Robotics is serious business
Much like how Apple devices are built today, the autons, robots, and other simulacra of the Cosmic Era are also manufactured in such a way to discourage home customization, modification, or repair. Only licensed technicians in approved facilities are approved to made repairs or upgrades to robots or autons.
The Clockmakers
Clockmakers are the underground robotics technicians who work on and modify mechanoids, illegally. Clockmakers often keep shops that are locally known for tinkering and making minor repairs, and have signs with timepieces or watches on them. The clockmaker is an important figure in the geofronts and slums, as their work keeps the machines working and technology limping along a few more days.
Usage:
Figure of Importance: inside the underworld communities, the clocksmith is likely the most skilled individual, and in more good aligned sectors, they are going to be council members or otherwise leaders of the community. In more chaotic and criminal sectors, they are going to the slaves of the warlords, or their supporters, giving them fighting machines for their defense.
Illegal Alteration: If a droid inside the city goes off of the rails, there are only two potential reasons, infection by a hostile program or virus, or the deliberate alteration by a clocksmith. This would send investigators looking for who did the modification, and why it was done. Droids can be reprocessed to steal, commit crimes, perform terrorist actions, or function as a vector of a viral attack.
Custom Work: colorful robots and outlandish work is the sure sign of a savvy clockmaker, and each will sort out their own style, a sort of combination of a fashionista, mad scientist, and garage monkey. This custom work is most often seen in underworld entourages and robosports.
RoboSympathizer: the clocksmith is a supporter of robotic rights, and works to create as many sentient machines as possible to support their cause. This can be problematic as machine intelligence and human intelligence are not the same thing.
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? Responses (4)
A useful person.
A necessary person in a roboticized future
One of the few decent things to come out of watching Antonio Banderas' painfully mediocre 'Automata'
A good portion of the movie was spent looking for the 'clocksmith', evoking a washed out 1980s post-apoc robot western version of Bladerunner, without the acting, special effects, charm, or memorable characters. The robots, with their synthetic voices and uniform appearance seemed to have more range than the human characters. If this was deliberate, it would have been better done (compare HAL's mellifluous voice in 2001: A Space Odyssey vs the toneless voice of Bowman) This was just formerly impressive actors working for a paycheck.
Again, WW casts a whole different vibe to this for me. Nice.