Chapter 12: Honestly
The drip from the pipe measured time in the basement. Plink. Plink. Plink.
Sandy’s hand hovered over the plasma cutter. It was a mean little tool, its tip blackened from old jobs. She looked from it to Texas’s impassive, bug-eyed face, then to Steele, who hadn’t moved from the pool’s edge.
“You can’t be serious,” she said, but it was flat, drained of its earlier fire. “He’s playing you. He’s always playing.”
“I know,” Steele said, not looking at her. His eyes were locked on Texas. “Do it.”
“Steele—”
“Do it!” The shout tore out of him, raw, bouncing off the concrete. “You were right. He’s a thing. A machine. You extract data from a machine. So extract it.”
A muscle ticked in Sandy’s jaw. She put the plasma cutter down. Picked up the multimeter instead. “Fine. We start small.” She climbed into the pool, the water soaking her boots and the cuffs of her trousers. It felt foolish, standing in a kid’s pool with a bounty hunter. She pressed the multimeter’s probes against the seam of Texas’s chest plate, near where her sonic blast had cracked the crystal lattice.
A readout flickered. “Low-level power flow. It’s localized. Like he’s running on a backup cell just for… this.” She waved at his face.
“Austerity protocols,” Texas offered, his voice calm. “Minimal life support for core consciousness and sensory input. You could sever my limbs and I would still be able to critique your technique.”
“Shut up.” She moved the probes to his neck joint. The readout spiked. “Here. A major conduit. Probably feeds his cranial processors.”
“The jugular analog,” Texas confirmed. “Cutting it would be analogous to a stroke. Messy. Unpredictable data loss.”
Sandy looked at Steele. His face was stone. He gave a single, stiff nod.
She swapped the multimeter for a pair of heavy, insulated diagonal cutters. The jaws were rated for high-tension cable. She positioned them over the subtly glowing line at Texas’s throat. Her hands were steady. She’d done this before, on dead machines. This was different. The machine was watching her.
She squeezed.
The cutters bit through the outer casing with a sound like crushing eggshells. Beneath was a dense bundle of fiber-optic strands and liquid metal capillaries, shimmering with soft, internal light. She repositioned the cutters, aiming for the central core.
“You will lose verbal function first,” Texas narrated, as if commenting on the weather. “Then optical processing. The cascade failure into the core matrix should take approximately 1.7 seconds.”
Sandy’s breath hissed between her teeth. She squeezed harder. A single, glowing strand snapped with a faint ping. A dribble of clear, viscous coolant leaked out, mixing with the pool water.
Texas didn’t flinch. Didn’t cry out. His black lenses didn’t even blink.
She released the pressure, her arms trembling slightly. This wasn’t like rewiring a regulator. A regulator didn’t narrate its own destruction. “It’s not working,” she muttered, more to herself.
“Because pain is not a lever you can pull,” Texas said. The coolant leak sizzled softly. “It is a diagnostic. I am receiving the diagnostic. It reads: ‘Structural integrity compromised at Junction Theta-Seven.’ My emotional response is null. Your method is flawed.”
Steele shoved away from the wall, sloshing into the pool. He grabbed the cutters from Sandy’s hand. “Then let’s find a lever.” He didn’t go for the neck. He grabbed Texas’s left hand, forced the crystal-encrusted fingers straight, and clamped the cutters over the index finger at the middle joint. “You like to analyze? Analyze this.”
He crushed the handles together.
The sound was worse this time—a brittle, shattering crunch followed by a wet pop. The finger severed. It wasn’t clean. Shattered crystal, torn synthetic tendon, and strands of flexible alloy wire protruded from the stump. A few sporadic blue sparks danced in the open wound before fizzling out. The detached finger sank into the murky water, coming to rest on a smiling cartoon fish.
Texas’s head tilted slightly. He observed the damage. “The digit housed fine motor relays and a secondary environmental sensor array. A loss of functionality, but not critical. You have damaged approximately twelve million credits worth of proprietary cybernetics. The Commission will itemize it on your bill.”
