AN: And now it's time for a oneshot AU, one with a bit of a sci-fi flavor to it! I feel like there's definitely plenty of story left untold here, but when I went into this, I wanted to keep the focus tight on those three characters. Perhaps I'll consider revisiting it in the future, though not for awhile yet, ahahaha~. Anyways, thanks for reading, and be sure to leave a review on your way out!

Clockwork Girl

AU

Characters: Ayumi Yoshida, Hiroshi Agasa, Ai Haibara

Summary: Sometimes one can find friendship in the most unusual of places.

It all started, as most things of such nature do, with a dare.

Truth be told, Ayumi wasn't exactly scared of the rundown looking mansion. The older girl from that detective agency had already reassured her that it wasn't haunted, and if it was her, she knew to put faith in her words. If there was one thing that she didn't care for, it was being told that she wouldn't be able to do something, so when the dare had been cast out, she had quickly accepted it. Perhaps if Genta or Mitsuhiko had been there that day, instead of out sick with a cold, they would have agreed to come with her- but she wasn't afraid about setting out on her own either!

Besides, it might be fun. Sometimes there were interesting things hidden in places like that! There might even be some kind of hidden treasure, if she looked hard enough. So with a backpack ready for anything that she found, and a flashlight in hand, Ayumi departed on her mission, determined to go into the abandoned mansion in the middle of the forest, and return with proof of her trip there. She expected to find something along the lines of an old photograph, or maybe even a photo album- but what she ended up with instead was definitely something that she couldn't fit in her backpack.

There had been a moment, a very brief moment, in which for a second, she thought she had found a corpse. The fact that she had found it behind a secret door really didn't help matters much. It took her just as many seconds as it took her to reach for her phone, unsure if she was trying to call the police or that high school detective who lived in her neighborhood, to realize that however human-like what she had found appeared to be, it was not, in fact, an actual human, living or otherwise. Letting out a long breath of relief, Ayumi placed a hand over her heart, tucking her phone back away.

Taking a few steps forward, chancing a closer look at what she was slowly coming to understand was nothing more than a life size doll of some sorts, Ayumi shined her flashlight on it. With short brown hair, ball joints, and surprisingly delicate features, it was covered in a fine layer of dust- it probably hadn't been moved from this place since it was abandoned. Maybe this doll was the reason that everyone thought this place was haunted, she wondered, creeping forward a few more steps until she was standing in front of it.

When she looked at it closely, it wasn't scary at all. If anything, it was a bit sad. To think that someone would leave something like this behind- it surely must have been loved and cared for at one point. Worn with time thought they might be, the rather fancy dress that she had been clothed in appeared to have been hand sewn, and with quite a bit of attention to detail at that.

She was pretty, really. Were she to somehow smile, she would probably be even prettier.

Reaching a hand out to softly touch the doll's cheeks, hoping to perhaps clear away some of the dust, Ayumi pursed her lips together. As sorry as she felt for the poor doll, there was no way that she would be able to move her by herself. Even if she were to recruit Mitsuhiko and Genta to help her, she wondered if they would really be able to move the doll safely. It was more or less around her size, that of a child- but she had no idea how much it weighed. It would be terrible if they moved it carelessly, and the doll wound up broken as a result! "I don't think I can bring you home with me by myself, but maybe I can clean you up a little, at least."

She didn't entirely expect the doll to respond to her, of course- it was only just a doll. It wasn't like the helper robot that the Hoshikawa family down the hall had, or even the more humanoid one the Satsuki family had, nor was it anything like the high tech robots that she had seen on her last class trip. There was no way it could be such a thing. As far as she knew, this house had been standing empty for ages, long before the invention of such things as humanoid robots in the first place- although that had happened long, long before she was born. Even her mother hadn't been born yet back then.

The Professor had showed her pictures of some of the older models before, pictures that his own grandfather looked. They looked nothing like this one, with delicate, human-like features, who looked as if she could begin moving any second. Even if she were a robot, she doubted that she would still be able to work after this long.

