Diss, Assemble

Dr. Rossum entered his classroom from the door near the electronic blackboard, which was really more of a huge pressure-sensitive multipurpose monitor and tablet. Those who grew up long ago might remember the dissonance from calling green slates affixed to walls "blackboards" rather than chalkboards. With chalk out of the equation, and any color available at the touch of an electronic pen, that term had fallen completely out of use.

The classroom seated two hundred students. Most seats were filled, as much as theoretical for a class that started at 9AM. Then again, the subject was still a fascination among young people, even as they proliferated through modern life.

With a tap of his pen, the blackboard changed to display the title of the course. ROB201 - Robot and Android Repair. Dr. Rossum's TA appeared through the same door, a slim woman named Carol who walked with her hands folded before her like the servant in a Chinese palace.

"Salvete omnes!" Dr. Rossum cried out to the students. The gentle hum of conflicting conversations lessened as they put away their phones and other distraction equipment. "Today, we shall finally disassemble an android. It'll be a lot like dissecting a frog, except nobody dies."

The professor chuckled, but nobody in his class laughed. They had all been born after interactive holograms allowed for realistic simulations of dissections without a real frog. Needless to say, the frog soon went extinct in the wild, now kept and bred exclusively for their delicate legs, eaten by fussy people who don't know better.

"You all might be thinking... where are we going to find an android?" Dr. Rossum gestured out to the class with his pen. "Well... I think now's about the time to reveal something to the class."

Dr. Rossum held his pen at the end of his arm, pointed at Carol like a magic wand. With a dramatic motion of his thumb, he depressed the button.

Lines began to form on Carol's joints like dried riverbeds, dark blue crevasses wherever she would move; her elbows, knees, shoulders, and fingers. The sudden exposure seemed to startle Carol, as she looked down to her more artificial appearance with some small amount of concern. Her skin appeared to be semiflexible plates covering the large planes of her body, the upperside of her arms, her decolletage.

"Yes, as a few students guess every year..." Dr. Rossum gestured. "My teaching assistant Carol is, in fact, an android. She's been helping me for so long that... her model has been discontinued. This is why I'm no longer afraid that someone will find her face on a website selling androids. It's also useful when someone tries to get out of class by saying they told Carol when they saw her at the dining hall."

Laughter slowly grew in the class as each student came to understand the joke. Dr. Rossum continued, "I lose one student a year to that excuse. For those who missed the first class, I'm very permissive with missing classes... so long as you don't lie about why. Try to say your grandma died, I'd better be able to find that obituary. If you lied about it... you are flunked."

The students laughter grew more nervous.

Dr. Rossum continued his lecture. He gestured to the visible lines on Carol's body. "Can anyone tell me what I've done to her?"

A male voice called out from the back row. "You turned off her joint compound."

Dr. Rossum pointed to the voice with the obvious affirmation of a correct answer. "I don't like the term 'joint compound,' but you are correct. To hide the more mechanical parts, humanoid androids have this special skin liquid. Pass a very gentle current through it, and it can solidify and flex in certain predictable ways and act like skin. It makes for excellent fake skin. But it's too expensive to cover her whole body with, unless she was a million-dollar model. Sadly... I couldn't afford one of those.

"As it is... every android has a wireless command that can turn this off. Its generally only in the hands of repairmen like us. This is not what we'd call a 'user-serviceable feature.' We could even turn off the

"Someone found the website!" A different voice called.

"Excuse me?" Dr. Rossum looked up.

"The site with Carol for sale on it. It was archived."

Dr. Rossum pointed his pen at the blackboard, temporarily opening it to student images. "Send it up here, please?"

With a swipe from his phone like he was pitching the top card from the deck, the student sent the picture to the screen. A picture of Carol with longer and clearly artificial blonde hair filled the blackboard. Based on the reaction from the crowd of students, Carol knew the picture that appeared on the screen was of her naked body. She turned to look at it. It wasn't actually her, as hundreds of models of her were surely manufactured. This one was fresh and brand new.

Next to her picture were useful statistics for the shopper. Height and weight, measurements, both of her bust... and the depth of her orifices. Evidently, they had researched the kind of man that bought these and allocated space accordingly.

