The Core
The robot’s eyelid still twitched.
It seemed like that’s all he could ever get it to do. No walking. No speech. None of the things he’d envisioned.
In Finnian Eastman’s pocket, the skipping stone stayed still—smooth as glass, heavy as regret. He’d been sanding it with fine-grain paper since his sister’s funeral. He thought back to the day before the shooting—when they were skipping stones at Lake Walukan. He was nine. She was fifteen.
She’d made it look effortless—seven, eight, nine skips every time. He’d just watched, mesmerized, as his own rocks sank after a single clumsy hop.
He thought it was the stones. So he decided to make his own.
Picked a promising one. Started shaping it. And never really stopped.
Every time he thought it was finished, he’d find another flaw. An edge just a little too sharp. A curve just a little too wrong. Six years later, he was the same age she’d been when she’d gone inside for a Coke and come back out in a body bag.
He leaned forward and ran the test again.
No movement. No flicker in the optic feed. Just the blank stare of his assistant prototype—Juno—half-built, half-dead, and going nowhere.
It was 6:04 a.m. The lab was cold, lit only by the blue glow of plasma interfaces and the slow blink of standby LEDs. Ozone and metal clung to the air. The hum of the ventilation system buzzed behind his eyes like a headache he’d forgotten to notice.
Across the room, Clara was scrubbing a beaker in the sink, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows. She was humming again—tuneless, almost mechanical. She always hummed when she was nervous, tired, or trying to stay ahead of the silence.
“You saw that, right?” he said.
“See what?”
“Juno blinked.”
She didn’t turn. “Blinked again? I keep telling you—if you want it to do more, you need a real neural power core.”
“But that’s the point,” Finnian said. “I can’t afford a neural power core. Neither can anyone else. How am I supposed to build a personal aid robot for the common man with a component that costs fifty grand and always will because Marcus never had to pinch a penny in his life?”
Clara shrugged.
Finnian continued his rant.
“That pompous prick has no idea how to do a cost analysis. You would think the things were made of gold the way he charges for them.”
“Platinum.”
“What?”
“He makes them out of platinum. That’s why they’re so expensive.”
“Yeah, well he kind of has to or the damn things will melt.”
Clara nodded and reached for another beaker.
Finnian stared at the still frame on his bench.
The neural power core was the brain, not the battery—it made decisions, learned, evolved. Without it, Juno was just an expensive mannequin.
But the choices at this point were limited to building it with platinum—or creating a component as big as the robot itself just to disperse the heat. Both were non-starters.
A week ago, he’d rebuilt the optical stabilizer by hand using recycled lenses from a visual prosthetic. He wasn’t even sure it had worked. The twitch could’ve been static.
Or it could’ve been hope.
Hope was the most dangerous theory of all.
Clara turned off the tap, wiped her hands, and said nothing.
They were both scholarship kids—outliers in Lab 7A, where legacies ran experiments and scholarship students ran errands. But Clara belonged. She moved through the lab like she’d built it herself.
Finnian had a desk because his uncle was Division Head of Systems Integration. It was supposed to be a “fair shot.” What his uncle really meant was: one last chance.
He took it seriously. Worked harder than anyone. Slept under the bench when no one was watching. Rewrote his code from scratch. Scavenged parts from donation bins and scrap auctions. Every inch of Juno had been earned.
Except the neural power core.
Because Marcus Li owned the cores—and all the patents. Marcus—the golden boy with four patents, his name on two textbooks, and a father on the Board—didn’t have to sabotage Finnian. He just had to ignore him.
Clara had called it sabotage anyway.
“Accidental exclusion,” she said, voice flat with irony. “You designed your system around Li-Core architecture. Then they made sure you never got one.”
“Typical,” Finnian muttered.
He was used to coming in second to someone who didn’t even notice he was racing.
But the next day, Clara changed everything.
She handed him a cryo-case during inventory, slid it onto his bench like it was nothing.
He opened it.
Inside: a neural power core. Brand new. Untagged. Quietly illegal.
“Where did you get this?” he whispered.
“I borrowed it.”
“From who?”
She didn’t look up. “Someone who won’t miss it.”
He stared at her. She stared at the sink.
He almost handed it back.
Almost.
Instead, he opened Juno’s chest plate and slotted the core in.
He told himself it was just to test it—just to be sure.
The stolen core clicked into place like it had always belonged there.
The bot’s fingers twitched. The chest lights blinked. A low vibration moved through the table—subtle as breath.
“You know this is—” he began.
“Felony-level lab misconduct? Sure.” She cracked a small smile. “You’re welcome.”
“You shouldn’t have helped me.”
“I didn’t help you,” she said. “I helped the thing you built.”
She started to turn, then stopped. Reached out and tapped the corner of his coat pocket.
“You’re going to skip that someday.”
“My skipping stone?”