That was why, when the doll's eyes fluttered slightly at her touch, Ayumi didn't expect it at all. Snatching her hand back, she took a step backwards, letting out a slight yelp as she tripped over some unseen obstacle. Hacking loudly at the cloud of dust that she stirred up, she sniffed, her eyes slowly trailing back up towards the doll. Even in the dust filled air, that made her want to cover her mouth tightly with her hand, to prevent her from breathing in anymore, she found her mouth hanging slightly agape, half wondering if she was imagining things.

She was pretty certain the doll's eyes had been closed just a second ago. Now they were wide open, eyes of a soft blue color that almost seemed fixed on her. And yet, for some reason, Ayumi didn't seem frightened by this development- there was something there, she couldn't help but think to herself, in her eyes. Something that wasn't scary at all.

Sad. Lonely.

Perhaps she was just impressing her own feelings on the doll- or what she thought it should feel, after being abandoned for so long. Slowly rising back to her feet, she tilted her head, waving a hand in front of it's face, to see if it would react to it. When it didn't show any signs of moving again, Ayumi frowned, wondering if perhaps it had been some kind of fluke.

Maybe she should show her to the Professor?

"Um," Ayumi spoke up, taking just a moment to try and brush some of the dust off the back of her dress. "Are you alive?"

There was no response, her own words hanging in empty silence. Frowning, Ayumi once again carefully reached out a hand, gently placing it on one of her cheeks. When this earned her no response, she withdrew her hand, her frown only growing deeper. For some reason, she couldn't shake the feeling that she had discovered something very mysterious indeed.

And more than ever, she was very, very interested in it.

"Well, well, this is quite the find indeed, Ayumi-kun."

Carefully making his way through the secret room that Ayumi had lead him to, a pleading look in her eyes as she begged him to follow her, that there was something that she wanted him to see, Agasa Hiroshi coughed a little as he stirred up some dust in doing so. Ayumi hadn't inclined to tell him what it was that she wanted to show him so badly, only that she couldn't move it herself, and thought he might know something about it. He was more than willing to go along with her, hardly the type to refuse an earnest request from someone that wanted his help.

"You know what she is, Professor?" Ayumi asked, peering out from behind him. "Ah, her eyes are closed again."

"Well, of course I know what this is." Agasa remarked, carefully reaching out a hand, taking great care as he peered down at the would-be doll's face. He didn't know what kind of state she was in, so the most gentle touch was required. All things considered, she looked to be in remarkably good condition- he had never seen an example of this sort of thing so well preserved before.

In the first place, not many of them were made to begin with- so what was one doing here, having been long abandoned like this? The fact that the model was based off of a child's appearance raised some questions for him as well- but even so, he still knew at once what it was that Ayumi had discovered.

"You say her eyes were open before?" Agasa observed, frowning as he stood back up straight, placing a hand on his chin in thought. "I wonder if she might still be able to operate..."

"Operate?" Ayumi asked, glancing up at him. "Then, Professor, is she really a robot?"

"That's right." Agasa told her, setting down the flashlight that he had brought with him, propping it on the floor so that it illuminated their surroundings. As if taking a cue from him, Ayumi did very much the same with her own. "She's a rather rare model at that. One of the first humanoid models to be produced, in fact, around my grandfather's time. Well, given the time that they were made, there was quite a bit of opposition to that sort of thing, and in the end, only around twenty or so ever came off the assembly line, I believe. Although I don't remember any of them being designed to look like children..."

"Then, that's why her eyes opened!" Ayumi said, her eyes almost sparkling at this turn of events. If this doll- if this girl really was a robot, then she almost wanted to meet her properly. There were so many things that she wanted to ask! She couldn't help but be interested by this. "Do you really think she might be able to still move, Professor?"

"I can't say for certain until I examine her more in depth, but if her eyes really did open and close on their own, it's not impossible." Agasa noted. "Her parts are probably all quite old, but this model was rather well made, so it's possible that I might be able to restore her to proper working order with some time, if that's what you want, Ayumi-kun."

"Yeah!" Ayumi nodded her head, her eyes shining bright. "Please, can't you, Professor? I feel so bad for her, being left in a place like this!"

