Dark Light Online

I woke up bright and early the next morning, having to get to the school early to make sure the bots still worked after I left them at noon the day before. I threw on a pair of jeans and a plain black t-shirt and stopped my morning rush to fix my horribly messed up dark brown hair, having some of the worst bed-head I have ever gotten. After, I just stared at myself in the mirror, not believing what I was seeing. Before my divorce I was a reasonably handsome guy, not super muscular, but, not just skin and bones either. I was 6'2" or 1.9 meters and weighed about 200 pounds, with not a lot of it being fat. But the man in the mirror looked like a skeleton, he was the same height as I used to be but there was no muscle or fat anywhere on his body, he was very pale contrasting to my previous tan self. I couldn't believe that I let myself go, this much, after the divorce. Glancing at the time in the corner of my eye I realized I was going to be late because I stared at my self too long, which has never happened before. I sprinted towards the door grabbing a energy bar on the way out and scarfing it down on my way to work. It was kind of sad that a Stanford graduate in mechanical engineering and coding was working as a "janitor" at a high school, but that was reality, just because you got a good education doesn't mean that you could get a good job.

When I finally got to the drone bay everything was a mess, it almost looked like a group of rabid velociraptors came in searching for food. This mess only happened once before, and I know who did it, but I couldn't get pissed at my boss for ruining my sanctuary. I looked around a bit and found him rooting through one of my desk drawers whispering to himself

"Where is it, where is it?!"

"Ummmm, what are you looking for sir?" I asked my eye twitching as I surveyed my workshop and the wreckage he caused. "Ow, f.u.c.k, you scared me there Johnathan." he said banging his head as he came out from under my desk. "Can I help you sir?" I asked again almost killing my boss as I saw my favorite duck statue on my desk shattered at his feet. " Yes well, you see Johnathan, I bought the most amazing gift for my daughter, a HOOTERS, and well since I knew that your workshop is the second most secure place in the school after the vault, which I can't access for personal storage, I hid it in here." He sheepishly said, but before he continued I interrupted saying "Let me guess, you can't find it?". " YES! exactly, I can't find it, so can you help me find it." he stated, more like an order than a question. "Fine" I agreed because you can't really say no to your boss. We started searching more thoroughly in my workshop, when the first bell rang I had almost given up on finding it when I saw a cleaning bot in its repair stall, meaning it needed to be unclogged or fixed. Wanting a break from searching I approached the screen next to the stall and ran a quick diagnostics check and found that it's brush was jammed. I walked over and pulled the item that was clogging it out, I saw that it was a HOOTERS box and yelled over to the principle " HEY I FOUND IT". He rushed over and took it from my hands almost crying. "Wait why is it all destroyed?" he asked. "Well, it got clogged in one of the cleaning bots and got all shredded, but the implants are still in mint condition it only has a couple little holes in it, what could have fallen out?".

The principle left soon after having to go wrap up the gift in a new box. After he left I pressed a button telling all of the cleaning and repair bots to go back to their repair stalls so I could check up on them. They started trickling in through the door and entered their repair stalls one by one. Through the next couple of hours I went through each and every stall running in to some of the common problems, like a clogged brush or a hammer that was a bit out of place. But then their was some weird ones, as their usually is. One bot barely got to it's stall before it crapped out, when I looked at the diagnostics they showed that the internals of the bot had been completely bitten and scratched through, which was pretty scary. That bot alone took me almost an hour of work to get it running again. Another funny one was that one of the repair bots apparently got in a "fight" with one of the cleaning bots, the bot had little tiny scratches all over it's chassis, while the cleaning bot had a big dent on the side of its brush arm. Apparently the repair bot was trying to "repair" the cleaning bot and vice versa. After a couple of long hours and a half-hour lunch break most of the bots were done getting cleaned and repaired. A few stayed in the workshop because they apparently got a virus in their systems, which caused them to shut down to protect the school and the kids from themselves. After another hour of coding to get rid of the virus I was beat, ready to go home and take a nice hot shower and go to bed. Usually after a bot has all of it's problems fixed it goes back to doing what it was doing before. But the bot that had s.u.c.k.e.d up the HOOTERS was still in it's repair stall, I checked the diagnostics one more time and realized that I missed the small red outline of one of the dust tank sensors. I quickly took it out glad that my last repair was something easy, I put it on the table when I realized something. That was the hardest day of repairs I had ever done, and I vowed to never take a half day again. When I opened up the dust bag I saw something bright green in the middle of a big dust pile, I reached for it thinking it was the thing that had messed with the sensor, but when I touched it.....