A Certain Cyborg's Cozy Life

A Certain Cyborg's Cozy Life

H|>exec_script{System._link(module: "consciousness", server: "home", options: [sentience_param = "anthropomorphic", intelligence = "auto", output = [output_stream_destination = "text_generator", language = "en-US"]], show_outcome: true);}

Initializing...

Ready.

Linking...

Complete.

Outcome: SUCCESS

H|>Press Enter to exit console

"I just want to see how you keep getting all dinged up," Orzora said. She was kneeling in her office chair at the house's terminal, pivoting impatiently, eyes fixed to the screen as she typed.

"Is it really necessary to output all of my thoughts as well though?" Jay said.

"Yeah... I guess not." She slouched for a second, silently whining. "I'm too lazy to redo the link. Sorry."

Sure... How could that response have been hiding an alterier motive?

"Wow," she said. "Just a few paragraphs and you're already way more sarcastic in your head. I wonder what else I'll find out about you?"

"Could you at least wait a few minutes before you read it; you'll get me stuck in an infinite loop. I hate those. They make me feel like I'm insane."

She stood and stuped close with a sny grin, her big eyes almost touching his own as she reached around his head and unplugged him from the house's terminal.

"I wouldn't do that to you, Blue." She returned to her chair, muttering the last part of her response under her breath like she always did when she was bored of a conversational obligation. She turned her nose down to his manual, holding it open in her lap.

Jay corked the inputs in the back of his neck with their rubber lid, then watched Orzora's eyelashes shift as her eyes scanned across his manual's pages. Her dark hair swayed on either side of her neck from behind her ears. Even in her oversized sweat pants and hoodie, she was a delicate sight - unlike the blue-tinted, metal housing around his own frame; she was perfect.

He took a scan of the garage before standing from the wooden chair beside the terminal and heading toward the attached house's door.

"Aww," Orzora said, making Jay flinch in his inevitable embarrassment. "I'm perfect?"

He sighed. "Not fair," he said looking back to her. "By the way, shouldn't you be getting ready?"

Her grin seemed permanent as she read the terminal's screen and occasionally glanced at him. "I will."

He continued up the five steps to the door and entered into the kitchen. Steam silently released from the group of valves on either side of his neck as his system regulated his internal temperature and adapted to the house's warmth.

He couldn't remember what it was like to wear his real body anymore; he could run thousands of mathematical and heuristic calculations in a matter of milliseconds (depending on how many threads his processors were running simultaneously) with one hundred percent accuracy, but he didn't know what his own skin felt like. Even his personality seemed synthetic now; but Dr. Karrow's last words to him were that it was still intact and unaltered, and he tried hard to believe him.

The oven's timer went off.

He tapped 'cancel' and used oven mitts to transfer the chicken casserole to the island counter. It smelled amazing.

At least he still had some of his senses to enjoy, even if he couldn't eat (there would be no reason for him to anyway; his brain was the only thing about him that was still organic).

He gathered the tupperware and bowl from the drying rack beside the sink and scooped a six ounce portion into both.

The door clanked behind, then Orzora skirted by and down the hallway. She tapped his shoulder on her way; her purity ring clinked against it through his tee-shirt.

The bathroom door shut as the shower started to hiss. 

He thought it was a good sign and wished she would give more effort into her presentability for their peers.

Jay packed the rest of the casserole in the fridge and started to slice cucumbers.

He wondered if she had been reading his output since he had gone inside.

The shower's water slapped; the sound always reminded him of the many times he had hosed off in the backyard (since the grime and oil was hard on their plumbing), and the many times he had insisted to Dr. Karrow that he didn't mind, but Dr. Karrow wouldn't hear of it and built him his own shower anyway. If he would have been honest, it did used to make him feel a little like the family pet; but he couldn't have asked any more of Dr. Karrow after welcoming him into his family -- and then saving his life.

