"...It was rough, doc. I mean, not as rough as what you've been through..."
"You're still valid, though."
"Tch...I'm not a single father like you, though. Can't be easy raising a whole kid."
"A "whole kid"...?" Black Jack trails off with a sigh as he finishes connecting one of Skunk's robotic cable "arteries". "...Well, that's one way to phrase it."
"I'm just sayin' I honour your patience, doctor."
Black Jack forces back a chuckle; he resists the impulse to tell Skunk how Pinoko was "born". More importantly, knew his patient's bluntness wasn't meant to be insulting. Skunk had made his respect for Black Jack quite clear as they talked through the "surgery". Besides, Black Jack knew he had his own issues with voice tone. To a bystander, the operation room must sound like the driest, most monotone conversation ever.
Skunk chugs back the rest of his glass of cognac. He tries to avoid looking at the analog clock hanging beside the door. Sure, the booze was making the operation go by faster, but he always felt ashamed of drinking before 1 PM.
"...You're makin' good time on it, doc," Skunk says.
"Thank you," Black Jack mumbles back. He seems genuine. "Shouldn't be much longer."
"Psh...take your time," Skunk says delicately. "I'll always pay extra for a job that's well done."
Money meant a lot to Skunk. He knew from experience that a handful of coins could make the difference between life or death. Money was probably the only reason he made it out of his early adulthood alive.
By day, Skunk was a junker. He had taken the bus two towns over and moved into a dingy little factory town called Avalon. The highway into town had a number of gas stations and rest stops...and, by extension, a lot of trash. Fortunately, Avalon had two paid recycling depots, and a lot of scavengers who needed to make ends meet.
Skunk sits back in his chair in Black Jack's office, remembering all the bottle type price values. The average tin can was 5 cents. A 500 millilitre bottle was 10 cents. A milk jug was 25 cents, and those ones added up quite quickly. Skunk would always find heaps of these behind the little milkshake shack on Highway 21.
By night, Skunk slept under a train bridge some kilometres away from Avalon's city limits. He'd found an unoccupied little nook directly under the bridge; it had a flat ceiling and a slope of patchy grass, the underside of where the bridge connected to the civilian road. The cars overhead never truly bothered him. Some nights, other homeless folks in the area would light a bunch of tumbleweeds and newspaper in a metal barrel, and it would almost resemble a campfire. Skunk spent many pleasant evenings sitting with the other vagrants, all more than happy to not know Skunk's name as long as he wasn't asking for theirs.
He stayed in Avalon for several months. During that time, Skunk got enough money to buy an ID card...with a fake name, of course. It came from another vagrant who put in the order for Skunk, placing it with some guy named "Frankie", who gave it back to the vagrant to give to Skunk in a little manila envelope. The card meant that Skunk was now able to open a bank account. Building his own little life was a struggle, but satisfying. The only people to have ever seen Skunk as a law-abiding contributor to the community were likely the recycling depot workers, who began to recognize his face over time. Sometimes, Skunk wonders if those people remember him whenever he's on the late night news.
One night, Skunk was digging through a dumpster closer to the edge of town. It had obviously been a busy day at the Ice Palace Frozen Treats, and Skunk was hastily shoving empty plastic milk jugs into a garbage bag. A car begun to race up the alley with its high-beams on...Skunk instinctively ducked behind the dumpster, knowing "scavenging" was an arrestable offence.
However, the car was full of wannabe gangsters; they all looked close to Skunk's age, or at least the age he appeared to be. The punks pulled their car to a screeching halt beside one of the dumpsters, and went about emptying their car's ashtray and tossing out old fast food bags. Light poured out of the headlights and illuminated most of the alley. Skunk knew he would be shivering if he were human.
He started trying to make a run for it. The garbage bag rattled much too loudly, and the punks seemed to notice Skunk immediately. They erupted with a cacophony of hoots and chattering.
"Oh my god, a guy," giggled a female voice. "That scared me so bad."
"Hey!" someone yelled out from the group. "You good, man?"
Skunk stopped, looking over his shoulder. He soon regretted it. His voice cracked terribly as he struggled to say, "Y-Yeah."
The punks got closer. Their leader seemed to be a scrawny, spray-tanned young man in a denim vest. His hair was black and spiked up into several points on the sides of his head. There were only five others with him, one girl and four guys.
The leader snarked loudly, then asked, "What's yer name, bud?"
