Shucking my hoodie, I lift up my shirt and depress my fourth rib. The haptic sensor unseals a slab of skin revealing the valve to my fuel tank where my intercostal muscles should be. I dismount the hose from its docking bay and jam the nozzle into my side. It takes a full minute to fill up my tank. A full minute of vulnerability.
Done. I disengage the pump and my skin reseals as my body makes the necessary pressure adjustments. Card in hand, I turn to leave, but a metal pipe collides with my head and constellations of black dots clot my vision. My knees hit asphalt as nanytes race to repair the damage done to my skull. Cruor drips from the gash above my eye, and pain ignites every synthetic nerve ending.
Three droids dressed in ratty sweaters and faded jeans, leer at me with wicked grins.
“Give us the card.”
They can have it. Their hands rifle through my pockets. Fingers find the card then slip beneath my shirt. They’ve got a canister ready to drain me of fuel. Not today. I roll and kick, knocking one android on his back. The other still wields the pipe and strikes me repeatedly across the shoulders until I’m face down, cheek scraped by tar. More pain overwhelms my circuit and again their fingers fumble with my clothes.
“Please,” I say, but the android chuckles and increases the pressure holding me down. I’m poked and prodded as they search my ribs for the sensor. Before they can jam the canister into my side, a fourth pair of footsteps smack across the asphalt.
I squirm beneath my assailant as another android, black as midnight, sends his titanium-reinforced fist into the attacker’s jaw.
The second assailant brandishes the pipe.
“Kit, behind you,” I hiss through clenched teeth.
Kit delivers a kick to the android and sends him sprawling.
“Come on, Quinn.” Kit grabs my arm and drags me away before the others have time to recover. They don’t pursue us as we sprint down narrow alleys heading further away from the city center. We slow to a jog when we reach the train depot splashed with graffiti and littered with trash.
“Were you following me?” I turn on Kit once we’re relatively safe.
“Thanks Kit for saving my bionic ass. What a happy coincidence you just happened to go in search of some H yourself.” He grins.
“So, you were following me.”
“What are friends for?” He shrugs, and we cross the tracks into robot squatterville: Fragheim. The settlement lies in a sprawl of scrap metal and barbed wire.
“You still haven’t thanked me.” He pouts.
“Thank you, Kit.” Him following me is still of concern.
“They looked like Z-class droids.”
“Felt like it.” I rub the spot above my eye, the injury another memory of pain.
“You all right?” Kit brushes his thumb across the ghost of a graze on my cheek.
“Fine.” I pull away.
“Told you, you need to install a martial arts module.” He tucks his hands into his pockets.
“My processor’s almost overloaded as is.”
“Because you insist on installing those stupid emotion patches. What are you going to do? Feel your way out of fights?”
Kit fails to grasp the importance of emotion in music. If I’m ever going to not only pass for human but also actually be human, emotion—not martial arts—modules are going to get me there.
“I need them.”
“Like you need fish-balls and coffee at an afternoon fika.” Kit might’ve made that throaty sound of disapproval unique to human physiology if his voice box had been programmed to harrumph with disdain.
“I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Good.”
We leave it at that and make our way through mud and scrap toward the clump of huts we call home. Since escaping my owners, I’ve been camping out here, living amongst the other unwanted robotic detritus. It’s survival of the most fuel efficient and well coded.
I head straight for Sal’s to celebrate my musical achievement. She understands, to a certain degree, what Kit does not. We weave our way through the geometry of our scrap-metal sanctuary, past kidbots scraping out Sudoku puzzles in the dirt and androids gathered around salvaged furniture discussing mathematics and quantum theory. Some talk economy and politics, berating the government that saw fit to bring them into being, mass-produce them, and then abandon them.
Simulated voices rise in anger; a fist shakes in the air.
