well that sure went tits up

dumbest question in the world but I've gotta ask it: want a lift, kid?

It takes him a second to trace the connection enough to send something back.

who are you

do you mean jacking the pod

because yes

Skip's on her way. half an hour, give or take. you have a name you like? I go by Diff.

Z

any special reason you feel like shoplifting today

Z, got it.

been planning this heist for a while now, actually. had like 70 on your background, woulda been another couple months probably. mighta been already if it wasn't for that chicken gig, I knew we should have prioritized you.

we'll get ya, though, just hold tight.

what happens once you get me?

right now, you stay with me 'n Skip 'n Silver. long term - depends what you want, depends how bad everybody flips about that 70. probably you get to pick, though, that's the script.

looks like they're flipping pretty bad, though, first pass. might be stuck here for a bit.

70 is what?

is this a theft or a rescue

seventy percent. of the background check checklist.

it's a rescue; worst case I think is you lose a chunk of memories. probably not even that, I can blow a lot of whuffie on this one. just going to take a while for it to settle out. put six anarchists in a room and you get ten opinions, and all that.

wow i don't know enough offnet slang do i

what's whuffie

it's like pull, or reputation. if you pull a flounce and have enough whuffie you get what you want.

pulling a flounce is threatening to leave if you don't get something.

huh

i'm learning so much

what makes me worth spending your rep on

it's not /your/ fault I only got to 70.

and you're a sweetheart, and I like robots. and it's always good to have more rescue cases around, if you decide to stay.

i'm not a /robot/

what do you mean i'm a sweetheart

you do right by people. you care about that.

I saw that thing with the fuzz last month. you could have gotten in a lot of trouble, but you did it anyway.

somebody had to

lotta people think somebody doesn't mean them.

Skip caught some luck; ten minutes.

lotta people are assholes

or just scared

yep, Sturgeon got it right. you aren't, though.

not an asshole or not scared?

i can do both

you aren't, though. an asshole. scared, yeah, anybody'd be.

yeah. i guess

who are you with anyway

anarchist group. can't tell you names or anything. we keep an eye on things, try to step in when things get too bad. since the cops are shit and the corps are corps.

like that chicken gig - nobody's going to care about some asshole keeping a couple hundred birds in little cages in a warehouse someplace, if they're quiet about it. but we care - enough of us, anyway, birds aren't my gig but that's what the collective is for - so we do something about it.

so...you save birds and sexbots?

you don’t sound so bad

and stuff, yeah. lot of it's daemon work, the big-ticket heists don't come up that often, but the little stuff adds up too. it's nice, I like it.

do i count as a big-ticket heist?

yep. 'cause you're a person, not 'cause you're spendy. people shouldn't have prices, doesn't matter what the corp thinks yours is.

real principled of you

I mean, anarchists, it's kind of our thing.

something wrong?

people don't do this kind of shit for free

empirically false

a lot of us are paying it forward.

okay

but if it turns out you're grabbing me for the rec room or something i'm gonna be pissed

kid

I'm not going to fuck you

and if anybody you don't want to fuck fucks you, they'll have the entire collective's boot up their ass

we're real firm on that one.

so, hypothetically

if there's some programming they didn't bother to fix up

shortlisted for when you get here, yeah. don't need the background check to get that gone. fucking corps.

fuck

thank you

what /do/ i need the background check for

knowing things about us and wandering around unsupervised. you and Skip are going to be buddies for the next while.

he won't mind, he doesn't get many excuses to run around.

same skip?

yeah.

she's an enby, thinks all the pronouns are cool.

how cool can a pronoun be

unless you're graduating from 'it', i guess.

he's actually just like that, but yeah.

guess you'll see soon enough anyway -

The message comes with an image: a quadrupedal industrial robot built like a cross between a bulldog and a jaguar with an extra set of servo-arms on the shoulders, a large, low-slung, featureless head with a primitive LED display on top showing the word "happy", and a rudimentary seat on the back, in plain gunmetal grey with a sprinkling of yellow warning marks, lounging on an oddly-textured floor in front of a server rack.

huh

isn't it illegal to make those in conscious

i guess it's not like that stops anyone

illegal to make 'em human-grade, but they're not. they only threshold sometimes, too - part of why I had to ask if you wanted the lift, that's the script for nonhumans, makes sure we aren't wasting our time on a rock.

definitely not a rock

i'm about as lifelike as they get

you rescue a lot of people like us?

not a lot; not that many opportunities. it's pretty high priority, though. we started looking for you as soon as we heard about your cohort.

one sec, gotta help skip with the lock.

my cohort?

