Only the finest for you.

“I would kill a man with an axe for a converter …” You talk to yourself kind of a lot. You note it, but can’t really think of something to DO about it as you dig through the scrap heaps at the landfill. Overseers for them usually do a good job stacking them together, enough to put the right sensors on automated sorting robots that metal generally ends up with metal. After all, if you’re taking money under the table from corporate engineers trying to make quota, they probably expect you to make sure they at least aren’t pulling their way through too many banana peels and used condoms. “Though not none,” you say out loud, shaking some unpleasantness off your hand.

Strictly speaking, landfill salvage is hella illegal. The liability of prospectors getting caught in a trashfall, falling into a sinkhole, or accidentally finding the very rare government-restricted tech item was heinous. But it was one of those laws people didn’t really care about at the end of the day. After all, if you died, the overseer rarely had a hard time covering up you were ever there. And if you got something red-labelled, well, you weren’t going to go off about where you go it anyway, were you?

Most of the material was just useful things rich jackholes didn’t know enough about the value of. The Nicotag buzzer in your heavy coat’s left pocket didn’t come cheap, and someone just tossed it. Not that you’d sell it, mind. They stopped making dedicated frequency targetters after some psycho used one to take over a drone pilot and crash a passenger jet nose-first into Buenos Aires Nation’s First. Lucky for any nearby aircraft (and whatever moron hadn’t fried the buzzer before junking it), you just wanted to steal some overpriced streams for while you tinker. And you couldn’t beat a Nicotag for that.

“AH!” you exclaim, seeing the telltale glint of a converter’s grid poking out of a nearby heap of tin cans and loose aluminum. Starting delicately, you wrap your hands around the bar at the top. The attempt to slowly slide it out like you would come from an install doesn’t even make it budge. Your brow furrows. Converters are delicate pieces; pulling too hard if it’s stuck could destroy it. Figuring it’s a pinch, you set about trying to work out a lever to make sure that when you pressure it, the converter doesn’t snap or get crushed by whatever’s holding it. Spotting a discarded crowbar buried through a piece of thin sheet metal, you put one foot on the panel, wrap both hands at the crowbar’s end, then pull with all your might. Crowbars, after all, aren’t known for their delicacy.

An actual scream bolts out of you when the crowbar pulls loose and the sheet metal slips, landing you on your ass painfully. Griping quietly to yourself, tailbone bruised at worst, you start to stand … and come face-to-face with an unmoving, silent woman.

“Oh, God.” A gurgle tells you that you might be sick. You’ve never seen a dead body before. Too pretty to be a prospector like you. And not dressed for it. Prostitute? You’d heard of orgs dumping rebellious assets in places like this, though the reality of seeing it produces less the disaffected cynicism you put up just hearing around the world’s horrors and more gut-wrenching terror and existential dread.

After a moment, a wave of relief, then tension, washes over you. On further inspection, it’s clearly an android, limbs heavily battered, broken, absent power, and, by the look of things, with a crowbar jammed in its thigh until a moment ago. THIS was a find. A Nicotag buzzer was worth a lot to terrorists, paramilitary types, whackjobs who wanted to feel powerful. THIS was a GT romance android. Besides being perfectly legal to trade, their compliance with virtual intelligence laws meant you didn’t even need to register her as “yours.” You could sell it, get out of your grandfather’s old shack. Hell, if it was the right series, you could probably afford a full-scale house, payment upfront.

For some reason, that thought harrows you with guilt as you look into her dead eyes. The damage is too specific to have been a mistake, someone did this to her. It. VI’s are just programs, she’s basically a very fancy, specific kind of computer. It, dammit! It’s not a person. It’s a sex doll worth anywhere from a new car to a new life. Fix her up, make sure she’s still compliant, you’d have no trouble finding a buyer … but you don’t want to let it go. Something tells you that you’d be handing it right back out to someone who’d do THIS all over again. Even if it wasn’t alive, it was a grotesque disrespect of a beautifully-crafted machine. It’s practically a work of art, the paleness of her skin without making it look artificial, her angular, incisive eyes, dead as they may be now, given immaculate detail, and, less as an engineer and more of a man who might occasionally desire female company, her chest was just insane. Selling her … would they even appreciate it? Or would it just end up here, used up, discarded, wasted?

It’s very easy to justify taking her for your own thinking like that.

You abandon your attempts to retrieve the converter. You can find another. You bend and lock the shattered splints of her legs and arms into a more convenient shape, some effort required with her servos locked in place, and put the android’s remains into your bag. Making special effort to seem entirely dissatisfied with your find, you stalk past the overseer, who pays you only a glance as you pass, not wanting to engage and be interrupted from his magazine. Sweat rolls off you heavily all the way home, becoming increasingly paranoid someone knows you took it and how much it’s worth. That this would end with you bleeding out in an alleyway while some org button man or even just a rowdy punk makes off with your prize. But as we already know, that didn’t happen.

You feel a little bit like a murderer, looking down at her. Of course, she wasn’t ever alive and you didn’t do the considerable damage dealt to her limbs … but she looks so real. Until you get to the stripped quickskin on her left arm, the cracks and exposed servos of her right limbs, and the horrific scoring her left leg went through, you could believe for a moment she was a real human woman, once upon a time. Which, again, made it seem way too much like you’re trying to hide a dead body.

“No one’s going to come looking …” you mutter to yourself, hooking the power lines into her empty, charred battery housing. God, whoever did this to her really went all out … on her limbs, anyway. And ripped the battery out. Blasted? Burned? You shudder a little involuntarily, unable to imagine her for a moment as anything but a living woman having her heart torn out. Why didn’t they touch any of her chest, her face? Then again, it seems insane to attempt logic here. A GT-X series like this, in the condition it was before it got wrecked (hell, IN this condition) could fetch a damn fair price. More than you could afford, certainly. Embarrassment over fetishes, maybe, but GalTech places such a high priority on discretion that wiping your history was trivial.

Her eyes are dark as they stare up at you. You can tell the synthetic irises are brown, but they look as black as her pupil, no light reflecting from them. It’s how you keep reminding yourself this is salvage, not . You’ll say this for GalTech, they make one hell of a sex doll. The momentary detachment lets you focus enough to connect the teeth of the cables to the nodes a battery would normally occupy. Sitting down at your computer with her stretched across the couch of your small hovel/workshop, you organize the tasks to be executed, triple-check everything’s in order, and begin the boot-up sequence manually.

“This isn’t going to work,” you tell yourself as your lights flicker and power pulses into the body of the android. It quivers, but you know that’s just machinery reacting to the voltage. The important part is if it can get the ball rolling hard enough for her core processor to come online and regulate the input. Which was a challenge on its own, even if you got the voltage of the battery precisely correct, and you can’t be sure you did. Aroused, excited, and horrified, you watch her dead, black-hole eyes, waiting, hoping for, begging against a sign of “life.”

The quivering stops extremely suddenly and you swear out loud, slamming the flat of your hand on the table. You start to check if the power crapped out, if you tripped the breaker, what went wrong, but the measurements look normal. Not just normal, regular. They’re balancing. Your eyes widen and you stand, looking over your monitor at the android.

“Hello, User2!” a stiff-sounding, but distinctly feminine voice says, brown eyes alight as they stare back into yours. “I am Mariah, GT-X series romance android. You have been selected as one of the very few to test this new model of the experimental, top-of-the-line virtual intelligence and its physical housing. Is there anything you request of me at this time?”