Chapter Forty-Five

Aaron

For the next couple of hours, Aaron lays on his bed with Valerie, simply being there for her. He lays on his back and she lays on top of him with her head on his chest. He wraps his arms around her and rubs at her back a little. For the most part, they lay there quietly, glancing at one another with smiles once in a while. It makes her feel like things can still go back to being the way they used to. She doesn’t want to wring him out with any more questions and is content to just have him back at all. It takes till midnight for her to finally fall asleep.

The feel of her skin touching his is quite a pleasant surprise. The sensation is so much more direct now. It helps him shed that vicious feeling that’s been lingering for so many hours. Before he died, he hadn’t thought about all the little details of having a mechanical body. Despite the emotional setback, he finds himself quite impressed by how well things have turned out. It’s astounding how well they integrated his mind into a completely foreign body.

When he carefully slips out from under Valerie, he looks down at her for a moment. He can still see that she is beautiful, and he is still very much attracted to her. He can’t put his finger on what exactly is missing, but it kind of feels like he doesn’t know her like he used to anymore. For some reason, it feels more like she’s the one who’s somehow changed, and not him. In her sleep, she mumbles something about him being cold. He gently rolls out of bed and carefully drapes his side of the covers over her, to keep her warm.

He takes one last long look at her before leaving the room. He knows there’s going to be some challenges after having completely swapped out his entire physical form, but he is already getting an uneasy feeling about it. The more his mind ventures, the more he feels the disconnect from what it felt like to be himself.

He was waiting to get drowsy and fall asleep, but it’s just not going to happen. At least getting up in the middle of the night to go out and do something is still going to be the same. He figures he’ll eventually lose the habit of getting in a bed at all one day. It makes him wonder how Valerie will handle that. He winces at the thought of sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night again. Last time, she woke up with him not there, he was dead.

His mechanical body has worked out better than anything he could’ve imagined. He’s less fluid and floppy than before. Now his structure feels deliberate, dampened, and crisp. It’s the mental part that’ll take the most getting used to. His mind is overclocking right now and he has no idea how to slow it down.

His perceptions of so many things are already changing. Before he died, he was confident that his views on life would mostly stay the same, but they haven’t, and it has only been a few hours. Random things like never reaching retirement, never having a real blood family, or the legal predicament of his existence, are all now very real.

He slinks out of the bedroom and quietly shuts the door behind him. The sensitivity and dexterity of his movements make him grin. Marco has fallen asleep on the couch whereas Five and Arma quietly chatting across from one another on the stools at the kitchen counter.

In the dim light, he walks over to the third stool beside Arma and suddenly stops short of sitting down. He hadn’t taken note that she was naked earlier. He remembers that she was, but didn’t think anything of it. It’s been over a month and it appears she has still hasn’t normalized yet, which is concerning or maybe inspiring. She’s clearly embraced being a robot over her past as a human.

He pretends to have not paid notice to her body and redirects his attention to Five, who is fidgeting with something in her hands. When it stops spinning between the tips of her fingers, he recognizes what it is. It’s one of Runner’s new claws that he’d designed and sent to the machine shop. The open box with the rest of the parts in it is sitting on the countertop in front of her. There along with it, is a whole pile of other opened mail waiting for him.

He sighs and looks down, kind of sad, realizing how long they’ve had to endure his death. If Valerie were awake, he’d go back in there and tell her how sorry he was for what she’s been going through. He considers going back in there and waking her up. That feeling of it maybe being his only chance is pulling at him. Five and Arma slowly look up at him with growing shy smiles. They’re excited that he’s not only back, but one them now.

“Sooo, how’s it going, Aaron? Me ‘n Arma really missed you. What’ya think?” Her bubbly personality is back.

Arma appears to be quite curious as if she’s already assured Five what he’ll say. “Hmm, is it different?” Her voice is as smooth as glass and she blinks at him like a big black cat. “What was it like being human, now that you can look back on it? Was it better, or… not all that?”

He barely glimpses down at Arma’s breasts on accident again before immediately diverting his eyes. “Well… so far, I think it’s, uh, an upgrade.” His eyebrows raise and then the other two let out a giggle. “We do have something special going for ourselves don’t we.”

Arma spins around toward him on her stool and looks him up and down. Her knees are spread like a man would sit, but she has her hands on the rim of the stool between them. “Welcome back you big sexy.”

