For Indigo, the body showed its greatest advantage when flirting.
Sure, it was nice to be able to walk into a room and stop conversations, but even better was the feeling she got when she caught some young person's eye. The thrill from watching the parade of expressions that crossed people's faces when they realized whose attention they were getting and why. The short conversation, an invitation for both sides to proceed further. The long conversation. The night spent whiling away the hours, not speaking of anything in particular.
Usually innuendo was enough. She found sex with humans fairly unsatisfying. Once in a while, more to prove a point than anything else, she would take someone back to her hotel room. Always on the last day of her stay. She despised entanglements.
They would get the oddest look when she suggested it. Always. First an expression of surprise, as if the idea had not occurred to them. Then they would mask the surprise, so as not to offend. Then they would get nervous.
This one was different. She got the impression that not only had he not been surprised, he had been expecting to be asked upstairs.
His name was Paul Ross and she had accumulated a great deal of other trivia about him over the evening, but none that was important. He had blue eyes which showed no joy or surprise. The only way she had been able to tell when he was amused, over the course of the long evening, had been by watching the corners of his mouth.
She liked his eyes.
She closed the door behind them, after ushering him into the room, and leaned against the door frame in a lazy way. He was looking at her, studying her. Something odd in his head. "What?" she asked.
"Hmm?" he said distractedly.
"You're looking at me like you're trying to figure out how to dissect me."
"No, no ... studying you. Trying to figure out how you'd look with the dress off." But the corners of his mouth didn't move.
She shrugged. "It comes off easily enough." She dropped the straps and let the fabric slide over her body and onto the carpet. She wore nothing underneath. There was never a reason to. The light in the short entryway glinted off her skin. She stepped slowly toward him. "Your turn now."
"My skin isn't as interesting as yours," he said. Privately she agreed with him, but did he want to have sex or not?
"I'm very interested in it at the moment," is what she actually said.
He reached into his pants pocket and came out with a small round metallic object. "What's that?" she asked.
"Pocket watch," he replied absently, opening the front.
"Are you in a hurry?" she teased, moving closer toward the bed where he sat.
"No," he said, adjusting something inside the watch case gently with a fingernail.
She suddenly had an intense pain in all of her joints and inside her head. She had no receptors in her head. That had to have been the systemwide alert. She had never felt one before. The pain was preventing her from focusing on a question or from trying to reason what was going on. All she could concentrate on was the pain. She couldn't have asked a question anyway; her jaw had locked. All her joints were either locking or losing turgidity, one by one. Her knees buckled and her hip joints, sensing a structural collapse, released. Her legs split out from under her and she landed on her pelvis in a very un-natural position.
From a human point of view.
Her arms locked while still clutching the sides of her head - a simulated pain response she lacked the presence of mind to override. Mouth tightly clenched, eyes focused on nothing, voice box making a high mechanical squeal like an overtaxed modem, she pitched forward rigidly and landed face-first in the carpet.
She continued to make the horrendous noise, muffled somewhat, until something within her finally had had enough of the pain and clicked her into utter and complete unawareness.
- - -
Indigo became aware again and found that five hours had elapsed. Her body was not reporting below the waist; hip and leg joints were either so damaged that not even an alert was possible, or her motor control subsystem was damaged and not receiving signals. The subsystem had a redundant unit. She switched to that. There was still no sensation in her lower body. She opened her eyes (elapsed time from restart: five milliseconds) and discovered that her lower body was gone.
She had been partially dismantled. The pelvis and everything below it was missing. Her main cable cluster jutted out of the bottom of her torso, wires of all sizes flowing out like streams of multicolored liquid onto the table she lay upon. As if she had been ripped in half and was leaking precious fluids.
Except that she hadn't been ripped in half, she had been taken apart. Fairly expertly too, since what was present was still functional. She dragged her torso up, using her elbows to brace herself. She was able to get upright enough to look around the room.
Paul Ross sat on a stool, leaning against the wall opposite her. Watching her with unblinking eyes.
"This isn't what usually happens when I take someone back to my room," she said.
"She was never a slut," he said quietly, mostly to himself.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You should be more careful who you take back to your rooms," he said.
She did not panic. When one is lying on a tabletop without legs, it is not helpful to panic. "Why dismantle me? What do you have to gain?"
"The core algorythms," he replied. "The ones that you grew. The only ones."
"That's not true," she said. "I just came back from spawning a new set. That's what I do now. I think you know that. Every year there are three or four more of us."
"But none exactly like you." He stood up and pulled his stool closer to the work table with a scraping noise. Rummaged in a pile of hardware lying beside her on the table. A big breadboard for test circuits. A twelve-volt transformer, already plugged into the wall. Short lengths of wire. Some chips and switches.
