Wes used the evening to get some more work done. He ran the calculations for Plantboy’s power usage and adjusted the charging bay to better siphon power from the greenhouse solar cell. After that, he plugged a data cable into Plantboy and went searching through all the new self-written code. Initially, he had set out to classify each of Plantboy’s emotional responses by giving them designations in the same way that pulses had corresponding emotions. Instead, he had opened the code and been met with an overflowing wealth of those strange number sequences he had never seen before. This discovery had completely captured his attention and spawned an entirely new project.

Wes copied down what he could of the various number sequences and pulled them into a new file that he labeled, “robotic enlightenment.” There, he started breaking down the millions and millions of numbers into smaller, processable pieces.

Slowly, a pattern began to emerge.

Wes isolated several number sequences that seemed to repeat and found that they were all perfectly one-hundred digits long. Some of them mirrored similar repetitions, but with different numbers. That somewhat confirmed what he was already suspecting: this was a program of some kind, and the repeating bits were likely standardized program functions. Now he just needed to figure out what they did and where they had come from.

Wes spent the next couple hours sitting at the kitchen table with his tablet, slowly breaking down chunks of numbers. He had planned on comparing the number sequences to pieces of other programming languages to search for similarities, but after another two hours of staring at meaningless code, Wes felt his stomach growl and his focus falter.

He tried to ignore the hunger and press on, but the digits across his display screen were beginning to blur together. Wes rubbed at his sore eyes and blinked hard. His theory was slipping away from him and it was infuriating. He tried to tell himself that he’d have some piece of it figured out in another hour, but the gurgles coming from his empty stomach protested noisily.

Wes stood up to stretch, pushing away from the table, his tablet, and the growing headache laid out on his display screen. He had carelessly assumed that the mysterious number sequences would have some sort of mathematical outcome. They were numbers, after all, and math was Wes’s primary means of interacting with numbers. But that was the problem. They weren’t actual numbers. They were more like letters, and each string of code was like a long, complicated word. He had been trying to solve an equation that was actually a paragraph written in another language.

Wes retrieved some filtered water from the water dispensary and took a mild painkiller for the dull ache that was beginning to press in behind his eyes. He pulsed to annoyance absentmindedly—an action that only exacerbated the headache further—and sipped his water. Eating felt like it was just another roadblock preventing him from figuring out some aspect of this puzzle, but he forced himself to turn on the cook top and gather ingredients for a quick meal.

As Wes cooked, he stopped occasionally to show his progress to an ever-curious Plantboy, who seemed intent on being walked through the entire process. Wes pulled open a sealed package of freeze-dried kelp steak and presented it to the drone before breaking the stale, green block into a couple chunks and dropping the pieces into his pan of gurgling brown sauce. If he didn’t stop to show off his ingredients before adding them to the mix, the petulant little bot would begin to bleat voiceline after voiceline, demanding that Wes confirm his delivery. Wes was sure that the bot had no way to conceptualize what cooking was, but it insisted on studying his actions through both of its camera feeds anyway. He had tried to distract Plantboy with a toss of the rubber ball to give himself some breathing room in the compact kitchen, but the newly sentient bot seemed to completely lose all interest in the ball now that a new and more interesting topic had presented itself for study.

Once the meal was ready, Wes collected his dishes and began running them through a cycle in the kitchen sterilizer before sitting down at the table to eat. Plantboy sidled up to the kitchen table and raised itself up on its mechanical legs until it was able to look down at the surface. It watched as Wes cut off a piece of the soft, green plant tissue and raised it to his mouth.

Wes opened his mouth to take a bite but found himself hesitating awkwardly. He lowered his eating utensils and arched an eyebrow at Plantboy. It was growing increasingly difficult to ignore the constant surveillance of the leering bot.

“It’s, uh, a little hard to eat with you staring at me like that.”

“Please confirm your delivery?” the bot asked, cocking both of its cameras to the side slightly.