“The Robot Revolution.” A Saga-droid stabs a finger at his friend. “Don’t think it’s not going to happen. We’re on a precipice here. If government doesn’t pass this amendment—”
“You think the amendment’s our problem?” Lex, a Quasar companion-droid like me, interjects. He folds his arms and leans against the precarious wall of a hut. “If this virus thing is true, we’ve got much bigger problems.”
“What virus thing?” I ask.
Kit rolls his eyes. “Tune into the Botnet once in a while and maybe you’d know.”
I don’t even tune into the newsfeeds any more. It’s always the same: the People Against Robot Autonomy arguing why robots should never be granted rights and robots arguing even more aggressively why they should. I’ve seen nothing about a virus, though.
“Please, Kit.”
“Fine,” he relents. “Some Saga hackers got wind of an AI virus apparently being developed by M-Tech.”
“What kind of virus?”
“Don’t know.” He shrugs. “But Lex figures it’s probably designed to hurt us.”
“Of course he does.” We pause in the mud as Lex continues to rant about humans.
“It’s time for revolution. Look at human history! They want us to wear armbands like Hitler made the Jews wear yellow stars. And you all know what came next.” His words sink into my core. Would the humans really go so far as to exterminate us like that? Maybe the real question is what’s taking them so long to do it?
“You want something.” Lex punches a fist in the air. “You take it, guns blazing.”
Having heard enough, I cut a track through the mire to Sal’s.
“Lex has a point,” Kit says as he ambles along beside me.
“That the humans are about to commit robotic genocide? I doubt it.”
“Why? Fragheim might as well be a Gulag camp.”
“We’re not prisoners here.”
“Aren’t we?” Kit glares at me, daring me to argue, but I can’t and he knows it.
“There must be better ways to get what we want.”
“Like pretending you’re human?” His gaze burns me to my core. I grit my coral-polymer teeth and jog the rest of the way to Sal’s hut.
The hut is a questionable union between corrugated iron and duct tape. Sal dangles in a canvas hammock reading, the text spooling across her jade irises.
“Any good?” I move her legs to sit beside her. Kit catches up and leans against an unstable wall.
“Chapter,” she says, and I wait for her to finish. “Not bad.” She blinks, and her vision clears. “I think Alfred Jarry drank too much absinthe, but his ‘pataphysics are … amusing.”
Typical. Only a Saga class android, manufactured for intelligence operations during the war, would find ‘pataphysics entertaining. It’s too bad Sagas were stuck in research facilities as data crunchers after the war. Sagas know they’re smarter than the rest of us with their intelligence quotients in the stratosphere, and Sal’s not shy in reminding us.
“So.” She runs her hand across her tattooed scalp. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company, boys?”
“I got in.” The grin splits my face ear to ear. Kit mumbles something indiscernible.
Sal takes a moment to absorb the information before crushing me to her organosilicone chest in a hug.
“This is fantastic. Congratulations! But I knew you’d get in. You’ve got top-notch music firmware.”
“Thanks,” I say as she releases me. I want to tell her it’s more than bei
ng able to read the music and move my fingers over the strings, bowing perfect tremolo. It’s about feeling something beyond what any emotion patch can offer. Playing music is about glimpsing the divine, about believing in something beyond yourself, some ethereal force. If I say any of that, she’ll just pat my head and smile that infuriating smile that says she knows better because she can rattle off every composer’s birth date and list their greatest works in six languages. I could download all those dates, but it would use up slots in my memstor that are better used for memorizing actual music. As for languages, we Quasars have severely limited linguistic capabilities.
“When do you start?” she asks.
“Saturday. First rehearsal.”
“It’s a bad idea,” Kit singsongs.
“Nonsense. We should celebrate.” Sal leaps off the hammock causing me to swing backwards into the metal wall, making the entire structure vibrate.
“It’s not that big a deal.”
“Yes it is.” Sal whirls on me. “First we celebrate and then we fix you up.”
“That’s what I’ve been talking about.” Kit rubs his hands together.
“I need fixing?” The uncertainty in my voice sounds so natural, so human. Sometimes I forget that under the layers of synthetic flesh, I’m a snarl of electronics.
