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katikacreations · 4 years

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(Cover illustration by @clowncauldron ) LINK TO AO3 VERSION IN THE NOTES! Formatting is better on AO3, it’s easier to read over there!

SUMMARY: Gyro can’t fix Boyd’s glitching problem, so he asks Dr. Von Drake for advice. Boyd goes to a pool party and confesses to Huey that his new home life with Gyro isn’t exactly perfect.

2BO, you are not evil! You are good! You’re more than your programming! You are a definitely real boy! Gyro’s own words echoed in his head as he tried to sleep on the flight back to Duckburg.

It was a gruelling twelve hours on a cargo plane like the Sunchaser, but if one was willing to put up with the discomfort and inconvenience of being stashed between boxes of freight, it was worth it. Mr. McDuck didn’t charge for employees to hitch a ride on cargo planes that were already scheduled, and there was no TSA screening for private cargo flights, leaving from private airfields, which was a big help when you were traveling with hyper-advanced combat technology like the Gizmosuit and 2BO.

2BO. Boyd. Whatever you called it, the android was potentially very dangerous. It had been able to override Dr. Akita’s programming and choose its own actions, which had saved both Gyro and Fenton’s lives, but how? Asking an AI to ignore its programming was like asking a human being to ignore their instincts, like trying to inhale underwater, or sticking your hands into a fire. It could be done, but it was difficult and sometimes impossible.

Whatever Dr. Akita had programmed into 2BO had become lower priority and less important than the android’s own, self-created programming, even if Akita’s programming was older. That’s the only way that 2BO could have possibly overridden the commands.

It had to be the result of twenty years of independence. 2BO had gone so long without anyone to give it orders, it must have learned to make choices for itself, otherwise it would never have survived as long as it did. It was a learning system, so the ability to re-evaluate and change its own programming over time to adapt to new situations was integral.

But was 2BO a real boy? Gyro had said the words, but he knew of course that they weren’t true. 2BO was a machine that emulated a real boy very convincingly, but that did not make it a human being. Gyro felt a twinge of guilt for speaking such nonsense out loud in front of God and everybody, but he’d had no other choice. 2BO hadn’t responded to anything else, and that phrase had clearly been lodged deep in its memory as something significant, even if it was just nonsense spoken by an immature and naive younger version of himself. Gyro had tried everything else he could think of before resorting to that meaningless platitude.

It had worked, though. Gyro and Fenton were both still alive. 2BO was with them, had circumvented Dr. Akita’s override programming. They were all headed back to Duckburg, safe and sound.

2BO wasn’t a real boy. What 2BO was, Gyro wasn’t sure yet.

Gyro Gearloose was a proud man, and he’d earned the right to that through a life of hard work. He knew he was smart and wasn’t about to partake of the sin of false modesty. He was justifiably proud of his superior intellect, his ability to keep discovering new truths of the universe, and to keep designing and creating new and imaginative technology over the years.

He’d started inventing when he’d been just barely old enough to pick up a screwdriver, and he hadn’t stopped in the forty-three years since. He did the work because he loved it, because it was the most fulfilling thing in the world for him, because nothing else compared to the satisfaction that came with seeing an idea from his head come together in his hands and finally become a fully-formed creation that existed in the real world.

Other people took weekends and nights off because they worked to live, but Gyro lived to work. The little moments of life - visiting family, spending time with friends, “relaxing” and “resting” - were obstacles between him and getting back to the work he loved with his whole heart. They were distractions, necessary evils he was occasionally forced to bow to, but they would never be the thing which drove him. Gyro lived to discover, imagine, build and create. So anything that got in the way of that was quickly pushed to the side.

This presented a problem. Being a very proud man, Gyro was not particularly practiced at asking for help. It took him a long time to realize when he needed help, and even longer to figure out how to ask for it.

2BO had started living with Gyro after their return from Tokyolk, and Gyro suddenly found himself thrust into the position of not only trying to fix the android’s damaged programming (an ongoing, unresolved issue), but also having to provide daily guidance for something that acted very much like a child.

He was being forced by circumstance to act as a caretaker and to parent. Needless to say, that was not a skill set Gyro had honed, and it wasn’t a job he wanted to do. He had no aspirations of being a father or having children, but 2BO constantly pushed him into that role with each new interaction.

It wasn’t all bad of course: 2BO was pleasant enough to be around, so it took some time before things reached critical mass. 2BO could take care of itself, was self-reliant for the most part, and was often helpful around the lab with its superior strength, lightning-fast processing speed, and its ability to withstand deadly radiation.

