When Li Xu woke up, he found himself lying in a medical pod.
It was very common for spaceships to be equipped with medical pods. Military medical pods on the battlefield could provide ordinary wounded soldiers with rapid treatment within a few hours and restore them to health. But clearly, the medical pod on Cheng Weilu’s ship was rather inadequate. Half of Li Xu’s body was numb, and he had been awakened by the pain from the burn on his leg.
He was wearing a new set of pajamas. Outside the medical pod were water, energy supplements, and some medication. He picked them up and looked at them, but did not recognize most of them.
Just as he was about to move, Robert came in. As usual, it had a cloth bag slung diagonally across its body, and it was holding two metal knitting needles and a ball of blue yarn.
“Don’t move around! You’re still an injured patient!”
It hurried over anxiously. Its metal arms and legs suddenly extended to the length of an adult’s limbs, while its head and main body remained unchanged, making it look somewhat comical.
Robert pressed Li Xu back into the medical pod, checked his recovery data, then made him drink some water and take his medicine.
When Li Xu tried to check what the medications were, Xiao Wei refused him. “Sorry, Li Xu. A Luo instructed me to prohibit your access to the Star Network.”
“They’re all common medications. There’s no safety risk,” Robert reassured him.
“Um… Although A Luo has forbidden you from going online, if you need any books, movies, or games, I can find them for you,” Robert said. “You can also chat with me if you’re bored.”
After taking his medicine, Li Xu asked, “Did Miss Cheng ask you to take care of me?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Did you help me change my clothes?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Thank you.” Li Xu said, “Where are we now?”
“We’re on a glacier planet.”
Li Xu had never heard of this planet.
Seeing the confusion on Li Xu’s face, Robert added, “It’s a secret planet discovered by A Luo. The gravity and air are suitable for human survival, and it’s covered entirely by glaciers and snowfields. Sometimes it’s extremely cold, and sometimes it’s not as cold. Whenever A Luo passes through here during one of the warmer periods, she stops to stay for a while.”
Li Xu remained in bed for another three days before finally leaving the medical pod.
During that time, Robert stayed by his side and took care of him, while Cheng Weilu never appeared.
He changed into the spare spacesuit Robert brought him. Spacesuits in the interstellar era could automatically adjust their size according to the wearer’s body shape once put on, and their protection against the cold was excellent.
When he opened the spaceship’s hatch, the cold, thin air rushed toward him. Accustomed to the stable environment inside the ship, Li Xu took several breaths before adapting to the outside.
Almost no land could be seen as far as the eye could reach. Vast expanses of ice-blue glaciers and snowfields scattered across them made up the landscape, with various shades of blue and white forming the dominant colors between heaven and earth.
Li Xu found Cheng Weilu on a towering stretch of snow. Beneath the snow was a dark-blue glacier crevasse, from which the faint sound of running water could be heard.
Cheng Weilu was sitting on the snowfield with a cup in her hands, listening to the sound of the flowing water.
Li Xu watched her from a distance for a while before slowly walking over and asking, “Is this the time when the planet isn’t as cold?”
“More or less.” Cheng Weilu sniffed. “Did Robert tell you?”
“Yes. Robert talked to me about a lot of things.”
“It really does like talking.” Cheng Weilu sounded somewhat helpless, but that was simply the natural disposition of robots of Robert’s model, and there was nothing she could do to control it.
Actually, Cheng Weilu herself liked talking quite a lot. During long journeys through space, she and Robert often chatted endlessly about trivial, meaningless things. Sometimes Xiao Wei would come over and add a few words as well.
She just did not like talking to people as much.
But thinking about how fond Robert was of Li Xu, Cheng Weilu suddenly had an ominous feeling. “What did it tell you?”
“It told me the story of how you salvaged it from space,” Li Xu said. “It also told me that it’s saving up travel expenses. It has a younger sister, and once it saves enough money, it’ll go look for her, but it never has enough.”
“Do robot manufacturers still make robots with families and gender identities?” Li Xu asked. “Robert has a younger sister, so is it male or female?”
