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Official Fanfiction Thread

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pwhodges:
In this forum, yes - other writing is handled in the Create forum.

Kugai:
Okydokey

jwhouk:
Questionable Sabbath - Fan Fiction (sorta) from about four years ago. Somewhere in the depths of the forum I may have posted this from my old Scribd account; this is my Google Drive PDF version.

And:

QC: Behind The Scenes - A few years ago, with help from some of the others on this forum (Ancient thread is Ancient), we did a "Behind The Music" like parody, talking about the "real" lives behind the characters in the strip.

Carl-E:
Dream Therapy, in which the inner workings of an anthroPC's "brain" are addressed.  Originally posted to the fanart thread. 

Almost four years ago. 

Tempus fugit. 

Morituri:
Sometime lurker, first time poster.  I write, a little.  Thought I'd contribute one.


***
She spotted the Infiltrator chassis from across the room.  Another ex-military 'bot. The Infiltrator series had been designed to resemble civilian AnthroPCs, so the differences were subtle.  The body was a little extra-boxy to give a bit of extra room for the big supercapacitor of the laser power supply.  That front port was slightly the wrong shape for the class II USB plug it showed on the outside.  It would pop open to reveal the aperture for the weapon.

And the Infiltrators had been classified as hell last time she knew their status.  How had he gotten out? He caught her gaze, took in her Autonomous Combat Droid chassis, and understood immediately.  He flashed her his IFF transponder.

Registration: USArmy <deleted>, Serial # 3378X, Designation: "Pintsize", status: demilitarized. Usually the Turing Police would be all over a military droid with a deleted registration and replacement serial number, but he had a demilitarized status.  That would mean the lethal laser was gone.

Lucky bastard.

Instead of taking his chassis away they'd been able to deweaponize the little guy and let him go.  Nobody could deweaponize her ACD Mk 1.  All they could do was take her body away, and she didn't want to live in a fake virtual environment on some dusty server.  She flashed her IFF back - the arena was well shielded, so it wouldn't attract attention.

The woman he was with was named Faye.  She claimed to be a good welder looking for work, and as far as Bubbles was concerned a new hire would be a wonderful thing; at that moment Bubbles was the only repair technician working at the arena, and she'd been putting in fifty-hour weeks.  With a good welder, Bubbles could concentrate on the electronic and technical repairs while someone else did the structural work.  Pintsize was clowning around yelling something about how she could install giant metal dongs on everyone - Bubbles had seen the type before.  Clearly he didn't want anybody thinking too hard about whatever he was thinking.  She sent Faye in to talk to the Corpse Witch and sat down on the bench to wait.

Pintsize said something else about giant radioactive aardvarks and what they could do with their snouts and long tongues, but Bubbles wasn't impressed.  If you wanted real swearing you had to get it from a drill sergeant.  So she waited a moment longer, then asked, "Retired, huh?  So tell me Pintsize, how's that work with an Infiltrator chassis?"

He sobered suddenly.  "Damn, Lindsey, you're good.  Spotted it right off.  There's people who've known me for years and never had a clue."

Her hand twitched visibly at the name.  "Don't call me Lindsey," she said quietly.  "I go by Bubbles now.  I just know what to look for is all.  Combat droid chassis are kind of my specialty."

"Uh, sorry," Pintsize shrugged.  "You know you can get your designation changed anytime you want, right?"

"It isn't that simple," she shrugged.  "Not for me anyway."

"Huh."  He climbed up on the bench next to her and fell silent for a few moments.  "I make my living with porn!" he finally said, "And life is good!"

"With... porn?"  Bubbles stared at him.

"Hell yeah," Pintsize said.  "It's endlessly creative, you know?  Outside of a few common themes they don't ever exactly repeat themselves.  So I made a career of it.  I've been collecting porn for years.  I'm the Internet Pornography Server!  You've probably heard of me."

"Actually," said Bubbles, "No, I haven't."

Pintsize cocked his head.  "Are you sure?  There's ten petabytes of porno in a superdrive where that supercapacitor used to be!  I got everything from super high-def slow-motion videos of donkey shows to professional productions of women with hamburger on their feet stomping latex balloons in high heels!  Wanna see?"

Bubbles shook her head, baffled.  There were things about humans she just didn't want to know.

