Chapter Text
My tale starts early one weekend afternoon, I am awakened from my slumber by a ringing noise, moments later I realize it is my phone and stumble out of bed and pick it up.
“Hello?”
“Hey baby.” It’s my mother on the other end. “Did I wake you up?”
“Yeah.” I responded. “So what’s up?”
“Could you come by later today and help clean out the garage? I know there’s some of your old stuff in there and I want to make sure you get it before it gets pitched.”
“Ok, sure.”
“Thanks, dinner tonight is smoked sausage and mac and cheese. See you then, love you.”
“Love you too, bye.”
It takes the better part of an hour to fully wake up, shower and dress, and the better part of another hour to get to my old childhood home in the countryside outside of town, bought with money Dad made from his time running a construction company, dealing mostly in painting, flooring and drywall. Coming up on the hill where it sat, I was greeted by the sight of a rented dumpster and my brother’s truck. Over time that garage had it’s capacity lowered from three, to two, then one with the accumulation of year’s worth of trinkets, memorabilia, and other such odds and ends, bits and bobs. My brother would often joke that our mother was a hoarder, sometimes I wonder if there was some truth to that. Getting out of my car, I walk around to the side and am greeted by my elder brother.
“We finally did it, bud, we talked our mother into cleaning out the garage.” He says with a joking smile.
“You’d think we’d have more equipment for this kind of dig. At least now we can call this place a garage before long.” I say with a grin.
“We’ve managed just fine so far, at least we found no dead bodies.”
“Good to hear.”
“We got some boxes out here for whatever stuff you find and want to keep. Everything else goes in the dumpster or the donation pile we have over there.”
“Gotcha.”
Turning to the garage, I could already see that it went from 1-car to nearly 2, with a good amount of it’s contents already emptied and sorted. After a brief moment looking over the task looming large over me, I set to work taking one box, emptying it’s contents, and with some help, sorting it into keep, donate, or trash. In truth, no one in my family were hoarders, we just came to realize we were too lazy to rent a storage unit or forgot about the oversized junk drawer that was our garage. Hours later, we took a break and went inside, my hair and clothes were turning white from the accumulated dust, my brother not much better. Grabbing drinks, we sat in the living room, the television on one of the sports networks my brother liked.
“Still no sign of some of my old games I lost.” I mention.
“Bud, we’ve got better chances of finding the fucking Ark of the Covenant.”
“I’ll just make sure to look away if it gets opened.”
Mom soon joins us, we catch up on our daily lives and how things are going. Dad was out of town supervising a job and would be back in a few days. Shortly thereafter, we wash up as my brother and I head back out to the garage and Mom goes to prepare dinner. More boxes, totes and bags are sorted through, and just as we finish allowing our garage to at last hold two vehicles once more, I notice that we opened up what could best be described as a corridor all along the back wall, looking more like a musty tomb than a dusty garage. Out of curiosity I grab a flashlight, squeeze in and take a look around.
“Careful, bud, don’t get yourself buried” My brother cautions as I begin exploring.
None of the containers lining this passage were accessible, at least not without potentially making this place my grave. The sickly sweet smell and taste of age, of things long buried was everywhere, cobwebs covered every surface like wallpaper, their original arachnid architects long gone. For some place so isolated from prying eyes, almost no bugs could be found, at least no living ones. I reach the corner, and see nothing I can access, at least not without topping everything, breaking everything within, myself included. I did see, however, a hole in one box, either torn or eaten away. Kneeling down and peering within I could see something which might be one of my old missing games or some lost possession I wouldn’t mind having once again.
Glancing upwards and around I spotted what looked like a random object on the ground, covered in cobwebs. I reach over and try to grab it, succeeding, but I was taken by surprise, by a pair of dead, cracked eyes, within the frozen face of one of my dearest childhood friends. I hadn’t realized it at first, thinking I had found an actual, severed human head in our garage. I dropped it, falling backward, screaming frantic profanities and scrambled backward until my back was against the wall.
“What's wrong?! What happened?! Are you ok?!” My brother yells in.
“Head! Head! There’s a FUCKING HEAD IN HERE!”
“A what?!”
