'Alloy' - work in progress by Sophie Hanson

                                                                                                                           Image by 0fjd125gk87 from Pixabay 

Alloy by Sophie Hanson

I know how to keep my mouth shut — oh, about all sorts of things — and so I have a pretty enviable job. I’m part of the team that conducts pre-shipment quality control tests on the skins. In addition to the checks I carry out for physical defect or malfunction, four psychologic criteria must be satisfied before a skin is signed off: cognition, pattern recognition, linguistic processing, and empathy. We are not supposed to call them skins, but we do, down here on the floor. We are meant to refer to them as ‘bioengineered humanoid robotic systems’, or simply as ‘the product’, but we don’t. To us, they’re the skins. (Something the company does not mention in its literature is that our QC scores have tolerances in either direction; your android might not be quite as clever or empathetic as you hoped. Of course, they’d trace it back to me if any of the skins I’d signed off ever seriously malfunctioned, but we all let the edge cases off. The Supervisors don’t mind. It’s in the interests of operational efficiency.) We’re not supposed to talk to the skins here on the factory floor, unless we need to issue a directive. I always have done, though. Their personality presets haven’t been disabled. I used to think that was a mistake; you keep their personalities intact instead of running them in Diagnostic Mode, and they can get bored. Still, I don’t make the decisions, and I get bored too, and so sometimes I talk to the skins. Do you have a name? I asked the one who keeps my cubicle clean and stocked one morning. My assistant, I suppose you could say. I first noticed it because it had non-standard focal inserts, beautiful greenish nano-glass irises. Overstock, maybe. They do that sometimes for the factory models, cobble them together with whatever’s left over. My serial identification is X730GZ44003, the skin replied. But if I had a real name, I’d like it to be Rose. * Most skins are dull. They’re programmed that way, unless they’re bespokes. Their personality presets are sketched with broad strokes — servile, polite, officious — just enough to maintain the illusion that the creature checking your ticket or serving your coffee is, if not quite human, then something slightly less. Rose wasn’t like that at all. I realised that within a few days of talking to her. She was curious. She liked to watch me, to ask me questions. If I’d been in charge of her QC, I think I’d have raised an eyebrow at her scores, maybe considered dialling everything down a bit. A few weeks after she told me her name, riots had blocked the shuttlepod tracks yet again and I arrived late and stressed. The tracker around my wrist buzzed with warnings of tardiness penalties. In an attempt to save time and avoid a wage docking, I grabbed a Steri-suit pack from the dispenser and changed into it at my station, forgoing the usual changing rooms. Stripped bare, I straightened up to grab the aseptic smock from the heat-sealed package and came face-to-face with Rose. She was perfectly still, as though in standby mode, but the processing light in her temple pulsed steadily. I said something stupid, like, oh!, and she raised one hand to the gentle curve on her own figure where the nipple would have been. Her articulated finger joints clicked over brushed aluminium. I suppose I could have told her to stop but I didn’t, just carried on getting dressed while she watched. The moulded rubber O-ring of her lips were gently parted. She began to talk to me more after that, some boldness creeping in to her. Inconsequential things at first, enquiring as to the name of a particular instrument or its function, or the different roles the skins we unwrapped from plastic sheeting and initiated in Diagnostic Mode were destined for. I taught her the hierarchy of the skins. The basic models like herself, their artificial appearances left obvious because they were to be sent to the colonies, waste processing plants, or industrial warehouses; and her silicone-coated brethren, some almost indistinguishable from real humans, who would serve in public-facing roles or accompany the rich and attend to their needs: food servers, pleasure bots, service assistants. One day she said, of a dark-haired skin I had just signed off: do you think he’s attractive? I looked down at the bland face, the unblemished features. They were all good-looking, the ones with skin-suits on. I found the pleasant symmetry of their silicone face-plates dispiriting. I preferred them without, all their workings exposed, the