Anika’s brows rose in surprise. “Bargain?”
His lips tightened. She could see he regretted that comment as soon as he made it. “I couldn’t sell him ta ya for five K otherwise.”
“Oh.”
Uneasiness had crept into Herc as soon as they started discussing his new appendage in a negative way. He could not say that he was happy that it did not match, but he did know that he wanted to keep it. He lifted his limp, discolored member and wagged it at her. “It does not weigh much. I cannot see that it would help to remove it. I could remove some of the armor and replace it later.”
He had the most divine voice! It was so deep, so well modulated. His speech was a little stilted, but the sound of his voice …. She could listen to it for hours. “Oh?” she said vaguely since the gist of his remarks hadn’t actually sunk in. The moment it did, reluctance washed over her—not for the member he seemed so distressed about, but rather the other. And wasn’t that just like a man to be so possessive over the thing? “Oh I don’t know if I’d want to do that. I mean, having the armor is actually a good reason to buy you. There’s really no telling about the place we’re going. It’s a frontier. It could be a bit wild and the armor would be useful.”
The shopkeeper and the Herc exchanged such a ‘man’ look the urge to smack both of them flared briefly.
“It would not be difficult to remove the thigh plates and those could be stowed with the belongings of a colonist whose belongings came in below the limit and then I would be able to put them back at a later time.”
“Brilliant!” the shopkeeper roared.
Anika merely gaped at him. It seemed like such an … underhanded suggestion. She wouldn’t have thought the robot would be capable of that sort of thing!
On the other hand, who would it hurt? “I suppose …,” she said slowly.
“It’s settled then!” the shopkeeper exclaimed.
Anika frowned, but the truth was that she was totally sold on the Herc. He might end up being a very expensive doorstop, but he was beautiful to look at and he had a voice that could almost give her orgasm.
She was still uneasy about dealing with the shopkeeper. “Half now and half upon delivery.”
He gaped at her. “Girly! We ain’t got no way ta deliver. You’ll have ta come get him.”
“Oh,” Anika responded, deflated since she’d thought the battle was about to start over the payment plan.
He wasn’t happy about the half and half, but he grudgingly accepted and Anika arranged a pickup time.
For all of her bravado and her determination as soon as she set eyes on Herc to have him, it was very disturbing to think about leaving Earth flat broke.
She might not even have enough to get her family/sperm/seedlings!
She’d planned to sell her apartment, though. She might as well sell the furnishings with it and get what she could, she decided.
With that in mind, because she was too wired to sleep even though it was getting late, she went out to get containers for her personal belongings. When she got back with them, she packed up her things and stacked them into two piles—one to take, and one to donate or dispose of. When she’d done that the place was clean enough for pictures and she took some of various angles and posted a ‘for sale’ notice online.
Thankfully, by the time she’d done all that she was able to climb into her bed and sleep because she had to report to the CSG Medical Center for her pre-flight physical early.
It transpired, naturally enough, that the early reporting time just meant she had to sit around with her thumb up her ass while they called the other fifteen to twenty people they’d assigned to the same block. At that, she was still lucky, because she did get called back at the end of the first block and there were already dozens more people waiting for the next two appointment blocks.
She was exhausted just from waiting, but she passed all of her tests and was given a boarding pass and assigned a cabin before she left.
She returned to her apartment then and collapsed with the intention of taking a nap.
She didn’t get one because she didn’t count the fifteen minutes she dozed off before the phone started ringing off the hook.
Her mother had called four times while she was out and called another four while she was trying to nap. She was also inundated, to her stunned surprise, with people that wanted her apartment.
It transpired that the ‘people’ was actually only a half dozen—most of whom backed out when they discovered she wasn’t desperate enough to sell the place for nothing. Thankfully, she had one guy who was really eager to take it off her hands with the furnishings! And he not only didn’t try to talk her down, he told her how relieved he was to find something at such a great price.
She felt like kicking herself for not checking the typical sale price before she posted, but she’d thought she was pushing it when she added 25% to what she’d paid for it.
She shook the thought off. It was a great deal—for both of them apparently—but certainly for her and couldn’t have been more timely. She made arrangements to finalize and called her mother back.
For once, her mother didn’t burst her bubble.
She actually inflated it quite a lot.
“I’ve been talking to a guy here that I’ve … uh … done a little business with and he has a connection there that can get you what you need for the trip.”
Anika stared at her mother blankly for a solid minute—until she folded her arms and started rocking them.
She sucked in a sharp breath when it hit her, and then another and started to explode with excitement, but something about the way her mother was acting set off alarm bells.
“Oh?” she said as carefully as she could given that she was shaking with excitement.
Her mother nodded. “Now this isn’t top of the line, mind you. That’s just not doable, but it’s very good and a perfectly acceptable … uh … quality product for what you’ll need. I’m comfortable with it. So much that I went ahead and put down a down payment and told them we wanted three.”