"Who's asking?"
"Ricky Lawson, bud," he drawled in spite of the cracks in his own voice. "King of the Delta Demons."
How embarrassing. Whatever. Skunk decided to be polite and gave them the fake name he carried at the time. "I'm Sirius."
"What's it matter?" the girl yelled out, stopping Skunk from speaking further. "He's a robot!"
Dammit. If Skunk had real lungs, he knew he would have sighed hard in defeat. The punks spent one long, dead silent moment gawking at him, analyzing little flaws in Skunk's humanoid visage that he hadn't been aware of, before bursting out laughing at him. Robot laws at the time technically meant the kids could claim him as property. A strange churning feeling resonated through in Skunk's abdomen and he assumed it meant dread.
A boy with Electric Blue Kool-Aid coloured hair yelled out, "You got an owner, robot?"
"I said my name was Sirius," grumbled Skunk.
"Your name might as well be Beep-Frickin'-Boop," said one boy with an insufferable accent. "'Cause you're gonna be our driver now!"
And drive he did. Years later, Skunk came away from the experience with appreciation for whoever in his gang had to drive the rest of them around. Skunk only spent about five weeks driving around the "Delta Demons", but it was enough to instill him with refined driving etiquette. He could remember the "Demon" boys throwing cans, shoes, and sometimes coins at the back of his head from the back seat while he drove. If anyone ever did that to Pilat, or any of the other fellas in his gang, Skunk would've had the car pulled over so he could kick the offender in the head a few times.
But back then, the "gang" Skunk was stuck in was nothing more than a bunch of rich kids who were clearly trying to piss off their parents. They would hang out in an abandoned garage a few blocks away from one of Avalon's strip mall shopping centres.
Skunk was encouraged to live there with them, but he opted to slip away in the night and go sleep on the roof. He would plug himself into the building's hacked generator, sometimes having to curl his arm up against it to keep the external charging cable in-place in the port. The port was becoming just slightly disjointed after about a year of frequent use. He normally ran on solar energy sensors, with the option for auxiliary batteries, but the batteries were specifically designed by - and only ever used and charged by - Skunk's father. Even then, his sensors were getting weaker over time, and his body wasn't converting as much sunlight as it should be. Almost all of Skunk's inner mechanisms were devices patented by his father. The only way he could get new parts was if he went back.
He refused to go back. He didn't even know where his father was living now. Maybe his father had already built another display model robot, with a whole new generation of parts, which he was now showing off to investors. Maybe he had actually gone to look for Skunk, and was still looking for him.
Skunk still thinks about it sometimes. Maybe his father sees him on the international news, too, and recognizes him in spite of his eclectic self-adopted name.
While Skunk was stuck with the Delta Demons, the punks threw an assortment of degrading nicknames at him. Ricky liked to call Skunk "Lowbrow" because of his strong browline. Ricky's girlfriend called Skunk "Spooky" because he was pale. However, one of the guys called him "Skunk" because of one day he'd joined them for a meeting, smelling especially of alleyway recycling bins. It wasn't his fault...the gang refused to give Skunk any sort of nice new clothes, thinking a robot didn't need to wear more than some rags. One day, he was lucky to get a fresh but secondhand long-sleeved shirt, but it was bright yellow, and emblazoned on the front with a cartoon bear.
A lot had happened in Skunk's mind to lead to him adopting the name, "Skunk", for himself. He just liked the sound of it back then, and somehow, it stuck. Skunk was sure to never respond to whoever in the gang would call him by that nickname; if they didn't get a rise, they'd forget about it almost immediately. This way, Skunk could take on the name, wear it, and tailor it for himself.
Regardless of whatever name they called him, the lone robot would drive the gang around town almost every night. Other times, he acted quiet and unassuming, slipping money and valuables into his pockets whenever he saw them unattended in the gang's hideout. Skunk managed to put up with the group for a whole month before he snapped.
One night, the group was especially rambunctious. The time was something close to 2:30 AM, and the guys in the back seats were yelling or singing out the windows, while their "boss" was sitting in the passenger seat with his girlfriend in his lap. The car radio was playing, but at a low volume, and it didn't match anything the punks were singing.
"I wanna listen to Novah Debree," whined Ricky's girlfriend. "Sirius, put on Novah Debree."
"I can't just tell the radio station to play Novah Debree," Skunk mumbled. He glared out at the road ahead from under the brim of his thick hat.
