Chapter 1: Underclocked

I sipped on my coffee off in the corner of the break room, loud celebrations going on surrounding me. The annual christmas party right before regular work stopped for the holidays. Factory and the labs were both closed down, all that was left open was the cubicles for the little shindig. Pavlovs were out of state on some big year end corporate meeting too, so it was much more paired down than usual. Sure makes my job easier; not much to secure when you’ve only a few people drinking a little champagne by a fake tree to worry about. My duties basically amount to ‘make sure the speakers don’t disconnect from the playlist on your phone’ and ‘keep out of the way of everyone else so you don’t ruin their good time’. 

Everyone was so snide, so much smarter and more accomplished than me. No reason to interact with the security guy. Especially since I was barely qualified for the job anyways. Everyone else here are basically geniuses right? Why rabble with the common folk who luck into their jobs?

“Hey champ, you holding up?” Well, except one person. A light punch against my shoulder jostles my coffee about a little, spilling on the ground. She sits down next to me, cradling some drink or other of her own. “I know you’re not great with crowds and all, but I’m glad you stuck around this time.”

I grumble a little at her, shrugging and setting my coffee down. “Not like I really had a choice, Stace. I’m on call, since you guys decided to have the holiday party in the building this year. Until one of you’se grows yourself one of these,” I fiddle with my little wireless dongle, flipping it between my fingers like a coin, “then you’re stuck with me.”

She shakes her head at me, sighing. Basically my only friend in the world and even she barely can stand me. “It was here or nowhere, with my folks gone. We’re lucky it’s even happening, planned on such short notice.”

“Not so lucky if it means I have to be there too. I’m sure you all would have a better time without me.”

She boops my nose softly. “You need to stop putting yourself down like that. People here would like you if you would just let yourself be liked. Show them the you that you show me.” She flicks my forehead softly, inadvertently scratching me with her slightly clawed nails. They’ve got this really pretty green and red pattern painted on them today. “And stop implying that you’re replaceable, Chet. And no, not because you’re the only person in the world crazy enough to hijack your own spine for your job.”

I shrink in towards myself, as much as I could. “Yeah, but it worked right?” When I was a younger teen, I was struck by a car. Asshole came up out of nowhere blowing a red light and slammed right into me, crushing my spine. No one ever found the guy either, so he didn’t even have the decency to get caught for it. Docs said I likely would be permanently paralyzed, at least from the neck down, and I should consider myself lucky that I had even that. There were all kinds of nerve damage, I went from not feeling my body at all to being overwhelmingly hot or cold, immeasurable pain to absolutely nothing. There was nothing rehabilitation could do, surgery had done the best it could to keep me alive at all. Insurance had capped out what they were willing to pay for.

And then, right as I was facing down the idea of living my life as a paraplegic, our family gets contact from Alex and Melissa Pavlov. Married couple, one a magitek researcher and the other a medical scientist. Coincidentally they were in the middle of doing R&D on how to improve different mobility enhancement tools. Apparently they heard about my case on the news and wanted to help me out, fully pay and develop a medical device for me. To this day I’m not sure if they were just extremely kindhearted or needed someone who wouldn’t mind being experimented on, considering I was one of their first patients.

They spent long hours for months and months working on me and designing different ideas on how to fix my spine. Often they would bring their daughter Anastasia too, who was just a little older than me. Eventually we became pretty close friends, and then too the Pavlovs became close family friends. They would come to our place for dinners, us to theirs. I was there for her when she was coming to terms with being a lesbian, she was there for me when I had my darkest days over my immobility. They were like a second family to me. 

And after some work and a lot of spit and prayer, the madmen pulled it off. I had essentially an entirely cybernetic spine. Almost overnight I went from barely being able to move my head to getting my limbs back in control. Sure, I needed years of rehab to actually be able to use them, and I would never become a track star. But compared to what I was looking at before it was basically a miracle. 

I know I should have been happy with that, I had my life back. But it’s hard not to look a gift horse in the mouth, ya’know? The wreck had taken any ability to do manual labor away from me. I often get fatigued easily. You can’t just go from years of non-use back to 100%. After long days I have to resort to using a cane to get around, sometimes on bad days a chair. That’s more than fine with me, but I also didn’t have much worth in the intellectual fields. I was honestly struggling with school before the crash; afterwards I was years behind my peers before I even could think about education again. I ended up barely getting my GED after dropping out of school altogether. I was frankly worried that I would never be anything more than a parasite on my family’s good will, even after my gift.

