Feeling Crystal Blue (Part Three)

Mela was relieved when Floran came into the shop the next day. He walked into the storage room, and Mela analyzed that he was extremely tired. Why was he tired? Surely, after a day of rest, he shouldn’t have dark circles under half-lidded eyes. He moved as if his limbs were heavier than before as he rummaged through crates stacked near the doorway. He found the part that he was looking for, a black circuit board the size of the palm of his hand. As he went to leave the room, he gave a flash of a glance to Mela and then rushed out, not bothering to pull aside the curtain. The thick material clung to him as he pushed through, and then swished back to its original position, swaying slightly.

Mela’s processor began to overheat, and he found it difficult to compute. After all that worrying, Floran had barely even given him a glance! Mela felt foolish, with a touch of hurt. He reminded himself that Floran didn’t know that he’s been worried. But it was like he didn’t even exist. Like he was a ghost. Or, even worse, invisible. Muffled by the heavy curtain, Mela heard the older one call,
“Floran, can you plug in that consort droid? I don’t think he was fully charged when he arrived.”

Floran re-entered the storage room; his curly black hair bounced as he strode forwards. He opened the crate next to Mela, who heard the thumps of wires being shuffled around. Out came a grimy black cord that looked over 50 years old, older than Mela even. He felt a “shiver” of energy surge through his wires at the thought of being plugged into that dinosaur. It was made for a Laven1, and he was a modified Laven4. The “Laven” consort androids stopped being produced altogether two decades ago.

Floran pushed Mela’s head into a bowed position with a click. He saw hair pooling in his lap and knew it had been brushed out of the way for easier work. There was the sound of nails scrabbling against rubber as Floran tried to open the small latch on the back of his head. He remembered that it had always been hard for his previous masters to open that hatch. The hinges were stiff and needed to be oiled. In a new droid, a simple press would open the charging port; with old droids, one had to find the edge in the synthetic skin, dig their fingernails under it, and try to pry it open. Yet another thing wrong with him. He felt the invisible weight on his shoulders again. Who could blame his old master for abandoning him?

All of a sudden, Mela jolted. Floran had managed to open the hatch and plug in the ancient cord, which had sparked as it was inserted into his socket. The energy was coming from a lithium battery, he knew. He could tell by the way the energy flowed into his body. The source must have been lying close by, because Mela hadn’t heard it scraping across the cement.
“50% charged,” a notification dinged in his head. He wanted to scream, although being in power-saving mode prevented that. The old wire hooked up to his system felt like a violation. He could tell his processor wasn’t working at full capacity with it sloppily pumping charge into his body.
‘It will be over soon,’ he told himself, unconvinced. Old chargers took hours to do their job.

And then Floran left. Mela heard his steps across the hard floor retreating. He just walked out, leaving him alone and plugged in to that loathsome charger. He chastised himself harshly. Of course the younger one didn’t care if he was suffering. He was just a machine. Not a human. Floran had looked right through him. Mela wanted to curl up into a little ball like an armadillo. There was nobody in the entire world who cared about him. Loved him. And as a consort droid, he would rather just die and not waste the lithium energy. If he was dead, he wouldn’t have to think about how useless he was. He didn’t know what this feeling was, but it was by far the worst.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Seeing the android again had stirred up a flurry of thoughts and feelings inside of Floran. He couldn’t identify all of them, but the main ones were confusion, anger, fear, and one more that he refused to name. The one that made his palms sweaty and his heart jumpy. The anger and fear were directly caused by this emotion. The confusion was because his mind kept mistaking that Mela was alive; a human being. His body was so life-like, down to the smallest crease around his knuckles. But then there was the fact that he had to be charged. It was almost sickening to watch, which is why Floran left.

Earlier that morning, he’d looked up Mela’s base model, the Laven4. All the versions he’d seen had been nothing like the beautiful droid, and as far as he could tell, they only shared their internal structure with him. All the images had shown robots with dull, doll-like eyes, and what appeared to be cheap, glued-on wigs. They looked exactly like what they were: mere imitations of humans. But Mela… Whoever had made him had clearly spent years making every little detail as perfect as possible. Floran could hardly imagine how much meticulous work had been done to create the android.

Certainly, Mela was a masterpiece. So why had his original creator sold him? Something so lovely, and that they had spent so much time making… It was a mystery, along with why Floran’s heart wouldn’t stop pounding in his chest.