Episode 9: Decisions and Upgrades

20 6 19
                                    

"I'm gonna kill him." Uka said stomping to the den.

"The robot?" asked Lawg.

"Yes, the damn robot." she barked.

"I think technically you can't because he is artificial. He'd have to be alive before you killed him. You could shut him down." yawned Marley, entering the conversation with a bowl of cereal.

"You shut up." she growled.

"Hey, I'm trying to fix him. He's an older model, do you know what happens to a hard drive when you design it 30 years ago and try to update it to modern drivers after being intended for combat, then reprogrammed for dancing, then reprogrammed for combat. The operating system is all solid state, its not designed to be re-written, let alone over and over. It's a miracle he even functions at all." he protested.

"All he does is sing and dance, and then power down because he overheated. All he is good for is hand-to-hand combat and when we aren't being attacked, I have to listen to him recite show-tunes, and if we ever need him to kill something...he'll probably be overheated and shut-down." she barked, motioning to the very quiet android, slumped in mid jazz-hands near the airlock. Lawg peered up in thought. Shallow thought.

"Well, that's what you get with a gay robot...showtunes and drama. You add defective and you have random shutdowns and constant re-boots. What am I supposed to do?" asked Lawg, enjoying a bite of his candy bar sundae.

"If fluff-dexter doesn't find a replacement part to fix him, I'm gonna have a meltdown of my own and reboot everyone." she growled.

"You really need to get laid more." Lawg muttered. Marley sighed in frustration.

"I can't fix him with toothpicks and glue you know. We have been scavenging the debris field for 3 days and all I got is junk. I can't adapt ancient technology." Marley defended. "So unless you can find something made this century with solid-state hardware above 800 terraflops, I got nothing." said Marley, throwing his last attempt at a solution across the room. They felt the slight shutter of the shuttle craft docking, Duffy returning with either a good find or good reason to stop looking. "So if you wanna stop complaining for a minute, you can help me dig through the junk Duffy just spent 4 hours scavenging and pray for a piece of modern tech." he said shuffling to the cargo bay.

"The hell is it?" Marley asked, getting nose-to-nose with an odd bit of alien tech, resembling a baseball-sized sphere with a tail of wires leading from it. He waved the scanner and looked shocked.

"Haooooowly jackpot." he muttered.

"Good find? Think it's got enough memory or ram or whatever you need?" asked Duffy.

Well, I needed 30 percent more than we currently had, this scans shows whatever this is could store about 600 robots and have room for my DVD collection in 30 million P quality. Whatever this is...its more advanced than anything I've ever seen...and it's super old. Where did you find it?" he asked.

"It sort of...found me." she explained. The bunny's eyebrow rose slowly as he turned with a concerned look.

"Oh do elaborate on that little alarming bit." Marley asked.

"Well, I got a signal that looked like a distress beacon from an old G2 class ship like the one I was stationed on before the SS shuttle pod. When I found it, it was drifting in my direction and it practically floated right to the shuttle grappler." she explained.

Dip$hits in Space, season 1Where stories live. Discover now