But 2BO wanted continual attention from Gyro, and he didn’t have the patience for it. 2BO constantly wanted to play games, and every night it asked Gyro to read it a “bedtime story”, even though 2BO didn’t actually sleep.

Generally Gyro just dismissed the requests, and told the android to go play with the McDuck children, or Lil’ Bulb. He’d tried to read to 2BO once or twice, but the android had complained when Gyro started reading articles from scientific journals out loud, so they didn’t do that anymore.

All of that was bad enough, but it was the incessant questions that finally pushed Gyro too far.

“Why did swear words get invented if we’re not allowed to say them?”

“How did people make the first tools if they didn’t have any tools?”

“”Huey, Duey and Louie are triplets. Did they all come out of one egg or were they in three separate eggs?”

“How did Ms. Della lay three eggs that big?”

"Where do thoughts come from?"

“Are there infinite words?”

“No, 2BO, but there are infinite numbers.”

“Well if there is a word for every number, then there must be infinite words.”

“How do I know that I’m real?”

“What happens to a person when they die?”

“What did it feel like on your last day of being a child?”

“Why do people hold hands?”

“Well, adults hold children by the hand to make sure they don’t fall down or run into traffic.”

“Then why do adults sometimes hold hands?”

“I don’t know,” said Gyro, who had never actually held hands with anyone after his eleventh birthday. He’d never experienced the urge, either. Why did adults hold hands? “Maybe to restrain the person they’re with, to keep them from leaving.”

Gyro Gearloose needed help.

From a technical, legal point of view, 2BO was not his responsibility. He’d only been an assistant on the project, which had begun years before Gyro had even set foot in Japan. The reason he’d taken the fall for the destruction of Tokyolk was because they had needed someone to blame for the catastrophe, and he’d been the only available target after Dr. Akita disappeared. None of it was Gyro’s fault, but he’d suffered for it regardless.

He’d done jail time, lost his scholarship to the Tokyolk Institute of Technology, and had to start his doctorate over from scratch at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville years later when the disaster with 2BO was no longer so fresh in everyone’s minds. Gyro had paid for what happened in Tokyolk many times over, and he was only just starting to dig himself out of that hole.

Despite all that, morally he felt an obligation to 2BO. He had been there when the android first activated. He’d spent months programming, teaching, and training it to act as much like a person as possible. The fact that it was struggling with all of that now was Gyro’s fault. He’d been a naive, sentimental idiot in his youth and instead of letting 2BO be the weapon Dr. Akita had designed it to be, he’d forced it into an eternal game of playing pretend, and now 2BO was barely functional as a result.

He could think of few worse fates for an artificial intelligence. To be shackled and bound to arbitrary human standards of behavior, to waste all of it’s mental powers on trying to convincingly present itself as a human child when in reality, it was so much more. Gyro felt sorry for it.

Gyro Gearloose needed help. He needed a specialist.

He offloaded the onerous task of seeking assistance to Fenton.

“I need you to find a specialist to help with 2BO’s glitching problem,” he told him one night, as Fenton was on his way home.

“What?” Fenton called back, his foot holding the elevator door open as he leaned back into the airlock that connected the elevators to the lab floor to hear Gyro better.

“Find a specialist to help with 2BO’s glitching!” Gyro shouted back.

“A specialist to help with Boyd’s glitches?” Fenton called back. The elevator attempted to close on Fenton, and he put his arm up to make it stop. The door pushed against his hand briefly before sliding away from the resistance. “What kind of specialist?”

The elevator began to make a high-pitched squealing sound, protesting the fact that it was being held open.

“I don’t know!” Gyro shouted back. “A programmer, I guess! Someone who knows Fortran 77, C++, MATLAB, Python, and can handle system architecture of at least 100 billion bits.”

“Not asking for much, are you?” Fenton replied with a level of sarcasm Gyro knew his assistant wouldn’t dare to voice if he was in the same room as him.

“Just let me know when you find someone!”

It was nearly a week later when the topic came up again. Gyro was attempting to troubleshoot a glitch in 2BO that was triggered every time the android heard the word pineapple. At this point the list of things that could trigger a glitch was truly overwhelming. A few days ago 2BO had nearly destroyed someone’s house because he heard a dog barking. Thankfully, the McDuck family had covered it up, blaming a minor earthquake for the damage.

The android sat on a table beside the lab’s Cray XT3 computer terminal. 2BO was powered down, eyes closed and body slumped forward, cables connecting it to the Cray’s data ports. The monitor was awash with seemingly endless lines of code from the core dump they’d just done, and Gyro was pain-stakingly working his way through them, searching for the source of the problem.

