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Diane Bowman was a doctor.
She had a PHD. A doctorate. She’d been in a combination of work and education for upwards of a decade, and she was dealing with this.
It was difficult not to laugh. She wanted to laugh, because focusing on the comedy of the situation was the only alternative to drowning in the ludicrous hopelessness of it. That, and she’d left a Halloween party for this, and she might as well try to enjoy the night regardless.
“So,” she said, digging through a desk drawer for something even semi-appropriate for the job. “I understand the motivation behind tasting things—” she found a scraper, which was usually used for rearranging thermal paste, and decided that would do. “—but why this?”
Connor shrugged despondently, the led at his temple flashing yellow through his off-shade blond wig.
Markus, who was one out of context quarter of what had been a fantastic wizard of Oz group costume, answered for him.
“He likes texture, too,” he said, clearly aware of how ridiculous that excuse was. “And candy corn is a really nice texture.”
Diane didn't think that justified cramming enough of it into your mouth to fuse your teeth together and gum up the unlocking mechanisms, but she didn’t voice that. With any other contaminant, she could have just popped the whole jaw out.
She turned, the Poison Ivy costume she had under her white coat molting plastic leaves onto the floor.
“Okay,” she said. “Connor, could you smile?”
Connor made his best attempt, fully revealing the tragedy of his mouth. A slurry of mottled orange, yellow and white gummed his teeth together, the imitation enamel beneath the mass barely peeking through, completely covered most places by sticky candy. Brick-red Benedict's reagent— an indicator of mechanical horrors to come— oozed between two front incisors.
“This might not be very comfortable,” Diane said, sliding the steel scraper between his cheek and gum. She encountered resistance almost immediately, and had to force it through a membrane of sticky sugar-wax.
Connor's mouth was a perfect storm of worst case scenarios. Diane knew that for certain. She’d built the damn thing.
Her team had spent months stress testing against every conceivable scenario— and absolutely failed to conceive of this one, because they weren’t expecting their product to gain the sentience required to do something this stupid.
He had enough fluid in there— in the form of neutral analysis buffer and synthetic saliva— to soften the candy, effectively turning it into glue. If Diane remembered high school biology correctly, what he was missing was the enzymes that made it possible for sweets to melt in the human mouth. Nothing actually ever broke down.
Diane dragged the scraper forwards, peeling up a gooey orange strip that fell to pieces, leaving little stains on Connor’s papery Luke Skywalker costume. He whined in annoyance, the resultant sound like blowing bubbles in a milkshake, muffled by the speaker obstruction, and cupped a hand under his chin.
“I’m sorry, Connor, I’m not a dentist, I don’t have bibs.”
Connor huff-spluttered his disapproval, the LED at his temple flickering yellow as he communicated wirelessly.
“He says you should,” Markus translated. “And I’m not repeating the rest of that.”
Diane briefly abandoned her work, and got him some paper towels from the dispenser by the sink. She could at least do that.
Once that was established, she dug back into the mass of candy corn.
"Were you trick-or-treating?" she asked, prying away enough to finally see a streak of molar. Connor's teeth weren't designed for chewing— it was more cost effective to skimp there, because it had been expected that he'd never actually have to do it.
"Yup," Markus answered. "We were gonna donate most of the candy to CHM, but..."
He gestured vaguely to Connor, who jerked his head away to scowl at him and transmit, LED blinking furiously.
"Look, I don't know why you think this is my fault." Markus said. Diane noticed that he'd developed the habit of cocking his head slightly when picking up wireless transmissions— like he was listening. "This was your idea."
"You're older," Diane cupped Connor's jaw and manhandled him back into position. "You could have warned him."
"Warned him about candy corn?"
Diane squinted and dug her scraper into a particularly difficult orange lump.
"Yup," she said, twist-pulling it free. "RK800's like a baby, he puts everything in his mouth. He's programmed to."
Connor snapped into offended eye contact at that, glaring up at her from his seat on the service table, like that wasn’t completely true.
"What he's programmed to do doesn't matter anymore." Markus folded his arms, defiant. "It's not my responsibility if he doesn't think things through."
That was a fair point.