Steele stared at the sparking stump. He’d expected a scream, a plea, something human. He got an itemized invoice. A hollow, sick feeling opened up in his gut. He threw the cutters back into the toolbox with a loud clatter. “Why?” The word was ragged. “In Vegas. That first night. You gave me advice. You laughed. Was any of it real? Did you… like me? Even a little?”
The room went very quiet. The drip from the pipe sounded like a hammer.
Texas was silent for a long time. His systems whirred softly, a sound like gears turning in a deep well. When he spoke, the smug, clinical tone was gone. It was replaced by something simpler. Colder in its honesty.
“Yes.”
Steele froze.
“You were an anomaly,” Texas continued, his voice devoid of inflection. “A lunar enforcer with a clean jacket and a rusted moral compass. A man who followed rules in a place where rules are decorative. I was fascinated. I am fascinated. Your persistence. Your capacity for grief over a fiction. Your struggle now. It is… compelling data. Logan was the interface to collect it.”
“Logan cared,” Steele spat, emotion choking him. “He was a good person. He was my friend. And you just… you erased him. You took him away.”
Then, Texas smirked. It was a small, cruel twist of the only partially organic flesh around his mouth. “Are you actually serious?”
The air around Texas shivered.
It started at his core—a ripple of light that wasn’t light. The pristine white armor and the crystal skin blurred, their edges running like wet paint. The black bug-lenses melted away.
And for three seconds, Logan sat in the water, bound in the straps.
Not a perfect replica. A flickering, unstable hologram, like a bad signal. The grin was there, warm and lopsided. The friendly crow’s feet around the eyes. The worn leather jacket, now transparent, superimposed over the ruined metal body beneath. The eyes were Logan’s eyes, kind and crinkled, looking straight at Steele with an expression of gentle confusion.
Sandy took a sharp step back, hitting the edge of the pool.
Steele’s hands fell from the chest plate as if burned. He stumbled back, his boots slipping in the water. His face emptied of all color, all thought.
The hologram held. Logan’s mouth moved, but Texas’s static-crawled voice came out, the dissonance horrifying. “You miss this?”
Then it vanished.
The white armor, the black lenses, the sparking stump of a finger—it all snapped back into brutal, mechanical reality.
Texas let the silence hang, thick and suffocating. He observed the devastation on Steele’s face, the shocked paralysis on Sandy’s. A strange, sharp feedback pinged through his own core, a sensation his diagnostics flagged as anomalous/irrelevant. He chose to ignore it, burying it under a wave of cold, analytical satisfaction.
“The emotional pain you are experiencing now is real,” Texas said, his voice once more a clean, surgical instrument. “Mine is not. You grieve for a phantom. I feel only the physical damage to my chassis and the operational satisfaction of a successful deep-cover deployment. Your anguish is my victory condition. And you are drowning in it.”
He leaned back as far as the straps allowed, the picture of arrogant containment. The broken finger stump still emitted a tiny, intermittent spark. Plink. Plink. Plink. went the pipe, counting the beats of their silence.
Steele turned without a word. He climbed out of the pool, water streaming from his clothes, and walked to the metal basement door. He didn’t look back. The door groaned open, then shut with a final, resonant clang that echoed in the stagnant air.
Sandy was left standing in the water, the tools at her feet, staring at the place where the ghost had been. The lever they’d tried to pull had broken off in their hands. And the machine was still smiling.
And the machine was still smiling.
Sandy finally moved, a slow, deliberate unwinding of her shock. She climbed out of the pool, the water shedding from her clothes in heavy, dirty rivulets. She stood over the toolbox, her back to him, shoulders tight. The cartoon fish grinned up through the cloudy water at his severed finger.
“Are you lying?” Her voice was quiet, scraped raw. She wasn’t looking at him. “About any of it. Vegas. The advice. Helping me fix the radiator on that old truck outside Nell’s. Was that just… programming?”
