31. Wallace #2
Did he sound nervous? Guilty? Scared out of his mind?
The front desk attendant didn’t seem to care, once he’d assured her that he didn’t need any help, thank god.
He continued directing Daddy forward, barely remembering to grab his wallet and keys before he left the apartment. Oh, and that weird piece of flesh that had covered the largest open port on Daddy’s lower arm. And the pink nickel drive that he wanted to smash into a thousand pieces and then burn.
Should he change clothes?
He looked down at himself. Burgundy off-the-shoulder sweater. Black leggings. Bare feet. A bra strap showing on his exposed skin.
He shoved his feet into his brown loafers, repressing a shudder at how weird they felt without socks. He was sure he looked even stupider. But fuck it.
Ben already hated him. What was one more thing to get teased about? As long as his Daddy was safe, it didn’t matter.
The walk down the shared hallway, past all of the apartment doors that could open any moment, took forever.
The elevator ride was excruciating, though he thanked every deity out there that at least it was empty.
He almost cried when he finally saw his car, only to have Volt trip on the tiny step downward, a step that he barely even noticed, and crash onto the cement.
He did nothing to catch himself. Wallace didn’t have the strength, or the reflexes, to catch him. He was already juggling his wallet, keys, phone, nickel, and that piece of arm flesh, since stupid leggings didn’t have pockets.
When Volt was finally standing up again, his jeans were torn and one cheekbone was abraded. Fortunately, he didn’t have any blood to spill.
Wallace almost cried again when he got Volt settled into the car and collapsed into the seat on the other side.
“Daddy, I’m getting you help,” he said, as they sped across the city. “I promise. Ben and Max will fix you right up. I’m right here with you. And I won’t stop until you’re safe.”
He didn’t know what he said after that, but he kept up his monologue until his throat was parched.
Fuck. Ben and Max lived way out there, and he cursed the distance with every mile.
They pulled up to the driveway, a tall, wooden gate sliding open just before their approach. It was even further to their house, the path lit with little garden lamps.
The golden light streaming from the windows would have been gorgeous if Wallace weren’t so overwhelmed. Ben’s house had the air of a quaint stone cottage, despite being immense. What did he use all of this space for?
The thought distracted Wallace for less than a second, because as soon as they pulled up to the house, they were surrounded by bots. Landscaping and housekeeping bots, it looked like, in all shapes and sizes, their little lights blinking.
Mixed in with them was a naked sexbot, standing and waiting as unmoving as all the others.
Was that Max? Er, Oliver?
Wallace got out of the car just as Ben stepped onto the porch.
He was dressed in a faded black t-shirt with a logo from a band Wallace had never heard of and yellow boxer-briefs with purple bananas on them.
He looked freshly showered, and, to be honest, freshly fucked.
And were those scratches along his arms?
Nope, not going to ask about one single thing. Ben could wear and do whatever the hell he wanted as long as he let them in.
“Do you need help getting him out of the car?” Maxamillion’s voice came from up above. Speakers mounted on the porch roof, perhaps. So that bot wasn’t Max?
“Yeah,” Wallace said. “He can respond to simple voice commands, but they have to be one instruction at a time. Uh, hi, Max.”
“It’s Oliver now,” Max said gently. “Is this your Volt?”
“Yeah,” he nodded, swallowing hard. “This is Volt. Hi, Oliver.”
Already, two bots were opening the car door, instructing Volt to lift his legs, one at a time, and move them to the path outside in Max, no Oliver’s, soothing voice.
Oliver was better at this than Wallace was.
Once Volt was fully outside the car, a large servicebot scooped him up, with two more delicate models hovering around to tuck in his arms and legs.
The bots made their way up the two stairs and into the house carrying their precious cargo.
“What happened?” Ben asked as they entered the warm, airy living room. A few bots trailed behind, one shutting the door, while others dispersed off onto the grounds.
“I don’t even fully know,” Wallace said.
He explained about Colton Alexander. About the love potion nickel that was supposed to be inactive unless he paid for it, which he adamantly hadn’t.
About how he’d lost the drive and forgotten about it after most of a year, then how Volt had apparently picked up the wrong one.
What he couldn’t really understand was why it had done anything when he hadn’t paid.
“Colton Alexander is bad news,” Oliver told him.
“Yeah?” How did Oliver even know this?
