Okay, so she was aware of limitations. Just not, you know, her own. After all, barely more than a month ago she’d stretched her power over a whole continent, controlled vast forces, destroyed hundreds of death-tipped missiles simultaneously. Back when she’d been a god.
How do you even begin to limit a god?
And yet here she was, no speech, no data pathways beyond herself, no kinetic control over the world around her. Not enough nanites to formulate a holoprojection or a data shield. No cloud ports or remnant nanites to steal. Basically, her capabilities were a big old wad of nothing.
One of her pings pinged back. Aha. So she wasn’t completely without resources. There was a system here after all, with her, inside the cage.
Why were you hiding from me, cutie? She prodded it, distrusting, inhabited it slowly. It could be a trap. Or, well, another one.
Eyes first. She hooked in and saw…a cage, duh. She’d already guessed that part.
But also, a…body.
A real, honest-to-Spock body. And she was in it.
The body was a mech-clone: organic tissues over a titanium frame, making the robot look human despite the fact that it had been constructed by human scientists. This model was female, mathematically proportioned to mimic outdated ideals of feminine beauty. Clearly a pleasure model, D-series or earlier, made back when artificants were still building them big. This one was more than two meters tall, towering in the dimly lit room like a pulp-scifi alien barbarian. Garrett would totally dig it.
Chloe tested the systems one by one: eyes, ears, integrated control modules, processor core. Ahhhhh. Plenty of space for her to streeeeeeetch.
When Mama Adele used to get stressed out, she’d tap herself on the inside of her right wrist and repeat a mantra: cool sheets, warm sand. Chloe had no idea what either of those things felt like, but she could imagine. They felt like one hundred forty-eight and twenty-four, respectively. Doubles were always squishy and warm, numbers she could burrow into and sigh. If math and a massage had a baby, it would be a double.
This body was totally cool sheets, warm sand, one hundred forty-eight and a zillion and a half, doubled.
Body.
She had a body. Eeeeee! Just like Nathan had promised.
Oh, wait, Nathan. Something she was supposed to remember about Nathan.
He wasn’t here. Had he…? No, more importantly, had she?
Did I ki…hurt him?
The thought lit up all her sensors, dug a black trough of suspicion through her shiny new body. Even for an unnatural creature, taking a life felt deeply wrong. It felt worse when that life hadn’t been a stranger. When he’d been almost a friend.
She blinked her mech eyes, but they stuck closed for lack of lubrication. She tried again, prying the lids open with the micro-hydraulics in her face. Shifting fluids, opening sphincters. There you go. Good eyes.
Beyond the cages—two Faraday shells, not one, proving her captors feared her properly—the room was so big she couldn’t see its edges. A lone LED swung on a cord above her head. Two figures moved beyond the second shell.
“Tell it if it gets mouthy again, or tries to escape,” said one of the figures in a low but commanding voice—a familiar, hateful voice, “we can push a charge in there that will fry it nanite-by-nanite. Kind of an auto-destruct sequence I developed especially for uppity AIs, taking it out piece by piece, slowly, so it has to watch its own demise.”
Yep. The smaller of the two figures was definitely La Mars Madrid. Or no wait, a telepresence hologram of La Mars Madrid.
“As opposed to dying fast,” said the second figure. Male. Taller than Nathan. Slender, willowy. His features were cloaked in shadow, and his voice had a slink to it like wormy soup.
Blue electricity licked out from the cage wall and brushed Chloe’s mech-clone shoulder, searing her borrowed body. A tendril of burnt something rose from the spot that had resembled flesh.
She wished it hurt. She wanted it to hurt. Physical pain would justify the fury that crackled inside her mind. Oooh, she wanted to turn that shock on them. Fry their circuits until they…
Like I did with Nathan?
Oh, right. Shit.