"I normally wouldn't have shown a picture like this in class..." Dr. Rossum looked up to the picture, and to the slightly more worn model he possessed. "But those of you who are uncomfortable with nudity... either get over it or change your major. You will have to deal with naked robots all the time."

A particularly obnoxious student laughed and elbowed his neighbor, an attractive student he evidently had a crush on. "Don't get too confident." The professor said. "Women are bombarded with image of female nudity through their lives, but we men... you'll have to see some male robots naked at some point. They've engineered them to be quite a thing. Almost impossible for the real thing to hold up in comparison."

The women of the class chuckled. The men, for the most part, were silent.

"How come her boobs are smaller in real life?" Called out another student.

"Well-observed, Sam." Dr. Rossum noted. "The skin liquid, which has a name, but it's eight syllables long, so even experts just call it Skin for short... the Skin is stored in the same areas where a woman would hold fatty deposits: in the breasts, buttocks, etc. For a male robot, it's generally made into muscles. It was a perfect solution, as it could be programmed to be the perfect density for those body parts.

"But as the years go on, bit by bit, the Skin eventually dries out and flakes away like the dead skin of a human. It's very gradual, but eventually... well, there's less excess to store there, so they gradually get smaller with age. Male robots tens to simply get less buff and get that Dad-bod that is so popular. Very few male 'bots are brought in to have new Skin installed. As the customer get older their tastes alter. But what is attractive in a woman never seems to change. Carol?"

Carol snapped to attention. Dr. Rossum took a wooden lab stool from the edge of his stage and brought it over. Rather than sit on it, Carol bent over it, rolling her shirt up from the small of her back. The removed Skin revealed a circular portal at the very base of her spine.

"This brings us to one of the most common repairs you will be asked for, which is Skin Rejuvenation." Dr. Rossum removed a tool from his pocket. It was orange, with a black rubberized grip with a diamond pattern.

"By the way, ladies and gents..." He pointed to the tool. "This is the best $230 you will ever spend, if you are serious about robot repair. This is an omnitool. It's not literally for everything, but for extracting bolts and nuts and other doodads of varying sizes, this thing has micromanipulators, like a million tiny fingers, that can grab any nut or screw. If you feel like fussing about with hundreds of different wrenches and screwdrivers, that's fine. But there is STILL no standard for parts used in androids. We still see imperial and Metric parts, for heaven's sake. Somehow, we still haven't made that universal yet."

He placed the rounded end of the omnitool on the round divot in Carol's back. The micromanipulators made a perfect seal around the piece, and a light on the back of the omnitool shined green. He turned the omnitool forty-five degrees. There was a click and a pop, like a huge jar of pickles being opened.

Lifting the omnitool away from Carol, Dr. Rossum withdrew a three-inch clear cylinder with silver supports running down the edges. Carol was left with a circular hole with four round indentations at four points. She didn't seem affected by this procedure at all.

"This is the Skin Tank." Dr. Rossum popped the cylinder free from the omnitool. "This holds enough to keep her skin soft and young-looking for years. Of course... hers is nearly empty. I'm afraid we haven't been able to find her any more because this form of Skin Tank canister has been discontinued. They found that too many turns on this would cause the screw filings in the portal to wear out."

Summoning a small lance that looked like the head of an airbrush attached to nothing, he sprayed icy cold air into the portal, a tiny plume of dust emerging from it. Dr. Rossum coughed and batted the cloud away from his face. He turned the device in his hand, using the other end to suction up some loose particles. He did this several times as he spoke.

"Some people say not to use CO2 when repairing robots because of the possibility of condensation forming. Now, when you're working in a real repair or refurbishing facility, you will have accessed to compressed air that won't do that. But in here.. I'm limited to what I can use, and... she's old enough that I'm not really worried. I can't really do her any more harm."

Having finished the cleaning, he set the cylinder back in the operating end of the omnitool, slid it gently back in place, and turned it in to lock it. "Some of you might wonder why her face didn't change when I turned off her joint compound. Well, the faces on some older models are controlled by a different system, before this all became unified. As it is, most users prefer this because if you turn off the face compound, they look like this..."

