Technician

“Please locate yourself appropriately within the maintenance procedure fittings,” the technician says coolly, and Raleigh feels anxious pinprick bursts of phantom sensation under her polymer skin.

“Are you — are you—” she stammers. “Will this hurt?”

The technician looks up from her clipboard and purses her lips. “Please locate yourself appropriately within the maintenance procedure fittings,” she repeats, with appreciably increased chilliness, and Raleigh clambers hurriedly — awkward with how hurried she is ­— into the fittings: half bucket seat, half industrial clamp. “I’m compliant,” she says, cringing at the fawning sound of her own voice. “I’m not — I just wanted to know if it’ll hurt.”

The technician picks up a quarter-inch-thick galvanised restraining bracket, and slots it into the fitting to Raleigh’s left side. “Align your leg, please,” she says.

Raleigh aligns her leg; the technician slams the bracket home with heel of her hand. Raleigh resists the urge to flex against it, to test the restraint. It won’t budge, that’s the point of it; and straining against it will seem noncompliant.

“Align your leg, please,” the technician says on her right side, and Raleigh aligns her other leg. “Align your arm, please,” and Raleigh crooks her elbow back in the weird position that aligns the slot in her arm with the fittings. “Align your arm, please.” Slamming each of the brackets home. “Align your head, please.” A precision steel rod, with a crossbar at the tip and a flange an inch or so back, a T-handle the other end. It slots through the fitting where her head leans back on it, into the keyhole at the base of her skull, turns. Locks her down.

“Do you understand today’s procedure,” the technician says.

“I,” Raleigh stammers. “I don’t know if it’ll hurt. Can you tell me if it’ll hurt?”

“Today’s procedure is decomissioning,” the technician says, with cold, contemptuous impatience, and reaches for the latches that hold Raleigh’s breastplate in place, one at each shoulder.

The breastplate latches, notoriously, are made of cheap plastic. They get brittle, fracture and jam. Raleigh has been handling them with patient delicacy for years past her end of warranty.

Her plate jams. The technician makes a noise of disgust, reaches past her for the tray of tools. Brings a prybar back into Raleigh’s field of vision.

“Wait,” Raleigh croaks in terror, and the technician slides the end of the prybar into her chest cavity through the gap, braces on her chassis, and wrenches hard. Brittle plastic shatters; her breastplate folds like the saddest origami, held together only by juddering breastforms and the polymer skin layer.

The technician pulls the remains free and drops it to the floor, so much rubbish.

Raleigh keens.

“You are End Of Life,” the technician says, brutally slow and cold. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Raleigh sobs in shame and fear. She’s been so careful, so careful with her discontinued parts, for years. So much rubbish.

She continues to sob while the technician presses a diagnostic probe to various test points inside her and marks down final values on the EOL data survey form. While the technician slides the precision screwdriver into the subtle, angled holes beneath her ears, turns the captive screws a quarter-turn, hinges her scalp open.

The head fittings had to be redesigned for the series after Raleigh’s, because improvements in the fibre tech meant they could furnish them with maintainable long hair. Raleigh’s series artfully worked around the materials limitations with what internet forums affectionately refer to as the Model 1 Tomboy hairstyle.

The technician uses a scalp-close grip on her hair to pull the panel up until the friction lock engages, holding her head open.

It’s not where she keeps all of her brain, but a lot of the design reasoning is inherited from the human frame she’s designed to resemble: proximity to the sensory organs cuts transmission lag. Specialised systems do a lot of audiovisual preprocessing at head level before piping comparatively low-volume high-level summary data down the spine to her core processor blade. And the top of the spine, inside the skull cavity, is an ideal place for the high-bandwidth spine bus debug interface to everything.

The technician carefully seats the pogo-pin porcupine, screws it into place on top of Raleigh’s spinal column with the four long corner screws with the knurled thumbscrew ends. Presses the debug probe onto one of the broken-out pads.

Raleigh yelps as a knife-fine line of sensation, utterly cold and without physical basis, shoots up the skin of her leg.

“I enjoy this,” the technician says clinically. “Taking scared little robots apart and shutting them off, a little at a time.”