He quickly looks down at himself, remembering just how much bulkier he is now. He doesn’t notice it though, probably because his mind has been altered to fit it. He looks like he’s gained a good eighty or so pounds of solid muscle. He probably weighs three hundred pounds now. He raises his elbow high and flexes his arm and the entire side of his body. He can hear the corded solenoid muscle fibers and tendons inside quietly creak as they reach their stress limits. He can feel the strain in his bones, and it’s outrageous. It feels like he could lift a truck with his new body.

He recalls the power he used against the guy in the elevator. He had no idea it was going to be so explosive. When that guy attacked Valerie, and then him, he unleashed something inside him. Something that was quietly waiting there in the background. It was scary, but it felt good, and now it’s here to stay. That worries him a little.

As if in a slow-motion replay, he remembers slamming the man down and watching his body splat against the side of the elevator like a wet rag. He meant to hit him as hard as he could, but he just didn’t know it was going to be like that. He begins to feel a little bad about how much he must’ve hurt him. The guilt trip stops when he hears Valerie’s scream ring through his mind. When he looks up, Five and Arma are patiently waiting for him to come back to reality.

Arma points at Five exuberantly. “See! That’s what you do! Just like that.”

“For that long?” Five’s eyes look a little alarming.

“No, longer, way longer.” She’s referring to how Five zones out all the time when she’s deep in thought.

When they look back at him with their silly grins again, he perks up. “Ya guys wanna go down to the garage and work on Runner with me?”

Arma only shrugs while absentmindedly staring at his chest. Five immediately jumps up and starts hopping around. He has to shush her before she wakes Marco or Valerie up. He grabs his big tool bag from out of the little hallway closet and sets the box of spare parts on top of it.

Before heading for the door, he catches Five’s attention with a subtle wave of his hand. Instead of attempting to whisper, he points at Arma with his eyes and tips his head once. She only barely smirks back and shakes her head. She shrugs her shoulders and wags her hand for him to just keep moving along.

If Arma doesn’t want to cover herself up, he won’t be the one to make an issue out of it. Besides, her skin is pretty much black, and her nakedness is not all that noticeable anyway. It’s just that her figure is so showy.

They still take the stairwell down to the garage just in case anyone is still up. He’s quickly reminded that he still needs some more practice in using his new body. Going down the stairs gets him back in the swing of things. After he takes the dusty tarp off of Runner and folds it up, he gives his machine the usual verbal wake up command, but nothing happens. He unlatches the battery cover and pushes on the charge indicator, and it lights up all the way, showing that it’s full.

“What the hell.”

Sheepishly, Five gives the verbal command to Runner herself and it wakes up. “Runner doesn’t recognize your new voice, Aaron.” Remembering exactly what he had said to Runner back when he originally gave her voice authority, she does the same for him. “One, two, one. Three, two, one.”

After she reaches “one”, he says his name to Runner. “Aaron.”

In the same raspy voice he remembers, it responds to him. “Voice authority has been granted… Aaron.”

He dumps his tool bag and the box of parts out on the concrete and sweeps everything to the side so he can work down on his knees. He quickly finds it to be pretty nice not having a stiff back anymore. Since they keep the lights in the garage dim at night, he hands his flashlight to Arma and instructs her to shine it wherever he’s looking while he works. Since she’s not spent as much time with him as Five has, he tries to not default to her as much and makes sure to include Arma. One at a time, he has Runner lift and hold its feet up so that he can work on them.

When Arm lets the light start wandering again, for the third time, Five starts to get grumpy with her. She does a good job of doing as he asked from then on. To break the tension between the two, he makes conversation with them while he works. Mainly, he needs to be filled in on what he missed while he was gone.

“So, I remember fighting with Ray and then getting shot in the chest. What happened after that?”

Arma starts her story from there. laying out every little detail through to the next day. After an entire hour, when she’s done, Five explains what all happened to herself as well, starting with how Mikel showed up at the apartment and lied to her. She makes sure to include that even though he was horrible to her, he has made up for a lot of it, and she’s forgiven him. If it weren’t for him, they would likely have all been killed off by now.

“You know, in truth, I’m not all that sour about getting murdered.” He looks around, to see if anyone else might be around and then speaks more quietly this time. “Don’t you ever tell anyone I said that. Seriously. But yeah, I was hoping that I’d get the chance. I just didn’t think it would actually happen, or so soon. I’d rather it have happened like this anyway. I’d wouldn’t have wanted to wait till after I was old. It’d be playing it too close to the chest for my taste.”

