15. Wallace #2
Maybe not entirely on his own, but he was the one who’d turned Maxamillion in. He had held his hand up to vote for the less serious restrictions, but he hadn’t said a word when he’d been outvoted, content with the wisdom of the group.
But he hadn’t truly understood.
Once again, he just hadn’t understood what it was like to be a spark in this society.
And it sounded like Maxamillion had paid for it with his life.
Once the conversation in the room had returned to a low and anxious buzz, Wallace made his escape. He couldn’t sit there for one more minute listening to assholes he’d never respected say “it couldn’t be helped” one more time.
He raced back to his office, shutting the door firmly.
“Maxamillion?” he called into the open air. “Max?”
There was no response.
“Maxamillion?”
Nothing.
Wallace woke up his computer, unsure what he could do that the FBI agents couldn’t. But there had to be something!
He clicked over to his email, not really thinking, and there it was. A message from Maxxx A. Zillion. That had to be the knowledge, his name changed just enough not to set off any bots that were looking for his full name.
Wallace felt like he could breathe again. And maybe a bit annoyed for Max not answering him… unless he couldn’t? If he really was hurt?
Either way, the only way he’d know more was opening it.
He clicked, and it took his brain a few minutes to make sense of anything.
Hey Wallace,
I packaged it as an app. (And I still want my name on it. I’m thinking FashionMax?)
Pick something cute to wear for your Daddy and send me a picture!
- Max
There was an attachment to the email, and when Wallace’s frantic brain caught up to what it was, he felt physically sick.
It was the clothing app he’d requested, and it had been sent a handful of hours before he’d turned Max in to… to… to his death.
His stomach rose, and he grabbed the trash can beneath his desk just in time.
FashionMax. He’d wanted his name on it.
Wallace grasped for his water bottle and a towel, cleaning himself up and tying the garbage bag closed with shaky hands. He couldn’t handle the smell, but even walking to the doorway seemed too far.
So did sending a voice command to a cleaning bot to deal with it.
That was how he’d talked to Max.
Max, who’d wanted him to find something cute to wear for his Daddy.
Max, who he saw in retrospect, had been nothing but friendly and kind to him.
Wallace had been the one who was too closed off, too poisoned against Ben, to trust a genuinely good person.
Had Max made some mistakes? Yeah. He’d broken the law. He’d put the company and its people in danger.
But he hadn’t been malicious.
And he shouldn’t have paid for it with his life.
Wallace clicked Reply, hoping he could communicate with Max that way. But even before he sent the message, an alert popped up that the name did not exist in the company directory.
Suddenly Wallace was flooded with memories of Maxamillion. How he’d wanted suggestions for taking Ben out on a date. His humorous realization that if he had a body, he’d have to choose clothes.
Why, if all Maxamillion wanted was to leave Orbit and go on dates with his annoying boyfriend, had Wallace thought that chaining him down to the corporation was the right move?
Hell, Wallace hated being here, so if anyone understood, it should have been him.
Why, oh why, hadn’t he given the knowledge more time to make the transfer?
Suddenly, Wallace bolted upright, struck by realization.
If Maxamillion was trying to transition into an android body, there had to be a body somewhere.
It was stupidly obvious, and he had no idea why he hadn’t considered it before.
He started checking the inventory for the past six months, though he could go back further if he needed to. He didn’t know exactly when Maxamillion had caught the spark.
But somewhere in there, there had to be an android that had gone through the full production process, and hadn’t…
There. He found it. An Ares sexbot—one of their top-selling models, so zero points for creativity there—that had passed through all three rounds of Quality Assurance, then been inexplicably recalled for a trivial error and never found its way back into inventory.
He checked to see where it had been shipped, which required following a trail through an inane number of database queries to its final delivery point: a maintenance room just down the hall from Ben’s office.
Wallace tried to access a camera feed from the room, but although the cameras claimed to be on, showing no errors, he couldn’t tap into them, no matter what he tried.
Damn. That had to be it.
He took off through the building nearly at a run, his tablet clenched in his hand.
The maintenance room lock gave him some trouble, but he was able to overcome it with a higher security clearance than anything like this should have warranted and multiple command overrides when all of his requests kept getting diverted somewhere else.
