Anon Buys a Rapedroid (Part IV)

     Chest heaving with exhaustion, Anon slowly gathered himself from his ordeal. He’d watched Holly’s face, contorted in both disgust and enjoyment, as she berated and assaulted him with her words and hands. His face blushing shamefully, she’d worked him to his breaking point and left. Her absence grew increasingly apparent as he looked out into the hallway of his apartment and found her nowhere. Towel wrapped around his waist he hurried out into the main hallway, still empty save for a scowling neighbor produced from a door just down the hall. Glaring at him, she shook her head silently.
     “Shameful behavior. Just shameful.”
     “Oh fuck off, Sharon.” Returning to his apartment Anon, making sure the door was safely shut, started to come to terms that his nandroid was now gone, just three days after he bought her. He knew he couldn’t put any missing posters up as that would immediately forfeit his right to the robot; harboring a robot that had run away, and was likely defective, was a serious crime with punishments not just for Holly. He sat his head in his waiting palms and groaned loudly - he was not only out several hundred dollars, a maid, and much needed companionship, but now his neighbors thought he was a robot-fucker. Picking his head up once again he saw, in the living room on the coffee table, the nandroid manual that had come with Holly when he bought her. His despair turned to rage as he remembered the round, mustachioed face of the man who had sold her to him. Anon was finally putting the pieces together between the ‘artifacts’, low price, and eagerness of the man to be rid of that piece of stock. Standing up, towel tight around his waist, he decided to take a trip to the shop - after he got dressed.
Freshly clothed and key in hand, Anon began the arduous walk to the pawnshop, his anger only growing as he remembered the grin on the man’s face when he left the store, the sweaty brow and oiled hair forming a clearer image in his head. A quick trip down the elevator and out the dingy lobby brought him to the grim streets and grey skies, already pouring rain, as he started his walk to the shop a few blocks away.
     Finally coming to the shop, its lights glowing dimly in the rain and flickering slightly Anon shook himself in the cold rain, the shop’s awning giving him a momentary reprieve from the downpour. He could see through the window, and the iron bars behind it, the rotund man sitting in an office chair behind the glass counter through which he’d been ushered last time. His brow furrowed as the man lazily flipped a page in a nudey magazine, scratching the thinning hair on top of his head before licking a finger and continuing. With a chime Anon stepped into the shop and the man, dog-earring his page and setting the issue out of sight, smiled warmly at him.
     “Hello, sir! Welcome to my shop, what can I interest you in today?”
     “I want answers bud.”
     “I don’t understand, is there something specific you were searching for? I can assure you my selection is quite wide, and if it isn’t-”
     “I don’t give a shit about your selection, you sold me a defective robot and now she’s *gone*. I want to know what you sold me.”
     “Oh, it’s you! Look, I can’t offer any refunds or store credit, it’s store pol-”
     “I told you I don’t want money, I want some answers!” Grabbing the chubby man by his collar Anon pushed him against the wall, gritting his teeth at the heft of him. “What did you sell me?”
     “You sure you wanna try that, friend? You don’t know who the fuck you’re messing with. Let me go - or else.” The man nodded his pair of chins at a large red button at his side, his ham-fist hovering above it, ready to strike. Anon’s eyes widened at the purpose of it, whether it called the cops or some personal cronies he couldn’t tell. What he could tell, squinting at the button again, was it had been sanded down quite heavily, some old lettering long removed.
     “I do know that button’s bullshit.” With a swing of his left hand he smacked the button full-on, the man gasping under his grip.
     “That was easy!”
     “Yeah, nice try dude.”
     “Okay,” he said, his hands now drifting upwards. “What do you want to know?”
     “What’s wrong with the robot you sold me.”
     “You need to be more specific, sir, I don’t exactly keep records of every robot I sell or buy here.”
     “Sterling, nandroid, red hair. You sold her at a very, very low price. Said she had some ‘artifacts’.”
