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Aura really should have seen it coming.
In the days surrounding the one year anniversary of the UR-1 incident, her depression caused her to not get much sleep. Lack of sleep weakens the immune system, so it made some sense that she caught a particularly nasty cold afterwards.
She decided to still go to work anyways. She had already taken enough time off as it was due to her grief. She didn't want to take any more days. Not that Director Cosmos would have minded. He was surprisingly lenient with letting her have however much time off as she wanted the past year. But she didn't want to continue sitting around crying. She wanted to get back to doing something productive. She wanted a distraction.
So it didn't matter that she couldn’t breathe through her nose, and she kept having coughing fits, and her throat hurt in a way that was worsened by the previous two symptoms. She would still try to get at least something done, even if it was less than she would normally achieve. Besides, it wasn’t like she had to worry about infecting anyone, since she worked alone in her lab.
Or more accurately, there weren’t any other humans around.
“Ms. Aura, you should not be here right now.”
The interruption came from one of the robots that frequented the lab. PONCO-2, or Clonco, as the other staff members had taken to calling him, due to his tendency to malfunction. She turned to look at him, propping her arm on her desk and resting her chin on her hand.
“Oh? And why is that?” she asked.
“You have a respiratory infection. Treatment typically recommends rest.”
“I'm fine. Don't worry about it,” Aura replied as she turned back towards her computer.
“You are not fine.” He paused, seeming to search for words. “You are coughing up a lung.”
Aura didn't laugh much since the incident, but she couldn't help but laugh a bit at the response. She would have to check where he was learning his vocabulary from. However, it was quickly lost to another coughing fit.
“I told you not to worry about it,” she rasped out once she gained control of her body again. “Now, shoo!”
As he rolled off, she returned to what she was doing. She wasn't in shape to work with her tools, which meant today was a desk work day. She wasn't fond of desk work. She much preferred tasks that let her move around and work with her hands. Being stuck at the desk was one more miserable thing to add to the miserable day.
Mètis used to handle all of the programming, while Aura handled the mechanical side of things. They had been a formidable duo. But with Mètis gone, both tasks were now Aura’s responsibility. She did her best with it, but she just wasn't as talented with code as Mètis had been.
The past year, Aura had adjusted to her absence, but she still missed her dearly. The woman could spin some absolute wonders, taking the thought processes of the human brain and replicating them in machines. Aura would never be able to live up to that. Nobody would be able to. She was irreplaceable and now she was gone-
“Ms. Aura, I brought you lunch.”
She was pulled from her thoughts by the return of Clonco.
“I didn’t ask you to bring me lunch today- *cough*.” She usually had Clonco fetch lunch for her to save her from having to leave the lab herself, but she had planned to skip eating today. Being sick meant she didn’t have much of an appetite. She was fine to subsist on the hard candies she had found were a good replacement for cough drops.
“Recommended treatments include warm liquids, such as soup or tea.”
Sure enough, the robot had brought a tray with a bowl of what appeared to be chicken soup, a hot drink cup, and surprisingly, a jar of honey.
“What's the honey for?”
“Honey has anti-microbial properties and can be a cough suppressant.”
The jar had been a gift from the Woodses, back before the incident happened. Aura hadn't seen them in, well, a year. There wasn't any point for Junie to come around ever since Athena left.
Athena, who escaped off to Europe, saying nothing while Simon took the fall for her actions.
“I sense you are angry. Did I do something wrong?”
“What? No, it's fine,” she said, shaking herself out of her thoughts. She picked up the drink cup. “What’s in this?”
“Peppermint herbal tea.”
As much as she was resistant to the idea of trying to eat, she couldn’t deny that the warmth provided sounded kind of nice on her sore throat. She took a sip of the tea. It still hurt to swallow, but there was a soothing sensation to it as well.
She gave into the temptation. There was no point letting food go to waste when it was already here, after all. As she ate, Clonco rolled away again.
It wasn’t until she was eating that she realized how hungry she actually was. The pain in her throat and congested feeling in her chest had seemed to block the sensation, but she was apparently starving. She didn’t know when she last ate, but it had evidently been too long.
Some time later, Clonco returned once again with a foil pill pack and placed it on the desk.
“And what are you bringing me this time?” Aura asked, leaning on her arm again.
“Dextromethorphan, phenylephrine, and acetaminophen.”
“So stan- *cough* standard daytime cold medicine.” She had already been taking medicine throughout the day. As bad as she was at self care, she at least could do that much. So there wasn’t much point in Clonco trying to help her with that. At least the thought counted.
Not that he really had thoughts. Clonco was nothing more than a machine. One that was particularly good at mimicking human emotions, but a machine nonetheless. Any feeling he displayed was artificial. He didn’t actually care about her, and she shouldn’t let her be fooled into thinking that.
…When was the last time anyone had really cared about her. These days it felt like she was all by herself. She’d never been great with meeting people. Now the few she did have were gone. Worst of all, one of those missing people was her brother, the one person she had always been able to rely on to be there no matter what. She started to feel tears well up in her eyes at the realization of just how alone she was.
She had nobody. The only one left that could even take notice enough to want to do anything about her being sick was the robot. A bunch of ones and zeroes designed to create a convincing semblance of human caring.
“Are you okay Ms. Aura?”
It wasn’t real. She had to keep reminding herself that. Clonco didn’t care about her. It was just her loneliness speaking. Honestly, she should go back through his code and remove this misleading behaviour. It would be better than allowing herself to be sucked into a lie.
But she was so tired. The past days had taken a heavy toll on her, both physically and mentally. So maybe, just for today, she would let herself pretend.