Chapter One: The Chop Shop

Jo Kimble hunched over the 'operating table' as she rummaged around inside her 'patient'. The serial on this unit was VFPA P1Alpha. She crinkled her nose as she noticed that the coolant tank was ruptured, in turn leaking goop all over the generator. The coolant seeped into the power supply via its exhaust grills. It looked like the stuff eventually worked its way out, but the initial reaction caused an emergency forced-shutdown. "Found the problem. Coolant leak."

"Is he gonna be alright?" Officer Birch sighed, removing his helmet.

Without a word, the engineer simply unfastened the fixings that kept the tank locked in place. Laying these bolts out in a neat line on the tray next to the table, Jo, who was kneeling on top of a wheeled office chair as she worked, kicked herself and this chair over to a rack in the corner of the room. The rack was lined with spare coolant tanks. There was a problem across the whole batch with brittle plastics being used for the tanks; she'd have to specify exactly what material she wanted for the construction of the next iteration.

The small woman snatched a coolant container up, pushed off the wall with her other hand, and came rolling back to the table. She slowed to a halt exactly where she needed to be then proceeded to refix this new replacement tank. "Did it take any immense impacts in the last few days?"

Birch nodded awkwardly "Y-Yeah. Yeah, sure did. Alf got rammed by a fleeing vehicle down at Soho yesterday. Was fine until we got back to the station; even then diagnostics didn't say there was anything wrong."

Jo was delighted that the police officer felt so attached to the drone that he gave it a nickname, but she wasn't one to broadcast her feelings. "Alf?" She asked monotonously.

"Well...yeah. Y'know, as in 'Alpha'. I've set him to recognise it as an alternative designation."

In the seconds that it took for Birch to answer, Jo had tightened the new coolant tank into place. "The damage was most likely caused by blunt force to the outer hull; in this case, that fleeing vehicle. Come." She said, ushering Birch over with a hand.

Birch moseyed over to Jo and peered over her shoulder. She raised the cracked tank. "The impact cracked the coolant tanksince it sits flush against the inner frame. It then leaked into the generator. In case it breaks again, use a spanner to release the bolts holding the tank in. The rest should be self-explanatory."

"Wow...thanks, ma'am."

Jo slapped a button on the side of the table. The bed slowly tilted, until the humanoid machine on its surface was in a standing position. Then, she picked up her diagnostics tablet and input a few commands. A second later, a whirring and clicking noise began to emanate from Alf, signalling that its generator had been rebooted.

Eventually, it spoke with that signature text-to-speech flavour. "MetCon VFPA online. Unit P one Alpha, power cycle complete. Synchronisation with control suite complete. Ready for operation."

The machine took a single step away from the table and awaited orders from its partner.

"Anything else to report?" Jo pressed Birch.

The man shook his head. "No, ma'am. After yesterday's patch, the lag during conversion was gone. I think Mitchell has something to talk about."

"Officer Mitchell. That's unit P one Delta?"

"Yeah, that's her." Birch said with a nod.

Jo tapped away on her tablet, her eyes not once meeting Birch's. "Send her in."

Birch smiled at Jo and moved towards the exit of the makeshift drone bay. "Sure thing, Miss Kimble. C'mon Alf, let's book it."

"Acknowledged, Officer Birch." Alf replied as it processed the command that Birch had programmed to signify 'follow partner officer' and executed. The six-and-a-half-foot tall machine walked as elegantly as any human as it followed Birch out of the room.

So far, Jo was extremely satisfied with the prototype testing of the VFPAs. As part of the prototype phase, the company she worked for loaned five units to the New York Police Department. Jo, as the lead engineer and project director for the VFPAs, spent a lot of time onsite to make sure they were doing well, and to listen to any feedback from the testing crew. The drones were performing as designed, even exceeding benchmarks. Jo didn't foresee how the testing officers would become emotionally attached to their units...if she did, she might've talked to the software team about more than one voice option. She quickly jotted down a reminder on her tablet to bring this up next time she dropped by thesoftware lead, as well as to redesign the coolant tank's shape so that it didn't sit up against the frame. Because of the current design, the blow to Alf didn't damage his armour but the force was handed over to the coolant tank since it was flat against the plate.

