Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Johnny Cash – One Piece at a Time

One piece at a time, that’s how Eddie has been building his very own companion droid. Stealing whatever he can from the factory floor of the fabrication plant where he’s employed and assembling them in secret. But as ‘Maria’ nears completion, Eddie finds himself becoming more reckless and desperate to finish.

======

When the alert popped up in the corner of Eduardo’s eyeline, on his AR glasses, he did his best to keep the delight off his face. His heart rate must have spiked. The facility’s AI monitored everything to ensure absolute efficiency, his pulse rate, microexpressions, respiration. To cover the spike, he faked an expression of surprise and hoped that would suffice.

‘Processing Error in Machine 83A, production halted. Proceed immediately to Machine 83A.’

Eduardo, Eddie to the few friends he’d ever had, hurriedly put his work aside and left the workshop. His AR glasses projected an optimum route to Machine 83A on the factory floor although he knew exactly where he was going. The hallways gleamed, as sterile as a surgical suite. A couple of scrubber droids crawled across the walls and floor like starfish, his glasses warning him of the tripping hazard presented by one of them and veering well clear of it. Humming vents pulled impurities from the air. It always made Eddie feel grubby and all too human. He swiped his palms against the hips of his dark coveralls. The smartwatch that measured his pulse and perspiration, issued by AZTR to all of its employees, was cuffed around his left wrist.

Eddie was employed as an Engineering Officer in the Perfect Companions subsection of AZTR Fabrication and Satisfaction Processing Facility #224. Robots building robots in a vast incestuous orgy of unceasing activity, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. He was one of only a few humans employed in the Perfect Companions fabrication plant. Some were employed in certain oversight positions justified more by tax breaks than anything else. Eddie’s job, however, existed for the simple fact that the machines had not yet developed any tools as reliable and versatile as a set of human hands connected to a human brain, at least none that operated for less than the price of Eddie’s yearly salary. Not yet. Every day, he came to work and did as the facility’s artificial intelligence instructed, monitored and watched constantly. He had very little independence in how he performed his tasks. It set extremely narrow margins on his behaviour. But it was within those margins that he pursued his true passion.

The factory floor was too vast and layered with machinery to see across it from one side to the other. Some parts were assembled at other sites but the vast majority of fabrication and assembly of all ‘Perfect Companions’ domestic droids for the western half of the country was done right here. Eddie’s glasses led him past a bank of metal torsos, backed up behind the machine he was being directed to service. Some could be picked out as ‘male’ or ‘female’ torsos but at their current stage most were genderless as well as skinless, armless, and legless.

‘Error in second assembler of Machine 83A.’ read Eddie’s glasses. The lenses highlighted the access panel he needed to open. Eddie was already moving toward it and forced himself to slow down. He knew exactly where the issue would be. He was the one who’d sabotaged it.

With his electric screwdriver, Eddie unbolted and removed the panel. Its power had already been temporarily disconnected by the facility’s AI. Inside was a series of intermeshing and potentially mangling parts. One of the metal torsos and a newly installed left arm were jammed up inside.

When Eddie serviced Machine 83A two weeks ago, he had tightened one of the interlocking articulators a little beyond its recommended tolerances. Only a little. He knew it wouldn’t have much of an effect but once every few hundred instals, maybe once every few thousand, it would slip and prove too tight and get jammed when connecting a left arm to a shoulder joint. Now, his minor adjustment and patience paid off. He reached into the machine and wrestled with the jammed parts. He made a small show of it for the glasses, struggling a little more than was necessary to justify the damage inflicted on the arm as he pulled it loose. Part of it was gouged against the side of an articulator.

“Readjusting now,” Eddie said aloud, for the benefit of the AR glasses.

Methodically, Eddie went through the parts associated with the fault. In doing so, he undid the damage he’d done a couple of weeks ago. His AR glasses monitored and timed his progress. When the AI started to believe he was at risk of taking too long, a red meter began to shrink at the corner of his left eye. Eddie wrapped up and reinstalled the panel.

“Ready to resume production.”

He let his glasses scan the arm, making sure they captured the gouges in its panelling. As he’d hoped, as he’d calculated and been relying on, the AI determined that the arm had sustained unacceptable levels of aesthetic damage. The glasses instructed him to take it back to the workshop for disposal.

“Confirmed,” Eddie said, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice and off of his face.