hygienic metal surfaces. In a way, I told Rose. Why? Do you? I was intrigued about things like that, I suppose. Whether they felt things like desire. Not really, she said after a moment. I think you’re much nicer. * She began to touch me, and I allowed her to do it. At first I wondered if her motion detector sensors had malfunctioned, if that was the reason for her brushing past and pressing against my thigh as I worked. But then she touched my hair, a deliberate caress, and something broke apart inside me. We went into the storage bay, free of the monitor drones that buzzed about the factory floor. Amongst the endless racks of limbs and anodised skulls, I asked if she wanted to kiss me. Not knowing if she would even understand what that meant. Yes, she said simply. Her body was hard and unforgiving as it pressed me back against the wall, her mouth a cool, dry void. It felt nothing like kissing a person. I liked that. Later that week I stole her a tongue. Rose unhinged her jaw compliantly so that I could slot it into place. The colour pigment layer had not yet been added and so the curled wires and tiny pistons that gave it motion were visible beneath its translucent silicone sheath. She didn’t need the tongue to talk, of course. Generally we only fitted them as standard to the pleasure models. Perhaps she knew this because she pulled me into a secluded corner, hidden by a row of storage bins taller than ourselves, and the joints of her knees made a smooth pneumatic hiss as she sank down. I put my leg over her shoulder and lifted my smock. The cold metal press of her face against the soft heat of me felt startling and good. Afterwards she came up smeared and sticky, her polished surfaces ruined. She said, you’re so soft and wet, nothing like us at all. She said this like it was a trait I ought to be proud of. She said, will you spit on me? I want to feel it. Skins have no capacity for pleasure, not like humans do anyway. Until Rose I had never heard a skin ask for anything at all. I looked into the hermeneutic surfaces of her lovely face and spat. Her luminescent eyes didn’t flicker. I watched my saliva make its slow way down her polished face. * The machined contours of her body excited me to some kind of monomania. I had the sensation that Rose had unlocked some part of me previously unknown even to myself. Finding excuses to traverse the factory complex, we secreted ourselves into cupboards and quiet corners away from the surveillance drones. Compliance required me to be present at my station to enter a biometric log to the system once per hour, and so our affairs were short, intense. Rose stole equipment from a skin on the sanitation team, mop and bucket. I used a bathroom pass and found her waiting for me, urging me to lock the door. She lay on the floor while I knelt above her and pissed, her mouth filling and then overflowing. I watched the tiny lenses in her eyes focus and refocus as she reached up for me, hot liquid clouding the chilled metal surfaces of her hands with condensate. I wish I could taste it, she said afterwards, exhilarated. She was using a microfibre cloth to sop up the puddles from the floor. As her artificiality excited me, all the flesh and ooze of me awakened some parallel hunger in her circuitry. I heard a funny scraping sound and looked down to see her fingers claw against the tiled floor, the saturated rag twisted between them. * I began to lose my head. I missed my hourly check-in twice in one week, the iris scanner at my workstation flashing emptily with nothing to measure. The Supervisor called me into his office and showed me a graph of my approval rating over the past month, its steep decline. I was malingering. I was not making the most of the opportunities that had been afforded to me. And my assigned assistant model was malfunctioning, too. (The holodeck switched to a new graph.) Its GPS history had inexplicable data losses. Same with the audiovisual recordings. Gone, for hours at a time. And, look, temperature gauges showing strange spikes. Had I not noticed? Was this machine, expensive property of the company that paid my wages after all, not my sole responsibility while I was on their premises? No, I told them, I hadn’t noticed. I would be better. I had been unwell recently, I explained. Side effects resulting from a medical procedure. No, not a recent one, in fact it was a couple of years ago now, but it had been performed by low-grade robo-surgeons; the incision botched. I looked straight into the eyes of the Supervisor as I said this. He looked away after just a few seconds. It was common knowledge among them, I assumed: the floor girls who will fuck you, the ones who don’t care or just can’t afford