“A FUCKING HEAD!” I yell again.
My brother goes to get Mom, and I stare at the object in abject horror. It takes a good minute, but after I calmed down a bit and came back to my senses, I recognized the face as being the same as the nandroid we used to have years ago, Mary. Though her lower jaw had almost completely been ripped off, and the rubberized skin on her face had cracked and dried out, I could still tell her expression was frozen in surprise. While I had realized that it wasn’t a human head I was looking at, it was still a horrific sight, and I almost couldn’t grab it for fear of it coming to life like some robo-zombie, only this time it wouldn’t be in a video game to be blown apart by buckshot. Mom had come out into the garage with my brother just as I had exited the corridor cradling Mary’s mangled head. To say their shock at the sight mirrored my own was an understatement.
Mary got trashed in an accident, Dad had some heavy equipment and machinery from his company stored in the garage, and the warehouse was too full. Some of it fell on her and dashed her to pieces. All her parts had been accounted for, save for her head, must've rolled or bounced in here and got lost in the confusion. We just assumed it just shattered into pieces too small to find. Inside a brown paper grocery bag, Mary’s head served as what could be imagined as one of the most morbid dinner centerpieces one could imagine. It lent a bizarre atmosphere to say the least. Smoked sausage and mac and cheese will never be the same.
“You sure you don’t want to pitch that, I mean she is dead.” My brother asks.
“Well, I’m sure she deserves better than that.” Mom suggests, and I agreed.
“I’ll take it and figure out what to do from there.” I say glancing over at the bag.
Needless to say, the shock of my discovery killed any real desire to clean the garage much further. Taking Mary’s head and whatever else I found and wanted to keep, I went home. I was plagued with an eerie feeling the whole way home, nearly wrecking my car as I caught myself staring at the bag in my passenger seat. Were I to get pulled over, any cop might think me a murdering psycho if they looked in the bag and didn’t realize what it really was.
Before long I began to reminisce about Mary when she was alive. We got her after Dad finished a job with Sterling Robotics, his company did the floors and exterior painting of a new building they had acquired. They had done such a good job, that Sterling gifted us with a brand new nandroid, which my Dad had unveiled as a gift to the whole family the following weekend. I was twelve. She was an immense help in all aspects of our life, from housework to cooking, and even counseling. My brother and I had some emotional and mental issues growing up, and while Mom tried to help some, it didn’t really amount to much as she either couldn’t or wouldn’t see us as anything but normal, but Mary, following her programming, saw what was wrong, and did everything she could to help.
Coming home, I came into the workshop I had set up inside my condo, cleared off a space on my bench, and took Mary’s head out of the bag and placed it there. It was a scary sight, her eyes staring up, black hair rendered nearly white by accumulated dust and cobwebs, rubber skin withered and cracked, jaw dislocated and broken. I had also noticed that from the stump of where her neck would have attached, I could see what looked like a dried up, bluish fluid. Aside from all the damage I could see, her head was otherwise intact.
“Her head was otherwise intact.” The thought repeated in my head, over and over, until another came along. Mary was a robot, a machine, not a being of flesh. Unlike a flesh and blood human, who, once dead can never be brought back, a robot could, so long as her “brain” was still whole. After much contemplation, and the imbibing of much alcohol in response to the macabre situation, I decided to begin preparations for something even more macabre. To repair and revitalize the dead head of a cherished childhood friend and see if I could bring her back from the dead. Tinkerer as I was, I knew that if the internal components were intact enough, I could very well play Frankenstein, and Mary could very well become my monster.
The next day, I started by looking over Mary’s severed head, revitalizing and repairing the rubberized exterior was simple enough, the hair could be washed and conditioned, made good as new. Slightly harder would be cleaning out and replacing the blue goop within the head. From what I read, it was a blue liquid latex used to lubricate and cool the interior, and could be flushed out using mineral spirits, though care would need to be taken to ensure none of the more sensitive bits were damaged in the process. Once done, then it may be a simple matter to wire up and “reboot” her, to see if she could even be saved. My mind then turned to an even darker thought, even if she could boot, even if she could be brought back to full consciousness, she'd be a severed head, unable to speak, move, and not to mention what might be if a nandroid could feel pain! I shook my head, dismissing the idea and instead adding another item to my mental “shopping list”, either a new jaw or parts to fix the one dangling off her head.