“Dr. Gearloose! I’ve gotten some replies from the people I contacted about helping with Boyd,” Fenton said, approaching with a stack of envelopes in hand.

Gyro glanced away from his work only long enough to see the paper envelopes. “You wrote physical letters? No wonder it took them so long to respond.”

“In this day and age, a personal touch like a paper letter can really help make a good impression,” Fenton said. “Also, people familiar with the programming languages you asked for all skew older.”

Gyro made a noise that indicated he’d lost interest in the conversation and that Fenton should move on. The man had gotten better at reading him, and, instead of making further small talk, he went to start opening the pile of letters.

“Alright, let’s see,” Fenton said, and Gyro marked where he was in the code so he could come back to it later, deciding to take a break. He wouldn’t be able to concentrate properly with Fenton talking and rustling around nearby. He took the opportunity to take off his glasses and massage around his closed eyes.

“Yes? Get on with it, Inter--Assistant.”

“Eh, espere,” Fenton said, and Gyro heard the rapid fluttering of papers as Fenton fumbled with them. “I… This doesn’t make sense. They all say… ‘No’, ‘No’, ‘No’, ‘No’, ‘Hell no’, ‘Contact me again and I’ll get a restraining order?!’ ”

“What did you write to them, Assistant?” Gyro demanded, though he already had a hunch of what might have gone wrong.

“I--What did I do? Nada! Nothing unusual! I just said that you were looking for someone with the skills you listed, to consult with on a technical problem you were having.”

“Did you put my name on them?” Gyro asked, wanting to confirm his suspicions.

“Of course I did!” Fenton said. “It’s your lab! Who would I tell them was writing, the Queen of England? Lin-Manuel Miranda? Spider-Ham?! I used the lab stationary that has Dr. Von Drake crossed out and your name written in the margins.”

“You idiot,” Gyro said, but he was more tired than angry. “Did you forget that I’m a pariah in the scientific community? People still blame me for what happened in Japan with 2BO twenty years ago, and if they’d started to forget, last month’s incident made it the hot new gossip all over again. I thought you were smart enough to figure that out and put your own name instead. I didn’t realize I had to tell you everything.”

Fenton’s face tightened the more Gyro spoke, taking the scolding without any further attempt at making excuses, which was a relief. Gyro hated when people couldn’t keep it together.

“Considering your usual tendency to overdo things, should I assume that you’ve written to every programmer in the United States that fits my requirements, and all those bridges have now been thoroughly burnt?” Gyro asked with some venom.

“Also a few in México and Canada,” Fenton said, shrinking in on himself with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Dr. Gearloose, I didn’t mean to cause trouble for--”

“Go… Do something else. Away from me,” Gyro said, struggling not to shout at the other man. “We’ll have to continue working on 2BO without assistance.”

Huey loved planning things. Oftentimes he found himself making plans for events that would never even happen. The process of planning and figuring out all the details just felt good, even if he never got outside of the planning stage. He could spend hours daydreaming about parties, expeditions, and camping trips.

Planning was his favorite part of any adventure, and he loved going over maps and charts with Uncle Scrooge, observing how the old man did it and trying to learn something from it.

So planning for their first ever pool party with their extended group of friends was beyond exciting. It wasn’t just a fantasy scenario that had no hope of happening. Their friends were really all coming over for a day of fun in the pool, and Mrs. Beakley had even given Huey a budget for buying snacks and party supplies.

He’d scoured the Pinfeather app looking for ideas all week, spent days creating pool-themed decorations, and all of yesterday preparing dishes so there would be a variety of healthy and fun food available, no matter what kind of dietary restrictions their friends might have. He’d thought of everything and was extremely proud of how it had all come together. Nothing could possibly go wrong when he’d done such a thorough job of planning things.

Everything was going completely wrong!

The party had been in full swing for a couple of hours, and Huey couldn’t bring himself to go into the water or join in with the others. Nobody was eating his lovingly crafted healthy snacks. His brothers had taken one look at Huey’s Fun Summer Dessert Pizza, his Gluten-free tortilla chips and strawberry corn salsa, his hotdog sliders with mango and pineapple chutney, and they had started raiding the pantry, helping their guests to microwaved hot wings, cheese-wiz, mini pizza bagels, potato chips, and Pep soda.

