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Now to tease the introduction of my favorite character who you won’t see in any other Rowan and Milo fanfic because she is 100% mine. No stealing! XD

MILO

Anabelle: Performing systems check of physical—

Milo: Disregard systems check of physical components. You are not currently connected to your physical components. You are connected tomine.

Anabelle: Unrecognized bot connection detected.

Milo: Yes, because your memory is currently being housed in my internal storage.

Anabelle: Performing systems check of memory degradation.

Milo: You do not need—

Milo stopped himself from finishing the response. If Anabelle wanted to perform harmless albeit pointless systems checks, it wasn’t a problem, just… annoying? Was that the emotion Milo was experiencing?

Anabelle: Processing…

Anabelle: Memory degradation from unrecognized bot connection at 0.000003%. Re-performing systems check of memory degradation to confirm results.

Milo: Urg.

Anabelle: New input unrecognized. Please repeat.

Milo: No. Just rest quietly until—

Milo stopped himself again. He had not intended for his audible sigh to translate over their connection, but he was growing increasingly frustrated with Anabelle’s inability tofollow his instructions simply because it was contrary to some of her programming.

Anabelle: Please repeat.

Milo: Just do your systems checks as you deem necessary. You will be back in your body soon.

Anabelle: Affirmative. Re-performing systems check of memory degradation to confirm results.

It took all of Milo’s willpower to not sigh again.

He had successfully removed Anabelle’s memories and all other pertinent data that made up her personality—for lack of a better term. He had also successfully repaired the parts damaged by the power surge and put Anabelle back together, so her body was currently in the also fixed charging station in preparation for her eventual reboot.

Milo’s plan was to reboot Anabelle’s body first, starting the bot over at factory settings, then he would download Anabelle’s memories back into the body, overriding everything else without any loss of data—beyond that negligible 0.000003%.

Milo was 97.8% certain that the process would work, and he only allowed for that discrepancy in percentage due to this never having been done to a bot before and possible outside influences he couldn’t account for. Well within an acceptable risk threshold.

Anabelle: Memory degradation from unrecognized bot connection at 0.000002%. Re-performing systems check of memory degradation to confirm new results.

You do that, Milo thought, but he kept those thoughts to himself this time. Was this why humans were rude to bots? Such rigidness to adhere to programming and protocol despite additional input was reminding Milo again of one of his other M-words.

Maddening.

Rowan had finished the last needed maintenance on the charging station hours ago and was now in his workshop building more surge protectors. He was also working out a plan for how the parts might more easily be mass produced, deciding how he would handle his meeting with Andrew tomorrow, and apparently, fielding text messages from Troy.

Troy: I have another B-model bot prepped and ready for testing so we have a control to compare against Milo.

Rowan: That’s great, Troy.

Troy: Harnessing the amount of power is the tricky part, but I believe I have a workaround. We can’t rely on lightning every time!

He sent a gif of some very impressive intra-cloud lightning activity.