Ai Era

Author's note: Hello! This is the third installment of my Diagnostic Test series. Please go read the first two parts for the necessary context if you haven't already! Thanks, Enjoy! :)

I took a deep breath. My eyelids fluttered closed. My jaw unclenched, slightly. It felt like it had been weeks since I'd been able to relax, even for just a second. I listened to the soft hum of the hovtruck's stabilizers, the rhythmic

tictactictactictac

of the turn signal, and took another long breath. We hit a pocket of wind that sent a small tremor through the truck before the stabilizers kicked in, and the heap that was Renee jostled against me.

My eyes flew open, panic immediately swelling in my chest again. Renee. Her stiff, lifeless body was crumpled haphazardly on the seat next to mine. She hadn't shown a single sign of life since she'd collapsed on the warehouse floor. I reached over and started to shake her, squeeze her hand, check her pulse, anything that could show me she was ok. The panic intensified as each attempt failed, until it finally dawned on me that what I was doing was useless. Of course she didn't have a pulse; she was a bot.

"Idiot," I murmured under my breath as I roughly pulled her closer to me and laid her head on my lap. I just needed to figure out how to turn her back on. I racked my brain for anything I could remember from the schematics I'd looked at before the diagnostic test as I felt around for the seam that opened the control panel in her neck.

Crick eyed me in the rearview mirror, his brows furrowed. I finally found the seam and hooked it with my nail to pop it open. The machinery still looked flawless. I brought my ear to the opening and heard a very faint buzzing. A sign of electricity, of working technology. A very good sign.

Crick swore suddenly as another Hovcar cut him off, braking just in time to avoid a collision. He let out a hissing breath through gritted teeth as he gradually slowed down to put some distance between the car and our truck, white-knuckling the steering wheel. We both knew that he had to drive as safely as possible. The last thing we needed was to get pulled over and have a cop look in the backseat and see at best an unconscious woman, and at worst the extremely valuable bot that had just been reported stolen and was now the subject of a nationwide manhunt.

Once the car in front was far enough away, Crick's eyes flicked back to the rearview mirror, watching me examine Renee's hardware.

"What are you doing?" He asked warily.

"Trying to get her working again," I said, slightly exasperated.

"I don't think right now is the best time for that," he said gently.

"What?" I finally tore my eyes away from Renee's wiring to meet his eyes. "Why the hell not?"

"Because if she powers back on, there's a good chance they can track her, which means they'll be tracking us. In fact, it's probably a good idea to disconnect her power supply in case they realize that they can do that and turn her back on."

I stared at the back of his head, dumbstruck. Was he serious?

"Are you kidding me? We did this whole heist, I lost my job, and probably became a fugitive to save her, and now we can't even turn her back on?" I picked up her limp arm and dropped it.

"Look, we'll figure it out back at the Body Shop. There's gotta be some way to disable their connection to her, but right now you need to make sure she doesn't power on!" He flapped his bionic arm at me for emphasis, keeping his eyes on the road. I hesitated for a moment. I knew he was right, but I just couldn't believe I'd gone through so much to get her safe, and she wasn't even conscious.

With a sigh, I pulled up the side of Renee's tank top and found her torso access panel. I popped it open, and after a bit of searching, found a thick black cable. If I was remembering her schematics right, this was connected to her battery. Just as I gripped the head of the cable, I felt her body twitch beneath me. My eyes flew to her face, which was just beginning to stir. Slowly, her eyes fluttered open and locked with mine, and the smallest hint of a smile crossed her lips. My heart gave a painful twang as I pulled the cable from its port. Renee stiffened again, the life leaving her eyes just as quickly as it had come.

I choked back a sob and carefully moved her back to the other seat. I let my head fall into my hands, and we rode the rest of the way in silence.

+++

Crick parked the hovtruck behind the shop as close to the back door as he could. He ran inside and brought out an oil-stained canvas tarp, which I quickly wrapped around Renee, trying my best to make her look as little like a dead body as possible. It was only a few feet from the truck to the door, but I wasn't in the mood to take any chances. I slung her over my shoulder, but without the adrenaline from earlier coursing through me, I could barely make it a few steps before my trembling legs felt like they were about to give out under her weight. Crick took her legs, and we slowly trudged through the back door. We laid her down on a workbench in the middle of the room and I gingerly unwrapped the tarp, revealing her still, lifeless body. The room was silent except for the rhythmic thumping of Ziggy's happily wagging tail from the dog bed in the corner.

