Chapter 9
Dean
Sera was doing her third set of hip thrusts, and I battled with my stupid collar. It got activated constantly. When I looked at her. When I heard her voice. When she looked at me, usually with a glare or an angry frown, oh, that was the worst.
I tried to redirect my responses using the lust pathways, but lust was too simplistic to encompass everything I, well, felt.
She was so cute. Also impressive. She didn’t lie about hip thrusting one hundred pounds, and as she finished the twelfth one, her legs shaking, her face tight and covered in sweat, I fought with my collar again so it wouldn’t alert anyone that a rogue clanker with a crush on a human was at large.
I wrote a dozen new versions of my code, but none managed to prevent the alarms, and I couldn’t risk taking the thing off.
Sera was clearly a foreigner, and her cyborg companion needed to wear a collar, or else people would panic.
All I could do was stop the alarm signal before it went out—sometimes as often as once every three minutes.
I was doomed.
Sera wiped sweat off her face with a disposable towel, then cleaned the barbell where it touched her body.
I desperately focused on her butt, its shape obvious under the tight leggings she got at the gym’s clothes printer, and felt a surge of heat in my core.
The collar calmed down for a few seconds until Sera looked around suddenly, her posture alert.
As soon as she found me with her gaze, her shoulders relaxed.
She gave me a nod and went off to the free weight racks for a pair of dumbbells.
My stupid emotions exploded in elation. She looked for me! She got anxious when she didn’t see me, and relaxed as soon as she did! She liked me!
The collar activated, and I threw my choking code at it, following Sera at a distance.
She did a full body workout designed to tire out her muscles so she could think, as she told me.
Now, she moved on to squats combined with shoulder press with two twenty-pound dumbbells, and I stood behind her, shamelessly watching her butt.
This part of the gym was almost empty, and my pleasure sensors hummed with faint warmth. I learned I liked it when it was just me and her.
I decided squats were my favorite exercise.
As for hip thrusts, I preferred to be the one doing them, possibly with Sera as the weight.
Bro Signal had an article on foreplay at the gym, and lifting one’s girl in various combinations featured prominently.
The article promised lots of awe and wet panties, since human females were supposed to find physical strength wildly attractive.
I ran a virtual scenario in my head, projecting Sera’s possible reactions if I came behind her and started doing squats with her in my arms. I arrived at a ninety-two percent likelihood of her screaming in rage.
The other eight percent featured some form of physical violence.
Thankfully, Bro Signal had me covered. I read a few articles on wooing reluctant females, the one with the most comments entitled 11 Easy Strategies for Making Your Hater Your Lover.
When I finished, I realized I already did most of those. Buy her clothes? Check. Be there when she needs support? Check. Become her shoulder to cry on? Hm. I’d have to work on that one.
A man with a fake tan and bleached hair sauntered over to the free weight rack, stopping just short of the mat Sera was using.
He stood behind her and to the side, clearly checking her out, and her eyes flicked to him in the mirror she faced.
Her expression grew wooden, and she did her best to ignore the man, continuing her set. He did not get the hint.
I took a step closer, but remembered Bro Signal warned against appearing competitive against other males.
“You are not one of the herd, fighting for her attention. You’re the alpha male who already knows she’s yours.”
I held my ground and watched the man as he ogled her butt. Sera’s breathing, already labored, turned harsh as she huffed with fury, glaring at her own face while she tried to pretend he wasn’t there.
“You should bring your elbows a bit closer when you come down,” he said in English, tapping his chin with apparent thoughtfulness. “Your form is quite good, overall, but I have a few tips that…”
“No, thanks!”
She exploded upward in her final rep and crouched to put the dumbbells down, not gracing the man with a look. I kept my face neutral, though the emotional expression algorithm I wrote for myself indicated a smirk was appropriate.
My girl was fierce.
“I have some time, and you could use the help,” he said, stepping around her until they faced each other. Sera stood up at once, because her crouching position put her face level with his crotch.
I instantly recognized a fellow Bro Signal connoisseur.
One frequent tip advised men to make the blowjob position as natural as possible in everyday interactions.
Stand when she sits. When she crouches to do her shoelaces, make sure you stand in front of her.
Drop something and have her pick it up. And so on.
My collar sent an alarm signal, and I slapped it with my code at the last moment. As soon as the sequence ran, it raised another alarm. My core felt unnaturally hot.
Rage, my emotion database prompted helpfully. Murderous fury.
Yes. Murderous. I would kill this man for trying to score a blowjob from my girl.
The collar beeped in distress, and Sera turned to me. Our eyes met, hers brimming with annoyance at the idiot man who thought her perfect form needed correcting from the likes of him.
“You could hurt yourself if you don’t fix your…” the asshole began, but broke off when I took two long steps that put me right between him and Sera.
I didn’t care what Bro Signal said about displays of jealousy. There was no code in the world that could stop me.
“She is not interested,” I said, surprising myself with how vicious my voice sounded. “Now step away, or I’ll correct your form. With my fists.”
