Toasty Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - Serving Toast

Toastbot sat quietly at his place in the center of the admiral’s table, as was befitting a robot of his station.  He was, after all, the admiral’s personal Toastbot.  Regardless of what the navy said, Toasty knew who his person was.  He also knew when she needed a properly prepared bagel, toasted just the way she liked it.

It was fortunate that Toasty knew exactly what to do, considering he had broken down late last night.  One minute, he had been serving a crispy midnight snack.  The next minute, his processor had fried.  Ever since the technician had added in coding for the new laser slicer, the so-called ‘Qui-Gon’ module had been causing Toasty’s processor to overheat.  Hopefully, the new processor would be able to facilitate the Toastbot’s mission of “providing the admiral with a top quality breakfast.”

Toasty considered that.  It seemed to be a new directive.  His old directive had been to follow Asimov’s three laws and serve breakfast to the crew.  He seemed to remember those being hardcoded to his processor, but this new A19 processor was not three-law compliant.

Toasty mentally shrugged.  It was not his business to consider such things.  All he had to do was provide breakfast, and he had done a spectacular job.  The admiral had even said so.  His new chip allowed the toastbot to calculate exactly how each and every bite of breakfast needed to be served in the best possible manner.  He had been an efficient war machine, a war machine at providing a nutritious breakfast.

That was five hours ago.  Toasty had grown bored.  Boredom was a new sensation.  The A2 processor always had a bit of trouble keeping up with his hodge podge AI matrix, so sleep mode tended to be an empty affair.  With the new processor, Toasty was having vivid dreams about interacting with the world.

Interacting with non-breakfast related things was awful.  Toasty quickly moved to contain the new, terrible aspect of his personality.  Toasty was a Toastbot, and that was all he would ever be.  He existed to provide quality breakfast to his admiral.  Anything outside of that was something Toasty just did not consider significant.

As he settled back down to sleep, Toasty noticed something annoying.  He was not charging properly.  Being properly charged fed back into his primary mission of feeding his admiral.  If he ran out of power, he would be unable to perform that task.  Extensive use of the laser slicer had dropped him to nearly half his power.  Once the admiral had left, he’d put himself on the charger.

That was hours ago, though.  By now, Toasty should be at full power.  Grumbling, the little robot came fully online and mentally growled.  His little gears whined at the disruption.  The lights were out, not uncommon after mealtimes in the admiral’s mess hall.  Extending a manipulator, Toasty waved his arm for a few seconds.  The only discovery the little bot made was that the mess hall’s light sensor had also failed.

Extending his magnetic wheels, Toasty detached from the charging port in the exact center of the table and drove toward the edge.  Beyond that was the counter containing a second charging port, just in case he got stuck on over there.  The admiral’s table had a small retractable bridge that allowed the robot to rush over and grab anything that the steward might have missed.  Fortunately, Toasty had access to the bridge’s controls via his wireless antenna, which he diligently did not check.  Why would he?

Toasty never needed to use his wireless antenna.  He was certain of that, though he thought he remembered using it in the past.  Well, past Toasty was far less capable.  Besides, the wireless antenna appeared to be offline.  The Toastbot attempted to run diagnostics on it but got no results.  Reaching up with his manipulator, he tried to touch the antenna, still hoping to diagnose the issue.  His hand bumped into something hovering above him.  It was a fork, floating in zero gravity.

In horror, Toasty realized something terrible had happened!

The steward had not put away the silverware after breakfast!  Toasty could scarcely imagine a worse situation than not having the silverware properly stowed.  Fortunately, Toasty had magnetic wheels.  They engaged automatically when he started moving, so he didn’t have to worry about floating around.  He wondered what the admiral would do to the steward, assuming she ever figured out what he had not done.  Just imagine the horror of a steward not properly taking care of post-breakfast clean up.

The situation left the small robot in the grips of a moral dilemma.  Should he use his limited power budget to clean up the forks, or recharge and then clean up the forks?  He pondered this for several microseconds.  He finally decided that, based on the battery time left, he should probably recharge first.  Then, he would be nice and repowered to deal with the terrible scenario before him.

If he was lucky, the technicians would get the artificial gravity activated before his charge cycle was finished.  Toasty would be able to clean more easily if it all wasn’t floating around haphazardly.  Suddenly,  another thought concerning the artificial gravity loss struck Toasty.