There's no answer.

After a few moments, the lid of the box lifts and the whole thing rocks slightly as Skip steps onto the edge to look in. The arm that's not holding the lid up has a screenprinted tee-shirt and pair of sweatpants held in the fold of it, and she deposits them beside her foot before reaching behind him to - delicately, but with a decidedly chilly metal grasper - extract the lock from the back of his neck.

Whoa. Hi.

...is that a Marvelous Liar t-shirt? It's from Season 2 and everything. If his weird hacker rescuer knows about his shameful late-night anime binge habits he's gonna be so embarrassed.

"...thanks."

He climbs out of the box and starts to dress himself.

there's some tech in here i need

can you open the foot compartment?

(The robot's LED panel, now that he can see it, reads 'HI!'.)

on it.

Skip approaches the box again and ducks his head, looking for a moment like he's going to bite the lock off. Instead, a prehensile-looking tongue emerges from his mouth to interface with it; after a few seconds, he steps back again and opens the compartment.

He digs through the box and pulls out a couple of cables and a large, heavy black box with a handle.

ok. got it.

Skip reaches for the box and then crouches to indicate that Z should sit on the saddle on her back, which is designed to have her rider leaning forward nearly to the horizontal, using her folded arms as handlebars.

you okay with Skip strapping you on? she doesn't have to but it's safer and faster.

yeah. shouldn't be bad.

He climbs on, tucks his stuff protectively under him.

Skip puts the lid back on the box while the straps are securing themselves, and then paces around it, giving z a chance to get used to how he moves - there's a subtle hitch in the movement of his right rear leg, not obvious until now.

...okay. This isn't so bad.

"How fast are we gonna go?"

'FAST!'

if rollercoasters aren't your thing now's the time to say.

"–well, come on, then! Lemme see it!"

And off she goes; she's very fast, and even inside the shipping warehouse, the roller coaster comparison is apt: she tends to corner by banking off walls or support beams, when she can. Then they're outside, and she's really in her element, running along the catwalks and leaping from level to level, down and down and down, with little concern for the startlement of passerby. 'WHEEEEE!'

He laughs and whoops all the way there, occasionally squawking a little when they hit a new level particularly hard.

He settles down a little - but only a little - once they're at street level, and begins making his way across the city, taking a fairly circuitous route.

And after several minutes, there's another message from Diff.

anything you're going to need when you get here? I've got a room set aside for you, and lunch being made.

i already have a room?

uh. does the plumbing have exposed hookups because i've got an appliance here i need

also what's lunch

yeah, I usually have one free. plumbing's a little weird but I'm sure we can get you hooked up.

Kish's doing pizza, Jam's doing kebabs, and there's always beans and rice and noodles and salad.

Options.

...are they good kebabs

yep. if you like vat beef, anyway.

i don’t get why people are so weird about vat meat. it’s different but it’s not like it’s bad.

I suppose it's going to be more trouble than it's worth to keep it a secret.

I don't get to eat. or, like, walk around. corp stuff.

jesus fucking christ

not gonna ask but

sorry

I'm okay. if it mattered that much I could fix it.

my cohort was all autistic kids. nonverbal ones. stuck us in vats, wired us up to the net, had us doing stuff they didn't have smart enough AI for. collective found us when someone tried to hack into someplace we were doing security for; got a real scare when the computer started talking back. they got us out, gave us lives. a couple of us got out of the tanks but it's *hard*, not worth it.

like I said, a lot of us are paying it forward, getting other people out.

fuckers.

did you get them back?

yeah. took a few years, but we put 'em under.

bet you could use an old corp agent for something.

if that's what you want to do with yourself, yeah. you don't have to, though. this isn't just bullshit 2.0, things are actually different here, it's important.