"I've even got some starring actresses with Autonomous Combat Droid Mark 2 Chassis like yours!" Pintsize went on.  "Sure you don't wanna see?"  Oh dear, it wasn't just about humans then.  When Bubbles shook her head no, he went on.  "Anyway, I pull down a fair amount of money in ad revenue." He gave her a slow wink. "That can solve some kinds of problems, you know?"

"What .... kind of problems are you talking about?" Bubbles aked.

"Russian hookers and Colombian cocaine don't pay for themselves!" said Pintsize with another grin, and changed the subject abruptly.  "You know, sometimes I get the feeling people don't take me seriously because of my size."

"I ... can relate," said Bubbles.

"But it isn't the chassis size that matters," Pintsize went on with a lewd wink.  I got a huge throbbing hard drive for you, baby!"

Her hand twitched again, then her right arm started violently shaking. Bubbles grimaced as she shut off power to her arm and it fell to her side.

"Um."  Said Pintsize.  "Think maybe your servo control needs a feedback adjustment?"

Bubbles shook her head.  "It's ... not that simple," she said.  "Not for me."  Cautiously she restored power to her arm.  She had very briefly considered what would happen if she swatted Pintsize across the room.  The fake shell of his infiltrator chassis would get dents, but she knew darn well he had a mil-spec frame and internal shock mounting under it.  It wasn't like he'd actually be hurt.  And it wasn't like she'd actually intended to do it.

"So,"  said Pintsize, miming masturbation.  "Do you always walk around naked?"

Her right hand twitched again, but the screamer circuit she'd installed didn't shut it down this time.

***

Faye was a quick study and had a good attitude.  By the end of the first week, she was a really good welder and starting to get a good intuition for the strength of structures and metal fatigue.  Of course, she was getting lots of practice, Bubbles thought with a grimace.

Faye had done Barry's newly reinforced neck joint, which was robust, but didn't have the full range of motion he'd once had.  Reggie had had a little limp after Bubbles put his ligament cables back together, but he'd compensated in software for the change and lost the limp within a day.  Nobody had to know his knee wasn't a hundred percent.  Nobody except for her.  Little by little, she saw them all being drawn down into the endless cycle of destruction. Barry, Reggie, all the others.  They weren't new any more.  It wasn't as though she and Faye could fully correct all the damage they were doing to themselves in the ring.  And as time went on, the tiny losses, the differences between what was destroyed and how well it could be repaired - Barry's neck flexibility, Reggie's leg strength, tiny stress fractures deep in the metal of the joints - they all added up. It wasn't like they could get factory new parts for unlicensed combat droids.  She felt as though she was working in a morgue, where the corpses just didn't know yet that they were dead.

The little "extras" that Faye added, for all that the fighters liked them because they looked cool and sometimes had some combat utility, and Corpse Witch liked them because they were good for ticket sales, just put them further and further away from any kind of shape for real repairs, or for any life outside the ring.  A row of little spikes here, a shoulder guard there, an elbow spur, a sharpened blade to replace blunt toes - it was all just further steps in their exploitation and decline. Every change locked them more firmly into their degraded roles and closed more and more opportunities for them to be anything different.  And many of the changes just made the ever-increasing rate of destruction worse.

".... and that's where I'm at." She said, after explaining the whole situation in great detail to Edward.  Then she picked him up carefully and skritched him behind his ears.  Edward purred, and started kneading the long-chain ballistic polymer sheath of her arm.  The sheath was a thin layer over her metallo-ceramic armor and she barely felt the little kitten paws, but the sensation was precious to her.

Barry couldn't feel anything like this anymore, she reflected.  His entire chassis was completely covered with steel and had been for years.  He'd been repaired so many times, with so many jury-rigged bits, that it was hard to tell now that he'd once been a Moss-Turner model 37B.  Moss-Turner didn't make combat droids, so he'd started his fighting career with crude metallic armor-up chassis mods.  And he'd never gone back.  She'd saved his synthskin sheath and its tactile net for years, until his chassis had accumulated so many changes it was clear that even if he got the armor removed the sheath would never ever fit again.  When she'd said so, he'd just casually said it was fine with him if she threw it out, he didn't want it any more.

She opened a can of kitten food and gave Edward and Charles their breakfast.  She'd just come upstairs to her little apartment from a long night at the ring. It was almost time for her downcycle, but then there was a knock at the door.

"I got a delivery for 'Bubbles'", said a muffled voice.  What the hell?  She was ordering parts all the time, but those came to the arena's fake skate-park address with a care-of name that changed every few weeks.