"Brooklyn is crawling..." sighed the old new-wave music on the radio. "...With famous people..."
The guys in the back were yelling "Come On Eileen" in discordant, off-key rounds. Ricky was singing some new single by a popular neo-dubstep group. The loud, boorish voices were almost enough to drown out Ricky's girlfriend's mopey laments about the car radio. Skunk drove onto the overpass that would take them over the river and down to a Burger Baron.
"I got them wings...wings, I got them..." Ricky trailed off as he began trying to light a cigarette. His thumb sloppily grinded against the lighter's flint.
"C'mon, trash pile, get my phone out of my purse!" Ricky's girlfriend was yelling. "It's right there! My purse by my frickin' feet!"
Ricky's girlfriend continued ordering Skunk to connect her phone to the car radio's Bluetooth communicator, all while drunken frat boys crooned out the worst of the 1980s. Ricky's lighter made endless grating, dry flicks - he almost got a flame, but it vanished, and he growled expletives at it.
Skunk had a single moment of clear sound. Maybe he accidentally connected his own receptors to the Bluetooth; maybe it was divine invention. The song on the radio gently crooned out, "I turn my vehicle...beneath the river, west from south..."
And so, Skunk wrenched the steering wheel to the right.
Everything moved so fast that his memory capture system couldn't record it fluidly. Ever since that night, Skunk's memories of it could only replay in his mind as blurry snapshots: the car breaks through the traffic barrier like Styrofoam. The car points downwards at a 90 degree angle. Water nears the car. Water floods the car. Everybody screams and flails in their seats, while Skunk calmly undoes his seat belt.
Somehow, he got the driver's side door open, and let himself float up to the river's surface. Out of the corners of his eyes, he could see the Demons' arms grabbing for their own doors; one of them seemed to be trying to launch himself up through Skunk's open door. The robot didn't look back at them. He didn't expect to be able to float up to the water's surface, either.
Nice of Pop to make me water-resistant, Skunk mused to himself. He was vaguely aware that the car was sinking as he spread his limbs out like a starfish, floating away, staring up at the sky. The sky was so dark in Avalon. Sometimes you could actually make out the stars.
He lay there for a while, the current gently pushing him towards some low-leaning, ragged shrubs hanging over the river's edge. Skunk let himself slowly crash into the twigs, not turning his head at all, until the twigs begun to jab into his hair and his back. Skunk then glanced over to where the car had pierced the river.
The water's surface rumbled with big, loud bubbles of air. Skunk felt a pang of worry pass through him, and he stared at the spectacle for a little while. Someone was sure to pull themselves back out of the water, and they'd make him sit still while they screamed him out.
But they didn't. Nobody came up. The bubbles became smaller, then less frequent, then stopped altogether.
It took Skunk another minute to process what had just happened. He shambled backwards onto the damp brush of the river's shore, climbing up to the walking path with trembling, jamming limbs. As soon as he made it up onto the path, he kept running, heading towards the only place he could think of: the bridge. It was only a kilometre or so away.
Skunk was exercising one of the few rules he ever abode by, though it was one likely baked into his internal programming: a robot shall avoid situations that could cause it to come to harm itself. Harming humans, however, was a new capability that he wasn't sure how to deal with.
Eventually, he made his way to the underside of the bridge's base, his usual spot, shrouded mostly in the darkness of the night. A group of vagrants were warming up beside a makeshift campfire they'd made in a metal trashcan. One of them seemed to notice the young man with water-soaked clothes standing off to the side, and the other two vagrants turned along with him.
"Hey, son," said the old, shaggy man. "C'mere and dry off."
Bashful but grateful, Skunk quietly shuffled up to the group, and sat on the ground beside the trash can fire. Heat radiated off the sides of the can; the group remained there quietly for a long while. One of the others pulled out a harmonica and began to play some old Tom Waits tune with it. For the first time in a long while, Skunk felt an emotion that humans probably referred to as "sleepy".
Being in the river's water for so long would eventually show its wear and tear.
Skunk kept saving up his recycling money, and he pawned the valuables he'd taken from the rich kid punks, being sure to sell it off bit-by-bit at different pawn shops. One day, he found a tablet with a cracked screen that had just been tossed into a dumpster. He gave it a good charge - plugging it into a courtesy outlet at the bus terminal - and was more than elated to see the tablet still worked. His world had just doubled.