"That's true. It does seem pretty lonely here." Agasa observed, beaming down at the girl by his feet, lightly patting her head. Taking pity on an old robot- she really was a good child, this one. Too many people these days treated such things carelessly, he thought. "I'll see what I can do. For the moment, let's see if we can't move her to my car. If I'm really going to stand a chance to repair her, it would be better if we moved her to my lab, and out of this depressing place."

"Okay!" Turning towards the robot-doll, a bright smile crossing her face, Ayumi carefully took one of it's hands in her own. "Did you hear that? Isn't that great news?"

"I hope we can be friends when you wake up!"

Every day, as soon as school let out, Ayumi made her way over towards the Professor's house. Every day, as she hurried inside, she always had the same questions on her lips- have you fixed her yet? Can I talk to her yet?

Each day, at first, the answer to both questions was simply no. But as time passed, the answer changed, and it was an answer that filled her to the brim with anticipation- soon. She would be fixed soon. She would be able to talk to her soon. Every day, he spent his days sorting through boxes of old parts, pulled from junkyards across the country, searching for the right fit, or for something that would do just fine as a replacement, searching for the thing that she needed on this day, upgrading her where he safely could, without risking damage to her overall programming.

Some parts he had to scrap and replace entirely- and some were easier to do than others. Replacing her face plate with something that would allow for far more movement had been rather easy, but the delicate operation of replacing her hair had been far more painstaking work. Her left knee joint was completely twisted out of place and worn down, something which he hadn't noticed until he had brought her here- replacing that too, had also been an early priority. The further he dug, the more he was able to determine what seemed to still work, what needed to be repaired, and what he needed to attempt to replace. Even the finer details couldn't be ignored, if one thing was out of sorts, the whole thing might very well not work.

She was a challenge, but one that he was willing to take on. As her carefully repaired her, piece by piece, bit by bit, he couldn't help but grown a bit attached to her in his own right, sometimes reminded all too vividly of the fact that life had not cast him a hand in which he was ever going to have his own children, nor his own grandchildren. Ayumi and her friends filled a bit of that void, whenever they came over to test out one of his new games, or one of his new inventions- but there was still a gap there, a piece missing.

So too, did he begin to wonder about her circumstances. Why had she been made? Just as he thought, when he went digging for information on her model line, there had been no child units ever produced- only adult sized one. Who had made her? The information about the model's creator had been lost over time, given that they had faded into obscurity after production had been ceased. How had she ended up in that place? It troubled him, and troubled him to the point where he went knocking next door, exchanging a few words with his rather reliable young neighbor, who exchanged a promise in turn to look into the matter himself.

He knew that it had caught his interest as well.

And then, one day, as Ayumi burst into the house, excitement written on her features as it was every day, unfailingly, the answer changed again. "Is she fixed yet? Can I talk to her yet?"

Turning to her with a soft smile, a pleased expression on his face, Agasa merely nodded his head. "Yes. If everything goes well, then the answer to your question is finally yes, Ayumi-kun."

"Really?!" Barely able to contain her excitement, Ayumi all but raced past him, making her way downstairs, to where she knew she was being kept. Since she had been taken away from that secret room, she had been properly cleaned up, no longer covered in dust, that alone making her seem a little less lonely. "Soon, Professor?"

"Right now, in fact. I was just waiting for you to come over, Ayumi-kun." Agasa told her. Replacing the power source had been the most tricky part of all- with the old one that she had been previously running off of, she would have barely even had thirty minutes of active time, not nearly enough, he thought. It had taken quite a bit of time for him to bypass her old power source, creating a new one that would let her operate continuously, so long as she stopped to recharge every now and again. "Let's see if we can't manage to boot her up."

That was the tricky part, of course. Although he had examined it as best as he could, he hadn't altered her core programming very much. He couldn't guarantee that even if he could power her on, that she would come back online, in the way she would have in the past- if there was damage to what made up her electronic brain, he didn't know if he could manage to fix it himself. It was more complex than anything that he had ever seen before- he was almost willing to call it a proper AI.