"Holy shit," Crick muttered, and I looked over at him

"This... this is a bot?" He whispered, just staring at her in dumbstruck awe. I realized that this was the first time he'd really seen Renee up close.

"That's what I said when I first saw her too," I said, following his gaze to her face. At this point I was used to her, but Crick had never seen such a lifelike bot before, even with all the bots and parts he'd worked with. Crick reached out and gently touched her arm.

"And you're sure she's a bot, right?" He asked, pinching the skin of her forearm slightly. "Not some kind of heavily cyborged human?" I stared at the point on her arm that he'd just pinched, watched the area flush ever so slightly red. The thought had never even crossed my mind that she might not completely be a bot. The more I looked at her and the more I thought about it, the more unbelievable it seemed that she was completely manmade.

"As... as far I as I know, she's a bot. Here, take a look at some of her wiring." I felt around for the seam in her neck and popped the panel open with my nail. Crick peered into the opening and whistled appreciatively.

"Look at the craftsmanship!" He muttered, studying the small window to her hardware in amazement. He twisted something on his mechanical arm and a screwdriver popped out of his palm, which he used to poke around between the wires. "I've seen some pretty high-tech bots, and I've seen expensive cyborg mods, but I've never seen anything like this."

"I know. Isn't it incredible?" I said. After a moment, I realized that I was staring at Renee's face, not her wires.

"So where do we even start?" Crick asked, straightening up. I wrenched my gaze away and looked at him.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, we've got to turn her on, no? Unless we just committed grand larceny for the world's bulkiest paper weight," he said, pacing around the room, collecting tools that were haphazardly strewn around. "Hopefully just plugging her power cord back in will wake her up, but more importantly we've got to cut her connection to their servers before we can even try," he continued. His mad dash around the room ended right in front of me, and he handed me a pair of pliers. "How do you suppose we do that?"

I stared wide-eyed at the tool in my hands. I looked back up at him.

"Uh... what?" I asked. Crick blinked at me impatiently.

"I'm asking you what to do. We need to alter her hardware, and you're the only one that's worked on her, so you're the expert here," he said with the air of explaining something to a five year old. He was right. I should've known at least the general area to start looking, I had studied her documentation enough. Everytime I tried to think about it, though, I saw her laughing, lively face instead, and the diagrams and schematics all just slipped away.

"Well... I never really worked on her interior all that much," I said, nervously twisting the pliers between my fingers. "The tests I did were... not very technical, I guess you could say." Crick wrinkled his nose. I set the pliers down on his desk, not looking at him or Renee. "And I mean, I haven't worked with any bots in so long, you know that's your thing. If she was a joint lubricator, then I would agree that I'm the expert here, but I'm really not up to date with any kind of bot-specific hardware." I finally looked up at him. He was eyeing me suspiciously, looking like he wanted to say something. After a moment of hesitation, he just shrugged and turned back to Renee.

"Alright, I'll hack into the database and pull up her schematics. You can poke around her panels while I do that, see if you find anything interesting." He sat down at his desk, leaving me to stare at Renee's stiff body sprawled out on the workbench on my own.

I shook myself out of my thoughts and got to work. Well, first I bent down to pet Ziggy, scratching behind his ears as he thumped his tail appreciatively. Then I wandered around the room, picking up a couple other screwdrivers. Then I made sure my shoes were tied. They were.

When I really couldn't stall any longer, I forced myself to bend over Renee to examine her. I wasn't quite sure what I was looking for, but I figured I'd know when I found it. Sometimes I strayed from checking her panels to touch her skin, marveling at the way it flushed, the texture of it. The idea that she might actually not be entirely a bot, that she might be human in some way, kept rattling around in my brain, growing more and more distracting. I'd never considered it before, but did Ple(Ai)sure really have the capabilities to make such a realistic bot? They obviously had some powerful people on their side, but was the technology really at that point, even in top secret labs? I picked up her hand and examined it, gently flexing the fingers. The knuckles wrinkled, the tendons tightened. She even had fingerprints.

