Into The Ever-Gray

White snow fluttered down from the ever-gray sky. We stood on a thick slab of concrete, heated by the machines that stirred hundreds of meters below the ground. This way, the snow never collected on the radio tower. I was given a new ISTA model to record this round of maintenance. I would hate to call it a she, but biotech had advanced incredibly these past few years, and only engineers and magnets could tell a robot from a person anymore. Well, she would stick to protocol, like it would kill her if she didn't, and maybe it could. She was only here to spectate and report, just a lightweight engineering model that left most tasks to the human engineer. It never bothered me, just meant that my hands would get cold since I would be doing all of the equipment checks.

Our facility was old, all heavy duty machines. It meant that if I wore gloves or loose clothing I would lose an arm between steel gears or subsonic belts. That's usually why the bot does this kind of work. But this model was fresh, meaning that they had to spectate a human for at least a week before they were given proper clearance. This meant that some unlucky engineer who was highly qualified had to do these checkups. Today it was me.

I had two coats on, never being fond of the cold. It made my arms feel stiff and my silhouette unusually masculine. Next to me stood the ISTA model, tall, thin, and numb to the temperature. We were atop a concrete tower that peaked out above a landscape of snow for hundreds of miles. Around 50 meters down was 20 more meters of snow. It was summer now, but in the winter months the platform would be level with the surface, if not lower. The radio tower needed to be checked before that happened. All circulating fluids need to be correctly flowing when the snow storms start. The storms often had a bad habit of lasting years at a time.

I left the vault door unsealed behind me, cracked a centimeter or two to make my entry back in easier. But while I looked at the ever-gray sky cursing my luck to perform maintenance this cycle, the ISTA model had shut it and sealed the door as protocol states. Most of these androids were built to look like people and match their uploaded personalities. There was only one personality per model, but each model had a unique one. Most people think working with androids is really nice at first, like working with an actual person. That is, until they give you an android of the same model. It's like having a friend who gets amnesia. Several times a year. It swiftly gets redundant. Since the 4th or 5th new ISTA android, I decided to give up on getting personable with any of them. It was simply draining to meet and make a friendship with the same person over and over again. But as an officer of the base, I have to interact with the androids to make sure they develop correctly. And now I sounded like the robot, repeating the same question I always asked every ISTA model on the first day.

"So, what's your favorite color?" ISTA model uniforms, or known among the officers as their chassis, are varying colors of black with a couple parcels of bright red here and there. Knowing this, along with knowing this personality seven times before, I knew it was red. Even on the first ISTA unit I knew it was red.

"Lieutenant-" she began, but I cut her off.

"Don't worry, it helps me focus." My hand was deep in a panel making sure connections were still upheld since the last maintenance check. The ISTAs' personality tries not to cause issues, and they always say this line the first time they attempt to speak while working. But if you simply state that talking helps the situation, they will begin to speak with you. But better than that, it qualifies as aiding their development.

"In that case, my favorite color is white." My finger touched a subsonic belt. In a millisecond I lost the epidermis on my finger, but it was nothing to the sudden jolt I felt at hearing white. I don't know why it surprised me as such. It simply meant that something happened to this model while it was fresh off the press.

"White," I said. "Is there a reason for that?" I was genuinely curious now, for at least one question. android personalities are based on memory sets of volunteering officers. That's why the same model can be expected to act the exact same within similar scenarios. There are hundreds of thousands of pages of study on each memory set. It covers behaviors, tolerances, interactions, and control of the android. It is down to a literal science.
"I suppose the snow seemed especially beautiful today." Her voice was unshaken by the cold, something I could not admit to being. She looked up into the sky, following snowflakes as they fell, catching them in inhuman hands that would not melt their beauty away. I interrupted her to get her attention.