The Good for Nothings [EXCERPT]

Chapter Three

I dropped my head into my hands.

Elio had always been a bit . . . off. A bit more human than the other bots that my parents had owned throughout my childhood. Even for a bot he was small. When we stood side by side, his dented head only reached my hip, but that wasn't the only reason he was different.

Elio was originally built to be a servant bot, until something in his programming chip warped. He was supposed to be able to cook gourmet meals, but everything he made ended up burnt beyond recognition—except for his cookies, strangely enough. He was also supposed to be able to clean an entire house at top speed. But whenever he tried, the rooms ended up messier than before. My parents had attempted to fix him numerous times, but no repairs ever worked. If anything, he got messier. More human. Eventually they got tired of trying and gave him to me to play with when I was six or so. Eleven years later and he was still my best friend.

I wasn't going to lose him.

I knew exactly what would fix him—he needed a new body. His was too old, too small, and his memory core had grown too advanced to be compatible. I wiped my hands on my pants before turning to my computer and flipping through pages of data, re-reading everything that I already knew.

Elio's brain was too human, and now his body was rejecting him for it.

Heaving a sigh, I tapped a few times on my keyboard, sending a pulse of electricity down the cord straight into the back of his neck. Elio jolted, slamming my bed against the wall. The fan near his front-end processor whirred angrily, but still he didn't wake.

"Come on, you stupid piece of junk, come on!" I pounded the keyboard again, sending more electricity into his charging port. When in doubt, a good insult always roused him. It was like he refused to die out of pure spite.

A third pulse of electricity. Another jolt on my bed.

And then . . .

"Ouch!" He pulled the cord out of his port, mouth agape with horror. "I am not a stupid piece of junk."

"Welcome back, Elio."

He grimaced and balled up the cord before dropping it back on my desk. "How long was I out this time?"

"A few minutes. Not too terrible," I lied. Right before he disconnected himself from my computer the capacity in his memory core had jumped back up to 83 percent, but it was likely falling again. He had too much knowledge and not enough space to contain it.

"Can I see?" He scooted next to me, flipping through the data from his diagnostic test. I couldn't read his aura—being mechanical, he didn't have one—but during times like this I really wished that weren't the case.

After a minute, he shut off the computer and busied himself with picking up the wires I'd dropped on the floor. Somehow, he managed to twist them into a ball of knots in five seconds flat.

"My name is Elio," he recited slowly. "My favorite thing to eat is cookies—"

"You can't eat," I reminded him.

"Not yet. Just wait until someone builds me a body that can." He screwed up his eyes and continued. "My favorite thing to eat is cookies. There are one hundred and ten species of bullfish in the lake on west Condor—"

"One hundred and eleven."

"What? No, there's one hundred and . . ." A pause. "Eleven. Cora, how did I forget that there are one hundred and eleven bullfish?"

"Relax. That's such a minor fact that it's basically insignificant."

Every time Elio glitched, he temporarily lost a piece of information from his memory core. It could be anything. Something trivial (like the common lillybird migration patterns or which of the one hundred and eleven species of bullfish was most vicious during mating season), or even something critical, like the friendaversary party I'd thrown him every year since I was eight. Or his favorite cookie to bake. Or the worst glitch yet—when he forgot his name for five whole minutes.