Wes now understood that this gesture represented the question “what-are-you-doing.” Plantboy had relentlessly been asking through the entire cooking process. He wasn’t sure if he had the time, energy, or ability to properly explain the concept of food and eating in a way that wouldn’t cause a fatal short-circuit in the bot’s limited brain capacity.

Wes set down his utensils and considered a response for a moment before simply stating:

“Eating.”

It was a one-word designation like he had used to teach Plantboy cleaning. Then he motioned to the plate.

“Food.”

Another one-word designation. He was keeping it as simple as possible.

The bot seemed to be processing quietly to itself, so Wes continued.

“Charging.”

He reached out to the Plantboy and tapped the open side of the bot’s chassis where the charging cable connected to a port in the primary power cell. Plantboy took a step back and swiveled one camera down to look at itself where Wes had indicated while keeping the other camera fixed on the plate of food. Wes pointed to the port again, then to his mouth.

“Ea-ting,” he over-pronounced.

Again, the bot seemed to mull over the new concept for a time. Wes used this pause as an opportunity to take a bite of the food in a comically slow and drawn-out way. Eating for the sake of robot education was somewhat less awkward than being silently watched through an entire meal by a curious bot.

Something flickered on Plantboy’s screen suddenly. Wes stared at the display for a few seconds before finally processing what he was being shown.

Plantboy had pulled up a visual display of its battery status. The chart was brightly colored, and likely leftover from some courier-bot factory’s diagnostic program. The screen presented a large percentage readout in a green circle, alongside a list of procedures that were actively draining the bot’s battery. Wes noted that “primary_display” was at the top of the list of power consumption, though most of the other procedures were listed as long number strings that took up multiple lines and ultimately bled together to blot out half of the display screen altogether.

Something in Wes’s explanation had clicked, and Plantboy had understood that this new process—eating—had something to do with power. Wes nodded excitedly.

“Yes!” he said, pulsing to encouragement. “Yes, that’s correct! Eating.”

He slowly took another bite to emphasize the action, then tapped on Plantboy’s charging port once more. The bot spun in a celebratory circle, flashing the battery display on its screen again and again.

“Delivery confirmed!” it beeped.

Static, Wes thought. It learns fast! Such a complex concept but it required barely any explanation at all. Is Plantboy speeding up?

Wes grabbed his tablet and hurriedly searched his pockets for a stylus. He needed to take notes! Clearly Plantboy was a visual learner, but just like the rest of Plantboy’s existence, that didn’t make any sense. What part of the emotion module was translating the bot’s camera feed into concepts and ideas? Such a process would have taken a very complex and very expensive level of processing power.

He produced the stylus from his pocket and the screen of his tablet flickered to life in his hand with a faint glow. But before he could pull up a clean area to jot down some notes, the device pulsed digitally to indicate an incoming communication request.

That was odd.

He didn’t often receive digital communications. Sometimes a classmate would ping him about schoolwork, but such messages were facilitated through secured AM-Peer student channels. This wasn’t a quick ping, this was a full-blown communication request. Someone was trying to send him a proper digital message. Occasionally he’d receive communication requests like this parental unit two, but he had set his tablet to immediately delete those. He couldn’t think of anyone else who would be trying to contact him, so he forgot about his Plantboy notes for a moment and tapped on the incoming communication.

Maybe it’s the delivery company refunding me for the timer switches, a hopeful piece of his brain conjectured.

The message was of a relatively small file size. It was tagged as a non-urgent request and the time stamp indicated that it had been sent a few hours ago, back when Wes had been trying to analyze Plantboy’s self-writing code. Upon seeing the sender ID, he instinctually pulsed to understanding. The communication request was registered to user ID: AMPU.UH013. That was Professor Hennil’s ID.

Wes pulsed the message open without giving it much more thought.

>>Communication begins:

Wesley, [Frequency: Greetings]

Apologies for interrupting you once more during your break [Frequency: Apologetic], but I have been considering our conversation in the workshop yesterday. Seeing your design for the multiple linked servos in your “mechanical ankle” had me hopeful that you would be pursuing further robotics hours for next quarter’s education contract. Upon review of your academic record, I see that this is not the case [Frequency: Concern]. As your academic representative, it is my responsibility to advise you in these matters.