“We could rough you up a bit.”
“Some droids already did that.” Kit nods in my direction. I point to my head where the pipe injury has reduced to a slight depression.
“You both get jumped?” Sal asks.
“Filling up. They took my card. Kit came to the rescue, as always.”
“Good thing he was around.” She glances in Kit’s direction.
“Next time I might not be. Next time maybe I’ll just watch.”
For an android determined to be nothing more than plastic and metal, Kit can be as passive-aggressive as any human.
“Hm, let’s hope not.” Sal muses with a finger tapping her chin. “You’ll pass for human, long as no one looks too closely.” She musses my hair and grins. “Better already.”
“No one suspected anything at auditions.” Quasars are made to look more human than other androids.
“You look like a doll,” Kit says. “Not that that’s a bad thing.”
“This is the biggest problem.” Sal grabs my wrist as I attempt to smooth down my unruly mane of platinum blond.
“My tag?” I stare at the black lettering of the code on my wrist. It’s not a tattoo or superficial decoration like the ink smears on Sal’s baldhead. Q-I-99: class, model, and number printed in flesh above my identifying microchip. It’s all that I am.
“Quinn.” Sal runs a finger over the numbers. “We can grind it out.”
“Are you that desperate to pass for an ape?” Kit spits Cruor into the mud.
“Couldn’t we just tattoo over it?” I ask, ignoring Kit’s jibe.
“Tattoos fade quickly.” Sal points to her head, freshly inked once a week. “Grinding it out will last longer.”
“The numbers will come back anyway. The chip’s embedded in my CNS. No getting rid of that.”
“True, but at least you’ll be unmarked for a few weeks between sessions,” Sal says.
“It’ll hurt,” Kit adds.
“As if that’s ever been a problem.” I shut him up with a look. “Pain is part of being human. How do you think all those composers wrote such awe-inspiring music?”
“That’s different,” Kit grumbles.
“Is it?”
“This is Quinn’s chance at doing something better with his life,” Sal says.
“Better? How is trying to fool the humans better than standing up for your own kind?”
“And what? Violently demanding rights from a government that might never grant them?” My tone is bitter.
“Go join the apes then.” Kit throws his hands in the air. He kicks Sal’s wall, denting the metal before striding away.
“He cares about you,” Sal says with a soft smile.
“Funny way of showing it.”
“Don’t let him dampen this. This is your chance to show the humans that we aren’t just machines, that they gave us minds. We think, we feel, we dream, we create.”
I nod as my tear ducts prickle with an automatic response to the emotion codes triggered in my processor.
“So, are we going to get Max to grind it out?” Sal looks ferocious, all sharp angles with an aquiline nose halving her face. She’d look gentler with hair, but she says it irritates her when it falls over her bulbous forehead into her eyes.
“I think I’ll take my chances and wear long sleeves.”
“It’s your fuel-cell on the line.” She raises an eyebrow at me.
“I’ll be careful.”
“In that case,” Sal grabs my hand, “I do believe it’s time to celebrate.”
Tyri
Glitch woofs a warning from her vantage point on the sofa, her dark eyes fixed on the front door. I open it before Rurik has a chance to press the buzzer.
“Hey you.” He offers me a silly grin and a giant bouquet of purple-checkered daffodils.
“This wasn’t necessary.” I bury my nose in the blooms. A single daffodil vibrates as tinkling music spills out of the petals. The flower sings to me in Rurik’s husky voice, asking me to forgive him for being such a jerk.
“You’re not a jerk.”
“You’re right, I’m a gangrenous nullhead and despicable boyfriend.” He smiles and his whole face lights up. If Rurik were a song, he’d be in D major, bright and easy going. His brown eyes peering into mine make me melt as I fold into his arms. I love the way he smells: a touch cinnamon and a touch lemon fresh. Being so close to him I can almost forget that he didn’t show up for the funeral and that he hung up on me.
