Maintenance

The first time Marguerite meets KJ is at Tedious Jim's loftwarming party. Tedious Jim had just talked his way into an arts grant to build a series of gallery installations out of old car parts, and was celebrating by ditching his old roommates mid-lease and cheating on his girlfriend. A week later, this would prove the final of the indignities Tedious Jim would ever inflict on her; she joined a cybertranscendence cult, hopped on their minibus, and departed for their free love and DIY surgery cranial broadband commune out East. Without her, he never made another decent piece of art, and the gallery eventually sued him to claw back whatever of the grant money hadn't vanished on assorted uppers, downers, and strippers.

Maguerite's first sight of her is of a short, square, angry-looking butch with a penlight and latex gloves. Someone she vaguely knew had gone to a slightly-shady downtown piercer to get subcutaneous RGBs on the cheap, and now one nipple has a glowing halo, and the other is a mess of inflammation backlit by a triad of red error blink codes.

"No," KJ is saying, voice a cold scalpel. "You were too stupid to get this done properly. Not giving you instructions for you to cheap out on again, buying fake aquarium antibiotics online. Either you come to me, or go to hospital. Or lose the nipple to a gnawing pus crater."

"Hey," Marguerite says, buzzed on artisanal gin cocktails and ready to fight someone a little bit, with words at least. "Don't bully Xindy, she doesn't have hospital kind of money."

"I don't charge hospital kind of money," KJ says dimissively. She doesn't even look at Marguerite. "Or she can neglect it more, until her tit rots off."

Xindy, seated on the edge of Tedious Jim's kitchen table clutching her shirt up under her chin, bursts into dramatic tears. KJ visibly dismisses her, too, standing from where she'd been perched on an upended plastic crate between the knees of her now-wailing patient.

"Hey," Marguerite says, in more of a fight-me tone, and KJ turns crystalline-cold eyes on her as she snaps the gloves off, disdainfully flicking them into Tedious Jim's galvanised-bucket-in-lieu-of-a-garbage-can.

"Fighter pilot," KJ says coldly, and Marguerite bridles. She's used to a certain level of smug judgement, from the Extremely Left-Theory-Reading crowd.

"I'm a whore, actually," she shoots back coolly.

"Technician," KJ says. "Don't care what you're doing with the military's hardware dollars." She holds up three fingers' tips and mimes a downward slash, the line of a human vertebral column flanked by the support structures of a military reinforcement armature. "Wrong config for army. No naval pelvic work. No shoulder pod external silhouette. Fighter pilot."

She doesn't say that the fully internal shoulder assemblies mean a starfighter, not the Air Force, kinematic-proprioceptive sensor pods built for microgravity. But she clearly knows.

"Sex worker," Marguerite enunciates.

"I don't care," KJ replies, mockingly copying the crisp diction.

The second time, Marguerite had put out some quiet feelers about finding some reliable maintenance for her synthetics, and showed up at an off-freeway unit that had once housed a gas station. Under the wing of a solar panel array, the sign said KJ's.

She doesn't connect the name to anything until she's in the doorway, with a friend-of-friend's name on her lips and a business card with the address in hand. She's limping, just a little.

She doesn't even get as far as her bone fides. KJ watches her enter, eyes narrow, lips pursed disapprovingly at the hitch in her gait. She kicks the exam chair around on its swivel, points to it. "Up," she says, blunt and aggrieved. Marguerite hasn't learned yet that it's KJ's default tone. She bristles a little, climbing into the chair, but KJ steadies her with a clinically professional hand when she falters.

"How much is left organic?" KJ says.

"Basically nothing below the diaphragm," Marguerite tells her. Not a majority of the torso above, either. She volunteers nothing else as KJ reels out debug cables, and the scan heads for tissue fault topography scanning and ultrasound, tersely naming each item as she brings it over and pausing a little, to allow for objections, before using it.

