Her legs were practically up to her neck, and such shiny chrome I almost had to darken the filters on my optical receptors.

She whirred, “You MAC09 ?”
I took a slug of oil from the can on my desk before answering, “Better than MAC08 . Who wants to know?”
“CERA812.”
I’d never seen one of the CERAs and ran my facial recognition software just for kicks. Anything to get off of those legs—I certainly didn’t want to keep running fantasy loops of interfacing with her. I bet she screamed impossible equations during the better parts.

The scan came up with nothing interesting. 105 years old, she worked at the Hub, in the Museum of Robotic History. Still plugged into my desk, I switched to scanning pertinent newsfeeds. There it was: two days ago the museum’s masterpiece, the leftovers of an ancient, twentieth century Asimo, had been stolen. The area’s vidbots had gone offline for 2.7 minutes. All the thief needed.

“Can you find it?” She buzzed.
I beeped.