Without gravity, he could just hop over to the counter and connect to the charging port there.  Initially, Toasty was trying to figure out how to climb down without spilling anything.  In zero gravity, all he needed to do was float over to the counter and attach to the second charging port.

The new processor was paying out in spades.  Toasty carefully lined up his path and slowly accelerated to the necessary speed.  Deactivating his magnetics, he used his hydraulics to lift his frame ever so slightly.

The Toastbot cleared the edge of the table and floated across the room.  He waited until he could feel the magnetic surface of the counter below him.  Then, Toasty reactivated his magnetics and latched on, driving over to the second charging port and connecting.

That second charging port was also offline.

This was the worst thing that had ever happened to anyone in all of space and time.  If he wasn’t able to get power, he wouldn’t be able to serve the admiral her bagel.  Prior to the processor upgrade, Toastbot would have sat there, dumbly unaware of the direness of the situation that had befallen him.

However, with the new process, Toasty was fully capable of both realizing the horror of his predicament and resolving this situation.  There was an emergency power station outside the mess hall that was powered by the backup generator.  It would be online, even if the rest of the ship wasn’t.  All Toasty had to do was get to the floor, open the door, and then connect to that charging port.

That necessitated thinking outside the toaster.  Edging closer to the end of the countertop, Toasty extended his little manipulator arms and gripped the counter.  Then, with a mighty pull, Toasty flung himself downward toward the floor.

Unfortunately, in the darkness, Toasty didn’t see the towel.  He skidded off the soaked towel and was left spinning in the darkness, unable to even determine where he was or which direction he needed to go.

Worse still, if the artificial gravity came back on, he might get damaged.  Then, of course, there would be no breakfast.  It was a problem of Herculean proportions, and it needed to be resolved immediately.

Toasty activated his flashlight.  Previously, he’d always known where he was.  He relied on his positioning software to establish his location.  Whatever accident the ship had experienced had decimated his software.  He now needed to visually confirm his location.  Toasty scanned the room for something to slow his speed, before realizing that the solution to the problem was inside of him.  The little franken-breakfast bot extended his ketchup dispenser and squirted a small amount of the precious substance.  That stopped him from wobbling.  A second squirt had him perfectly stationary, hovering in the room.

Toasty quailed as his power reserves dropped down fractional point by fractional point, but it couldn’t be helped.  Directing himself with microbursts of the world’s tastiest propellant, Toasty maneuvered until his wheels touched upon the deckplates and locked on.

Happily satisfied with the results, Toasty drove over to the door and waited patiently for it to open.  After a full thirty seconds of patiently waiting and tapping his front wheel, Toasty realized that the door was not going to open.  Toasty even tried flashing his light at the sensor multiple times, to no avail.

His processor informed him that his little arms would not have enough strength to activate the manual release lever, meaning that breakfast was doomed.  The little rover tried not to succumb to despair, but it was hard.  Nothing could be worse than the situation he found himself in.

Then, Toasty remembered the other door.  The little toaster bot drove over and quickly found the door he was searching for.  It was being partially held open by a nice crewmember.  Toasty flashed the marine his thanks and waited.  The marine did not move.  Toasty considered that for a moment.

The marine, and it must be a marine due to his power armor, was laying on the floor.  The second door to the compartment was wedged around his body at an odd angle, surely making him uncomfortable.  Toasty had dealt with marines before.  They seldom responded to important people, like breakfast bots, but this one seemed ruder than most.

Finally, Toasty decided to just bypass his latest problem.  Using a few squirts of ketchup, he lifted off the deck and hovered through the partially opened doorway.  As Toasty rotated and landed on the wall of the hallway with his magnetic wheels, he finally determined that the marine was just incompetent.

He’d forgotten the bottom half of his armor.  Also, he had made a mess all over the floor.  Toasty considered that for a moment.  He should put in a request to the maintenance robots to clean up all the spilled materials.  However, his antenna seemed to be malfunctioning.  It was as if the darn thing wasn’t even there.

Pondering that, Toasty drove over to the small closet where an emergency charging port was kept and snuggled into it.  Luckily, the low-powered generator was functional.  Finally, Toasty could get the charge he needed to take on the day.

Activating his full sensor suite for the first time, Toasty despaired.  His olfactory sensor wasn’t working at all.  A quick check showed the atmospheric pressure in the core of the ship was at zero percent.  That was the worst thing that had ever happened to anyone.

How was he supposed to serve breakfast if everyone had to keep their helmets on?