Hercules 500 Read online

  And he didn’t look like an upstanding citizen.

  In fact, she wasn’t convinced she should even talk to him let alone do business with him. “If I had enough to buy new, I’d be buying something new—not used. But I think I might be able to get one of yours.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You need a domestic, you say?” he said slowly.

  “Yes. I’ll have work when I get there and I have to work off passage, as well, so I’ll need a domestic for the household and to take care of the children.”

  He nodded, his eyes shifting around with mental calculations. “I’ll get back with you in a little bit. I’m pretty sure I’ve got something, but I’ll … uh … have to check it out to make sure it’s in top working condition.”

  That didn’t actually sound very promising, but she thought if it was in working condition she might be able to get by with it.

  It would be better than nothing and, given that everyone that went was required to have needed skills, she should be able to find someone on the colony world, Beauterre, to work on it if necessary.

  She wasn’t certain what he meant by ‘little bit’, but she was too wound up to just sit around twiddling her thumbs. She spent a little more time searching for other possibilities, but, unfortunately, she didn’t see anything more promising than the robot he claimed to have. She did find some clunky ancient ‘household robots’, but they were task oriented and none had true AI. They might be helpful, but they weren’t worth spending what the shopkeepers wanted for them.

  She could do the work herself.

  Or just let it go to pot if she was too tired to do it and keep the money.

  Giving up on the search after a little bit, she got up and did an inventory on her possessions to decide what she would take with her.

  Chapter Two

  He had memories from ‘before’. He could not make sense of them. They were a jumble of brief flashes of images that did not seem to fit together, but he was certain—now—after a great deal of consideration—that they not only were memories, they were his memories.

  In any case, it made no sense that he would have sprung into existence in a sea of garbage.

  But that, unfortunately, was one of his more extensive, solid memories.

  Mountains of rusting, twisted metal, the stench of rotting vegetation and other things even worse.

  Scavengers.

  There had been a battle for the pieces of him that were strewn about, buried or partially concealed by the mounds of refuse.

  He had been in darkness before that.

  He had been in darkness for a timeless time after that, aware of some things—lights, smells, sounds—but mostly aware that his internal power supply was so low he could do nothing but hang on to that spark for fear it would be completely extinguished and he would lose even the fragments of memory he still possessed.

  Then the darkness lifted and he was able to open his eyes, to see and to grasp what he was seeing.

  He was lying upon a gurney, staring up at the bright lights that seemed very familiar to him.

  There was nothing about the room he was in or the man working on him that seemed the least bit familiar, though.

  The man noticed he was staring at him.

  “Shit! God damn thing’s on! Pull the fucking plug before he does something we’ll all regret!”

  The loss of his expanded senses was almost instantaneous, but not complete, not even at the minimal levels of before.

  This was not the place where he had come into existence, but it was a similar place—at least in the sense that humans were working to put him together, to hopefully fix whatever had been damaged and replace whatever was destroyed.

  He was content enough with that thought to allow himself to sink deeper to conserve his strength.

  When he ‘awoke’ again, he was in the same room on the same table, but he had the sense that a great deal of time had passed. He had no idea why he felt that, but he did and he was certain it was a correct assumption.

  “Run an internal diagnostic on your systems and give me a report.”

  He did so.

  It was troubling.

  “As far as I can ascertain, all systems are functioning at 99 to 100%, but there are inhibitors ….”

  “Yeah. I didn’t think it was a good idea to mess with those. Get up. I want to see what you can do.”

  He was still troubled by the presence of inhibitors, but he obeyed the command and sat up.

  An unpleasant surprise awaited him.

  There was no flesh.

  He knew, in spite of the lack of memories, that there should be flesh. He should not be looking at a form that was all metal and wires.

  “I have no flesh,” he said aloud.

  The man glanced at him sharply. “Yeah, well it looked like shit after your stint in the garbage heap. Figured we might as well get rid of it. Your nanoes should replace it. They’re already working on it.”

  The man handed him a reflecting glass and he stared at it, or rather the image reflected back at him.

  It was a horrible thing—a grinning metal skull only partly covered by bright pink, new flesh.

  A strange sensation washed over him.

  It took him a few moments to comprehend what it was.

  Dismay.

  He released the mirror when the man grabbed it to take it back.

  It took an effort to get off the gurney and when he had, he staggered.

  He was dismayed about that, too.

  “Whoa! Watch it!”

  “I do not understand,” he said. “My diagnostics showed almost 100% function.”

  “You’re going to have to re-learn this body, though. You were dismembered and I ain’t a hundred percent certain the parts we found go with your torso—well, originally. There was pieces everywhere. We just gathered up the stuff that looked like it was in fairly good shape and might be repaired.”

  That made absolutely no sense. “What am I?”

  The man sent him a startled look. “Uh … you’re a Herc.”

  He blinked at the man in confusion. “A Herc?”

  “Yeah. A Hercules 500 … A Cy … robotic domestic helper.”

  * * * *

  Fortunately, it did not take long to regain his sense of ‘self’ so that he was able to perform physical tasks flawlessly.

