kara

You don't feel good about this. The world might have been unfair to you, but aren't you just becoming part of the problem now?

You grit your teeth. This is the yuppy newtown district, you remind yourself, these people can spare a hundred dollars or so. Its their inconvenience vs your survival. This shouldn't be a moral question at all.

But you still feel, as you walk into one of the Christmas-decorated clubs, like yet another part of you is dying.

You dry yourself off at the entrance and make your way inside. The bouncer looks like he's about to comment on your wrinkly hotel uniform, but you manage to smile seductively enough that he lets you through. Inside, its a mess of colors, cups, and karaoke. A Second Gen in a Mrs. Clause outfit carries drinks between the tables and bar. A young couple are up on the stage doing a reasonably good performance of some pop song. People are talking, dancing, or just drinking and watching other people. Quite a few pairs of eyes fall on you, though you can't say if its your beauty, your choice of clothing, or that they recognize you from the ads. Probably not the last one, you assure yourself, nobody's going to look that carefully.

"Hey there," a thirty-something year old man approaches you, "you looking for someone?"

You seize him up. Broad shouldered, a little heavyset but not bad looking. More relevant to the task at hand, his buttondown shirt looks new, and not cheap.

"No one specific," you say coyly, "though I was planning on getting a drink before anything else."

He smiles wryly. "Right right, of course. I was about to get another dachory, you want one?"

...

You swish the beverage around in your mouth and let it flow back into the cup. "I don't know," you say, not making eye contact with him as you put the cup back down, "I guess I haven't been free during the holidays in a long time."

"My condolences. Where do you work anyway? Someplace that never lets you dress down, I'm guessing?"

You smile weakly. "No, I just came from work. Thought I needed to relax before going home. I'm a hostess."

He smiles back, much more assuredly. "Sorry, I'm sure you don't want to talk about work."

"You're right, I don't." You take another fake sip, eyeing him much more coolly now. Hard-to-get. He's probably married and looking to score behind his wife's back, you assure yourself, but you still feel like a predator, and not in the empowering way.

"You really look familiar. Have you done any modeling or something like that?"

You look coy again. "Do you really think I could be a model?"

"Pffft, your fake modesty's no good, Kara. Try again."

You giggle. "You're right. Its not. I'm just gorgeous."

"Mmhmm. Bad liar, though."

He puts his hand on yours. You can tell it would be strong, firm, and warm against your skin, if your sense of touch was working right. You hold his hand back.

...

Just twenty minutes to go. You're going to start panicking soon.

"Oh, I come on strong?" he chuckles again and pulls your body closer against his, "This coming from little miss 'I'm not looking for anyone in particular?'"

"You're so perceptive."

You press your breasts against his chest and plant your lips on his own. You feel hard muscle, under the little bit of pudge, and his arms feel strong as they softly caress you. Your lack of proper touch is starting to actually frustrate you...or it would, if you weren't worrying about much more urgent things. You remind yourself of the silver ring on his left finger. He's a cheating jerk. He probably deserves this. You're not doing anything really wrong.

"I need to use the little miss room," you whisper after he comes up for air.

"Hurry back."

You pop into the bathroom and pull his wallet out of your pocket. His credit chip is one of the high-security kind, but he's been buying all the drinks with cash so far...and you're not disappointed. A little over ninety Cascadian dollars. That should be enough. You carefully put it back in your pocket before leaving the bathroom stall.

"So," you say as you return to the table, "I've really had a great evening, but something came up."

He looks crestfallen. "Not something we can work around?"

You shake your head, a little more curtly than you mean to. Eighteen minutes.

"Whelp. I guess tonight's another point for my wife."

Your eyebrows rise. "What."

"She's at a beach party. Looks like she'll stay in the lead for now. Anyway, I had a great time with you as well Kara."

Oh. Swingers. That's a fad in Seattle right now, you should have remembered that.

"Bye," you manage to say before quickly turning and stalking away. Before leaving though, you bring his wallet - sans cash - to the bar.

"I think someone dropped this."

...

An old parking garage. Two minutes. You lock yourself in the elevator and get out the drill. The concrete walls are blocking wifi signals, so hopefully they'll also protect you from the GPS.

The drill tip gleams lethally as you press it against your pale stomach where you've slipped the little patch of skin off to reveal the bolt underneath. You know its just a screwhead, and that removing it won't damage you. You know that you're not capable of pain even if it did. But when you press the drillbit against yourself, you can't close your fingers around the trigger.

"Come on," you whisper to yourself, "what the hell's wrong with you?"

Come to think of it, what the hell ISN'T wrong with you?

You shut your eyes, grit your teeth, and squeeze. You feel an indescribable jarring sensation, the same as the one you experienced in the assembler, as the electric whine overwhelms your hearing. One bolt clatters to the elevator floor. By the time the second joins it, you feel like you're in a dream, mangling and impaling yourself without feeling pain. By the time the fourth and last screw comes out, its almost as if you're watching yourself do it from afar.

You look down at your belly, not missing its covering. Soft, nylon tubing throbs and pulsates. Fibre optics gleam in sheets and streamers around it. Something soft and plastic looking contracts as you bend over further.

You gag. Collapse onto the floor, clutching your throat, trying to vomit, but you have no stomach.

Coughing, dry-heaving, wishing you could cry, you fish around in your own insides, trying to think of anything else that you COULD be reaching inside of, trying to ignore the not-feeling of your hand pushing your internals aside.

Its not in your stomach. You have to reattach it and remove the front of your chest next.

...

You stagger back onto the street, wearing a cheap black hoody and pair of sweatpants. Your hotel uniform is in a dumpster at the base of the garage, along with the chip you pried off the front of your metallic rib cage. You've just spent a quarter of an hour performing surgery on yourself. You want water, but you're not thirsty. You want the cold air to purge the polymer dust from your lungs, but you don't have real lungs, and the air does nothing for you. Your body is working perfectly, sans a few scars on your stomach, but you're barely able to stand, let alone walk.

You double over and dry heave again. No...can't let yourself stop moving. Need to get as far as possible from the garage. They're probably on their way already. You limp across a street. Someone asks if you need help. You keep walking, limp across another. Then another. Then another.

...

A message comes from your autonomous systems: your CPU is running critically hot, you need to defrag immediately.

What...that doesn't make any sense. You've only been active for a day. Based on the readings, its as if you've been running nonstop for weeks, or even months! No wonder it was getting hard to walk. You're going to need to shut down immediately, and stay shut down for a couple of hours at the very least.

You're in a snow-covered park, thick with frosted trees and bushes. There's nowhere else to hide, so you crawl under some particularly thick bushes and curl into a fetal position in the half-melted snow. You still want to cry. You still can't. Before shutting down, you think one last conscious thought, regarding the future. Tomorrow you will start your day by...?