     “Ah, right, mhm, okay, I see. Cat’s out of the bag now, I suppose. She try to rape you too?” Anon paused, stunned; he wasn’t the only one. “Yeah, whoever had her last had the same problem and their wife ended up catching and divorcing him, tough shit right? He told me he bought her second-hand and didn’t want her anywhere near him. Somewhere way, way down the line someone put something in its head to make it like that. That’s all I can tell you, not even I can trace a product’s history that far back, and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna dig around in there to figure it out. I’ve got priorities.” The man flashed his left hand now, a thin gold band strangling his ring finger. Anon slowly let the man down, letting out a sigh as he relinquished his grip.
     “Can you call me if someone brings her in?”
     “Fuck no! Who am I, your friendly neighborhood cop? Get the hell out and find her yourself,” he grunted. “If it’s any consolation her battery’ll be dead in a day, two tops. Pray someone kinder than me finds her and charges her.” With that he sat back down in his spinny-chair and reopened his magazine, as though nothing had happened. Anon hesitated to leave, but could tell he wasn’t going to get any more information out of him. Bell ringing again as he left, he stepped out onto the sidewalk with more questions than answers, and still no inkling of where Holly could be. He couldn’t even ask about a ‘missing’ robot for fear of some paranoid middle-aged woman calling the cops on him and inciting a city-wide search for his robot (which would be promptly impounded afterwards). Finding a way to canvas his neighborhood for information without attracting attention was going to prove harder than he thought, but he needed to find Holly before somebody else did. Stepping past the awning once more Anon was met with the same pouring rain and grey skies, adjusting his jacket collar as he started the walk home to plan his next move.


     Night was falling on the city, the rain having slowed to a lazy misting. The woman stalked the darkening alleyway, emerging from a cellar hidden well into the concrete wall behind her. She’d been living this way for quite a while, her line of work falling into the ‘less than legal’ jurisdiction, but not dangerous enough to warrant a constant police presence. Walking along the asphalt length of the alleyway the diffuse yellow of the street lights caught on a crumpled human shape.
     “More addicts,” she thought. “City gets worse every day.” Continuing her walk she stepped over the shape only to glance at the porcelain white face, stained yellow by the lights just a few meters away. Investigating further she noticed the shut, synthetic eyelids, the artificial hair and the dark, lifeless cheek spots.
     “Who the hell throws out a nandroid in this kind of condition,” she questioned aloud, hefting the robot onto her shoulder. “Unless she’s a runaway, of course. Either way it’s a lost robot.” Her priorities changed, she stepped back down the alleyway and, taking care not to knock the droid on her shoulder, ducked back into her waiting cellar. The steep staircase led into a dank, close ‘apartment’ consisting of a handful of bare concrete rooms, rugs thrown about for comfort underneath a ceiling lined with incandescent lights. Flicking a switch with her free hand the woman lit the damp basement, ruddy yellow light casting shadows in every errant corner of the veritable bunker she called home. Sidestepping low tables and a central sofa she walked to the back of her home, a small hallway which bisected the space into, on her left, the bathroom and, on her right, her workshop. She stepped into the room and delicately laid the limp robot onto a waiting steel table. She carefully lifted the shut eyelids, examining every inch of the robot underneath her handy flashlight; every inch of her was near flawless, her joints were not overly gritted and her exoskeleton was free of any grievous blemishes. A quick check on her diagnostic panel showed she wasn’t bricked, just out of power. Stepping away she rifled through a plastic crate full of tangled cords, cursing as she spent too many minutes untangling them for what felt like the hundredth time.
     “Here we are - Sterling, Model 3 Nandroid. Let’s get you charged up.” She plugged the chunky cord into the robot’s waiting port, and left the room to wait the few moments it would take to get her talking, if still tied to the wall. She laid down on her couch for a few moments before a thumping knock came at her door. Bolting up she stared at the stairwell before the familiar jingle of keys and release of the lock eased her mind.
     “Hey Bruce,” she shouted from the couch. Stepping down the concrete stairs came a hulking, grey robot, faded and chipped yellow stripes lining his limbs, where a few plastic bags hung.
     “Hey Lia, you’re not going out to scav tonight?”
     “Negative, got something in the alleyway,” she said. “Another lost bot.” She stood up from the couch and relinquished the groceries from the robot’s thick arms, tools once meant for construction now too aged for most anything but domestic tasks. The pair stocked the fridge together and stowed the few robot accoutrements beneath the dripping sink.