Anika couldn’t think of anything to say that would be ‘safe’. She’d known she couldn’t get the top rated seed. It wasn’t just the price. She wasn’t an acceptable candidate now that she’d reached the edge of peak and was about to go over it.
It angered her, but she did understand. People with any sort of problem weren’t just unhappy with their lives, it cost a lot of money to treat anything that was chronic or long term and that was a drain on society if there were very many.
Like cancer had been.
And Alzheimer’s had been.
A thrill went through Anika. She almost felt like crying. “Aww! Mom! That’s … that’s … I don’t know what to say!”
“I’ll pay you back?”
Anika felt her face turn red.
Belinda relented. “I was just teasing you, baby! I was happy to do it. Now … here’s the address and the man’s name. Just tell them you’re doing a pickup for Belinda and Lyle from Beauterre.”
Nodding, Anika wrote it down, uncertain of how well she was going to remember everything when she was so excited.
“They’ll be expecting you at ten tonight. Make sure you get there right on the mark. You have to use this signal when you knock on the door,” she finished, demonstrating it.
Shock rolled over Anika.
She stared at her mother with bulging eyes.
She knew, even though nothing had actually been said in the open, that they were talking black market and most of the people in that business lived in very dangerous areas of the city.
Places you didn’t want to go after dark, let alone late at night.
Nodding, she broke the connection, struggling to get her heart rate to something close to normal before she passed out from sheer terror.
“I can do this,” she muttered shakily.
Her mind, completely without her consent, exploded with a nightmare scenario of her trip into the underworld for the children she wanted
so desperately.
She came out of it shaken by the images her mind had conjured but determined.
She was going to get her children!
First, though, she was going to get her domestic! He’d belonged to someone who lived in the bad area, she thought, suddenly relieved and excited. He could keep her safe!
“Oh! I am soooo lucky! No way would I be able to do what I have to without him!”
Chapter Three
All Anika could manage to do for several long, heart-stopping moments after she first encountered her acquisition in person was to gape up at him in trembling awe. He’d looked really big next to the old man selling him—actually the young man that worked with him, too. But he looked like a mountain when he walked up to stand in front of her.
She had to crane her neck so far back to look at his face that she could hear the gulp in her throat when she remembered to swallow.
And blink.
Thankfully, they’d dressed him.
His long hair had been slicked back and tied and a filthy knit cap now covered it.
The boots on his giant feet had holes and at least one sole was loose and flopping.
The pants were baggy and still only reached to just past his knees. The sleeves of the shirt ended just past his elbows.
It looked, and smelled, as if they’d ‘shopped’ for clothing in the garbage and she was reasonably certain they had.
It made her feel awful to see her magnificent domestic clothed in tatter rags that, clearly, even the poorest didn’t want.
But was there any point in arguing?
At least he wasn’t naked.
She paid the balance of what she owed and waited while the old man drew up a bill of sale. When she’d examined it carefully to make sure it was completely legal and said everything it needed to, she tucked it away, smiled a little weakly at the hulking robot and headed out.
Thankfully, he followed without any prompting.
She noticed as soon as they’d left the shop that he was having difficulty walking. A sick feeling knotted in her stomach as she stopped to study him. “What’s wrong?”
He stared down at her. “We removed the thigh armor. I have not adjusted yet to the difference in weight.”
Her face reddened at the explanation and then the blood rushed away when she realized she’d crippled him. “Oh my god! I’m so sorry! I had no idea it would make it so hard to walk.”
He tilted his head, tenting his dark brows over the bridge of his nose, and looked at her strangely.
Instantaneously, the image popped into her mind of an inquisitive puppy.
It was adorable.
Really!
Even on this mammoth.
“I need only recalibrate,” he said finally, slowly.
The realization hit Anika that she was acting like he was real, a real person, not a machine that couldn’t really feel anything. No wonder he’d looked at her so strangely!
She frowned at that thought, wondering why he would feel anything at all about it if he was a machine and incapable of feeling.
So maybe the expression was just something programmed into him to coincide with anything that confused him?
It gave her a headache trying to figure it out so she dismissed it.
Thankfully, when they started again, he was able to navigate fairly smoothly and his gait became smoother as they continued.
Of course, he had to pace himself to keep from walking all over her. She was walking briskly, but his strides were so long she could take three steps to one of his.
Surprisingly, no one really seemed to notice her. Well, people never did, but she would’ve thought she would have drawn attention with the massive robot.
He drew all of the attention, though.
Well, everybody they passed didn’t stop dead in their tracks and gape, but a lot of people did double takes.
And walked into things because they were focused on him instead of where they were going.
She supposed the rags were enough to make him virtually invisible—regardless of the stench emanating off of the clothing.
“Good to know,” she muttered thoughtfully, realizing it worked way better to downplay notice than she would ever have thought. But the smell had to go!
“What?” the Herc responded.
Instead of answering, she frowned. “You need a name.”
“I am called Herc.”
She gave him a look. “You are a Herc. You need a name.”