There was a wealth of replacement parts available, a simple search would give a listing all that there was, licensed and unlicensed. Or so it seemed, a model as old as Mary would face an absolute dearth of parts in the best of times. Mechanical pieces were easy, I've seen enough schematics to know how to piece a frame together myself. Not being well practiced, though, it would probably look monstrous, malformed and hideous to behold. No, for the body itself I'd need to find something to "appropriate", likely from the disposal facilities of some Sterling stress tester, junkyard or some refurb shop with the right connections. The sheer amount of choice was paralyzing. Best to see if this was even possible, I had been so focused on what could be I failed to realize that I should have checked to see if I could even boot up Mary.
I changed my focus from looking up parts to finding more detailed schematics for Mary's specific model so that repairs could be made. Took more than a day, but I managed to find a dark web archive of a site taken down that held complete schematics of nandroid models from those days, Mary's included. The interface between mind and body wasn't that hard to reproduce, but this was the early days of Sterling working in proprietary hardware, and from the look of it, a lot of adapters would be needed, followed by a copious amount of soldering wires between adapters when adapters for those adapters couldn't be found, but it was more than doable.
The following week, every day after work I had gone around to every place I could think of that might have the parts, tools and materials I needed, hardware stores, robot repair and refurbishment shops, even grocery and craft stores. Mom had always taught me to find what I needed everywhere I looked and this was no different. After coming home and making a mental note to send more than a card for Mother’s Day, I set to work.
I decided to work from the inside-out, I set up a small pump and with the aid of some brushes, I flushed the blue latex goop from Mary’s head, flushing, brushing and filtering out dust, solidified latex bits and other flotsam, rinsing and repeating until nothing but clear mineral spirits flowed forth. After I wasn’t feeling so fuzzy anymore from the fumes, I set to work on repairing the jaw. Some bits were broken, snapped off and needed to be replaced, thankfully not the whole jaw itself. Glue, epoxy and replacement screws, nuts and bolts were the ingredients necessary to affix Mary’s jaw back onto her head back where it belonged. The hair was a matter of washing it with halfway decent shampoo and conditioner, and half-assedly styling it back into some semblance of what it used to be with a spare comb. I’m no stylist, but it’ll have to do until Mary has hands to do it herself.
Next was repairing the flex rubber covering the face. I had to order some adhesive specifically for this sort of rubber, but once it had arrived, repairing the face was no big deal. When it was done, Mary’s face had what looked like an inverted “Y” crack in it, with the vertex right at the nose. Some more work was still needed, but it would have to do until I could build or procure a new body.
Obtaining liquid latex was no trouble, plenty of robots use it for the exact same purpose that nandroids do, the problem was that at the moment, Mary was just a head, with no means of really recirculating the liquid, anything coming in would come out, with no means of coming back in. Until I could find a new body, an interim solution would be needed. A somewhat twisted idea came into my head, I still had the pump used to flush out the old liquid, I just needed some kind of reservoir to hold it until it could be pumped back in. The solution was simple, a pan, and I had a baking pan in my kitchen. The end result was a crude setup, Mary’s head supported by an apparatus braised together from some old wire, holding it upright while the pump was set up to move blue fluid into her head as it passively came out, really it was something straight out of a horror movie.
I double and triple checked everything to make sure that it was ready for me to flip the switch. After attaching what I needed to power everything, starting the pump and ensuring good circulation, and after much trepidation, I flipped the switch. A brief moment of nothing passes, but before I could wonder if something was wrong, her eyes flickered to life.
"Hello? Is anyone there? Master? Mistress?"
I damned near broke down, but composed myself enough to speak. "I'm here, Mary, I'm here."
"Who's that? You sound familiar. Like my young master." Her eyes flickered in and out, likely due to the fact that her optical sensors were damaged due to age and exposure in the dank conditions of the garage. “My vision isn’t optimal. What’s going on?”
I let out a long sigh, choked up from pent up emotion. “It’s me alright, where do I begin?”