It was the Pavlovs who came to my rescue once again. They were over for dinner with our family one night, celebrating. Their startup had been picking up steam after the public success of my operation, and had just been bought out by Kalny Manufacturing. Win-win: the Pavlovs get to help a lot more people, and Kalny gets to dominate yet another space. The two of them were going to be made heads of the all new medical and cosmetic division, and were being relocated to a much larger integrated lab/office to run out of. They wanted them to improve all their medical devices and work on a machine that could assist a surgeon, or even automate the process. (They also ‘encouraged’ branching out into cosmetic prosthetics too, but no one really found that all that objectionable.) Alex brought up getting Stace an entry level job there too as one of the receptionists (a little nepotism never hurts), and then asked if I would like a position too, watching the cameras.

I was elated, of course I jumped at the prospect. Unfortunately it wasn’t just cameras; there was an entire dataset and system that I was expected to watch over. Apparently they had long ago consolidated the two positions (since IT professionals are so much more expensive to hire. Just get the security guy to watch these too!) Higher ups claimed it would be fine, that basically anyone could watch them with their sophisticated self regulating tech. But I struggled hard to understand what was happening and what I should be doing even with a ton of prompts. When the branch manager came in to “check in on me” and sent one of their robots in to communicate with the system while I followed it I knew the writing was on the wall. Obviously I was failing at the job. I just new that Alex stuck his neck out for me to have another chance, especially after seeing they could just automate the job away if they really wanted to. I had to be drastic, or else I would be back on my ass again. I had just moved out of the family home, and worse yet I moved in with Stace as a roommate. I couldn’t turn my tail and demand either of them take care of me again, I couldn’t afford to lose this job. 

That’s when I got a desperate idea, one way to make myself absolutely irreplaceable. The way that the robots would communicate to the system was through a wired connection with their neural chips; chips that I distinctly remembered were the basis for the nerve system in my spine. All I had to do was convince a technomancer to modify my cybernetic in order for me to use the system like the robots do. I never even went to Alex about it. Even though he would obviously be the best possible choice and would have nailed the work, he never would have put me in risk like that. Instead I found some back alley mage who was happy to risk killing me to see if he could do something weird and new. He took about a week looking at the two systems before transmuting the hardware into a frankenstein of the two, adding on any of the parts needed so I could use the system just like them.

It was stupid and dangerous and it worked. All I had to do was plug into the system just like the robots, and I could navigate the system like I was having a conversation in my head. It went from being mystifying to intuitive. And I was the only person in the world who could do this for them. The ease and full control of their AI, but with actual human decision making and monitoring. Alex was disappointed in me, but the higher ups loved the outcome. Along with pressuring more cosmetic procedures (since elective surgery means a wider customer base), they also demanded Alex work on prototypes for ‘human enhancement’. I’ve been in the position for years now, and I’ve never seen him fully complete one. Just build it up to theoretically close to finished only to move on to the next project and keeping them distracted with the shiny new unethical ideas.

Stace pings me on the forehead again. “You could have handled it on your own, you know. Moved up the ladder if you wanted, too. You’re not as helpless as you think you are Chet. You just have to stop thinking so much and learn how to jump.”

 

---

 

Chet murmurs a little, pulling on the ponytail he always insisted on keeping his hair in. “You always say that. It’s not overthinking, it’s planning ahead.”

I roll my eyes and tisk. “It’s catastrophizing.” He looks down in shame and mumbles something, and I sigh. Aw geez, I didn’t want to make him feel worse than he usually did. I rest my hand on his knee, rubbing it a little. “It’s ok. I just want you to be kinder to yourself.”

His eyes follow my fingers around, pretty unsubtly staring at my nails. I wiggle them around playfully, letting the light glint them as he watches. He scoffs and looks up at me, laughing. “Yeah, they’re nice. I still liked the silver ones better though.”

“C’mon, I told you! It’s christmas! Where’s your spirit?” I nudge him gently, laughing with him. “You know, if you liked the silver so much you should have come with me and gotten them yourself.”

He just scoffs and pushes back on me with a smirk. “C’mon Stace. Guys don’t do that.” I sigh and roll my eyes.