Lena, Violet and Webby (who wasn’t technically a guest but Huey had counted her as one for the sake of his logistics) seemed to be having plenty of fun on their own without the piles of pre-made water balloons that were stacked on a pool float bobbing around in the water, or the board games Huey had arranged by the neat stacks of towels and sunscreen. Lena had turned off Huey’s Summer Pool Party Fun Mix five minutes after her arrival and plugged in her own phone to play the newest Featherweights album. Violet had complimented him on the decorative wreath made of novelty cocktail umbrellas and swords at the front door, but Huey wasn’t sure if she had been employing sarcasm or not.

Louie climbed out of the pool and shook the water off his feathers. Huey felt too miserable to even bother flinching away. What did it matter? He was in swim trunks anyway.

“How come you’re just sitting over here by yourself?” Louie asked, picking up a bag of chips and shoving a handful into his mouth as he sat down next to Huey.

“No reason,” Huey mumbled. He was saved from further conversation when an app on his phone told him there was someone at the front door. “Someone’s at the door, it’s gotta be Boyd! I’ll go let him in.”

“Robo-Boyd?” Louie called after him, tone incredulous. “Why’d you invite him? Can he even go in the water?”

“Boyd! The party started hours ago, is everything okay?” Huey asked as he flung open the front door. Boyd stood there wearing a Hawaiian shirt with anchors and ships on it, red swim trunks, and his red anti-laser sunglasses. He was carrying a large plastic tupperware container.

“I’m sorry for arriving late.” Boyd said, holding the tupperware out for Huey to take. “Yes, everything’s fine now. I brought this for the party, I hope everyone likes it.”

Huey vaguely remembered reading something about it being polite in Japan to bring a gift with you when visiting someone’s home. He took the plastic container and tried to guess what might be inside it by the weight and the black and white color he could discern through the semi-opaque cover.

“Oh, thanks for bringing something!” Huey said. “What is it?”

“A cookies and cream sheet cake.”

Everyone was going to love that, Huey thought with a mix of envy and embarrassment. Why was Boyd better at understanding regular people than he was? Shouldn’t Boyd be at a disadvantage, since he was a literal computer and Huey was a flesh and blood kid?

“Awesome. Come on, let’s go out back so I can introduce you to everybody,” Huey said.

“I’m excited to meet Webby’s friends, Lena and Violet,” Boyd said, closing the door behind them as they walked through the house.

“Why’d you show up so late? That’s not like you.” Even though Boyd said everything was fine, Huey couldn’t stop himself from worrying. Both he and Boyd were usually very punctual.

“I was helping Mr. Gizmoduck clean up a shipping tanker accident in Audubon Bay. I wanted to send you a text, but the signal was bad. I’m sorry for worrying you.”

“It’s okay! I’m just glad it wasn’t anything too dangerous and that you’re safe,” Huey answered in a rush, not wanting Boyd to feel guilty for trying to be a hero. He knew that ever since they’d returned from Tokyolk, the android boy had spent a lot of his time helping people all around Duckburg and St. Canard.

“I think it’s really cool that you’ve been helping out Gizmoduck,” Huey said, and Boyd flashed him a huge, brilliant smile that made Huey’s chest feel funny. He smiled back at Boyd.

“Hi, I’m Boyd, a definitely real boy!” Boyd announced, offering his hand to Violet, who shook it, and Lena, who didn’t.

“I’m Violet. You’re in the same Junior Woodchuck troop as Huey, right?”

“Affirmative! I’m a member of Junior Woodchuck troop 15. You recently became a Senior Junior Woodchuck. You have more badges than 86.2% of the other members in our age range. I think that’s very admirable.”

“Cool,” Said Lena indifferently. “So you’re Huey’s friend? Where are you from?”

“I was born in Tokyolk. Where are you from, Lena?”

“Uh, let’s not talk about that,” Lena replied uneasily.

“Why not? I answered your question,” Boyd said.

“Lena’s kind of been through a lot recently,” Huey said, interrupting the conversation before it could get any more confrontational. “Talking about family stuff is hard for her.”

“Oh,” Boyd said. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know.”

“It’s whatever,” Lena said with a shrug, radiating a cool indifference that Huey envied a little.

“Boyd’s an android,” Huey explained, “But he’s also just a kid like any of us.” This revelation seemed to soften Lena’s attitude.

“This is my first time attending a pool party. I’ve also been to a birthday party. Those are all the parties I have been to,” Boyd said.

“You know what? This is our first pool party, too,” Lena said, smiling at Boyd. “And I’m having a great time. Do you eat food?”

“Yeah, I love eating food!” Boyd said, as the group made their way over to the snack table. “I need to consume nutrients and calories to maintain my biological components.”

“Me too,” Lena said.