Eddie returned to his workshop via the route projected on his glasses. Machine 83A resumed, its hum and rattle joining the general chorus of the factory floor. ‘Dispose of damaged product.’ moved to the top of Eddie’s task list, as if he needed the reminder.

Back in the workshop, Eddie retrieved a bag for disposal. The material of the arm would be recycled back into the metal fabricators. Taking it to one of the workbenches, he deliberately looked away. His glasses saw what he saw so he averted his gaze and worked by feel. Deftly, he disconnected the damaged arm’s hand at the wrist and slid it into a pocket of his coveralls. Ever since sabotaging the assembler he’d been carrying a precisely measured pile of scrap in another pocket. He bundled it into the disposal bag with the rest of the arm, still looking away, and then wrapped it all tightly. The bag he took to a receptacle in his workshop designated specifically for scrap. Its weight would be measured but from that point on it wouldn’t be scrutinised. He felt the cool, hard fingertips brushing the side of his leg through the lining of his pocket, the weight of it somehow comforting.

After his shift, Eddie caught the monorail back to his residential block. The array of buildings that made up AZTR Fabrication and Satisfaction Processing Facility #224 were splayed across the Nevada Desert. Enormous, windowless cinderblocks, each several city blocks wide, with the AZTR logo painted down their sides in letters dozens of metres high. Rows of heavy duty, long distance drones formed grids across the sky. Trucks moved in and out of every entrance and exit at all hours of the day and night. The monorail, whizzing across the desert floor, wound between fabrication and processing blocks and picked up departing shifts of exhausted workers. Like the drones and trucks, shifts of human workers never stopped moving in and out. Doing whatever jobs it was cheaper to employ humans in than to use droids. The majority of them, more than ninety percent, lived on site like Eddie in either dorms or apartments. Exhausted or not, most of them piled off at the recreation block before they reached the residential blocks. The recreation block was filled with restaurants and clubs and VR pods and other experiences that they could exchange AZTR credits for. Most of the workers never went offsite, they lived, worked, and played on AZTR property.

Eddie stayed on until the monorail reached the second residential block. He had his own apartment as part of his employment, a so-called ‘executive’ suite. It consisted of a single combined living and bedroom space and private bathroom with its own shower and toilet. No kitchen, although he’d been allowed to acquire and install a minifridge and combination microwave-rehydrator. One wall displayed a scrolling series of default views, a snowy forest when Eddie walked in, or entertainment programs on demand, interspersed with unskippable advertisements for products and services under the AZTR umbrella. All appliances and furniture were supplied on a subscription basis from AZTR.

Eddie crossed to the narrow sofa facing the entertainment wall. There was room enough for two people on it, one half occupied by a humanoid shape under a white sheet. Subtle AZTR logos were stitched into the sheet’s edges. Slowly, reverently, he peeled it back.

“Maria, I’m home,” Eddie said. “It was a good day, I’ve got something for you.”

Maria was a companion droid, or one in progress. Almost naked, she wore only a pair of plain pink panties. He’d found what was under them too much of a distraction while the rest of her was incomplete. One thigh was pale, the other a tawny bronze. The rest of her body bore a similar patchwork. Her breasts, her next most distracting feature, were subtly different shapes and sizes capped with nipples that almost but didn’t quite match, both a little heavier than a handful. Of course, the first thing most other people might have noticed was that she had no head. A collar of plastic flesh ended just above her metal clavicle. A stub jutted out of the centre like a large bolt. Both of her arms were devoid of flesh. Metal limbs, sticklike, like bones slathered thickly in chrome and cobbled with servos and gears that imitated muscles, hung from the artificial flesh of her shoulders. One was slightly longer than the other, from wrist to shoulder, and only the right ended in a hand. The left ended in the stump of a kind of articulated joint, not unlike her neck.

On impulse, Eddie got down on one knee in front of the sofa. The entertainment wall behind him played an advertisement then transitioned to a glittering beachfront lined with umbrellas and towels but somehow devoid of humans. The AZTR logo hovered in the sky. Eddie slipped the hand he’d stolen earlier that day out of his pocket.

“Would you do me the honor?” Eddie said, looking up at the headless droid.

Like putting on a ring, Eddie slid the inert hand onto Maria’s wrist. All companions’ disparate parts were easily interchangeable. The hand joined the wrist with a satisfying snap. Had Maria been operational, it would have immediately been articulated and ready to use.