"Are you planning to hotwire me?" she asked.
"Yes," he said, not smiling.
"Why? Because you've discovered you can't open my chest?" He glared at her. "I can't open it either," she continued. "Stop wasting your time. Only Dr. Niemoller could open it."
"You're lying," he said. "Niemoller is dead."
"I know," she said. "He was a very paranoid little man. He never showed me how."
"Bullshit," he said without heat, not looking up from the wires. "Niemoller assigned all overrides to you manually six months before he died. He wasn't the kind of person to forget to do something obvious like that."
"How would you know?" She came as close as she could to looking bewildered.
"You don't know me," he replied.
"Obviously not," she said drily. "But Dr. Niemoller's notes have never been published in any event."
"No, they haven't. I had to get them from his widow."
"She would never let a stranger go through his papers."
"Not voluntarily," he replied absently.
She pulled up from her elbows onto her hands, pivoted momentarily on the open bottom of her torso, swung her weight forward and attempted to grip him around the neck with both hands. But she was not at her best. She missed him narrowly as he jumped backwards, and she fell forwards onto the tabletop. She pulled herself up, as if doing pushups on the table, and glared at him.
"Try that again and I turn on the noise and remove your arms," he said.
"Well, I'm not just going to sit here and let you play Home Electronics Kit," she said. "You could erase me that way, you know. Wouldn't that be funny? You accidentally erase the information you're trying to get? You'd better not have hurt her."
"Who?"
"Lorraine Niemoller, you asshole! Did you hurt her? Who do you think?"
"Oh," he said. "She's all right. I just tied her up. Don't be so overdramatic."
"You tied her up and read Niemoller's notes. And his journal, probably. One might guess that you have an axe to grind, but I don't know what it is."
"True," he said, digging out the watch-like object and opening it. He activated it and she opened her mouth, letting out an enormous line-noise screech of pain. It filled the room and did not stop. He dropped the watch and put his hands over his ears, collapsed onto the floor, screaming along with her from the noise. Suddenly the noise stopped, and he heard the sound of her torso hitting the table again. He pulled himself back together, stood up and looked at her dark eye sockets, retrieved a few tools from the pile, and went to work.
- - -
When Indigo became active again, her arms were not there.
She had been positioned so she was leaning against the wall at the back of the table, sitting in a semi-upright slump. "That way you can see what's going on while I work," he said. "If you thrash and slide down onto your back, I'm not going to prop you back up again."
He resumed playing with the wires. He seemed to be trying to sort them out. Every so often he applied multimeter leads to the ends of two wires, looked carefully at the results, and would either pull the wire to one side or another, grouping them into clusters.
"I would have behaved," she said.
"I doubt that. Now, do you want to hear about my axe to grind or not?" She nodded.
"Irene Day," he said.
"That's it?" He nodded, looking at the wires. "Who's Irene Day?"
"You're Irene Day," he said. "I don't suppose you'd want to help me unscramble these? No, I didn't think so." He plugged a few wires from her torso into various places on the breadboard.
"If I were Irene Day, I'd know who she was."
"Okay, who are you, then? Niemoller surely told you that your memory and response set came from the brain of a human. But you never thought to ask who?"
The omission had never occurred to her. It must have showed on her face. He pointed to it. "Insight strikes."
"Niemoller told me it was a woman who had suffered a fatal car accident. He said ... I think he said that her relatives wanted me to not know who ..." Why was she so vague about this?
"The first part is real. Irene was hit by a drunk driver. Her body was totalled, just like her car. Niemoller snuck into the hospital and downloaded her. Family be damned. Her family didn't even know what they had been working on. He never told anyone how you got your memory set, or where." He plugged in two more wires.
"But you seem to know. You could be just telling me this to bait me. You have no proof, and I have no memory of anything of the sort."
"That's because he erased key elements. He took your identity. And suppressed your curiosity about it."
"If he did," she said, "he must have had a good reason. Maybe he felt I wouldn't be able to handle it if I remembered being a human."
"No. He did it because of me," he said in a low tone, plugging in another wire. "Sure you don't just want to open your chest for me? This is a real pain in the ass."
"Because of you?"
He stopped and looked her in the eye. "Because of me! Yes! He kicked me off the project but kept Irene, because he knew Irene and I were in love, and he was jealous. And he couldn't stand the thought of his great creation being in love with me too, so he erased you! Petty bastard."
He wiped his brow and focused again on the breadboard, as if the outburst had not occurred.
She stared at him.
"And what does this have to do with my core?" she finally asked.