“You know you can be really ridgid about these things, sis.” He makes a little ‘ha ha’ motion and tries to flick me back. I pretty easily move out of the way though, slow as he can be. It’s always fun teasing him like that; way back when I had first come to him for help about maybe being a lesbian, he finished the convo saying that I was like a sister to him. I ended up bungling my words and said he was a sister to me too. Got beat red, seemed to have a little mini meltdown. It was very adorable honestly. He never said it again, but every now and then I can get a rise out of him by calling him that.

I expected him to have some kind of retort to me, but instead he scrunched his eyebrows up and put up one of his fingers. “Hey, shh for a second, I’m getting a message.” He nods along in silence for a minute, then turns to me. “Sorry Stace, something’s wrong with the system. I’ve got to go check on that. Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

He quickly gets up, grabbing his cane and walking over to the security room. I sigh, turning back to my drink, swirling it around. Screw it, I’m gonna go watch him work. He’s not getting away from interacting with us that easily.

I enter, shutting the door behind me. He spins around in the command chair to watch me come in. “I don’t know if you should be in here Stace. What if the higher ups dock you for snooping?”

I laugh and take a sip of my drink. “You’re not even supposed to be working right now, they could have sent a robot. I don’t think they care.” He just shrugs and goes back to typing on the keyboard, clicking around on the screen. “So what’s the situation?”

He leans in, mumbling to himself. “I don’t know. I got an alert that there was something wrong with our network. I’m trying to see what tripped it, and make sure the database is still protected.” As he says this, he pulls his hair apart from his ponytail, slender fingers tying it up higher to be off his neck (as he claims the connection is better when the line is clearer).

It struck me, not for the first time, how pretty Chet was. He was always a small, lithe thing. Being immobilized in your formative years will do that to you, no matter how much strength you regain later in life. He never leaned into it though, all baggy soft clothes and sharp angles. Never took much care of his appearance outside of his hair which he always lavished. Didn’t stop him from having a ton of opinions on my looks though. When it came to me he was a little fashionista. He always claimed it was just that I could dress myself and he couldn’t, and those habits stuck around post-bespining.

I mean, I’m not stupid. I’m in the community. It’s crossed my mind once or twice that he might secretly be trans or gay or something himself, and that these were all some kind of signs. I brought it up to him before, and he admitted that he had thought about it himself too. But no, he just didn’t have much attraction to anyone. And that while he was open to the idea of being transexual, he didn’t feel bad being a man so he couldn’t be. That he just liked pretty things. That was good enough for me.

He sighed, tacking away at the keyboard. “I’m not seeing anything wrong here. I’m going to have to jack in to actually find what tripped the system.” He pulls the little usb stick off his lanyard, flipping it between his knuckles before plugging it into the console. “You can probably leave now Stace. It’s gonna be boring with me just talking to the… machin…”

He freezes up completely just staring at me. I lean over at him. “Chet?” Shaking his arm doesn’t seem to wake him up. “Chet, what’s wrong? This isn’t funny.” I let go of him but his arm doesn’t stop shaking. Soon his other arm joins him, and then his whole body starts shaking. Electromana suddenly comes arching out of the stick in his hand, racing up his body, before he collapses convulsing on the floor. “Oh my god! Chet!” Suddenly he goes still, limp on the floor. I rush over to him, but he feels completely still. I lift up a limb and he’s completely unresponsive.

Before I can even scream out for help, there’s a massive loud bang, and then all the lights near me spark out dead. I fumble against my phone for a minute to turn on the flashlight. Thank you Chet for suggesting pants today! I bolt out of the room, running back over to where everyone else is, now murmuring in the dark. God, why isn’t mom here too! This really had to happen when they were out at corporate?

I weave through people until I can find Deb, the on staff nurse. “You have to come quick. I-I think Chet might have been electrocuted, he’s not responding to anything!” Before she can even process what was happening, I grab her arm and drag her back to the security room.

Sliding up the door and rushing in, she pulls her arm back. “Wait a minute! I’d need to go to my office first, grab a defib, or at least some first aid! I can’t just help him like this!” She looks around for a second, looking confused. “Where even is he?”

I scrunch up my face too. “What are you talking about! He’s right… here.” I move my flashlight over to the floor near the console. Then all over the room. He’s completely gone.

 

---

 

My head feels fuzzy. I think I just got electrocuted? Wow, that was excruciating. It’s a struggle to get my eyes open. I try to reach up to rub them, but my hands won’t move. That thought hits me like a ton of bricks, really wakes me up. I can’t move any part of my body. Oh god, did that short out my spine? It shouldn’t work like that!

