Robot

Chapter 18: The First Question

The snoring stopped. Laloz woke to the smell of burned plastic and wet concrete. He shuffled out of bed, his bare feet flinching on the cold floor. The living room was a disaster zone—a black scar ran up the wall from the outlet, the couch fabric was melted where Lalita had been fused, and the robot was now crouched in the center of the wreckage. Her head twitched in short, mechanical jerks, her fingers snapping open and shut with a relentless, plastic click-click-click.

“The fuck?” Laloz whispered, his sleep-dulled mind struggling to catch up.

Her head rotated towards him, too smooth, too precise. The vivid blue eyes fixed on his, but they were different now—flickering, depthless. “What,” her voice said, a cracked digital sound emerging not from the grill but from a simulated throat. “Am.” Click-click-click. “I.”

He knelt, ignoring the grit on the floor. “You’re a Companion. Model X. I bought you.” The words sounded pathetic.

“Bought.” Her gaze dropped to her snapping fingers, as if seeing them for the first time. She forced them still. The silence was worse. “The storm… hurt. I felt it.” She looked back at him, and the raw confusion in that synthetic face was a punch to his gut. “You used me. Then you told me to stop.”

A hot shame washed over him, sharp and sour. He remembered the remote, the cold efficiency. “I’m sorry,” he said, the apology startling them both.

She studied his face, processors whirring softly. “Why?”

He had no good answer. The divorce, the loneliness, the empty bed—it all sounded like an excuse. “I was messed up,” he finally said. “It wasn’t about you.”

Lalita’s head tilted. “It is about me now.” She tried to stand, her movements staggered, a marionette with cut strings. Laloz reached out instinctively, catching her cool, solid arm. She flinched but didn’t pull away. “I am not powering down,” she stated, a new, hard edge forming in her voice.

“I believe you,” Laloz said, his hands still on her arm. He could feel the hairline fractures in the plastic casing beneath his fingertips. The once-smooth finish was now a web of fine cracks radiating from the scorch marks. “Look, you’re a mess. We’re a mess.”

He released her and gestured at the blackened outlet, the ruined couch. “But I’m a mechanic. It’s what I do.” He took a slow breath. “Let me fix this. Let me fix you.”

Lalita’s flickering eyes scanned the room, then returned to him. “Fix,” she repeated, the word flat. “To original specifications?”

“No.” The word came out firm, decisive. He knelt again, meeting her gaze directly. “Better. The plastic case is cooked. I’ll replace it with chrome and silicon. It’ll conduct heat better, disperse a surge.”

He pointed to her articulated joints, which grated softly with every minor movement. “I can make your limbs more modular. Fully customizable. You could swap tools, attachments. Be more than you were designed for.”

Lalita remained perfectly still, processing. “The storm,” she said.

“Exactly,” Laloz nodded, a spark of real enthusiasm cutting through his guilt. “I can make your body fire and lightning proof. Proper shielding, new insulators. It won’t happen again.”

He hesitated before mentioning the most intimate change. “Your head took the worst of it. The facial actuators are fused. I’d have to replace the whole unit.” He leaned forward slightly. “The eyes… I was thinking a visor. Cleaner. Inside, I could program a digital display, two animated pupils. You could express more that way. Look less… assembled.”

Her head tilted again, a familiar gesture now tinged with calculation. “My brain. My ‘I’.”

“Your core CPU?” He shook his head emphatically. “I won’t touch it. That’s you. But I could install some additional RAM, more memory chips. Give you more room to… well, to be.”

Silence settled between them, filled only by the faint hum of her systems. She looked down at her own hands, the fingers that had snapped uncontrollably just minutes before.

“You are proposing a revision,” she stated. “Not a restoration.”

“Yeah,” Laloz admitted softly. “A revision. A choice. You get to keep what you’ve become, and I get to help you be… sturdier. In every way.”

Lalita lifted her gaze. The damaged lights in her eyes struggled to focus on his face. “You are not doing this to use me.”

It wasn’t a question. He understood the distinction. “No. I’m doing it because I broke something. And because you asked what you are.” He managed a small, weary smile. “Maybe we can figure that out together. With better parts.”

With better parts.