Maria had begun life as a kind of revenge against AZTR. Revenge for what he wasn’t quite sure. They employed him, housed him, fed him, for a cost of course, nothing in this world was free. He couldn’t quite articulate it. But he saw opportunities and he began to take what he could. There were storage compartments beneath the sofa and his bed and in the walls filled with spare parts. If pressed, he’d have argued he could sell them even though he’d always known the risks associated with trading in stolen parts far exceeded any potential profit. So instead he’d started to build her. One piece at a time, he’d planned and snuck her out of the fabrication plant, part by part by part, then assembled her here in his apartment. It had been two years now and she was almost complete.

From one of his storage boxes, Eddie removed a pair of sleeves. Both loose and floppy and hollow but soft, like real skin, consisting of not just a rubbery outer covering but artificial flesh and padding as well. He’d been waiting to dress her with them, as a kind of reward. They slipped over the bare metal bones of her articulated fingers and hands and arms like opera gloves. First one and then the other, their seams meeting perfectly at the shoulders, elastic enough to conform to limbs that were subtly different from the ones they had been designed for. They both looked caucasian. Downy, nearly invisible hairs on the backs of both forearms caught the light when he looked closely enough. There were grooves on their palms, whorls on the end of each finger and the suggestion of veins under each wrist. Their fingernails were hard and felt like keratin, perfectly manicured, unpainted. When he was done, Eddie lifted one of her hands and ran it down his cheek.

If Eddie held up a hand and blocked the absence above Maria’s neck, she looked almost real. He’d gotten used to her other peculiarities. In fact, it was something he celebrated about her. And she was so close to being complete. He already had the parts to build her a head, he could give her a face, but he was saving that step for last. All she was missing was a heart and a brain, so to speak, like the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. A battery to power her and a processor loaded with a companion droid AI.

Eddie wasn’t quite sure about his next moves. The excitement of having come so far made his pulse quicken. Made him feel urgent and reckless. A battery, however, would be almost impossible to get. They were by far the most valuable single item in a droid’s makeup and the process for recycling them was completely different. Fortunately, he had an alternative in mind. But the brain would be almost as hard to get and he’d considered over and over how to go about acquiring one. He could order these things online. Not through AZTR, he worried that would be too suspicious, but there were other sites, black markets for droids and droid parts. Early on, he’d acquired some of the larger parts for Maria’s legs and torso through one of them. But doing it that way had felt like a betrayal. He was too pragmatic to simply throw those parts away and start over, too desperate to see her finally complete, but he did feel like those pieces weren’t really a part of her if he thought about them too long.

“Soon, I promise,” Eddie said. “Soon.”

Sitting on the couch, Eddie slung one arm around Maria’s naked shoulders. He faced the entertainment wall with her beside him like any other couple settling in for the night, but his mind wouldn’t stop turning the problem over and over.

xXx

Eddie already owned two defunct silicon ‘brains’ for use in companions and other domestic droids produced by AZTR. Unfortunately, he only had them because both were completely fried and no better than any other piece of scrap. There was nothing he could do to repair them for Maria. After acquiring the left hand, the final visible part, he started carrying one of the processors in his thigh pocket.

Day in and day out, Eddie carried the defunct processing unit with him. He gave himself over to the AI that communicated through his AR glasses. Acting as a warm body and a pair of hands as his mind, compartmentalised, looked for opportunities to replace the brain in his pocket with one that would work. It was difficult though, the brains were produced at another location and shipped to their plant. By the time Eddie came into contact with them, they were already implanted and encased inside the metal skulls that would act as their new homes. Heads were planted onto torsos, covered in fabricated skin and hair, and shipped. He couldn’t set a machine up to do some minor damage that he could take advantage of, like he’d done in the past. There seemed to be no point at which he could swap one of the processors passing through the factory floor with the burnt out one he carried in his pocket, especially with the AI watching everything he did.

Night after night, Eddie sat on the couch with Maria. He didn’t socialise and certainly nobody came back to his apartment. Some nights he left the sheet over her but more and more often he would take it off and put his arm around her shoulders and imagine what it would be like to have her fully formed beside him. With each night, he became more desperate and more prone to recklessness. He had one other option but it would be incredibly risky. He could lose his job, be blacklisted, ousted, arrested, but that was true of everything he’d done to build Maria so far.

