Wake up?

Are you dreaming? Are we all nothing but dust in the-- Ow!

"Pay attention to what you're doing!" A glove clad hand whacks you on the back of your head. A tangle of curly, auburn hair gets in your face, as you bend forward from the impact. Confused, you rub the soreness away, glaring at your dad. An imposing figure, standing with his arms crossed, a thin-lipped mouth hidden underneath is black full-beard.

He merely glares back, adding, "Tie up your hair, too! If one of those sparks gets you, you'll end up more than hot-headed."

"Sure." You scoff, shrugging off your father’s overbearingness. Weren't these dumb goggles enough? Not like you've gone blind yet. Which might be due to those dumb goggles. Okay, fine, the goggles are pretty necessary.

Dad opens his mouth as to say something, thinks better off it. On his way out, your dad knocks on the giant engine suspended - separating your work space from his. You never fail to notice this odd habit. Mostly due to the fact that you couldn’t ignore it if you wanted to. The engine, a hollow thing of steel and iron, thunders with reverberation if you even look at it wrong.

Part of you can't help but gnaw at how you scoffed. It's not that you particularly dislike your dad. In-fact, that’s the weird thing. You never really felt that intense hatred for any of your parents. Always the good daughter. Working, learning the art of metallurgy and robotics, keeping the town functioning and safe. Sure, the way he just smacked you could be seen as pretty hard, but… they don’t know your relationship. It’s all in good fun! Then again, it’s not like you really give back as good as you get. You’ve never really had that rebellion thing going for you- least of all in a physical way. Yours was more of a… Nothing at all, sort of way.

Instead of acting out, your rebellion folded in on itself, crawled into the attic and laid down to rot away. Maybe that’s a sort of anger? You spend hours, day in and day out, working alongside your father in this tiny, sweaty, dumb workshop. How could you not feel a little frustrated? Would you have loved to spend time elsewhere? Hang out with your friends and see what they look like in daylight, maybe? Yes. That’d be pretty cool.

Then again, your brother isn't that much younger, so he could have been dad's apprentice. Instead, Dad, chose you. Trusting you with all that responsibility. He doesn't even know all the ways you've failed him. All the ways you’re going to – quite frankly – betray him.

Your friends and you have been long planning to mount an expedition. Not towards anything special, just… somewhere not here. Out beyond the valley and into a world yet unknown. The thought of exploring the world with your friends makes you happy. And ashamed. You’d explain it, but, damn, you’re not quite sure you know how you feel yourself. Chiseling away at the mental disaster of your thoughts, you’ve kinda settled on a logic that makes sense to you: Why would you want to leave? If you want to leave, your life is awful. If your life is awful, leaving would make you happy. You are happy at the thought of leaving, so that makes you an awful, ungrateful bitch of a daughter.

Neurons fire in your brain, but it feels like the distance is so vast, that you can’t connect the dots. Somewhere, inside tha machine of your mind, there’s pieces missing. Your logic makes sense… but it doesn’t.

Thank everything, that his workspace is at the other end of this place. Somehow that makes the guilt and shame a little easier to bear – and easier to hide the actual amount of time spent working contra spent daydreaming.

Used to be a warehouse to store stuff, according to the elderly. Amazonian drones used to fly in and out of this place, carrying - you can only presume based on the name - loads of wood, stored here till people needed it for their fireplace. Now it only stores your increasing anxiety of a future spent eternally trapped working here. First every day alongside your father, then, eventually, alone.

Besides, welding and daydreaming, how could that not be considered safe? At this point you could weld PR073-C70R in your sleep. Not that it would let anyone else make repairs on it. Dad tried once- it did not go well.

Point at whatever wear and tear it might have gotten and - ta-da - you could fantasize about more important stuff while being useful. Like, how you're making progress on your poem collections (that no one will ever see), imagine being wooed by your crush (a title they'll never ever know they possess), or how to avoid literally giving your dad a heart attack when you work up the courage to tell him you won't be a roboticist (which you might be able to do... when you've run out of excuses to postpone doing so).

PR073-C70R apparently ran into a bit of a wolf problem. Wolves being especially problematic ever since they spontaneously developed the ability to spit acid.

You're not quite sure they didn't do so in the past, but when the geezers start ranting about tales their grandfather told them of old earth, it gets pretty hard to dispute. None of them described anything like PR073-C70R, though. Beyond the modifications you've made on it, their frame is already human enough that you might mistake it for one. In the dark. With no moon out. And if you haven't met a human being before or looked into a mirror, and you happened to be under the misguided belief that limbs were elongated, slim things with occasional clusters of metal providing vague impressions of appendages.

Then, yes, you might mistake it for human.

Having already done most of the repairs on PR073-C70R, only two remain before you finally achieve sweet, sweet freedom.

There's some loose plating and internal damage on PR073-C70R's sword hand. If not repaired it could hinder its combat abilities. Purely speculation, there's no reason a robot wouldn't be able to use its left hand for swinging a sword around. Actually, why would you specifically program a robot to be right-handed? Just seems like a weird and arbitrary thing to do. It would also give you a chance to add a couple of stanzas to your poem collection.

On closer inspection you also noticed PR073-C70R's leg hydraulics seeming a bit iffy. You've never seen it fight, but something about its design tells you that PR073-C70R relies heavily on their mobility. Call it a mechanics intuition. Working on that would give you plenty of time to think of the many rousing way's your crush could potentially woo you.