As a robot, Robert’s model should have been very old.
Li Xu remembered that even before the war began, household robots of this model had already been available on the market. Several decades had passed since then, so the product must have gone through many generations of upgrades. He did not know why Cheng Weilu was still using this model.
Li Xu had also never seen anyone pay a household robot a salary before.
“I remember you said you paid Robert a salary, 3,500 star coins a month. Is this also a new way of living nowadays? Giving robots a certain degree of social identity.”
“How was the monthly salary of 3,500 star coins determined? Based on the workload? Robert said its travel expenses alone would cost 80,000 star coins. That’s so difficult to save up. It’s always short of money.”
After sleeping for fifty years, there were truly many things he did not understand.
Cheng Weilu noticed that whenever Li Xu spoke, he liked to look at her with unwavering focus. Although the two could already be considered familiar with each other, and had just gone through life and death together, she still felt slightly uncomfortable.
Cheng Weilu looked away. “Yes, Robert is my hired employee.”
“As for its identity attributes…” Cheng Weilu looked out at the snowfield. “It’s a little complicated to explain…”
Complicated meant she did not want to explain it.
But Li Xu walked over and sat down beside her, his eyes fixed on her curiously. He was clearly very interested in hearing the story.
Well, it wasn’t as if there was anything she couldn’t tell him. Cheng Weilu pinched the bridge of her nose and reluctantly began to explain.
Cheng Weilu had discovered Robert in geostationary orbit around a relatively obscure planet.
Several years ago, not long after arriving in this era, Cheng Weilu had been extremely interested in exploring new planets.
Before she randomly jumped through a jump point and accidentally entered that planetary region, Cheng Weilu had never even heard of the planet.
The gray, gloomy planet looked lifeless. Far too much debris and space junk was scattered throughout its orbit, most of it fragments of spaceships. She detected no biological signals. The only thing that appeared on her signal display was a faint, non-human distress signal.
After enlarging the star map, she saw that it was a robot about half the height of a person.
The robot’s program had been terminated, but it was still capable of sending a distress signal. Cheng Weilu retrieved it without much effort.
After connecting to its program, she discovered that it was a companion-type household robot. Its former companion had been a little girl, and according to its programmed settings, it called her its younger sister.
Household robots loved talking and working, were enthusiastic and naive, and liked getting close to humans. These were their innate personalities by design, but sometimes they could make the robots appear somewhat unintelligent.
They did not actually need to be that intelligent.
While examining its program, Cheng Weilu accessed its memory data. When the planet where it had originally lived became involved in a war, Robert had left together with the family of the person it served. However, their spaceship encountered an accident along the way, leaving only Robert behind.
Robot systems were upgraded and improved far too quickly. Cheng Weilu checked and found that Robert’s model had been manufactured sixty or seventy years ago and had long since been phased out of the market.
Its model was so outdated that its system could no longer be upgraded and could only receive patches. Cheng Weilu kept the name given to it by its younger sister and did not delete its original memories, but she hid the part concerning the final spaceship accident.
After restarting its program, the newly awakened Robert discovered that it was already aboard the spaceship of the person who had salvaged it. The penniless robot, filled with gratitude, decided to work for its rescuer for free for five years in repayment for saving its life.
Five years later, Cheng Weilu and Robert reached a verbal agreement, and she decided to start paying it a salary.
She paid Robert the median rental rate for robots on the Freedom City market, and Robert itself accepted it.
“A monthly salary of 3,500 star coins is reasonable.” Cheng Weilu took a sip of tea from her cup and glanced at Li Xu. “I’m not exploiting my employee.”
“Because it’s an outdated model, I occasionally need to replace its parts and patch its system, which costs money. That’s why it never has enough money to set out. That’s true too. I haven’t lied to it.”
Li Xu lowered his eyes to the ice and remained silent for a while before asking, “Does it still not know that its sister is gone?”