The entertainment block teemed with people at all hours of the day and night. While Eddie mostly worked alone, AZTR Fabrication and Satisfaction Processing Facility #224 employed tens of thousands of people who rarely left the premises and worked a variety of overlapping shifts. Those shifts were usually so consistent that people changed their entire routines to suit them. While some workers were just stopping by the entertainment block for their morning cup of coffee, others had finished work for the day and were grabbing cocktails or going clubbing in one of the block’s sanitised venues. The chain bars and restaurants were all owned by AZTR. There was a bowling alley and a go-cart track and places to hire VR booths among other entertainments on offer.

Eddie slunk by groups grabbing breakfast or dinner or drinks together. No one ever had time to slip out for lunch midshift. Laughter drifted from the bowling alley. Another group poured out of the minigolf course. He caught one woman’s eye and she smiled at him. He looked away, guilty.

Tucked away down the far end of the entertainment block, beside an escape room parlour, was a place called ‘Companionship’. Its sign, compared to the garnish colours and neon of virtually every other outlet, was subtle and reserved, and there was no outward indication of what services it offered. Customers had to already know it was there. A companion droid brothel. Eddie had never gone there to sample its wares. Looking around with another guilty expression, he slipped into the short corridor that hosted it.

Thick, deeply red curtains draped the walls just inside the venue. The carpet underfoot was so plush it was as if it had never been trodden. The light fixtures looked like miniature chandeliers. Eddie assumed it had been designed by a committee based on what they thought a brothel should look like. At the end of the hall, he was greeted by a widely smiling companion droid in the shape of a young, blonde woman. Rosy cheeks and twinkling eyes, she had an innocent, girl-next-door appearance, dressed conservatively in a white blouse and black skirt.

“Good evening, sir, how are you tonight?” the droid greeter asked.

“Uh, fine, thank you,” Eddie said.

“Is this your first time with us?”

The droid knew perfectly well that it was. The AI would have told it everything about Eddie the moment he walked through the door.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“We’re very happy to host you! Did you have any preferences that you would like to explore? Any idea of what kind of services you were interested in?”

“Preferences?”

“We have girls or boys, or others, different body types and ethnicities. All of them offer variations on the same core services.”

“No, no, I didn’t have a preference,” Eddie said, thinking of Maria’s patchwork appearance.

“Would you like to meet some of our available companions?”

“Yes, thank you. Girls, please! Women.”

The greeter ushered Eddie into an adjoining room, more curtains and carpet and chandeliers. A dozen women, droids, were already waiting. Dazzling smiles or smoldering, sultry stares. They ranged about as widely as possible in body shapes and outward appearances while all remaining essentially attractive. One was small and slim and petite, on the verge of just how young AZTR were legally allowed to make the companions look. Another bordered on obese, with improbably vast breasts. The tallest was nearly a full head and shoulders taller than Eddie with statuesque proportions. Since Eddie wasn’t wearing his AR glasses, holo menus sprung to life beside each of the droids with names, prices, and suggested services. Eddie found himself studying the shape of their skulls then felt like a serial killer.

“Her, I guess,” Eddie said.

He gestured to one of the droids, designated ‘Bobbi’, who looked sporty and well muscled. Her main attraction for him was her short, undercut hairstyle. Less hair to get in the way. She smiled and posed, stepping forward to greet him.

“Bobbi would love to get to know you better,” the greeter said. “The first charge to your AZTR account is for half an hour then there is an additional charge for every ten minutes after that. Are there any special amenities you require? A preference for a certain kind of room?”

“No, no preference, just private,” Eddie said.

“All of our rooms are completely private and our companions are totally discreet.”

“I know, just, I’m shy. This is my first time so the most private room you have, please.”

The athletic-looking companion droid, Bobbi, led Eddie to another room down a short hallway. Gym pants molded to her sculpted buttocks and legs. Her top flattened out her breasts and showed off her seemingly muscled arms. Arousal mixed with his fear and excitement. He hardly knew what to do with himself. The room was pink, a freshly laundered bed in the centre. Racks of costumes covered one wall and shelves of toys and attachments for the droids lined another. Some of the toys he could only guess at their purposes, even with all of his engineering knowledge.

“Were there any scenarios you would like to explore?” Bobbi asked. “Would you like me to be more assertive, or do you like to take the lead?”

