[Parking lot/Afternoon/2061]

The smell of fresh coffee from your built-in coffee machine in your work van brings a sense of temporary enjoyment to your nostrils—not in the sense of happiness. No, coffee would never give you eternal joy; it’s more like… a boost of energy that keeps you from being down. Although you could sip all the coffee in the world and depression wouldn’t cure itself—well, if you don’t die after drinking the millions of gallons first. So is coffee really that worth it in your line of work?

Well, no.

You are a repair technician. More specifically, a robot/android repair technician. You go to places in your van and fix broken, glitched androids or just move them back to a repair shop if the damage is too severe.

You might think it sounds hard and complex, but it’s not—since half of the callers are just morons who accidentally roughhouse their love doll too much in bed. Androids, despite becoming more human-like, are treated like objects for humans to do whatever—

BZZZZZT

Your cell phone goes off as a caller comes through. You look down and take the call—must’ve gotten yourself a new customer to help. Exciting, isn’t it?

A young girl speaks desperately through the phone with pants. “H-Hello!?!? You work with androids, right!? We need help over here!!” She tells you the address of the place desperately. You’re about to ask her questions, but she hangs up.

You get up and check the address in your GPS. It’s in a school… Although this could be a prank call, it’s worth noting the school board’s public announcement about rolling out android students on campus to assist classes and classmates. But why was the caller so desperate? You move in the repair van and take the wheel.

[High school/5 minutes later]

You arrive at the school and take your toolbox and equipment with you, stepping out to find three girls waiting impatiently and worried. They assure you that you’re the right person and nod as they begin taking you through the school to the indoor garden plaza.

They lead you through the small plaza to a utility closet by one of the walls of the place and point at it. “She’s in there.” You nod and open the closet to find an unexpected sight lying inside.

What seems at first like a young student with glasses lying inside the closet with her body sprawled, reveals itself to be an android upon closer inspection. She has her back-head compartment open, exposing her blocky operating system with beeping lights—and casually, a SHOVEL cleaving her operating system in half.

She looks clean and in top shape everywhere else, with her LED eyes darkened (deactivated?), probably having lost access to her optic sensors. A small drunk smile is on her face, with artificial liquid made to serve as fake saliva running down her cheeks. She seems to still be somewhat turned on, as she jerks and twitches slightly while lying in the pool of tools. She’s still powered on but incapacitated and broken due to the shovel injury.

The girls behind you look down ashamed as they explain what happened. “Well, we were playing with our friend Chiaki-Chan’s body, but we removed her ‘Thought Doc’ and it deactivated her pseudo personality. She kept looking forward, oblivious, as she repeated something like: 'Error, could not start because the pseudo personality data is corrupted.' We tried inserting it again into her operating system, but she said the same thing—not moving.”

“We needed to go back to class and had to hide Chiaki-Chan’s identity, so we put her in the locker until after school to fix her. But when we came back…One of the shovels in the closet had fallen and ended up splitting her operating system in half, we found her like this. Please help her… We didn’t know what we were doing and got our friend hurt.”

You look back at Chiaki. She has dilated pupils in her eyes and is still moving without making a sound. She seems to be on but incapable of using all five senses. She continues to glitch as saliva runs down her lips and her body spasms and twitches occasionally.