For the following quarter’s academic contract, you have logged every hour of your schedule in the applied course. I’d like to advise against this [Frequency: Advising]. Wesley, you are a plenty capable medic already. You could pass the GCA certification exam whenever you should choose to do so [Frequency: Commendation].

Don’t waste your time [Frequency: Advising]. Medical competency accounts for only 38% of your contract’s completion requirements. You have more than surpassed that parameter. Time and time again you receive perfect scores for your work in the applied [Frequency: Commendation]. I think it’s time you shift your focus to the other 62% of your academic contract: robotics [Frequency: Recommendation].

I’ve granted you temporary clearance to change the terms of your education contract for next quarter, and I’d like you to consider what I’ve said. Use the provided credentials [Frequency: Explanation]:

ID: AMPU.WA00514

Clearance Code: 9917-6//8400-2

Additionally, I’d like to extend an offer. If you’re willing to adjust your education contract for next quarter to focus on putting more hours into the workshop and my classroom, I’ll sign off on your current greenhouse drone as a contracted project for next quarter [Frequency: Earnest]. I’ll personally grant you full funding and resource access, and you’ll receive academic compensation for the hours you’ve spent on the project already. Your ankle mechanism was clever and well produced [Frequency: Earnest, Commendation]. I’d like to see more from you.

This is a reasonable offer, I presume [Frequency: Friendly]? It would be a shame to see the design wasted on a scrapped drone when the schematics have so much more potential. Have you conducted preliminary testing yet? I would be interested to hear how your design has been implemented.

Please consider what I have said, but do not let this consume your break [Frequency: Request]. I will speak to you once classes have resumed.

Prof. Hennil

>>Communication ends.

Wes traced back over Hennil’s words again, not really reading them so much as glaring at them. He furrowed his brow as his vision drifted over the section of communication that asked him to change his academic hours for the next quarter. He pulsed open a response channel but hesitated before committing any words to the screen.

Then he closed the entire communication and slumped in his chair, pulsing heavily to exhaustion.

This was too much for right now.

Thus far, he had managed (albeit shakily) to deal with the sentient robot anomaly and the stranger hiding from a militant faction. He was anxious, but he wasn’t an idiot. Except for a couple small panic attacks, he had managed to keep his brain from imploding by taking things one at a time. He took a breath and shut his eyes, rubbing at the sides of his head where the aching still lingered. He was going to get through this, he just needed to be able to take things at his own pace.

Wes willed himself to put the communication from Hennil out of his mind for now. He set down his tablet, stabbed a piece of kelp steak with his knife, and popped it into his mouth. It was perfect—glazed with sauce and crispy and wonderfully soft through the middle. He had to chew between open-mouth breaths with how hot the meal still was.

Wes swallowed and looked to Plantboy, who cocked both of its cameras at him and flashed the battery display on its display screen once more.

“Delivery confirmed?”

Wes couldn’t help but grin at the bot. Static, it was almost cute in a way despite its cut-up-and-cobbled-back-together exterior.

“Yeah, bud. Delivery confirmed.”

Wes was able to finish his meal despite the unflinching gaze of the curious bot watching him. When he was done, he tasked Plantboy with mopping up a nonexistent mess on the floor, and the bot happily practiced its one-legged cleaning routine. That gave him some space to tidy the kitchen one more time. Afterwards, he took a concentrated breath and gathered his in-home medical supplies. It was finally time to face the anxieties he had sealed behind the door to the study. He was going to check on EJ like he should have hours ago.

One thing at a time, he reminded himself.

He’d help EJ recover, he’d solve Plantboy’s mystery code, and he’d figure out his academic contract. He just needed to handle things one at a—

Just then, a muffled thump sounded from the direction of the living room, as if hurrying Wes along. He dropped his sterilizer next to the water dispensary and hopped over to the room where EJ had been sleeping.

Wes took a deep breath, then reached for the door switch with an optimistic pulse.