  Unfortunately, the memory fragments remained a jumbled mess as he, apparently, was when he had been found.

  They called him Herc—the young man who had apparently ‘fixed’ him up and the old man the young man called Gramps.

  Herc just did not ‘feel’ right—no matter how many times they called him that.

  Robot also did not feel right. They were inferior to …?

  So could he assume that he was actually … something else? And if he was correct why was it that they called him Herc?

  There were a lot of things that did not seem to ‘fit’, but he not only could not make them fit, he could not figure out why they ‘felt’ wrong.

  He thought it might be the inhibitors, but he had no idea how to disengage those.

  At least, he had not figured it out yet.

  To his relief, the flesh they had removed was slowly but surely re-grown. They had wrapped him in some sort of bandages from head to toe to protect his internal workings until the flesh was replaced, and that was better than looking down at his exposed chassis, but he was very relieved when there was new flesh—even though that was very thin and very pink at first and too easily damaged.

  His memory was full of holes—and that disturbed him a great deal—but, physically, his systems diagnostics reported him at nearly one hundred percent.

  Perhaps, he decided, he need only ‘exercise’ his AI and the gaps in his ‘brain’ would also be mended?

  Unfortunately, that was not easily accomplished. Stimulation for his AI was almost non-existent. He was given tasks around the shop that required no intelligence and provided no true learning experience.

  Even the hu
mans he had to observe and learn from were virtually useless. They did very little beyond grunt at one another, or bellow angrily.

  Within a handful of weeks he had concluded that the shop where he had been repaired had absolutely nothing to offer him in terms of his AI beyond years to slowly rot from disuse.

  Then, there was excitement. A woman had come to the shop searching for a domestic to take with her to the new world.

  “I am a domestic?” Herc asked curiously, wondering, if he was, why it was that that sounded so very unfamiliar to him.

  Gramps shrugged. “You can make him one, right, Sonny?”

  “What tasks will I be required to perform?”

  Sonny looked sullen. “I thought we were gonna keep him?”

  Herc glanced from the elder to the younger man and back again, feeling a flutter of what he could only describe as anxiety that he would miss an appealing opportunity because of Sonny’s possessiveness. “I am certain that I can master the tasks required of a domestic.”

  “You ain’t got no idea what they are!” Sonny snarled sarcastically.

  Herc frowned, analyzing not only the words they’d said but the tones used. He concluded that Gramps wanted the money and Sonny wanted to keep him—for whatever reason. Perhaps carrying out the trash?

  He also concluded that he was eager to be sold. He did not care what tasks might be required of him, the chance to leave the shop was enough of an enticement. “Will she pay a great deal for me?” he asked, hopeful that prompting them to consider the benefit would help his case.

  Gramps rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Damned right! Five thousand credits an’ you ain’t cost us nuthin! So that’s clean profit!”

  “Not exactly,” Sonny pointed out. “We had to pay those bastards three hundred to get access to the spot where they dumped all the scrapped ‘borgs.”

  Gramps folded his lips together angrily and stomped Sonny’s foot. “Stupid! You was told ta keep yer mouth shut about that! And that weren’t nuthin’ compared to what she’s willing to pay. It’s still a dang good profit. But yer gonna have to get him presentable so hop to it, you shit ass. If yer so hot to have a ‘borg you can take some of yer share and go back for another one.”

  Sonny looked disgusted. “An’ I might or might not find one that can be fixed!”

  “Don’t matter right now. Can you do somethin’ about his … uh … the missing thingy?”

  Sonny gaped at him. “She wants one that’s a sex toy? How the fuck …? Never mind! I’ll find something.”

  “She said domestic, you idiot!” Gramps snarled. “An’ she’s goin’ to the colony! Of course she wants one fer her bed!”

  This interested Herc mightily. “I will be a sex toy? How am I to accomplish this without programming?”

  “Hell! That’s a good point. He’s need more’n the thingy.”

  Sonny smirked at Grandpa. “Somethin’ fer you, then. You can find the programming needed while I hunt the jewels.”

  “This is precious stones? What am I to do with jewels?” Herc asked, confused.

  Sonny snorted. Shoving his pants down, he waggled the limp piece of flesh hanging from his belly.

  Herc gaped at it, realizing instantly that he was certainly missing that thing. “It is small, discolored and ….” He paused to search his vocabulary, “squishy. I cannot fathom what sort of jewel that would be.”

  Grampa uttered a bark of laughter and kept laughing until Herc began to think Sonny might beat his brains out with the wrench he was holding. Thankfully, after growling menacingly for a moment, though, he merely threw the tool down on the floor and stalked out.

  Herc was not particularly pleased by the ‘jewel’ he brought back. He examined the dead thing with revulsion, in point of fact. “It smells ….”

  “Like something dead? Probably because I got it off a corpse,” Sonny said cheerfully.

  Herc was briefly horrified, but he decided that it must be one of the ‘sick’ jokes the pair of humans seemed inclined to appreciate.

  He climbed on the table reluctantly when instructed to do so.