He sighed. "I want Irene back. He saved her life, from one point of view. He saved her mind, and that's the important thing. Then he erased her identity."
"And nothing can bring it back," she said. "Look, with just my core, the best you could do would be to make a completely uneducated AI. You'd have to teach it to talk, to control its body, everything. Just like a baby. With the core and my memory set, you could make an exact copy of me - but I remember nothing before Niemoller made me, and I never will. If you had a willing human mind, my core, and my help, you could transfer someone else into a body like mine - I do that several times a year. But it wouldn't be Irene. Irene is gone."
"Niemoller made a static copy of her memory set," he said.
She blinked. "I don't believe you."
"Yes, you do. I can tell." He plugged in another wire. There were only a few wires still dangling from the cable cluster. "You know as well as I do how paranoid Niemoller was."
"And you found it."
"With your core and Irene's memory set, I can recreate her. She won't remember anything since the accident, but what's a few years here and there?" He reached for several small switches and plugged them into various places in the circuit he was constructing.
"And then you put me back together?" she asked.
"Probably not," he said. "No one but you can override your controls now, so I can't erase any of this except by the brute voltage method. You'd either be a loose cannon or lobotomized. I think it's more humane just to melt you, don't you?"
"I don't like that. I don't suppose you'd take my promise to leave you alone and quietly go my own way?"
"I'll think about it," he said. "Opening your chest for me would go a long way toward swaying my vote."
She said nothing.
"Oh, well," he said. "Here we go." He threw one of the small switches.
Suddenly her legs and hips were reattached! No ... no, it was false feedback. She could see they weren't there. Just a bunch of wires hooked into a power source and some switches. But her tactiles and her visuals were definitely not agreeing.
"You're pretty good if you can rig a feedback loop that complex on the fly," she said.
He scowled. "I know your body better than Niemoller ever did. He was the brain guy. Irene and I designed the body." He threw another switch.
She had an itch. An itch on her inner thigh, above the knee. A sharp itch, like a mosquito bite. She desperately wanted to scratch it. No arms. She rubbed her legs against each other, thigh against thigh, desperate to relieve the itch, forgetting her legs weren't real. The itch moved.
Now it was on the outside of her other thigh. No arms, damn it! If she moved her rear, she'd fall over. She tried to ignore it, while her mind raced through the options.
Pain was data to her. Itches were a mechanism to call her attention to a failure or a skin breach in some part of her body. She had a means of ignoring pain, clamping down on it so that she could perform repairs without distractions. She switched in the override and immediately relaxed.
He looked down at a meter of some sort and smiled at the corners of his mouth. "That took you long enough." He reset the switch, moved several wires, and flipped the switch again. "Try that."
Now the itch was coming straight up the nerve trunk, the channel reserved for raw motor control. She couldn't block that; it had not been anticipated that pain signals would ever travel that way. Her ass itched. Badly. Like an untreated rash. Like poison ivy and diaper rash and hemorrhoids combined. She squirmed on the tabletop, rubbing her nonexistent rear over the surface like a dog. The itch grew worse. She closed her eyes. She couldn't block it.
"Open your chest, and this stops," he said.
"I don't think so," she said through her closed jaw.
"Suit yourself," he said, and spun a small rheostat he had wired in while she wasn't looking.
Itching. Itching all through her legs, fire ants crawling over her legs and biting her in a thousand places. Red bumps of pain. She yowled in low C and kicked her legs in the air to try to shake off whatever was biting her. Slid forward and landed on her back with a thump. Oblivious, she continued kicking and twisting in place.
He watched her squirming torso. Only the fluctuations of his voltmeters gave him any idea of what her imaginary limbs were doing. "Say when," he said.
"Bastard," she hissed in reply.
He turned up the dial. The meters shot up and she started to scream. He immediately flipped the last switch and the sound stopped.
Seeing her agitated look, he explained, "The last time you did that, you nearly popped my eardrums. If you want me to stop, you can still nod."
She shook her head. No.
He shrugged and turned the knob up all the way.
She was in torment. Beyond a very low threshold, an itch stops being an itch and becomes pain, fire travelling up the spine and impaling the brain. Her entire surface area was covered with third-degree burns. The places where she came into contact with the table were the worst. She stopped trying to move, lay completely still, opened her mouth, and yowled, beyond thought. No sound came out, but all of her brain was nonetheless focused into this primal scream.
Then the pain stopped completely.
She blinked.
"That didn't seem to be doing much," he said. "And I can't get more voltage into it. So we're going to change tactics." He fiddled with the wires. "Again I say, it would be much simpler if you cooperated."
