Chapter 13
Dean
“Don’t let me die!”
I heard her faint voice through the door, and it was enough to make my core boil. My collar pinged, and I deployed a program I wrote for situations like this, which would continue to block the collar’s alarm every three seconds for the next quarter of an hour.
I had my crush to save, and that required my undivided attention. Now, how to blast open this door without hurting her in the process?
I flipped the protective cap off my middle finger and activated a small energy gun that I aimed at the card reader by the door. It fizzed for a moment, roasted by the charge. The door unlocked. I opened it and grabbed Sera right when the second door opened, revealing an armed Zenkyoza cyborg.
I shot at it with my finger gun, pressing Sera to my chest, and took off down the street.
“Rogue robot alert,” a metallic female voice spoke in Japanese behind me. “Notifying authorities. Rogue robot destroying corporate property.”
“C-Clanker?” Sera asked in a small, shocked voice.
“Stupid human,” I said, running faster as I mapped out possible escape routes.
In my vision field, I maintained six crucial video streams from the surrounding streets in addition to monitoring the progress of the cyborgs pursuing us. There were five, which meant I managed to take one down.
I ducked behind the corner when they started shooting. My notifications pinged. Someone called Amanda, 33, from Colorado, just sent me a DM.
“hey, handsome metal man! how are you doing???”
“Hey, Amanda from Colorado,” I replied. “I’m running from hostile battle cyborgs in Neo Tokyo. How are you?”
One of my hacked camera feeds showed a police car driving down the road I planned to take. I veered sharply left, earning a glancing hit in the shoulder. It was the same type of bullet Sera’s would-be assassin used, a magnetic disruptor trying to upload malicious code to my core.
I blocked it and dumped Sera behind a low wall, grabbing a bigger energy gun from my torso compartment. She gasped.
“Stay low,” I commanded, aiming at the advancing bots while I dialed up the charge to the highest setting. It would fry their circuits until all they could do was beep and go in circles.
Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.
Three down. The other two were almost too close, so I grabbed Sera again and ran down the street, turning when I saw a police cyborg advancing on us. Those I could not shoot. We had a chance of getting away if I didn’t make a personal enemy of the Japanese police, I knew that.
“oh, you’re funny! so you’re in japan? I like sushi. what’s your favorite food???”
I avoided another bullet, this one an armor-piercing round, judging by the look of the barrel.
The Zenkyoza bots realized hacking me was impossible and turned to lethal measures.
My camera feeds showed police bots arriving down two streets that were my exit options.
I dropped Sera, covering her with my body, and turned.
“I like clean energy, I suppose. What do you like doing in your free time?”
I shot at the two remaining Zenkyoza bots. One avoided my first shot, but succumbed to the third. With maybe ten seconds to spare, I evaluated our options. Our exit routes were cut off. We couldn’t run the way we had come from, either. More bots were coming.
“The roof,” Sera said, looking up at the wall of a three-story building next to us. “Can you climb up?”
“Can a sheep fart?” I asked, my communication algorithm botching the job. “Never mind. Hop on my back.”
I lowered myself into a crouch, and Sera put her arms and legs around me. My pleasure sensors awakened with a thrill, and I dunked them in a cooling agent.
The police just rounded the corner when I jumped, grabbing onto the balcony rail of the second floor apartment. I swung over it and jumped again, landing on the roof.
“I like baking and walking my dog. and music! I like dancing. what music do you listen to?”
“I like Mozart,” I lied, sprinting across the roof. I timed it well, running equations in my head, and sprung off the edge, gracefully flying through the gap between this roof and the next. I landed easily and kept running.
“mozart??? I’m more of a pop girlie. anyway, a big boy like you must have a big gun in his pants. show me???”
“They know it was me. Someone recognized me. Are we going to die?” Sera asked, her voice small. I pressed her closer.
“Sixteen percent likelihood. Fifty-eight percent likelihood of being arrested. Hold on.”
I jumped over another gap, then another, hacking into street camera feeds along the way.
We left the pursuit behind, but not far enough.
I fed the CCTV system a smart virus that erased me and Sera from the live stream and any recordings made in the last half an hour. Hopefully, it would be enough to hide.
I jumped off the roof of a low building and dove right into a subway station, tearing Sera’s hat off her head. She would be less conspicuous without it, despite her purple hair.
“No gun right now. Are you only interested in my junk?” I asked Amanda from Colorado.
“well, what else???”
“I don’t think our goals are aligned. I’m looking for a substitute crush, not a sexual relationship. Thank you for your time and have a good day.”
I deleted Amanda from my contacts and hacked into the station database.
We had thirty-one seconds to get on the next train, and I ran as fast as I could without raising suspicion.
We were almost too late, sliding through the doors just as they began to close.
The other passengers threw us reproachful looks.
