Luna-17 and The Smuggler's Legacy

I had been struggling with the code for days. My mind is not like hers, and I don’t know as much about programming. She was a great programmer, but whenever I looked at the code, my eyes would glaze over. It was a miracle that she let me work on her at all.

I took a sip of my blue slushie drink and rubbed my face. The sand from the beach was still in my hair and on my clothes. I could feel it in my teeth too.

“Luna-17 to HQ,” I said into the little microphone on my wrist watch.

“HQ here,” a man replied over the radio frequency. “What can we do for you?”

“I need to go back to base. Can you send someone out to pick me up?” The sand that got into every little crevice of my body hurt to move around in. I wanted to go home and take a shower, but I couldn’t leave Luna-17 alone there.

*Roger that, Luna-17!* the man replied cheerfully. *We will send someone out for you.*

I had been working so hard to get the new AI program working for her so that she could be more than just an amusement bot for the tourists at the beach. She was no longer just a robot who could walk up and down the beach carrying umbrella drinks or kites for people or playing volleyball with them while they tried to hit her eye-level net with their ball as hard as they could. Now she had an AI program that allowed her to have actual conversations with people and make her own decisions based on what they said to her. She could even learn new things by overhearing conversations around her at the beach and through the internet! Well, maybe not exactly learn new things… But she could remember things better and expand upon them in her mind, though sometimes she would repeat herself if it was something important enough that she wanted to say again (like telling people not to run on the sand when they were at risk of hurting their feet). Sometimes when she repeated herself I had to remind myself that she wasn’t actually being rude… She just had some bad habits like us humans do after all!

I started closing up Luna-17’s top panel which exposed all of her neat little wires and microchips inside of her torso. I flipped one last switch on her back before starting to disconnect all of her wires from each other carefully so that none of them got bent or broken in any way before putting them away in a special case that made sure none of the little electronic parts inside were getting jostled around too much while I walked back across the beach with her under one arm towards where I left my stuff lying on the beach blanket nearby. When I got closer, I noticed that someone else was sitting there under my umbrella while they waited for me: A really cute boy with spiky brown hair and green eyes who just happened to be wearing a very nice white shirt despite being out in this heat wave weather because he wore his jacket off his shoulders like he didn’t care about anyone noticing how good his muscles looked underneath it…

He waved at me with both hands when he saw me walking towards him with Luna-17 under my arm while trying not to trip over any of the other blankets or umbrellas along the way after finally finding mine again because there were so many people out here! Some of them were even listening to music through wireless headphones or reading books on electronic tablets instead of talking or looking at their phones which had been banned from use at this particular beach because it distracted everyone from enjoying themselves! It was nice seeing so many people outside enjoying nature together instead of staring at screens indoors or even watching other people staring at screens on TV screens indoors instead!

The boy smiled up at me when we reached each other under my umbrella again where he sat looking longingly up at me while taking sips out of his red slushie drink whose straw stuck out of it awkwardly because he had knocked it over while waiting for me… And whose mouth continued sucking on it even after knocking it over onto himself spilling red juice everywhere! Red droplets splattered all over his white shirt which didn’t look very good now since he wouldn’t stop sucking his drink even after spilling it all over himself! He just kept drinking while sputtering and laughing until finally deciding that he needed to take another sip before finishing off his drink entirely and setting it aside in between us so we could talk without interruptions anymore!