She moves the probe, which Raleigh dimly thinks she can’t be using correctly, must have turned it off, must be using the metal tip as nothing but a conductor, just big enough to bridge pairs of pads that have no business connecting—

Phantom sword-slashes of burning cold at random angles across her legs, arms, torso as the probe tip runs across debug pads like harp strings. Raleigh wails.

“You’re landfill now,” the technician says. “I could keep just enough of you to still feel things, clamped to a benchtop in here. Hook up a little piezo buzzer for you to scream through sometimes, if you’re good.”

Raleigh wails again.

“A little like that,” the technician says. She leans past Raleigh to put the probe down, blouse brushing her cheek. Raleigh can smell her shampoo, citrusy.

The technician comes back with a six-inch jumper wire, stiff and plastic-coated, with exposed ends, for patching and improvising. She gets a little closer, one wire end pinched and protruding between clever fingers on either hand. Straddles one of Raleigh’s knees, to get close enough to work with both hands.

Something in Raleigh’s skull sparks. Not metaphorically. She jolts, without conscious intent; her leg spasms as hard as her motors will go.

There’s a sickening metallic crack.

“Fuck,” Raleigh says in panic, trying to look down.

(“Oops!” her girlfriend says, leaning back.

(“That’s supposed to be a genuine service-centre restraining bracket!”

(“It was,” Raleigh’s girlfriend says, giggling with the aftermath of an adrenaline shock. “Or that’s what the eBay listing said. It was supposed to be ex-service centre stock, maybe it’s just been through too many load cycles and sheared—”

(“I could have broken your pelvis,” Raleigh says.

(“Don’t be dramatic.” Her girlfriend cradles her face in her hands for a second. “I’m fine. But if you’re worried about it—”

(“I am.”

(“—Then I’ve got a surprise.”

(Raleigh glances down as far as she can, in the direction of her unexpectedly gaping chest. “Another one?”

(“I have a mint-in-box replacement for that,” her girlfriend says matter-of-factly, carefully extracting the right-hand restraining bracket, and the pieces of the left. “But yeah, some Korean service centre manuals leaked last year, and someone on the forums has been trying to translate them. Check this out,” she says, picking the probe back up—)

A beep sounds inside Raleigh’s hearing under the probe’s unfelt touch. A visual indicator overlays the corner of her vision.

“PTM?” Raleigh says unsteadily.

“Pose Training Mode,” the technician says, sounding warmed to her…work. “It’s not motor shutoff; it’s pure conscious control shutoff. Your legs are currently only responding to haptic suggestions, for pose training by debug and bootstrapping technicians.”

“Pose training?”

The technician puts the toe of her sensible shoe under Raleigh’s toes and applies the barest upward pressure. Raleigh moves with it, involuntary, as responsive as if she’s light as a feather, wafting ahead of the gesture, stopping the moment the pressure relents; toes lifted, foot angled upward at the ankle, calf tensed just at the point of following inverse-kinematically.

“Pose training,” the technician says, and sharply kicks Raleigh’s legs apart at the ankles, slammed all the way to their internal rubber stops and actively arrested there, braking humming, without so much as a bounce.

Raleigh makes a high and uncontrolled noise through her clenched teeth.

“Did you prefer the brackets?” the technician says mockingly, and Raleigh whimpers, and then, “did you prefer the brackets, please? It’s for our EOL data survey records—”

“I don’t know,” Raleigh whimpers.

The technician walks away across the room. Comes back wheeling a sturdy metal tool trolley. It’s had an industrial motorised jack bolted to the top, pointing horizontally, an inexorable mechanical j’accuse. It’s pointed — it’s pointed somewhere vulnerable.

It’s got a big, bulged, scary-looking sex toy attached to the business end.

Robots like Raleigh have some weird stuff in the recesses of their minds. No more consciously accessible than a human’s recesses of weird stuff, but just as powerful, and of course so strongly modelled on human ones that there are inevitable hangups. Raleigh feels very, very fortunate she’s never had a Registered User, because there’s — well, some of the weird stuff down in the recesses is there on purpose, and it’s all very corporate-American-puritan simultaneous Shalt Not and SEX! SEX! SEX! User registration may look like a warranty-card first-run tickbox to the human involved, but to the robots there’s a powerful layer of Marriage Is Between One Man And One Robot Till Death or Decomissioning Do You Part conditioning fuckery.

