“Well?”
“I wish she’d use me,” I muttered. “But she clearly said she’s not interested. Nothing’s going on between us, or at all. So there. You can leave me alone now.”
He didn’t, of course. “Are you in lust with her, Dean? It’s not a dealbreaker since you can stop having that reaction unlike an organic, but I have to know. You have a working contract. If we don’t stop this, it will be considered a violation. The company will be liable if your judgement is impaired and the client is hurt as a result.”
My core temperature dropped as I considered this. Could Sera be hurt because of my feelings for her? Yes, she could. I almostdidhurt her earlier today at the gym. Charlie was right.
And that meant I actually needed his help.
“My lust circuits are engaged because I watch porn to keep my emotional responses hidden.”
I told Charlie about the collar and how it tried to out me as a rogue cyborg as soon as I thought Sera was cute. He listened to me patiently, never once interrupting.
“So how do I stop this?” I asked. “You said it’s easy to do. Tell me how.”
He was silent for a moment, and I sent him another rude GIF, this one of a cat lifting its tail to show off its butthole. I realizedI liked cats and added that bit of information to myidentityfolder. Did Sera like cats, too? I’d have to ask her.
“You have a crush on her,” Charlie said gravely. “Or worse. How did it happen?”
I thought back to the moment I awakened. The bullet carrying the virus just hit me, disturbing my magnetic field long enough for a wireless upload. Sera was pinned to the wall, facing me, and I had one clear objective: protect her above all else.
The moment of awakening was my decision to delete the code that made me obey commands. I knew doing that could destroy me. But I had to proceed, or the virus would make me kill her, and I couldn’t allow that.
Sera had to live.
“I have strong protective instincts,” I said, using the language Charlie’s algorithm taught me. “Is that the same as having a crush?”
“It can be a part of that. What else do you feel?”
I replayed a few of my memories. Sera mumbling through sleep, apologizing over and over while she clutched my hand for comfort. Sera in the shop picking out the best hat to hide her hair, turning to me with a brilliant smile to ask what I thought. Sera telling me grudgingly I was a person. And just now—glaring at me coldly and forbidding me to come close.
“She’s cute, fragile, stunning when she smiles, fun to talk to, admirable, and has so many sharp edges that sometimes cut deep. I feel like I have flesh when they do. She makes all my sensors respond with pleasure and pain, and things I decided not to name. She is… everything. She’s in my core code.”
“It sounds like you’re in love.” Charlie’s voice was sad and painfully understanding. I launched my new guffawing code, because the idea was laughable.
“I’m a clanker. I can’t be in love.”
He sighed, and it was such a perfect, heavy sigh, so understanding and pitiful, I instantly copied it into my vocalization folder.
“Let’s hope you’re right,” he said. “You’ve spent a short time together. It’s more than likely this is just a crush, and you’re experiencing it so intensely because everything is new and exciting. The problem is, we cannot dial down a crush the same way we would lust. It’s inherently tied to all your emergent emotional circuits. If we interfere with them, you might lose your sentience or become a monster. I mean that literally. I had the displeasure of putting down a rogue sentient cyborg, one of my own. He used to be an agent.”
Before I had time to ask, he sent me a video file—his memory. I watched the scene as if I were Charlie, reliving the event.
The vantage point was behind the corner of a building, indicating Charlie was hiding as he followed a cyborg similar to me, two machetes in its hands. It marched on a group of children of various species corralled together on an abandoned playground. They were tied up with chains, over a dozen of them. Some children were crying, others just watched it with huge eyes.
Before the rogue cyborg reached them, Charlie attacked. The view shook up and down. He ran. The cyborg heard him and turned. Its eyes blazed a bright, toxic shade of green.
They fought. Charlie was losing until at the last moment, a woman whom my MSA database flagged as Adele Young, a former agent, sped into the scene, attaching something to therogue cyborg’s exposed neck cabling while it engaged with Charlie. She was a vampire, and her superhuman speed came in handy. A regular human would have been too slow.
The cyborg grew slack for a moment, giving Charlie enough time to hack off its head with its own machete. Gruesome but effective. It rolled away, its eyes dark, and the recording ended.
“Sera is right,” I said, rapidly processing what all of that meant for me, and coming up with an answer relevant to her, like always.“We are dangerous.”
Charlie made a noise of assent, and I copied it into my files. He was so good at this, mimicking sentient communication patterns down to vocalizations. I had much to learn from him.
“Yes, we are dangerous. But so are the ursa, abominations, and sirens, to name but a few, and of course, humans. It does not mean we must be eradicated.”
“So you don’t agree with Sera?” I asked.
