CHAPTER EIGHT—STRANGER

Twenty-two minutes ago…

“Do you not like these?” she asked. Lexa wanted John’s input on what parts to choose. She wanted to please him—to make him happy like a real girl.

But he didn’t seem to feel comfortable.

“Don’t worry about me,” John said. “I want you to choose what you want. I don’t want to design you. I want everything to be your choice.”

And then he asked for some fresh air and walked away.

Some time passed… 2.36 minutes precisely.

Maybe he felt embarrassed about all this. But did that mean he felt embarrassed about Lexa? His words hurt a little, but she wasn’t upset. Not even she understood what it truly meant to be “upset” without a biological body. What was worse, she didn’t know what to do. She had wanted his help, but he felt uncomfortable.

Her scans of his motor functions and vocal output—the slight change in how he moved and the tone of his voice—all indicated his embarrassment about the issue.

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She had tried not to scan him.

A real girl can’t scan a man like that.

Or could she? In her own biological way, Lexa knew that humans—or even non humans for that matter—could scan each other.

“Excuse me,” someone said.

Lexa glanced back at the voice and found a smiling man of middling height with deep creases in his face and a rough goatee of facial hair.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. He was wearing a security uniform. He stepped up to her holo-emitter and buffer. “Just going to have to take this.”

“What are you doing?!” she snapped, then made a call in to John.

It rang once and he picked up. “Lexa?... Lexa?... Are you there?”

She couldn’t speak—she couldn’t communicate—she couldn’t even send a message. Frag it—she should have sent a message instead of calling him.

John ended the call.

“Yes,” the man said with a grin. “I’ve hit you with this.” He raised a technical device. Some kind of electrode-emitting android stunner. “It’s quite useful.”

Her holo-display switched off and she was locked inside her emitter. She tried to escape her buffer and go back to John or Kyle, but the buffer stream was cut off from their wristlet devices.

Oh no!

Was this what it was like to be kidnapped?

She remembered when Kyle and John stole her from the Chylaxium. That didn’t feel like this. This was… different.

This was bad!