Crick sneezed, and I dropped her hand, letting it fall back on the table with a dull

thunk

. I quickly got back to examining her neck panel, but this time something caught my eye.

"Hey Crick, is this a ZB9 port?" I said over my shoulder. He had been poring over a blown-up image of what appeared to be a cross-section of Renee's head— I shuddered involuntarily— but spun around at my words. He came over and I pointed out the tiny slot that was tucked right behind her ear.

"Looks like it-" he said, barely finishing his sentence before darting off into the adjacent storage room. I blinked, slightly dumbfounded by his sudden departure.

Before I even had time to ask where he'd gone, he came zipping back into the room, shaking a few loose black chips, each about the size of his pinky fingernail, in his hand.

"A ZB9 port is perfect, I've already got a couple drives with Signalgrid jammers loaded up on them. Obviously we'll need to tweak the code because I'll need to add something to block her connection to the Cloudnet, and I can't imagine-" his words cut off abruptly as he tried inserting one of the drives he was holding into the port. I leaned over to look and saw that the chip wasn't fitting. Crick flipped the drive around and tried again. Still it wouldn't go in. He tried forcing it in with a little more pressure, so I quickly plucked it out of his fingertips.

"Don't break it!" I warned, but he didn't seem to be listening, just squinting at the offending port.

"Maybe it's not a ZB9," I said.

"No, it's gotta be-" he straightened up suddenly, slapping his non-bionic hand to his forehead with an eyeroll.

"Oh god, it must be a ZB18 port," he groaned, flitting back to his desk chair. I followed behind him.

"ZB18? That's a thing?" I asked, confused. ZB9 ports were pretty common, even in the machinery I worked with, but I'd never heard of a ZB18 port.

"They just came out. Like, a week ago." He typed into the search bar and several recent headlines from niche tech reviewers came up announcing the release of the new drives. He clicked around, skimming over several articles praising the increased storage capabilities and faster transfer speeds and other features that only a niche tech reviewer could possibly care about.

"The engineers who built her obviously had access to the drives in advance. Makes sense, I guess. I don't have any in the shop because they aren't backwards compatible, so they're basically useless until more stuff is released to accommodate them." His words devolved into angry muttering about universality and adapter sales, but I had already drifted back over to Renee. Her eyes were closed, and I could almost imagine that she was just peacefully sleeping, could almost pretend her chest was rising and falling with breath.

Crick pushed off against his desk and shot his office chair back to the workbench, pliers in hand. He started poking the tips into her neck panel.

"Maybe I can jerryrig some kind of adapter so we can use a ZB9..." he mused, reaching for his soldering iron. This was too much for me. I slapped his hand away from the iron and pulled the pliers from his hands. He looked up at me, blinking.

"No. I draw the line at jerryrigging." I deposited the pliers back on the bench. "I'm not willing to take that kind of risk. She's not some broken-down synthesizer we're refurbishing. There's no going back if we fuck something up." Crick looked slightly irritated.

"Kel, this is my job, I know what I'm doing. I work with bots every day."

"You've never worked with a bot like this. No one has." A small voice in the back of my head spoke up;

if she even is a bot. Is she?

"Look, where can I find a ZB18 drive? They've gotta be selling them somewhere," I said.

"They probably have some at that snob techy shop a few blocks over," he reasoned. I started for the door, and he jumped up.

"Woah, Kel," he said, catching my arm. "You can't just go out there. You're basically a fugitive!" I looked back at him. Looked at Renee, lying on the table like a corpse, surrounded by screws and tools. Looked at the blown up cross-section of her head still up on the screen.

"It's fine." I pulled my arm away, and Crick let his fall to his side. "I'll be fine. I'll walk there, and I'll be in and out of the store quick. It's a big city. How could they possibly find me that fast?" Crick didn't reply, but he scrunched up his nose and fiddled with a joint in his thumb. I backed away towards the door.

"I just... I need some air. It'll be fine. Read through her schematics or something. I'll be back soon." With that, I turned and darted out the back door.

