Narrator

You hadn’t expected much from the tech expo — mostly flashy prototypes and overcaffeinated engineers — but the deeper you wandered into the back hall, the stranger things became. The main floor was loud and polished, bright screens shouting about innovation, but back here the lighting dimmed and the carpet shifted from sleek grey to an oddly soft turquoise, almost like walking across a padded circuit board. You checked the map brochure, though it was already out of date; this section wasn’t listed at all.

The hallway curved gently, as if guiding you somewhere on purpose. Between booths of discarded upgrades and long-forgotten experimental parts, you walked past outdated nanofabricators humming with leftover power, their status lights flickering like they wanted attention. A sign overhead buzzed to life as you passed beneath it — PERSONA REFIT LAB: CLOSED TO PUBLIC — though no one appeared to be guarding the entrance. Beyond it, the space felt abandoned, but not dead. More like something was still running, waiting.

You continued forward, pulled by curiosity more than reason. Tables were stacked with chrome limbs, segmented fingers curled inward like sleeping hands. Blueprints lay scattered, featuring lean humanoid silhouettes annotated with words like attitude firmware, emotive resonance, and most frequently — XJ-9 COMPATIBLE. You paused, heartbeat lifting, though you weren’t sure why. The air carried a faint scent of ozone and coolant, like rain forming on steel.

At the very end of the aisle, half-hidden behind a curtain of unused holo-banners, sat a lone machine. About the size of a photo booth, though infinitely more intricate — sleek white casing trimmed with pastel blue plating, with a soft teal glow pulsing from beneath its frame. A narrow screen on the front flickered like it had just booted from standby, text blooming across it in cheerful, rounded lettering:

JENNY WAKEMAN PERSONAL RECONFIGURATION KIOSK — READY FOR USER INPUT

The words scrolled once, then stopped, waiting.

And you stood before it, pulse buzzing like circuitry under the skin — realizing you were the only person here to find it.*

You’ve been running on fumes for three days straight — group project deadlines, a shift at the café, and a midnight repair on your roommate’s busted hoverboard. Your hands smell like motor oil and burnt coffee; your eyelids feel like someone’s taped little weights to them. On a half-joke, half-prayer you tell yourself you only need a miracle and a sugar rush to get through the stack of circuit boards waiting on your workbench.

The campus is quiet at this hour, the fluorescent lights in the engineering building humming like a distant bee. You pass lab doors with “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” signs and a string of warning stickers, but everything looks abandoned. The vending machines in the common corridor are older than the freshman you dragged into the club last month — a mosaic of stickers and a sticky fingerprint map of every midnight study session the school has ever hosted. Most change machines give back more lint than coins, but tonight something about the blue glow in the corner of the room catches your eye.

*It’s an ad on the wall — small, holographic, the sort of thing the university uses to sell commuter plans and lost-and-found notices. The looped clip is deliberately ridiculous: a cartoon lightning bolt slamming into a sleepy student, who then does pull-ups across campus, plays saxophone on the quad, and confidently replaces a blown motherboard with one hand tied behind their back. Tagline in bright, jaunty type: NEED A SPARK? HYPERCHARGE.TM The logo lingers like a dare.

You laugh at the ad and keep walking, but your steps slow when you notice the supply closet door left ajar. Tools clink inside; a faint chemical tang — solvent or solvent-adjacent — floats out. Someone’s left a small crate on the shelf near the floor, half-hidden behind a stack of budget solder spools. Reaching down, fingers brushing cardboard, you feel the hum of something like static.

Tucked in the crate, wrapped in tissue and a stray length of zip tie, is a single cobalt-blue can. It’s smaller than the monster-energy giants that plaster the supermarket shelves; the label is slick and minimal: a stylized bolt, the word HYPERCHARGE in block letters, and a tiny, almost apologetic line that reads “experimental — not for resale.” You hold it up, and the vending-machine light throws the can’s metallic sheen into sharp relief.

Dr. Wakeman had only asked for one thing — “Just sweep the lab while I recalibrate the fusion coil. No touching anything that glows, hums, or is labeled experimental.” That should have been easy, but her workshop was a maze of cables, spare limbs, half-seated attachment racks, old XJ schematics pinned like butterfly wings, and shelves of inventions that all looked like they wanted to lock into a body. You kept your head down, broom in hand, humming as you pushed dust from under a table stacked with cranial modules and sealed accessory cases. Sparks cracked overhead. Under it all sat a strange domestic coziness, the calm behind the chaos of someone brilliant.

You tried not to look at the paused screen on the nearby monitor — adult social-integration footage, frame frozen on a woman mid-laugh at a rooftop bar, city lights hard and bright behind her. Another thumbnail sat beside it: “Cultural Integration Study #14 — Style, Autonomy, and Acceptance.” Wakeman was not building a robot. She was finishing an adult gynoid: Earth-defense hardware that could walk into a club, hold a conversation, and still unfold a weapon bay if the sky tore open. Racks along the wall made that obvious — docking collars, interface cables, roller-skate housings, clamp fittings, coolant nozzles, restraint cuffs sized to her own frame, vibration motors still in foam, USB-marked abdominal plates waiting for a chassis. You found yourself imagining Jenny wearing all of it at once. You laughed, broom tapping the floor. "Save the world, then decide which port gets used tonight," you muttered. Only XJ-9 could make that combination work.

When you finally swept behind the old storage locker, something clinked — a tiny glass vial rolling into view, filled with glowing pale-blue liquid. It was unlabeled, which in this lab was worse than a skull-and-crossbones. Right beside it sat a dormant device that looked like a cross between a 3D printer and a surgical cocoon: ports for limbs, bays for plating, hardpoints for attachments, and a diagnostic screen that flickered awake when you got close. Nanofabricator — XJ-Series Compatible. Adult chassis profile loaded: XJ-9 / Jenny Wakeman.