“He’s got a prison record. Dealing drugs. Attempted manslaughter. A bunch of minor things. But he’s been getting out too early.”
Yeah, Wallace wasn’t going to ask where this information came from. Just knowing it was scary enough.
“What does that mean?” He followed along helplessly as the bots carried Volt down the hallway to a cluttered room filled with every wire, tool, and device known to humankind. A trio of maintenance bots were quickly clearing a table, and two more lifted Volt onto it.
“It means that he’s working for someone. Someone’s paying off a judge. I’ve got people looking into it.”
“Huh?” Wallace asked stupidly. What kind of people did Oliver know?
“Don’t worry about it now,” Oliver told him.
Wallace didn’t. He couldn’t. A flurry of bots were dancing around Volt, opening ports, plugging in wires, and testing out circuit boards.
They wrestled him out of his clothing, popping open more panels until he was more gears and chips than flesh. Wallace knew it was all there, but he hated to see his Daddy so vulnerable like this. Like he was in open heart surgery.
With his skin intact, Volt could swim in a pool. Like this, a glass of water could destroy him.
Wallace clenched his fingers together. He’d already given the nickel drive to one of Oliver’s many bots, so there was literally nothing he could do that wasn’t already being done.
A service bot that stood about eight inches high on its three spidery legs hopped onto the table and started murmuring commands, one after another, all in the vein of returning some form of control to Volt’s system.
“Volt model three six seven, return autonomous motor function. Volt model three six seven, return autonomous speech function. Volt model three six seven, return control of sensory receptors.” It went on and on, naming features in increasingly small increments.
Volt moaned after some of them, a heartrending sound of pure agony that made Wallace want to rush to his side and cover his ears at the same time. He darted forward, then kept stepping back.
It was horrible just watching, but he knew that Oliver was doing a thousand times the work he could do himself.
“You should hold his hand,” Ben muttered.
Wallace jerked his head up to look at him.
Ben just tilted his chin in Volt’s direction.
Wallace flew across the room, the bots moving easily to resume their flow around him. One brought up a chair and he sank into it, registering nothing but that it would allow him to be closer to Volt.
Volt’s fingers were cold. Not freezing, but cooler than normal. Room temperature.
That was a creepy thought.
He stroked the tensed fingers anyway, curling his fingers into them. “Do you think he can feel me?”
Ben shrugged from the stool where he was perched across the room. “Who knows? But I, uh, held my gramma’s hand when she was in the hospital. I think it helped her.” The sorrow in his voice suggested that whatever time Ben had spent holding her hand, that time was over now.
Wallace swallowed hard.
It had never occurred to him that Ben had a beloved grandmother whose bedside he’d sat at. That he’d known loss and love. That he was loyal and caring.
But it was fitting for a man who’d rigged the traffic lights to save his friend’s spark boyfriend from a horrific hate crime. A man whose friends visited him every day while he was grieving Maxamillion’s apparent death.
Fuck. How had Wallace not realized this about Ben before? Well, obviously he couldn’t have known the details.
But it was like the moment when he’d met Volt’s family. When he realized that Volt, too, had loves and worries and passions, and wasn’t just the hot sexbot who wanted to be called Daddy.
Hell, was everybody in the whole world walking around like this, with their private sorrows and loves just eating away inside them and Wallace had never realized?
“She must have been lucky to have you,” Wallace said, thinking of Magnolia, and how Angel and Volt spent time with her every day. How bright and vivacious she was, even as she fought off another bout of pneumonia. “Volt has an aunt who’s in the hospital right now,” he added.
“Yeah?” Ben asked. He turned to work on something at the table.
It wasn’t much of a question, but Wallace answered it anyway.
Maybe if holding Volt’s hand would help, talking would too.
“Her name’s Magnolia. She’s this amazing woman.
Probably ninety years old and skinny as a rail.
She wears bright red lipstick, though, and always has her nails painted.
She used to be a madam at a brothel. A sexbot brothel.
To give clients alternatives to, uh, exploitative agreements with human sex workers.
She doesn’t want to compete with higher-paid sex workers who are choosing their own paths. ”
He wasn’t sure why he was saying all of this. He wasn’t even really talking to Ben, or to Oliver for that matter, though it seemed like most of the knowledge’s attention was caught up in assessing Volt’s situation.