Chapter 2: 2

Most of the beautiful bot’s repair systems had worked wonders. Merci couldn’t tell that she had fallen so far into the back of her truck to look at her, if not for the torn clothing that looked so very expensive and delicate. The problem resided inside the bot. The neuro-repair drone, Merci had paid so much for, should fix most of that, but Merci couldn’t find a hatch upon the seamless, porcelain-smooth outer skin. Which left only one option.

Rubbing her hands down her coveralls, Merci hesitated. While she had inspected the bot, before, she had tried not to touch her, fearing that the slightest pressure upon that skin could shatter the bot into a million pieces. Her hands hovered above the bot’s face, fearful of tainting the perfect artificial skin with her dirt and filth that she could never seem to wash away. Yet, she had no choice.

The skin felt cold to the touch. So smooth, Merci doubted any kind of dirt would stick. She knew she couldn’t break the bot, but still she touched the bot’s lips as though they were the most fragile things she had ever seen. Those lips, full, ruby red and far softer and warmer than the rest of the bot’s skin, refused to open. Not from the light touches Merci performed. As much as she didn’t want to, she needed to apply greater pressure.

With both hands, she gripped the bot’s jaw and tugged, grunting as she strained at gears and servos far stronger than her hands, until, finally, the lips began to part. If anything, it made the bot look even more beautiful, as though she were in the middle of a song and Merci dearly wished she could hear the bot sing. Nevertheless, she had managed to part the lips wide enough for the neuro-repair drone, taking it from the shielded package and holding it in the palm of her hand.

Unlike the bot, the drone did not look pretty at all. Like a vicious spider, the drone had a series of legs, protruding from a distended, metal body. It looked sharp and dangerous and, were she to think about using it on a human, she would expect it to do more damage than any good. Tentative, worrying, she placed the drone upon the bot’s face and stepped back.

As soon as the drone touched the bot’s face, it came to life. Spindly legs flexed, rising the drone up before it turned in a circle. Before Merci could even react, the drone entered the bot’s mouth, razor-like legs pressing impressions into those soft lips, passing by brilliant white teeth and then down, into the bot’s throat, disappearing from sight.

With little else to do until the drone performed its repairs, Merci decided to perform her usual routine. Removing her work clothes, ignoring the glaring sight in the full-length mirror she had scavenged from the stacks of trash outside, she lifted her single bed up, revealing her shower. She had to stoop to use it, and she didn’t quite fit into the tight space, but she managed. It remained one of her few pleasures. To remove the stink and the filth of the day from skin taut against her extra weight.

All the while, as she allowed the lukewarm, precious water to cascade over her, she made furtive glances toward the bot, but still the drone had not finished its work. Clean now, mostly, she slipped into clothing that few would ever see her wear. Feminine clothing that did not flatter her, or make her look anything less than a gargantuan monster, but she liked them. These, too, she had found in the teeming, tottering stacks of trash, thrown away by people that thought little of the long life the clothes still held.

Food came next. Only nutrition packs, but enough to stop her bulging stomach from complaining. The nutrition packs self-heated and she savoured the warmth as the tasteless paste slipped down her throat. An altogether far more pleasant experience, she could imagine, than having a horrific spider-like robot crawling inside her. She did that. She humanised robots, though the majority would feel insulted that she did.

Bots had secured a modicum of freedom and equality after the Bot Uprising all those years ago. They were still treated as second-class citizens, but, in a world where even humans had next to no value, that meant little. They had grown a culture of their own, apart from humans, yet still within human society. Most bots avoided having skins, preferring to show their technological sides. Bots like the one Merci had found were the exception, not the rule. That bot looked like a cross between a human ideal and an ancient, marble statue from the Earth-That-Was.

Not that Merci knew much about the Earth-That-Was. She had little interest in history, knowing only that, for some reason lost in the mists of time, the Earth had suffered some kind of cataclysm. Yet, even before that, humans had spread out among the stars in great generational ships. One of those ships had arrived here, finding the abandoned, and fully functional, Tether, and had made it their home.

Hundreds of years later and humans had ruined this place as Merci suspected they had ruined their homeworld. Humans were parasites, infesting places and eating away at the resources until nothing remained. That was cynical of her, she knew that, but she saw few redeeming qualities in her fellow humans. She never had. All she remembered were the insults and the pain she had suffered at the hands of humankind. Bots had never treated her so bad.