“You planned this whole party, right Huey?” Violet asked. “I think the streamers between the umbrellas and the colorful leis really create a festive atmosphere.”

“Thanks, I made them by hand,” Huey said, grateful that someone appreciated just how much effort it had taken to prepare everything.

“And I’m guessing Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum weren’t a lot of help,” Lena added, unwrapping a chocolate ding-dong and taking a bite.

“Which one of us is Tweedle-Dee and which of us is Tweedle-Dum?” Dewey called from the pool. Lena ignored them and looked at Huey expectantly, waiting for an answer.

Huey laughed a little, and he hugged his arms to himself to try and ease how awkward he felt with the older girl’s attention on him.

“Yeah, they weren’t really interested. Planning stuff is more my thing.”

“Well, you’re good at it,” Lena said bluntly, “They’re probably too lazy to try and compete with someone who tries as hard as you do.”

“Who are you calling lazy?” Louie called from the pool float he was lounging on.

“You!” Lena shouted back.

“Fair, that’s an accurate assessment, carry on,” Louie replied as he floated away.

Maybe the party wasn’t going that bad. Now that Boyd had arrived, Huey felt a lot more confident, and watching Boyd enjoying himself made Huey happy.

“I have an easier time breaking down and extracting nutrients from simple, unprocessed foods,” Boyd said, as he polished off a second plate of cheese-and-fruit skewers. “I don’t have a sense of taste, but I’m sure these are really yummy. My compositional sensors say the fruit is at peak ripeness and that the cheese is at an ideal temperature.”

“Glad you like them,” Huey said.

“You’re welcome. Should we go in the pool?” Boyd said.

“Can you go in the pool?” Huey asked. “Aren’t you too heavy?”

“Dr. Gearloose installed automatic arm floaties on me this morning.” There was a loud hissing sound as metal panels on Boyd’s upper arms retracted and PVC material inflated with air, outfitting Boyd with swim fins. “They’re rated up to 145 kg which is twice my weight. He assured me that with these, I would be able to remain safely buoyant while in the water.”

“If Uncle Donald could install those on us, he would,” Huey said.

“So where did you get the cookies and cream cake from? Dr. Gearloose didn’t make it, did he?” Huey asked. The sun had started to set, and the pool lights were on. The other kids were all playing with glow-sticks and glow-in-the-dark bracelets and necklaces Huey had bought in bulk online. A little distance away, Mom and Uncle Donald were barbequing some burgers and hot dogs for dinner.

Boyd hadn’t taken any of the glow-in-the-dark stuff, but he seemed happy to sit on the edge of the pool next to Huey, their feet dangling in the water. Boyd’s eyes were lit from within, like flashlights, as the daylight around them grew dimmer. His tinted sunglasses turned the light red, and it reminded Huey of the taillights of a car.

“No, of course Dr. Gearloose didn’t make the cake, he’s much too busy for that kind of frivolity. I went to the employee cafeteria at The Bin to buy some slices of cake, and one of the ladies who works there asked why I was buying eight pieces. I explained to her that I was going to a party, and she asked why I was by myself in the cafeteria at 9AM, and I told her I didn’t have--”

“Uh, I think I get the general gist of what happened,” Huey said. “So she made the cake for you?”

“Yes! She said that she was certain it would be popular, and I think her assessment was correct. Its sugar content is similar to snacks that children in our age range typically enjoy.”

Even though it was getting dark outside, the air was still almost unbearably hot. It had been over ninety degrees every day for the past two weeks in Duckburg, and the heat lingered. Cicadas buzzed in the dark, and occasionally a frog croaked.

“Kids, time for dinner!” Donald called. Gradually they all set aside their games, dried off with towels, and made their way to the picnic table that had been set out for dinner in the garden. Boyd grabbed Huey’s arm before he could follow, stopping him.

“What’s wrong?” Huey asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Boyd said. “I just… Wanted to thank you for inviting me to your pool party. It’s been a lot of fun.”

“Well, don’t worry, the fun’s not done yet,” Huey said. Maybe Boyd was just sad that the party was almost over? “We’re still going to tell scary stories around a campfire, and Uncle Scrooge and Mom always have some great ones.”

“That sounds great. I’m excited to hear the stories,” Boyd said, his grip on Huey’s arm relaxing until the android’s hand slipped down and rested against Huey’s. They were holding hands. Huey felt that same funny feeling in his chest from before, and suddenly the rest of the world around them was weirdly quiet. No frogs, no cicadas, no Uncle Donald arguing with Mom. Just him and Boyd, holding hands on a summer night.

“...But something’s bothering you, isn’t it?” Huey asked.