There would be trouble were such a thing true- the rise of robots in popular culture had only happened because they didn't have such a thing, at least, not to this caliber. Such things were outlawed, in fact. If the wrong people caught wind of her, there might be trouble not only for himself and the robot girl, but even for Ayumi as well, in spite of the fact that she was merely a child.

Taking in and letting out a deep breath, Agasa carefully propped up his computer on the desk next to her, connecting it to the robot girl. He had found no way to activate her directly while working on her, and wondered if such a thing had been removed before she had been abandoned. He would have to go a bit of a roundabout route, but once he got her online, if he could successfully do that, she would be able to stay online- or so he hoped.

"Here we go."

For a moment, there was nothing. No reaction at all, not even the faintest fluttering of the robot girl's eyes, nor the smallest twitch of her finger. For a moment, both people held their breath, wondering if it hadn't worked after all, if such a thing really was impossible.

And then, finally, the robot-doll opened it's eyes, her fingers twitching. When she opened her mouth, her voice coming out, the pair that had been waiting for this moment for quite some time now exchanged an excited glance between them.

"Where am I?" The robot girl spoke, slowly seeming to take in her surroundings. As her gaze shifted, and she glanced between Agasa and Ayumi, the faintest of frowns made it's way onto her face. "Who are you?"

"I'm Yoshida Ayumi!" Ayumi introduced herself, beaming brightly up at the girl. "And this is Professor Agasa Hiroshi! You're in his house right now. The two of us found you, and he's been working hard to repair you all this time." She told her, taking a small step forward. "Hey, do you have a name yourself?"

"A name?" The robot girl slowly blinked, for a moment taking back by the near barrage of words, her brows almost furrowing in thought. As she searched her memory banks for such information, she almost found them entirely blank- a distressing development in it's own right, as she couldn't shake the feeling that there should be something there. Quite a bit, indeed.

She couldn't recall anything. What was she doing here? What was this place, and who were these people? For that matter, what exactly was she? She seemed to faintly understand that she was a robot of some kind, being able to gather that much from the wires coming out of her body, from the ball joints of her fingers and wrists, but beyond that, she knew nothing else about herself. Only that this fact troubled her greatly, which in and of itself, she couldn't help but feel was odd.

Still, she did seem to find a name.

"Ai." She told the two of them after a moment, somehow sensing something in their eyes that told her not to fear. There were many questions that she wanted answers to, but something told her that neither of these people had any intention of harming her. "I'm Ai."

"Ai-chan! Over here, over here!" With a wave of her hand and an equally bright smile, Ayumi almost bounced on her heels, patting the seat next to her. "You can sit next to me!"

"You're always hogging Haibara to yourself, Ayumi." Genta couldn't help but grumble, turning around to peer at the seat behind him, watching as the recent transfer student took a seat next to Ayumi on the bus. "It's no fair!"

"You and Mitsuhiko-kun were already sitting together, Genta-kun, so it can't be helped!" Ayumi pointed out, shifting over a tad so that Ai could slide into the seat next to her without any problems. "Besides, it's up to Ai-chan to pick where to sit in the first place. Isn't that right?"

"That's right." With a rather curt nod of her head, Ai glanced up at the pair of boys who were peering at them. Well, it wouldn't do if they started to fight over her- the last thing that she wanted to do was to be a thorn in their pre-existing friendship. Although she had only known them for two weeks, and the girl by her side for only a month, they were all good kids, she thought. "If you're that upset about it though, Kojima-kun, then I'll sit next to you on the ride back, okay?"

She had come no closer to obtaining answers about herself. Enrolling in elementary school for a time had been the Professor's idea- naturally, she had been against it. It was easier to lie about her, than it was to conceal her existence entirely. Concealing her true identity had been as simple as explaining away her unusual joints with prosthetics- after that, nobody asked any further questions. As as easy as that was, she still don't understand the idea herself in the least. However human-like she was, enrolling a robot in school alongside humans was something that was unheard of- and she was pretty certain that they Professor would get in a good deal of trouble if the truth were to come out about her. Still, he had been insistent, apparently under the impression that perhaps interacting normally with humans might naturally unlock the key to her memory.