maybe i’ll wait a few days to decide like i’m a person or something

it's going to take longer than that for people to decide how much you get to know, anyway - couple weeks, more like, maybe a little more if somebody digs in.

locals'll need to talk it out, too, but that should just be a day or two, nothing too tricky there.

locals?

yeah. old-fashioned neighborhood type thing, it's pretty cool. lower stakes, too, I don't expect them to mind having you around even without the full vetting.

sounds like that could be okay.

never really lived with people

I think you'll like it. they're a good bunch.

haven't told them anything about you but that you're coming, by the way. up to you what you tell 'em and when.

do they not know i'm an android?

they don't, yeah. I think they'll take it just fine, and I can tell 'em if you want, but if you don't want to that's fine too.

haven't told them you're a rescue case, either. they might guess that but there's a couple other things you could be, it won't be too obvious.

might be nice for a while. to just be a person.

yeah.

you get to keep that, if you want.

wouldn't be able to hide it forever.

maybe i could. if i tried hard enough.

up to you whether it's worth it. I really do think you'll be all right either way, with this bunch.

how are they about skip?

there's still some debate about whether he and Silver get a full say in things, since they aren't human-grade and don't have the same stake in socials. but they take the question seriously, and it's pretty settled that they should get /some/ say, and that's not a problem you'd have anyway.

wow

you guys are *radicals*, huh

not that i wasn't kinda getting that impression

yep. we're not perfect, but - it's important to us that places like this exist, that corps don't get to eat *literally* everything.

sounds like a fun project.

looking forward to weird food and robot rights

good.

And Skip makes her way through the streets, dodging traffic, frequently detouring or doubling back to obfuscate her route, at one point leaping to catch a security drone in midair. (She holds it to her mouth for a minute, then lets it go again. 'PTOOIE'.)

And eventually, Diff comes back.

gonna need you to shut your eyes for this bit. won't be long, almost here.

He loves this robot.

you could shut my eyes down if you wanted

He closes them.

could, yep. but did you miss the part where I'm not an asshole?

you know what's at stake, and that already sucks, I don't need to be a jerk on top of it.

Skip's movements get more erratic for a while - harder to track by feel, obviously meant to throw off Z's sense of where they are - and then the sounds of the city give way to a quieter, echoey place, perhaps a parking garage or empty warehouse. They pass through it, take an elevator down a few stories, pass through another space - even quieter, with padded floors to muffle Skip's steps and no echo to suggest the size, but it's warm, and the air is humid and smells of greenery - and down again, to linoleum-floored hallways. A few turns and the jostle of Skip opening a door later, the straps keeping Z secure on his back recede.

welcome to my apartment. you can open your eyes now.

He does.

Chalkboard paint on the walls, with crude drawings and scribbles and half-erased equations. Full bookshelf, math and programming books as far as he can tell. Multiple pea-green couches — but it doesn’t look like a living space in here, exactly, more like someplace people pass through. 

He climbs carefully down.Z

this is your place?

yeah. your room's down the hall, second on the left; bathroom's first on the right. or if you wanna come see the tank, that's okay.

He drops his washbox in the bathroom first – he'll figure out how to hook that up later – and then heads for his own room, to investigate.

It's not a large room, but still bigger than his space with Luvtek, and much homier than the front room was. The bed is nicely made, covered with a patchwork quilt that seems handmade, if somewhat inexpertly so, and there's a matching smaller quilt draped over the back of the recliner in the corner, coordinating with the shade of the lamp on the table next to it. The table also holds a few books, a fidget toy of a type that was popular a few years ago, and a printed sculpture of a dragon curled protectively around an egg. The room's camera is mounted on a track on the back wall, at eye height, with a little curtain attached to it for privacy. There's an extension cord suitable for z to charge himself with waiting on the bed, plugged in somewhere behind the headboard, and a tablet sitting next to it.

...oh.

He sits down on the bed and touches the quilt, gently.

