Now, you'll probably look at this and think 'Ah! That's very similar to that film about that girl by that bloke who did that other film...'. And you'd be right. It started as a pastiche based on a film with a very similar name. But on the way -- as these things so often do, it became something else. I hope you enjoy it.
Alisha
"Doc? Tell me again how I came to be?" Alisha asked me as we sat listening to the storm rattle the old building where we live. We were sitting together on my worn old couch, comfortable, both of us semi-dressed in the warmth of the room, a warmth that was the perfect antidote to the rain beating against the windows.
Alisha's perfect breasts rose and fell slowly, she was relaxed and her movements were languid, her whole elegant, finely formed, exquisite body draped in enticing ways across the couch, and me. Her head -- that beautiful face, that long soft hair -- rested on my shoulder, her delicate but surprisingly strong hands making subtle moves in my crotch.
"How you came to be?" I asked her, "That I don't know, you came to be in a time many hundreds of years ago, in ways even I do not know.
"How I found you? How you came into my life? Now that's another story, and that I can tell you."
In a kittenish frame of mind, she wriggled -- sensuously, happily and thoroughly enticingly, making herself comfortable.
We call it Above. It's a city that hangs over our city -- Below -- in a way that cities shouldn't.
It's been there hundreds of years, and the privileged people who live there, live their lives, prosper and fall, fight and screw, have no thoughts for us except for what we can produce for them and send up to their city through the massive combined anchor and support conduits.
They crap their trash down on us in Below.
Piles of it, daily, scrap, worn out equipment, broken tools, anything inorganic. The organic material, they recycle. They drink recycled water and eat their recycled food -- all supplemented by the fresh foods we send up to them.
Everybody in Below works for them in one way or another. If it isn't directly, it's indirectly. Directly, you work in farming or extraction, or refining or processing, sending food and raw materials up. Or you can work in recycling -- sorting through what they send back down.
If you don't work for them directly, you work for them indirectly, supplying the workers, meeting their needs -- bars, whores, and other services.
I'm Doc. Aka Doc Spark. I live in Below. A long time ago I lived in Above, but now I don't and my life in Above seems like another world. Above is the pinnacle of human social living, a utopia. Below isn't but it is vibrant and it's full of life and stuff and it's interesting. I've lived here long enough now that I think of myself as a Below person, I'm an Us, they're the Them.
People call me Doc, but I'm no doctor. Spark isn't even my real name, but that's what people call me and I'm happy to answer to it. I'm an electronicist. I fix high end tech, electronics, and robotics. Prosthetics, AI circuitry, nanotech, cyber enhancements, vid players, hell I even fix printers -- 3D and inkjet.
The thing is, I prefer machinery and mechanisms to people. Oh, not exclusively, it's hard not to be involved with the people around you if you live somewhere that bustles and hums like Below. I'm not a hermit - I deal with my customers daily and I have friends I see on a regular basis. We go to the local bars and have a drink, we laugh, we listen to live bands, but generally I am more comfortable with prostheses and relays than people and relationships.
I understand how they work, what they do, I enjoy rebuilding them and repairing them and recycling them.
At least I do if I can get the parts I need.
And that was how I discovered Alisha.
I have to make runs out into the crap pile, the junk raining daily onto Below, looking for parts and pieces I can use. There's a whole bunch of juves who do this for me, dodging the incoming, picking through the scrap and bringing me things that they think that I can use, but I like to do it myself as well. Clambering, and sliding across the uneven surface of the scrap. It's dangerous, especially if the wind changes and you don't notice, and can be unrewarding but you never know what you're going to find.
And that was where I discovered Alisha.
The scrap shifts over time, because the wind affects the falling materials the heaps change shape, the surfaces move, and that uncovers stuff that has been buried for a while. You can search an area, get some good parts and components, and then go back a few months later and the surface you picked over has changed and there's a whole new seam to look at.
And that was when I discovered Alisha.
