“God damn, are you going to call the guys working here your henchmen next? Yes. You’re a joke. You run a multibillion dollar arms and tech defense company with blatant sway over government heads all over the place and you call yourself Jericho. I mean fuck me, why not just paint a tiny dick on the back of your suit and change your name to erectile dysfunction? And even then, what a fucking terrible name. You named yourself after a town so shitty, the walls fell over from being yelled at. I mean, you know that right? You didn’t just pick the name because it sounded cool, did you?”
He had turned bright red the literal instant the words “tiny dick” had come out of my mouth and his palette change didn’t show signs of stopping. I’d never seen a human being bust blood vessels in multiple parts of their head at once, but I was hopeful for a moment. He calmed when he looked at Marine, somehow.
“And you don’t even know, do you? About that thing in there with you. Risking your life for it.” He stomped, still trying to keep his temper about him. He couldn’t find anything else to say so he stomped away. “Carla!” His voice cracked again as he went.
We were alone again in the room.
“Who do you think Carla is? You think she…”
As I turned, I saw that Marine was ghostly pale. Worse than at her shop.
“Marine? Rinny?”
She looked terrified, her eyes scanning my face intently.
“I’m sorry, Laze. Please… I didn’t mean to keep it a secret. I don’t want you to find out from him.”
I raised an eyebrow. It hadn’t occurred to me when I was insulting him, but he called her a thing. I had been so caught up in maintaining my bluster that it had just run right over me.
“Oh man. I know where this is going.”
“Laze, no you don’t. I am serious, you—” She took a step closer to me.
“You have a dick don’t you?”
She hit me. Open hand. Right on the arm. It wasn’t so bad, but I flexed my stomach to brace against it.
“No!” she yelled. “Ass. Idiot.” She hit me a few more times. “God, you’re making this so fucking… weird. Just…” She huffed in frustration. “Just shut up and let me talk.”
Of course, immediately after saying that, she stopped talking. She still seemed upset and shaken and unsure of what to do, so I let that go.
“I’m…” She drew in a deep breath like she was preparing for the worst. “I’m a trashcan.”
A trashcan? I searched the word for some kind of hidden meaning. A metaphor. The obvious one jumped to mind, but I didn’t want to be flippant at the moment so I gave it another run through my mind and I came up with nothing.
“I, uh…” I rubbed the back of my head with my hand. “That seems like a really negative way to think about yourself.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Okay…” She sounded exhausted. “That one is sort of on me I guess. I just… I don’t want to ramble and I don’t want you to get freaked out and I don’t… I don’t know. I don’t want you to hate me. Or something.”
“Well—”
She held up a hand to shut me up. “Just give me a minute, okay?” She shifted around, psyching herself up. We were standing closer to each other than we’d ever been, I’m pretty sure. She looked down and exhaled sharply. She looked up at me. Her eyes were piercing. “I’m prefacing this, okay? I know this is weird. It’s not a joke. Okay?” She paused and I wasn’t sure I was supposed to answer. “Answer.”
Ah. “Yeah, okay.”
“You know those little robots with the brushes and the pincer arms and all? The ones that clean up trash? I’m, I was, one of those. I was made from one.”
I shook my head, running through the possible implications of that. “An android?”
She nodded, solemn. No hint of a joke.
Let me explain why this sounded like absolute bullshit. Firstly, there were two functioning androids in the entire world. Neither of them lived in a fucking shop in the half-shit part of town and wore loose shirts and weren’t looking at me right now making me feel… stuff. Weird, inappropriate stuff. They were loud, whirring pieces of kind-of capable tech. Show pieces. And AI wasn’t… it wasn’t this. It wasn’t her. It was imperfect. Sort-of learning, sort-of abstracting. Most of it so desperately poorly conceived that it spidered out until it burnt out whatever hardware it could force itself into. They were thinking viruses, not cute, slobby girls.
“I have questions.”
She winced.
“I shouldn’t have questions?”
“Not shitty ones. Please.”
I felt like I was being underestimated. Not-freaked-out me would have said so. So I did.
“I feel like I’m being underestimated, frankly.”
Still, I could understand her trepidation. I could imagine the stupid, summer movie questions. Dozens of them. Are you going to take over the world? Are you evil? What do you think of humans? Not bad questions, considering. But answered well enough by having known her for years. Something clicked in my brain. I didn’t quite understand it myself but just thinking of all those questions, something turned over. I didn’t care, really. The obvious questions sorted themselves out. Clearly she was constrained to her hardware. Personality likely trickled down from that. Quirks, limitations. They were built on whatever she developed first. Human-like. She just happened to be a nerd. Obsessed with the things like her first and humans second. I got it, I felt like. Maybe I was wrong, but that was sort of half the fun of knowing people, I reasoned. Well… maybe one question.
“How do you poop?”
“Fuck sake, Laze. You prick… why did I even fucking try?”
“I have one question and that’s the response I get? I just
