Author : A. Zachary Spery

I was looking good when I wheeled into Chaucer’s, the hottest singles bar in lower downtown. I just had my corpus bridge upgraded to a new Mitsushimi DX900q and installed prominently on the side of my Neodynamics’ engramatic coprocessor case. My high efficiency General Electronics’ sonofusion power cell glowed a brilliant green through the walls of the polyurethanic cylinder housing in my abdomen and my polished aluminum frame was gleaming. My drive wheels were new Goodyear’s.

I rolled across the room to an empty space at the bar and ordered my usual gin and tonic. The bar tender handed it to one of my end-effectors. I swung around and leaned back on the elbow of my quaternary manipulator to casually survey the room.

That’s when she rolled in. She had a classy rig with the kind of right angles that would drive the Robopope to sin. It was elegant, with just enough acrylic-plexi to see there was high dollar hardware inside, but not so much that you could tell the bus speed of her hypothalamic multiplexor. She wheeled up beside me and ordered a girly drink–something with an umbrella. The other men in the bar were disassembling her with their optical sensors.

I craned my neck over and said, “Girl, you’ve increased my coolant flow by orders of magnitude.”

She pointed one of her optics at me briefly and removed a cigarette from her purse. “It looks like you can handle it.” Then she smiled and said, “Nice cooling system.”

My CPU voltage capped and the chrome on my heat sinks blued.

She continued, “But I don’t think you could handle me. You’re not my style.” She swiveled her optical instrument array away. “Too much show, too little go.”

I gestured to the transparent cover over my DSX-771 motherboard cluster with onboard cognitive accelerators. “Girl, I am all go. I am the Italian sports car of go. It takes me mere seconds to calculate pi out to a billion decimal places.”

She smiled again. “No, not that kind of go–”

Just then a large industrial unit lumbered up and put a hulking mechanical arm on the bar between her and me. He had a flat grey coat of paint over a steel art deco exoskeleton that made him look like a soviet era locomotive. Gears spun and clunked within him, heat waves emanated from a vent on his head, and I think my state of the art Trasco olfactory sensors detected a hint of burned oil.

“Is this jerk bothering you?” asked the locomotive while glaring at me.

“I think he was just keeping your spot cool until you arrived, baby.” she said. “Weren’t you, Fonzy?”

“Thanks.” said the locomotive as he pushed me over to the adjacent spot–stripping the gears in my drivetrain. “I owe you one.”

I left. Maybe I’ll try Duffy’s.