Astron

The first Astron model was designed by the Mallory Corporation in 1943 as an advanced children’s toy to be gifted by wealthy parents. It was an intuitive playmate, but what really set the robot apart was its signature ability to fly using a liquid-fueled jetpack on its back. The toy was clearly dangerous and impractical, and early lawsuits led Mallory Corp to take it off the shelves and scrap the idea entirely. However, Astron was revived in 2027 when some of its old advertisements and design blueprints were unearthed around the same time as the discovery of Mallory’s unused dance bot design, which would later be turned into Automatic (?). Unlike Auto, who was created soon after his blueprints were rediscovered, it took much longer for the toy companies to recreate Astron. Despite the profit that the model could potentially grant them, many feared the liability problems that might arise as they had in the forties.

It wasn’t until almost five years after the blueprints were found that Autonoma, a robot toy company that made products for teens and older children, decided to take the risk and start a new line of Astron toys. Their new model was sleek and modern, while still taking inspiration from the first Astron, and it had built-in safety features to prevent it from hurting kids. It no longer used liquid fuel to fly, but it did have an improvised fog machine on its back to simulate a jetpack. The Astron sold well for over a year until a single unit malfunctioned over a busy street in Delaware, smashing through a windshield and causing a huge crash involving eight vehicles. Autonoma simply shrugged and dumped the Astron, and that was the end of things, at least until over a hundred-fifty years later when a child in Africa fished a rusted old Astron out of a waste heap.