upon waves of pushing arms and shoving shoulders.

Wes paused for only a moment, just long enough to let the terror of the idea tickle the back of his mind. Then he took off running down the empty street towards the college in the distance.

* * *

A short time later, Wes buzzed himself into the school resource center by pulsing through his ID. As the mechanical door slid open in front of him, he rested his hands on his knees and gasped down hungry, desperate gulps of air. He had never been very athletic, but life still found ways to make him run from time to time, despite his best efforts to avoid any form of physical exertion. Once his lungs weren’t stabbing at his insides with each inhalation, he stood up, took a couple deep breaths, and walked into the building.

Now, I should have plenty of time to find everything I need, maybe even reorganize the shelves if it's bad, he reassured himself.

The Biotechnical College of Modern Medicine consumed a sizable chunk of city central, even bleeding into the adjacent 99th district. The vast campus space was comprised of three main parts: the student wing, which hosted classrooms and teacher offices; the workshop, which housed advanced tools and resources for student use; and what was referred to by students as “the applied course,” where a portion of campus was actually a functional medical office staffed by teachers and highly ranked student officials. As a student here, Wes had been to the applied course a handful of times for both assignments as well as personal health concerns. As a child, all his early developmental appointments had been conducted here on campus. The applied courses had supplied his meds as well as a few surgeries he had once needed. For your average civilian, that would have cost a fortune. Of course, Wes’s connections made money a nonissue, especially in regards to college expenses.

He banished those thoughts immediately, before they had time to get stuck in his mind. He had gotten good at that in his years away from home.

When Wes finally arrived at the workshop, he buzzed himself in and let go of the breath he had been holding onto. The anxious undertone in his frequency gave way to a pulse of full-blown relief. Everything was as exactly as he had left it, various tools and mechanical components neatly organized according to his experimental “relevance” system. Over the course of the last semester, Wes had spent some time observing how often various tools and pieces in the workshop were used, and how often more of one item needed to be ordered for the school’s supply. Based on his findings, he assigned each item stored in the workshop a number that corresponded to how frequently the item was needed. Once his preliminary data gathering had been completed, Wes was able to sort everything into the workshop’s mechanical, sliding shelves by grouping items that shared the same relevance score. It was a simple procedure really, but he predicted it would revolutionize the way his fellow students in the workshop conceptualized organizational streamlining in their own, personal storage systems and workplaces.

Wes walked to the shelf control terminal and pulsed through his ID once more to gain access. The small display screen chimed to indicate it had been unlocked, pulling up a picture of Wes from the year prior when he had last gotten his ID renewed. His hair had been shorter then, and his wavy, red-brown locks now hung well beyond his shoulders. Longer hair wasn’t a very popular style at the moment, but that kind of thing had never really concerned him.

Wes reached into his pocket and retrieved his media tablet, a rectangular display screen that stored files and doubled as a journal in which he could draw out his designs. On it, he had written out each of the components he would need to rebuild the broken drone lying on his floor back home. Next to the list, he had sketched out a quick rendering of what he envisioned the new drone looking like. Wes was calling the design “plantboy.bot” in his media tablet. He told himself it was a temporary design name, but he knew that the silly, little moniker was already sticking in his head as this drone’s new identity.

Wes double-checked plantboy’s design.

The new blueprint kept the same structure of any standard-model courier—a basic, bipedal walking machine. Problem was, Wes wouldn’t be able to add arms back onto the drone. After cracking the machine open and checking the condition of its internal structure, Wes had discovered that the drone’s shoulder supports had been compromised in the arm-removal process. That made it impossible to attach arms to any form of shoulder joint without carbon printing a new frame entirely. He could do that here at the school on one of the large-format carbon printers, but the process would take an hour minimum. Wes had ultimately decided that his time was more valuable to him in this scenario than the quality of plantboy’s torso.

Sorry, plantboy.

On any vaguely humanoid design, arms were a crucial component of the machine’s ability to balance. If he was set on using the drone’s armless frame, he would need to work around that deficiency as he was rebuilding plantboy.

Wes’s solution to this problem was relatively simple: two big, metal feet. Well, the solution was more about the ankles, really. Rather than spend the time and resources needed to calibrate the drone’s balance entirely in its legs, Wes had dipped into his study of biological life, figuring that he could create a sort of mechanical ankle for the bot to supplement its balance in the same way his own, organic feet and ankles did. He pulled up the design for the complex mechanism on his media tablet.