When she's done with the diagnostics, she stands in front of the chair, hands on her hips. "In a second," she says, in a flat, unimpressed way, "we go through your options and the pros and cons. Your expensive options. First, the lecture. It's free."

Marguerite parts her lips to decline it.

"Not optional," KJ says. "I do not care about your sex work. I do not care if it was or wasn't a client. You are only walking around because of military-grade voluntary pain attenuation. If you were organics down there, you would probably have bled to death. If you were consumer-grade synthetics, probably need pelvis replacement? This damage is ridiculous."

"I specialise," Marguerite says. "Cyborg clients. Do you know how hard it is for ex-military enhanciles to find partners they can responsibly fuck?"

"Nothing responsible about it." KJ hasn't stopped looking her in the eye, or giving her an affronted little frown. It feels, Marguerite realises, less like you let people do that to you for money? judgement, and more like a mechanic scowling in you see what this asshole did to a perfectly good classic car? judgement.

She gives herself withering introspective side-eye, and files the impersonal frown to masturbate about later.

"My client," Marguerite says, and stops and sighs and contemplates that this is more than she'd ever usually reveal about any of them, "was one of the experimental TwinLink Air Force duos in Gulf III. Direct brain-to-brain, pilot and gunner. They got hit by second-gen enhancile malware through an airframe E-War suite zero-day and flew into a hillside. She managed to pull it together enough to bail; the gunner didn't. Front-row merged-subjectivity brainlink to her partner's combat death, while having the mother of all bad trips. She's in therapy. About once a year, she also does acid and — does me."

"High-torque arm replacement," KJ says dourly. "Uncapped joint acceleration, for combat. Custom hands after demob."

"You can tell she has custom hands from the—?" Marguerite's eyes flutter down to herself, back up.

"Damage pattern. Yes. Not reasonable hardware for fisting," KJ tells her sternly. "Not even for you."

"She's actually one of my favourite clients," Marguerite says, and KJ snorts and shrugs.

"If you want the bladder like-for-like," she says, "have to deal with the VA. No civilian supply chain for the parts. Might be able to refurb it, if you want to keep the existing one and not deal with them. Commercial parts are good these days, better interoceptors than your current, but if you insist on that—" and she juts her chin at Marguerite, "you're looking at total replacement each time. Expensive, once a year."

"I'm expensive," Marguerite says, and KJ grunts and nods, one appropriately-priced professional to another.

Marguerite recognises and appreciates good technical care, needs a fair amount of it, and pays up front in cash. She becomes a regular. They chat, to the extent KJ chats to people. Eventually KJ mentions that they live in the same neighbourhood, and Marguerite casually mentions that she regularly does brunch at one of the nicer places over on Clifton, and maybe some morning when Marguerite's not being kept company by her accountant or her sister or any of her professional peers—?

"Not a brunch person," KJ says, and thinks about it. "Or a restaurant person. Or a company person."

"Tuesday?" Marguerite says, careful to present it as a value-neutral fait accompli, not to make it pleading or flirty or anything else that will make KJ close up like a flintily indifferent mollusc that finds your species tiresome.

KJ grunts in a suspicious, grudging way. Marguerite isn't at all sure she'll show up, and elaborately pretends not to notice herself pretending it's fine either way; but KJ shows, which is a huge secret relief, because then Marguerite doesn't have to work out how to pretend she's not sulking about it.

"Are you...seeing KJ," Marguerite's sister asks at one of their own brunches, squinting over an espresso caramel panna cotta.

"Oh, no," Marguerite says dryly. "No, KJ doesn't — like people very much."

"Is it because of your job?"

"She doesn't care about that," Marguerite says. "She just doesn't like people very much. You know you joke about giving up men and dating your vibrator? She wouldn't date a vibrator, because that would make it too much like a person. She'd be all this is libido maintenance tool number one."

"You talk about her a lot," says her sister, so Marguerite points at her dessert.

"If you're not going to eat that, I will," she says.

