Jesse

Jesse started life as an inconvenience. His parents weren't much for love; tax breaks and dual income were more than enough motive for marriage, and a kid was an accident to be ignored unless written in on welfare applications. It didn't help that he acted strangely, blunt and shy and prone to shutting down in the face of confrontation. Autism would never be diagnosed in him, but where home was chaotic at best, there was comfort to be found in the predictability of the machines that peppered his world.

Pulling little maintenance robots apart (and apologizing to them as he put them back together again) would get him in trouble growing up. But as soon as he hit his teens he'd flee that shadow to shelter in a mechanics internship, learning the trade from a disillusioned security bot tech who was content to let Jesse hide out in the shop for hours as long as he took on his teacher's work. Jesse learned more from the hands-on experience than anything else, but when proper job applications came along, his mentor at least had the decency to pen a recommendation letter. With that, he was off, hopping on the first shuttle to the quickest job he could land, ready to start fresh.

Entry level work in bot maintenance consists of grueling hours, and Jesse would be lying if he pretended it was all a walk in the park. But it paid off--through overtime, hard work, and a serious caffeine addiction, he'd managed to job-hop his way to the interview office of Unitex, a mining corporation whose large, multi-billion credit drilling machines required a steady hand and a meticulous eye. Jesse was elated when he got the acceptance email. They'd ship him out to Jenome, a booming mining colony, with accommodations under the company's name and a bigger paycheck than he'd ever seen in his life once he finished the 8-month probation period. It was a dream come true, and had made every late night and repetition injury worth it.

Of course, things are often too good to be true. He might have expected Unitex to fall through on their offer, but they upheld it; the first six months of his stay in Jenome went exactly as promised, and as the date of becoming a full employee loomed, things seemed genuinely promising. It wasn't until it was too late that misfortune came to strike the familiar blow. The rival mining operation on the planet, Royce Industries, was a known factor, but exactly how much they were undermining Unitex was a closely held secret until the very last moment. One day Jesse was looking forward to a more stable future; the next he was being evicted as Unitex was folded into Royce Industries' enormous operations. Having been paid only the probation-level wages for his work, Jesse hadn't had the chance to save much. As he was kicked to the curb, it was only by the grace of others that he was able to couch-surf until he could find a new roof to keep over his head, a special sort of anger seething within him as he tried to stabilize his upturned life once more.

A friend of a friend of a friend reached out to him in the middle of this chaos. He had a companion bot, a high-end, humanlike machine that tittered at his jokes and provided a smile for him to come home to--or at least, it had, before an unfortunate accident involving a subway car and a smoothie spill had left the thing in crumpled pieces. Any price, this thrice-removed friend insisted, just name it and he'd pay; he'd heard that Jesse was a proper mechanic, and was desperate after others had considered the bot a lost cause. Jesse himself was dubious, but with this man offering his dining room as a workshop and a blank check for payment, there really wasn't a reason to say no.

Ever the professional, Jesse somehow pulled it off. He'd had about enough of hammering out twisted parts and trying to compare what could be salvaged to what had to be replaced, but there was something deeply satisfying to see the companion's eyes flutter open with the glimmer of recognition. Naturally his client was delighted; Jesse had expected the job to be a simple one-off, but ardent fans of companion bots tend to run in the same circles, and soon he had a semi-regular flow of work. Did he enjoy having to repair synthetic D-cups while fine-tuning the delicate joints of these elaborate machines? No. His eccentric (to put it generously) clientele were not his favourite part either. But Jesse had long ago resolved to be kinder than he'd been raised, and something about these near-human machines spoke to him, so he accepted the work with as much grace as he could. It was not lost on him either that suddenly he was making enough money to, say, live on his own again .... and so he tracked down a tiny, two-room apartment, one to function as his compact little workshop and the other for everything else.

It's been four and a half years since he first arrived in Jenome, and he'd be lying if he said he enjoyed it here. But he's had the bizarre fortune of falling in with a fair group of friends, a collection of weirdos from in and around the companion enthusiast circles. It's nice to be in with a crowd with a respect for their machines (and a willingness to collectively keep quiet about the sentience modifications blooming in these back corners), but more than that, it's something special for Jesse to be with people he really feels like he can belong with, even as most of them aspire to escape Jenome someday. He's also got a special new addition to that group, a certain unusual companion bot named Audrey, who acts nothing like the socially suave machines that usually come through his door and who is all the more interesting for it. There's a lot for this bot to learn, and Jesse's commitment to sharing the understanding he wishes he could have received makes him a pretty good candidate for teaching them.