“I’m not talking about my asshole to you.” She shook her head insistently, talking to herself more than me. “I’m not.”
“So you have an asshole?”
She groaned and slapped at me. I grabbed her arm and we ended up, you know… close. I felt a moment. Real magical stuff.
I leaned in.
“What—”
You know the sound when you slap two thick pieces of plastic together? That’s the sound our teeth made when they ran into each other. We both backed away, clutching our mouths. Whoever put nerves in teeth was a special kind of dickhead.
Marine stopped swearing and making pained noises long enough to look at me. I couldn’t quite place the tone of her voice. Not… mad. Definitely not happy.
“What the fuck was that? Were you trying to kiss me? Right after you asked about how I take shits?”
“I felt a moment.”
“You felt a moment?! What the hell does that even mean, Laze?”
“It’s like… in movies. You know? Baring souls and… forget it. Fuck me, Jesus. There were signals, Marine. I’m not retarded.”
“Oh, you’re one hundred percent retarded. That’s quantifiable now.” She stood up finally, shifting her jaw back and forth. “And whatever signals you might have picked up on your little retard antenna most definitely weren’t screaming for you to kiss me after asking a question about how feces happens.”
“So, but maybe before that…”
She did an angry growl and huffed out of her nose before heading to the farthest corner from me and sitting down, facing away. Part of me really wanted to keep talking. About anything. I mean, it got weird, sure, but there was still a sort of heavy weight in what she’d told me. At least to her. Girls is girls to boys. Even robot girls.
“So…” I just let the word sit there for a second. I knew what I was going to say, but timing is important. “Why were you so worried?”
She didn’t look back over at me, just talked at the corner. “I’m a walking crime, Laze.” She sounded defeated. “And people get… I don’t know… they get kind of crazy when they find out some essential assumption they made isn’t right.”
That made sense to me. People like their assumptions. They tie their self-esteem to being right and they fill in blanks to make the unknown about a person as agreeable as they can. She was scared of my ego, maybe.
“I’ve never said it. To anyone. That I’m not human. That I’m a trashcan that thinks.”
“I mean… I ride a hoverbus every day. I sit around in virtual reality half the time.” I shrugged. “You’ve got this big expectation built up so I’m supposed to really be reaffirming and whatever, but you’re just not that weird to anyone who’s paying attention. I live dreaming of stuff like you. Not to, uh, dehumanize you. There’s not really a great way to say that. Anyway, I love tech shit. All of it. That’s the reason I went into your shop in the first place. I mean, really, if we’re splitting heeep—”
I leaned against the door to the cell and it pushed open and I landed in a very elegant way on the extremely unforgiving metal of the floor. I froze. That sort of freezing where you are waiting to be caught by an adult. Nothing. No one was screaming at me.
Marine had turned at the clanging of the cell door against the bars. She was standing, staring at me sprawled in the walkway between the two cells.
“How did you open it?”
I shook my head wordlessly, righting myself and clambering to my feet. I stood in the walkway, high-knee jogging in place, hunched like a moron, whispering, “What do we do? What do we do?”
Marine looked at the hallway door and then back to me. She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Escape?”
Chapter
EIGHT
The first thing I did after we were both out of the cell was swing the door back shut. The hinges were quiet, but I couldn’t help but be bothered. Was the door broken? Had we been let out? I pushed it shut and it made a solid metal clanking noise. I couldn’t remember if I’d heard it before when I got put into the cell in the first place. But that was it. The door was shut tight and I was no closer to knowing if this was a trap or if someone had genuinely fucked up shutting the thing.
“Find a door or something.”
I said the words and immediately moved to look down the hallway to see what was going on. We hadn’t been left alone very long so it stood to reason to me that we would not be left alone much longer. Oddly, when I looked down the hall it was empty. None of the suits were there, not Jericho, not the guards. It was clear all the way down to reception as best I could tell. Marine had moved over to the console the guard sat at.
We hadn’t really gone far enough that I felt like we’d get murdered if anyone showed up and found us out of the cell. This wasn’t really even an escape yet. More like we were just, you know, milling around, doing some stretches, maybe prepping for pilates.
Pilates, though, I would pass on. I don’t buy it. I mean… first things first, it’s just some guy’s name. Doesn’t it sound like some crazy foreign workout system or something? Maybe kind of vaguely medical? Yeah, no. Just some dude’s last name. And worse, his first name is Joe. Joe Pilates. I wouldn’t buy a fucking used car from a guy named Joe Pilates, let alone a series of expensive inflatable balls so I could roll around like a soccer mom trying to get her uncomfortably tan body ready to creep out children come pool party season. Who do they think they’re fooling? Your entire stomach is a series of sad skin pouches. Making them the texture and color of mistreated leather between sessions spent sexually assaulting a