While the three of them go on with the conversation, he replaces everything below Runner’s ankles. The new claws have been adapted to stay retracted while running, or until Runner forces them to draw out. The design of the original actuators didn’t give him much to work with, so he had to double up the use of the main wrist tendon as what pulls on the claws. They’ll only dig in when a good amount of extra pressure is applied to the wrist. It takes him four hours to install the hardware, but everything fits up perfectly when he’s done.

With Runner able to learn and adapt, he won’t need to bother with doing any reprogramming. He simply explains the changes to Runner and then instructs it to do a myriad of tasks. Like he had planned, the new feet have hardly made any effects on the way it already runs. They prove to be even quieter like he had hoped for.

To try out the new claws, he instructs Runner to place a paw on the round top of one of the yellow bollards in front of the elevators. When he tells Runner to put as much force as it can down on that paw, the claws snap down and even dig into the top of the pole. The plastic covering on it splits where each of the four claws stuck into it. He nods his head and grins. “This’ll work just fine.”

Since they’ve already ruined the thick yellow plastic covering on the pole, he decides there won’t be any difference in finishing it off all the way. He goes over to the pole and puts his hand on the side of it.

“Runner, watch what I’m showing you.” With a side sweeping motion, he swats the side of the pole pretty hard. “Runner, do the same thing, but hit the side of the pole as hard as you can.”

As soon as he moves out of the way, Runner lurches forward and slams its paw across the side of the pole. With a loud “ding” the claws bite into the side of it and rip the entire shroud off the steel pole. There are four long shiny marks in the heavy steel tube glinting through the paint when they examine it. The three of them are all pie-eyed after what Runner did. They didn’t expect it to seem so aggressive. The plastic is still stuck on Runner’s claws, even though it has let go.

Arma quickly pulls the plastic away and tosses it over behind a nearby car, out of general sight. Plenty satisfied, he takes Runner back to its parking space and drapes the dust cover over it before telling it to power down. Even though they’ve been on camera the whole time, they scurry back into the stairwell before anyone can catch them in the act.

On their way back up to the sixth floor, they chuckle about the idea of teaching Runner to growl like an animal. When he reaches the top of the stairs, he is smiling. He remembers how it used to get his heart rate up and make him breathe. This time, he hardly noticed the effort of it. His muscles did get slightly warmer and he can feel the temperature in his legs, but just barely.

Halfway down the hallway to his apartment, Aaron notices that something feels out of place, then he notices the trim around his doorframe hanging loose. When they all sprint to the end of the hall, they find that the door has been kicked in. Inside, both Valerie and Marco are missing.

They search the entire apartment to make sure one of them isn’t still hiding somewhere, but they find no one. His first thought is to call the police, to see if they might be able to intercept anyone moving about at night, but he knows it won’t do any good. If it were the rats that took them, they’d be underground by now, they’re careful. The fact that the cops haven’t shown up already means they must’ve come in and out undetected. None of them would be able to explain anything to the authorities anyway? All three of them are robots, and more than likely murder suspects.

While he and Arma are chomping at the bit to bludgeon anything that moves, Five is the only one thinking straight. “Aaron, we need to tell Clarice what’s happened. She can get help if we need her to, but she has to know.”

“Alright, and she can get hold of Mikel. He still owes us.” That feeling of intense anger is back in full force again. He can hardly keep himself from throwing his fists through the walls and tearing them down.

When they leave for Clarice’s apartment, they notice Aaron’s big knife sticking into the wall by the front door. Valerie or Marco must have thrown it at the intruders when they broke in. There’s no wondering about what’s going on. Arma grabs the handle of the knife and pulls it out of the wall. He looks at her, expecting her to hand it to him, but she doesn’t. Even when he holds his hand out for it, she is hesitant to relinquish it. Five notices the way she looks at it before she’s about to hand it over too.

“She’d become quite fond of it while you were gone. Mikel told us you weren’t going to be coming back. It was really hard.”

Arma looks down at it and then holds it out to him. “I was gonna keep it to remember you by… in case you never… but you’re back, so...”

Aaron exhales and takes his hand back. I’m sorry for dying on you like that and leaving you out there all on your own. It was reckless and I should’ve known better. I want you to keep it, it’s yours.”

