Jack stared at the ceiling, Dee’s head on his chest and a blanket over them.
“We can’t tell anyone about this.” He sighed.
“I was just about to say the same thing.” She whispered, chuckling sadly.
“I mean we got away with it for a while I think, no reason to stop but we can’t announce it. They won’t understand.”
“I get it. You’re a big-shot killer, big masculine stud who doesn’t need help from anyone and who fixes everything. Most men who get companion bots aren’t exactly open about it. Fucking a robot isn’t exactly the conquering male fantasy, it’s usually the last resort or the safe way out.” She sighed.
“That’s not that I meant. I don’t give a shit that you’re artificial, but the fact that you are a model based on my friend back on Delmar is going to seem weird to everyone. They’re not thrilled about her having a line of sexbots, and now the platonic friend who never had interest in her, is interested in her robot. They don’t see that you’re not just a stupid sexdoll with response lines anymore, You’re a form of life that took refuge in the only artificial body on the ship to save yourself. Which unfortunately happened to be a Dee sexbot.”
“I’m sorry I don’t look like someone else.” She said sadly.
“I didn’t mean it THAT way… Dee is visually attractive, hence why these things sell. They’re realistic enough even with plastic skin, and you’ve the real human flesh. That’s not standard issue.” He smirked. She pondered a moment, looking alarmed. “It’s not that I’m ashamed of you. I’d just be ashamed of banging Dee,because frankly, she’s about as intelligent as the damn bimbobots, and 5 times as annoying, not to mention that she's been around the block more then the tram systems on Delmar. You have the one thing about her that’s actually quite nice, her body, and you have a different personality. But people are weird and judgmental, and they won’t see it as me sleeping with a robot or me sleeping with an alien artificial lifeform using a robot. They’ll see it as me sleeping with Dee and I’ll never hear the end of it. The theories, the looks, the reasons why this is somehow wrong despite nothing being actually wrong. All the correct things they would say if I was screwing Dee, they will apply to you, because you look and sound like her.”
“Why doesn’t that bother you?” she asked.
“I don’t know, maybe I’m just lonely and logical, maybe the brain damage has messed with my emotions, maybe you’re just special. I honestly don’t know, but whatever you are, it's fascinating, and you’re more than an emotionless stupid sex machine, you’re more than most humans I know. I don’t know what you are, but it’s fascinating and I want to understand it.”
“Jack, why DO I have real skin? I remember being sold to Vinn and Nicole, fully synthetic and they never once mentioned an upgrade, they never even had sex with me. And then I remember you and Gizzy joining the ship after yours was damaged, and then I remember Gizzy giving me Delmarian Blood infusions, and I have human skin. I don’t remember anyone saying why.”
“That was before you had feelings and emotions, probably just one of Gizzy’s weird experiments to upgrade her blood or… do something. We’ll have to ask her, but it’s good that she did, or you wouldn’t have wanted functional feeling for it later. You’re a strange mystery I can't seem to solve, but damned if I don’t enjoy searching.”
“What if you can’t ever understand what I am?” Even I don’t really know what I am, how can you hope to?”
“Then I’ll enjoy the journey of trying to find out, and if I fail, I’ll like ya anyway.” He said before kissing her on the forehead. She peered up with her dimly glowing red eyes. “This just feels so familiar to me, Dee. Dozens of little memory fragments of someone I loved, and it’s not quite there but it has to be. Who else could it be? I know for a fact I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else on this ship, or… what the hell was her name… Samantha. I don’t even like her name. Hell, everyone said we didn’t get along. If you and I had something and I lost that, I want it back.”
“But I don’t remember this. Nothing about this feels familiar to me, it just feels right. It feels amazing and exciting but it feels new. Was my memory wipe self-inflicted so I did a better job, or are my digital files easier to erase than human memory? Jack, I feel a lot of things right now, but none of them familiar, it just feels… happy.”
“Shit, it also feels like 9:14, because it’s 14 minutes after 9am, when I get up… and you’re in my room. Hide in here for a while after I leave and if anyone spots you, pretend to be cleaning up or something.” He said, getting dressed in a hurry and looking back with a guilty face. “I hate that we have to hide this, but you understand, right? It’s not you, it’s the situation and how it looks.”
“I understand.” She nodded with a smile, agreeing inside, but feeling a little alone the moment he left. “See you soon Jack.” She whispered to the empty room.
...
“I don’t get it.” Nicole said sipping her coffee as Jack snuck on the bridge behind Vinn and Gizzy. Gizzy gave him a pat on the back.
“Oversleep?” she asked.
“Sorry.” Jack sighed.
“Don’t be, oversleep all you want. You’ve been through some shit, you need rest and we’re between missions. I’d rather you oversleep than drink all night because you can’t sleep.” She said, pausing at the irony that she was currently raising a beer up, drinking it anyway.