+++

The store was obnoxiously white and clean. The kind of sterile, minimalist white and clean that screams "you're too dirty and low-class to even step foot in this store without mucking it up." Or maybe I just felt that way because I was severely on-edge and irritated. Every few minutes of the short walk over here I was glancing over my shoulder, every siren I heard in the distance causing me to jump. When I finally made it to the building, I realized I had no idea how to get to the shop. The store was 140 floors up, and most people would just drive up there in a Hovcar.

The clerk working in the pawn shop on the ground floor directed me to an elevator in the back of the building. A tattered handwritten sign taped to the doors read "Out of Order, doesn't go down all the way, starts at floor six." I guess there weren't many people going to the tech shop that didn't have a Hovcar.

After six flights of stairs and a creaky ride in an elevator that felt like it was going to drop if I breathed too hard, my nerves were severely frazzled, which is probably why the clean white smoothness of the store in front of me was pissing me off so much. The elevator had spit me out at the back of a Hovcar parking lot that opened up onto a beautiful open-air pavilion of gleaming turf and manicured trees, which were rare to see nowadays after most of the trees in the city streets had been replaced by liquid trees; tall, cylindrical algae tanks. Paths wound through the area, leading to each of the shops that ringed the space, some branching off the edge to become floating catwalks that connected similar areas of other buildings, gently sloping up or down to reach other floors. The area was gorgeous, but I felt oddly exposed without the comforting presence of the behemoth buildings I was used to looming over me. The sun, which never really seemed to reach all the way down to the streets below, felt unusually bright. I purposely stayed far away from the edges of the pavilion because I knew the drop would be dizzying, and I was already feeling unsteady on my feet. Standing out in the open was just making me more nervous, so I pushed open the polished glass door and stepped into the shop.

In every way, it was the complete and total opposite of The Body Shop. Sunlight shone through the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the carefully curated displays that artfully dotted the pristine floor and walls in a way that felt more like a museum than a retail shop. Where Crick's store had haphazard piles of any kind of bot or cyborg part you could ever need on proud display, this shop almost seemed to be hiding the fact that it sold bot parts. Accessories and hardware replacements for cyborg modifications came in discrete boxes, the displays advertising their wares with bland pictures of serene-looking people running on the beach or eating salads, captioned by vague phrases like "live with freedom" and "push yourself to new limits."

A few customers milled about the store, an unattended child was taking selfies with one of the display tablets, and a bored-looking attendant was dutifully ignoring all of us behind the counter in the back.

I scanned the shop for the ZB18 drives, giving the other people in the shop a wide berth while I tried to look as inconspicuous and normal as I possibly could. I felt like everyone was looking at me. Were they looking at me? That guy was definitely looking at me. Wait, no, he was looking at the phone pod cases behind me. Was he?

I finally spotted the display that held the drives and strutted over to it in a very cool and casual and non-suspicious way. The top shelf was dedicated to the new drives, neat rows of packaged chips sitting beside an informational plaque. I picked one up that was bundled with an adaptor and examined it, debating if I should get a few extras, when I froze with sudden realization. How was I going to pay for this? If I paid credit with my ID chip, it would be easily traceable. How long would it take for someone to get to me? Could I find an ATM somewhere? I don't think I'd ever used one before. Even if I found one, wouldn't it be even more suspicious to pay with cash? Who does that?

I was so busy panicking that I didn't even notice the two people that quietly slipped behind me.

"Hi Kel," said a voice behind me. I whipped around, nearly taking out the display in the process. A man and a woman stood there, just on the verge of being too close for comfort. They were two of the most incredibly generic people I had ever seen. Both had brownish hair, his cut short and hers pulled back in a ponytail. They were wearing business-casual clothes in tones of gray and black, nice but not too nice. Their faces were just... faces. Not particularly beautiful, not ugly, just completely average. If I had closed my eyes for ten seconds and spun around a few times, I probably wouldn't have been able to pick them out of a line up.

I blinked at them, my pulse skyrocketing.

"Been a busy day for you, hasn't it?" The woman asked. My eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them. I guess I didn't have to worry about being traced. They'd already found me.