The professor tapped the pen again, pointing it at her face. The skin on her face receded into her hair, revealing many different independent plates for her cheekbones, jaw, eyebrow movement, lips and other facial structures, all lined with blue lines underneath what appeared to be her skull. Her eyes sill had 'eyelids,' something like the lenticular membrane in a crocodile's eye.

The crowd gasped. Lurking under this cute assistant was this rather ghoulish robotic countenance. Some robot fetishists preferred the 'silver treatment,' but this crowd, somehow, didn't seem to have any among them.

Carol understood how some humans would feel if they'd left the house without 'putting on their face,' as much as the retro vernacular applied to her. Every gentle movement in her face made an audible click, normally hidden by the skin.

The professor clicked his pen again, and her skin reformed, perhaps a little nicer than before. Carol touched her face, in a move a human might call 'involuntarily.'

Dr. Rossum then took his cleaning tool, unlocked a chamber at the bottom, and tapped it into the trash can in the corner of the room. To those students who knew what the 'blackboard' was, they might also remember the ritual of emptying the pencil sharpener of all its accrued shavings from a day of learning.

Watching this flutter of white-gray flakes, all of which emerged from that single dirty portal on her back... the crowd of students all groaned in disgust.

If one watched these preceding events and wondered what Carol was thinking, it being possible to judge again now that her face was back... Carol was wondering why her cleanliness functions were so gross to the students when, every day, every one of those students went to their lavatories and did something far worse. Was it simply familiarity that made their ritual seem cleaner? All it is is dead skin, and the crowd is groaning like it was a dangling eyeball.

As an android meant to be beautiful and desirable... it was embarrassing to hear such a reaction.

"Carol, am I detecting some discomfort?" Dr. Rossum eyed her sideways.

"No, professor." She answered simply.

"You don't mind if we perform a demonstration of the kind of maintenance they're likely to see in their future careers?"

"Not at all."

"It will involve nudity and disassembly. You will be helpless."

"I affirmatively consent to this."

"Well, you're my property, so perhaps I don't need it. Nevertheless, at least that is unambiguously clear."

The professor smacked his forehead, the sound filling the auditorium. "I almost forgot." He tapped his pen again. Multiple black shapes drifted up from his desk like soap bubbles, almost like flying snail shells. They made a gentle hum as they drifted about the classroom.

On the blackboard, five miniature video feeds filled the side of the screen. All said "LIVE" in the corner like an old-fashioned news broadcast, before social media had grown so advanced that people learned of celebrity deaths minutes before they had actually passed.

"We'll be streaming this lecture to the world to facilitate other classes." Dr. Rossum said. "Undoubtedly, this will be pirated by someone and shown to millions of eyes through the world, depending which streamer finds it. You might then wonder why you're paying so much for this class, but... anyone just watching this won't get the certification, and good luck getting hired without it. I hope you're all OK with that."

A murmur from the class.

"If the streamer is famous enough, maybe you'll be famous, Carol." The professor noted. "Maybe the retro-robot community will dig some of the old shells out of mothballs or junkyards and refurb them into something useful."

Carol had no visible reaction. In her powerful processor, she imagined how many eyeballs could be watching her. In this classroom, there were hundreds, but out on the vast Internet... there could be millions.

"Alright, let's get this show on the road." Dr. Rossum took out an ordinary pair of trauma shears, one tool his expensive 'omnitool' could not effectively replicate. He started snipping Carol's T-shirt from belly button to collar. She did not move.

"Most of your subjects will not have clothing, and even if they do, you won't be allowed to do this." The professor noted. "But I didn't want to give Carol the idea that this was a striptease. It's very hard to drum out the sexy algorithms from these things. It's like the Three Laws, except... well, you understand."

When he reached her collar, the shirt billowed at the pressure of her breasts being released from the small T-shirt. With two snips of the sleeves, it fell off her into the professor's hands.

"Besides..." He noted as he balled up the shirt. "I always hated this shirt. I hate remakes of classic cartoons. For me, the only REAL Thundercats will be the original series from 2018."