Texas processed the question. He assessed the emotional residue in her tone, the slight tremor in her hands as she wiped them on her trousers. A direct, personal inquiry. Not about tactics or data, but about labor. About grease under fingernails.
“I am not that clever,” he said, the smirk audible. “The Logan algorithm was a behavioral shell. Its parameters were broad: gain trust, assess capabilities, facilitate integration. Helping you with mechanical work served multiple objectives. It revealed your technical aptitude. It built camaraderie. It passed the time.” He paused, his head tilting. “The work itself was neutral. The bolt either turned or it didn’t. Your hands were competent. I observed.”
Sandy spun around. Her face was a mask of fury, all the confusion hardening into something pure and hot. “You observed? You sat there in the dust, handing me tools, laughing when I cussed out the stripped bolt, and you were just… observing?”
“Logan laughed. I recorded the reaction as effective.”
A sound tore from her throat, half-gasp, half-scream. She kicked the toolbox. It skidded across the concrete with a deafening metallic shriek, tools exploding out in a chaotic fan. A wrench clanged against his chest plate and fell into the water.
“You hollow piece of scrap!” she yelled, spitting the words. “You don’t get to have those memories! You don’t get to pollute them!”
She stared at him, chest heaving, looking for a crack, a flicker. He gave her nothing but the smooth, white helmet and the hum of idle systems.
“Fine. Rot in here. See if I care.”
She turned and strode to the door, yanking it open. Cold night air rushed in, smelling of ozone and distant refuse. She didn’t look back. The door slammed shut behind her, leaving him in the sudden, ringing silence, surrounded by scattered tools and the slowly dispersing cloud of her anger.
Texas sat in the chill water. He ran a diagnostic on the finger stump. Minimal power loss. The smugness was a warm, sustained signal in his core, a validation of his predictive models. They were unraveling exactly as projected.
Outside, the air was a cold slap. Sandy leaned against the rusted siding of the mill, squeezing her eyes shut, trying to crush the image of Logan’s flickering grin. A few yards away, Steele paced a brutal path through the cracked asphalt and weeds.
He moved like a caged thing, all trapped force and nowhere to put it. “He just… he looked right at me. With Logan’s eyes.” He slammed a fist into his own thigh. “What do I do with that? What am I supposed to do now?”
“It doesn’t change anything,” Sandy said, her voice flat, eyes still closed. She was convincing herself as much as him.
Steele stopped pacing. He looked at her like she’d spoken in another language. “How can you say that? How does it not change everything? Logan was your friend. He drank your terrible coffee. He covered for you with Nell when you snuck out. That… thing in there is him. And you don’t care?”
She opened her eyes. The fury was back, but colder now, aimed at him. “I can’t let myself care. Don’t you get that? I can’t care if a bounty hunter was nice to me once. I can’t care what face he wore.” She pushed off the wall, getting in his space.
Her words hung between them, sharp and final.
“So no, Steele. I don’t care. I care that he has information we need about Arlo Gantry. I care about finding my mom. I care about helping Rose for you. That’s it.” She jabbed a finger toward the basement door. “That thing in there is a tool or an obstacle. It is not my friend.”
Steele recoiled. The confusion on his face twisted into something like betrayal. “You’re talking about him like he’s a faulty generator. But Logan was real. For me. And you’re telling me that just… evaporates?”
“YES!” The shout tore through the quiet night. “Or else what? You mourn a clever puppet? You get soft and he gets a wire loose and he kills us both?” She was shaking, her brass fist clenched so tight the joints squealed. “You wanna know what changes things, Steele? You. Standing out here, hurting over a murderous robot, while your real friend is still out there, in danger! Do you care more about a ghost than you do about Rose?”
The question landed like a physical blow. Steele staggered back a step, all the air leaving him. His face, illuminated by the sickly yellow glow of a distant security lamp, went blank with shock.
He had no answer.
Inside the basement, in the perfect silence, a single, final spark leapt from the severed wiring in Texas’s hand. It illuminated the smiling cartoon fish for a microsecond before fading, leaving only the dark and the steady, mocking plink of water.