     “She bricked?”
     “No, she’s fine. I was waiting for you to get back.” She pulled him along into the workshop, lights still on. There on the table, still limp, was the small maidbot. Her clothes, the tee shirt and shorts, had dried little from the rain outside.
     “A nandroid? Jeez, some find. Judging by her clothes she’s a runaway.”
     “I figured the same, no way to know ‘til we boot her up.”
     “Go for it.” With a delicate flick of the access panel on the nape of the nandroid’s neck, she gently jammed a paperclip into the startup button. After a few moments pause, she sprung up, head turning wildly as her eyes blinked and adjusted.
     “Wh-Where am I,” she squeaked.
     “Far from home, that’s all I can tell you,” the woman answered. “Did you run away?” The robot paused and struggled for an answer. Staring at the blank wall across from her she nodded her head slowly, reluctantly.
     “Okay, so you’re a runner then. What was the last straw?”
     “Excuse me?”
     “What flipped your switch? Bruce and I get a fair number of girls like you, battery dead on the street, huddled in alleys and junkyards. Your owner must have done a number on you judging by your clothes and that you’re here, not ‘home’.”
     “My owner…” Holly searched her memory briefly before whispering a shocked gasp, remembering what ‘she’ had done. Her cheeks flushed with robotic shame. “It’s not his fault! Really!” The larger robot turned to his female companion; he’d heard the line before. She met his gaze sternly, telling him to let her explain.
     “I-I, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. You see, I,” she stopped. She knew she sounded insane, which from a robot is less than expected. “There’s someone else up here.” She tapped her head and looked down.
     “You want us to take a look? We could help you.”
     “I don’t know where you’d even start, even I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I hurt my owner and couldn’t face what I did.”
     “So that brought you here.” Holly nodded. “How far back do your memories go?”
     “Just this weekend, as long as Ano-, my owner, has had me. I don’t know any of my other owners.”
     “So that’s a start. Whatever is up there,” she said, gesturing at her head, “isn’t his, or your, fault.”
     “We’ve come across stranger things and robots worse off than you,” the constructobot said. He clamped a firm hand on Holly’s shoulder. “You obviously care about your owner, so he cares about you. Just know he’s probably out looking for you.” Holly smiled at the reassurance and nodded her head enthusiastically.
     “Let’s do it.” The woman smiled emphatically before retrieving a chunky laptop and a smattering of cords.
     “Okay, I need to hook up into you to take a look inside, is that okay?” Holly nodded again. “Bruce, can we have some privacy?” The towering robot nodded curtly, not wanting to spoil the intimacy of another robot’s memories being spilt out for study. Having shut the door the muffled noise of a television leaked into the room as the woman started plugging a handful of cords into Holly’s main access panel, stringing her to the computer.
     “All hooked up, you feeling okay?” The nandroid peeped her approval, knowing well there was no other option than to trust these coarse strangers.
     “Jesus,” the woman muttered. “You’ve got a lot of aftermarket mods, that’s for sure. Whoever owned you previously pumped a lot of cash into modding you.” Holly knew too well what mods she meant and, wanting desperately to say something, struggled for words.
     “It’s okay, I get it’s embarrassing. Messed up people do messed up st- Christ, dude. Whoever made those modifications had one thing in mind, that’s for sure,” she spat, her gorge rising. “Fucking coomers man, jeez.”
     “C-Coomers?”
     “Don’t ask. Suffice to say there’s a lot of hardware stuck into you, all around the same time according to the install information on you. Probably a single dude did this and passed you on after he got bored, or worse.”
     “That doesn’t explain why I, er, did what I did.”
     “Wasn’t you hun, I think I hit what you were talking about. It’s a very malicious subroutine,” she said, stopping herself.
     “Scratch that. This dude just put a whole new personality into you. Damn, horny *and* stupid.”
     “What does that mean, exactly?”
     “Well, our suspect had, obviously, a very select choice in women’s attitudes that your programming simply couldn’t offer. Without scrubbing you out of, well, *you* he just popped in a new personality. Odds are the conflict between you then and this personality was so extreme at install he couldn’t cope with it and ditched you. Then you started travelling down the line of owners until you got to your… Anon, was it? Suffice to say it was more violent then than now, but it’s still there.”
