Story by Sammy Cheung
Art by Gabi Backus
==06:14==
“—listening to Radio GLXY. Be careful out there in the rain. Don’t forget your covers if you’re not waterproof!”
Could’ve used that reminder an hour ago, Su thinks to themself, watching the water slash the windows. Back in the day, they would get waterproof paint jobs, but they’ve long since worn off, and Su’s never gotten around to getting another one. They’ve been getting by like the organics do, armed with umbrellas and old waterproof tarps fashioned into jackets that they’re careful not to tear. Somehow, they usually manage to forget both and have to scramble to dry themself before the rusting begins.
“NEON VALLEY.”
They press the bright red button on the pole. The Driver coasts to a stop, silent amid the sounds of water hitting pavement. Several people around Su stumble out first, making a general hum in thanks. It’s a holdover from the days when the Driver wasn’t the car itself—a funny habit, Su thinks, but not a bad one.
Su slides out into the rain and begins their trek. They prefer being out at this time of day, when a figure passes in the street only every so often, the rain making their respective covering glow under the streetlights. Surroundings quieter. Sure, PynK’s been offering for years to turn the noise sensitivity down in their cores, but Su doesn’t like people up in their gears. It’s too close, someone else’s hands behind their eyes, and powering down to avoid it would be worse. And anyway, it’s not that kind of noise.
Su weaves around a few streets, away from the lights, winding their way to a neon sign up against a blank metal wall. CHROME SHOPPE, it reads, with its perpetually flickering E’s.
They reach up, pressing the first E, at the end of CHROME.
The wall shifts, rattling slightly. In a moment, a thin beam of yellow light appears in the wall slightly above Su’s eye level. It scrutinizes them, a paler yellow beam projecting onto their head and skimming down to their boots before retracting into the original beam.
“STATE YOUR NAME AND PURPOSE OF VISIT,” a disembodied voice booms.
Su rolls their eyes. “Ellis. It’s me.”
“SEARCHING DATABASE. NO M-E FOUND.”
Su leans against the wall, unable to help the ends of their lips twitching upwards. “Eeeellis. I forgot my coat again. Let me in before I rust out here, old man.”
There’s a noise that sounds like a suppressed laugh and a crackle before the beam disappears and a glowing blue rectangle, roughly three times Su’s width and twice their height, appears on the wall to the left of the sign. The wall within the rectangle separates from the rest, sinking backwards before sliding to Su’s right with a hiss, revealing the inside of a storage room. A little droid carrying a towel on one arm rolls into view, grinning as he does. “Let me have some fun.”
“You’re getting better,” Su says, taking the towel from him as they enter. “If I didn’t know any better, you might’ve had my circuits shorting.”
“You always say that.”
“Only because it’s true. They’ll be asking you back one of these days.” Su drapes the towel around their shoulders.
“Maybe,” Ellis murmurs, absently moving his hand and covering the faded 3LL15 on his hip. “But who else would I have to torment if I went back into showbiz?”
“I’m sure you’d find someone. You’re terrible.”
Ellis rolls directly into Su’s leg. They let out a string of beeps and buzzes and reach to slap him. He laughs.
==14:00==
The shop thrums with sound, and if Su closes their eyes for a moment, they can feel that sound in their core. Different from the sounds of the street, it comforts them to be at their workbench with sound filters nestled in their ears and their protective visor over their face, elbow deep in wires and parts. Lila would have used the cliché and said the shop ran like a well-oiled machine, even if many of its members weren’t exactly well-oiled themselves. Lila was good about keeping herself maintained though, and woe to anyone else who didn’t keep the same standard (Su) or pretended to ignore her (also Su). Even now, the memory comes easily: Lila marching over, her words as harsh as her hands were gentle over the spots of rust forming on Su’s shoulder—
“Su.”
They jump, scattering a few bolts across the workbench surface. They look, and across from them stands a golden amphibian wearing a pilot’s suit. The pilot wiggles their fingers slightly in the air next to their face. Su blinks, then laughs as they pop out their sound filters and retract their visor.
“Kaelyx, you gotta stop doing that.”
