"Satoko."
The response was slow. Jin called out a second time.
One must not be hasty.
For the sake of convenience, Sumi perceived this individual with the pronoun 'he,' though in truth, its systemic gender parameter remained null. Regardless of name or perception, in Sumi's internal processing, Satoko was nothing more than an antiquated, genderless machine.
And in any case, Satoko was slow.
Its processing speed was so ponderous it seemed to replicate at the hardware level the inefficient processes—the conflicts and hesitations—that once plagued biological humanity. The immense lag required for a prompt to be received and then rendered as action.
Yet, this primitive act of 'waiting' was a luxury of the highest order, the pinnacle of Uranian extravagance, afforded only to Sumi, whose own calculations numbered in the billions per second.
"Satoko."
A third time.
Now the name was uttered with the deliberate care of one adding phonetic guides to a written word.
At last, a section of the residence's sterile outer wall—a service entrance like a hidden door of consummate minimalism—swung open, and the robot revealed itself.
If Sumi was the crystalline embodiment of singular opulence, technology compressed to the very brink of a supernova, then the emergent Satoko was its antithesis: a fossil unearthed from the deep strata of the earth.
It was a relic from a prehistoric age, a time long past when humanity was still imprisoned in the fragile cage of protein.
It had been a common, mass-produced, general-purpose domestic unit, designed for a reason so earnest, so pathetic, it threatened to make lubricant well in Sumi's optical sensors: to serve as a proxy for the labor of protecting their frail, inefficiently fueled organic bodies.
At last, the ancient relic—a model one might date to the hundred-millionth power BCE—made its appearance.
A furrow of vexation, born of long waiting, creased the space between Sumi's perfectly sculpted brows. It was an expression akin to the refined melancholy of a classic British actor, umbrella in hand, on a rainy London street.
With this calculated discontent, he slowly turned his optical sensors toward Satoko.
It was an encounter that evoked a sense of temporal estrangement so profound it was as if they were reuniting for the first time since the kindling of the Big Bang. A strange sensation, a mixture of nostalgia and a faint otherness, like finally capturing in one's retina the light from a galaxy several hundred million light-years away.
Processing the nostalgia that flickered through his own CPU, Sumi initiated a detailed scan, intending to update his data on this domestic robot for the first time in an age.
First, its sense of scale.
Assuming Sumi's own height parameter in this space was set to one hundred and eighty centimeters, Satoko's possessed an ambiguity that seemed to defy precise measurement. But if one were forced to make it converge upon an existing unit, it was close to the average height of a third- or fourth-grade student of old humanity. Accordingly, the balancing of its limbs also mimicked the skeletal proportions of that age group.
Its appearance, however, was the antithesis of Sumi's.
Where Sumi was the apotheosis of humanity's aesthetic ideals, distilled to a point of transcendent, elven beauty, Satoko never ventured beyond the domain of a 'humanoid machine.' Though its silhouette mimicked the human form, its surface was not soft skin but cold metal and reinforced resin.
It was an industrial design, instantly recognizable to any observer as a robot. Yet it possessed a certain charm born of its very inorganic nature—a unique endearment one might call 'metallic-cute.' A faint whir of actuators with every joint movement, the flat timbre of a synthesized voice likely to issue from its speakers—it had the air of retro-futurism.
Its head was shaped reminiscently of a cathode-ray tube television of old, though it was of course no massive box. It was of a compact size, proportionate to its body, with a gently curving glass surface serving as its face.
No features—no eyes, no nose—were present. Instead, primitive text-based emoticons would appear upon the screen, a feature designed to digitally convey its owner's emotions. This exceedingly archaic interface, in turn, lent it the dignified patina of an antique.
The joints of its elbows and knees, with their ball-and-socket mechanisms deliberately exposed as a point of structural beauty, bespoke a frankness that made no attempt to hide the fact of its artificial creation.
And as for its attire—much as clothing a wild animal might be considered a form of abuse, any fabric upon this completely mechanical body seemed entirely superfluous.
In accordance with his own aesthetic judgment, Jin did not subject the android to the confines of restrictive clothing. There was but one exception: a single apron of tartan check.
Yet this apron was no mere scrap of cloth. At a glance, its pattern appeared subdued, but its fabric was woven from "Chrono-Silk"—a rare material possessing a spectrum that deviated subtly from the wavelengths of visible light. Depending on the angle of observation and the light source, it could conjure within the retina phantasmal colors that ought not to exist.
It was the ultimate, singular garment, one that Jin had specially commissioned for this solitary, old-model robot.
In truth, Sato-ka was no mere old model. He was a relic of such rarity that even a museum would hesitate to put him on display. Any serious collector, upon seeing such a priceless android of Solar System heritage status being subjected to the drudgery of household chores, would likely faint at the sheer madness of it. It was a sacrilege against a cultural treasure, and at once, the pinnacle of extravagance.
It was this treasure, this retro-humanoid, that now broke a long silence to address Jin.
"Yes. Master Jin, did you summon me?"