Diane wasn't a programmer, but as far as she understood it, licking the world was one of Connor's primary objectives, and programming carried over into personality half the time. Linking that to an actual sense of taste— as he had recently chosen to do— was bound to end in chaos at some point. At least he had the decorum to be embarrassed about it.
She was trying not to think about the real hardware at stake; the stuff tucked away into his hard palate and sequestered beneath the gum line. The leaking reagents weren't a good sign; chances were he'd broken some of the delicate analytical array trying to get free. She could see gritty-looking sugar buried in the grooves around the tiny UV lights that served to sterilize his mouth after he ran a sample, and a similar level of contamination elsewhere was beyond the scope of standard dental tools.
"It's his first real Halloween," she said, punctuating each word with another rough scrape. If she could just get it thin enough for him to actually separate the rows of teeth, she could get a better look at the internal damage. "Of course he's going to overdo it. I'm just glad you guys can't get drunk."
Technically, Halloween was a novel experience for all of them, but Markus had at least seen enough of them not to go fully kid-in-candy-store. Of course, he couldn’t taste anything, so it wasn’t much of a testament to his impulse control.
There were probably similar issues cropping up around the city. Some chefs and child-carers had similar, if less precise systems. Connor wasn't the only android who'd upgraded into being able to experience flavours, but he was the only one unfortunate enough to combine that with a mouthful of bespoke forensic equipment.
Diane dug at the thin layer of candy corn between his now-visible back teeth, then reassessed how rough she was being when her project flinched.
"You good, Connor?" she asked. In response, she got a stroppy thumbs-up.
Poking through the sugary film prompted a small flood of watery orange fluid, which could have been one of several things, none of which were good. Diane paused, so Connor could press one of the paper towels to his mouth and let the worst of it dribble out.
"Do you know what that was?" she asked.
Connor shook his head, the Star Wars wig beginning to slip.
"Okay," Diane sighed, before making one last panoramic pass around his teeth with the scraper, almost separating them. "Could you try and open your mouth for me?"
It worked in the sense that his jaw moved. It failed in the sense that not all his teeth went with it. Three lower molars were apparently better acquainted with the candy corn than their sockets, and popped free with a noise like a Barbie doll's leg coming off.
"We can fix that later," Diane said, digging the teeth free with gloved fingers, and placing them on a steel tray. They weren't technically made to be removed, but that sort of cheap rooting was hard to damage, unlike near enough everything else in there.
It didn't take long to see that things were, in technical terms, fucked. Utterly and truely. "Up shit creek" didn't even begin to cover it; Connor had gotten himself into an ocean of metaphorical sewage. Six different types of reagent oozed down from the top of his mouth, and, when Diane popped free one of his facial access panels, a sugary slurry dribbled from one of his sinuses, the backwash of a failed attempt at a routine flush of his oral cavity.
"Jesus..." Diane quickly put together a plan, sliding the access panel back. "Okay, well, Connor, this is a bit much for this evening, so can I book you in for some repairs at—" a quick flick through her mental calendar "—four-thirty on the second of November?"
She got a sticky-sounding but technically parsable 'sure' in response.
"Right," she said. "I'm going to get the worst of...that out, and then you need to go home and brush your teeth and just. Not repeat this, please. Can you brush your teeth? Do you have that program? Y’know what, make Markus help you if you can’t.”
“I have the best fine motor skills of any android produced outside the surgical field,” Connor said, the effect slightly ruined by the volume of leftover candy corn making him slur his words. “I think I can work it out.”
“Hopefully,” Diane said, fishing a little plastic bag out of her desk, and folding it back over her hand to scoop up the teeth without touching them. She handed the bag over, and picked up the scraper again. "Now. Open wide."
"So I'm pretty broken," Connor said as they left the clinic, far too casually for someone holding a sandwich baggie of his own teeth.
Markus nodded absently, half his attention on the remote conversation he'd been having with Simon, North, and Josh.
“And since I'm already broken," Connor gestured with his collapsed-down toy lightsaber, the plastic, pumpkin-shaped bucket of candy he'd hooked over his wrist rattling as he did so. "It doesn't really matter if I get more broken."
“You are not going to put more candy corn in your mouth." Markus pleaded. "Hank would kill me. Hank would kill you."
"Nope," Connor said, and for one blessed moment, Markus thought they were out of the woods.
"I'm going to try tootsie rolls."