At that point, Officer Mitchell strolled in alongside her VFPA unit, P1Delta. Mitchell, as well as every officer that was testing the robotic partners for MetCon, was outfitted with equipment designed to complement her role. On her forearm was a control tablet with which officers could command their VFPAs with a user-friendly interface; they could plot walk tracks, play specific phrases from their onboard speakers, tell them to follow, hold position, engage in crowd control, and more. Additionally, as Birch demonstrated, an officer could issue commands verbally. These phrases could be interpreted by the speech-recognition software installed into the units.

"What's the problem?" Jo asked, not looking at Mitchell but instead still at her tablet.

Mitchell stopped and crossed her arms. Since Delta was executing the 'follow' command, it copied its partner's momentum. "I was thinking that Delta would be more helpful if I didn't have to tell him what to do all the time. There anything you can do about that?" Said Mitchell.

Jo arched an eyebrow as she continued sorting through diagnostic data. "What exactly do you mean?'

The officer shrugged as she walked a little closer to Jo. "The other day I was caught in a firefight. First, I had to dive behind cover, find the perps, then draw my sidearm. After I do all of this, I realise that Delta's standing out in the open because he's still on 'follow'. So, obviously, I had to take my focus from the situation to tell him to enter combat mode, mark the armed individuals for him with my tablet, then tell him to open fire. That's a whole lot of time civilians could've gotten shot in."

"You want the unit to be able to react to the environment, instead of you."

"Yeah, I guess."

"The company doesn't want to pursue sophisticated artificial intelligence right now. If it was up to me though, these prototypes would be operating on a system like that already."

"But they already have A.I, right?"

"Yep. But it's very basic."

"Like Siri?" Mitchell mused.

"Yeah. The VFPAs can recognise user input and associate these commands with an action. Whether it means retrieving information like a criminal record or opening fire on a target, it's still just simple commands. Like Siri when you tell it to call someone. It's literally the same code."

Mitchell propped herself onto a crate and rubbed her chin. "Right...I keep forgetting what Artificial Intelligence means. It ain't real intelligence. It's fake...it's meant to look like intelligence, right? So is...is giving Delta the ability to analyse a situation even possible?"

Jo blinked a couple times. She finally looked away from her tablet, but not at Mitchell. She gazed at a spot near Mitchell's feet. "I think it is. It'll always be artificial to us because we've broken it down into things that we can understand on a working level. Listening and replying in simple ways are things that human children do, but that's real to people. The VFPAs don't listen and act the same way as children do, but at that point it doesn't make a difference. They're both doing the same thing. I think we just need to find a way for the hardware to detect things like elevated heartrates, sweat, uncomfortable facial expressions, and things like that so they can assess situations more thoroughly."

"Also, how to tell a gun apart from a stapler. That would help." Mitchell joked.

Jo huffed out of her nose, her version of a chuckle. "Short answer; we can't do anything about that because my new boss is regurgitating Tony Stark's opinion on A.I. because he's Tony Stark."

"Well...I don't blame him. You know, there was that one A.I. that went rogue and killed heaps of people."

Jo then began a ramble; something that Mitchell was used to nowadays. "I blame the creator. Ultron wasn't a person, it was a thing. It was doing what it was told to do. When a car explodes for no reason and kills the people inside, do people blame the car? No, they blame the people who designed the car. Hank Pym was a physicist. He had no business building a peacekeeping platform capable of sweeping decisions. What happened was that he gave it an unclear parameter, it interpreted it in a matter of fact way, then executed. Machines can't think; they can't put their own spin on things."

Mitchell smiled. "You think you can do it better."

"Well. Yeah. Maybe. Yes. Eventually. Pym ruined it for everyone. Now they think artificial intelligence is the devil, despite the fact that everyone has one in their pockets."

As if it heard her current conversation, Jo's phone vibrated in her pocket.

"Nice talking to you again. Wish you'd be here more often." Mitchell said as she left with her VFPA in tow.

Jo pulled her phone out and saw that she had a handful of missed calls and a text from her colleague Lan asking 'Where are you? You're an hour late.'.

—————————-

Without making eye contact with anyone in the conference room, Jo pushed through the door, slunk around to the end furthest away from everyone and plonked herself into a chair.