While it had originally seemed like the lazy design approach to take—nothing more than a work-around to bypass a broken piece—Wes had discovered a speck of genius to be found in his robotic ankle. Before his delivery had been stolen, he had been planning on using hyper-precise timers to control how much water each of his plants was receiving. Wes was pretty sure he could rig the actuators in the complex ankle mechanism he was building to be relatively precise in their own right. Now all he needed was an old-fashioned watering can. Sure, he was swapping automation for a small level of manual labor, but he theorized that it may be even more precise in its end result. By affixing a large watering can to the head of the drone, Wes could manually fill the can with precisely how much water he hoped to expend. In place of his stolen timers, he could write a program that had the drone’s ankle mechanism lock at a specific angle, causing the can on the drone’s head to dispense water on whatever plant it stood in front of. The program could substitute for a timer by controlling exactly how far the drone would lean forward, as steeper angles would cause water to dispense much faster from the can. In a janky, roundabout way, that would let Wes tailor the amount of water dispensed to the needs of each plant, just as he had wanted to do with the timers. It wouldn't be as accurate as the timers would have been, but it would have to do. From there, all he needed to do was calculate the rate at which water dispensed from the nozzle of the can on an average pouring, which would give him the information he needed to extrapolate the varied angles to program into the ankle mechanism.

Wes had already decided on what angle constituted a “baseline pour” from the can, and used it to deduce the water dispensary rate through a series of complex equations that he had finished up before leaving the house. He quickly scrolled over to the calculations, which spanned multiple pages of writing, and double checked his work.

I may be a mechanical genius after all, Wes thought, pulsing to what was perhaps his rarest frequency—self pride.

Wes chuckled to himself as he looked over the design. The whole thing was simultaneously simple and needlessly complicated all at once—silly and stupid. But it worked. It worked, and it was his. Entirely his. He had come up with the solution and designed each custom part by himself. Perhaps that’s what made him love plantboy the most—the fact that it was all his. Creating plantboy made Wes feel smart. But more than that, more than simply highlighting his own intelligence, creating plantboy made Wes feel creative.

In everyday life, he often found himself bothered by any design that didn’t shortcut its way into perfect efficiency. But this design was different for some reason. He had subverted any logical solution to his problem, while still accomplishing his end goal with relative precision and efficiency. His design was the definition of the phrase, “just crazy enough to work.” But the best part? It would look entirely ridiculous from the outside—a robot with a mundane watering can strapped to its head. No, it wasn’t until you delved into the deeper functions of the bot, into the very heart of the machine itself, that you would detect just how clever and well-designed the whole thing was.

Wes used the control terminal to navigate his perfectly organized shelves of machine components, which slid along a mechanized track in the ceiling of the workshop. As he retrieved the pieces of his little project, pulsing contentedly, Wes found himself to be genuinely excited. Perhaps plantboy would be the first engineering project that didn’t make him immediately remember his disdain for the entire field of robotics.

“Wesley?” A soft, older voice questioned from the door.

Wes jumped, dropping a few machine components which hit the ground with a heavy thunk. He had been so caught up in his drone design that he had somehow managed to ignore the sound of heavy workshop doors opening behind him. Wes quickly picked up his pieces before turning to face the source of the voice.

Professor Hennil, his Advanced Sensory Robotics teacher, watched him with a cocked head as the automatic entrance closed behind her. She was an older woman, with pure-white hair buzzed to its shortest length. She wore a long, white lab coat with the simple staff ID badge pinned to the front pocket, like an exposed motherboard encased in glass. Pulsing through the device would allow her to quickly display her identity, station, and rank in a compact holographic projection. A thick strip of metallic gold underlined both of her faded, green eyes, an indication of visual augmentation.

“It’s the first day of 3rd cycle break, dear. What are you doing here?” Professor Hennil pulsed to amusement, a smile cracking on her face.

“I uh, got an idea. Needed to get some stuff to build it.” Wes tried to hide his embarrassed frequency behind a playful chuckle. The persona he had just maintained a moment earlier, that of a confident and clever designer, dissipated into nothing but awkward, bumbling static.

“Must be quite the idea, then. Mind if I take a look?”

“Uh, yeah, sure. Here,” Wes set down the pieces he had retrieved and walked over to her, handing her the media tablet. Hennil scrolled through the pages of design, followed by the calculations, before settling on Wes’s sketch of the drone with a watering can strapped to its head.

“Hm. Interesting,” Hennil noted to herself, pulse shifting from amusement to intrigue momentarily. “I take it this is some kind of liquid transport?”

That was a silly thing to call it, but she said the words with the same, serious inflection in her voice. Wes knew it was the voice of a seasoned mechanist and designer. Before taking up life as an educator, Hennil had been the lead designer at AM-Peer, one of the founding companies of the Governmental-Company Alliance.

“A greenhouse bot, actually,” Wes corrected, still pulsing to embarrassment. Damn, it was a tricky frequency to shut off once it got going.

“And this,” Hennil said, scrolling to the sketch of the ankle mechanism, “some kind of compounded actuator?”

