Quva Logipal Commuter
Written by: Coupe
So a few years back, the marketting team of Quva Home-Automation started looking back on old innovations in invasive home-tech to see if any of it can be repackaged for today's audience. Back just after the awakening, there was this short lived craze for early 'smart home' tech. Y'know, having all your house appliances linked together under some ominous electronic box that would let you control it all with your voice, at the trivial expense of any sense of privacy or security.He ain't lyin' about that last part. I had one back in 2013, fucker started giving me ads for antidepressants after I talked about some mental health issues with a friend of mine. Had fun throwing that piece of drek into a sewer with an armed grenade, I tell you what.Now smart-home tech is a given in all but the oldest and most paranoid living spaces, but Quva wanted to bring back the old concept of centralizing all of it in a single device that could listen in on its owners commands and personal correspondances any time of the day, and so they created the Logipal, a smarthome hub-module full of proprietary tech that would connect any and all Quva branded appliances together (and begrudgingly to the same with compatible non-Quva products, albeit spamming ads for the 'superior alternative' all the time) and organise it all around your day-plan (extrapolated from social-media posts and commlink GPS positioning) with a trid-projected mascot acting as the liason between the device and its owner. The Logipal was a moderate success, especially in corporate enclaves and arcologies where the device's AI could interface with your work and commutes. But for folk who lived outside of a megacorp's comitee-designed ivory towers, the Logipal didn't offer much more than what other smarthome systems would give. This changed in '71 when one of the engineers who worked on the project, an Ork by the name of Veleda Hendricks, came to work one day for a mandatory in-person meeting, and her Logipal module followed her in. See, Hendricks was one of those archetypal engineers who combined genius engineering talents with a crippling social anxiety disorder, and while the many delivery and drop-off options in the sixth-world can accomodate that to a decent degree, there were some times when stuff outside her comfortable abode would have to be picked up or looked at personally. And so Hendricks took the base unit of the Logipal module, opened it up and wired it up to a small engineering drone with an extendable grabbing-claw mounted on the side. The end result was that Hendricks had basically turned her smarthome device into a sort of robotic therapy dog that could follow her around whenever she leaved her home, and with the flexibility of the Logipal's patented 'Therabuddy' software, could perform a surprising amount of social interactions in Hendrick's steed while she waited in her locked car. And when the marketting-team saw this trundle by their meeting-room, they got inspired. Enter the Commuter, an add-on for the Logipal (sold seperately of course) that turned it from a stationary smarthome-hub into a cute quadruped assistant that could leave the house and walk and talk with its owner while they pick up groceries, visit the park or commute to work. In essense, it's a drone made to carry and follow commands from the Logipal device it carries in a special recess on its main body. In its collapsed form, it's just big enough to fit in a rucksack or carry like a briefcase from its carry-handle, but its omnidirectional wheels sit on extendable legs that let it reach up just high enough for pair of robot arms to reach up onto low countertops and place objects into a little basket you can mount on the back of its body. Since it was based off an engineer's kitbash, the drone showed a surprising amount of modularity too, with optional packages that could turn the Commuter into a dedicated grocery-shopper, a gardening assistant or even a dogwalker.
I actually saw a few of those cute little things trundle through my parent's store here and there, had a shopping-list scrolling on a mounted trid-projector. You picked the goods off the shelf, put it all in a bag and into the little basket and the store's computer would register the exact cash transferred wirelessly as it trundled out. Kind of surreal, not gonna lie.
So what's to stop some enterprising ne'er-do-well from stealing it, or snagging whatever it's carrying?
The cargo modules are shut tight with a thumbprint lock system, and if the scanner detects the wrong print too many times or someone tries to muck with the whole drone, the in-built speakers let out this ear-piercing alarm while the drone flees towards home. Hell, some of the fancier subscription packages even have it call the cops.The Commuter made plenty of money as a fad-toy of the early '70s, but it was never gonna see long-term success as smart-home tech advanced to the point beyond the need for a centralizing device, instead operating on cloud-based software packages. The Logipal line was shuffled off the market in 2075 to make room for more modern smart-home solutions and the remaining stock of Commuter drones were sold off by Quva to smaller stores and manufacturers looking for a cheap and modular drone-platform, but Quva still support the Logipal's software and produce replacement parts for the hardware still in use, and plan to do so 'till 2083, where they'll stop support entirely. But of course, the shadows have their uses for everything: When Commuters started turning up cheap in drone outlets, a few riggers taking a look at the insides of one made a fun little discovery: Components of the Logipal were outsourced to an independant manufacturer in the CAS, who used parts from one of their other product lines to save a little money. As it turns out, one of those components was the chip-board from a LEO-companion drone, with most of the firmware intact and re-used to control the robotic arm. Long story short, the Commuter's had fire-control software built into it this whole time. Quva tried damage-control by removing that little 'feature' in later generations, but the cat was out of the bag. Now you see 'em used a lot by the thriftier kinds of gangers looking for a small and reliable companion-in-crime, able to pop someone with a taser and carry their loot home for them.
A few kids on my block have taken to playing a new style of tag, where whoever's 'it' chases around the others with a taser-armed commuter. It's pretty cute to watch a bunch of cackling teenagers running for their lives from a little plastic quadruped, least 'till you get caught in the crossfire!
Motto
Bring the Smart-Home Experience Everywhere!
Manufacturer
Price
3,800¥
Rarity
8
Speed
2G
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