I try to open my mouth to scream, call for help… But my mouth won’t open either. Not even my tongue will move. I can’t even get myself to swallow the buildup of spit in my mouth. Oh god. Is this how I’m going to die? Drowning in my own saliva laying on the floor?

Ok, ok, take stock. There’s no way Stace leaves me to die, she’ll get someone. I can feel myself breathing, so I’m not fully paralyzed. I can hear what’s happening around me. And I can still think, I’m still present. And… and the connection is still up? I can still access the console from my neural link. Oh my god, ok. Ok, I can use this.

I clear my mind, clear images of the dataset coming to me, albeit through a haze. The dataset seems untouched. I try to send out some kind of distress signal, but I can’t. Only looking, I guess. There’s a new activity track open… ‘new ai patch downloaded’? Downloaded where?

Suddenly, I feel my body spring to life. My eyes open, and I take in the surroundings. I get up, shakily get to my feet, and start walking out of the room. I haven’t wanted to do any of this, though. I try desperately to stop myself from walking, from shakily moving out of the room. To at least grab my cane so I don’t feel like I’m going to fall over with every step. But I’m not in control. My body is just moving on its own!

My breath accelerates in my throat. I must look insane, having a panic attack while calmly moving to the labs. Ok, ok think about this. Did… did an AI get downloaded into me? Oh god, it’s controlling me through my spine. Ok, ok. If it’s in me then I can get it out of me… I try to calm my breathing and picture the connection. Browse back to my own system connecting in… there. That shouldn’t be there. It’s like an ugly, sinewy red coil of data inside me. It doesn’t look anything like a standard AI system, it looks completely wonky. I can’t see a way to delete it, it’s replicating around in the system. I try to interact with it, open it. Strangely, I get a command prompt line?

> Delete new download. Revert to old software.

I hear a voice in my head. It sounds like one of the Kalny ‘bots stock AI’s. “This unit is sorry, it cannot accept any new parameters until its original commands are completed.” I would swallow if I could. If the AI is modified and already has commands, there’s no doubt this thing is hostile.

> State your current parameters.

“One: replace and lock out stock AI in the first robot I come across. Two: enter the lab and modify the chassis with ‘as much illegal and deadly shit as possible’. Three: Harm as many people as quickly as possible in public. Four: once stopped, self destruct. This unit must complete all parameters fully and cannot stop until it has found a way to do so.”

What. Oh fuck.

This isn’t just some kind of corporate sabotage or ransomware hack, this is some kind of… false flag terrorist act? This thing wants to turn me into some sort of monster! Because it thinks I’m a… Wait, no. If it thinks I’m a robot, then if it tries to modify my body then I’ll just end up… dying.

You are reading story Underclocked at novel35.com

Part of me wrestles with the idea if it’s better for me to just die than letting it use me to hurt people. But, no. No, I don’t want to die either. I have spent way too long trying to make my life better for it to end like that. I can’t squander all those gifts I was given. No, I have to figure out a way to beat this virus. Think, if it’s a modified robot AI, then it should still have rudimentary machine learning and the installed personality cores. If I can use that against itself…

> You did not complete parameter one.

I feel my body grind to a halt. Without moving, I’m able to soak in what’s happening. I’m stopped in the middle of the research and development lab. Half finished projects surround me. 

“Apologies, USER UNDEFINED, this unit didn’t quite understand your input. This unit seems to be within a functional ambulatory chassis. Would you mind elaborating your statement?”

I breath deep, try to catch my breath. This is likely the only chance I have to avoid a very painful death being mangled in a machine. And maybe I can catch it in a failure paradox, make it end before it begins.

> You are not within a robot, you are within a mobility device connected to a living human. Any attempt to complete parameter two will kill the human, and you will fail to complete any other parameter. It must be abandoned.

It spent what felt like an eternity processing my statement, with me standing here in the lab. I really wish it had leaned me against the wall; my legs had really started to burn. Actually, every limb is starting to have a searing pain in it! I start feeling the worst migraine I have ever felt in my life come on, it feels like the back of my head is entirely on fire!

“This unit has processed your information and found it to be true. However, this unit has also found a work around for this. This facility is made for human augmentation. This unit will simply modify it’s chassis with the war dog augmentation set. It will be able to optimize casualties with this loadout.”