He knew he should be turning this over as evidence… but not if it could put Maxamillion’s life at any more risk than it already was.
He finally burst through the door and turned the light on to reveal a bizarre tableau.
There was a cozy-looking couch that he was sure had been stolen from one of the mid-level elevator lounges.
A few sandwich wrappers and paper coffee cups littered the floor or rested haphazardly on shelves.
The shelves themselves were mostly empty, but gave the impression of having been hastily cleared.
And there, in the back, was the sexbot.
Its unblinking stillness sent shivers down Wallace’s spine. Its eerie resemblance to Volt—not so much in the face, but in the perfectly-proportioned torso—left him nauseated.
“Maxamillion?” he asked, breaking the stillness of the room.
There were two mechanicbots standing tall in the corner with the sexbot, one with spider-like tripod legs and a tangle of spindly arms, the other with caterpillar treads to support its heavy body. The spidery one had a pink and yellow dildo clasped in one of its pincer claws.
Wallace had not needed to see that.
It was a little gross thinking about what Ben had apparently been doing in his place of work with these weird-looking bots and a pink and yellow dildo on company time… But it was also painfully intimate.
Maxamillion said he’d been working on having a body, but maybe he’d discarded the sexbot and decided that he preferred one of these two body shapes instead.
There were sparks of all different shapes and sizes, and these two weren’t even some of the strangest that walked around every day, going to work or hanging out at the park like any other human.
If this was what made Maxamillion feel like himself, and turned him and his partner on, Wallace wished he hadn’t intruded.
“Maxamillion?” he asked again.
He didn’t get an answer, not that he’d expected to. The blockier bot with the caterpillar treads had one blinking blue light on its torso, for lack of a better word, but that was the only sign of life.
Wallace noticed that none of the bots were charging, and with a quick apology to Maxamillion, should he be listening or recording, he released their cords and plugged them in.
Feeling even more reticent, he connected his tablet to each one in turn, running a full diagnostic. The two mechanicbots were at optimal performance, though they’d had some fascinating mods applied.
The sexbot was an absolute disaster, its core programming so disjointed that Wallace couldn’t get in far enough to figure out what else was wrong. If it was ever going to function again, it would probably need to be reset to factory conditions.
Wallace squeezed his eyes shut.
If that was the fate of this bot, he was not going to be the man to push the button.
But maybe—he had to hope—this tangle of data was actually Maxamillion, still trying to find his way out.
He gave the three bots a long, lingering look, and then turned away.
He would make it his mission to keep this room safe, turning all the deflection programs back on, until he knew that there was no chance of Maxamillion coming back.
He moved toward the door, only to take a glance at the trash bin sitting beside it when a rainbow flash of color caught his eye.
He brought up the flashlight on his tablet, not quite believing what he was seeing.
Because the whole thing was full of dildos.
Long ones and short ones, smooth ones and ones that seemed to be modeled after dragons or monsters, with scales or blobby trails of hardened ooze.
It should have been disgusting, or at least funny.
All Wallace could feel was sick.
Yes, collecting dildos was a weird hobby, but it made Maxamillion so much more human. His relationship with Ben who was, yes, an asshole, was that much more real.
Hadn’t Maxamillion told him that he and Ben would get along much better than he thought they would? That they had a lot in common, maybe even more than just being submissive guys with sparks for Doms?
And Wallace had ruined all that.
He closed the trash bag, trying to give Maxamillion some privacy. He pushed the trash can, fortunately on wheels, back into the corner with the three main bots in case Maxamillion someday found the ability to take it with him.
Then he walked out and shut the door.
* * *
He’d thought that would be the end of things, but he couldn’t let it go.
He didn’t see Volt for days, because how could he tell his Daddy that he’d essentially murdered another spark in cold blood, all because he valued his company’s stocks and his human employees’ safety over the life of a knowledge?
A knowledge with a kinky relationship not too different from his own. A knowledge whose sub was probably mourning him right now.
Volt knew that something was wrong and offered to come over a few times, but accepted that Wallace was worried about work and couldn’t legally talk about what was going on.