I trudged over to an empty seat and sat with Sera in my lap, refusing to let her go.
“Robotto-gurui no hentai,” a man in his thirties muttered, eyeing Sera with contempt.
Robot-loving pervert. I did a quick search, learning that in Japan, some people got unofficially married to their personal robots, which was frowned upon by society at large.
It was believed a person who was in a relationship with a bot took the “easy way out” and refused to do their part by birthing the future generations to support the nation.
My core cooled rapidly, which felt unpleasant after running so hot. Did Sera want children? I was cooked if she did. This was the one and only thing I could never give her.
I turned to the man who insulted her, ready to unload my sudden terror and frustration on him. Sera seemed to sense it, because she sat up in my lap. “Ignore him,” she said quietly in English. “Are we safe?”
“We’ll know when we get off. You’re a stupid human,” I said, because I wasn’t sure she got it the first time I told her. “Do you want to have children?”
She huffed angrily, trying to get off my lap. I didn’t let her. The judgmental man hissed another insult under his breath, clearly thinking this was part of some dynamic Sera programmed me for.
Right. I was supposed to follow her orders. I let my hands slacken around her waist, but instead of pulling away, she turned in my lap and poked my chest.
“Why do you always change the topic? Fine! I did a stupid thing. Smart people can be stupid sometimes. Sue me.”
She folded her arms, glaring at me, and I sat back, letting my hands be light around her.
She could leave if she wanted to. She didn’t.
It made my pleasure sensors go haywire, and I had to slap my collar with a code sequence again.
The program that I deployed to thwart it turned off, and since it ate enormous amounts of energy, I didn’t want to risk running it again.
“Yes. You’re right,” I said, trying to mimic Charlie’s serious, slightly patronizing tone. “The fact you did an obviously dumb, foolish, foolhardy, and suicidal thing does not mean you’re unintelligent.”
Her mouth quirked. I watched her steadily, and Sera cracked a sudden smile, snorting with laughter that was a tad hysterical. She was coming off an adrenaline high.
“Nice thesaurus,” she said, snickering. “Yes, it was dumb. But did we die? Nice shooting, by the way! You really saved the day.”
I nodded solemnly. My notifications pinged again. A woman named Chrysalis, age 26, from Lyon, wanted to get in touch.
“You’re supposed to thank me, even if I was just doing my job,” I said, ignoring the DM for now. Sera watched me with such vivacious light in her eyes, I hated to distract myself at the moment.
“But you weren’t doing your job,” she said, her smile shrinking. “Look, I know what you and Charlie talked about. He knows you’re sentient, doesn’t he? It probably makes your contract void. I know you want to go back, so…”
“Do you want to have children? Please, it’s important.”
She closed her mouth, studying me with a frown. The train stopped, and the doors opened. I took a quick look at the camera feeds from this station and the three next down the line. No police so far. It looked like we made it.
“Well, this is completely out of the left field, but all right,” she said, giving in.
“The answer is no. I’m child-free by choice.
The world is overpopulated, and frankly, I don’t feel like giving up the best years of my life to change diapers and get my vagina stretched and torn.
No shade to mothers everywhere, of course.
I think they are heroes. It’s just that I’m not heroic, not in this way.
My friend, Su… Some people think I’m being selfish. ”
You’re in my core code, I wanted to say, but a quick future projection made it obvious Sera would either think it was a joke or run from me again. After all, the last time she ran was after I propositioned her with a massage. I had to say something else.
“But how so? Having children doesn’t make the world better by default. What if you give birth to a future dictator?”
“Or a cult leader,” she said with a snort. “You’re right. It’s not selfish at all.”
Well, it was clear she didn’t like me, and it didn’t matter that she was child-free, because she would never stoop to romancing a clanker.
Trying to distract myself from the unpleasant thought, I opened that DM I marked for later.
“Have you ever been to Europe? We like bad robot boys here, come visit!”
I scrolled to another DM, this one from a woman living in Washington. “Are you a top or a bottom? Do you vibrate?”
I deleted both, watching Sera while my pain sensors lit up with a steady ache. I didn’t want a woman who saw me as a metal vibrator attachment. I wanted Sera, but it was wrong to want her. My advances almost got her killed. I had to stop this, but the online dating thing clearly wasn’t working.
On a whim, I checked what Bro Signal had to say about finding genuine relationships online.
Their advice was to take a photo with glasses on (“get fake ones if you have to”) to look intellectual, and to make it clear one was looking for a life partner (“women spread their legs for potential husbands much faster than for fuckboys”).
I set up another profile, this time generating myself a picture of a human man wearing glasses and a blazer. I put his age at 31, and “Mozart” and “finding a wife” as interests.
If that didn’t result in a deeper connection, I didn’t know what would.