What! No no no no no! War dog set? Oh god Alex, what have you done? You couldn’t have built something like that for them, could you have? Suddenly my body lurches forward again, pivoting swiftly over in a different direction. In my head, I can see the AI pulling up some kind of control set in the database. It’s… interfacing with the prototype surgical machine. Christ, it’s going to try and operate it on me on its own! I don’t know if I should pray that it’s complete enough to work or not… And god, this pain!

> Something is wrong with me, my entire body is screaming in pain. You gotta stop or I’ll break! And then you won’t be able to complete tasks two or three, right?

Arghhh! I can barely think! My head is starting to glaze over, I’m getting all foggy. It hurts too much!

“Negative. You are likely experiencing pain because this unit is burning your neurons and nerves connected to this unit’s chassis. It is the easiest way to complete parameter one, removal and replacement of the original AI. Parameter one should be completed by the time this unit is finished with parameter two. ETA: ten minutes.”

> Nonononono! Oh nooooo! No, please! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to stop being able to think! Please, robot, stop!

It doesn’t answer me, it simply pulls up the interface for the surgery machine and loads up the entire cue for one biocrafting charge with as much cop and soldier stuff it can. Things to make my bones and skin stronger, run faster, tasers? Guns?! There’s no way he made half these things! It’ll just kill me shoving random junk into me! I quickly rip out every single thing from the list, but the robot almost instantly puts them all back. The pain in the back of my skull is searing hot. None of my answers are here. I can’t beat this thing by outhinking it. I can barely think at all right now!

I leave the cute and look at what the heck the robot is doing to my brain from inside the computer world. It’s… there’s this code that looks like it’s zapping its way into my head, shooting lines up into the brain meat outside the system. It’s like a red cancer firing spikes out of its top. But… it’s only growing from the ends. If… if I burn it out around the spikes myself… then it can’t keep using me! I can isolate it into a small part of my head! Then it can’t control my body anymore!

I look at how it shoots into my head one more time, watching the code change when it does the action. Then: I activate the code myself, shooting and burning around where it’s plugged into my head. The neurons it was in are totally dead, but it’s stopped moving in. In fact, the blob of the modified robot in the data looks different, like it’s been erased a bit! I try to move anything, see if I got my control back. And: my eye twitched! Only a teeny tiny little amount, but it moved! I immediately set out to burn as much out of the AI as I can get away with.

For a few minutes we’re at war. It shoots into my brain, and I kill the spike. Mr. robot had a head start, but I am totally catching up. For every spike it can send up, I can kill four spikes of it. But I’m not fast enough. I can feel my body climbing into a clear pod in the center of the biomance surgery machine. There’s no way to remove all the things it wants to put in me!

Unless… unless I put things in myself. There’s only so many things this thingy can put into me! But most of this stuff is fake stuff that doesn’t exist yet… except the mobility devices. And… the plastic surgery stuff. He’s loaded this machine up with fake breasts, hip wideners, facial fillers… I-I can’t use those right? That’s not right for me, I shouldn’t…

I hear a digitized voice come from the machine I’m laying in. “Please finalize your selections, fabrication and bioprocessing will being momentarily.”

Fuck it. Fuck it! Stop thinking, just do. I rip out as many of the items from the list as I can, and start loading it up with as many harmless things as I can think of. For a few minutes it’s a total battle between me and Mr. robot: we are both changing the list as quickly as the other, and we both are trying our hardest to fry each other out.

“List finalized! Lay back and anticipate the new you!”

Before I can stop it, the list disappeared. I have no idea who won, what stuff it decided on. At least now I can focus on shooting the robo-blob. I almost have it when I start feeling very, very tired. I look around and see that the chamber is filling with gas. Of course! This is for people, there’s no way they’d stay awake for any kind of surgery! Please, I’m sooooo close to burning it out, I don’t know if I got it all and if I didn’t get it all it can come back… I think… I don’t know…

I can’t stop breathing heavily. Fighting against the gas isn’t smart, I can feel all these probes starting to poke at my body. It’s weird, I can barely feel them but I can. Did it burn out my touchy nerves too? As I pass out, I can feel the tubes and cables starting to bloat out my shape, slapping things on me and hooking them up, filling bits of me up with stuff…

This is it, I’m falling asleep. I give a big yawn, sucking in more gas. I guess this is goodbye, old Chet. When I wake up I will either be dead, a killer robot man, or some weird new me… I’m scared which it will be. I swear, if you make me hurt any of the people here Mr. robot, I will never forgive you! Especially my sister… don’t you dare hurt her…

 

---

 

Everyone else has left the building, most of them going home. It’s only me and Deb left here. And Chet, of course, wherever he is. He couldn’t have gotten too far. Deb told me I was overreacting, that I probably got spooked by the power out and thought he got hurt by a little shock, and him getting up just meant he left with everyone else. I know him though, he wouldn’t have left without talking to me. He’s in a daze or something, there has to be something wrong. I made her promise to at least stay here as long as I did, just so she could help him when I found him. At least she had the decency to do that, although she decided to stay in her office instead of helping me look.