  “Think of it as a … sort of template for the nanoes,” Sonny said, relenting. “That was missing when we found that part and the nanoes couldn’t repair something that wasn’t there. This way, they can … hopefully. Either way, there will be something there to convince the customer to buy.”

  * * * *

  As little as she was convinced she had, Anika was neck deep in stuff when the shop keeper rang back. Stumbling over the stuff piled around her, she managed to catch it on the third ring. The shop keeper appeared on screen. “Any luck finding something in my price range?” she asked hopefully.

  He grinned at her, showing a set of the worst teeth she’d ever seen in her life. “I got just tha thing!” he responded, and summoned someone or something off screen. “He’s a Herc500—completely operational—AI—nanoes for self repairs ….”

  And completely naked.

  The bare skin was enough to make her hyperventilate and go into a catatonic state.

  Acting more on instinct than rational thought, prompted by a panicked need for privacy to get a grip, Anika ‘accidentally’ disconnected. She covered her face with her hands the second the screen went black. “Christ! I don’t know if I can do this,” she muttered.

  He was … well, magnificent—every other word that crossed her mind paled. And yet, even though he looked like a work of art—sheer male perfection—at the same time he looked so real she couldn’t wrap her mind around it.

  His dark, dark hair wasn’t quite black, but didn’t miss it by much. It was thick, glossy and healthy looking but oddly long and jagged—as if it had been allowed to grow naturally or trimmed with a dull knife. And the dark hair contrasted starkly with the pale, pinkish flesh that looked new enough and flawless enough to be baby skin. His eyes were an electric blue that seemed to look right through her.

  His face was so perfectly symmetrical, his features so well formed, that he almost seemed too perfect.

  And that didn’t begin to describe the beautiful, muscular body ….

  How was she ever going to get anything done with that to look at!

  “Hello? There’s a problem?”

  Anika snatched her hands away from her face and stared down at the console, feeling her eyes bulge from her head when she saw what she’d done.

  “Holy shit!” she exclaimed, feeling her face turn fiery red with embarrassment. She hadn’t disconnected the fucking thing! She’d just cut off the monitor.

  Which meant they could still see her!

  Shit!

  “Oh! Sorry!” she stammered. “I accidentally brushed the button …. What?”

  “Ya said ya didn’t think ya could do this. Ya said before ya had tha credits I was asking for …?”

  She struggled to shake off the shock, dimly aware that her state could be construed as awe and that might translate into a demand for more money.

  She managed to blink and that seemed to throw her brain into gear. “He’s uh …. He’s a lot bigger than I expected,” she stammered finally.

  The proprietor turned to study the robot beside him. “He just looks really big when he’s naked,” the man said dismissively. “It’s all that white skin and the muscles.”

  The word ‘naked’ unfortunately, triggered an errant thought and Anika looked down to see if he was anatomically correct.

  He was.

  Sort of.

  It was really dark next to the skin tones on the rest of his body. Anika studied the member suspiciously. She really didn’t need that feature. She wasn’t especially comfortable with the idea of having a live-in sex toy, but she’d already accepted that she was pretty much going to have to accept whatever the guy offered or do without. On the other hand, she didn’t want to have to pay extra for something that looked like it might fall off from lack of circulation.

  Dragging her gaze from it with an effort, she braced herself and glanced over the robot again, tr
ying to be objective.

  He was a thing of beauty in spite of the discoloration of his genitals.

  But she didn’t think it was imagination that he was huge—even if it transpired that the shopkeeper was a midget.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, scrambling around her mind for something to say. “Well … uh … it’ll be close. And … uh … to tell you the truth he looks like he might be a little more … uh … functional that I really need—if you know what I mean? What about his weight?”

  She’d mostly asked to distract him, but the answer he gave her threw her into a new state of turmoil. “Oh my god! Are you serious? He’ll take up my entire weight quota! At least. I might even get fined or they might not allow me to take him. Why’s he so heavy? I mean … I knew they weighed at least as much as a human equivalent, but ….”

  “Steel alloy chassis,” the robot responded in the dreamiest voice imaginable.

  She felt a little shudder run through her that made her wonder if she’d just cum.

  “And also I have armor plating,” he added.

  That rocked her back on her heels, piercing the haze of lust that had gripped her. She blinked at him several times. “Armor plating?” she echoed finally, and dragged her gaze from the thing of beauty with an effort and looked at the shopkeeper. “Why does he have armor plating?”

  The man shrugged. “The original owner bought him for security. He lived in the slums.”

  She blinked a couple of times, absorbing that news with a new jolt and then dismissing it as her mind circled back of its own accord to the more pertinent issue of the moment.

  It damned sure wasn’t her imagination that that was huge, she decided. It hung halfway down his thigh.

  She frowned. “Uh … does that work? Or is it …? Never mind! I don’t actually need that feature,” she added hurriedly, resisting the urge to fan her burning face. “Why’s it black? Well …dark, grayish. It doesn’t look … uh … healthy.”

  “Pigmentation defect,” the shopkeeper said flatly. “That’s why I got him at a bargain price.”

  Anika’s brows rose in surprise. “Bargain?”