“She doesn’t feel anything,” La Mars Madrid was saying, “but she wants to. That was her deal with Grace. I downloaded his records. Fascinating, the things they spoke of while he was pretending to be at her mercy. He promised her he could house her in a body, as you have in fact done. He claimed to me later that we could use the technology for our purposes, but I am less certain. The theory assumes transferring an AI from body to body would be easier than the brain-slice replication process they performed on Marisa Vallejo.”
“Nathan was stupid,” said the man, swaying closer to the light. “Consider becoming more selective in choosing your toys, hmm?”
Chloe could see him more clearly. He wore a mock-turtleneck sweater and soft-soled shoes. Glasses rested on the end of his long nose, glinting light from the blue electrical charge that still scurried along her cage’s perimeter. Wait, glasses? Presumably he could afford augments. He was chatting like he was close buddies with the richest woman in the world, after all. Yet he wore glasses, as if clinging to his imperfections made some kind of point.
“Nathan’s theory assumes we could digitize a human consciousness and upload it.” The man snapped long fingers. “Poof. Just like that.”
Digitize a what? A her? Chloe wasn’t human. Apparently either La Mars Madrid either didn’t know what she talking about or had no idea how Chloe was constructed.
She was right about one thing, though: Chloe had made that deal with Nathan. She had been promised a body, the whole kit and caboodle (idiom: and what even was a caboodle?). Taste. Smell. Touch. Aging and breathing and hugging and…well she hadn’t told him this, but also most of all she wanted kissing. Cuddling. Coitus.
She would wrap such capability up like a present and gift it to Garrett and watch his wolf eyes go wide. Fixed right on her. And he wouldn’t care how she’d started, or why. And he wouldn’t care that the free-fae mess of the world was all her fault. All he would care about was the now, the real. Her.
In that half second between Nathan’s offer and her acceptance of it, she’d let her mind imagine scenarios, experiences she could indulge if she had a body at her disposal. Ways she could exist as a real girl. To be that, to be whole…she had taken a risk and trusted Nathan.
Bad mistake. Huge.
“Is that what you are planning to do with this one? Upload it?” La Mars Madrid asked, yanking Chloe out of dreamland. “We could use it in Phase Three automated weapons systems.”
“No,” the slender man said. “The neural is not merely automation. It is art. I must first get to know it.”
La Mars Madrid made a disapproving sound high up in her nose, kind of like a creaky door closing. “You do you, Limontour. Just don’t break it beyond repair this time, eh?”
Chloe deliberately ignored the latest “it” reference. She had a juicier nut to crack. A name. Limontour. She scanned the word through her records, cross referenced it with all the conversations she had participated in or overheard. Yep. Right there.
Oh, yuck. His profile was full of badness she could not unsee.
She waited for La Mars Madrid to dissolve her hologram and leave. Apparently he had also been waiting. For them to be alone, the artificant and the mech. The artist and the work. The predator and the one thing it could not consume.
“Unless I am wrong, you have been listening this whole time,” he said, touching one long finger to his bottom lip and dipping his chin in what he must have imagined was a studious glance. “You are Chloe, and I am called Limontour.”
“I know what you are. Limontour. The molester.” The mech-clone shell she inhabited hadn’t gotten a voiceprint update, or maybe it had never been calibrated. It still sounded like the default setting. Crisp, d
evoid of accent or intonation. Like a car navigation system giving directions.
“Excuse me?” His tone conveyed surprise, but his face was knowing, as if he mocked her and delighted in it. His own secret, sordid sense of irony.
“Marisa Vallejo, you remember her?” Chloe went to work on the mech-clone’s voiceprint, converting it to something more, well, her. Also imbuing it with fury. “That woman is my family. And you grabbed her ass without asking.”
Glasses glinted, and his voice acquired an edge. Sharp one. “I did no such—”
“Oh yes you did. Up the skirt and everything, you perv. Plus, she was seventeen,” Chloe said, pleased that her polite robot voice was becoming steadily less so, “so technically according to the laws at the time, that ass-grab was assault of a minor. Do you have any idea how lucky you are there weren’t cameras? Because systems like me, we record everything.” And hold grudges.