“It knows… and it doesn’t.” Cheng Weilu said, “I told it once. I synchronized it with the current time and showed it information about the planet that no longer exists. It took time to accept it, but every time I repair and maintain it, that original portion of the data gets reset. Once the repairs and maintenance are finished, it wants to go find its sister again.”
“That’s what it was supposed to do decades ago. It’s written into its core programming, so overwriting the data is useless.” Cheng Weilu looked toward the blue horizon in the distance. “Eventually, I gave up. I simply hid the memories of the accident and let it remember everything else.”
Cheng Weilu’s tone was very calm as she spoke. Even though she kept drinking hot tea to warm herself, the cold wind on the glacier planet still turned the tip of her nose red.
Li Xu withdrew his gaze from her and looked at the snowfield before them with her. “Robert is a very good robot employee, and you’re a very good employer too, Miss Cheng.”
There it was again… Li Xu must have heard Robert’s habit of saying “too” so often that he had started picking it up himself.
Cheng Weilu silently complained to herself before nodding. “Thank you for listening. Just remember to pay it a little more, and it’ll be happy.”
…
Li Xu’s body had more or less recovered, but the spaceship remained parked on the glacier planet without moving. He could not access the Star Network’s star maps, so he did not know their exact current location, nor did he know what Cheng Weilu planned to do next.
After the incident at Gray Dove Base, Li Xu knew he had to give her an explanation. But Cheng Weilu was even calmer than he had expected, remaining as polite and courteous toward him as ever. During the several days the spaceship remained parked, she ate and rested as usual every day, went outside to take walks across the snowfield, and never brought the matter up.
At dinner time, Li Xu went to the central lounge of the spaceship. He saw Cheng Weilu sitting at the lounge table wearing a lake-blue knitted hat and a sweater of the same color. She nodded at him in greeting.
The robot Robert beside her was also wearing a lake-blue knitted hat. When it saw him appear, it happily walked over to him. Its mechanical hand held out an identical hat, and its voice was filled with anticipation. “Can you put it on? It’s a holiday today.”
Li Xu was from the Alliance’s Baicheng Star and only knew the holidays celebrated on Baicheng Star. Later, when he had gone to planets with military fortresses, he had only participated in their celebrations for political reasons.
He had never heard of a holiday that required people to wear blue knitted hats.
Two portions of food had been placed on the table, one of them prepared for him. Cheng Weilu nodded at him from her seat. As he accepted the knitted hat and put it on, she pointed to the seat beside her. “It’s a holiday today.”
And so, two people (and a robot), all wearing lake-blue knitted hats, sat around the table. Robert clasped its mechanical hands together and closed its eyes. “To my eternal homeland, Cerulean Star. May the sky always remain blue.”
The name Cerulean Star did not sound unfamiliar, but Li Xu could not immediately remember where he had heard it before. It should have been a relatively obscure planet, unlike the Alliance’s mother star, Baicheng Star, whose name was widely known.
The gesture was very simple. Li Xu imitated Robert and Cheng Weilu, clasping his hands together as he said, “May the sky always remain blue.”
The food was an upgraded version of the nutritional packs commonly eaten during space travel. It was not unpleasant, but it was not particularly delicious either. After eating, Cheng Weilu went to the main control room as usual and lay down to read.
After returning to his room, Li Xu thought again about the holiday ritual. He took off his hat and held the lake-blue knitwork in his hands. He remembered the name Cerulean Star and wanted to search for information about it, but Xiao Wei was strictly enforcing Cheng Weilu’s ban, and he had no way to connect to the Star Network.
Li Xu walked to the window and looked out at the vast, endless glaciers and snowfields beyond the porthole when he suddenly remembered.
Cerulean, Cerulean Star.
When the Alliance Civil War began, Cerulean Star had once been one of the designated fortress positions. No wonder the name had seemed familiar just now.
But he clearly remembered that not long after the fighting began, the front line shifted. This relatively unimportant small fortress position was abandoned by their side, and was subsequently destroyed by the enemy.
From then on, Cerulean Star became a dead planet, fading into darkness on the military’s star maps.
…
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