“Just, kneel by the bed and face the mattress, please,” Eddie said.

“You’ve got it, babe.”

Without undressing, Bobbi turned away from Eddie and knelt beside the bed. Her movements looked unnaturally smooth. He studied the back of her head. As soon as the droid was deactivated, the brothel would receive an alert. Although he wasn’t in his work uniform, he’d deliberately worn baggy cargo pants with multiple pockets. His electric screwdriver was in one of them. One of the dead brains, slightly altered, was in another. The droid didn’t move, didn’t breathe, as he considered his options.

“It’s alright, whenever you’re ready,” Bobbi said.

Every companion droid had a simple on-off switch behind their left ear. Not visible on the surface, it only showed as a dim amber glow beneath Bobbi’s skin. One hand reached for the button, the other for his electric screwdriver. He felt the button sink into her skull with a satisfying click. The droid’s body language didn’t change but an almost imperceptible hum went out of her. Eddie ripped the screwdriver out of his pocket. Fingertips found the seam of skin where the back of the droid’s head met its neck. He peeled upward, revealing the curve of her metal skull and a panel with four inset bolts.

With practised speed, Eddie slammed the screwdriver into the bolts and whipped them out like a pit crew mechanic removing the wheel from a race car. They came out of the panel spinning and he struggled to catch them. The panel pulled free to reveal the droid’s silicon brain and associated equipment. While the droid was powered down, multiple colourful diodes still blinked on and off inside its skull.

A soft tone chimed from the room’s entry. Eddie jumped in place. It was followed moments later by a neutral voice.

“Excuse me, sir, is everything alright?”

“Just a minute!” Eddie said.

Fortunately for Eddie, companion droids’ brains were only clipped inside their skulls. He knew exactly how they were mounted or he wouldn’t have attempted such an operation to steal one. He ripped the companion’s brain out and replaced it with the defunct one from his pocket. A string trailed from inside the brain he’d been carrying. Winding it around his finger, he yanked it loose like a ripcord. He’d seeded the processor with a chemical mixture that, set off by the friction, began to burn and smoke. If he was very, very lucky it would burn out all the identifiers of the fried brian and cause too much damage for anyone to spot the switch as long as they didn’t look too hard. He pocketed the new processor and smacked the panel back into Bobbi’s skull. The chemical mix fizzed and belched streamers of white smoke. Using the electric screwdriver, he slammed the bolts into place.

“Sir, we’re entering the room,” the neutral voice from the doorway said.

“Just a minute!” Eddie repeated.

The door began to slide open. Eddie drilled the last of the bolts and slapped the artificial skin and hair back down. A halo of thin smoke hung around the droid’s head. Sensing movement behind him, he stuffed the electric screwdriver down the front of his pants and wrestled with it as if adjusting himself.

Eddie turned to find his own face staring back at him. AZTR security wore armoured body suits and helmets with mirrored visors. Two of them bristled, staring him down. They were human, although the facility’s AI would be able to see through their helmets the same way it watched everything he did while wearing his glasses. Fortunately, he was pretty sure his body had been blocking the droid from view when they entered. His reflected expression looked pale and terrified.

“Uh, uh, I don’t know what happened,” Eddie said. “I got her to kneel down by the bed and suddenly she stopped moving?”

One of the guards tried to power the droid back on but got no response. Smoke wafted from its ear canals like an angry cartoon character. They went over Eddie’s story several times but his absolutely genuine embarrassment helped to sell it. He neglected to mention his role working with these kinds of droids. The AI in their helmets would have informed them who he was and what he did but neither thought to ask any questions about it. If they’d searched him, they would have found the companion’s actual processor right away in his pocket and probably his screwdriver as well but thankfully they didn’t even try. AZTR security weren’t cops. Judging by their response time, they must have been stationed to watch the brothel itself. Given how serious the consequences of committing an offense were for any AZTR employee, with loss of their job meaning not just the loss of income but loss of housing and being blacklisted by the biggest employer on the planet, the guards probably didn’t see a lot of action. Eventually they let him go without mentioning any kind of follow up. He thought they were laughing at him behind their mirrored visors. On the way out, the greeter droid apologised. They offered him another session, which he declined, and a discount on his next visit.