I found her half-way down a slope. Saw her from the other side of a gully, realising that what I was looking at was a human form, almost a whole full body. Now that's not unusual, Above use humanoid cyborgs, but the augmentations don't often come onto the heap.
I clawed my way up the slope to it, picking up some scratches and a couple of cuts until I reached it. It was only when I had fully uncovered it that I could see the droid properly. It was battered and dirty, a full femidroid torso, and most of its right leg, part of its left leg, it was missing both arms, the right foot and its left leg from the knee down. The face was that of an angel. The droid looked as if it was asleep. More finely shaped than a lot of the femidroids I have seen, it looked to be a bit of a specialised model.
At this point I figured I had hit the motherlode for spares. Although physically the droid looked to be in a bit of a state the internals would be good for lots of other jobs. And then I ran a scan over it and found that there was still a faint trace in its core systems. Not running, dormant but still there.
That made a big difference. A droid like this one could be a massive earner, done up and sold on, it would be worth a lot of money. Time to get it home and checked over.
Normally, even with a femidroid, they're a heavy haul. The metal frames and structure, mean a droid frame can be a quarter, even half again as much as the equivalent sized human frame. This one wasn't slight, in fact if she had been in tact it would have been pretty nearly my height but with less bulk, it weighed about right for an equivalent human. I really couldn't wait to get it on to my work bench to have a look at the tech in her.
And with that I picked the droid up to carry it down the slope, and the first thing I noticed was that it wasn't a solid shell. The droid had some real textures. The torso felt soft and yielding even though I could see the synthetic skin and the discolouration on it, and the patinas that all those years on the scrap heap had formed. It definitely had a metal skeleton It could see the ends of the arms and legs but it didn't feel like it.
With the scrap shifting under my feet, the clamber down the slope was nearly as deadly as the climb up but eventually I was at the bottom of the gulley, and I was able to set the droid down and go back up to see if I could recover the other parts -- the arms, the feet and leg. I found one foot nearby where the droid had been and the other, lower leg and foot higher up the slope. The two hands had travelled even further and I nearly didn't find the right hand, only seeing it as I was about to give up, it was resting at a funny angle and I was able to grab it and bring it down.
As I came back down, I swear that the droid was watching me. Which was crazy. Yeah, there was life in the frame, but this femidroid had lain in the weather and the scrap for who knows how long. The droid wasn't dead but I reckoned that all it was good for was parts and it would be a mercy to do it.
Back in my workshop the droid went onto the workbench.
The first thing I did was to scan the main elements to check for internal damage. It was built tough, aside from the damage -- the arms and legs -- the internal structure appeared to be complete with no obvious damage, even the spinal structure and the neck. Which was pretty impressive, considering the height she had fallen from.
The scan showed the droid's skeleton was very humanoid. Sometimes people designing droids use a monocoque approach, paying lip service to the idea of a skeleton. This was quite faithful, though some of the long bones and plates around the skull looked like they had mechanisms built into them. The breaks were all at the joints so I didn't need to go into the internals of the machine, still it was a truly marvellous piece of engineering.
After that I started to clean it up. It was late and I really wasn't up for the dismantling just yet, so I figured it would be a good idea to give the droid a bit of a wash.
I didn't have a sonic bath big enough and any kind of blasting -- sand or otherwise -- would have been too harsh -- so I put some degreasing agents into a bowl of warm water and set to, the old-fashioned way.
I started on the face, seemed like the logical thing to do. Bathing it like you'd give a real person sponge bath, soaping the 'skin', wiping it off and rinsing it, before drying. And it worked. Took some scrubbing in places, and so help me I tried not to be too rough, but eventually what appeared to be a near flesh tone began to appear. It was a very nice piece of work too, kind of a light coffee colour, not too pale, not too dark. Some would say it was an indeterminate colour but I thought it was a good tone, suggesting a lot of heritage. Like a lot of people here in below, we're all of the races under the Sun, just jostling up against each other, carrying on carrying on.
The skin felt quite delicate, soft still after so many years of exposure. The skin carried a faint pattern too, like a kind of brocade pattern, all swirls and stuff.