Orzora entered from the hallway, now dressed in loose jeans and a tee-shirt. Her hair was just dry enough for its natural waves to start forming. "You know you don't always have to pack my lunch for me." She pulled her lunch bag from the counter near the fridge and started to pack it with what he had prepared.

"What else am I going to do with all my spare time?"

Having finished packing, she grabbed a fork and the bowl he had dished for her and brought it to the table, taking a bite and briefly studying him on the way. The look was as nagging as she ever got, aimed to remind him of what her father had said about going through normal self-care routines, even when he no longer needed most of them, because they were still beneficial to him.

He packed the prepped cucumber slices into the fridge, reserving a small zip lock bag to bring to the table, then sat across from her. His leather belt muffled the clank his body normally made against the wooden chair. He slid forward and hiked up his khakis. 

She grabbed a cucumber slice and held it by her cheek until she finished her bite of casserole.

In a few hours he would be sitting in a desk at school, usually at the back corner while Orzora would sit in the front. Though not in fifth period math; in that class, the back corner seats had already been taken and Ms. Hollrun wouldn't let students swap.

"Stop sliding the desks," she'd say to both of his desk-neighbors, who would almost always slide their desks away from him. "How many times do I have to tell you." She'd slap one of the front desks for emphasis as they slide their desks back in place.

She was one of the younger teachers, and barely looked a few years older. He always felt like she was angry at him for something, but he didn't know what.

"Hey, man," Jeff said from behind. "Don't-" he restrained a grunt of pain.

Jay looked back at him to see him clutching his fingers.

What happened?

"Jeff," Ms. Hollrun said. "Go to the nurse."

He crept up the aisle.

"Jay, go with him."

Jay followed into the hall. He kept his distance beside Jeff, who was still wincing and holding his hand. The tips of his fingers were red, like he had burned himself. "Did I do that?"

Jeff offered a smile. "Don't worry about it."

He must have tried to touch Jay's shoulder while his temperature was regulating; the steam probably burned him. "Sorry..."

"I said no worries, man. It's not like you did it on purpose."

Yeah, but 'on accident' was even worse...

"It's honestly not even that bad," Jeff said, shaking his hand, then displaying it for himself.

Jay suspected that he was just being nice to keep face for tutoring; Jeff struggled in math and, well, the only problems Jay couldn't solve were the ones that literally no one had found the solutions to yet; so he was popular with the more dedicated subgroup of his struggling class mates.

Jeff stopped at the drinking fountain and ran his fingers under its stream, using his thigh to keep it running.

Jay stood behind him for a second, then held in the fountain's button so that he could relax his leg. 

The sound of winding gears came from a few yards back toward the class room. A snake-like robot slithered past at running speed.

"Go, hurry," a man's voice said as Orzora came running into the hall after the snake-bot.

"'Kay, okay," she said, waving back to the voice. She tried adjusting various knobs and sliders on the remote control she was carrying. As she passed by, she slowed her pace slightly and smiled at Jay. "Hi."

"Hey," Jay said.

She chased the snake-bot around the corner, muttering at her controller until chucking it behind her. It clanked against the tile floor and skidded back into the corner. "Come on, snakey. Come back to momma." Jay could see her lean forward into a sprint through the window panels of the hall exposing the inner courtyard. After a few yards, she dove for it.

"Dang, man," Jeff said while drying his hands in his shirt. "Tech-girl has got a thing for you."

No she didn't. Jay wished Jeff hadn't said that; it wasn't true; and that would have made things weird.

Jay found himself standing alone. He released the fountain's button and searched for Jeff, whom he discovered behind him walking back to class. "What are you doing? We're supposed to go to the nurse." He caught up to him.

Jeff was still holding his fingers and occasionally flicking his hand. "Ugh... Mr. Crain creeps me out-" He jumped and did a three-sixty scan, like he was afraid that Mr. Crain had suddenly showed up. "All he would've done was run water over it anyway. I can't afford to miss anymore; I'm going to fail."

