Scott Carter: The Android Who Became a Human Who Became an Android

The last time I saw Ginger, she was sporting two breasts instead of three. Personally, I thought her breasts were perfect before, but I know that with some guys you could never have too much of a good thing.

When I stepped out of the shower, she was sitting there on the edge of my bed, decked out in a silky red number with a slit up the side that showed plenty of her long legs and a plunging neckline that definitely revealed too much of a good thing. Steam wafted out from the bathroom and rose from my bare skin. I was naked except for the towel around my waist. Outside my tinted floor-to-ceiling window, a constant swarm of Versatian hoverpods hummed and whizzed past, everybody in a hurry to get somewhere on a planet where everybody supposedly came so they didn’t have to hurry.

“I need your help,” she said.

No hello. No how have you been. No sorry for breaking your heart, emptying your credit account, and taking off with your ship and your entire twentieth-century holodisc collection. The last time I saw her, I was stepping into a shower. Now, five years later, I stepped out of one and there she was.

“You have a strange sense of irony,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. How’d you get in here?”

She shrugged. “Bribed the desk clerk. I’m pretty sure he thought I was a hooker.”

“You are a hooker,” I said.

She made a tsk-tsk sound. “That was another life. I’m a respectable woman now—married to one of the richest stepdock manufacturers in the known universe. And you can kindly stop staring at my breasts, thank you very much. It’s not that uncommon.”

“Sorry. You know, I am working here. I didn’t ask for you to barge in on me.”

“You’re working? In a place like this?”

“I’m checking the security system for the hotel.”

“Ah,” she said, and waved her hand dismissively. “Since when does Dexter Duff stoop to grunt work like that?”

“A lot of things have changed since you ran out on me, Ginger.”

She made a pouty face, sticking out her lower lip and making her eyes wide. In the old days, I found that look irresistible. Now it just looked childish, which was probably what it was all along. “Oh, dear,” she said, “you sound bitter. I was hoping that was all water over the bridge.”

“Under the bridge,” I said.

“Whatever. Look, if you want to take me to bed, let’s do it, and then we’ll get all the tension out of the air.”

“You just said you were married!”

She shrugged. “It’s not like he’d care. He doesn’t care about anything any more. That’s part of the problem.”

“Oh, I feel so sorry for you. Let me get you a Repsiter harp and you can earn some tokens down on the tramspace.”

She sighed and stood, smoothing out her dress. “Look, are we going to do it or not?”

“I’d rather lay down with a pair of blood-sucking Mornala tree worms. At least they have some emotions, even if it’s just fear and no-fear. That’s more than I can say for you.”

“I bet if you drop that towel,” she said, “we’d find out you really think otherwise. There’s some things a man can’t hide.”

I snorted derisively and headed for the built-ins, the drawers sliding out of the wall before I got there. The tile floor felt cold against my bare feet. I dressed quickly, mostly because I was afraid my body was going to betray me despite my best intentions. My towel slid off before I’d managed to get my pants all the way on, giving her a damn good view of everything I had to offer. Or didn’t.

“God, what happened to you?” she said.

It took me a moment to realize she meant the scars. “You know my line of work, Ginger.”

“Yeah, but you never looked like that back then.”

I slipped the shirt over my head and straightened the collar. “I was younger back then. These days, I don’t always manage to duck when I should be ducking or dodge when I should be dodging.”

“Maybe you should get into another line of work,” she said.

“Maybe you slither back under whatever rock you came out from under,” I replied.

I glared at her. She looked back with her practiced look of placid bemusement, like she was humoring a small child. Still glaring at her, I hand-printed the safe next to my bed, pulled out on my laser pistol, and checked to make sure it was fully charged. It was. Then I checked to see if her expression had changed upon seeing me holding a weapon. She still looked at me like I was a two-year-old. I slipped on my shoulder holster and placed the pistol in it, then donned my leather jacket and my boots. Only when I started toward the outside door did she finally speak up.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you what I want.”

I stopped, not yet turning around. “You know, no matter what you tell me, I’m not going to help you.”

“Even if I paid you?”

“Especially if you paid me.”

“Even if I paid you an awful lot?”

“Even… Even then.”

My hesitation had only been for a second, long enough to think about the sad state of my credit account and all the freeze-dried food cubes that had served as meals the past few months, a moment of weakness that lasted no longer than a blink of an eye, but she sensed it like a spider senses a twitch in its web.

“Darling,” she said, her heels clicking on the tile floor, her voice drawing nearer, “you do understand that I am a very rich woman now. I can afford to pay you ten times your normal fee.”

“I wouldn’t do it for twenty.”

“Then I guess I better make it twenty-five.”

I had no idea what she wanted me to do, or whether I’d be willing to do it once I found out what it was, but even a small job would have to be a lot of money. I’d been trying to get my act together for quite a while, and there was always something that set me back. Usually that something involved a trip to a medical ward. This could have finally gotten me my own ship. Maybe even a couple of robots to take care of the small stuff.

She touched me on the shoulder. I tensed.

“Duff,” she whispered, “was it really all that bad?”

“Yes, Ginger, it was.”

“All of it?”

I thought about it. There’d been other women after Ginger, some who’d broken my heart just as badly—for some reason, it was a recurring problem—but she had been the first, the one who’d made me afraid to ever let my guard down again. “If you stayed up all night reading a multivid,” I said, “but the ending was so horrible that you threw the vid across the room, do you remember that the vid was good enough to keep you screening until that point? Or do you just remember how you felt at the end?”

“Hmm,” she said, a bit of a purr in her voice, “I was never one for reading. I always liked my pleasures a little more… real.”

When she said his, she ran her hand up my inner thigh. It would have been easy to give in, but there was no way I was going to let her get the upper hand with me, and I knew if we got anywhere near the bed she would definitely have the upper hand. She’d been a AAA sex professional, after all, certified by all the top prostitution boards and trained by the Sisters of Desire, the masters of erotic pleasure on New Saturn who only took in sixty-nine pupils each year.

I spun around and grabbed her shoulders. “Stop it,” I said. “You’re not doing this to me again.”

“Ow, darling, you’re hurting me.”

My fingers pressed into the soft flesh of her arms, but I didn’t loosen my grip. We stood close enough that I saw the flecks of gold in her emerald eyes, something new, something else she’d done to herself since we’d been together. We stood close enough that her breath was hot on my face. My heart was pounding.