Page 34 of Time Traveling Space Bastards
“Thenyoupunch him in the dick. I’ll bet some cyborg-on-cyborg violence actually hurts.”
Enix pulled me into a hug and it was the first time he’d willingly touched me so far. I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed him because I figured we both needed it. It hurt like fuck to punch him, but hugging him felt like hugging a very muscular person. I couldn’t tell he was a cyborg at all.
“If he’s involved, I’ll make sure he pays.”
“Thanks,” I said, nuzzling his chest with my chest.
Being able to fold fitted sheets was cool and everything, but the real magic was in cyborg hugs.
“Can you scan and see if he’s in there?” Kuka asked.
Enix did his thing, but he didn’t let me go. I wasn’t complaining at all.
“I’m not picking up life signs, cyborg or person, but the solar batteries are just undamaged enough to power the cloaking and for someone who designed it to access the logs from the console to figure out what happened when it landed.”
“I’m still going first,” Torrek said.
That wasmyman…alien? Saki? Whatever.
Torrek and Omi went first and then popped their heads out to let us sneak in. I knew Kuka said this was all based on work he did in college and it didn’t work very well, but this was way more advanced than anything we had on Earth, even if it was broken.
The console was completely different and there was no way I could fly this one. I was so focused on figuring out the controls that I didn’t take in anything else until I heard Enix’s horrified gasp.
I followed his line of sight and there was a man slumped against the wall unceremoniously. He didn’t look a thing like Enix, but I knew he was a cyborg, just a different model. I walked over and took his hand.
“What happened to him?”
“We were designed based on the holy texts. I know you said you made everything up after you met us, but they were able to use everything you wrote about the Enix to make us. They added a failsafe that wasn’t in the texts. From what I’m told, it’s worse than being factory reset. There’s an option to shut us down and disable us. It’s like dying.”
“Can you be turned back on?”
“I know how, but remember, they aren’t all like your Enix,” Kuka said. “Yours is a bit of an anomaly. He’s always fought his programming, even when factory reset. This one is basically a soldier. He’s programmed to follow any order my crazy brothergives him. My brother could have shut him down with orders to kill us as soon as we woke him up.”
“He won’t,” Torrek said. “He needs you to take him home, and it’s a forfeit if you kill the competition.”
“Who is going to fact check him if we’re all dead?” I asked.
“He’s been shut down for a while,” Enix said. “It’s going to take him a while to boot back up properly and he’ll be disoriented. I might be able to get through to him then and try to convince him that we are more than our programming. He might tell us where Valtens is and what his plans are. If he wants to fight, I’ll shut him down.”
I grabbed Enix because we were hugging now and I thought he might need it again.
“You’d better be careful because I’ve decided you’re mine, however you want to be. If you want to because consent is a beautiful thing.”
He just gave me this beautiful smile.
“I’d be happy to belong to you. Let me just take care of this first.”
I swear to shit, no one had better hurt my cyborg.
Ididn’t particularly like this model and he looked down on me because I was a pleasure model. We were basically the exact same thing with different programming and I had the better cock. If someone wanted to, they could put his exact programming into me and I’d still have the better cock, but he still acted like he was better than me when Kuka took me home.
Still, this shouldn’t have been done to him. My previous owner threatened to do this to me all the time, but then he wouldn’t have an Enix for his brothel. Only the grotesquely rich could afford to power down an Enix and just go buy another one. Valtens was grotesquely rich, but this particular Enix seemed to get along with him just fine, so I didn’t know why he’d be powered down.
They kept the information on how to power us back on off of any server so we couldn’t access it. They made us indestructible, smart enough to access and interpret any data, and trained some of us to kill. Honestly, the only thing stopping us from starting arevolution was the threat of the kill switch and being told for so long we couldn’t do anything they didn’t program us to do.
Kuka didn’t hide it from me or make me look away. He’d never been like that. He knew what I could do with this information, and he trusted me. He showed me exactly how to power back on someone like me and I was grateful. I wouldn’t have been angry if he made me turn my back. Honestly, I would have expected it. We weren’t allowed to know this. Kuka didn’t care.
His body jerked as he powered back on. This one was called Ghol. Most people gave their Enix a name, but my previous owner couldn’t even give me that and now I was used to responding to Enix. Now that I knew Enix in the holy texts wasn’t the name of the cyborg race, but the name I gave her, I never intended to change it.