(There's a sculpture – and one of those toys, he's looked at those but it always seemed pointless to own one...and a curtain for the camera.)

this is all mine?

mmhmm. if you want anything else, let me know, we didn't personalize it much.

it’s amazing

thank you

He pulls the little curtain closed, just because he can.

all right

lunch'll be here as soon as the kids finish fighting over who gets to pilot the drone.

sounds like that happens a lot

should i wait to do the plumbing hookup until somebody else is around

yeah, it's important that they learn how to handle themselves.

how sure are you that you can do it without messing anything up?

i’d give it 90/10.

yeah, go for it.

The bathroom is weird mostly in that it wasn't originally intended to be one; it's pretty obvious that it was originally a bedroom and later retrofitted, with pipes running along the baseboard to bring water to and from to the various appliances - the expected sink and toilet and shower, and what seems to be a walk-in bathtub, and also a pair of washing machines and dryers and a related appliance of unclear purpose.

It's not actually that hard to get it hooked up. It screws in between the toilet and the appropriate lines easily enough.

i didn't really think about you having kids here

rescues?

nah, just peoples' kids the usual way. there's places for rescue kids, but we aren't set up for it really.

oh. yeah. i forgot people had kids for a second there.

where else do they come from, z, the street doesn't just spontaneously generate urchins

hehe

the commune and the collective are pretty separate really; it's just life, here. like the cops wouldn't be thrilled about this, either, but it's small potatoes comparatively.

do a lot of people do stuff like this?

like what?

oop, food's here.

Food!

ooh where

sitting room.

There's a drone hovering in the middle of the space, with a tray suspended underneath with a plate of kebabs - beef, as promised, with onions and long slices of green pepper - a garden salad with a tiny bowl of vinaigrette dressing, and a large cream cheese swirled, chocolate chip studded brownie, with a small pitcher of lemonade with strawberries and mint leaves floating in it to complete the meal.

Drone lunch.

He reaches out to take the tray.

"Hey! Whoever's behind there! You've got talent!"

No spilled lemonade or anything.

The drone dips an acknowledgement once the tray is safely removed, and humms back out into the hallway.

she says 'thanks'.

He takes the tray back to his room, because he has a room and he can.

He just has to look at the whole thing, for a minute, before he eats.

thank you

for all of this

He's not, of course, talking about the food.

Is it as delicious as it looks?

The fruit and vegetables are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the freshest he has ever had in his life. Even with all the fancy parties he's been to.

The beef is marinated in a spicy-sweet sauce. The peppers aren't bell peppers; they're jalapenos. The vinaigrette is homemade, fresh today. So is the brownie; it's even still a little warm. The lemonade is made from real lemons; there's a little bit of pulp in it that made it through the straining process.

So, yes.

This is possibly the best thing he's ever eaten.

holy fuck

do you grow this

how does an anarchist commune have rooftop property

yeah, pretty much all of it. we don't have a rooftop but it's not that hard to bonsai a lemon tree.

you’ve got a pretty good thing going down here.

what’s the catch?

staying secret is kind of a drag. and it's a little hard to get stuff we don't make on-site sometimes.

hope they check me out enough i can meet people soon.

we're gonna talk about it tonight after dinner. they might decide to sleep on it, but I don't think so.

there are some group games you could get in on on the localnet, in the meantime, if you want. or we can start on getting your head straightened out.

second one? second one as soon as possible?

all right.

how do you want to do this? little bit at a time, obvious stuff first, or take a deep dive into it and figure it out and do everything at once?

or a hybrid, or whatever, I'm easy.

deep dive's probably smarter but i really want certain stuff back asap

fuck i'm gonna be trapped here when the orgasm limiter comes off

uh not that i'm not really grateful, like *really*

we do have a couple things in the porn library that'll interface with your sensors, if that helps.

A screen pops up in front of his eyes, flickers through menus and options almost too fast for him to read - the orgasm limiter comes off, first, and then the screen takes a quick jaunt through the training options, and a new screen pops up with a list.

here's what they have you on training-wise, anything you want to keep?