He pitched the shirt into a trash can in the corner, it fluttering into a ribbon of ruined fabric as it passed through the air. The shirt still made it in.

Dr. Rossum gestured to the trash can as if it would take a bow. "Did anyone else see that? Three points!"

Nobody responded. They were all staring at Carol.

My breasts aren't that small, she thought. She knew they were approximately 35% smaller than when he first left the showroom floor. But a refill would fix that... if Dr. Rossum would ever bother to do it. Unnecessary, he'd call it. A distraction. He'd probably pull out a chart and show that D's in the class had dropped when hers had shrunk to C's.

"OK, sure." Dr. Rossum was hoping at least one of the autonomous camera drones had caught it for proper use in a compilation video. "Drink her in for a moment. Trust me, the robots you'll be working with in the field will be even more beautiful. If being bored by suspiciously perfect and inhuman beauty scares you... well, there's always the Math department."

The professor snipped away her skirt and panties as quickly as he could, leaving her stood in nothing a pair of shoes. The cameras hovered around her, forming a circle of dots scanning her form.

"Based on that jump in the viewership... we've been found and pirated just in time." The professor observed, burying his chin in his hand. "Or all of Denmark has tuned in."

Carol's hand came together in front of her hips.

"Oh, suddenly, we're shy?" Dr. Rossum planted his hand on her shoulder and spun her in place, her rear now facing the audience. "This seems a fine time to show where to start with disassembly. Please pay attention and don't stare at her ass. It's a four out of ten at best, let's be honest with ourselves."

Standing nude before the crowd when facing them was one thing. Standing with back turned, unable to see their reactions, their cocked eyebrows, their sneers of dismissals...

"You take the handle of your tool, or anything narrow, pop out the shoulder blade a bit, so you can get this in here... if you don't have an omnitool, it's a Metric 7mm Robotron specialty tungsten pressure pin. Unscrew it by pressing the button on the end here..."

There was a short whirring sound, and the sound of pressure being released. Carol's right arm disconnected from her body. The professor tossed it to the desk, more interested in the single screw that kept it in place.

"What on Earth is this?" He mumbled, and then referred to the crowd. "I'm afraid this isn't a Robotron pin. This is an aftermarket pin with a regular Phillip's head." He showed Carol the pin. "Where have you been getting repairs? Some back alley? Someone stripped your tungsten out under your nose and you didn't even notice. I know you don't have taste buds in there, but couldn't you FEEL this?" He stuck the screw to the base of his omnitool, magnetized to hold ferric nails and such in place. The pin stuck to it.

"Steel. I can't believe it." He swung behind her to remove her other arm.

"It's moving!" A student pointed at the arm on the desk. It was gently moving, fingers waving in and out like it was being held outside of a moving car and passing through the air currents.

"Yes, Carol's model is equipped with limited auxiliary power. Since it's not as strong without the primary power cell, it's very weak. It couldn't drag its own weight across the table by itself, for instance."

The second arm snapped free. "But of course... I could've told you that she didn't carry her own weight around here."

He tossed the second arm next to the first, the hand of the first hand looking up at as it came towards it like a confused snake.

"Now, Carol looks something like Venus de Milo, though not as beautiful, and definitely not as valuable." Dr. Rossum put his hands around Carol's torso and lifted her up, holding her away from him like she was an infant with a dirty diaper. He lifted her to a sitting position onto the desk.

"Getting the legs off is a little harder, as they have three redundant pins connecting the leg to the hips. On this model, they're 11mm Robotron hardened tungsten pins, and they hold this circular shield in place." His omnitool made three quick whirs, like the air-powered screw used to remove Formula One tires, and with as much haste. He withdrew the shield with the three bolts still inside their holes, and Carol's leg came free with a clatter.

"I'd make an arm and a leg joke about tuition, but..." Dr. Rossum threw the leg against the arms, unwilling to even finish his sentence.

"And we do the same for the other one."

Carol's leg twitched almost imperceptibly. Without both legs, she couldn't cross them and hide herself from the crowd. Maybe they didn't care, but... she felt more eyes ignoring her breasts and looking lower...

With another quick blast of omnitool turns, the leg was removed and tossed aside.