They found the partygoers inside. Some of them had been high on pirated Ellondra when Frankie dosed Eliasz.
“Hey, it’s Aleksy!” A man with pale skin doffed his bright red hat theatrically. He turned to the group. “Last night was so epic. Aleksy was patched against Ellondra, so Frankie owned him up with a custom chemical! Oh, man.” Then he grinned at Eliasz. “Your bot had to carry you home!”
Eliasz gave a sheepish shrug. “Yeah, I was really out of it. But at least I wasn’t knocked over by something as simple as Ellondra.”
Red Hat warbled a laugh and gestured for them to come over. “I’ll tell you a little secret: None of us is actually concerned about being vulnerable to Ellondra. That stuff is great.”
Eliasz and Paladin dragged up some chairs, pushing into the group next to Mecha and Slavoj, who didn’t mind having more excuses to bump into each other and giggle.
Red Hat turned out to be Hox2, the person who ran the space in the Twin Center where they’d gone last night. Another group of bleary-looking people in transparent armor arrived, and Hox2 retold the story of his night, with more flourishes at the moment of the drugging. Hox2 finally ended his tale by gesturing at Paladin.
“Does he always carry you home from parties?”
“She,” replied Eliasz, around a mouthful of eggs.
“What?” Hox2 and the people in transparent armor looked confused, while Slavoj and Mecha started to kiss.
“She’s a she,” Eliasz explained. “And I believe this is the first time she’s ever carried me home. So, do you live in that place where you had the party?”
That managed to change the subject. The basement space was obviously one of Hox2’s favorite subjects, maybe even more than coercive drugging. “Technically, it’s a space for doing lab work, so I can’t live there, right?” He raised his eyebrows conspiratorially. “It used to be an official free lab, but now we let people develop under mixed licenses. People have to make money on what they’re doing, right?”
This comment set off what sounded like a well-worn debate at the table, with some people arguing that a free lab would be better for social progress, and others taking the view that nobody would have any incentive to invent things without patents. Breakfast wore on, and Mecha got up to leave. Hox2 stood with her, straightening his hat, and announced that he had to get back to the space and clean up.
“You should come by later this afternoon,” he said to Eliasz. “Frankie is doing a presentation on some free tools for analyzing protein functions.” As Hox2 walked away, he patted Paladin’s head. “Yes, you can bring him too!”
“Her,” Eliasz muttered to his cold cup of tea.
Presently, Eliasz tapped his wrist and beamed some cash to one of the people in transparent armor, who was collecting everybody’s money for the meal. Then he stood up, too. “I’m gonna catch a nap and then go check out Frankie’s presentation.”
Slavoj waved at both of them. “Bye, Aleksy and Pack! See you later!”
They walked back to the hotel in silence, avoiding the egg-shaped electric cars that taxied people through the streets, and threaded their way through sidewalks crowded with shoppers.
As soon as they entered their room, Eliasz turned to Paladin and grabbed her body with an urgency the bot now recognized. She wrapped her arms gently around him and bent her head so that he could kiss the fine mesh over her voice synthesizer. There were no piezosensors on the place Eliasz would know as her mouth, so she felt nothing of his kisses except a kind of light pressure in the structural frame of her head. But her arms and legs could smell molecules on the man’s body that came from salt and sexual arousal.
“I knew there was a reason I wanted you, Paladin,” he whispered. “I must have somehow sensed that you were a woman.”
There it was: the anthropomorphization. But did it really matter if Eliasz didn’t understand that bots had no gender? If Eliasz saw her as a woman, Paladin could have what she’d been wanting for days on end. It would make things easier for both of them, even if the truth was more complicated than Eliasz realized.
Eliasz ran his hands over her carapace, finding the edges of her armor plates and trying to reach between them to feel the woven fibers of Paladin’s muscles. “You feel so good.” Pressing his body against hers, he powered down his entire defense perimeter. The sensation made Paladin ache with fear and protectiveness; she was the only thing that kept him from danger now.
Eliasz’ pulse elevated and he pulled away from her. “Come to bed with me, Paladin,” he said, grabbing her hand. As he stumbled into the main room, she followed, watching him remove all his clothes and a translucent web of sensors, which he left in an invisible tangle on the floor.
He led her to the bed. She allowed him to push her down on it and climb on top of her, his chest blocking the apertures for her guns. His flushed face pressed against the curve of her neck. It was the first time she had felt him completely naked against her, and she placed her hand against the knotted muscles of his lower back as he strained and sighed in a pleasure she knew she’d induced as surely as Frankie’s drug had.
When at last Eliasz’ heartbeat slowed, he lay sweating in the crook of her arm, running his fingers across her other hand, the one Lee had modded.
“What does that feel like to you?” he asked sleepily.
“It feels like… pressure and movement. I can sample your blood and see that there’s prolactin in it.”
“Does it feel good?”
“Knowing that it is you, and that I am keeping you safe, makes me feel good.”
He sat up a little more, looking at her face. “Is there a way that bots can… come? Have an orgasm?”
Paladin thought for a while, considering what Eliasz meant by “orgasm,” and trying to find some kind of equivalent experience.
“I am only a few months old, so my knowledge of undocumented functions is incomplete. But I have a program that I downloaded from the bot server at Camp Tunisia that causes some of the same physical symptoms as an orgasm.”
Eliasz’ heartbeats came faster again. “Can I watch you while you play it?” He pressed his body against hers the way he had earlier, growing aroused.
“It would not be safe while your weapons are off. The file forces me to reboot.”
The man jumped up and settled the light net of sensors over his head, waiting for it to weave itself tightly across his skin, connecting with his subcutaneous network. “Lie on your side and I can cover you,” he whispered, curling around her torso and head, protecting most of her legs with his own. She checked to be sure that his perimeter was on a secure setting, though it was not armed against her.
“I will play it now,” she vocalized. She opened the original executable and it began to run, the worm rapidly replicating a few pieces of nonsense data inside her as she watched the scene stolen from a game world, of herself rescuing a man on the battlefield. She felt Eliasz’ hands and body moving against her carapace distantly, adding to the general sense of wrong inputs flooding her sensors. At last she was overwhelmed: Her mind filled with errors, and a pleasurable confusion raced through her before she crashed in his arms.
When she rebooted, Eliasz was still in a defensive posture around her, stroking the shielding around her brain.
“Awake now?” He kissed the back of her head.
“Yes.”
“Great, because I really do have to sleep.”
“It is safe now.”
His grip on her relaxed, and she stole away from the bed to stand guard at the center of the room.
As the day began to cool, Eliasz woke up, checked his messages, and took another sponge bath before they headed out to Frankie’s presentation.