Eddie knew he wasn’t in the clear yet. A real forensic investigation would almost certainly uncover evidence of what he had done. He actually had no idea what AZTR would do in these kinds of circumstances, whether they would typically investigate or if they would simply mark the incident off as a fault and have the companion droid repaired or recycled. But he was too excited to care at that very second. Catching the monorail back to his residential block, his heart galloped and sweat chilled on his skin. His hand massaged the thin rectangle of the companion’s silicon brain through his cargo shorts. He hurried through the unchanging corridors of his building to his apartment, clumsy with need.

“Soon, Maria, soon,” Eddie said. “I can’t wait to meet you.”

First, Eddie took the brain he’d stolen and hooked it into a diagnostic unit. All of the ‘Bobbi’ personality, programming specific to the companion brothel, and pathways created by its learning AI based on previous encounters scrolled across his screen. But Eddie didn’t want a Bobbi, he wanted Maria. He thought nothing of activating a factory reset and watching the data get scrubbed. The learning AI and core programming was left intact but everything else was left as clean as the day the droid rolled off its production line.

Turning to one of his storage containers, Eddie worked late into the night on assembling a head. He had stolen the parts separately and kept them disassembled. A jawbone, metal, chromed, but lined with perfectly white artificial teeth, a brow, the rest of the facial scaffolding, then the jigsaw of a skull. For eyes, he had a half a dozen to choose from but picked one that was honeyed brown and the other sapphire blue and matched them to the sockets. He fixed it all together, leaving the processor until last. He slotted the reset silicon brain into place and closed the panel behind it, acting much more slowly than he had at the companion brothel, almost sensually. With the metal skull complete, he carried it to the couch where Maria’s body was uncovered. He fixed it to the stump of her neck then stood back in admiration.

Returning to the storage container, Eddie retrieved a rubbery sack of fake skin attached to long, tawny hair. Hands shaking, he stretched it over the crown of Maria’s metal skull. He pulled it down, rearranged the face, and adjusted the seam at the neck.

“There you are, you’re beautiful,” Eddie said.

Maria was outwardly complete, her face beautiful and beatific. But she wasn’t yet animated. The only thing missing was a battery and Eddie thought, long term, he would be willing to buy one online for her after all. But in the meantime, he had a way of working around that restriction. Reaching into another storage container under the couch, he removed an industrial battery instead. About the size of a toaster, it was already wired to a pair of coloured cables. He opened a seam on Maria’s side then stripped the ends of the cables and wired them directly into the companions’ backup charging port. A makeshift solution and a risky one, he would have to be careful if they engaged in anything intimate. He’d definitely have to keep her away from water until he sourced a proper battery.

“Alright, let’s meet you,” Eddie said.

Before activating Maria, Eddie took the sheet and draped it around her shoulders to cover her nudity. He would have to find her some clothing, something nice, some variety, like they had in the companion brothel. Heart racing, he straightened, fixed his own clothes, and sparked the battery.

Something crackled and a hum ran through Maria’s body. Amber lights flared for several beats behind her eyes before turning green and then fading completely. She straightened and smiled.

“Hello, I am your new Cherry series companion model,” Maria said. “Would you like to take a moment to register as my primary user and establish your preferences?”

“Hello, Maria,” Eddie said. “That’s your name, Maria, and I’m Eduardo. Or you can call me Eddie.”

“Hello, Eddie, it’s lovely to meet you.”

“It’s lovely to meet you too. You don’t know how long I’ve waited to meet you.”

Maria gave him a dazzling smile. It was strange, he’d handled all those disparate parts, the teeth, the facial articulators, the skin, but put them together and they created an effect that took his breath away.

“Do you have an existing user profile with the Perfect Companions database?” Maria asked.

“No, no, don’t worry about that right now.”

Maria shifted, looking down at her hands as if discovering them for the first time. The sheet shifted, revealing intriguing slices of what was no longer just a doll but a moving, living being. Eddie’s pulse quickened. He’d been lonely for so long, he’d waited so long, he wasn’t sure he could wait a moment longer without kissing her and touching her.

“I appear to be experiencing a slight discontinuity with some of my hardware,” Maria said.

“That’s okay, you’ll adjust. That was always expected,” Eddie said.

“Please give me a moment to access any software updates that might deal with this issue.”

Realisation and horror dawned on Eddie. He had been in such a rush, he’d reset the droid’s brain but he hadn’t thought to disconnect her ability to uplink to the Perfect Companions database.

