The box was taller than the Kid's mother. It came off the truck at twenty to five on a Thursday afternoon, and the Kid had been watching for it since half past three, the way he'd watched for it, in some form, for two years. He'd refreshed the tracking page forty times. He'd done the math on the truck's route twice.
At 4:38 he'd heard the diesel groan two streets over and gone out to stand at the end of the driveway with his hands in his pockets, trying to look like someone who happened to be standing in his driveway, and failing. The driver had a sunburned neck and a wedding ring worn smooth. He made the Kid sign for the box on a phone with a cracked screen before he'd wheel it up the driveway on a hand truck. The Kid signed with his fingertip.
It came out looking like a seismograph trace. "What's in it?" the driver asked, stacking the hand truck back into the truck. "A robot," the Kid said. The driver absorbed this the way men absorb weather they can't change.
"Huh," he said, and drove away. The Kid got the box into the garage alone, which took some doing, ninety kilos and a hand truck with opinions about where it wanted to go, and stood over it with his hands on his knees, breathing through his mouth. The stencil on the side read MERIDIAN DYNAMICS in gray on brown cardboard, and under that, in smaller type: FIELD TEST UNIT: NOT FOR RESALE. Under that, in warehouse marker, in a hand that had written the same thing six times already that day: #7.
He'd been in Meridian's Field Test program for two years. That meant two years of surveys about a dishwasher that didn't exist yet and a thermostat with opinions, two years of firmware builds with his name in the acknowledgments file, two years of waiting for the thing Meridian had been promising in keynotes since he was thirteen. The Harbor H-1. First production run.
A domestic android, actual walking-around hardware, not a render. Unit seven off the line, and it was his for a year, telemetry and all, provided he didn't take it apart. He was already planning to take it apart. Not out of malice.
The Kid had never been malicious about anything except, briefly, a substitute teacher in fourth grade, and even that had been more of a proof of concept. It was simpler than that. He couldn't walk past a locked door without wondering what was behind it, and he never had been able to, and at seventeen the habit was fully calcified, load-bearing. His mother called it curiosity, because she loved him.
His school called it a disciplinary pattern, because it didn't. In second grade he'd finished the year's math workbook by the second week of October, and his teacher, out of options, had given him the answer key and asked him to check the other children's work during quiet time. He'd returned it on Friday with three corrections and a two-page note explaining where the publisher had gone wrong. The teacher had cried, not at him, she'd insisted, at the week, and the school had moved him up a grade in math, which solved nothing, because the problem had never been the grade.
The problem was that the Kid's mind ran about four times faster than the room, and the room could feel it, and nobody knew what to do with the surplus except punish it or ignore it, and mostly they did both. He'd been beta-testing consumer hardware since he was thirteen. First a mesh-router startup out of Austin that folded six months later (he still had their router, it still worked; it was the best router anyone had ever made and that had been the problem, too expensive to live). He'd found a buffer overflow in their admin panel in the first week and reported it with a patch attached, which the founders had found thrilling and then, over the following months, exhausting.
Then a smartwatch company whose firmware team he now emailed with at two in the morning, when he found things, which was often. Three companies total, counting Meridian. His feedback read like engineering notes because it was engineering notes: thermal graphs, packet captures, a twenty-page teardown of a speaker dock's power supply with the failing capacitor circled in red and a cheaper replacement specced, with a distributor and a part number and a note that the fix would save eleven cents a unit at scale. The companies found him annoying in the specific way of a person who is always right in writing, and they kept inviting him back for exactly that reason.
Annoying was cheap. Recalls were expensive. The Harbor unboxed like a puzzle designed by someone who'd actually thought about it. Molded pulp cradled each limb; the unit came folded, knees up, arms crossed, head bowed, like a person sleeping on a train.
The Kid lifted it upright with the help of the garage's engine hoist, which was the kind of sentence his life produced regularly, and stood it on its feet in the middle of the oil-stained concrete. It was taller than him. A hundred and eighty-seven centimeters, eighty-four kilos, matte graphite panels over a frame he could feel humming faintly when he put his palm against its chest. Its hands had the right number of fingers, which he noted with approval (he'd seen prototypes with six, and six was a choice) tipped with compliant rubber pads worn smooth at the factory by ten thousand test grasps.
...continues in the full book.