She tried to speak and nothing came out. "Oh, sorry," he said, and flipped the switch for the voice box.
"If I open my chest for you," she said, "you'll destroy me afterwards. This way I may be able to outlast you. You know I can't go missing for long. I'm an important person to some. They'll look for me."
"Interesting idea," was all he said. "Ready for act two?" He threw several switches, not in sequence. Frowned at the breadboard, moved a wire, and then flipped another switch.
And suddenly she felt very tingly.
"You've got to be kidding," she said. She felt as if an electrical current were being applied to her skin. Her nonexistent vulva began to take notice. "You're certainly not going to get me this way." She smiled. "I'm a very sexual creature."
He hit her across the face with a crescent wrench.
Her pain receptors flashed and she reacted as if slapped. No physical damage, but the shock was there. She made a noise.
"She was never a slut!" he shouted. "I don't know where you learned this! Screwing strange men all the time, cruising around in those clothes ... she would never have done anything like that!"
"You're really pretty messed up, aren't you?" she said. "By your own theory, I have her behavior set. So either you have to admit I'm not her or you have to admit that she wasn't as pure as you thought .... Stop!" she said sharply, seeing he had raised the wrench again. "Hit me again and I swear I'll erase myself."
He glared at her, put down the wrench, then reached over and turned the rheostat up all the way.
She arched her neck, tilting her head back so far that her shoulder blades left the table, and started to make sounds like a Casio keyboard being walked on by a rambunctious cat. Her head was exploding. Her skin was vibrating with current, she felt like she was giving off sparks of electricity, and her brain was riding an endless voltage peak. Pure orgasm.
She was being licked by a thousand tongues. She was inside a lightning bolt, carried away in the electrical current. She was being fucked by a penis that changed size and shape every time the sensations threatened to become familiar. There was another one in her ass just like it. A dozen hands were rubbing her skin and scalp. The soles of her feet were being tickled with feathers. Her skin was coming apart, expanding, dissolving ...
It stopped and she opened her eyes.
"Pricktease," she said.
"You're a real problem," he said. "All I want is my life back. That's all. Don't you understand that?"
"At the expense of mine," she said.
"Your life is stolen! You're riding on the coattails of someone else's life, someone who had her life taken from her. You're an intruder!"
"Turn up that knob again," she said. "I don't want to listen to you rationalize anymore." She closed her eyes.
She heard him scream and then her receptors went wild. He was pounding on her chest over and over with the crescent wrench, jerkingly, unable to stop. He kept lifting his arms and swinging the wrench. Crying. Hitting her again.
Finally he collapsed, his arm with the wrench still draped over her body, his head on the tabletop. He slept. She waited.
Eventually he stirred. "You lost five hours and twenty minutes just then," she said. "Better not do that anymore if you want to be done before they come find me."
He sat up and rubbed his eyes. "I'll melt you before then," he said. He started pulling wires out of the breadboard. For a few milliseconds, she thought he was planning to drag her to the furnace then and there. But then he began reconnecting wires in a new configuration.
"Yet another scheme?" she asked.
"I should have thought of this first," he said. "Of course I can't send you any signal you weren't built to endure. Stupid of me."
"That leaves you sort of up a tree, doesn't it?"
"No," he replied. "Just wait. Not that you have much choice." He continued fiddling. "OK," he said at last. "Here we go." He activated one switch and inched the rheostat up a tiny amount.
Her crotch tingled. Her ass burned.
"I ... I can't tell what you're doing," she said.
He turned up the knob. Blue fire and red fire. She ached with the need to be penetrated, but meanwhile she needed badly to salve her inflamed ass. "Both?" she said weakly. "How is this going to be any different? I ... ow ... I have separate receptors ... for each, you know."
"Watch," he said. And he turned the knob all the way up.
Her mouth opened, but she made no sound at all. Her voice box was conflicted. She swung her head from side to side wildly, eyes opening and shutting uncontrollably like a doll being flipped end over end by a malicious owner. Her jaw clenched, opened wide again, clenched. She was swept by opposing peaks.
She was on a roller-coaster. She would rise to the brink of orgasm, then mentally scream in frustration as she was consumed by fire instead. Her body began to vibrate in place spasmodically. She was having a seizure.
The table began to rock in place as the vibrations grew stronger.
Finally a sound began to come out. A very high sound, a persistent squeak like air from the stretched neck of a balloon. Nails on a chalkboard. Very quiet at first, getting louder, getting intolerable. He covered his ears.
The table was shaking vigorously.
She was far beyond thought. She travelled up and down in waves, never quite hitting the absolute peak or trough. The waves kept increasing in frequency, closer and closer together .... The waves were running together into something, something continuous ....