Marguerite has maybe put too much thought into her entirely fabricated headcanon about Libido Maintenance Tools Numbers One through Seven, their rivalry with Hand-chan, and secret identities as the Hentai Sentai Rangers, sworn to repel the menace of horny humans from the vicinity of KJ's crotch; which is maybe how, when KJ's acting as designated driver back from the booze commiseration afterparty of an interpretive dance recital, she ends up brightly asking what it's like when KJ fucks.

"Don't fuck," KJ says, after looking at her out of the corner of her eye the whole time they're waiting for a red. "Too — people. Hard to get off. Don't like — don't like most things."

Marguerite gnaws her lips nearly bloody in an effort not to push, not to ask more questions, to wait.

"Hump things," KJ says eventually. "Like. Pillows."

"You can hump people," Marguerite absolutely cannot help saying.

"They get shitty about it," KJ says. "I'd be disappointing."

"Who the fuck got shitty about it, I'll fight them," Marguerite says, and it's only in the miserable depths of next morning's hangover that she properly processes, like being hit in the face with a rock, that KJ: A — has done that, B — someone was mean to her about it, and C — KJ hadn't said she was disappointing, or that someone had told her she had been disappointing. Would be.

Marguerite curses her drunk self, her sober self for letting her get drunk, her hangover, and KJ's exes who apparently exist for being shitty and also existing.

"You know," Marguerite says, sitting in the exam chair for a routine maintenance checkup, eyeing the debug probe in KJ's hands, "while you have that hooked up to my spine, you could. Just. Turn off the conscious motor volition to all my synthetics."

"Don't need to," KJ says.

Marguerite shifts in the chair. Squirms. "No, but," she says. "You could. And then you could just. Tip me out of the chair, like a ragdoll."

KJ looks at her.

Marguerite's fingers are digging into her knees. "You could just sort of shove me around down there," she says. "Just — tip lube on me. Slam my face into the floor, grind on the back of my head—"

"If you want to hook up," KJ says quietly, "I can. Get you off," and Marguerite wants to cry.

"No," she says, which is the hardest and most conflicted it's ever been to turn down something like that. "I mean. I'm sure you're — I'm sure you're amazing. But I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to be stupid lady who was horny and got amazing maintenance for it."

KJ frowns at her.

"That's not," Marguerite says, looking at her hands painfully gripping her own legs. "I want to be for you."

"Maintenance?" KJ says.

Marguerite pulls her shoulders in defensively.

"Think we need to talk. Outside the workshop," KJ says. "Not the place for — horny."

"Are you fucking kidding?" Marguerite says. "The inherent eroticism of being disassembled and repaired? This place makes me so wet every time." She pauses. "And you. Well. Mostly you, maybe, honestly?"

"Shut up," KJ says, sounding aggrieved.

"Make me," Marguerite says, and splutters as KJ immediately pushes one large, rough-skinned thumb into her mouth. She wants to say something outraged and incomprehensible around it, but it's hard because her brain is made of melting chocolate.

KJ refuses to look at her. "Listen," she says shortly. "Hard to get off. Takes hours maybe. Frustrating. I'm — I get angry about it. Shout. Cry sometimes. Not fun."

Marguerite moans around her thumb until KJ takes it out, but keeps her hand on Marguerite's face, smearing her own saliva across her lips, her cheeks. "I don't care," she says. "I don't want fun. I want to be — be your object. That you use. Swear at me for not getting you off better. Whatever you want—"

KJ shoves her thumb roughly back into Marguerite's mouth. "Need to finish your checkup," she says angrily.

"Are you sure you two aren't seeing each other," Marguerite's sister says, a couple of weeks later, as the three of them sit down at their usual table.

"No," Marguerite says, at the same time that KJ rolls her eyes and pointedly says, "Eighteen months of brunch dates?"

Her sister looks back and forth between them.

"What," Marguerite says, almost whining. "What. Those weren't dates, because you don't like people and you'd have been scared off!"

"Had to let her think it was her idea," KJ lies condescendingly, to Marguerite's very own sister.