“Uh, that’s actually an ankle,” Wes stated, not thinking to offer any clarification.

Hennil looked at him over the tablet, raising an eyebrow.

“Pardon?”

“Well, I had my timer relays stolen so I’m using a courier drone to make a bot that can lean forward to water my plants without losing its balance and falling over. Hence the ankle.” Wes pointed to his head as he explained, as if he too had a watering can strapped to his torso where his face would be.

“A bot for garden duty is certainly—” Hennil’s contemplative expression shifted suddenly to confusion, and she pulsed briefly in concern. “Wait, did you say they were stolen?”

“I guess the courier was walking through swapper territory. They must have cut off its arms and taken my package. When it showed up to my house it didn’t have either,” Wes explained.

“I see.” Hennil eyed him, still visibly confused. “That is rather unfortunate.”

Wes offered a half-nod in response.

“So instead of a timer-based system you’re going to attach a watering can to the head of this,” Hennil paused to glance back down at the media tablet. “This plantboy.”

“That’s correct, Professor,” Wes said, standing up a little straighter and finally managing to get his embarrassed pulse under control.

Hennil thought for a moment, looking over Wes’s calculations before speaking again.

“Don’t you think that’s a little—”

“Silly?” Wes interjected, suddenly worrying about the critique of a master engineer looking over his design. “I know there are easier ways to accomplish this, but—”

Wes lept to soften the blow of incoming criticism, but Hennil raised a silencing hand, pulsing to the frequency of consideration. After a moment in thought, she smiled.

“I admit, I was going to say ‘foolish,’ but the word carries more of a negative connotation than I intend to express. You’re absolutely correct, Wesley. The proper descriptor, I suppose, is infact silly. But more than that, I would venture to call this contraction clever.”

Wes blinked. His professor, who was perhaps one of the most intelligent mechanists in the field of robotic design, had just complimented his creation. Almost immediately, the split-second of stunned pride reversed itself in full force. Wes wasn’t sure how to react. What was the appropriate pulse here? Pride? Gratitude? Did he thank her or try to turn down the compliment? I mean, he was far from deserving of such praise.

Wes’s mind began to buzz with a torrent of thoughts.

This isn’t praise I can accept, right? No, it’s meant for someone else, someone who will actually do something with their life. I was just tinkering with a broken-down drone that plopped its corpse onto my front porch. Plantboy isn’t more than a lazy fix for my greenhouse problems. And people have probably designed a mechanical ankle before, right? Does she know that? Does she know I’m just cheating my way into this praise?

The thoughts quickly overwhelmed his mind, and Wes felt his lungs grow tighter. His hands were shaking lightly, and the lights in the room seemed to get intense suddenly, overwhelming even. They were like massive spotlights, projecting beams of hot, uncomfortable attention onto him. He wanted to leap for something to hide behind, somewhere safe where he could curl into a ball and drown in the whispers echoing in his mind. They reminded him that this was just a mistake, that this was a trap. This was a tactic from Hennil to expose him as the fraud that he was. Wes tenses his muscles, unsure if he was fighting the urge to run or simply paralyzed out of fear. Suddenly the tightness in his lungs snapped, and Wes realized that he hadn’t been breathing. He drew in a stuttering breath, but it wasn’t enough. His breaths devolved into quick, short bursts, like he had just run from his house to the workshop.

Wes tried to pull himself from the deafening static in his head by focusing on Hennil. She was saying something. What was she saying? He could see her lips moving, but sounds were still impossible to make out through the din of the voices in his head, bombarding his mind with questions and doubts. Wes slipped a hand into one of the side pockets of his smock and felt through the contents until his finger grazed something cool and metallic. The sudden sensation seemed to spark something in Wes, and he was able to recognize the panic that was building in him.

With some concentrated effort, Wes managed to get his breathing back under control. He felt the voices in his head grow quieter as he grasped the coin in his pocket, running its smooth edges against the palm of his hand. He took a breath and tried to focus on Hennil once more. As he did so, her words began to become clear again. Part of Wes relaxed suddenly, and he felt himself pulse distantly to reassurance.

“—so I do believe there could be quite a few applications for a mechanism like this,” she was saying. “Very well designed, Wesley.”

Wes managed to nod and smile like he had been listening. Hennil handed the tablet to him and clasped her hands behind her back, adopting a professional-looking stance that would have intimidated Wes if his brain space wasn’t already occupied by dozens of chattering thoughts. What was he pulsing right now? Was it a mess of mixing frequencies, or nothing at all? Wes just hoped it hadn’t been confusion, or something equally embarrassing. He could only feel his frequency as something distant, like an audio file being played at its lowest volume in another room.