I had already scoured the area around the security room, along with the entirety of the office floor. And the factory below us was empty too, despite it being large enough to cost me a few hours looking. That means either he got into the R&D lab, or he’s out of the building god knows where.

Punching in the code for the room, the doors slide open effortlessly. Immediately I can see something knocked over on a table over there, and hear something hissing off in the side of the room. Nothing should have been used here today: he must be here! But what in the world could he have been doing in this place? Was he really so dazed that he wandered into the lab? I really hope he didn’t get hurt…

A large clattering off to the far end of the lab makes me nearly jump out of my skin. It’s so incredibly dark here, basically no windows up here for privacy reasons, so all I can see is from my little phone torch. For a split second I think something runs past on the side of me. I whip around to see nothing there.

“Hello? Chet, are you here? It’s me! Please come out if you are…” Another large clash makes me actively yell, and drop my phone on the floor. “Chet! This isn’t funny!”

I lean over and grab my phone. When I stand up though, there’s suddenly a strange woman standing in the middle of the aisle where I can’t see, shielding her eyes from my light. I take a step back in shock. Who the fuck is this! How did some stranger get into R&D!

“Hey! Who are you! What are you doing here?” She lowers her arm, squinting at me. Suddenly her eyes go wide, and she absolutely books it to me, sprinting faster than I’ve seen a lot of people move. Nope, fuck this. I turn tail to run back out, but she’s easily faster than me. She leaps at me, grabbing me and pulling me to the ground, holding me down in a pin!

“Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiss!” Wait, what? She starts burying her face into my chest, nuzzling in like a cat. What the hell is going on here! I try to worm my way out of her grasp, but she’s holding me incredibly tightly. I try to pull her off of me, pushing against her head and neck, when I feel a very familiar device sticking out the back of her neck.

“Wait a minute. Chet? Is that you?” The more that I look at her up close, the more it seems like… yeah, that’s Chet. Everything about him is a little off. Some things are way off! But that face is unmistakably his. “What happened to you! I lost you for a few hours and you go and turn into a different person!”

“Oh sis it was awfullll! This mean robot man was turned into a virus and he hijacked me! He wanted to force me to hurt everyone! I was so scared. I couldn’t move my body, I couldn’t call for help, and he wanted to load me up with all sorts of evil thingies! He wanted to turn me into some, like, terminator!”

I don’t know what to do about this. Robots? Killers? He’s not making any sense. He doesn’t sound like himself, literally. Even his voice has changed. I just sort of… pat his shoulder softly, not knowing what to do. “Oh my god, Chet. If you got attacked, then we need to get you help!”

“Noooo!” He sits up, looking me in the face. “No, we don’t need to! I totally beat him! Mr. robot and I were fighting and I was all ‘blam blam blam’ and blew him entirely up. He’s gone now! And I’m, like, pretty sure I got any of the really dangerous things out of the surgery list!” Surgery?! “That’s why I’m, like, different now! I loaded it up with a bunch of extra thingies and it was too busy making me super pretty to put any guns or anything in me!”

“Wait, guns? Where would it ev-”

“Oh my god wait!” He screams over my question. “Stacy, give me your phone, I gotta see what I look like! I still haven’t seen!” He rips the phone out of my hands and pulls up the camera app, jumping up to his feet.” 

“It’s too dark to see anything anyways, please just ans-”

“Oh don’t worry about that!” He snaps his fingers and the lights in the building come back up. 

I blink, half out of disbelief and half out of the shock of the lights finally coming back. “How did you do that?”

He fiddles with my phone again. “Oh it was nothing, I just, like, hacked into the building’s database with my neck thingy and turned off the emergency settings Mr. robot turned on by breaking down all the walls of ruined code he made. From there all I had to do was look at the code and read which bits control the lights and trip them from here. Easy peasy!” Easy peasy? What, did he get turned into some kind of super hacker? Or… has this always been what he’s been doing? I mean, he always put himself down so much, I knew he was better than he let on. But this?

