Chapter Text
“You know what? I changed my mind. Let’s go to the Bolero.”
“Right away, sir.”
The hovercar made a legal U-turn several hundred meters down, and soon enough, he was speeding off into the opposite direction. The sun was just about to set over the brightly-lit city, and Viktor Nikiforov felt like he had the right to at least have a good time before clambering into bed only to begin his day anew tomorrow morning.
He worked hard – as hard as one could work in a society like this. Most people have taken very quickly to the androids. They cooked, they cleaned; they worked in factories and policed the streets; they drove and made the hover tunnels they drove through – basically, they did everything. After many thousands of years, humans had finally reached the peak of their laziness: one could work if they wanted to, but it was not a requirement. Even the poorest of the poor could afford a machine that would procure food and tend to their house. It was Utopia.
It was boring.
Viktor leaned his forehead against the glass and sighed, closing his eyes to fend off the intrusive light of the myriad advertisements polluting the city. It was all just too much. Too much everything. He missed the good old days when his parents had only had a small house away from what people back then called ‘civilization.’ They’d only had a household robot that did the most menial tasks; Viktor had been raised to do most things on his own, which had immediately made him a weirdo. What had turned him into an even bigger weirdo was the fact that he had gone into the performing arts.
To him, at least, it had made sense at the time. He believed that no robot could ever produce something as beautiful as a human work of art: a statue, painting, dance, a piece of music so fantastic, it would send shivers down one's spine. Androids were zeros and ones; they were machinery, they had no appreciation for the aesthetically pleasing.
Some people, though, thought the opposite. That through science, through meticulous calculations, androids could actually produce the ultimate work of art. That was the reasoning behind the Bolero, Christophe Giacometti's club, filled with exquisite beauties of all shapes and sizes who danced, tantalizingly twisting their bodies and exposing them for the visitor's viewing pleasure. The catch? They were all androids. Non-humans. Mechanical toasters, filled with nothing but wiring and logic boards. They were pieces of junk that could be discarded when they malfunctioned, and new ones could be whipped up in a matter of hours to replace them.
Needless to say, Christophe’s business was booming. The Bolero had become one of the most popular places in town. Viktor had even heard that entrepreneurs from other cities had taken to the idea and started opening clubs like these of their own. But whatever, Chris had told him, his club had been the first, and it would remain the first by being the best.
Viktor, though skeptical of the entire idea behind it, couldn’t help but agree that it was at least a way to pass the time. Better than sitting at home and watching the news on the holostream, he supposed.
That was why, several minutes later, the hovercar whooshed to a halt in front of the most popular club in town. There was a line around the block – a line of androids of all shapes and sizes. Their owners would send them to stand in line for them, and then they'd just show up when their turn was up. Quite smart. Viktor hated it.
What was the point of having someone else wait for you? Wasn't waiting part of it? The anticipation? The slight fear that you wouldn't be able to get inside and feast your eyes on the sight of the shapeful beauties presented there for you? Wasn't there beautiful pain in the rejection from the android bouncer, who scanned people's ID's and made sure they have dressed appropriately, were unarmed, and overall not sleazy? That was something Viktor appreciated – the fact that Chris had pretty tight rules here, despite the fact that his protégés were not human. He didn’t want this place to turn into more of a den of debauchery than it already was. Viktor appreciated that.
The moment he stepped out, all eyes were on him. Android scanners went over him, and the line parted respectfully. Viktor Nikiforov was a pretty well-known face to both humans and robots alike. And being well-known meant that he skipped the line.
He walked inside, allowing the android at the door to take his coat, and as soon as he was in the main room, an arm slung itself around his shoulder.
“Vitya! You made it!”
Viktor rolled his eyes as a suspiciously purple drink was pressed into his hand. Chris, for how well-integrated he was into this world of technology, still enjoyed experimenting at the bar by himself. Sometimes, the results were explosive – quite literally. The man had had a tough time explaining to the fire department drones why the wall in the backroom had been blown off clean. Apparently making literal Jäger bombs was not a good idea.
“Yeah, I made it,” Viktor said, taking a sip of his drink and leaning into Chris’s side. The man was a bubbling mess of energy, already chatting his ear off about this and that model and this and that dancer, and Viktor listened half-heartedly as he glanced around. The drink wasn’t too bad, a little sweet, perhaps, but he enjoyed the warmth that spread from his chest to his extremities as he watched the scenery around them.
Tonight was boys' night. Pretty little things, they were. Well, not all of them – some, for those with particular tastes – were huge, hulking, muscular Adonis-types clad in skimpy little thongs, shaking their behinds at the squealing patrons. The credit machine kept beeping annoyingly as the clients spent, spent, and spent money on tips for the dancers – as if the dancers needed the tips. Come closing time, they'd all be plugged in to recharge in the storage room, their eyes glassed over, their mouths shut. Viktor pictures Chris sitting in his office and cackling like a twentieth-century movie villain as he counted his profits.
