Tin Man, Part 4 of 4
15 Sep 2020JB Threepwood
I walked up to the doors to Chubby's workshop to be greeted by a gentle swoosh. I was surprised, I'd fixed the door a little but now it was as good as new.I walked through to find the place immaculate. The piles of crap that had cluttered the place were now replaced with carefully sorted and stacked boxes around the edge of the room and the place no longer had the grubby, stained look of a homeless person's foot.
As I stood there, processing the cleanliness of the room, I saw the robot emptying a dustpan into a bin at the back of the workshop. The robot caught sight of me and straightened up, almost as if ashamed.
"Hello, Sir," said the robot.
"Erm, yeah, hello... you tidy this all up?" I asked. Obviously he had but it was hard to picture the oppressive looking security droid doing a bit of spring cleaning. Leaving the domesti-bot's cleaning sub-routines in had at least paid off for Chubby.
"Yes, Sir," he replied. The COVAS voice, coming through the security 'bot and the damaged wiring of the replacement head, gave it a weird accent... gruffer and a little tinnyer than a normal COVAS.
"What's your name?" I asked the robot as I looked in a newly made box labelled as 'Robot Spare Parts'.
"You haven't given me one, Sir."
I stopped and looked at the robot. Regardless of the fact that he was a metal skull attached to a killer 'droid, he stood there looking completely helpless. I looked back in the box and found the front and back parts of an old education droid's face casings that would fit the metal skull.
"You didn't have a name before?" I asked.
"I don't know, Sir, my memory has been reset... I have sub programs but the rest is blank, Sir."
Like picking my own name after fleeing my old gang, I didn't want my new copilot to have a hackneyed, over used name. I thought about all the sidekicks I'd read about during long supercruises to far out, dodgy outposts.
"What do you want to be called?" I asked him, "Watson... Tonto... Friday... Samwise... Sancho Panza..."
"Panza, Sir?" He replied, It was more of a question than an answer, repeating the last name he'd heard.
"You want to be called Panza? That's good with me," I replied regardless and passed him the case for his metal skull.
I chatted a little to Panza as I attached his new face. I let him know about his new job as a copilot. I told him a little about the smuggling organisation I was now a part of. I told him about the other members of the faction I now flew with and how he'd be interacting with them.
They were a good bunch. After leaving my job as a bounty hunter I got into trading but it was an inevitable slide into smuggling. My new name had been passed around between smuggling gangs as I'd built a bit of a reputation for myself.
One day, as I was sat in some rat-ass bar in the back end of Grom territory, Red Rose, a smuggler I'd heard a lot about, came in looking for me. She said she represented a group of older gang leaders who were looking to unite a lot of smuggling rackets into a larger organisation. She said she still needed competent pilots to lead the gang out in the field and that's where I came in. I'd had my fingers burnt with people before but I decided to give them a couple of months, see what they were like..
That was a few years back now.
All the new programs I'd attached to Panza seemed to be connected properly so he was "happy" with the new role. Or, at least, understood what his role was.
After spraying him black (because it's cool) I removed the bits of masking tape.
"I'm ready for a new start, Sir," said Panza as he flexed his newly painted limbs.
"Call me JB, Panza, I think this will be a new start for both of us."