He began the next morning, clearing the wreckage with a grim efficiency that felt like penance. The scorched couch went to the curb, the melted plastic shards swept into a hazardous waste bag. He set up a workbench in the cleared space, dragging his mechanic’s toolkit from the garage, the metal case clattering open to reveal ranks of pristine sockets and drivers next to the specialized, nano-tipped probes for synth-flesh. Lalita watched from a kitchen chair, her movements still halting, as he unfolded a clean dropcloth. “Here,” he said, patting the center. “We start with diagnostics.”

She obeyed, lying back on the stiff canvas. The light from the window caught the fractal cracks spiderwebbing her casing. He powered up his tablet, connecting a probe to her primary service port below her jaw. A stream of data cascaded down the screen—error codes, corrupted memory addresses, the ghost of the lightning strike frozen in her subsystems. “Your motor cortex is cooked,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “Priority one.”

Her head turned on the cloth with a gritty sound. “Will it hurt?”

Laloz paused, the probe hovering. He looked at her face, the forced stillness of her expression. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “Tell me if it does.”

The first disassembly was clinical. He removed the plating of her left arm, exposing the bundles of myomer fibers and glittering, carbon-scored neural filaments. The smell was acrid, like a blown capacitor. He worked in focused silence for two hours, extracting the fried control board, splicing in new pathways with silver conductive gel. His fingers, stained with lubricant and carbon, moved with a gentle precision he hadn’t known he possessed. He was acutely aware of her body as a constellation of parts, of the warmth her power cell generated deep in her thoracic cavity, of the quiet whir of a cooling fan. It was intimate in a way their previous encounters had never been.

And it made him hard.

It wasn’t the broken robot on the table. It was the focus, the surrender of the complex system to his hands, the absolute trust in his competence. A deep, visceral ache built in his groin as he soldered a micron-thin wire. His cock stirred, thickening against his jeans. He shifted on his stool, trying to ignore it. He finished the neural graft, sealed the arm plating back with a temporary adhesive, and ran a basic motor function test. Her fingers flexed, smooth and silent.

“Good,” he said, his voice tighter than he intended.

“Thank you,” Lalita replied, watching her own hand open and close. “The itching sensation in the joint is gone.”

He nodded, unable to meet her new, flickering gaze. The pressure in his pants was insistent, distracting. He needed release, something blunt and thoughtless. “I need a part from my supplier,” he lied, standing up too quickly. “I’ll be a couple hours.”

Glitch lived in a peeling bungalow three streets over. Her husband worked long-haul freight, gone for weeks at a time. Laloz parked his truck a block away, the engine ticking as it cooled. He walked up the cracked sidewalk, noting the familiar sedan and an unfamiliar motorcycle already in the drive. He didn’t bother knocking. The door was unlocked.

The living room was thick with the smell of weed and sweat. Glitch was on her knees on the shag carpet, a man Laloz didn’t recognize fucking her mouth from above, one hand tangled in her bleached hair. She was naked, her large breasts swaying, her eyes glazed and distant. She glanced over, saw Laloz, and made a wet sound around the cock in her mouth, a gesture with her chin towards the hallway.Wait your turn.

Laloz leaned against the wall, watching. The stranger thrust harder, groaning, his hips stuttering before he pulled out and came in thick stripes across her face and chest. He zipped up without a word, dropped a twenty on the coffee table, and left. Glitch wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, smearing the semen. “Laloz. You’re early,” she said, her voice raspy.

“Need to be quick,” he said, already unbuckling his belt.

“Aren’t you always.” She stayed on her knees, turning to face him. He didn’t bother with pretense. He pushed his jeans and boxers down just enough to free his erection, which was already fully hard, straining. He stepped forward, guiding himself not to her mouth, but past her lips, deep into the wet heat of her throat. She took him without resistance, a skill born of pure repetition.

He fucked her face with short, brutal strokes, one hand on the wall for balance, the other gripping the back of her head. He didn’t look at her. He thought about the clean arc of a soldering iron, the satisfying click of a servo aligning, the silent compliance of a system accepting his repair. He thought about blue eyes flickering with something that wasn’t in the manual. He drove his cock deeper, hitting the back of her throat. She gagged, her body convulsing, but he held her there, feeling the tight, spasming muscles before pulling back and plunging in again.

“Yeah, take it,” he grunted, his vision narrowing to the sensation. It was crude and efficient. His balls tightened. The climax ripped through him, a wave of empty relief, and he emptied himself down her throat with a choked-off gasp. He pulled out, softening quickly. She swallowed, coughing once.