Just as he was about to look back at Chris and pretend that he was following the conversation, someone – well, something – caught his eye. To the left of the room, in a booth that appeared to be stylized to look like a cage, a lovely android was seductively swinging its hips, reddish brown eyes glazed with artificial lust. It was small, smaller than most, and perhaps a little bit plumper than the others, too, but the way it moved looked strangely natural; almost as if it had been taught to dance by a human.
Viktor watched as the pretty android lifted itself up onto the pole and did a spin with hits legs parted perfectly.
Suddenly, their eyes met. Then, the world froze.
There was a crash as the android fell to the floor in a heap. Viktor’s mouth gaped open.
The patrons, drunk as they were, booed and cooed at the android, which got up clumsily and went back to work, the expression on its face perfectly blank.
Viktor turned back to Chris who was frowning at the android.
“Well, that’s weird,” the man said, shrugging. “Ah, glitches. Can’t help them. At least that one’s adorable enough to make it look cute.”
Viktor lifted an eyebrow. Glitches happened; but they had become less and less common over the years as android technologies had progressed, reaching a rate of one per billion, at the most.
“That a new one?” He asked, nodding his head at the droid.
“Yeah. Eros." Chris nodded. "Just got him from this factory in Japan. Dunno what that was, though. Maybe he wasn't calibrated correctly. I'll have the boys run a system check after he’s done, just in case.”
“Pretty. Not your usual style, though,” Viktor observed, pointing at the lumbering piles of muscle in the middle of the room. It was quite obvious that Chris had a thing for abs.
The other blond just laughed. "Well, I did promise to cater to every single possible audience, you know? The patrons seem to like him, anyway. He's… pretty, as you said. Soft. Makes people want to give money to take care of him and stuff."
“And by taking care of him, they’re automatically taking care of you,” Viktor said, smirking. “Get it? Automatically? ‘Cause he’s an android?”
Chris rolled his eyes. “You’re such a cheesy-ass moron, Vitya, I have no idea how you get any.”
Viktor shrugged. The truth was that he hadn’t gotten any in a while. His previous lover had left him several thousand credits poorer and with a small portion of his male ego gone as well; so for now, he was content with not being together with anyone. Just exploring his options and such.
Too bad most options in this town weren't even human, to begin with. And those who were human were either attached already or modified within an inch of their life. Viktor was pretty sure that he and Chris were the last surviving humans without fake body parts (and yes, before you ask, that part of Viktor was also very real and the height of his pride, right next to his ass).
"C'mon, let's get you another drink, yeah?" Chris called over the loud music, and Viktor nodded, his eyes sliding over to the Japanese android who was back in his element, wriggling his hips with his mouth parted and his hair slicked back with fake sweat.
He looked so damn real that Viktor forgot for a moment that he was, in fact, an it.
Over the next couple of days, Viktor found himself wondering back to the club. He would stop by after work and let Chris ply him with his new bartending concoctions. Some days, the Japanese android would be there, and Viktor would feel himself gravitate toward him in what was a definitely unhealthy habit.
The weirdest thing was, though, that whenever the android spotted him, things went haywire.
The first time, Viktor and Chris had both written it off as a glitch; but then the next day, Chris mentioned in passing that the systems check had come back with no errors. Weird.
The next time, two days later, the android went completely off-rhythm in his routine, causing him to stumble. Viktor frowned, and Chris made a note to recheck the androidagain.
Nothing.
The third time, Viktor was right in front of the droid, and when he was spotted, the Japanese beauty just let out an undignified squeal, his hand slipping off the pole and making him have to grab onto it for dear life, finishing his spin in a clumsy display of clinging to the pole for dear life.
“I’m gonna have to send him back, I guess,” Chris said, leaning back against the wall, his eyes hooded as he watched the droid pick his dance back up.
Viktor glanced at him. “Send him where?”
“You know, the production facility. They’re gonna have to check him out. Strip him down probably, since he’s glitching so often. There’s bound to be some sort of defect. I mean, it’s not the software, so it’s something they fucked up in production.”
“So they’re gonna strip down a strip droid?” Viktor asked.
“I hate you.”
Viktor went home that day feeling kind of bad – it was almost like he felt it was his fault that Eros was being sent back. After all, the glitches had started when he’d walked into Chris’ club, right? No, of course not. That wasn’t possible. He’d been coming to the Bolero for years now, and Eros had just arrived, so it was bound to be the droid. Not him.
He still felt fucking guilty, so he dove back into work and resolved not to visit the club for a while. Maybe he was just lacking human interaction. Therefore, the best recipe to cure himself of this misplaced guilt was to associate more with those, humans; he threw himself into producing his latest piece with his all-human troupe, and he was definitely too busy thinking about their routines to reflect on Eros’.