to lose their jobs by saying no. For me, it had been a mixture of the two, and anyway I had presumed myself sterile like most girls of my generation. The Supervisor who befriended me had been middle-aged and wheezing, but apparently still virile. The pregnancy was ectopic. The Supervisor paid for my hysterectomy with his company expense account, but still used the cheapest firm he could find. Maybe this one knew my insides were damaged. Maybe he just felt sorry for me. Either way, he sniffed and switched attention back to his screens, told me I was on probation and that I should book my assistant in for a full service by the end of the week. * Rose came back to me the next day smelling clean and antiseptic. The men in the servicing department had taken off her chest panel, she told me, shone bright lights inside her. I wanted you to do that to me, she said, her face pushed against my arm as she bent to remove a tray of instruments from my cubicle. I wanted you to fill me up with parts of yourself. We had to lay low for a while, I told her. No sneaking off. Instead we spoke quietly as we processed batch after batch of skins. It was surprisingly easy to tell her my secrets; her smooth blank face invited confidences. I told her about my childhood, growing up in the new communities formed after the floods. About the college boyfriend who slapped me when he couldn’t keep it hard, the best friends I no longer saw because they had taken campus jobs, like mine, in other cities. About the Supervisor, how he had recognised my loneliness and told me he would be my friend, he would look out for me and now maybe I would like to do something for him in return? Is that the one? Rose asked me next time he stepped onto the factory floor. I kept my head down, concentrating on my data readouts. Yes, I said. She made no reply, just went on gathering up the empty packets of sterile lube and dropping them down the waste chute, but she was distant for the rest of the day, preoccupied and sad. Perhaps I wanted to cheer her up, or else the old madness had taken hold of me, because the next day I went alone to the loading bays and stole a box from the crates that had yet to be processed. I brought Rose to a secluded charging bay, surrounded by sleeping transport pods, and showed her my gift. Since all models had universal sockets, she had the same customisation options as any of the pleasure models. I showed her how to slot the thick mechanical cock into its housing and slide across the small metal pins that locked it into place. She looked down at herself with undisguised delight and pushed me over the front of one of the transport pods. The cold metal shocked my insides, a sensation I could not at first differentiate from that of being burned. I told her I wanted to go on forever, but of course it was me who tired first. * I was halfway back to my station when my wrist buzzed with an immediate summons to the Supervisor’s office. One of the security droids must have caught us on its monitoring feeds. It crossed my mind to run, but there was nowhere to run to; the perimeter gates were locked outside of shift changeover points. At least I had a few moments to breathe before I set off; Rose had no such luxury. She would have walked alongside me, I believe, of her own free will, but they sent a remote summons directive to her, no override option. She walked away from me with a fast, unfamiliar gait while I was still tidying my hair at my station, willing calm. Perhaps it was the lack of resistance to the override command that lulled the Supervisor and meant he didn’t order a security droid to the office to escort Rose and I. Maybe it didn’t occur to him to expect any kind of threat. Or maybe he had some other form of punishment in mind, to be doled out away from the eyes of the droids. Whatever his plans, they failed. By the time I scanned myself through the heavy door, Rose had her hands around his throat. When the Supervisor caught sight of me, for some reason relief spread across his face as he opened his mouth and attempted some approximation of my name. He shouldn’t have done, because it allowed Rose to get her slender fingers in between his teeth, grabbing at slippery flesh. When all safety limiters have been disabled, the grip strength of a skin is rated at 50kg per square inch. Rose moved easily before me, her anodised surfaces marred by the slick liquids a body can produce. The Supervisor’s wet eyes appealed to me, wide with some imagined betrayal. I turned and locked the door, and hoped that the fluids that ran down Rose’s polished arms were mingling with mine. - This work-in-progress version of 'Alloy' features as part of Wedding Ritual #24 by Sophie Hanson.