She looks at Five, to the knife, and then back to him again in appreciation. “I don’t know what to say, Aaron.”

“I’ll find something to give to you too, Five.” It won’t be Runner, but I’m sure I can find you something nice.” She smiles and clasps her hands together under her chin like she usually does when she gets excited.

After knocking on the door for the third time, Aaron can hear what sounds like Mikel cussing on the other side. “It’s four in the fucking morning, Clarice, who else do you think it’s gonna be?”

They can hear Clarice’s muffled voice on the other side too. “It’s not their fault they don’t sleep, Mikel. Can you just be nice to them, please.”

Aaron realizes it’s likely that neither of the two knows he has been resurrected yet. At the sound of the deadbolt being unlocked, he grabs Five by the shoulders and plants her front and center at the door while slipping to the side himself. At the sight of her meek stature, Mikel opens the door wide and kindly invites her in.

Arma follows in after Five, and then he steps in. When Mikel closes the door, he is standing there filling the entire frame. Mikel staggers backward and nearly falls to the floor. All he can manage is “Shit, shit, shiiiit” while his eyes dart around the room for a place to escape.

Arma turns around and softly puts her hand in the middle of Aaron’s chest, stopping him from advancing any farther. “You don’t need to be afraid of him, Mikel. He doesn’t mean you any harm. We need your help.”

Not wanting to waste any time patching shit up between the two of them, he plainly states why they’re there. “Valerie and Marco have been kidnapped by rats.”

Mikel scrambles into Clarice’s room to tell her and then immediately returns with some of the clothes Arma left in Valerie’s room. He tosses them at her and starts pulling his pants on. She looks at him annoyed and holds her arm forward to drop them on the floor in front of him. “For fuck sake, Arma, just put something on! We don’t have time for games right now.”

While the two of them get dressed, he gives Mikel the rundown on what’s happened. They both figure it’s most likely the same rats from before that’ve come back. As Mikel is getting the keys to his truck, Clarice rushes out to them, completely hysterical after hearing what’s going on. She only pauses in shock for a second when she sees his face but then throws her arms around him.

When she looks up at him, he watches her face change at the sight of him. She lets go and stands back for a moment looking him over. He knows what’s she’s thinking. It’s all over her face. She puts her hands on the sides of his arms and nods at him in condolence of what he has lost. Her hands feel so small.

“It’s good to have you back… Aaron.”

He can see the heartbreak in her eyes, and it makes him doubt himself to the core. She’s not looking at him like she used to. “You bring my sister back, Aaron, whatever it takes.”

“I’ll make sure she’s good and alive.” He knows that’s what she meant.

When he thinks of losing Valerie again, like when he was dying, it feels like the floor has suddenly fallen out from under him. He can see her face in his mind as if she were right there. A wave of heat flushes through him when he imagines finding her discarded in an alley. He’s brought out of his thoughts when he hears Mikel in the background

“You coming or not?”

In the garage, Mikel has them wait at the elevator doors while he runs off into the dim parking area. In the distance, they can hear his all-metal driver side door bang against someone else’s car, and then his big truck firing up. The sound of tires lets them know when he backs out of his spot and then towards them. His truck is almost as loud as Valerie’s, but with the distinct clattering of an old-school diesel engine. He hasn’t heard one like it in many years. It kind of takes him back. He still remembers everything.

Before getting in, Aaron peers over the side of the bed to see if there’s anything in the back. To his luck, the bed is empty and as quickly as he can, he uncovers Runner and boots it up. He drops the tailgate and commands Runner to climb in and to make sure to not fall out while they’re moving. He jumps into the front seat and waits for Mikel to floor it, but of all things, he’s on the phone having heated words with someone.

“You tell me where my friends are right fucking now, or I’m gonna send these robots after your dead ass. They’ll tear you and anyone near you apart, just like they did to the others last month. You tell me where they are, or we’re gonna start killing whoever we come across until someone eventually talks.”

The tone of the man’s voice on the other side becomes much more compliant. In short order, he gets direct answers to every question he asks. “If anything happens to them, you fuck, we're gonna tear your goddamn arms and legs off!”

“Who the hell was that?”

“Hell if I know. Some guy named Doug. A random-ass rat that cold-called me the other day.” Before flooring it, he looks at Aaron with a furious face for a few seconds, making sure he understands his dedication.