I'm a Cyborg's Pet (girl X cyborg)

Chapter 20/The Confessions of Midnight

A/N You're reading too quickly!  The picture gives a hint about the machine's look for e-Slaves. At the end of the day, it's all about uniformity and burying distinctive features. 

Desperately I followed the wall around, when I got to the stairs I grabbed Kayla's hand and rushed up. We fled as furtively as we could. Level 41 had only a few people wandering through it. We stormed up to the landing on the floor above, on 40. I spotted a collar charger station and rushed at it like Jake T. Austin at a bottle of vodka after rehab. I grabbed the cable and plugged it into Kayla. She did the same thing to me with the other cable. 

"Warning: 3% battery, <beep>. Self-destruct armed," Cortona announced pompously to me.

Kayla held the tiny cable in her gloved hand and held it against my neck. She was having problems flipping up the tiny flap, which protects the port from dirt, on my collar, to stick it in.

"Hold still, hold still," Kayla said frantically, while she fumbled at my throat.

Hold still? Was she is serious? I was this close to becoming Makizushi sushi filling.

I felt the click in my neck and sighed.

"Charging, <beep>," Cortona announced.

"Kcuf that was close. I was on 3%," I said out of breath. I was that close to being my own reproduction of the French revolution.   

"Behind you. Don't turn," said Kayla, looking over my shoulder. I turned slowly to see '88 looking around. Then 12-20 rushed up and clearly managed to explain herself. '88 looked fairly happy. I turned away to look at the charging station.

"You should see the look she gave us," said Kayla.

"I'll watch your collar cam later," I said, looking away.

****

By the time we had charged up, it was time to get back to the dorm-cages.

"What was it like?" said Joe, under the half-dim lights, before curfew.

"Scary. I was closer than a mouse's balls to running out of power. I could have ended up a really hard-to-remove stain on Kayla's clothes," I told him.

In reality, nothing would stick to our clothes for long. As slaves go, we were the most stain-free slaves in humanity's history and the machines liked us that way. 

"Not the room. Kissing 12-20," said Joe.

"Joe!" Kayla and I said in unison.

"Please!!" Joe pleaded.

Generally, I felt sorry for Joe. I could swear his collar was trying to get him to speak in a higher register. But I also knew he would sleep with Kayla quicker than you could drop a stoat down Principal Humbolt's trousers. OK, I decided to humour him.

"Err, a bit weird. Wet, not bad. It was odd, you know, you're kissing a bloke and he's doing all the wrong things. Kissing '20 was like, you know what to do: it's what you wanted yourself," I explained clumsily. 

"OK, bad question: too much detail. This is 12-20? The tall girl, she's practically in kitten heels," said Joe.

"Yes, I could feel her knees in me."

"Forget that. Did you ask her what he does?" said Kayla.

"No. Look, you can watch my collar cam tomorrow," I told them. I should have asked her that.

My collar was nagging us to get ready for bed and so we split up and used different dressing stations before climbing up. I plugged in and lay down, still wondering what I'd discovered. So, Rockwood was a bad boy. I guess the question was, why had he rejected 12-20? He must have known she was tall as it was on her profile page. What was wrong with her in the flesh, was it her smell? If he was a Cyborg, he might have some weird quirk. Why would he take just one look at her? It was like he was looking for something or someone? What was he looking for? And, most of all, why was he bidding so desperately for me? I really had to figure this out.

*****

A/N -  #45 in SciFi Hot and it's all down to you, dear reader. All on 1200 reads (amazing!) Your votes,  comments even adding the book to your library all helps keep the book alive. Thanks so much  - but we are so greedy.