"Okay...now that...I'm sorry, what was your name?" The new CEO of MetCon started. He was a thirty-something year-old man with a head of slicked back brown hair. He was a fairly good-looking man, not that Jo was looking at him to see it anyway.

"Jo."

"Oh, cool. Is that short for...Josephine?

"No."

"Joline?"

"Nope."

"Joanne?"

"No."

"What's it short for?"

"Nothing."

"Your name's Jo...? Just Jo?"

"Yeah."

"Is that...is that what it says on your driver's licence?"

"I don't have a driver's licence."

"Is that what it says on your passport?"

"Yeah."

The man crossed his arms with an impressed look on his face. The rest of the people in the meeting were in the middle of facepalming. "I'm Lionel Stanton, the new CEO. I'm...pretty sure we haven't met yet. You are..." Lionel glanced down at a sheet of paper on the desk. "The lead engineer? Wow. You're a little young, aren't you?"

"I'm twenty-nine."

"Oh. You're just tiny then. No problem." Lionel quipped with an awkward laugh. "Okay, now that Jo is here, we can get started. As most of you know, my name is Lionel Stanton and I'm the new Chief Executive Officer voted in by the shareholders following that mess of a year that was twenty eighteen. Now, we are going to rethink the future. We are going to rethink the present."

He pointed up at the whiteboard behind him which was fastened with a magnet that bore the MetCon logo on it. Lionel continued "First of all...this name. Military Electronics and Technology Consolidated. It's square. It's boring. Also, this?" He slapped another magnet onto the board that read 'VFPA'. Jo of course, had her attention on the spinning reflection of the ceiling fan on the conference table so she wasn't alerted to the jab at her personal project until Stanton said "This isn't a consumer-friendly name. Vee-eff-pee-ay?"

Jo's eyes lanced onto the whiteboard.

"Vooffpah? I mean, what is that, right?" Stanton laughed, inciting a few others in the room to do the same.

"It's...it's an acronym." Lan Cho, the programmer for the VFPA computer systems and lead designer on all MetConelectronics, muttered.

"What's it stand for?"

Lan replied "Variable-form policing aid."

Stanton scrunched his face up in confusion. "Yeah, no. That stinks. That's not going to get people to look at you. This is the problem with this company, man. You need to stand out! You need to be hip! You need to be now! When people think tech, they're not thinking about you. They're thinking about this guy."

He slammed yet another magnet onto the whiteboard. It was the smiling, bearded face of Tony Stark. "He is your worst enemy. Hate him! Hate his guts! He's the reason your government contract is being questioned. People don't want robots anymore, people want suits! They want armour! So Jo, no more robots. We're going to do suits too."

Jo shrugged. "Nah."

"What do you mean 'nah'? Why not? What's wrong with a suit?"

"It has a person in it. They can die." Jo retorted.

"Well...yeah, but--"

Sarah McGregor, the public relations manager, promptly responded "Jo's unmanned drones mean that no one needs to be harmed in dangerous situations. They can be controlled remotely or act autonomously with a human aide, can be mass-produced, and are designed to assist people, not replace them. If Stark started shipping his 'Iron Man suits' to every cop shop in New York, there'd be piles of body bags the size of Mount Rushmore. Worst of all, it would mean escalation. Hello, Lionel? Ivan Vanko? Obadiah Stane? Justin Hammer? How many times have maniacs tried to rip-off that hardware and gotten people killed? No one rips-off Jo's tech because they aren't killing machines; they're tools for our brave men and women to use to save lives."

People around the room started nodding in response to Sarah's devoted defence of MetCon's unmanned drones. Lionel licked his lips then said "That's awesome. Really. If we wanna keep doing robots, that's fine. I'm just throwing things out there."

He then threw up another magnet. "Starting next weekthough, we're going to rebrand."

The magnet read 'ARGENT' and had tiny words underneath each letter. "Advanced Robotics, General Electronics and Neural Technologies. It gives everyone a clear idea of what we do, how we do it, and best of all, it sounds cool. All MetCon told people was that you guys make guns or something, right? It wasn't specific enough. This, it runs through everything. It tells people what you do, Jo. It tells people what you do, Ian."

"It's Lan."