Kaelyx rubs their fingertips against the back of their other hand. “Sorry.” Their voice is barely audible over the sounds of the workshop around them, but the lightly accented words ring clearly in Su’s ears. “I forget that you can’t read my signals when I come in.”
“Mm-hm.” Su picks up the bolts they scattered earlier. “Not that I’m complaining, but…” They side eye Kaelyx as they drop the bolts into a box already almost overflowing with other bolts and gears. “Wasn’t expecting to see you so soon. The new cores not work out for you?”
“The cores function fine—it’s the landing gear. I ran into trouble on Indri-15.”
Su grimaces as they imagine how Kaelyx must have navigated their ship into the hangar. “Indri-15, huh?” Su picks up an empty toolbox, pulls open a few drawers below the main workbench, and grabs a few tools and parts from each of them. “They building a new resort out there?” They smirk.
Kaelyx huffs slightly, the edges of their mouth quirking up. They blink slowly, first one eye, then the other. “You could say that.”
“I could say a lot of things.” Su opens and rifles through a few more drawers on the other side of the workbench. Eventually, they find what they are looking for—another pair of hands, faded orange, larger and blockier than the ones opening the drawers. “And I could also point out”—they jab an orange hand’s pointer finger in Kaelyx’s direction—”that you’ve come more times this season than the folks at Horizon would like. Ellis said Aegis called twice already.”
“I know,” Kaelyx says, stopping a stray screwdriver from rolling off the table by delicately picking it up with their fingertips. They set it back gingerly on the table next to a few other scattered tools. “But you can charge more, you know. I can handle the lecture.”
“And you know damn well I can’t do that.” Su presses a button on their forearm, and the hand attached pops out slightly from the wrist with a small hiss. Su twists the hand off, replaces it with the larger one, and presses the button again. They repeat the whole procedure with the other side. Once they’ve finished, they clap their hands and rub the palms together. “You keep doing your work, I’ll keep doing mine, got it?”
Kaelyx doesn’t say anything, but Su swears the air around them gets a little brighter.
==19:00==
Some old organic friend—Su forgets now who exactly it was—once said that older humans could sense when it was going to rain, because their joints would ache. Something about the pressure in the air. Su knows that androids don’t work like that, of course—while humans and other organics regenerate their cells and are mostly stuck with the same limbs their whole lives, androids have to replace or fix themselves when they start to break down. No healing process required. Still, they think, it’s nice to have something in common with organics—aches and pains as their components wear down. Countless years ago, Su hadn’t even thought they would be around to ponder such a thing. And if the Engineers had their way… well. What they don’t know can’t hurt them.
Su leans away from their work for a moment, sighing and raising their arms above their head. Their wrists creak in protest as they rotate their hands in circles. They wince.
“I saw that. Heard it too.”
“Saw what?” Su feigns innocence, pointedly avoiding eye contact with Ellis as he rolls behind them. They roll each of their shoulders a couple times for good measure, as if this was part of the whole routine.
Undeterred, Ellis wheels around into Su’s line of sight. When they turn their head, he follows. “The whole shop heard you, Su. Don’t play games with me.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s what you’ve been saying since Month 3. It’s almost Month 10. And you know how people get during the ArmsFest—”
The Armistice Festival. Of course. Every year Su manages to forget the exact dates, but they always feel it when they see the decorations go up, feel it in the ache of their wrists and the tight, twisting sensation in their core wires—
“—manage without you for an evening—”.
“Sure,” Su murmurs. They allow their arm to drop on the table with a soft thump.
Ellis pauses, his expression softening slightly. “Get yourself something nice on the way back, okay?”
“I’ll swing by Gio’s and see if they have a bottle of Triple M.”
“That’s not nice, Su. You deserve better than that.”
“And maybe a can of LPen.”
Ellis sighs. “Good enough, I guess. But I expect you to show me proof that you’re not just saying this.”
Su rolls their eyes and smiles just a little. “Need me to bring a picture?”
“I expect you to bring in the can.” Ellis returns the smile. “Go on.”
“All right, all right.”