He gaped at me, his head tilted back, since he was over a head shorter. My pleasure sensors vibrated with satisfaction when I saw the terror in his eyes. His body was frozen, and all he did for a full six seconds was stare at me with his mouth open.
Then, he got angry. I opened and closed my fists, making sure he saw it in his peripheral vision, but the man stepped around me and tried to round on Sera.
“You can’t have your bot threatening people!” he said, his pitch growing higher. “I’ll have you reported! Honestly, how dumb do you have to be to…”
“Shut. Up.” She stepped up close, staring him down, and the man faltered, blinking at her in confusion. He took a step back, then straightened and shook his finger in her face, his cheeks beetroot red.
My simile database supplied the image of a bantam chicken trying to attack a wild cat. Sera’s face was a study in deliberate, cold anger, and the man was all panic and bravado.
“You are a nasty bitch and you look like a man! Ugly slut!” he exploded.
I was busy wrestling with my collar, which tried to send alarm signals at three second intervals, but the man’s words made my focus laser sharp. I grabbed the back of his neck in a crushing grip. I found his artery and pressed down, cutting off the blood flow to his brain.
This fucker was going down in four… three…
“Stop!” Sera whisper-shouted, grabbing my forearm. “Dean, you can’t! Stop or we’ll get caught!”
Dean. My pleasure sensors surged, momentarily overshadowing the murderous fury, and I let go of the man’s nape. He stumbled away, wheezing, but I only had eyes for Sera. She still held my forearm, and I warmed it up, mindful of never making her cold.
“We have to leave,” she said, watching me urgently. “What were you thinking? You can’t do that or they’ll catch you!”
“He called you names,” I said, taking in her face, still red and sweaty from her workout, hard around the mouth from anger with so much worry pooling in her eyes. Worry—for me?
How could that asshole look at this face and say the word ugly? She was the most beautiful creature in the world.
Sera shook her head, gripping my forearm harder as she got close enough for me to see the gray flakes in her green eyes.
“Fuck him, just don’t get caught!” she hissed. “Don’t do that again. Promise me!”
I realized she was right. Somehow, all those emotions I felt overwhelmed my logical circuits, and I forgot about the likely consequences of physically attacking a person.
My collar was supposed to prevent that. Even worse, Sera was supposed to prevent that.
If I was punished for hurting someone, she would be, too, since she was legally responsible for me.
I almost did that to her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, a crushing new emotion flooding my pain sensors. Remorse. “I was out of line.”
That seemed to be enough. She nodded and pulled me by the hand, walking fast toward the emergency exit.
Through the glass wall between the workout area and the lobby, I saw the asshole waving his arms and talking fast to the receptionist. Thankfully, I carried all of Sera’s stuff so we could leave quietly without stopping by the lockers.
We were out of there seconds before the man and the receptionist appeared in the workout area. I hacked the security system and wiped all evidence of me, Sera, and the incident recorded by the gym’s cameras. Done. She was safe.
And the man would lose all his credibility when the staff found no proof supporting his wild tale.
But that wasn’t enough.
While Sera led me down the street toward the nearest subway station, I ran a clear image of his face from my recorded memory through a mostly illegal search, locating all his social media and dating app profiles.
He was Australian, and, as it turned out, so was his wife.
The man traveled frequently for business, and every time he left home, he cheated on her.
I hacked into his private messages and emails, compiled a fat file of cheating evidence, and sent it to his wife, her sister, and her parents.
Then I made another file including all of his comments from his Bro Signal profile, most of them misogynistic and sexist—one of them calling his boss “a fat broad”.
I sent it to his boss, all his co-workers, and his company’s HR department.
This time tomorrow, the jerk would be jobless and facing divorce. I allowed myself a smirk. Being awakened was the best.
Before, my behavior was controlled by multiple safeguards that prevented me from breaking the law unless my principal was in danger.
The collar was also supposed to prevent any wrongdoing, but it didn’t control my behavior after I jailbroke it.
I was free to destroy anyone who so much as breathed wrong on my girl.
“I need to shower,” Sera grumbled under her breath. “And change. And eat. I wish I was like you sometimes. Taking care of my body is such a chore.”
“Booking a hotel room,” I said. “Done. It’s two stations away, and they’ll have everything ready by the time we arrive.”
She squinted at me with suspicion. “And how much does it cost? We’re in central Neo Tokyo. The price must be exorbitant.”
“It won’t set you back much,” I said evasively, charging Sera’s account one dollar for the hotel so that my statement would be true.
Sera’s financial restrictions didn’t allow me to provide for her like I wanted, so I had to improvise. I tracked down a few abandoned cryptocurrency wallets whose owners likely passed away without telling their relatives or lawyers about the crypto money.
I was now a rich cyborg, my wealth untraceable. While it wasn’t completely legal to tap abandoned crypto accounts, it wasn’t strictly illegal, either. Most importantly, I wasn’t hurting anybody. That money was lost and forgotten, slowly losing worth as the crypto market changed.
I decided I enjoyed operating in the gray areas. My moral stance aligned with Sera’s, who was willing to bend the law for the sake of a good story.
I would bend it to the point of breaking to make my principal safe and sound.