By David C. Daoust
7of7
Margo moved swiftly as she came in sight of the Starport. It was late at night, and such a small girl being out alone would call unwanted attention. Luckily, she had once played a supporting role in the blockbuster ‘Galactic Assassin’, so stealth came fluently. Her parts in the film were mostly flashbacks to the main characters childhood, depicting as the character was trained in the martial arts by some wise old sage or so the story goes.
Though it was a bit part, the martial arts were still downloaded into the small stunt-bot’s memory, if only to make the training montages seem more authentic. One of which involved the young girl scaling a wall by simply kicking from one corner of a wall to the other. An act Margo just completed before she dropped down into the Starport’s main hangar bay. She thumbed her nose with a grim expression after, as any good action movie star would, then studied her surroundings.
Starports looked the same all over the Onion; a huge bowl surrounded the landing, a few communication towers on either side, with an inordinate amount of spaceships parked therein, with droids working through the day and night, loading and unloading.
Margo didn’t envy the droids life, even though droids didn’t really form an opinion either way about it. Once droids were given a task, they completed it as their programming dictated or they were told otherwise. There were no scholars or activists debating the quality of life for droids, or questioning whether or not they should have rights as there were for bots. Droids were just tools that did a job.
Margo flitted through the darkened landing. She flipped through terminal after terminal until she found a spaceship headed for the Belt. She found one at last. It was headed for Grady on Twin Crown, two names that meant absolutely nothing to her. It was on the belt, so this was her ship.
It was a small moon that orbited the gas giant Neo Vir’ees, apparently.
As tough as she was, as sturdy and resilient, she still had the proportionate strength of a little girl. Not due to any failings of her own, due to the laws which stated what was legal for an active bot to have, especially if it may be in the public. Not only did she have programming lodged in her brain to keep her from exerting beyond a certain amount of force, her joints all held safety rings, that would suddenly slip free at a certain amount of pressure. Not that her arms would fall off, they would just stop her from truly pushing, griping, or forcing. Bots had personalities, lawmakers never truly trusted that one of these personalities wouldn’t be crazy or trusted that the bots reasoning wouldn’t lead to harm in some way.
This limitation is what stopped her from forcing open the keypad terminal to open the cargo bay doors of the already ‘packed and ready to go’ spaceship she had planned to stowaway on. There was no getting into the damn thing; she had to find a second way in. There was no need for an entrance beyond the bay doors, as the ship was basically a droid itself. She found a latch up into a side port, where the computers all hummed within. She imagined techs could jump in and work on its systems for pre-flight jargon or whatnot. It wasn’t as spacious as she imagined the cargo bay would be, but there was enough room, for her, and her green blanket, to get comfortable for a long ride through space.