"Yeah that's what I said, Lan. And it tells people what you do, Holly."

Holly Ibanez was the designer of the neural hardware that was being worked into some military departments, helping remove input lag when dealing with dangerous situations through drone usage. She thinned her lips and said "That's...actually not a bad idea."

Stanton planted his hands onto his hips. "Of course it isn't. Look, now we need a new name for the police robots. Something cooler but still highlights how it turns into a motorbike, because that's your thing Jo. No one else can do it as well as you do. That's what sets us apart from Stark and everyone else; we got transformers."

Lan rolled his eyes and looked at Jo to ascertain her reaction. She was cringing, like she was watching something mildly disgusting like someone drop a candy bar onto dirt, pick it up, then eat it.

"Maybe even redesign them. Instead of having those memory alloy wheels that fold up into the bodies, I dunno give 'em some old rubber tires you can see that it transforms."

"That's counter-intuitive. Shape memory alloy tires can't be popped, and they save space. Having the wheels hang out blocks articulation of the arms, also makes the unit larger and stops it from entering smaller structures." Jo answered.

"Okay don't worry about the wheels. New name, alright? Just throw it out there. Anybody."

There were a few seconds of silence before Craig Watts, general manager, said "Robocop."

Murmurs of laughter echoed through the room. Stanton sighed heavily. "Thanks, Craig. You're a real funny guy, you know that? You should become a comedian. Come on. Anyone? Something like...like...Hermes, because it goes fast. Or Mercury. Same guy, technically."

"Cooperative Operations Bi-modal Robotic Aid. COBRA." Sarah added.

Stanton clapped. "Sarah, holy cow that is fantastic. You're the exact person who should be on public-relations. Beautiful. Any objections Jo? This is your project. Yay or nay?"

Jo shrugged. "A little much. But as long as the name isn't lying to anybody, I don't care."

"Excellent. Roll with it for the next iteration, alright? Where are we on that, stage two prototypes or production?"

Jo said "I'd like to go to production after a few more weeks at Brooklyn."

"Alright, nice work. This leads into my next point. Tony Stark designs, programs, and engineers everything. He also keeps close to the people, you know what I'm saying? He has a tight relationship with the consumers. We need that. We need every single one of you guys to be the face of your departments."

Confused glances rotated around the conference table.

Stanton leant onto the desk as he said "He does interviews, he does TED talks for crying out loud. He talks to the people about his product in a real deep way because he's the one who designs everything. We need you people to do that. Sarah? We're going to expand the public relations department. We're going to get makeup people and wardrobe people whenever we go to public events. Also, you're gonna have your own film crew. Make us some interview videos, factory tours, whatever it takes to get the consumers closer to us. You feel me?"

Sarah nodded excitedly with a psychotic grin on her face.

"So Lan, Holly, Jo, you all are going to start doing press because you're our top brains."

Jo's brow twitched. Lan sent her an amused smirk, knowing full-well that she wasn't a people person. Jo abruptly stood. Everyone in the room but Stanton knew that it was time for one of Jo's trademark splurges. They all knew she was stubborn, uncompromising, and difficult to work with...but they gave her space to do her own thing. Suddenly, Stanton was turning everything upside down and forcing her to do something that she didn't want to do.

"I'm not doing press. Get an actor."

"We can't do that, Jo. That's ingenuine."

"So is everything else you've been talking about."

"Listen, we need you to do this. The last financial year was a big loss. If the company goes through something like that again, everyone in this room is out of a job. To fix that, we need to change how people see us. Think about people like Tony Stark, Elon Musk, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Everybody loves them. They're science rockstars. That's what sells nowadays."

Sarah turned in her chair to face Jo and said "Hon, don't worry. I'll make sure it isn't anything too crazy for you, okay? We could even just stick to videos if you like."

Jo breathed deeply for several seconds before she simply nodded.

Stanton laughed. "Excellent. Good job. Okay, so we still got one gig to go before our big rebrand. The New York Emerging Technologies Convention is in a week, so we're going to go about this a bit different. We're going to have our products on display on the show floor, including the COBRAs, the supercomputers, and the neural stuff. Everyone needs a demo model of their project ready to go by Friday. Now let's do this. Let's put Stark out of business."