However, a week or so after that, Skunk's body stopped charging properly. His battery would only replenish 70% of the way through. Neither available charging method would work to make up the difference. A week after that, three of Skunk's fingers on his left hand stopped responding to movement commands. They remained locked, curled inward, and Skunk at least had some use in hanging plastic bags off them while he scavenged. He was terrified, though.
Skunk eagerly tried to look for spare parts in the trash, but it was no use. All of his major workings had been produced by his father. A large, ticking clock seemed to hang over Skunk's head at all times, counting down to when his body would finally shut down, unable to upgrade, unable to be transferred over to a new body.
A new body. It was a possibility, but finding it would be a longshot. He didn't begin to understand how his own CPU worked, let along if he could be completely ported over to a new system. He didn't want to lose all of his memories, in spite of how much some of them hurt.
One day, Skunk went to the bus terminal to kill some time before dusk fell. He brought along the tablet and, on a total whim, he opened a search engine and entered "dr. fooler associates".
Not a lot of relevant articles came up through the query. Skunk scrolled through the page, looking for universities that might have mentioned his father and his research. The most helpful link he could find was nestled between two FBI pages about robot bootleggers: a page from the University of Nerima's English website about its engineering alumni class, from thirty-something years ago. With one cautious finger, he gently tapped on the link, and let the page load before him.
Most of the page was dedicated to the regular term students; Skunk scrolled past all the tinny little photos of each person, looking for a soft-faced man with balding, freying ha-
He stopped. Before him, under the header of "Term 1 Exchange Students", was a group photo featuring his father. The man was still short, his hair still fraying and scraggly, but with a much lower hairline than the one Skunk used to see on him. His eyes trailed along the faces of the group; they were five men and two women.
The photo's caption identified them as "Team Kusa-I": Always fond of jokes and a jovial mood, these students adapted a pun for their team's name during the 20▮▮ Robotics Jam. The error came about when J. Fooler (centre) tried translating the group's names into traditional Japanese kanji. This led to the unfortunate, literal renaming of E. Grasswell as 草井, read in Japanese as "kusa-i", phonetically identical for our word for "smelly". Grasswell found it quite amusing, and she named their team after it.
Among the group of graduate students was a short, soft-edged robotic figure; it had been stood up beside an activation capsule, with his father's hand on its shoulder. Skunk stared, mouth agape, at the photo for a long moment. If he ever had any roots in any family tree, they would have definitely started here.
He stared at the two Japanese symbols for a long while, remembering the shapes they made up. One looked like a tower and the other looked like a gate. He liked the way they sounded, too.
Skunk hastily scrolled down to check the names of the exchange students. They were separated into three clusters - each a different Robotics Jam team - and went straight to Team Kusa-I's. His father's name was second in the list. He ignored it, though, as he hurriedly searched for the other six online.
"Hey kid," a man's deep voice bellowed.
Skunk jumped in his seat and whirled around, soon seeing a security guard standing tiredly behind the bench he was reading at. Skunk tried not to look terrified as he nodded affirmatively, a silent yes sir?.
"Bus terminal closes in half an hour," said the security guard, loud but neutral. "Just givin' you a heads up. There's an all-night McGrisby's down the road, though."
"Th-thank you," nodded Skunk, stammering. The guard walked away and returned to his patrol of the lobby. Skunk couldn't believe how intimidated he was by someone with such a larger frame than his own.
Not for long...maybe, he said to himself. Skunk quickly flipped through the five tabs of search results, trying to gauge who was a possible lead.
Esther F. Grasswell. Builds caregiver robots in Scotland. Works with UNICEF, has tons and tons of interviews...she'd talk too easily, he thought.
Antonio L. Brazzi. Was working in robot repair services...until he went to jail for embezzlement.
Walpur Guiss III. Has a few URLs leading to custom robot services. Good.
Rebecca Rin. Worked in animatronics up until ten years ago, when a robot shark malfunctioned and killed her. Good grief.
Elmer Dobbs. Also killed by that malfunctioning robot shark.
Timothy Grandstile. Currently a robotics technician...but for the Australian head office of Happy Science.
He stared at the three tabs he had left open. A celebrity, a guy in a science cult, and a no-name repairman. Well, the only way Skunk had been able to identify the third individual's own name in his results was because a German genealogy page came up featuring tbe man's surname. Skunk gingerly opened the page and scrolled through, winding up near the bottom of a long list of portraits at a "Walpur Werner Guiss the Third". The man in the adjacent photo indeed matched the man Skunk had seen standing beside his father in Nerima, Japan.