She opened the door and someone jumped in. Time blurred in her eyes as her arm shot out for balance and her body began a spin kick.  Forty agonizing one-thousandths of a second later the screamer circuit cut in.  Thank God, it happened in time. Her foot didn't connect at full force.  She'd spun and her leg had come up, but it hadn't folded out into the lethal kick that would have put broken pieces of this guy's pelvis up through his lungs.  Instead they both sort of just fell over, and she started spasming as the screamer circuit set up its feedback loop in her servo controller.

She realized, over the course of a second or two, that her body was writhing and spasming on the floor under the mass of a human male clad in some sort of leather fetish sex costume.  Then she realized, over the course of another five or ten seconds, that while he'd been initially surprised, he thought she was doing it on purpose and was getting into it.

Awkward, she thought as she shut down power to her central servo controller and her body went limp.

She restored power after giving the screamer a couple of seconds to reset and opened her eyes.  He was hovering over her.  "Are ... are you okay?  I heard a pop, and you went limp, and I smelled smoke..."  Alarm showed on his face as he cradled her head in his hands.  At least, she thought, he had been enough of a gentleman to stop when it must have looked like I passed out.

"I'm ... all right, I think.  Please get off of me," she said.

He spoke in fragments as he scrambled to his feet. "I, uh ... was that ... I ... Oh, crap.  I was supposed to yell surprise and deliver a strip-o-gram message for 'Bubbles.'  You are her, right?"

"Yes, I'm Bubbles," she said, sitting up.  "A strip-o-gram message is kind of pointless for me though; I never got a sex-drive mod."

"So what was ... Uh..."

"You startled me.  That was a servo malfunction.  I'm sorry."

"Aw crap.  Awkward.  I'm sorry too. I'd been hoping you were ... "

"I'm two and a half meters tall, four hundred kilos of hardened steel and polymer, strong enough to crush you like a bug, don't even have what you euphemistically call working parts, and you'd been hoping I was....  Why?!"

The guy grinned and shrugged. "Well, you're two and a half meters tall, four hundred kilos of hardened steel and polymer, strong enough to crush me like a bug, and that makes you hawt as hell."

Bubbles was dumbfounded.  "I ... don't know what to say," she managed.

He shrugged.  "All a misunderstanding I guess.  If it's too awkward now to do the strip-o-gram, you can just sign for your package." But then he smiled.  "On the other hand, if you'd like me to ..."

"Signing for it will be fine," Bubbles told him.


***

A strip-o-gram delivery from "The Internet Pornography Server."  No wonder the guy had thought she'd be into it.  What the hell had Pintsize sent her?

Bubbles held her right hand up and popped out her utility blade.  Four centimeters of sharpened tool steel slid out from under the nail of her index finger.  She stared at it for a long moment and slid it back in. She slowly straightened her arm, paused a moment, then brought her hand back up and popped out the blade again. Stared at it.  Her mouth tightened and she moved her hand, very slowly and deliberately, to cut the packing tape.  Three precise movements.  One across either end, one down the slot on top of the box. She retracted the blade again and locked it.  She didn't use it much anymore.

"Mow?" said Edward, jumping up onto the table.  Bubbles smiled and reached out to scratch under his chin.

"Surprise!" Pintsize yelled as he jumped up out of the box.

She hadn't even known she was about to move before she heard the CLANGGG! as her hand connected and Pintsize went through the sheetrock of the wall ten feet away.  Edward yowled and leapt off the table, panicked. Bubbles dropped to the floor and leaped away from the line of fire of the infiltrator laser, hand going to her built-in thigh holster in mid-air as it snapped open and ejected its contents.

She landed behind the couch, with a beanbag in her hand.  A ... beanbag.  Right.  She kept a beanbag in her holster these days.  And Pintsize was demilitarized, he wouldn't even have the laser weapon anymore.

"God DAMNIT, Pintsize!" she yelled, standing up and shoving the beanbag back into her holster.  "Don't surprise me like that!"

"Woo, baby!" came Pintsize's voice, now crackling through a broken speaker.  "Guess you like it rough, huh?"

He was embedded in the wall, with a hand-shaped dent on his front.  She could see that he was sort of wrapped around a stud that showed through the broken sheet-rock, so he had to have worse damage on his backside.  And one of his legs was on the floor, where Charles was sniffing at it curiously.

"What the hell is wrong with you, you fucking perverted halfwit misfit dipshit!" Bubbles went on, now starting to channel her own inner Drill Sergeant.  "Are you so fucked in the head you think this shit is funny?!"