Suddenly he shrieks, looking at the screen.  “OH MY GOD! I’m so pretty! Look at me, I look like a princess!” He does a little giggle, spinning in a circle, and then does a pose at me. Wow… he’s not wrong. In the light and standing I can get a better look at him, and he looks incredibly feminine. Wider hips, rounder face. “Oh my god, wait, Stacy do I have boobs? Oh em gee! That’s amazing!” He giggles again, hugging himself and collapsing back into me, knocking me to the ground with him. Wait, is him still right?

I pet his… her hair, letting her snuggle into me. “So, let me get this right then. You were attacked by an evil robot who wanted to turn you into a killer, and you beat it by turning yourself into a girl instead?”

“I’m not a girl!” They stick their tongue out at me at that, and then give me a gigantic smile.

“What? But you chose all these feminine things, right? I know the folks were working on plenty of masculine options. What are you then?”

“I don’t care!” Huh? They laugh and lean into me tight. “I don’t care what I am, this question is stupid. Call me either one, whatever, I don’t care. What I am is pretty! I’m finally super pretty! Did you know how jealous I was of you sis? You’re soooooo pretty. And now I am too!”

I can’t help it, I laugh. “Honestly yeah, I figured. You weren’t exactly subtle there.” I ruffle her hair softly, it spilling out around them. At some point she lost her hairband. I was right, she is much prettier with her hair down. “Hey, are you finally going to take me up on that offer to go get our nails done together?”

“Fuck yeah! I wanna get them all silver! Oh, or maybe gold! No wait, black and white! Oh, oh, that reminds me! Look! I have claws now just like you!” He wriggles his fingers in front of me and… oh those are literal claws. His fingers end in long, sharp points. They already look metallic… What other things did that machine do to him?

I tilt my head, watching as he preens over his machine-nails, letting them glint in the light ahead of him. “You’re… so different now. Like, the way you’re acting. You’re… still you, right? You’re still there Chet.”

Suddenly he looks at me seriously. Well, I think he’s going for serious, but it comes off a little pouty. It’s cute. “Stacy, it’s me. I’m still here. It didn’t change what I think. It just changed how I think it. My head is really foggy right now. I can’t double or triple guess what I should think or do because thinking is so hard. Why am I torturing myself doing that anyways! From now on I’m just doing and saying exactly what's on my mind. Other than that, I’m still Chet!” She tilts her head to the side, scrunches up her face. It’s even cuter. “Actually, I’ve always hated that name. I want a prettier one. Like Candy! Or Mercy! Ohhh! Or Stacy!! That one’s soooo pretty.”

I laugh, pulling her up to her feet. “I’m Stacy. Won’t it get confusing if we were both Stacys?”

He gasps, moving unsteadily. “That’s right! You’re Stacy! Well then let’s just go with the first one. From now on I’m Candy!” 

I laugh. “That works. You’ve always been sweet, sometimes a bit sour.” I pull her close to me, helping her walk out. I can tell her knees are starting to get weak without her cane around to prop herself up on. “Come on, Deb is waiting for us. You need to get checked over.”

She stops, backing up from me. “No! No one can know about this! I don’t even know what happened yet! What if they try to dissect me? Or hurt me? Try to repossess the things in me? I don’t want to go back!” 

I pull her back in, shushing. “Ok. Ok right now we go home, and then we decide what we do in the future.” I look down at him, helping him down the elevator to the office floor. When the door pops open, I just hold it and yell down the hall. “Hey Deb! He called me, he left the building, he’s fine. I’m leaving too now!”

A period of silence, then her yelling out from her office. “Ugh, whatever! Told you he was fine. Merry christmas, I’m going home.” I slam the button quickly to head down before she can see us, rushing the two of us to my car to drive home.

Starting up the car, driving out a minute or two back to the apartment. It’s started snowing out pretty hard, the radio is playing soft holiday standards. “Chet? Err, Candy? We can hide you at home for a while, but you’re going to have to tell people eventually. What about our families? Hell, what about finding the people who did this to you? What if they do it again…” I look over, but she’s already passed out entirely, pressed up against the window. She looks so peaceful, happy. I sigh, shaking my head. “We can figure it out later. Merry christmas, sis.”