Warden
to the Bardain’s cargo container to wait for Horatio to pick her up. Once again, she was consigned to the sitting room at the entrance.Horatio arrived shortly and guided her back to the cargo container she called home for the time being. Gizmo followed along overhead, hidden in the night; she knew it was there only because of her overhead map.
“I thought having a robot body would mean I wouldn’t feel exhaustion anymore,” Rhea told Horatio. “Why do I feel weary to the bone, then?”
“Weariness can be caused by two things,” Horatio said. “The first is when you work too hard: as your servos overheat, they send signals to your brain to make you feel tired. In that case, all you have to do is sit down for a bit and let your robotics cool off. The second cause of weariness is malnutrition. Since the rest of your body is mechanical, any food you ingest will go a long way, but you still have to eat from time to time to properly nourish your human brain. Forgo food for too long, and you’ll experience weariness, which will become a strong malaise if left unattended, and finally all-out lethargy. I can imagine you must have felt very tired at times during the day’s training, but you recovered when your robotics cooled. Since you’re not working too hard at the moment, however, and you still feel weary, I have to ask, did you eat today?”
“I forgot,” she admitted.
“There you go,” Horatio told her. “I’m ordering a pizza for you.”
“You’re not going to make me eat a fat pill, like Will?” she said, surprised.
“I figure you’re allowed to splurge now and then, especially considering how hard you worked today in training,” Horatio told her.
She leaped on him and gave him a hug. “Thank you!”
Horatio awkwardly pulled himself from her grasp. “Er, welcome. But in the future, please, no hugging? I have delicate electronics.”
She laughed. “Not so delicate, if you’ve been able to last in the Outlands against bioweapons.”
“You caught me,” Horatio said. “I just don’t like physical contact. Especially with cyborgs.”
Rhea frowned. “Why not?”
“Sometimes, they don’t know their own strength,” Horatio said. “Believe it or not, while those aren’t the strongest arms we gave you, you could still crush my chest enough to disable my power source.”
“But I’d never do that,” she told him.
“Not purposely, I’m sure,” Horatio agreed. “Though like I said, sometimes cyborgs don’t know their own strength.”
They reached the HourlyBnb residence and piled inside. Rhea had acquired a bit of a lack-of-food headache by that time, but then she smelled it: the delicious scent of baked bread, melted cheese, and smoked ham, wafting through the room. Her eyes darted to the coffee table next to the trashcan-shaped attendant. A thin box waited on it, with a picture of a pizza stamped onto the cover and the words “Large - Feeds Three” underneath.
The trashcan beckoned a telescoping limb toward the box. “Your dinner arrived while you were out.”
Rhea eagerly snatched up the box and clambered to her chamber. When she was inside, she sat on the bed, retrieved the pizza, and ate the entire thing in under three minutes.
When she set down the empty box, she felt better immediately. She’d read that humans often felt sleepy after eating a big meal, but she felt the opposite: her weariness and headache were gone, and she felt full of energy.
She wanted to explore the Rust Town and see what it had to offer at night. Maybe she could visit Aradne as well—assuming any guards allowed her inside.
Yet she was also afraid to leave her room. Even if she kept her hood pulled low, there was a good chance someone might try to rob her, especially if she was out alone. And when they found out she was a cyborg, all bets were off. If she really wanted to leave, she’d have to ask Horatio or Will to escort her, and somehow she doubted either of them would be leaving their rooms any time soon. As far as she knew, Will had stayed inside all day, a steady stream of transport drones supplying him with all the food and goods he could want. He probably had another lady friend on her way to his chamber at this very moment. As for Horatio, he’d told her about a massively multiplayer VR game designed specifically for AIs—no doubt he was currently logged in and playing.
As she sat there, trying to figure out what to do, she realized she didn’t have to leave her room to explore the city.
She accessed VidTube via her HUD and searched for “Rust Town at night.” She didn’t really find all that much. The settlement was pretty much dead after dark. She tried the same search for Aradne and discovered multiple videos of two different areas: Brandywine Street and Orleans Avenue. These two streets were filled with nightspots, but apparently they were only open once or twice a month, during certain holidays: young people met and hooked up almost exclusively online these days. With the advances in teledildonics, they didn’t even have to leave their homes to have a sexual relationship with another person. Supposedly some people lived out their entire lives without physically meeting their partners in person. Rhea didn’t really buy it, and she thought people like that must be the exception rather than the rule. After all, even Will had invited a woman to his room, rather than engaging in remote intercourse.
Still, for someone like Rhea, who was a full body cyborg, remote intercourse, and never meeting her future partner in person, might be the only option for her, unless she wanted to invest in a body that was more human. Otherwise, in virtual reality, she could be whoever she wanted to be. But even if she did go the virtual route, she’d have to purchase the necessary mating upgrades for her existing body, and that would have to wait until after she paid off her debt. Still, there