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You had never been to a nightclub before. Of course you had never been anywhere before, but you had enough photos on file to recognize the trappings. A surprisingly well lit reception area for scans was staffed with a bored looking woman in a spiked choker. The sides of her blocky head were closely cropped and pale, while the wavy top was coloured in blight blues, purples and pinks. She wore a tight dark sleeveless shirt (designed to look torn) which stretched across a heavy bust. Both muscular arms were covered in sleeves of spiralling tattoos. She barely looked up from the flexi-screen embedded into the back of her hand, let alone pay you, an apparently innocuous metal orb being carried like some strange accessory, any attention. She simply waved her other hand, a spiked bracelet on her wrist, at the vertical scanner for the Doctor to voluntarily pass through.

Isabelle did so and the scanner provided no signs of having detected anything untoward, so you supposed you weren’t classified as a weapon, thankfully. Once she stepped through into the club proper you noticed bathrooms were immediately on the right via more humming neon signage. The music bounced off the matte black walls like an erratic heartbeat and you wondered what kind of damage this level of decibels might cause to her hearing if Doctor Isaac stayed too long. The noise did not hinder her unknowing reception of your Wavelength though.

Perhaps the doctor really did mean to go dancing, as she weaved through said dancefloor on her way to one of the bars on the other end of the room. It didn’t seem overly crowded, with many of the tall tables flanking the dancefloor unoccupied, but the dancefloor was a fog of heat with the frantic bodies twining amongst each other. Still, there was no difficulty for the Doctor to reach one of the smaller side bars wedged in a corner and she slid onto an empty stool by the wall. You were placed onto the oft-wiped down bar, unacknowledged by the service android behind it.

“Evening’ ma’am,” the robot greeted the Doctor in a clear, friendly tone, barely a hint of digitization in its voice. “What would you like to start with tonight?”

The bartender-bot was an older model of Dyno. A Dyno-11 made to look even older, that is, as if it’s casing was cast of now rusted iron and bolted steel rather than the carbon fibres and chrome glass it was actually manufactured in. It wore a faded grey bowler cap at a jaunty angle, a monocle pinned to it’s brim (rather than on the robot’s face) and it had two dark round lenses for eyes. It once had a fake handlebar mustache attached to its face, but that had since been removed or lost and only a moustache shaped discolouration in the metal plating remained. The overall effect had a charm to it, which you noticed Doctor Isaac seemed to like.

“Whatever single malt is closest, Elvis,” she told the barkeep. “Splash of water.” There was an excessively clinky nod from the server and then its head, arms and torso spun in one direction, independently to its pelvis and legs which stayed absolutely still, so that it could now face the shelf of liquor. It picked out a bottle of something brown in a green glass bottle. You noted that all of its movements were programmed affectations to make the robot move more robotically. It’s limbs jerked and bent with sudden bursts, but its pour was smooth and not so much as a drop of **** would ever have been spilled. You knew it would have been able to perform the same movements in a much more economical and fluid fashion, more like a human with a dancer’s grace. But instead, whoever owned the automaton had wanted to give it a bit more personality… which was achieved by making it seem less human.

“Laphroaig 10 Years,” the bartender chimed ‘happily’, pushing the short glass of glimmering tan liquid into the Doctor’s reach. “Splash of water. Please enjoy, miss.”

Your creator had stopped paying attention to the robot as soon as she ordered and wordlessly took her drink and took a curt sip. You couldn’t tell if she did enjoy it or not. She was scanning the dancefloor, legs crossed, perched on her chair with the gaze of a kind of predatory bird. There was only a moment of pause from the bartender as it waited for further instructions, but when none were forthcoming it went back to pick up a dish rag and moved further down the bar. It selected an already pristine glass to wipe indefinitely. ‘Elvis’ hadn’t requested payment from the Doctor at all, so you wondered how the economy of the bar worked. You assumed some sort of tab was in place. You also assumed that the Doctor hadn’t brought you here to be a table ornament while she just sat and drank scotch.

“Doctor,” you said, your voice not required to carry so much due to the strategic vantage point Doctor Isaac had chosen to sit. It was somewhat out of the way of the din. It allowed patrons near the wall to have conversation that didn’t require shouting over the thudding music. You knew she had heard you, the woman clenching her jaw even though she kept her eyes forward. You plunged on. “What are we doing at this nightclub?”

You saw a half of the smile from the side of her face.

“What do you think we’re doing at this nightclub, Gus?” she asked aloofly, before taking another measured sip of her whiskey.