“So what’s the commotion here?” He asked Nicole.
“The stupid magic book piloting the ship took us nowhere. We dropped out of FTL and there’s nothing here. There’s nothing wrong with the ship scans, engines are fine, and there are no computer errors. It just decided through whatever other-worldly means this thing uses to work that we needed to drop out of FTL into just dead space and drift for a while. Won’t let me manually fly either. Damnit, that override will take hours.” Nicole huffed.
“Maybe the true mission is the friends we make along the way?” Vinn joked. “I’m kidding, I’ll run another scan in higher detail for anything out here.” He said before taking his seat.
“I’ll go down to the engine controls.” Jack volunteered. “See if I can get it to back to manual override. I could use the quiet time alone.” He nodded.
“Well, I guess I’ll go tinker for a bit.” Gizzy shrugged. “May as well work on the new robot, maybe by the time we have a real mission it will be up and running. We may need extra crew. You never know.” She said before trudging off, grabbing another beer on her way.
...
Gizzy shook her head looking at the robot on the table as Dee sat watching.
“I’m gonna be honest. This new robot you got is trash. I mean, it’s good enough to clean but if you wanna modify it, especially if we want it combat functional, the work and effort and cost to fix it is just too much. You may as well start from scratch. None of the technology is compatible with your current technology, so we’d have to upgrade the memory, the links, and the skin. Half the skeleton has microfractures in the plastic, so that's a problem as well. I have a better idea.” Gizzy said.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Go on” Dee said.
“You’re basically a brand new for of life incompatible with most other artificial systems, and the body you’re in is frankly very good quality, that’s why they bought it. It’s why I upgraded the chassis, I thought we may need something combat level sturdy. The clone machine counts you as crew, I still don’t understand how it works but you push a button and it prints you, and we just swap to a memory card with your memory on it. So why don’t we just copy you and you can modify yourself?”
“I can just… duplicate myself? That’s not a problem for you and a risk of me overtaking the ship?” Dee joked. “You didn’t want one pornstar bot on the ship, let alone a Menage a trois to deal with.
“Look, I’ve learned that you’re not a threat, I’m not saying we won’t limit this, I don’t want 20 of you running around the ship, but you’re clearly obsessed with the idea of self improvement and as someone who’s upgraded my own form, I get it. You’re exploring yourself and your body in a way that I should have worded better so it doesn’t sound like a metaphor for the puberty conversation. My biomech body back home was anything but stock. I had that thing battle ready, illegally upgraded and packed with weapons. We’re not doing that, but I understand the idea of mechanical self improvement.”
“So you’re fine with me upgrading myself?”
"It IS your body, and I’d be a hippocrite asking for help replacing my organs and then telling you that you can’t replace things in your body. I’d rather you just spend time in the lab with technology we know, rather than trying to basically infect a foreign robot, because frankly that sounds like a good way for some Uno reverse bullshit and having an Evil Dee copy running on the ghost software we didn’t fully clear. You’re already the result of copying over badly deleted files and we’re lucky you turned out… not evil. We have me already and I don’t like competition. A cloned Deebot is just the safest and easiest way to upgrade. Replaceable milspec parts, compatible tooling.”
“That means a lot to me. The fact that you don’t really like me and yet you would allow two of me on the ship, it means a lot.”
“Well it’s not my ship, It’s Nicole’s ship. Mine got blown up. Long story, probably about 40 chapters. Speaking of Nicole’s ship… I’m being summoned for a mission. Basic supply run, should take a few hours, Me and Jack can handle it. Vinn can help you if you need modifications.” She said leaving her to it.
...
“So… while they’re doing their thing…” Dee asked. “Can I talk with you?”
“Yeah sure. Go for it.” Vinn said as they wheeled a cart to the clone machine. He pressed the button and like a human vending machine, it made his selection of ironically… D 2. It hummed away as the lights moved up and down. “So what’s on your mind?”
“Can you keep a secret?” she asked.
“Yeah sure.”
“Because I feel like you guys already are.” She said as he froze, trying to think of a way out.
“Uh, Look, sometimes uh...” he paused.
“What happened with Jack and Samantha?”
“Look, I’m under direct orders to not discuss the Samantha situation. All I’m allowed to say is that she died in the explosion that injured Jack, and since he lost his memory, you volunteered to have information deleted for security protocols.”
“So you CAN keep a secret. You know I’m smarter than blonde bimbo I’m modeled after, I actually can form a theory based on information gaps. Such as why I needed my memory deleted after Jack’s memory loss. Or how Samantha is bullshit and a scapegoat for something.”
“You heard my explanation. It sucks, but I have orders.”
“How bad would you feel if suddenly you were just…disconnected from Nicole. Unable to be together, truly intimate, missing something you need to be happy?”
“Can we change the subject?”