Using her implant, she tried to reach out to the bot on the table, but felt nothing. Strictly speaking, that was illegal, but Merci had, in her younger, wilder day-cycles, modified her implant as far as she could. That had enabled her to go DreamSnatching, giving her enough money to survive, but also to interact with bots without needing to speak. Over the years, though, she had shifted away from all parts of society, human and bot alike. Her skills had grown as flabby as her body.

Nothing. Still nothing. She could sense the neuro-repair drone inside the bot, but nothing else. Perhaps the bot had become too damaged to repair? If so, she had only managed to fill her tiny home with yet another piece of junk. A pretty, pleasing piece of junk, but junk, nonetheless. At the very least, Merci could know that she could always look at something that could never deteriorate or rot, like pretty much everything else in her tiny home. Including herself.

With little else to do, Merci turned to her bed. Replaced back into position after her shower, the bed was the only comfort she had. Another scavenged object. Here, she could sleep, even if she had to curl up and maintain a night-long balance, her larger body too wide and too long for the space. She wasn’t about to sleep, now, however. She needed to work and replace the money spent on a neuro-repair drone that she wasn’t even certain worked.

Attaching the stabiliser to her forehead, to stop her falling too far into the Thought-Scape, she closed her eyes and tried to relax. Travelling through the dreams and nightmares of others while they slept was a perilous occupation for the unprepared. Some DreamSnatchers could do it without hardly a thought, but Merci wasn’t near as accomplished. Some could drop into the minds of others before they had even entered REM.

The Thought-Scape connected everyone in the Tether, the implants surgically inserted into brains at birth giving access to everything anyone would need. A Tether-wide library of content, from music to books, holo-movies to games. Everything anyone could need to entertain themselves that didn’t involve the physical. The Real. And it recorded everything. Or, rather, it accessed those parts of the human brain that held those memories, those thoughts, those experiences. Blocked off, for legal privacy, some people, like Merci, could break into those memories. Those experiences.

The dreams and nightmares of others were big business. Far more real and visceral than anything created and acted. It was also wildly illegal to access the minds of others. Most rich people had serious security upgrades, Merci could rarely access them. Most normal people had less stringent security protocols and they were the prey for the lower-skilled DreamSnatchers, like Merci. Whenever she broke into a rich person’s security, steal their dreams, their experiences, she didn’t need to work for a long time.

She ghosted through the Thought-Scape, her mind travelling to places and Sectors she had only ever heard of. All about her, she could sense waking minds, people going about their lives oblivious of the virt sneak thief’s mind assessing them and passing them by. Nothing here was real. Merci couldn’t ‘see’ anything, as such, it all relied upon sense. She allowed the tides of Thought-Scape to carry her along, drifting with no purpose. Doing it any other way could bring down the full force of Trace:Sinister and the filth of Trashtown wouldn’t stop them coming her to take her away.

They were there. Connected to the Thought-Scape. Monitoring. Testing. Searching for anomalous  readings. Guilty thoughts. Trace:Sinister were the cops of dreams. She couldn’t stand to fall under their gaze, so she allowed her mind to drift further and further, upward and downward, throughout the Tether, searching for that one, precious, sellable dream or nightmare. The filthy ones made the most money. The depraved ones. If she could find one good one, she could return to the Real and continue watching over the bot.

Something was wrong. Not Trace:Sinister, she hadn’t connected with any sleepers yet. This seemed closer. More ... stark and mechanistic. It probed into her mind, through her implant and Merci almost screamed, but that would prove nothing but pointless here in Thought-Scape. Something in the Real. Something painful, scratching metal fingers against her thoughts, scraping along her senses. She unravelled herself from Thought-Scape, opening her eyes, blinking, trying to reorient herself, only to see something, someone, looming above her, her throat constricted by strong, porcelain-white hands.

“Who are you?” The beautiful bot’s face showed no anger, no surprise, no happiness. Only cold, sterile features as her hand squeezed against Merci’s throat even more tight. “Who do you work for?”

Merci couldn’t answer if she wanted to. From the empty, crowded, blinding-bright blackness of Thought-Scape, she now fell into another darkness, her fingers scrabbling uselessly against the hand at her throat. A hand far stronger than Merci’s military grade arms and Merci couldn’t believe it as unconsciousness took her.