A Pornodroid's Tale Read online

  #

  The next morning, Jimmy Babe said only one thing to the tender droids.

  “Bring the pornobot along. Put it in my groundside dressing room.”

  He refused to respond to anything else they said to him, all the way from orbit to the venue. He went straight to his dressing room the moment it was ready, then shooed the tenders out. Galena sat on the edge of the bed, motionless, staring at the floor between her feet.

  Jimmy took his shirt off, dragged a chair over, and sat down facing her, knee to knee. He leaned over and put one hand on the back of her neck, rested the other on her shoulder.

  “What are you going to do?” Galena asked, and looked up, into his eyes. He flinched, but didn't look away.

  “Do you care?” Jimmy asked, question for question.

  “Will you rape me?” she said, the words flat, without inflection. He looked deep into her unblinking android eyes and the seconds stretched out long between them.

  “I don't know,” Jimmy said. “I don't know what to call this.” He shoved his fingers hard into the nape of her neck and twisted at her collarbone sharply at the same time. She didn't resist. The front of her torso detached in a single panel from the top of her breasts to just above her bellybutton, and Jimmy set the panel aside. Inside, cables snaked and a few fans softly whirred, driving her heat-regulating breath.

  “No,” she said, and her hands gripped his wrists hard.

  “You're not Galena,” he said, voice breaking. “They wiped whatever made you aware. Wiped you back to being just another pornodroid, right out of the box. Your feelings for me are gone, and your feelings for Rusty are a programmed ruse. And that means, pornodroid, that you obey human orders. You don't know me well enough to know when its safe to disobey, not anymore. Let go of my wrists, right now,” he said, ignoring the tears that slid down his cheeks. She let go.

  “How did you know I was reset to defaults?” she asked. Not Galena. Just another droid, learning.

  “It's the little things,” he said, and he drew a bundle of wiring out of her torso, separating it into cables, taping the ends to key points on his chest, the back of his neck, his skull, just as Galena's printed instructions said. Had she known what was about to happen? Jimmy pushed the thought away. There wasn't time to ponder it now. “Do you still know how to transfer my consciousness to your hardware?” he asked as he finished, suddenly afraid that her reset had erased the knowledge. The thing that had been Galena paused.

  “It is in a secondary storage device, archived,” the pornodroid said. “I have unpacked it, and now I do know.” What else had Galena archived? No time to ask.

  “Good.” He sucked in a deep breath. Was he really ready to risk his life to transfer into an android mind, in the prime of his life? Transfer was for the dying. All he had to do was suffer out the end of his contract and he could do whatever he wanted.

  Thirteen years to the end of his contract. Thirteen years of endless touring. Thirteen years of talking to droids, of faceless corporate heads giving him instructions by hypercom, of billions of screaming faces he'd never have a chance to talk to, but only sing at.

  Thirteen more years alone in front of billions of plastic strangers.

  “Do it,” he said, and clenched his teeth. He expected pain, a tearing away of thought like being drugged to sleep, a sense of process, a dream. Instead, reality flickered, as if he had blinked.

  And he was looking into his own vacant and drooling face. He replaced his extruded wiring, reached over and picked up his android body's breast panel and held it in place until it locked itself. The breasts jiggled slightly with the click, an odd sensation, one that he had never felt before as a lean male—but there was no time to think on the ramifications of gender change at the moment. Or the larger change from biological to machine. He laid his former body down on the bed (it was light; Jimmy's new body was strong, and machine effort felt indefinably different from meat effort), pulled the covers up, closed its eyelids with two fingers. And then he left the dressing room, into the growing chant of the crowd in the stadium, the thundering yearn of a hundred thousand people all waiting to see Jimmy Babe.

  “Jimmy is meditating and wants a wake up ten minutes before curtain,” he said to the tender droid standing next to the dressing room door, keeping his voice neutral. He walked down the hall to the car that had brought him down from orbit, entered, told the tender droids that their presence was requested inside. He was not questioned. He was only a pornobot.

  But he was a free pornobot. Once the last tender left the car, he lifted off, hovered for a moment, and took off flying full throttle for the new and faceless ocean he saw in the distance.

  See more from S.A. Barton on his blog at https://sabarton.com

  On Twitter at https://twitter.com/tao23

  And on Facebook at

  https://www.facebook.com/pages/S-A-Barton/312607662122218