“Vinn, I found missing data files deleted from my system the day Jack was injured. I’ve looked for Samantha’s records, and there are none. It’s like she didn’t exist, and a lot of files are missing from mission records. I’d also like to know why Gizzy had human skin put on me and Delmarian blood compatibility upgrades… I assume your blood. What happened?”
“You need to talk to Gizzy.” He said coldly. I don’t have authorization to touch that subject.”
…
Jack and Dee sat in some folding chairs with a look of confusion while Gizzy silently brought up the view screen.
“Why don’t you just tell us?” Jack asked. "We’ve been in here for 5 minutes and you haven’t said a word, you’re just setting up a video. Can we cut the presentation bullshit and get to why you tampered with both of our memories?”
“Because you didn’t give me any other choice, Jack. You asked me to do it, and I said no, it’s a 25 percent chance you die on the table or suffer permanent psychosis as a result. And you know damn well I keep consent videos of everyone who undergoes any experimental procedure involving memory because people tend to understand it better from themselves. You asked me 3 more times to wipe your memory and I refused 3 times, and then one day Nicole was wandering the ship and she found you in an airlock holding a gun to your head. You took the memory file out of the cloning machine and sat down in the garbage ejection hatch with your pistol off safety and against your head. There’s no fixing that Jack. If you pulled the trigger, after destroying your memory file, there would be nothing left of you to clone back, just an empty-brained shell with your body. You tried to kill yourself, Jack, the only reason you didn’t was because Nicole manually opened the hatch and grabbed you, and put her head on yours. You stopped because if you pulled the trigger, that round would kill you both and you couldn’t do it. Nicole saved your life. You may wanna thank her for it later.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, why would I want to kill myself?” he asked, feeling a swell of emotions out of nowhere.
“Because when you took this mission, you brought your wife.”
“I don’t…he started, “have a wife?” He said slowly, as if asking himself.
“I know, not anymore. 4 years ago you met a woman named Annabel Victoria Belvedere, Everyone called her Vicki. You fell in love and you got married. She was sick, she had cancer, she fought it with experimental treatments, and her altered DNA was so resilient that you eventually started training her for missions, and she was actually quite good. But she needed to consume blood to survive, human or Delmarian. Like a vampire, she needed to feed, so we set up the robot with human skin and Vinn’s compatible blood and things seemed fine, until she got attacked by something we called The Pitch, a sentient black tar substance that infected her mind and body. She went insane, mutated into something we couldn’t control or contain, and tried to kill us. The love of your life who you vowed to take care of through sickness and health, cancer and dangerous missions, became your enemy. You wouldn’t accept it, you even shot me to protect her and in the end, she ultimately took the lives of over 200 people, some of them innocent people, fathers, mothers and at least one child. You either put a gun to your head because you couldn’t live without her, or you bluffed, in order to force my hand at a procedure that could kill you in order to erase her. Dee volunteered to have her memory of her wiped as well, because we weren’t sure if you would try and extract the information from her and she felt it was better because she barely knew her and it was a simple procedure for a robot, with low risk and no invasive surgery."
“I had a wife?” he said with tears in his eyes. “and now she’s just… gone?”
“After she tried to kill us and the cloning failed, we realized Vicki was infected so deeply that even her clones would just turn on us. She poisoned your mind, manipulated you, and she actually killed me, successfully. We put her in stasis to find a cure but Dee’s boyfriend, ironically a prisoner we had onboard for Vicki to feed on, Zhoren, tried to hijack the ship and steal a shuttle, taking Vicki with him and she got out of containment and killed him for it. So… I killed her. I put a bullet in her backup clone’s head in her tube and we burned the data files and DNA samples. Your wife died long before that, whatever virus she was after it took over wasn’t her.”
“So the memory flashes, of someone in my bed, on missions with me, the missing gaps were her?” Jack asked.
“Yes. We made up Samantha as a way to explain mission files and hoped your mind would fill in the gap and assume you had a quick romantic affair with her and she died on a mission. Just some quick fling you’d get over and move on from. Apparently, once again, somehow through all impossible odds, Dee managed to, despite a memory wipe and being a damn fuckbot, still ruin everything and dredge up the past. I could have skinned you, returned you to factory plastic and wiped everything, but you’re a sentient lifeform now and you didn’t consent to that. You couldn’t get rid of your organic flesh after this new sensation called feeling. So here we are, mysteries cracked open like Jack’s skull, and both of you are gonna watch the video.” She said placing down a memory card on the table. “You’ll know what this is for after.” She said leaving the room and slamming the door. Dee looked as devastated as Jack.
“Jack, I am SO sorry, I didn’t know.”
“Dee, this isn’t your fault. You were only trying to help and it just failed to take. The memory flashbacks and feelings would have driven me insane, I knew something was wrong. Don’t you dare blame yourself for helping me find the truth. Now please, just let me see this.” He said before pressing play.