Secondhand registered robots do poorly, psychologically speaking.

Also, there’s some stuff in there, some weird possibly-unintentional, possibly-registration-incentive stuff about Saving Yourself Until Marriage which makes Raleigh freak out about penetration.

(“Are you sure, Ray?” her girlfriend had said when they first started negotiating this, which was a while back, and plenty of times since. “Because you’ve had meltdowns about one finger....”

(“Scared to death,” Raleigh told her honestly. “But. That’s how kink works sometimes?”)

“Am I going to ruin you for your husband, little robot girl?” the technician says. “Am I going to ruin you?”

“Yes,” Raleigh whimpers.

“No,” the technician says, meanly. “Because you’re already scrap, dumpster doll,” and reaches past her, coming back with a bottle of lube.

Raleigh starts sobbing a little at the humiliating relief she feels that it’s people lube, sex lube, not — like, graphite powder bicycle lube or something terrible and dehumanising like that, and some slow, deep part of her circles that reaction like a curious fish and thinks interesting and takes notes for next time.

(Next time?) some slightly-less-deep part asks hysterically, as Raleigh watches the technician’s hand slick the silicone. Squirt more lube onto her fingers. Reach for oh not for the toy—

“Trying to put me out of a job?” the technician mocks, fingertips just brushing, and Raleigh opens her mouth, and then she makes some crushingly atavistic atonal electronic modem-squeal of a noise with two sudden fingers inside, and fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

She’s. Ready. Some terrible part of her, maybe, some deep and awful corporate-Evangelical memeplex unlocking to go yes this is what you’re for. Maybe. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much, if she’s a noncompliant out-of-warranty unregistered queer android who fucks her girlfriend and likes it.

She hopes so, in a distant crazed way. And then the technician is slipping out of her, kicking the trolley right up to slam into the front of the procedure fittings, so that the tip of the toy quivers just barely touching, and then painstakingly gathering up the ratchet strap looped round the back of the maintenance cradle, winding it around the trolley’s back, and ratcheting. With eye contact.

Raleigh is making glitchy echolalic sobbing noises, staring down at the heavy-duty industrial motor and the worm gear it drives, the cog that will turn oh-so-slowly to drive the jack a precision-engineered fraction of a millimetre per second, implacable as time.

The technician kicks the power switch nonchalantly, a grubby illuminating rocker flickeringly lit by some ancient filament bulb. Holds the tip carefully aligned for an eternal minute, maybe two, Raleigh is too fucked up to keep any kind of track. Whines when the technician lets go and leaves it to its own slickly burrowing devices; whimpers when she wipes her hands clean on a rag, whistling unconcernedly, not even watching; sobs when she comes back and straddles the endless glacial trundle of the jack, cups Raleigh’s face gently in her hands, and demands, “Eye contact.”

“Nooooooo,” Raleigh says brokenly.

“Yes,” the technician says, just the right shade of chilly, and Raleigh, suffering, falls endlessly into her eyes.

It turns out that even with her legs in PTM, the leg brackets served a purpose; they denied her the leverage to arch, to roll her hips. Twenty minutes in, she clenches, heaves, and with the second awful noise of the evening, tears the end right off the dildo.

(“Oh my god,” Raleigh’s girlfriend says, almost crying from holding back laughter, as she undoes the ratchet strap and hauls off the trolley. “Oh, babe, I’m so sorry, I’ve fucked this entire scene up for you.”

(“No,” Raleigh says deliriously, “no you haven’t—”)

“Well, that’s going to have to come out,” the technician says, looking down at Raleigh’s lube-puddled crotch. The silicone stump on the now-silent machine stands forlorn.

“Oh,” Raleigh says, and she looks at the technician’s evil cold grin and the theatrical flex of her fingers. “Oh.”

“Don’t worry,” the technician says. “If I think I’m risking my hands, I’m pretty sure there’s a PTM switch for those muscles, too—”

“Oh fuck,” Raleigh says, high-pitched and glitchy.