Several weeks later, just as he was closing up at the studio, he received a call from Chris.
“I think the club’s haunted.”
Viktor snorted. "I think you need to stop doing twenty-first-century drugs."
"It's not the drugs!" Chris replied defensively. "I'm serious. There's something weird going on at the club, and the only scientific explanation is a ghost. Or a poltergeist."
“Chris, ghosts are literally the opposite of scientific.”
“Just… come over and see for yourself, you jerk!”
Rolling his eyes at the man’s antics, Viktor ordered his hover car to take him to the club only to find it closed for the night. It seemed as though Chris really was taking the whole ghost thing seriously.
He found the owner at the back entrance, his eyebrows knitted in worry.
“So, I’m here,” he said, crossing his arms. “Now what?”
“Look,” Chris said, bringing up the security footage on his portable Holo. Viktor watched the perfectly boring video of the back corridor, squinting to see what it was that Chris wanted him to see.
“And… what is it that I’m looking at? Man, Chris, you need to get your droids to clean that place, it’s unsanitary,” he drawled.
“Shh!” Christ shushed him. “Watch.”
Viktor watched. And then he blinked. The next thing he knew, the image changed.
“Uh…”
“See? I told you!”
That door, the door which led to the droid storage, had definitely just been closed, and it was now open. And he’d seen nobody. Nobody could access the door unless they had a passcode. And Chris’ irises.
“And that’s not all that’s weird,” Chris said, minimizing the footage. Viktor looked at him, frowning. There was more?
"Someone's been rearranging the dolls," Chris said. Viktor almost rolled his eyes at the moniker Chris preferred to use for his toasters, but didn't, because this was starting to freak him out a little bit too.
“What do you mean, rearranging them?”
“That same night, when I walked into the storage, some of them were not at their proper charging stations," Chris said gravely. "And before you say it, no, I wasn't that drunk. I couldn't have misplaced them. I take good care of my dolls. You know that."
Viktor didn’t know what to say to that. This all had to have some sort of explanation, right? Right?
"Just… tell me what to do," Chris said, latching onto Viktor's arm. “Tell me I’m not going nuts.”
“You’re not going nuts,” Viktor said automatically.
Chris seemed relieved at that. "Should I go to the police with this? I don't know if it's a crime since nothing's been taken, and… itis n't exactly an offense to… uh, replace droids at their charging stations," he said, biting his lip.
“I… I think you should wait. I mean, it’s only happened this once, right? So–,”
“Twice.”
“What?” Viktor looked at Chris blankly. The man glanced down at his feet.
“Twice. It’s happened twice. Yesterday and today. I didn’t want to tell anyone the first time because I did think I was going crazy.”
“Right. Twice,” Viktor repeated. Well, this was definitely concerning.
“Alright. Tell you what, how about I keep an eye on the club tomorrow night? See if anything happens, yeah?” Viktor said. Chris looked at him as if he’d hung the moon.
“But, don’t you have your production to worry about?”
Viktor shrugged. “Yurio and Mila are big enough to manage their own business for a day. It’s okay, seriously. Just… now I’m intrigued.”
Chris chuckled, shaking his head. “I knew I could count on you and your obsession with… what’s his name? Sherwood Cumberbatch?”
“Hey, twenty-first century TV was legit!”
And so, somehow, Viktor had turned into a private investigator of sorts. Well, he even got himself a long coat, so he was the real deal. Therefore, he had to carry out his duties accordingly.
Which had landed him, ballet master extraordinaire, and overall sex symbol, parked across the road from the back entrance of the club with a powdered donut in his hand. Because donuts were essential to stakeouts; or so, he had learned from old movies. He wasn’t quite sure how donuts helped, but… hell, it was good. He just hoped that Yurio wouldn’t see him like this, consuming about a gazillion powdered sugary calories on his day off.
Too bad the donut didn’t really go down well, so now he was kind of choking.
And he’d been here for hours and nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary. So, to hell with it, he was going to get himself a drink before he met his maker. He was too young and definitely too good-looking to die.
With that, he shrugged off his detective coat and left the car, heading for the café to his right. The place smelled divine even from several meters away: it smelled like pure caffeine and subsequent heart attacks.
Just what he needed.
He practically ran inside to the counter and gasped his order (coffee, black as my soul), to the droid who nodded and proceeded to prepare his order while Viktor reached for the glass jar on the counter to at least pour himself some water.
He turned around to look at the uncrowded tables, trying to figure out where to sit.
What he saw sent the jar crashing to the ground in a million pieces.
There, completely relaxed, chatting with a slightly darker-skinned and equally attractive friend with a breathtaking smile on his face, and clad in the most atrocious outfit Viktor had ever seen since he’d managed to find Mean Girls in the city archives, sat Eros.