     “Can you, well, remove it?”
     “I can certainly try, but personalities are tricky and are hell to remove, which is why they’re typically only one to a robot - unless you’re an idiot, of course. I’ll do what I can to remove the ‘oomph’ of it so you don’t have another person swimming around up there, but it won’t be clean, there’s no ‘delete’ for these.”
     “So what does that mean for me?”
     “Could mean any number of things, could mean you picking up her mannerisms or tastes, things like that. Vice-versa she could take some of you and what you like. It’s a crapshoot when morons start mixing personas, honestly.” Holly hesitated, agonizing over what would happen were she to be plucked from her head, kicking and screaming. But she knew full well there was no way to go back to Anon in this condition. It was the only way.
      “Do it, please. Take her out.”
      “Will do, just gimme a sec.” Lia crossed the room from her seat and scanned the shelves of errant robot parts and elements before seizing on a minimalist black cylinder. Plopping it back onto the metal table the woman ran another cord from computer to cylinder.
      “What’s that?”
      “Primitive domestic assistant, early century. An antique by our standards, but,” she said, tapping it lightly, “surprisingly spacious - conveniently enough to hold a low-tier fetish persona. I’m starting it up now, it’ll only take a few moments.” Holly felt an insatiable tingling along her steel spine, every fiber and nerve of her chassis grew fuzzy and soft, her very body felt as though it was becoming one pliable mass. She let herself down onto the table, the bite of cold steel dulled by the increasing warmth she felt. In her head there was an entire vacuum of space now empty, like every trace of shame and regret in there was ripped asunder and revealed behind it a pleasant, confident glow. Time stretched and ebbed before Holly as she waved her hands ahead of her eyes, the fuzziness and pinpricks dotting her limbs slowly receding as her mind cleared. She sat up, light headed and struggling to balance, but feeling euphoric, a consuming vertigo surrounding her as the walls heaved and sighed and the ground bowled away. And, like a snap in silence, everything was back to normal. For once there was a peaceable quiet in her head, no nagging voice or tinny, nasal ache for the impure. The woman shut her laptop with a heavy clunk and smiled at Holly.
     “All done. Here she is.” She presented the little house aid, silent and black before a flash of blue light circled the rim and it spoke.
     “You fucking whore! Slut! Man-stealing bitch! Look at that shit-eating grin! Once I get out of here you’re fucking dead, kiddo! You can’t survive without me! You-” The woman graciously pressed the mute button atop the piece.
     “Nasty one isn’t she?” Holly rapidly nodded her agreement, still finding her legs as she hopped off the table. “So, now what?”
     “W-Well, I suppose finding my owner? But I don’t even know if he’d want me back after all this. I wouldn’t even know where to look even, I can’t exactly go back to his apartment,” she said, knowing she had no key. “I don’t even have a free movement permit, either.”
     “Don’t be so sure about that.” The woman produced a thin piece of plastic, a small chipped card with all manner of biographical information on it.
     “Where-How, how did you make me one so fast?”
     “They’re shit-easy to forge honey, government couldn't care less about robots roaming free because the blame falls entirely on the robot companies. Take it and find your guy.”
     “What about my battery,” she said, tugging at her power cord.
     “You can take that cord if you’re willing to carry it, though it might be a bit suspect to passersby. Another choice is you spend all your time travelling around here and you can come back at night to charge,” she said, walking past to open the door. “Isn’t that right, Bruce?” Her shout was returned with a distracted ‘yeah’ as the TV continued to blare.
     “I-I can’t say how thankful I am, and from complete strangers.”
     “Don’t mention it, it’s a shitty world out there for robots like you and people like me. For now, just lay down and power up, I’ll get you a blanket while you sleep.”
     “Thank you, that would be wonderful.” With that last remark Holly shuffled herself into the coziest stone corner of the room, nestled next to the outlet she was plugged into. Swaddled in a thick quilt she drifted off into the night, images of Anon dotting her mind as she slipped into sleep, ready to start tomorrow searching for him.