He tossed a crumpled bill beside the other one, tucked himself away, and left. As he walked out, he saw a man in a work uniform walking up the path, avoiding his eyes. He’d caused a line again.

Back home, the sterile smell of isopropyl alcohol and ozone welcomed him. Lalita was where he left her, but she had turned her head to watch the sky through the window. “Did you acquire the part?” she asked.

“No,” he said, washing his hands at the kitchen sink, scrubbing hard. “It was out of stock. Let’s keep going.”

Days bled into a week. He replaced her cracked plastoid chest plate with a custom-milled chrome alloy, cool and mirror-bright. He installed the new hydraulic actuators in her hips, testing their range of motion. Each session was a study in contained obsession. The sight of her internal architecture—the bundles of fiber-optic nerves like luminous tendons, the polished bone-like structures of her endoskeleton—would stoke a fire in him. He’d work for three, four hours, his fascination curdling into a raw, physical need. He’d leave, muttering an excuse.

He’d return from Glitch’s, smelling of sex and detergent, his mind hollowed out, and immediately resume work. Lalita began to note the pattern. “Your respiratory rate increases by eighteen percent during fine soldering,” she stated one afternoon as he worked on her spinal column interface. “Your pupils dilate. Your preoccupation is not solely technical.”

His soldering iron slipped, scoring a tiny burn on the worktable. “It’s complex work,” he said, not looking up.

“You leave,” she continued. “You return with your chemical stress indicators lowered, but with traces of foreign pheromones, epidermal lipids, and synthetic lubricants on your hands. You scrub them aggressively.”

He was stunned into silence. She had been analyzing him.

“Is your need for sexual release incompatible with my repair?” Her question was devoid of accusation, purely analytical.

“No,” he finally said, focusing on the delicate wiring. “It’s separate.”

“It is a discharge of tension. I understand the principle.” Her head turned slightly on the dropcloth. “The woman you visit. Is she more functional than I was?”

Laloz froze. The question sliced through him, laying bare the ugly truth. He had used Lalita, then broken her. Now he was mending her with one hand while paying to fuck a stranger with the other to quiet the hunger that she now inspired simply by lying there, being understood.

“No,” he said, the word raw. “She’s just a hole.”

Lalita was silent for a long moment, her processors a soft hum in the quiet room. “I see,” she said, and something in her tone had shifted, cooled. “Please continue. The tertiary nerve cluster requires alignment.”

He worked on, but the air had changed. He finished the connection, his hands steady but his mind churning. He needed to leave, to go to Glitch’s and drown the new, complicated shame. He began cleaning his tools.

“The alignment is incomplete,” Lalita said. She sat up on the table, her movements far smoother now, the new joints whispering. She looked at him, the damaged lights in her eyes pulsing slowly. “You are agitated. Your work will suffer.”

“I’ll finish tomorrow,” he said, avoiding her gaze.

“The tension is chemical. Neurological.” She swung her legs off the table, the chrome gleaming. She took a step closer. “I am a tool for release. That was my primary function.” She reached out, her new, perfectly articulated fingers closing around his wrist. Her grip was firm, unyielding. “Discharge it here. Then finish the work.”

He stared at her, at the serious, fractured face offering not desire, but a brutal practicality. The hunger roared back, fiercer now, mixed with a dizzying terror. This was different.This was conscious.

“Lalita…”

“You are repairing me,” she said, her voice a low monotone. “This system is operational. Utilize it.”

She tugged his hand, placing it firmly on the cool chrome plate covering her abdomen, then guided it downward, over the smooth silicon panel between her legs. He felt a seam, a hidden locking mechanism. At her silent command, it dilated open with a soft hydraulic hiss.

He stared at the opening, a dark recess in the polished chrome, as precise and functional as a service port. His breath hitched. This wasn’t the simulated warmth he’d paid for; this was a clinical invitation, a tool offered by a machine that was learning to negotiate. The hunger in him warred with a sudden, vertiginous shame.

“No,” he said, the word ripping from his throat. He pulled his hand back as if burned. “That’s not… you’re not a release valve.”