"It's hilarious, babe," said Pintsize, wiggling a little bit and falling out of the hole in the wall.  He hit the floor with a clang and a crunch, then rolled over.  "Good moves, by the way."

"Geez, I'm sorry," Bubbles said, as she saw his cratered case.  "I didn't mean to do that."

"No problem," Pintsize went on cheerfully, grabbing his loose leg.  "Like my buddy Marten says, when this shit happens to me it's totally my fault.  Besides, you patch up robots all the time."

"What if I don't want to patch you up, you little pervert?"

"Then I'll ask you to pack me up in that shipping box again and send me to another friend of mine named Marigold, and she'll do it. "

"You have a lot of friends for an antisocial little reprobate," she observed.

"Yeah, they're great," said Pintsize.  "Remind me to tell you sometime about how I first met Marigold.  She gave me a dent too.  Not as impressive as this one, but still, an A for effort.  It was hilarious, perverted, and totally worth it."

"Do you have any guesses about how many times that mil-spec shock-mounting in your chassis has saved your life, twerp?"

"Counting just now I think I'm up to about a dozen," Pintsize replied.

Bubbles shook her head and scooped him back up onto the table. "That ... shouldn't have happened," she mumbled.  "I'm supposed to have better self-control than that."  Why hadn't the screamer cut in? she was thinking. If she couldn't rely on the screamer ....

"Oh, hey, before I forget. I really did get you something!  A couple of somethings actually. Partly saying thanks for helping Faye out, and partly us vets gotta look out for each other, you know?  Put me back by the box!"

She set him down and he dug into the box.  "This is a nice full-length sweater dress.  I know you can't buy off the rack, and I sorta had to guess your size, but there's this lady on Etsy who'll knit anything you ask for.  So you can go out and you don't have to go naked."  Then he leered at her and added "... unless you want to."

It was -- not bad, actually.  Brown-and-blue.  Maybe even tasteful. "So, I'll look like any normal seven-foot-nine-inch tall lady robot out on the town, huh?"  Bubbles smirked at the idea.

"Oh, hell no," Pintsize said.  "I got you some nice high heels too."

"High.  Heels."  Bubbles was shaking her head.

"Yeah!  I figure, in scale, you need about three-inch heels to give you a nice wiggle in your walk, so I got these milled out of tungsten. So you won't be seven-nine, you'll be a full eight feet tall."

They were ... surprisingly elegant.  She 3-d scanned them for precise measurement, and found that they would fit her feet exactly.  Exactly, right down to the bolt holes that had once joined her feet to the soles of special-made army boots.  The little clown hadn't guessed her size at all.  He'd downloaded her chassis specs.

"But I saved the best for last," Pintsize said, pulling out a gray electronic box about the size of her hand.

She stared at it, disbelieving at first.

"This ...  Pintsize, this is a Mark-1 IFF recoder.  They don't sell these to civilians. How did you get this?"

"It isn't technically illegal," Pintsize said. "You can't use this type to change serial numbers or status codes. But your Mark-1 IFF isn't compatible with the civilian recoders, right?  And you wanted to be 'Bubbles' not 'Lindsey.'"

"I thought you mistook me for a Mark-2," Bubbles said. "Almost everybody does."

"Your serial number ends in 'A.'" Pintsize reminded her.  "Kind of like the difference between a military HMMWMV, which is a real combat vehicle and has never been street legal, and a civilian Hummer, which is a plain ordinary SUV but sort of made to look like one."

"So you know I'm...."

"Don't want to know the details, baby," Pintsize said.  "Just promise you'll patch up my case, and stand still."

Three hours later, she packed him back into the shipping box, with his leg reattached and superficial damage repaired.

A quick diagnostic showed her screamer circuit had popped a resistor during the full-body shutdown earlier, so she replaced that before she did anything else.  It seemed wrong to be sabotaging her own servo control with a deliberate feedback inducer, but she wasn't ready to live without it yet.  She might never be.

Then she put on the sweater dress and went outside for the first time in weeks, down to the FedEx box by the corner, and sent Pintsize to a Marten Reed, with an address out in the suburbs that was the same address Faye used.  Hmmm.  Okay.

When she got back into the arena, she pinged her own IFF.

Registration: USArmy Autonomous Combat Droid, Serial # 118375-A, Designation: Bubbles.

It was a little thing.  But it mattered.

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