Page 2 of Fembot
“What are you doing?” Yarek asked as the bots retreated back into the hallway. They didn’t answer him, but the programmer in the next suite over had also entered the hallway.
“Did you hear what happened?” Yarek asked Phillippe.
Phillippe was the opposite of Yarek. Where Yarek had worked at Rebonix Tech for six years and knew almost no one, Phillippe had been there for six months and was best friends with everyone.
“The anti-bot crowd infiltrated the building. They cut the power, caused a bit of mayhem.”
Yarek frowned. “To what end?”
“I guess they wanted to free the bots? I don’t know. Destroy them maybe? Who knows with those crackpots.”
Behind him, he heard his computer beep, indicating that the diagnostic had completed. Phillippe heard it too.
“Your bot survived the outage?”
“Seems so.”
“Wow, mine is toast. Absolutely fried.”
Phillipe invited himself into Yarek’s programming suite and leaned over his shoulder as he brought up the scans. There was nothing out of the ordinary. According to the computer, the upload had been interrupted but still completed successfully.
“What’s error code 912834?” Phillipe asked.
“Oh, that’s because the upload was interrupted. I wouldn’t worry about it,” Yarek said, clearing the error from the bot now that the diagnostics had been ran.
“Are you going to stay and run another diagnostic? The security bots said once everyone is accounted for, we can all go home”.
Phillippe put his hands on Yarek’s shoulders and dug his fingers into his tired muscles. The truth was that everyone loved Phillippe because he loved everyone right back, and Yarek wasn’t immune to his charms. They’d hooked up a couple times before, and where some people were put off by his extensive experience, Yarek definitely didn’t mind benefitting from it.
All Phillippe had to do to convince Yarek was lean down and whisper.
“Please,” he purred in Yarek’s ear. “I’ll do that thing you like.”
Phillipe had no care for the fact that their every word was being recorded, but Yarek had some modesty left.
Some.
“Shhh. Fine. Just… keep it down.”
Phillippe laughed and tugged Yarek to his feet. “Come on, let’s get this guy unplugged and down to packaging, and then we can get out of here.”
“What about your bot?”
“I had him sent back down to assembly. They’ll have to wipe his circuits before we can try again. It’s a bit weird that my bot is garbage, but yours made it through the power failure just fine.”
Yarek unlocked the wheels on the gurney the bot was strapped to for transport around the facility. “It’s because my backups have backups, and those backups have backups.” Which didn’t explain the error code he’d gotten.
“Yeah, yeah, we all know about how brilliant you are, but trust me, I excel in other areas.” Phillippe got the door for him, and they wheeled bot 85295-C down to packaging.
Yarek took one final look at the bot and then let Phillippe roll him away.
CHAPTER TWO_
85295-C
Manual Input: Power on.
Data Uplink: Connected.