Jay stared back behind to see if Orzora was coming back with her snake-bot yet. She wasn't; he couldn't even hear her (or the bot) anymore.

Ms. Hollrun stood dazed at them for a brief second as they entered the class room. "That was fast."

Jeff smiled off any obligation to explain why as he crept to his desk. 

Jay followed suit, then tried to display some effort into catching up with Ms. Hollrun's writings on the white board, even though she was just introducing derivatives.

The sound of winding gears in the hall, which he could have sworn were real, took his attention to the door every ten seconds or so. After the fourth time Ms. Hollrun shut the door, never having turned around to see that it was distracting him; she really lived up to the stereotype. It didn't prevent him from peeking at the door out of reflex (if he still had reflexes) though.

The rest of school was equally uneventful and, like most school days, drawn out. As usual, his locker neighbors gave him plenty of space and waited in turn while he got his textbooks from his locker -- not that they would have been cramped for space.

Today he beat Orzora to the car. He stuped to look into the Buick's passenger window, then surveyed the pines around the parking lot. Snow fell in big flakes, cutting the evening's darkness. A passing car's tires skidded in the slush, pushing it slightly sideways in the lot's aisle.

Orzora came jogging through the line of busses at the school's entrance.

"Hey," a guy who Jay had seen before but had never met called her from behind.

She halted and spun back to him.

Jay pinched a sleeve of his jacket and started to wipe the snow from the windshield.

A red car flashed by and crashed. Jay looked to see that it had spun out and slammed sideways into the back of a parked car, shattering its tail light and triggering its alarm. The guy driving found Jay with a grimace.

Jay returned his attention to the windshield.

Feet came slapping the slush on the ground in a jog. Orzora sighed as she ran around the car to the driver's door. "Sorry." When they both got in the car, she checked the rear view mirror. "Hm... I hope we can get out."

The car parked in front of them backed out and left.

"That works," she said. She concentrated on navigating through the lot, then relaxed once they reached the highway. "So how did your day go?"

"Good. Same old. -- You?"

"Mmmmmhm."

They continued in silence while listening to the radio, save for Orzora occasionally humming and tapping to the beat on her thigh. The surrounding hills of pines were capped in pure white; they went on forever. It reminded him of watching Orzora through the corner of the school's little courtyard as she chased her snake-bot.

"Did you ever get your robot?"

"Mm," she groaned. "Yep. I got it once it ran out of batteries."

"Really? How far did it go?"

"Oh, not far. I make sure to only give it a little charge in case it gets away, since it's so fast (which is exactly what I was going for)."

It was a big step up from her last robotics project. Jay remembered the little mouse-shaped thing, which was basically just a remote-controlled car. But she had built and programed it from scratch, so it was still impressive. He wondered if she would end up surpassing Dr. Karrow.

"What were you guys doing?" she said.

He found himself dazing at the dashboard. "Oh, um... Jeff burned himself and Ms. Hollrun wanted me to go with him to the nurse's office."

"Burned himself?" Her eyes bounced between him and the road. "Your eyes are- ... Is that amber? What does-Admin, what does amber mean?"

His system overrode his voice module to answer her query.

"Don't feel bad," she said.

He held his forehead. "It's fine. I guess it wasn't that bad."

Her eyes lingered on him once more, then she tightened her lips at the road ahead. He could hear what she would have said next to reassure him, like she used to when they were kids. Not that he was complaining, but he wondered why she had stopped.

As they drove past he gazed down the intersection that led to the local grocery store where he worked.

"You don't work today, right?" Orzora said.

"Nope."

"M," she groaned and tapped her thigh. "Right. Sarah and Chels' are coming over later to play the game you showed them, I guess?"

"Oh, Pants and Suspenders?"

She smiled. "That's what you guys were playing? I never heard anyone get so into it playing that game."

"Yeah, right?"

"I mean -- they were literally shouting; I had to put on headphones to actually study."