It was an old photo, though; it looked like a JPEG someone had saved as a .gif, no doubt trying to save bandwidth on their now-obviously neglected vanity site. The signature on the page said it had last been updated by a Countess Ramona Guiss twenty-two years ago.
Hope was beginning to dim, and so was the sky outside. Skunk quickly bundled up his tablet and his cross-body tote bag, and begun to head out to the McGrisby's down the road. As he walked, he thought about how his best case scenario was that another one of W. Guiss's search results, the repair services from "Wahrnehmung Werkstatt", could lead him anywhere towards a new body.
Once at the restaurant, he bought a small coffee - and, by extension, at least an hour's worth of an excuse to stay in there - and sat down at a booth in the corner. Skunk made his way back onto the Wahrnehmung Werkstatt web page and was struck by how stark and archaic it was, even moreso than its owner's family tree shrine site.
At the top of the page was Wahrnehmung Werkstatt's logo, some blue 3D text on white in all its 320 x 240 px. glory. Below it were a few lines of text interspersed with grey link buttons.
For existing clients,
[Please Log In Here.]
To submit a client application,
[Please Enter Here.]
For all other inquiries,
[Please Use This Form.]
Skunk went with the third option. The ensuing page was only composed of a simple form under the "General Inquiries" header: a box for the sender's name, their email, their message, and then Submit and Reset buttons. He wondered if he should be feeling unease at the amount of secrecy on this website, instead of glee that he would be among his kind with this individual. He tapped on the first text box, let the keyboard load, and leaned his tablet horizontally against the McGrisby's napkin dispenser.
He left the name box empty for now. For the email, Skunk reluctantly entered the email he used for e-transfers and coupon sites. Finally, Skunk got to the message box and begun to animatedly type:
I apologize about reaching out to you out of nowhere but I am in dire need of robot parts. as mine are wearing down. I do not know if you remember my "father" dR. Junji Quinton Fooler but I am a robot. created by him. I also please ask that you not reach out to him as I am currently going though certain circumstances. I have some money that I ccan offer for these new parts and ideally I would like a modern body. Please contact me anyt ime at this email.
It had been a very long time since Skunk had to write any sort of paragraph, but he hoped this would suffice. He stared at his message, reading it over twice and thrice in his head, before tapping the grey button labelled "Submit".
It didn't send. The page remained unchanged, but now, red text appeared beside the Submit button: Name Required.
Skunk stared at the empty name box. He looked deeply into it for a long while, thinking, running over options in his mind. After weighing the pros and cons of each one in his head, he anxiously typed in: Skunk Kusai.
Submit.
The form disappeared, giving way to a handful of hopeful-looking text:
Thank you for submitting your inquiry. Our AI will direct it to the relevant internal department.
[Click Here To Return To Homepage.]
Skunk opted to close the window instead. He let his tablet's screen dim and shut off while he pretended to drink some of his coffee. He hadn't touched it in a while, and he'd gotten worried that anyone in the restaurant was watching him. Some of it got into his mouth but he wasn't bothered. Skunk's system would convert some of it to coolant fluid; it had gotten cold enough to work as coolant anyways.
The paper travel cup had just barely been set back on the table when Skunk's tablet buzzed with a notification: 1 new incoming email. He scrambled to grab his tablet so fast that he nearly knocked over the coffee.
It was an automated response from Wahrnehmung: Hello Herr. / Frau. Skunk Kusai, Thank you for your application to become a client! It has been forwarded to our lead director, and you should expect a reponse within 4-6 business days. Kindly, Wahrnehmung Werkstatt.
The young man sat back against his seat in a silent but joyful daze. Skunk stared off into space with a big, open smile, as he tried to process this development. He could expect a response! Most of all, three words echoed throughout his head: "Mr. Skunk Kusai".
He liked the way that name sounded. He really liked it, almost more and more by each second.
Sometimes, Skunk still thinks about this night in the McGrisby's so many years ago. He thinks about it again as he sits in Black Jack's operating room, and smiles to himself. He really wishes that he could tell the whole story to anyone, but he feels it's too good to share with anyone but himself.
"Not much longer now," says Black Jack.
Skunk nods. He replies with a curt, "Hell yeah."