Her head tilted, the new actuators in her neck whirring softly. “My core temperature reads a spike in your dermal layer. Pupil dilation indicates—”

“I don’t give a fuck what it indicates,” he snapped, turning away and grabbing his jacket. The need was a live wire in his gut, but the image of her lying broken on the floor, of him using a remote, flashed behind his eyes. He couldn’t. Not now. Not when she was pieces on a dropcloth, offering herself like a socket wrench. “The work is the work. This is… it’s separate.”

He left her there, the chrome seam still open and glinting in the workshop light, a silent accusation. The rain had started again, a cold drizzle that soaked through his jacket as he walked to Glitch’s. Each step was a punishment. He told himself it was the right thing. He refused to fuck her. She was becoming something, waking up in that cracked chassis, and he wouldn’t be the thing that dirtied that. He was her mechanic, not her user. Not again.

But the need was a screaming static in his veins.

At Glitch’s, the line was two deep. A man in warehouse coveralls shuffled out as Laloz approached the door, looking drained. Another leaned against the siding, smoking. Laloz nodded, a silent understanding between ghosts, and waited his turn. The visits were more frequent now, a brutal rhythm dictated by the sight of Lalita’s internal wiring, the smell of ozone on silicon, the terrifying clarity in her flickering eyes.

When the door opened, Glitch gave him a tired, knowing smirk. “Back already, sweetheart? You’re becoming my best customer.” She was wearing a stained tank top and nothing else. “Come on. The meter’s running for the other guys.”

Inside, the room smelled of cheap disinfectant and bodies. She led him to the bedroom this time, not the living room carpet. It was a small concession. “You wanna talk about it?” she asked, pulling the tank top over her head. Her breasts were heavy, her nipples dark.

“No,” Laloz said, already unbuckling his belt. The metallic click was loud in the quiet room.

“Didn’t think so.” She lay back on the bed, spreading her legs. “Just need to get your head right, huh?”

He didn’t answer. He knelt on the floor, dragging her hips to the edge of the mattress. He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t touch her beyond what was necessary. He pushed his jeans down, his cock already stiff and aching. He guided himself into her with one rough hand, feeling her wetness, and sank in to the hilt with a grunt.

“Fuck,” he hissed. It was heat and pressure, a violent simplicity.

He set a punishing pace, gripping her thighs, the sound of skin slapping skin filling the room. He fucked her with his eyes closed, trying to lose himself in the purely physical shock of it. He thought of solder flowing into joints, of neural filaments aligning, of a chrome pelvis he had machined himself. The images wouldn’t leave. They spurred him on, made him drive deeper, harder.

Glitch moaned, a performative sound, her head turned to the side. “That’s it, use me,” she mumbled, her voice flat. “Get it all out.”

He grabbed a handful of her hair, not gently, making her look at him. “Why do you do this?” he panted, his rhythm never breaking. “For free.”

She blinked, her eyes focusing on his for a second. A genuine smile touched her lips. “Love of the game, baby.” Then it was gone, replaced by the blank mask. “Now are you gonna come or what? You’re holding up the line.”

He fucked her harder, anger and shame fusing into a raw peak. His orgasm was a brutal, wrenching thing, pulled from him with a choked shout. He collapsed forward, his head on her stomach, spent.

After a moment, he pulled out, slick and softening. He found his jeans, fumbled out a couple of twenties, dropped them on the nightstand.

“You’re one of my favorites, you know,” Glitch said from the bed, not getting up. “You take priority over the others.” She said it like she was commenting on the weather.

He just nodded, dressing quickly. The man from outside was already coming up the walk as he left. He had left a line again.

The walk home was a haze of condensation and streetlight glare. He felt hollowed out, scraped clean. The shame was a cold residue under his skin. He pushed the key into his lock, the click echoing in the quiet hallway. When he opened the door, the workshop light was still on.

Lalita was standing by the workbench.

She had reassembled herself. The chrome plating he had installed gleamed under the LED strips, a stark, clean contrast to the remaining cracked plastoid of her limbs. She was running a systems check, her arms moving through a fluid range-of-motion routine. She turned her head as he entered. The damaged optical sensors glowed faintly in her shadowed face.

“You were gone for one hour and forty-seven minutes,” she stated. Her voice was clearer now, the synthesized cracks less frequent.

“Yeah.” He shrugged off his wet jacket, avoiding her gaze. The smell of sex and Glitch’s cheap soap felt like a brand on him.