“A skipping stone that doesn’t skip is just a rock,” she said. Then added, almost too casually: “Just throw it already. Or drop it. Doesn’t matter. Just do something with it.”
He studied her. “Why do you care?”
“I don’t,” she said too quickly. Then, softer: “I just hate seeing good things sink before they get a chance.”
Then she walked away.
He didn’t have time to process the heat rising in his chest.
Because thirty seconds later, the lab doors slammed open.
Two security officers strode in—one with a clipboard, the other with a scanner.
“Random audit,” said the tall one. “Eastman, log your inventory.”
Finnian’s heart jolted. The core was live. Traceable. No time to pull it clean.
His hands moved before his thoughts did. He triggered the emergency stop on Juno. Disconnected the core. It burned his fingers. He slid it into his coat.
The scanner passed over his chest. Beeped once. Then fell silent.
The officer frowned. “Lab records are cleaner than most,” he said. “Still—trace patterns don’t lie.”
Clara turned slowly, holding up a half-cleaned beaker.
“Might be from the recycled photonic panels in bin D,” she said evenly. “They throw spikes sometimes.”
The guard checked the bin. Muttered. Shrugged.
They swept the room once more. Then left.
Clara rinsed her beaker. Set it down.
“You’re lucky,” she said.
“I’m not,” he replied. “I’m just getting better at faking it.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Her face was calm. Her voice wasn’t.
“You don’t get it,” she said. “They only reward people like Marcus for playing nice. The rest of us? We either cheat, or we vanish.”
She didn’t hum after that.
The next morning, her station was clean.
No note. No message.
Just a torn lanyard draped over her stool. Her name missing from the attendance queue.
He checked her drawer. Empty.
Her terminal had been wiped clean.
She was just—gone—as if she had never worked there.
That night, Juno woke up.
Its sensors clicked. Its head turned toward sound. One servo tightened in the wrist, like a reflex. The voice module crackled:
“Hello. I’m Juno. I am ready to serve you.”
Finnian stared.
His pulse stopped.
After all the hours. All the failures. Just like Clara had said—it was the power core.
“Hello. I’m Juno. I am ready to serve you.”
He hung his head.
No. It wasn’t ready to serve anyone.
It wasn’t a victory. Not really.
It was a theft. A risk.
A betrayal of everything he wanted Juno to represent.
So he powered it down.
Sat beside it in the quiet.
Wondered what it meant to be ready—and never get the chance.
And waited for it to feel like enough.
It didn’t.
By Monday, Clara’s investigation was amended to include him.
Guilty by association.
The board called him in. Clara had been caught on camera in an unauthorized area. They couldn’t prove she took the core—but that didn’t matter. Unauthorized access was enough. She was fired and escorted from the building.
As for Finnian, the questions came fast:
“Did you help steal the core?”
“Were you part of the plan?”
“Did you steal it yourself?”
“No,” he said. Each answer, honest.
But then:
“Have you seen the missing neural core?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where it is now?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“I didn’t steal it.”
“That’s not what we asked.”
He told them where it was.
Refused to say where it came from.
They suspended him.
Three months. No work. No pay.
When they erased his access codes and deleted his files, he didn’t ask for backup.
He just left.
Three months passed.
Then they let him back in.
His bench: reassigned.
His schematics: purged.
Juno: gone.
But someone had left him something.
Inside an old AI systems manual, folded neatly, a single note in Clara’s steady hand:
Just throw it.
That afternoon, Finnian skipped class.
Walked the winding trail behind the engineering dome, past the solar farm and the old observatory, down to the reservoir.
The sky was glassy. Pale gold over steel water.
The world was quiet.
He took out the stone.
Held it for a moment. Felt its weight.
Then he threw it.
Not to see how far it would go.
Not to count the skips.
Just to let it go.
One skip. Two. Three. Four. A long, clean glide.
Then it sank.
He watched until the last ripple vanished.
He scanned the shoreline and found another stone—nearly perfect.
He picked it up.
Thought about keeping it. Starting over.
Then he dropped it.
“Son of a bitch,” he said aloud. “It was never the stone. It was the person throwing it.”
He thought of Juno.
Then he smiled—embarrassed, maybe. But clearer than he’d felt in years.
He hadn’t failed to build a robot.
He’d just been focused on the wrong problem.
It was never about making the perfect machine. It was about giving everyone the tools to build their own.
The robot wasn’t what people needed.
The neural power core was—the brain!
Make that brain affordable, and the people could build their own futures.
That’s what he was meant to create.
“Screw Marcus! And his $50,000 platinum dinosaur!” he said aloud. “I’m making a brain!”
Finnian bent down, picked up another stone, not even close to perfect. He threw it—
“Thanks, sis,” he whispered. Then he turned away before it even touched the water.
He was so focused on crafting his new proposal that he never saw it skip nine, ten, eleven times before it sank in glory.
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