|On Smashwords | Retailer Links|Sarina Rubik, is madly in love. Her guy Cylus, a broke down, Tank-Class Sentinel, loved her back with his every circuit. Yet Sarina, prone to trouble, walks right into a conspiracy on the Morningstar planet Gear. Why are fembots vanishing? Who is the Shredder? Most of all. What are the green skinned Humanoids that lurch around in Volt’s shadows?
Table of Contents
Epigraph
Chapter 1. A Girl, And Her Mecha
Chapter 2. Devil In The Details
Chapter 3. All The Women Came And Went…
Dramatis Personae
TERMS OF INTEREST
Also By…
About The Author
Epigraph
Transition from mankind, into Hybrid, Morningstar offspring, did not come about as an abrupt traumatic occurrence. For a single reason. Homo Sapiens are prone to randomness, which we, as designed Robots lack. Both in our psyche and SNA. This tendency for entropy attracted us to you. Following a continuum, Neo-humans forged ahead, where Homo Sapiens ended. Everything from routine tasks, to falling in love.
— Roark Dallas, The Architect Chapter 1. A Girl, And Her Mecha [Planet Gear, City Of Volt. The 22nd Century] 50, 298 beings, many of whom were machines, populated the Fountainhead offshoot colony, Gear and resided inside its shiny primary metropolis, Volt.
There they labored and loved.
Volt, as could be expected from a city manufactured mainly by and for Robot kind, featured numerous modern technological amenities. Pneumatic transit chief among them. Smooth and power efficient, it carried Volt’s citizen’s home and to work, built to accommodate all makes or models. For the populace of Gear came in varied shapes and sizes. From giant construction behemoths, to human-form Morningstar models. Two such organisms were about to begin an adventurous week. Little did they know it. Only because the girl ‘bot just couldn’t keep herself out of trouble. Even by Volt’s unusual standards, they were a very odd couple.
Sarina Rubik fluttered open her glistening, neon-blue eyes. Yawned. Stretched, curled up on her boyfriend’s bulky army green chassis. Sitting up, Sarina brushed away her light-brown hair, naked, aside from a pair of white lace panties, shapely butt cheeks pressed hard, taut onto Cylus’s sturdy arm. She climbed up his mass and smooched his round silver face.
During the Battle of Earth, Cylus had been a heavy munitions ‘tank’. Essentially a semi-sentient sentinel, configured to repel invaders. Afterward, during the Exodus, Cylus had been reformatted for construction. First on Fountainhead and later here, on Gear.
In a universe replete with Artificial Intelligence, that which constituted personhood required a very specific meaning. Merely reacting to stimuli didn’t count. Your pet cat or laptop computer reacted to stimulus, to say nothing of the plethora of working machines. Cylus at one time was no more than a very complex, yet none entity. Until that is, a bolt of lightning seemed to upgrade its — His, programming.
Cylus could now moralize. This fit snugly into the Morningstar definition of person.
“Wake-up, sleepy head!”
A rumble, not unlike that of an engine powering up filled the room as Cylus began to cycle into waking mode. The one-time war veteran and construction Mecha wasn’t much of a talker. Though he could speak, given the right motivation.
“I’m awake, Sarina.” Said Cylus, in his grumbling modulated voice. Vocalizations, which like that of the shell they were housed in, sounded heavy.
Sarina hopped off Cylus, generous breasts jiggled in a most mesmerizing manner. She glanced over her shoulder, grinned toward her lover and made for the shower unit.
Despite an Eastern European surname, Sarina had features which could be delineated as Asian. The surname, a result of her father’s quirky choice after he’d been decanted, for a family name in honor of a 20th Century Earth puzzle. She was a second generation, pure-bred Morningstar. Common, but not so much as 80% of what constituted human these days. Hybrids of Morningstar and Homo Sapiens. All the end product of a forced galactic Diaspora and human destiny being ceded to Morningstars. The cataclysmic destruction of Earth would do that.
In the shower, Sarina could hear creaking as Cylus stood, his joints needed lubricant. It reminded her sadly that he was an old combat model, lucky to not have been scrapped. Who would have been junked, had Fountainhead’s High Court not ruled him a person.
Getting out of the hot water, which loosened up her own high-grade polymer muscles, Sarina pulled on a towel, began to dry and brush her hair. Sarina determinately appeared Filipino, with the exception of her luminous blue-eyes, which were dominant among Morningstars.
Going out into the open bedroom, their apartment, basically a garage subdivided into living and kitchen area, as well as Cylus’s workshop, Sarina went over to her wardrobe, pulled out a maroon bra and panty set. Selected black jeans and a tight gray tank top. She spent a moment after she clothed herself to apply pink lip gloss and atomize a pleasant scented, cherry blossom perfume between her ample cleavage.
Over at a shrine, where a frosted glass illuminated cobalt representation of the Blue Ghost had been erected, Sarina closed her eyes and prayed silently. As always, she gave thanks to The Prime and Its Messenger for endowing sapience upon Cylus. Made sure as well, to bid good fortune for a lucky day.
The old war hammer did not himself worship the Blue Ghost. Strangely, at least to Sarina, her boyfriend preferred the Budjah faith of the scarlet robed monks, who maintained the interstellar communications network. A religion unquestionably Old Earth and Homo Sapien in focal point. But then, Cylus could be quite the slumberous philosopher.
Moving about, Sarina took the lubricant can and oiled Cylus’s creaking leg sockets. Caressing him as she did so. The girl scaled onto his shoulders in order to reach his rotating arm, ball-and-socket joints. “My very own Tin Man.” Nuzzled Sarina. “I love you, big ape.”
The construction Mecha let out a groaning utterance as his girlfriend climbed downward.
Meow! Simba, the gray tabby cat demanded attention.
Felines, and archnemesis, rodents hijacked onto the Morningstar Exodus. Actually, Simba and his compatriots in the Fountainhead Conglomerate, Gear and other such Morningstar colonies were the second feline wave out of Terra, Sol III. The Falcanians brought with them a variety of feline specimens when they themselves fled Earth.
After feeding the cat, the only honest-to-goodness organic lifeform in the whole household, Sarina patted Cylus on his brawny arm, said. “I’ve got to go to work.”
“Come straight home –”
“Cy,” Sarina sighed. He could be so damn paternal. “I’m not going to vanish.”
“Sure,” Cylus exclaimed. “Bet those other fembots thought the same before whoever took them, did. Yet they’re no place to be found.” He glumly added, as if speaking were an effort. “Probably got slagged.”
Sarina didn’t hear, as she’d already gone out the garage, onto Tesla Boulevard, Level 30, Grid 9. Across the street construction workers continued Gear’s endless assemblage. New skyscrapers, many rooted into the planets core continued to rise above the early morning skyline.
Pneumatic transit was only a block away from Cylus’s garage. Sarina reached the transport sphere minutes before it departed its station. If she knew what sort of Pandora’s Box she’d be blindly walking into, just by going to work, Sarina would’ve called out for the day. …
