Frankie Stein Tenma's thick lashes fluttered open. Flashes of bright white light strobed before her as she strained to focus, but her eyelids were too heavy to lift all the way. The room went dark.
"Her cerebral cortex has been loaded," announced a man, his deep voice a blend of satisfaction and fatigue.
"Can she hear us?" asked a boy.
"Hear, see, understand, and identify more than four hundred objects," he replied, delighted. "If I continue filling her brain with information, in two weeks she'll have the intelligence and physical capabilities of a typical fifteen-year-old." He paused. "Okay, maybe a little smarter than that. But she'll be fifteen."
"Wow, Dad, this is amazing." The boy said. "A sister."
"I know." He replied. "Daddy's perfect little girl."
The man kissed Frankie's forehead while the boy squeezed her hand. The man smelled like chemicals, and the boy smelled like metal. Together, they smelled like love.
Frankie tried to open her eyes again. This time she could barely make them flutter.
"She blinked!" the boy exclaimed. "She's trying to look at us! Frankie, I'm Astro, your brother. Can you see me?"
"She can't," Their father said.
Frankie's body tensed at the sound of those words. How could someone else decide whet she was capable of? It's didn't make any sense.
"Why not?" her brother seemed to ask for both of them.
"Her battery pack is almost drained. She needs a charge."
"So charge her!"
Yeah, charge me! Charge me! Charge me!
More than anything, Frankie wanted to see these four hundred objects. Wanted to study her family's faces while they identified each object with their kind voices. Wanted to come to life and explore the world she had just been born into. But she couldn't move.
"I can't charge her until her bolts finish setting," their father explained.
"Oh..." Astro said, his voice no longer sounding joyful.
"It's okay, son," their father cooed. "A few more hours and she'll be completely stable."
"It's not that." said Astro.
"Then what?"
"She's so beautiful and full of potential, and it... it just breaks my heart that she'll have to live... you know... like us."
"What's wrong with us?" their father asked. Yet something in his voice suggested he already knew.
Astro snickered. "Your kidding, right?"
"Toby- Astro, things won't be like this forever. Times will change. You'll see."
"How? Who's going to change them?"
"I don't know. Someone will... eventually."
"Well, I hope we're around to see it," Astro said, sighing.
"We will be," their father assured him. "We Tenmas tend to live long lives."
Astro chuckled softly.
Frankie desperately wanted to know what about these "times" needed to "change". But asking became unimaginable as her battery drained completely. Feeling both light-headed and impossibly heavy at the same time, Frankie floated off deeper into the darkness, settling in a place where she could no longer hear the people around her. She could not recall their conversation or smell their metal-and chemical-scented love.
All Frankie could do was hope that by the time she woke up, that thing Astro wanted to be "around to see" would be there. And if it wasn't, that Frankie herself would have the strength to get it for him.