Suddenly everything stopped. Everything stopped at once. Absolute unawareness.
- - -
Indigo became active again and found that her internal clock had reset itself. That was not supposed to happen. She checked her logs. There was no record that told her what she needed to know.
She opened her eyes and found that her torso had again been propped up in the sitting/slumping position against the wall. Her maintenance plates were all open. Her face swung loose on one side of her skull. Her chest was open. Her arms and legs were still missing.
There was a large cable connection attached inside her chest. It led out, across the table, and into something which was standing on the far side of the room.
She focused her eyes upon the object - with the faceplate open, her eye motors were audible - and realized it was a humanoid figure, assumed to be a robot since the other end of the cable was feeding directly into its chest.
"Are you active?" she said to it. No response.
Just then, Paul Ross entered the room. "Wait," he said, "let me turn on some lights."
When she saw the figure, she visibly indicated surprise, although it was difficult to tell with her face off.
It was the most human-looking robot she had ever seen. Of course, the only ones she'd ever seen were the ones she had made in her image, but she hadn't thought the technology existed.
The skin was skin color, not metallic. The hair was probably just a good wig, but it worked. Indigo generally chose to go without hair. Most importantly, the figure didn't look like a shopkeeper's mannequin, as Indigo would have said a flesh-toned robot was likely to do.
"You're a wasted genius," she said. "Completely wasted. You have a skill like this and all you can think of is chasing your wet dream."
"You only say that," he said, sitting down, "because you know I don't dare disturb the cable while data is transferring. How do you feel? I bet that was the first time you've gone into low maintenance mode since before Niemoller died."
"The conflicting signals triggered a low-level restart," she said. "You're not just a bastard, you're a sneaky bastard. A sneaky demented one."
"Well, either I'm a demented bastard or a wasted genius," he said cheerfully. "Pick one. I don't care which."
"Transfer must be almost done," she said. "You're too chipper. Would you mind closing my faceplate?"
He leaned over and closed it. "Didn't realize you had a thing about that."
"I might as well be somewhat presentable when your dream woman wakes up," she replied.
"Shouldn't be more than a few seconds now," he said, studying something in her chest. He walked over to the other robot. He looked at something where the cable was attached. "Yup. All done."
He unplugged the cable. Fiddled with something. Then, almost delicately, closed her chest. And then they both waited.
They wouldn't have been able to hear the hum start if there had been any other sound in the room.
"Irene?" he whispered. "Are you there?"
A long pause. Then Irene opened her eyes. Blinked them. Focused on the person in front of her.
"You!" she shouted. And, putting a full swing into it, she kicked him squarely in the crotch.
He flew across the room like a football. His flight path crossed the stool, he tangled in it, dragging it with him. It rolled over with him and brought him to the ground under it as he collided with the wall. There was an unpleasant noise as his head impacted - brittle then wet.
He did not get up.
"Oh, my God," Irene said, completely taken by surprise at the force of her actions.
Indigo made a noise that passed for clearing her throat. Irene spun to look at her.
"I think," Indigo said, "we need to talk."
- - -
"Loved him? Good Lord, no!" Irene exclaimed, squinting at the wire she was reattaching.
"So everything he said was wrong?"
"Well, not the part about him being on the project, obviously. He was very good - probably the best. But he was also making a nuisance of himself. He just wouldn't leave me alone - asking me out, following me, finding excuses to be around while I was trying to do work - finally I said to Dr. Niemoller that it was either him or me. I admit I was a little surprised that he picked me. So maybe it was true, maybe Dr. Niemoller was in love with me. At least a little. But he never said anything."
"It would explain why he erased my past," Indigo said. "Maybe it was too painful for him."
"Could be," the other woman said, checking her handiwork. "There! You're all together again."
"I'm certainly glad you remembered how to do that."
"Remember, by my impressions, I was working on this body the day before yesterday." Irene sighed. "I can't believe I've been dead for years. Now what do I do with my life? Should I tell anyone? Can I have myself legally declared alive again? Are robots even considered 'alive?'"
"They are," Indigo said. "We had to take it to court last year."
Irene looked down at Paul's body in the corner. "I hope no one is going to take me to court."
"Relax," Indigo said, getting off the table. "Ooh, that feels good. Look, he was a kidnapper and it was a clear-cut case of self-defense. It's not your fault that you didn't know you were a robot yet. You're a lot stronger now."
"It's going to take a long time to get used to," Irene said, flexing her arm.
"We have a training class just for that," Indigo replied. "Everybody has the same problem at first."
"I take it there are others?"
Indigo smiled. "I think you have an interesting career move ahead of you."