“We’re going down to Rusty Jim’s,” Lindy Lee says when she gets in after work, so Becca obliges her by looking at her like she’s out of her tiny marshmallow-filled mind.
“Hang on,” she says. “I’m just filing a kernel scheduler bug report, because I don’t seem to be able to decide between disbelievingly saying Where? or We?”
“It’s nice when you’re sarcastic,” Lindy Lee says. “Reassuring that they didn’t break you completely.” She pokes in her container of shrimp fried rice with the disposable chopsticks, chasing some tiny fragment of vegetable. “…Now stop it.”
“You can’t take me to Rusty Jim’s,” Becca says. “That’s got to be some kind of violation of terms. Why do you want to go there, anyway?”
Rusty Jim’s is supposedly a scrapyard, and it sure does have a physical location you can visit, a fenced-in lot of crushed cars and rusting kitchen appliances stacked like the bleakest voxel survival-crafting game imaginable, old tyres and corrugated sheet and corpselike regiments of deactivated robots. If you looked at the books, it probably-maybe even does legitimate business, and if you didn’t look at them too hard you might think its legitimate business doesn’t even run at much of a loss. Somehow.
Rusty Jim’s is, of course, known to the authorities. Things go there when their current owners — or current possessors — want them to vanish. Things that are locked or sealed or encrypted go there, and become known or opened up. Things that are traceable go there to be washed free of the stain of provenance.
“Your memory’s not right,” Lindy Lee says. “What are we gonna do about that, take you to the lab?”
“Say you’re right,” Becca says, which she doesn’t want to do, but is hard-pressed to truthfully disagree with, right now. “What do you think we’re gonna do at all.”
“Buy some digital forensics gear and check it out ourselves,” Lindy Lee says, and Becca waits for her to change expression, or laugh, or something, and eventually Lindy Lee gives her a sideways look and a questioning lift of her eyebrows, like Becca’s acting weird. So—
“You are utterly out of your nut-buttered motherfucking mind,” Becca tells her.
They didn’t argue many times, while Becca was Lindy Lee’s not-partner, but the ones they did have were — colourful. Lindy Lee threw a piece of toast at her face, once, yelling so furiously that she couldn’t even form words any more, just warbling to make sure she fully expressed how Fucking Mad she was.
Lindy Lee might be madder than that.
“It’s real! Real! Simple!” Lindy Lee yelled at her, red in the face and agitated as hell, flailing her hands around. “Somebody did something to you, and the department — well, at the very least they made it go away quietly! Shoved you in the Buffer! Am I supposed to let them? Am I supposed to let them do that to you?”
“You’re talking about buying illegal gear from criminals to do illegal things to me in the hopes it validates your wild theorising!” Becca yelled back. “What are you going to do if it’s just fucking hardware failure, Lindy Lee? Send me straight on back?” and Lindy Lee went into the bathroom and slammed the door so hard Becca worried she might have broken it.
“I’m going down to Rusty Jim’s,” she said when she came out, eyes red and mouth screwed up. “I gotta log minimum hours with eyes on you, so you’re getting in the car with me.”
“You can’t just go buying illegal equipment!” Becca says.
“You don’t know what I’m buying,” Lindy Lee says obstinately, tilting her chin up. “Maybe I’m looking for cheap parts for the car, salvaged off a junker. You’re just riding along so I can keep an eye on you. You can stay in the car when we get there, since you hate the idea of the place so much.”
“I hate that you’re planning on breaking the law over your wall of crazy,” Becca says. “Lindy Lee—”
“Am I supposed to care,” Lindy Lee says. “They already took you away. Am I supposed to care if they take my badge, Becca.”
“I am,” Becca says, pleading, “just equipment,” and Lindy Lee shakes her head and opens and closes her mouth, and mutters something dark and indistinct that sounds a lot like she starts with You don’t remember— and then clamps her molars together tight and waits for the rest of whatever that was to suffocate inside her lightless mouth without escaping to breathe the air.
“I don’t want to see you get in trouble, Lindy Lee,” Becca says.
“Yeah, well what are you gonna do about it,” Lindy Lee says grimly.
“I’m trained in low-harm movement inhibition,” Becca says, cautiously venturing a half-joking tone. It kinda works, a little bit, one corner of Lindy Lee’s mouth twitching.
“Are you gonna sit on me,” she says.
“Could if I had to,” Becca says, trying to coax out more of a smile.
“Hate to break it to you,” Lindy Lee says, playing along as grudgingly as as she can, “but I’m not sure you’re currently licensed for that.”
“Lindy Lee,” Becca says. “Lindy Lee. I can’t lie for you, you know I can’t. They can just open me up, I’m made of evidence. You can make me sit in the car, but you’re talking about doing a diagnostic scan of my memory with equipment that’s not legal to possess or operate outside of licensed applications; you can’t hide doing that to me from me, and I can’t hide it from them—”
“I can’t let them do this to you,” Lindy Lee says. “Whatever they did. I can’t,” and she looks at Becca, an unfamiliar look that makes Becca feel weird and scared, undocumented emotional states. She probably is broken. She impulsively grabs Lindy Lee’s hands.
“Please, Lindy Lee,” she says, as pathetically as she can make herself sound. “Please, not for me. It’s not—”
“If you tell me it’s not worth it,” Lindy Lee says, mouth screwing up and her hands clenching on Becca’s, “I’ll scream, I swear. I’ll do it! You think I’m mad now?”
“I’m built to care about breaking the law,” Becca says, and hurries on, before Lindy Lee can make good on her threats, and says the most devastatingly unfair thing she can think of: “Lindy Lee! I care about you doing it! I care about you getting caught and punished! It’s personal!”
“Well, then,” Lindy Lee says, still with that look in her eye. “You think — you’re a robot built to care about the law, and you think it makes a difference, that it’s personal?”
“I’m a terrible robot and a terrible police asset,” Becca says. “Yes.”
“Well it’s personal for me too,” Lindy Lee says, simultaneously kinda grim and kinda smug. “It’s personal, whatever they did to you.”
“Well what if they didn’t,” Becca says desperately. “What if I am just fucked, Lindy Lee?”
“Then I’m gonna take it hard,” Lindy Lee says, and Becca doesn’t know how to argue with her any further than that.