“Of course, I should expect nothing less from the child of Muirenn and Khels, two of this college’s very finest. Indeed, it seems you have inherited their intelligence on the front of robotic innovation.”

Wes felt the comment jolt through him suddenly. It resonated clearly in his mind, turning the rest of his swarming thoughts into a quiet layer of background static. Wes gripped the coin in his pocket with a full fist, forcing himself with some effort to not immediately pulse to defeat. Hennil continued.

“You know, it was in this very workshop fifty-some years ago that their breakthrough brought us modern amp-intuitive technology. Yes, I remember what life was like before such conveniences were available.” Hennil laughed at her own remarks. “Forgive me. I’m sure you are already quite aware of such facts. I can’t help but wonder in excitement at what your grand discoveries in this field shall bring into the world.”

Wes didn’t move. All his energy was being devoted to preventing himself from pulsing in a way that would expose his true feelings on the subject. He forced a generous smile to appear on his face.

“Uh, maybe it’ll be robot ankles?” Wes managed to stammer out.

Hennil laughed.

“Yes, perhaps it will be. Do me a favor and lock the terminal when you leave the workshop, Wesley.”

Hennil dismissed herself with a polite nod, and turned towards the door. She buzzed herself out, pulsing through the badge on her lab coat which beeped as she did so. She turned over her shoulder before leaving.

“Oh, and Wesley?”

Wes blinked.

“It was a delight to run into you, but please make sure to take an adequate break before classes resume. Wouldn’t want you to use up all your brilliance on robot ankles before getting to my class,” Hennil smiled, pulsing to indicate a joking tone.

“I’ll try not to,” Wes responded, adding a chuckle that he hoped sounded amused.

Then she turned and exited the workshop.

Wes leaned against the shelf control terminal and slid to the ground, letting go of the coin he had been gripping in his pocket. He fought against the instinctual pulse of defeat, but it leaked out of him anyway like a low, pathetic whine. He wished he could express something else for once—anger, frustration, maybe even just cold, honest sadness. But it was always defeat. Just empty, meaningless defeat.

It seems you have inherited their intelligence on the front of robotic innovation, Hennil’s voice repeated in his mind.

It’s always their intelligence, Wes thought. That’s what I am, after all. Theirs.

It took effort to think the thoughts. For a time, all he could manage to do was sit there, his professor’s words reverberating through his skull. The automatic lights of the workshop detected no movement after a while, and shut off, but Wes still didn’t get up.

The only light remaining in the room was the glow of Wes’s media tablet and the control panel of the workshop terminal. Wes glanced down at the media tablet next to where he sat. His eyes scanned across the sketch of plantboy, trying to distract from the emptiness that had turned his mind into static. But it was no use. The spark of proud creativity was gone now.

Then Wes’s eyes flickered across the media tablet’s time display, and he felt a vague feeling emerge through the emotional smog. It was anxiety, he realized. But why was he anxious?

Realization crystallized slowly in his mind.

I have to get home.

His hour of empty streets was fading fast. He didn’t have time to sit here and mope, he needed to get back home before people flooded the streets.

Come on, pull yourself up. Wes tried to point the thought at himself with as much feeling as he could muster. Find something to feel again, grab onto it and hoist yourself up.

Wes pulled himself to his feet, triggering the workshop’s automated lighting. He blinked against the sudden brightness, then spotted his machine parts as his vision adjusted. He shoved the components into a bag that someone had left behind, slinging it over one shoulder. He took a precious few moments to stymie his own defeated pulse, regaining some control over his emotional expression. He couldn’t eliminate the feeling in his own mind just yet, but he could at least stop his pulse from expressing the emotion. That was the first step to locking the feelings away again.

After centering himself, Wes pulsed through his ID at the door. Even waiting for the large, metal door to slide open was agonizing, as he was now all-too-aware of his dwindling minutes. Wes turned to the side and shimmied through the small crack before the workshop entrance had even finished opening all the way.

He checked his tablet once more. 10 minutes before nightlife consumed the city streets. The familiar rattle of an anxious frequency flickered in his amp like a dying circuit. That was good. If he was going to get home before the streets flooded, he was going to need to feel something, anything to convince himself to move again.

If he booked it back towards the house, he could probably still make it through light street traffic. He took a deep breath and pulsed to a vaguely optimistic frequency, trying to prepare his body for more running—this time with the added weight of machine parts in a bag slung over one shoulder and a panic attack threatening to shut down his muscles.

Wes took a deep breath. Then he remembered.

I forgot to lock the terminal. The thought pounded in his mind suddenly like a blow to the head.

He glanced at his tablet once more, anxiety amplifying in his pulse as he imagined the crowded streets of city central.

9 minutes.

Wes groaned. Then he booked it back towards the workshop, only minutes remaining before he would need to push his way through swarms of people just to make it back home.