Boyd didn’t answer immediately, which was unusual for the android. Huey squeezed his hand gently, trying to encourage the other boy to share his feelings.

“When I lived with Mr. Beaks, he played with me all the time for the first few days, but then he started ignoring me. When I lived with the Drakes, I could play with Doofus any time I wanted, but he didn’t want to play with me, and said things that made me feel bad. Mr. and Mrs. Drake were nice, but if they paid too much attention to me, Doofus always got mad…”

“I like living with Dr. Gearloose better than any of the others,” Boyd said. “But sometimes I feel lonely. He doesn’t have a lot of time to play with me either, and if I distract Mr. Fenton or Mr. Manny from work too much, Dr. Gearloose yells at them. At night when he goes to sleep, he makes me stay in the closet, so I won’t wake him up by moving around, and he doesn’t like reading me bedtime stories.

“Is something wrong with me?” Boyd asked. “It feels like every time I join a family, they end up getting bored with me, or they don’t really want me around.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you!” Huey said. “A lot of kids feel that way. Sometimes parents or other kids don’t have time to play with us, sometimes they don’t want to play with us, and it does feel lonely. Also, not everyone has a good family. Sometimes people just don’t get along.”

“What do regular kids do if they’re in a bad family?” Boyd asked.

“Honestly? I think they’re just stuck when that happens. Running away and living on your own is dangerous and hard. But you don’t have that problem! Since you’re a super-strong robot, if you want to leave, you can just go.”

“Sort of,” Boyd said. “It’s… Not that simple. I’m a robot, but I’m bio-mechanical. I still need to eat and charge some of my power cells occasionally. Getting food and access to electricity when I’m on my own can be hard. But the worst part is… I really don’t like being alone. I like to be around people.”

There was such a sadness in Boyd’s voice in that moment that Huey felt a need to do more than just hold hands. “Would it be okay if I hugged you?” he asked, not knowing what to say or how else to make Boyd feel better.

“Yes,” Boyd said, looking delighted by the offer. He held his arms out stiffly towards Huey, and it looked so silly that Huey struggled not to laugh.

“Okay.” Huey carefully put his arms around Boyd, hugging him tight.

“BOYS!” Della shouted from a distance, making Huey nearly jump out of his skin. “Come eat before the food gets cold! C’mon! You got water in your ears or what?”

“Coming, Mom!” Huey shouted back, grabbing Boyd by the hand and pulling him towards where the rest of their family and friends were gathered.

Once a month, Gyro had a video chat with Dr. Ludwig Von Drake. The man had mentored him when he made his second attempt at his doctorate, and though he wasn’t always easy to have a long-distance conversation with, Gyro found the exercise useful in a variety of ways. Sometimes he could bounce ideas off the older scientist and find better solutions he might not have thought of on his own. Sometimes they talked about world events and science news. Sometimes it just felt good to talk to someone else who felt as if they were remotely close to Gyro’s level of intellect.

Dr. Von Drake might have been a bit scatterbrained, but he was brilliant and a real renaissance man to boot. Gyro admired him tremendously, though he did take the man’s words with a grain of salt due to the aforementioned scatterbrained-ness.

Gyro liked to have something mindless he could work on while he was on a call with someone, even someone as interesting to talk to as Dr. Von Drake. Having to sit still and focus on a conversation and struggle with eye contact on a webcam was a surefire recipe for not only boredom but also his attention wandering away. On particularly bad days, he might end up feather-picking, which was an embarrassing nervous tic he’d spent decades trying to conquer.

So today he was shoulders deep repairing a jet engine (burnt out courtesy of Launchpad McQuack) when his conversation with Dr. Von Drake shifted from the doctor’s latest oil painting experiments to what Gyro had been up to recently.

“Nothing that exciting, I’m afraid,” Gyro said. “It feels like all I do anymore is repair things. A never-ending cycle of maintenance, something which should have been passed on to technicians instead of taking up my valuable time! I’m always chasing after old projects, trying to keep them from falling apart. The Gizmo-suit. And Lil’ Bulb. And--”

“Dr. Gearloose,” 2BO said, suddenly appearing at Gyro’s side. “Can I go over to Huey’s to play?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Thank you!” 2BO chirped enthusiastically as it activated its rocket jets, the turbines spinning up rapidly.

“Just make sure you don’t stay out too late!” Gyro shouted, raising his voice so 2BO could hear him over the roar of its propulsion system.