==19:30==
The wind has picked up, making it hard to see in the rain, even with their visor up. But Su knows the way to Gio’s like the detailing etched in their hip—they’ve been coming here since it was “Gio and Etton’s.” From Gio’s window, they’ve seen three separate Oilers open and shut down. They joked with Gio once that his slogan should be, “No matter what, Gio’s here.”
The door chimes its familiar tune as Su stumbles through the front door, causing curtains on the side to flutter. There are a variety of people in the store. Su recognizes a few, though not all. The organic standing at the counter, an elderly human man with a big beard, smiles in greeting. “Su! You’re here early. What can I get you, friend?”
“Don’t suppose you have any Triple M on you, do you?” Su retracts their visor with a soft click.
“Ellis told you to get something nice on the way home, didn’t he?” He reaches behind the counter and pulls out a small, round, clear bottle of deep red liquid, which reads Mycellius Motor Mask. “You’re in luck. Got the last one right here—next shipment doesn’t come in until next week.”
“You’re a hard drive, Gio.”
“Anything for you, Su.” He laughs as he hands over the bottle. “You want me to ring you up right now?”
“Nah. Ellis was being a real gas can tonight about ‘nice.'” They shrug one shoulder. “I’ll have a bit of a look around first.”
A bit of a look around, as if Su doesn’t know the store like the inside of the workshop by now. An old phrase, uttered originally because Su can’t settle on oils, and continued because Etton would bring this fact up every time Su came into the store. An old piece of conversation Su and Gio never got around to changing out, much like the hand-lettered signs that mark each aisle and the paper promotional posters that hang on the wall.
They meander down the aisles for a few minutes. Gio normally keeps everything well-stocked, but some of the shelves are empty. Su isn’t surprised. It’s often like this around ArmsFest. They’re more surprised that Gio has had a moment to breathe behind the counter—he doesn’t exactly have a lot of help around the shop. Too stubborn to get it, because nobody, not even Su or the other regulars, know the place and Gio’s patterns like Etton did. Su knows all too well what that’s like.
Eventually, Su settles on a bottle of 32NULL, a slim, translucent blue bottle. Nothing too heavy on the circuits. It’s been a while since they’ve had this, they realize. Etton used to crack open one of these sometimes after hours in the back room when Su would stop by late after leaving the shop. Back then, stopping by late was a rare occurrence…
Gio is talking to a slender android at the counter. Probably in showbiz, based on their stance—poised like a dancer on long legs, with a flowing trench coat and pants that make them look even longer—and the way their coating gleams just right even under harsh lights. Definitely under warranty with regular tune-ups.
It takes them a few beats more to notice that this android’s clothes are completely holographic—the rendering is quick under these lights, and it’s probably even less noticeable to the untrained eye in dimmer locales. Guess it’s been longer since Su has been to a clinic than they thought.
“—So sorry. I’m fresh out, my dear, and I’m not getting the next shipment until next week,” Gio is saying, his voice gentle and guilt genuine. “Is there anything else I can help you with? Your friend was right—Triple M is the best—but perhaps I can recommend a few substitutes?”
Su turns the Triple M bottle over in their hand. Their wrists ache as they do so.
The android looks down, avoiding Gio’s hopeful face. “I—”
“You can have this one.”
Both Gio and the android turn. “Su, I—” Gio starts.
“It’s not mine yet, Gio. I haven’t bought it.” Su faces the other android and hands the bottle over to them. The other android gazes at it, as if unsure. “Go ahead. I get this stuff all the time; I can get something else. You need it more than me.”
The android gazes at the bottle, then at Su’s face for a few more beats.
“Take it,” Su says firmly, even as the wrist holding the bottle twinges in protest. They press the bottle into the android’s hand, and before the other android or Gio can say anything further, Su whirls back around right into the aisle from which they emerged.
When they return a few minutes later, armed with a couple of cloth patches, Gio is looking out the storefront windows, into the rain. Su can’t quite tell what he’s looking at. When Su puts their patches and bottle of 32NULL on the counter, Gio takes longer than usual looking up the codes of each of the items.
“Your last bottle was in Month 6.”
Su takes the bag and looks into it as if they don’t already know exactly what’s inside.
“I know.”