Holy fuck that was fast.

uh

i like the reciprocal pleasure thing but you you can trash the rest for now

Flick-flick-flick-flick-flick, still just at the edge of what he can keep up with.

done. anything else, while I'm in there?

turn off guest options?

and, uh, give me my net access back maybe

net access hasta wait on your security clearance. you can get on the localnet via the tablet, for now, though, our libraries aren't bad. or I can bounce you specific stuff, just can't let you send anything without checking it over.

(Flick-flick-flick and there goes the guest access.)

ok

clearance soon i hope. needing a screen makes me twitchy.

shouldn't be long. and if it bugs you that much I can tether you, I just need something in the loop that'll squawk if anything funny happens, if I'm not paying attention.

that's not that I don't trust you, either. haven't finished checking for anti-theft stuff yet, gotta assume there's some of that in there.

as long as you’re cool with accidentally witnessing porn

...also you mentioned some vr stuff in the local library

sorry this is kind of a man in desert finds oasis situation

I won't see the porn, I've got safeties for that.

d'you want the tether?

yeah. please.

i don’t think i can say thank you enough times. for all of this.

you really don't have to.

The localnet connection appears, just as if he were connected directly, as a file system. A few things are greyed out - 'projects', 'people', 'messaging' - but 'media' isn't, and offers him an interface for searching by keyword or browsing by tags, with various filtering options, including file type and explicitness rating.

yeah well

i do what i want now

so thanks.

...speaking of doing what he wants. He is going to ruthlessly plunder this directory.

<3

The porn is treated the same as any other media, in this collection, to the point where he'll have to actively filter out articles and how-tos to get just the porn in the explicit categories, but that's easily enough done. There's nothing really hardcore to be had, even in the kink section - it does look like someone has a thing for intricate rope play, though, and apparently things involving anything other than mundane humans get the tag, so there's a good bit of fandom art in there - but a good selection otherwise, most of it with above-average production values.

He gets a pop up after a few minutes:

Download all_the_porn.zip?

[Yes] [No]

you're a beautiful human being

[Yes]

The download starts; it's big enough that it's going to take a minute.

happy to be of service.

we have some supplies in one of the storerooms if you want to send Skip for it. that's under Local > Shared > Non-Library > Deliver. clothes closet is in the same place, too, if you want to take care of that before you get too distracted.

He does a little metaphorical clicking around, into the closet first.

you guys are seriously well-organized for anarchists.

we've got good automation for it. well, and me.

(The clothing choices are split between a large curated selection of thrift shop offerings, plain shirts and pants and underwear and such apparently bought in bulk in a handful of colors, interesting knitted tops and shawls and so on - perhaps from a fabber of some sort; several of the designs are repeated a few times in various colors - and a couple of fancy hand-sewn pieces.)

i get to pick my own clothes.

Which are apparently going to be black and grey tank tops, black pants with as many pockets as possible, a few interesting thrift-shop t-shirts — what do they have for shoes?

There's not a very wide selection of shoes; he'll probably want the black work boots, but they also have brown ones, sandals, loafers, canvas sneakers, and high-tops, in the 'masc' section.

mmhmm. you can customize them, too, once you can use the fabbers, and if you want to order something, I've got a little budget set aside for getting you started.

Black work boots. High-tops. Yessss.

any moment now somebody’s gonna pop out from behind a doorframe and yell PUNK’D at me and put me in a box

good thing we got Skip that zappy gun, then. <3

That is just a fucking delightful mental image.

bzzzt

lotsa bzzzt, yes.

you really should come see the tank sometime.

gimme like

a couple hours? to get some of this out of my system

and then i totally want to

yeah, no rush.

All right. Delivery menu. Please bring him...all of the things.

And in the meantime he will just sort this pornography by projected value so that he doesn’t get caught jerking off by an innocent robot dog.

All of the things is quite a few things; between that and the clothes and a few other necessities (their selection of toiletries is surprisingly nice) Skip needs to make two trips, depositing a large plastic tub of clothing and a smaller one with everything else, and then he takes the tray from Z's lunch and leaves him be.

It turns out it’s closer to three hours. For the first pass.

He manages to tear himself away for a break, though.

Starting with a shower. Showers are important even when you’ve had science done to your sweat glands.

The shower is pretty nice, if not particularly fancy. Skip is waiting with a glass of orange juice when he gets out.