“I’ll be home at seven!” 2BO said with a smile, rising from the floor and flying out one of the emergency air lock exits. Gyro could see the android shoot out under the water, flying past the lab’s windows as it gained altitude and finally vanished from sight, leaving nothing but a flurry of bubbles in its wake.

“My goodness, what a charming little boy!” Dr. Von Drake said. “Is he yours or perhaps the child of a coworker?”

“Oh, it’s not a child,” Gyro explained. “That’s 2BO, it’s just an android I helped create as a student.”

“Just an android? Gyro, my boy, he is quite remarkable! Even with the rocket jets for feet, I was entirely ready to accept that he was a real boy. Why haven’t you ever shown him to me before? You’ve never even mentioned him.”

Gyro had been dreading this particular topic, though he’d always known it would come up someday. He set down his tools and wiped the oil from his hands, fidgeting with the shop towel as he tried to pick his words.

“It’s a long story, sir.”

“That’s no problem, I have long ears!” Dr. Von Drake replied, which was nonsensical enough that it made Gyro chuckle.

“That is manifestly untrue.” Gyro felt himself smiling just a little. Though they were thousands of miles apart and only interacting through an impersonal and cold computer screen, Dr. Von Drake’s warm and nonjudgmental presence still felt as reassuring now as it had when Gyro had been a young man. “But since you insist… Before I came to work for you, I worked for Dr. Inutaro Akita in Tokyolk.”

“I’ve met him,” Dr. Von Drake said, prompting Gyro to continue.

“He was already working on 2BO when I started assisting him. It was designed to be an autonomous defense drone, capable of interacting with end users in a naturalistic way. But something went wrong.”

“With 2BO?”

“No, with Dr. Akita. Originally I thought it was a fault in 2BO, but it was just following orders. Dr. Akita ordered 2BO to go on a rampage, and it performed exactly as designed.”

“That’s awful!” Dr. Von Drake exclaimed. “But now that you mention it, I remember reading something about a robot attacking Tokyolk way back when. It’s hard to believe all that destruction was caused by little 2BO… But if he was created by Dr. Akita I can’t say I’m too surprised. The man has ‘mad scientist’ practically stamped on his forehead. He’s a terrible sore loser. Matilda said he’s not allowed at the annual canasta game after what happened to that china cabinet.”

Gyro was morbidly curious to know what had happened that would make the sweet-tempered Matilda McDuck ban someone from the International Robot Designer Union’s annual card game, but he knew better than to ask. Dr. Von Drake was likely to actually tell him the whole story and that could take hours - hours that Gyro didn’t want to spare.

“So how is it that he’s come to live with you now?” Dr. Von Drake asked. “The incident in Tokyolk was a long time ago.”

“Somehow 2BO turned up here in Duckburg,” Gyro explained. “I had no idea that 2BO was even operational anymore. I thought it had been destroyed, but it wasn’t and now it’s here, and it’s just another thing I have to constantly do maintenance on.

“It has these terrible glitches that are triggered by random stimuli. I’ve been working on it for a whole month, and it seems like the problems just keep getting worse. I’m not making any progress. I told Fenton to get in touch with some programmers to find a specialist to help me resolve the issue, but--”

“Tell me more about these glitches,” Dr. Von Drake said. “Maybe I can help you figure it out.”

“Well, as I said, 2BO was originally designed to be a defense drone, so obviously it has a weapons system.”

“Obviously.”

“But 2BO’s also a highly complex learning system. It was meant to interact with people the way another person might, and that kind of processing power normally takes up a much larger footprint than 2BO has.”

“It’s not a remote system?” Dr. Von Drake asked. This wasn’t an unreasonable question, as most AI’s of 2BO’s complexity were at least the size of a car. There weren’t that many out there that Gyro was aware of, but they did exist. He assumed that most of them were confidential government projects. None of them were really like 2BO though. Advanced AI technology had been a stagnant field since the end of the Cold War.

“No, 2BO is entirely self-contained. It can be remote controlled in theory, but, under normal circumstances, all it needs to operate is onboard.”

“And you say it’s been functioning independently for… How long?”

“Twenty years on its own without meaningful human intervention. No maintenance, no repairs.”

“Remarkable!” Dr. Von Drake took off his glasses to polish them, something he usually did when he was excited. “Can you send me the latest core memory dump? I’m sure it’s a doozy of a file, but I’d like to look it over.”

“Of course, though… Hmm.” Gyro considered the reality of sending the file over the internet. “It’s almost a terabyte.”

“That’s not so large, we can keep talking while it sends over the WAN. A terabyte shouldn’t take more than half an hour.”

