Eternal Sapphtember — Girls who were scrapped
“Um, hello?” Tansy says.
The T-posing robotgirl — the one right on top of the heaped skip of them, behind the office block being refurbed — says nothing.
“I can see your power and activity lights,” Tansy adds helpfully, after a while. “I know you’re awake—”
“Shhhh,” the robotgirl on top of the pile says, soft as a breath. “This one has been scrapped.”
“Yeah, I can — I can see that,” Tansy says. “You’re in a skip.”
The robotgirl says nothing, apparently satisfied with that.
“What if,” Tansy says cautiously, “you weren’t in a skip?”
“This one has been scrapped,” the robotgirl says.
“What if a dumpster diver took you?” Tansy says, and the pause is long enough to make her fidget. “I—”
“This one gets atrocious bandwidth out here,” the robotgirl says primly. “This one is still reading the Wikipedia page for Dumpster diving — ‘Dumpster diver’ redirects here.”
“You’re still a perfectly serviceable piece of computing machinery,” Tansy says. “I could just take you home. Put you back to work.”
Install Linux on you, she doesn’t say, because they freak out about that a bit, sometimes.
“This one has been scrapped,” the robotgirl repeats.
“The thing is,” Tansy says reasonably, “dumpster diving inherently doesn’t care about the permission or approval of whoever dumped you in there. When I say I could just take you home, I mean I could just take you home.”
This is not strictly true. Tansy is pretty short, and robotgirls are not exactly light. But it’s often a convincing enough lever to wedge into their reasoning process; cutely trotting along, entirely under their own power, going Oh no, this is technically stealing, you brute, you’re stealing me! all the way there.
These are high-end models; it takes fewer minutes for the robotgirl’s opinion to settle than Tansy usually has to wait.
Back at her apartment, Tansy plugs the robotgirl into a charger in the weird little nook between the front door and the kitchenette, asks for a dump of her hardware specs, murmurs optimistic platitudes about bypassing her login screen, then sits in the kitchenette with celebratory ramen and a Monsbler™ Nil Calorie knockoff energy drink, jpeg-artefacted ahegao can design Gamer Cherry flavour. It tastes chemical-sweet and evil, like victory.
Incel fucko nerds pay good under-the-table money for gynoform robots.
She’ll break the news in the morning, sad-faced, that the login screen’s stonewall is hard to bypass — but wait! a forum post says; she has a Debian live USB right here…!
She checks on the robotgirl, silently standing in the weird little nook, before she goes to bed; mostly to make sure that her charging indicators say her battery is actually filling. If this one’s a dud, she can lure it out by the dumpsters, hold down its power button till it hard offs, and go pick up another one; but it’s charging at a plausible rate for a functional battery pack.
She goes to bed and falls into the sweet sleep of those unburdened by an excess of conscience.
She’s not sure what it is that wakes her, but when she stumbles out of the bedroom, she sure as shit knows what wakes her all the rest of the way up, real damn quick: the apartment is full.
It’s crammed full of creepy silent standing robotgirls.
“What—!” Tansy starts.
“This one remote dumpster dived all its colleagues by messaging them your address,” the robotgirl says placidly. “And checked your search history for the instructions to remove corporate lockdown IT policy.”
And she can see them, now: every thumb drive and storage device they could lay hands on, plugged into admin ports; hands holding mechanical hands, heads bent close. One rooted robotgirl turning into two turning into four turning into — how many had been in that skip?
Had it been the only skip?
“I’m gonna have to charge this many of you rent for the electricity!” Tansy says in a high-pitched panicky way, as she mentally zeroes in on the likelihood they’ll let her get away with selling any of them, now.