He looked down at her with that expression of confusion. “Why?”
She frowned at him. “Because you do,” she snapped, irritated for no particular reason. “What do you think about Bob?”
He sent her an indecipherable look. “No.”
She bit her lip, but she snickered anyway. “Billy-Bob?”
“No.”
“Claude?”
“No.”
Warming to her theme, she threw out more and more outlandish names as they crossed the city. She was enjoying herself, she thought in surprise. For the first time in a very long time she was interacting with another being and enjoying it.
Well, a robot.
With AI.
But it felt like she was with a companion and that was the whole idea in making them seem as real as possible. It was so she could have that illusion.
It occurred to her that she was lucky to have found him and that inspired an idea she thought they could both live with.
“Bonne chance means good luck in French. I feel lucky I managed to find you and I could afford you. What do you think about Chance?”
He gave her the tented black brows and tilted head look for a handful of seconds and then nodded. “Yes.”
“Chance, then!” Anika said happily.
Finally, they arrived at her apartment.
He didn’t just fill the doorway he had to squeeze through. He dominated the apartment in such a way that it almost felt like he was taking up all the air.
“Ok—we will have to get rid of those. I’m going to puke if I have to smell them much longer.”
Apparently, he didn’t like them any more than she did. He stripped so fast she felt light-headed. Then, after glancing around, he strode to the window, opened it, and tossed the wad out before she could shout, “NO!”
She dashed to the window but, of course, the ‘litter’ was long gone.
That was going to cost her a minimum of five hundred credits for litter, damn it!
To say nothing of the fact that he’d just tossed the only clothes he had to cover himself with. It wasn’t like she had conveniently had a recent boy friend that was as big as a house and left some of his clothes!
“Shit!”
She turned her head to look at him—which was when she discovered they were almost nose to nose.
It wiped the snarl right off her face.
“You are beautiful,” he murmured in a low voice that made her tingle all over.
Before she could relish the compliment and the way it made her feel, he continued, demolishing the tingling thrill and replacing it so swiftly with shock and outrage that she almost felt dizzy.
“Shall we fuck now?”
Anika blinked at him in disbelief. “Now?” she gasped in outrage.
“I am naked.”
“NO!” she snarled.
He blinked at her. “Grandpa said that you would want to fuck. Why do you not want to fuck? ”
“You mean aside from the fact that you still smell like the clothes you tossed out the window that’s going to end up costing me a minimum of five hundred credits?”
He gave her the puppy dog look.
That time it failed to melt her cold heart.
She glared back at him.
“Grandpa and Sonny always toss their refuse to the ground.”
“Which is why it’s the slums—because everybody around there just throws things down and leaves it.”
“I will shower,” he responded, promptly getting to his feet and looking a
round.
“I don’t know that my shower will hold you, but I agree the bath is a damned good idea. Maybe we can get the smell of shit and old piss and dead things off of you.”
He managed to squeeze into the tiny shower box, but there was no room left for maneuvering.
“OK,” Anika said. “You get a two minute wet down and then you can soap the top while I handle below the waist since there is no way in hell you’re going to bend over.”
She’d considered telling him to get out and soap up, but visions of a flooded apartment filled her mind and there was no telling what might happen if he managed to soap down and then tried to move when he was slippery as shit.
He’s a robot, she told herself, just a machine.
I can do this.
He didn’t look or feel like a machine, though. She uttered the chant ‘he’s a machine’ in her head all the way through and she was still dizzy, breathless and thoroughly rattled by the time she’d finished her end of the deal.
His genitals looked perfectly normal … now. Well, still a little bit discolored and wrinkly, but it certainly seemed to function just fine and it didn’t look gray like dead flesh.
“Must have been the light,” she muttered when she got up and left him to rinse. “Stay put. I’ll be right back.”
She’d noticed a neighbor that had a little bit of a weight issue. He wasn’t as tall as Chance, but he wasn’t exactly a midget either and the breadth should work.
Always assuming she could talk him into letting her have a pair of trousers and a shirt.
He looked pissed off when he opened the door to her determined knock.
She smiled her best smile anyway. “Hi! I’m your neighbor across the hall….”
“You’ve been my neighbor across the hall for about ten years now,” he said ungraciously. “Never spoke to me before.”
She blinked at him at the barrage of unpleasantness, trying to figure out a response that wouldn’t piss him off more. “Uh … well I don’t have a lot of time outside of work ….”
He nodded. “But now you do?”
“I … uh … wanted to ask a favor.”
“Ah.”
Well, he was a nasty bastard! She’d had a feeling he would be. That was why she hadn’t tried to make friends before! Well, and the fact that he always looked at her like he could see through her clothing. “I have a … uh friend,” she said, unwilling to tell him that Chance was a domestic, not a friend since she expected no sympathy for a robot with problems, “and something happened to his clothes. I was wondering if I could borrow a pair of pants and a shirt until I … we could get him something …?”
Cyberevolution Aftermath I: Hercules 500 Page 3