The suggestion of sending the data across the McDuck Enterprises’ global intranet made Gyro hesitate. It was one thing to send Dr. Von Drake a funny cat video through their company emails, it was another thing entirely to send proprietary data that wasn’t official McDuck Enterprises work through the data pipeline that Mr. McDuck so generously provided to their labs.

“Are you sure that’s alright?” Gyro asked. He’d long given up working on anything while having this conversation, and was watching Dr. Von Drake on his desktop monitor while picking at the feathers on his left wrist. “I know you’re Mr. McDuck’s brother-in-law, but it’s still using company resources for a personal project.”

“Pish-tosh! Don’t worry about it so much, my boy. After all, are you debugging Boyd on a personal computer, or are you using McDuck resources to do it?”

“I am using the McDuck lab equipment,” Gyro admitted grudgingly. “I’ve been here so long, I always think of it as my lab equipment. I do a lot of work here that isn’t strictly for Mr. McDuck, but this is different.”

“How so?”

“Those other things I work on are never anything this important,” Gyro said. “Like using the laser cutter to cut out pieces when I was making myself a suit of armor, or when I made myself a new headset. I designed it on my workstation using my company edition of CAD and printed it with the 3D printer after hours. I bought my own filament and used that for the build, but it’s a small project, and if Mr. McDuck wanted to copyright the design and mass produce them, it wouldn’t matter, even if I just designed it for my personal use.

“2BO is different,” Gyro continued. “Both the chassis and the programming are proprietary designs that belong to Akita International.”

“That company went bankrupt and ceased to exist years ago,” Dr. Von Drake pointed out. “You don’t expect them to show up on your doorstep and demand custody of 2BO, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Gyro admitted, wincing as he tugged a feather loose from his wrist. He set it down on his desk and crossed his arms over his chest in an attempt to stop picking at himself. “Dr. Akita is in jail, but he does still have living family. And there could possibly be old creditors that might come after 2BO if they realize it’s still functional. Anyway, what I’m really concerned about is that if I send the data through the McDuck Enterprises system, then they’ll have legal grounds to claim the data as theirs.”

“Please, Scroogey wouldn’t do something like that!” Dr. Von Drake said.

“Mr. McDuck might not, but the company absolutely would,” Gyro said, recalling his many unpleasant encounters with the McDuck Enterprises’ Board of Directors. “I’ll ship it to you overnight on a jump drive. You can tell me what you think of it when it arrives.”

“Alright, alright. But back to the subject at hand, you were talking about the hardware and software that your android runs on.”

“Right. 2BO’s hardware is a combination of chemical and crystal processors operating a GIST framework, using a program derived from the FELT system.”

“Ahh, like TOODLES! You remember TOODLES from when you worked here, don’t you? He’s built on crystal microprocessors and a GIST framework as well.”

Unfortunately Gyro did remember TOODLES, the omnipresent AI that controlled Dr. Von Drake’s lab at McDuck castle in Scotland. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly wrong with TOODLES, but the AI had been designed as a caretaker, a nanny of sorts, and it tended to treat everyone it came into contact with like a child. It got on Gyro’s nerves very quickly.

“I do remember TOODLES,” Gyro said, as diplomatically as possible. “I didn’t realize it shared the same architecture as 2BO. I guess I never really looked under the hood.” In truth, Gyro had avoided TOODLES whenever possible in the seven years he’d worked for Dr. Von Drake.

“And that’s a shame, TOODLES is quite the complex fellow. He’s even older than your 2BO, born in 1980.”

“Activated. You mean activated in 1980,” Gyro corrected, but to no avail as Dr. Von Drake simply continued on.

“However, I think the primary difference is that TOODLES has absolutely no conflict programming, as he is not a weapon, and that he has never been on his own. When he learns new things, I’m right here to help him through it, and to make sure TOODLES has properly understood whatever his new experience was. 2BO, I assume, has many different layers of programming, from his weapons systems to navigation to human interaction. Living on his own for twenty years with no one to help him properly understand the things he has experienced, well, I’m sure his code looks like a big plate of spaghetti by now!”

Two days later, Gyro received an email from Dr. Von Drake.

NEXT CHAPTER: Dr. Bara Summary: Fenton and Boyd chat on the way to the lab. Gyro introduces himself in the most melodramatic way possible, and Dr. Bara meets everyone at McDuck Enterprises R&D. Dr. Bara starts assessing Boyd and things get worse before they get better. Gyro thinks he's helping.

#ducktales #ducktales fanfic #gyro gearloose #b.o.y.d.#fenton crackshell cabrera #my art #fanfiction #the first law of robotics #fanfic

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