She didn't believe such a thing was true. She wasn't a human, after all, the memories that she had lost weren't going to come back. They had most likely been deleted, wiped from her mind when she was abandoned in the first place. The fact that the Professor had taken the time and care to repair her in the first place was more than enough for her, really. She didn't need anything else, however undeniably curious about herself as she was. That curiosity in and of itself was curious- the other robots that she had met since waking up were nothing like her at all, even though at least a hundred years separated them, she knew that wasn't the reason why.

She knew that the Professor had people looking into the matter- she had met them once or twice. High school detectives, they had called themselves, though the two boys that she had met couldn't have been more different from each other, the only thing shared between them being a powerful desire to unravel the truth. Kudo Shinichi was cool on the surface, though she suspected there was a more childish steak within him, hiding just underneath. Hattori Heiji, in comparison, was as hot as fire, and didn't seem the least bit bothered being dragged into a case by the one he had casually referred to as his rival.

Neither of them even so much as blinked at her. Shinichi had merely shrugged his shoulders and told her that frankly, she wasn't the strangest thing that he had ever seen come out of the Professor's place, not by a long shot. Heiji had simply beamed brightly, patting his own shoulder, joking far too easily about how he was probably closer being like her than he was to Kudo anyways, ever since that incident. There was a look of guilt that had surfaced in Shinichi's eyes then, she noticed- there was a story there, untold as of yet.

"Then it's a promise, Haibara!" Grinning widely down at her, Genta's words roused her out of her own thoughts. "But you know, compared to the last field trip we took, going to a farm somehow seems less cool."

"Ayumi is looking forward to it!" Ayumi piped up, a bright smile on her face. "They said that if we're careful, they'll let us help feed the baby goats! Doesn't that sound exciting?"

"Well, in that case, I don't think Genta-kun is going to have much of a chance." Mitsuhiko couldn't help but quip, a little more upset than he was letting on that he was going to be the only one of them who wasn't going to have a chance to sit next to Ai on the bus. "But I'm certain that both Haibara-san and Ayumi-chan will be able to."

"Me too?" Ai blinked. "I don't know about that..." Trailing off a little, a slight frown crossed her face. Ayumi had ended up telling both of her friends the truth- she had already told them about her when she wasn't yet active, so it couldn't be helped, really. They had taken to the secret with a childish enthusiasm, vowing that not a word of it would leave their lips. "After all, I'm..."

"It'll be fine, Ai-chan!" Ayumi was quick to reassure her. She might only be a child, but even she could tell when someone was worried about something. And while it was true she couldn't quite understand the rather complex things that she found the Professor and his neighbor, that detective boy, talking about sometimes, even she knew that the most important thing of all was the fact that Ai was Ai. In the month that she had been turned back on, she had become rather close to her, forging a quick bond of friendship with her. "After all, you're a nice person. I'm certain the baby goats will love you!"

Human or robot, such a thing didn't really matter to her. Ai was already her precious friend, after all!

"Ayumi-chan's right!" Mitsuhiko said, nodding his head. "It'll be fun, Haibara-san!"

"I suppose you're right." Ai said after a moment, giving them a faint smile. "Thank you."

Well, as much as she didn't understand the Professor's idea, there was some small part of her that felt like she was starting to. Perhaps it wasn't about her memories at all- perhaps he just wanted her to have a chance to socialize with children who looked around her age, even if she knew that she wasn't. Perhaps he wanted her to live something of a normal life, seeing something within her that she was rapidly coming to understand about herself- that she felt in the same way that others did.

And some part of her, some part that perhaps had been lonely for all of those years, sitting in that abandoned mansion by herself, seemed to desire friendship. Something which she had found in spades where she was right now- and something that she wouldn't trade for the world. Whatever her past was, whatever she herself was- it didn't change the present fact that right now, at this current moment, she was Haibara Ai.

A slightly odd transfer student, who had already found herself three close friends here. And the relative of Agasa Hiroshi, who had come to live with him.

That was Haibara Ai. That was what was important.