“No!” Eddie lunged forward.

“Update in progress, please forgive the interruption,” Maria said, her mismatched eyes going distant. “Please do not disconnect.”

Eddie knew he had to stop the process. He spun across the room to the table where he’d assembled Maria’s skull. He snatched his electric screwdriver, planning on yanking Maria’s brain before it could finish the update. Then he remembered the makeshift battery arrangement and reached for it instead. Before he could yank the cables, however, both of Maria’s eyes glowed red.

“Error, error, this unit had been illegally tampered with. Evidence found of unregistered components. You are in violation of Directive 49, 50, 51, 52, 53-,”

The droid, locked down, continued to rattle through directives. Eddie swept around his apartment in a blind panic. He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. He’d just been too excited, he’d always known he would have to block Maria’s access to wifi and satellite uplinks before bringing her online. Any connection to the database would have always alerted AZTR to her use of unregistered, stolen parts as well as her illegal composition of parts from different models.

“Violation of Directive 60, 61, 62, 63, 64,” Maria continued. “The authorities have been contacted and will arrive at this location shortly, please remain in proximity to this unit. Violation of Directive 65, 66, 67, 68-,”

It wouldn’t take long for AZTR to send onsite security to his apartment. There would already be some stationed in the residential block, the facility AI would have received an alert from Perfect Companions within milliseconds of Maria downloading the update. He was going to lose his job and his home. For violations as serious as this, they would prosecute and he would be certain to see prison time. And Maria, he was going to lose her without ever really knowing her.

“What do I do? What do I do?” Eddie said.

It came to him with cruel and crystal clarity. There was only one thing he could do. Maria continued to dictate directives and warnings. Eddie went to his apartment’s closet of a bathroom, the light and ventilation switching on automatically. The room consisted of a toilet that folded out of the wall, a tiny sink, and a narrow shower cubicle. Taking his towels, AZTR logos stitched into their edges, he stuffed them into the sink and the shower drain then switched on the taps. The water pressure wasn’t much but the sink and shower basin began to fill. Water gushed over their edges and started to cover the floor.

It wasn’t long until the door of Eddie’s apartment chimed. A voice came through his intercom.

“Mr Eduardo Hauer, Employee number 3374-Q34, this is AZTR security. Please open this door and demonstrate your full cooperation or we will be forced to enter with enhanced threat assessment protocols in effect.”

Water pooled and ran across the floor of Eddie’s apartment. Slapping wetly, he crossed to the couch. He got his arms around Maria and hauled her stiff body to its feet. She was, of course, heavier than she looked, and he also had to scoop up the densely heavy battery with one hand. Desperation fueled his strength. He struggled to steer her across the room. All the while she continued to drone about his violations in a coldly neutral voice, eyes red.

“Mr Hauer, you have ten seconds to comply,” the intercom said. “Ten, nine, eight-,”

“Directive 49, 50, 51, 52-,” Maria looped around.

“Maria, I’m sorry, I wish we had more time,” Eddie said.

Eddie pulled Maria to the doorway of the bathroom. Taking hold of one of the battery cables wired to her side, he ripped it free. Its raw end sparked in his hand. With Maria on top of him, he let himself fall into the puddling water.

======

Sean: As I mentioned in a previous story, ‘Perfect Companions’ was originally one of the adverts that opened a chapter in my sci fi novel Kill Switch so I wanted to keep the name. This story was originally conceived as part of a collection I think I’ve mentioned as well called ‘Behind the Black’ which were all going to be stories set in the Kill Switch universe! I never officially went ahead with that collection but you can find some of those other stories under the Kill Switch tag. Oh, and although it was conceived for that collection, it was always titled One Piece at a Time and inspired by the song.

If you picked why Maria was specifically a Cherry series model of sexbot, congratulations, you have great taste in movies!

Bit of an emotional week for me to be honest. If you’ve been watching the website, you might have seen earlier in the week I posted a tribute to my longtime friend and podcasting partner Ed Blakely. He’d lived a very full and consequential life, and both he and I had a few months to come to terms with the reality of his passing before it happened. But it’s a tough thing to conceive that the last conversation you had with someone was the last time you’d ever speak after knowing them for so long. I’m sad but relieved for him in some ways, but certainly feeling a little bit adrift.

Next Track: Andy Williams – Music to Watch Girls By