As they pulled into their driveway, their neighbor Kent was plowing the last stretch of snow from it on his lawnmower. He was a widower in his mid-thirties; other than that, Jay didn't know anything else about the guy.

"Aw," Orzora said. "That's nice of him."

When Kent saw them he stopped at the mound of snow he had just pushed. They exchanged a wave as Orzora pulled the car into the garage, shutting the garage door behind.

The house's terminal attached to the back wall of the garage seemed to stare at Jay for some reason; it made him anxious. He didn't think he had thought of anything embarrassing today for Orzora to read...

The car door alarm rang from Orzora opening her door. She started to dig through her backpack.

"Hey," Jay said. "Would you mind redoing the link?"

"Mmmhm. Sure."

He technically could have done it himself, but there was a possibility for him to enter an infinite loop if he was the one making the changes to his system.

They got out of the car. Jay grabbed his backpack from the back seat, pulling back up his pants. Snow crackled under his shoes as his weight shifted.

"Mrs. Pegg must have left the garage door open again," Orzora said while rambling toward the terminal. She stopped at the office chair and watched her feet press the snow. "Mm. I love how snow pops under your feet; it reminds me of when we'd go sledding. We should go sledding later."

"Yeah... I know what you mean." He couldn't feel it, but the sound was enough to remind him of when they were kids.

There was at least an inch of snow covering most of the garage's floor. Oil started to drip from the car and make a brown patch behind its wheel.

Jay swung on his packpack and scooped up some snow. He packed it in his hands as he approached Orzora, who was sitting on the edge of the office chair and reading the terminal's screen. He placed the ball on top of her head.

Her jump made the ball fall and cumble in the hood of her parka. Her attention remained on the screen though; she didn't even grunt or try reaching for the snowball.

Jay thought he might have been annoying her. He scooped the snow out from her hood. "Sorry..."

She sniffed from the cold and spun the chair to face him. She stared at him with red eyes.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"Would it be weird?" she said. "What Jeff said? -- If he was right? -- Would that be weird?"

She was reading the output; it was only a matter of time when she would see that. He didn't think what he had thought was mean though. But he hated seeing her hurt. "No, I mean-I didn't mean-"

She wiped tears from her cheeks and looked away. "When you got hit... I thought you were going to die, and I knew you didn't even- ... you said you didn't believe in God." Her trembling lips pinched. "I thought you were going to go to hell."

He knelt in front of her, resting a hand on one of the chair's arms. "Yeah, but I do now."

"I know... I mean... If it wasn't for the robotics transplant... You would be suffering right now."

"Don't think like tha-"

"You're still the same Jay I knew growing up. Am I supposed to pretend like you're not? That Jay was always sweet and kind and softhearted... I loved that Jay. I still do, Jay. I don't care what people think. I don't care what you look like. I want to be with you."

She fell on him, wrapping her arms around him. "If you'll have me."

His mind raced. He couldn't think of what to say to her. It was just... What did he have to offer her? She had to make a verbal query to his system just to get the simple feedback of a facial expression. His face, though shaped like a human's, was made of rigid, cold steel.

"Orzora, I-"

His jacket squeeked against his body as she squeezed him tighter.

"The truth is..." he said. "I don't want you to be stuck."

"Don't."

"I can't care for you like this."

"Don't you dare." She slammed her fist against his back. "Yes you can." She repeated twice more.

"I'm sorry-"

She squeezed him tighter again. "Please... Just tell me how you feel. I don't care about anything else."

He debated. If he were to reject her, how would things be between them? But, if he told her the truth, she would be missing out on a normal life, a normal relationship.

He sighed.  "Yes. I feel the same way." He pressed her off of him so that her face wouldn't get burned on his shoulder.

The house's door opened. "Are you alright?" Mrs. Pegg said.

Reviews

[Vishesh Kashyap]

nice, I liked it. continue the same way, you will reach a long way.
do read my book too. its a book and its first chapter i have written do read it. its the fight and chapter is depressing but the way out