“Sorry about earlier.” Rurik tilts my face toward his and we kiss, a slow meeting of our lips. He tastes of peppermint gum, and I kiss him again. He jerks away, cursing as Glitch shoves herself between our legs and pees on his foot.
“Glitch! Bad dog.” She gives me a baleful look and pads into the house, nonplussed by her actions.
“Codes, I’m sorry.” I dash into the house. Dumping the flowers on the kitchen table, I grab a towel and head back to the door. Rurik stands barefoot, shaking off his sneakers.
“Not like it’s the first time.” He chuckles and cleans his foot. Dropping the towel and shoes on the porch, he kisses me again and shuffles me into the hallway before closing the door behind us.
“Your Mom home?”
“Not yet.”
“Excellent.” He drops his bag and shrugs out of his jacket before grabbing my hand and heading down the passage to my bedroom.
“Greetings, Rurik. Would you like some refreshments?” Miles comes to my door as Rurik pushes me down onto the bed.
“In twenty minutes,” Rurik says. “Coffee and hot chocolate.”
“As you wish.” Miles leaves, flashing green.
“My mom’ll be home any minute.” I gasp as Rurik nibbles my neck, and his hands slide beneath my shirt.
“Baby, I can work with a minute.” He kisses me, ferocious this time as he leans his body into mine. My pulse beats in agitato triplets as I pull off his sweater. Rurik’s all jagged hipbones and harp-string clavicles. He’s just taken my shirt off when the front door hisses open and my mom yells for Miles.
“Botspit!” Rurik reaches for his sweater. Giggling, I put myself back together and smooth down my hair. Mom always knows. I don’t know how she can tell when Rurik and I have been fooling around, but somehow she always does and ends up giving me this look of disapproval that feels worse than if she confronted me outright.
We’ve never had a mother-daughter sex talk. Mom taught me about menstruation and procreation using scientific terms, showing me diagrams in a textbook. It felt more like a lecture than a conversation. Going to buy tampons for the first time was the most embarrassing experience. Mom asked me about
the heaviness of my flow right there in the store. I don’t even want to think about how she’d deal with a discussion about prophylactics and orgasms.
Rurik combs fingers through his curls and rearranges his pants.
“Tyri?” Mom calls, her slipper-covered feet shushing down the hallway.
“In here.” We position ourselves in what we hope passes for innocent stances: me on the bed flipping through sheet music on a databoard, Rurik sitting on the floor fiddling with his moby.
“Think you might want these.” Mom drops Rurik’s bag and sneakers at the door. She raises a single eyebrow. That combined with her severe suit and hair bun makes her seem all the more like a cane-wielding schoolmistress.
“Tyri, you called me earlier but didn’t leave a message?”
“Yeah, I’ve got good news.”
“And I’d love to hear it. Join me in the kitchen in five.” She pauses at the door. “Rurik, your sweater’s inside out.”
Rurik, pale as snow with his pure Skandic genes, turns puce with embarrassment.
“Let me help.” I tug off his shirt again, turning it the right way round and looping it over his head.
“Once I’m at Osholm, we’ll have more privacy.”
“You’ll have a roommate.”
“Nothing a digisplay set to busy can’t fix.” He tucks loose hair behind my ear and clears my bangs from my eyes. “I am sorry about earlier.” His apology seems genuine. “I was with my dad.”
“Sorry I interrupted.”
“Don’t be. It’s just, well, you know how he is.”
“I’m surprised he even managed to squeeze you in between press conferences and golf course meetings.” Knowing Rurik’s father, it’s no wonder his mom looked for love elsewhere. The only reason they didn’t get divorced after that was because it wouldn’t be good for Engelberger Senior’s or their eldest son’s political career, never mind the family’s corporate image.
“He’s preoccupied at the moment,” Rurik says.
“Problems?”
“Not sure, but he read me the riot act about not bringing shame to the great Engelberger name while I’m at Osholm.”
I Heart Robot Page 2
