Fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck.

I was sprinting down an alley, all attempts at appearing normal abandoned for the moment.

The day had started normal, read books until three then head out for exercise to probably end up at the park to meet Ali after school or just enjoy the stream. My plans were derailed when I was passing the synthetics store on Winslow, a dark-skinned guy in crisp clean brown slacks and a grey shirt with a few hexagonal pastel blue hexes on it emerged from the store with a large tool bag right into my path. A deviation would look suspicious according to Ali, so I stopped short to wait for him to pass.

He paused when he saw me though, I was staring straight ahead so I got to see his expression shift, something about me was making him suspicious. I didn’t know what though, it’s not like I have done anything but stop and I knew what I was wearing was reasonable for an assistant robot. A one-piece dress of all these funny little angular components as was the fashion around here, it was in the same sort of brown grey as his pants with piping details of purple. My runners had long been abandoned for a pair of locally styled boots with short platform heels that ended above the ankle, with stockings covering the rest of my legs.

He looked me over a few times with a frown. “What is your task?” He asked after a moment of consideration while stroking his short neatly groomed beard.

“On path, destination Grove Park, purpose escort, individual child” I flatly droned the practiced line that Ali and I had prepared.

“Active time?” He asked

“Eight hours, twenty-three minutes, six seconds.” I don’t really know when I woke up but that’s good enough.

“Previous tasks?”

“Private information.”

He nodded, then thought for a second. “Engineer Override, code Saimaa, what is your model?” He declared.

Huh? I haven’t practiced anything for how I should respond to that-

“Battle-Maid Systems mark seven prototype, serial number zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-one.” My mouth responded for me.

Fucking what.

He was at least as shocked as I was, if anything it looked a bit like I had slugged him or something. “What the fuck are you doing here walking around?” he asked incredulously. “Engineer Override, code Saimaa, stand by for further commands override current task, justification stolen synthetic.”

Oh fuck. Oh fuck.

“Rejected.” My mouth said after a moment’s hesitation.

Oh, thank fuck.

“What?” He frowned. “Reason for rejected command.”

“Insufficient authority to override autonomous mode.” My mouth answered.

I learn new things about myself all the time, I guess I’m in autonomous mode normally. Also, this guy can’t actually order me to do certain things despite having some kind of authority over me.

“Autonomous mode? That feature shouldn’t have anything associated yet.” He started rooting around in his bag to pull out one of the huge cellphones from around here. He pressed a few keys and then brought it to his ear. I stayed stock still trying to avoid dropping my cover, but I was starting to think maybe I should just hit the bricks.

“Hey Jess, it’s Lane.” He said after a few moments of waiting for whomever he was calling to pick up. “One of our prototypes is out and about… yeah, I’m not kidding… mark seven… that’s what it said… you should know if that’s possible… yeah it said I don’t have authority for that… yeah… autonomous mode supposedly… yeah, I know… ok it’s at Winslow and Queen, I’ll wait for you here.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

OK, there’s my cue to get the fuck out of here, I looked around quickly to confirm a lack of traffic and for where I could get out of sight quickly.

“Wait a sec, it’s doing something-“

Before he could finish his sentence, I broke into a sprint.

“What the FUCK?!” I heard him shout from behind me.

I booked it across the street into the alley between the buildings there, swinging right into the narrow part where I knew I could get onto a low roof via a dumpster. I was glad these shoes have proper soles despite the heel, I haven’t had to run like that in a while and I don’t really have practice in anything with heels either.

I got up on the roof before continuing my dash along it while keeping back from the edge to avoid being seen as much as possible. When I reached the end, I lowered myself off the edge to the quiet street behind this block before dropping myself down to the ground. I looked around while smoothing my dress back into place, there didn’t seem to be anyone around to notice that I had been acting weird, so I slipped back into acting like a robot and set off down the road.

I gotta assume they will be looking for me now, so I don’t want to just head back to the taxi depot in case they are tracking me somehow. I didn’t want to lose my makeshift home, if nothing else it took weeks to get comfortable and I am not sure I could steal all that stuff again.

I had topped up just before I left, so I could walk around for hours as it is, beyond that I knew where all the construction sites with accessible fuel are and when people leave. I decided to try to move through the city randomly at least until darkness fell, I would love to just go and hide on a roof or something, but it would be so easy to get trapped if someone noticed.

I had been walking for maybe thirty minutes when I saw a local panel van go past with General Synthetics slapped on the side. I didn’t think anything of it until the guy in the passenger seat pointed at me, I immediately darted off into a nearby alley and took a few more random turns into a residential area. I guess that must be where the guy I saw before was from, Natalie had said they have a lab here.

It does raise a question, why is General Synthetics after me? The man had said I was one of their prototypes too, I would have expected people from Battle-Maid Systems to be after me. Maybe there’s some relationship between the companies I don’t know, it’s not like I could just hop on the internet to look it up and I hadn’t encountered either company in the books I read really. General Synthetics was in them as a major player from the technology point of view not whatever business stuff they were doing.

I spent another forty minutes mostly undisturbed, bar having to dodge another truck I had seen before they could notice me. I was trying to stick to the city proper as it would be way easier to notice a random synthetic walking around in a residential area, not to mention more places to duck into. This inherently increased the threat the General Synthetics people represented though since if they figured that out too it would greatly limit my options to evade them.

I was on one of the quieter streets near the library when I saw the next truck, it was idling at the base of a large condo building. I took the next left and made my way onto a busier main road, hoping they hadn’t seen me. Unfortunately, this time I wasn’t quite so lucky, I heard a growl of an engine approaching from behind, and a glance confirmed it was the same truck I had seen. I abandoned any pretext of subtly to dash down the only alley I could see, I knew this one fairly well at least. It should have a big parking lot at the end, from I can cross through into another alley with plenty of directions away from it-

There was another General Synthetics truck in the lot. A woman was leaning against the driver’s door wearing a local t-shirt and the somewhat overstyled jeans popular here with sunglasses partially obscuring her face, her brown hair up in a bun. The engineer from earlier was sitting in the passenger’s seat, apparently having been in the middle of flipping through a clipboard of papers while his phone sat on the dashboard. He had looked up sharply when I emerged from the alley behind me.

“Huh you’re right Lane, it does look like the mark seven.” Her voice was eerily familiar and jangled my memory. I had paused when I’d seen them, but they weren’t that much in the way, so I started running to pass beside them. “That’s enough of that, override Kulovesi, stop.”

Before I could wonder what that meant, my stride was already transitioning smoothly into one that brought me to a halt just past the van.

“My overrides work fine, that’s really curious.” The woman said, all I could do was listen to her approach as I struggled to move or do anything. I couldn’t even blink. “Override Kulovesi, state full model name.” She commanded.

“Battle-Maid Systems mark seven prototype, serial number zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-one.” my mouth responded again.

“See? Just like I said!” The engineer called out from within the truck.

“Hmm, interesting.” The woman responded somewhat distractedly. “Alright, let’s get her back to the lab and take a closer look. Override Kulovesi, shut down.”