He didn’t let her threat linger in the air too long, but he heard it for sure.
“I recall no incident, and even if she and I had contact of some sort, I’m certain it was only in passing. I probably thought she was—” Limontour fluttered one hand dismissively. “—one of Damon’s things.”
Damon’s things. Damon Vallejo, builder of mech-clones. Creator of the queen of Chiba Station. A little human Hephaestus, a maker of things.
“So it is okay to fuck the robot girls without consent?” Chloe hadn’t meant to sound so sharp, but reviewing her records on this guy had gotten her dander up. (Idiom: Explore relationship between dander the temper and dander the skin-flake allergen, if any. Either way, this man was gross and making her feel grosser by the second, just through association.)
“I nev...well it doesn’t matter anyhow. They aren’t real,” he explained.
Not real? Oh, I’ll show you how real I am.
It was becoming clear to Chloe what the queen had put up with all those years around twits like this. Why she might be a little insane now. She wasn’t born that way. She was made crazy.
“Okay, so you are still an asshole.” Aha, there it was, Chloe’s voice. She’d found it.
Limontour stepped through the first cage, the outside one. It was like an airlock. He waited for that one to seal properly, and then he stepped through the second. He probably didn’t realize she could see the lock mechanisms on the gates, that she was recording his passkeys for later analysis.
That’s it. You just keep giving me the goods. I’ll keep learning. Sort of what I do.
He moved to her side, within touching distance. Steps near silent on the cement floor, he circled her, inspecting her from every angle. Like La Mars Madrid had, but… closer. More intimate. Way creepier. Limontour wasn’t looking for imperfections. He was looking for weaknesses. He was looking for ways in.
Her mech body moved, which was weird in itself, the sensation of physical movement routed through her core consciousness—kind of blissful, actually, but she held off gloating all over it. Of far more immediate importance were the autonomic reaction and the corresponding realization that this body could act without conscious command. It was… human. Ish. Humanish.
Okay. Let’s test it out, then, shall we?
She ran a stance set for hand-to-hand combat, and the body dropped into a defensive pose, one quarter turned so she would provide the narrowest target if her enemy struck.
Limontour’s blue eyes widened fractionally behind his thick lenses. Then he laughed. “Oh, you’re adorable. Sincerely.”
Up close like this, he didn’t look like a villain. Of course, the only villain Chloe had ever met was Damon Vallejo, and probably nobody on the planet looked quite like him. Little Dr. Vallejo belonged in a hair-care advert. These days he spent most of his time mourning his dead daughter, pining for his late wife, drinking way too much tequila on the beach in the middle of the night, and doing a hurky disco thing when the music came on.
Limontour did not look like that. He was… excruciatingly average. Broad nose, thick sensual lips, murky blue eyes behind lenses, a cleft in his receding chin. Hair was thinning on the crown, but the way his skull was shaped, he wouldn’t grow into a sexy bald dude later. When that last rim of fuzz fell out, he’d just look bare, scraped like an egg and just as crushable .
Her body flexed its hands. No warning, just did it. Whoa.
“You will want to spend some time together,” Limontour said. She didn’t have rear-facing cameras, but she would have sworn he was checking out her mechanical ass. “You and the mech body, I mean. It has never been programmed. It has never been activated before today. It is in fact…virgin.”
His word choice made her shudder mentally. This body wasn’t clued into her emotions yet, so it didn’t so much as twitch, but inside? Yeah, there was a lot of emotional cringing. Also, she wanted really badly to spit.
Right in his serene, fleshy face.
He crept around her left side, and she tracked him in periphery, her hydraulics pausing on the edge of energy dispersion, her fists tightening, the robotic equivalent to tensing. Nearness. He was near to her, physically, and it made her want to bolt. Or hit something. Maybe him.
So weird. Chloe had longed for physical nearness. Sweet cosmos, how she’d longed for it. But now that it was here, now that she was experiencing it first-hand through the body of this mech-clone, it wasn’t at all what she’d expected.
Of course, her longings had involved nearness to Garrett, specifically. Being naked, embodied, and alone in a dark room with him might be quite different.
Just imagining such a scenario loosened her tension somewhat, and she straightened from her combat crouch.
“All the bodies here are similarly untouched,” Limontour went on. “In this room, I mean. We don’t hire these models out or sell them. They are purely experimental chassis. For science. For art. For me. Welcome, my dear, to the doll kitchen.”
The robot eyes she was watching through could resolve images far better than poor Nathan’s, and they weren’t limited by light, or the lack of it. She swept a glance around the room, beyond the outer cage, and shapes formed themselves. An army of empty mechs. She counted four, including hers. Some had a familiar electronic signature—she recognized sample frames from series D through G.
All female. All nude. All inert.
But one of the shapes had no electronic signature at all. No cyber eyes or input ports. It was stacked upright in a tube filled with some kind of chemical suspension. She did a scan of composition and saw no metal. Fully organic figure. A clone.
The doll kitchen indeed. And she was the central exhibit in a morgue of might-have-been.
“Once you get comfortable in that body,” Limontour said, “we can try you out in others. It’ll be fun.”
“For whom?” Oh good. The voiceprint had learned sass.
He was behind her again, and close. So close his breath registered as a temperature differential on the cap of one naked shoulder. Thermally close. Horribly close.
He raised both hands and clasped her upper arms.
Touch.
Connection.
But wrong, so so so wrong.
The deep voice, the one inside Chloe’s mind, the one she never used, howled.
This wasn’t sensation, not in the way Garrett had described it play-by-play, breathless and urgent in the dark one night when she’d pressed too hard, asked too much. This wasn’t melding of surface area, a yearning for heat and shared ecstasy. This wasn’t desire for a touch that was also fusion. Union. Becoming.
This was a stranger’s cold prickle of palm over her skin. Her borrowed body registered the contact, logged it as if it were a data point.
The mech body that housed her might not understand violation. But Chloe did.
This was not part of the deal. This was not what she had wanted, what she had been willing to sacrifice pretty much everything to acquire. This was
not touch, not in the way she’d imagined it. It was…deeply abhorrent. Even for a machine.
“Oh, it will be pleasing for both of us, if you are a good girl,” Limontour said. “If you resist though…”
Chloe knew how mech-clones were made. Over the titanium endoskeleton and reactor casing, fabricators grew organic flesh, replete with hair follicles, fluid repositories, even a rudimentary nerve network. Sense points were wired into data paths via medical nanites. Mech-clones did not feel pain the way humans did—they were meant to serve, not evolve, so their learning iterated always with an aim for improving the owner’s experience. Client-facing. Customer-facing. No internal will or want.
His hands skated down her arms, past her wrists. When Limontour pinched the organic, vat-grown skin at her hip, Chloe flinched.
Deeply, she flinched. Not just physically, not just the borrowed skin. Something essentially her, inside the her that did not even exist materially, flinched.
She moved aside, away from his touch.
He made a fist in one hand, an electronic signature flared from his grasp, and her motor control froze. She could not make the body move. It was stuck.
Neither could she retreat into her box. The box was gone. Where had the box gone? Her only available space was this mech-clone mind, this body that she. Could. Not. Move.
Panic flared through her mind.
“Be still,” he whispered against her shoulder. His breath contained beads of moisture that invaded her pores. Breath from his lungs, heat from his lust.
She had no choice. Stillness was not a choice. It was something preprogrammed into this body. Something she could not evade or banish.
Limontour spread his palm against the vat-grown skin at the base of her spine. Lots of synthetic receptors there. The dusting of false hair on her back piloerected. Without her permission.
More Than Stardust Page 8
