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It was a dark and stormy night.
T. Honeywell, resident basement roboticist for the Tokyo Lift, leaned back in his rolling swivel chair that didn’t roll any more, but he hadn’t bothered to fix until now, and probably wouldn’t for a while. It was very low on his list of priority lists, as many things were. The list was rather long. Counting each item on every sub-list, it probably stretched into infinity. That did not bother T. Honeywell.
The basement T. Honeywell resided in was deceptively large. There were two floors to it, largely similar in function, each which he used about as much as the other. Currently, he was on the floor closer to the surface, the one with a six-inch high wrapping window on two walls, which was how he knew that it was a dark and stormy night.
The lights flickered. T. Honeywell sighed. He wouldn’t get any work done if the power was iffy.
On any other dark and stormy night, the resident basement roboticist for the Tokyo Lift for ten seasons (and many more years) would have gone to sleep. He’d been awake, after all, for multiple nights in a row. He had no reason to be. Insomnia, however, was a H__l of a drug.
This is how T. Honeywell found himself, one dark and stormy night, outside of the Tokyo Legscraper, glaring at its lightning rod that must not have been working as perfectly as it could have been. Its characteristic neon pink, gold, and cyan arrow pattern burned through the mist around it, creating some singular effect of a beacon of light, a bastion holding out against the storm. The building, alien as its architecture was, looked much the same now as (usually) it ever did at oh-two-hundred hours.
What did not look much the same as (usually) it ever did at oh-two-hundred hours was another onlooker beside T. Honeywell. Onlookers were common at the Tokyo Legscraper—tourists, mostly, but locals often enough too. They were common in the mid-morning when the tour guides began their spiels about the Lift and at sunset when the neons were most vibrant. They were not common at oh-two-hundred hours.
“Hi,” the onlooker began placidly.
T. Honeywell did not like people. He especially did not like people who talked to him. Maybe, he thought, if he ignored this person, they would go away.
“I noticed you came out of that building,” the onlooker continued.
Maybe if he ignored them harder, they would go away. He continued to stare at the lightning rod. Once the storm was over, he figured, he'd go up there and fiddle with it. It wasn’t exactly his specialty, but if no-one else—
“I think I’m supposed to be in there,” said the onlooker in an indistinct tone, “but it’s locked.”
T. Honeywell didn’t think he had given the impression he had been listening.
“So,” the onlooker pressed, “please let me in.”
T. Honeywell coughed politely and pretended to look at his watch. He wasn’t wearing his watch. He had left his watch on one of his desks downstairs because it had developed a few seconds’ lag which persisted even after he adjusted it with its typical side-knob.
“Listen.” He heard a mechanical click, almost imperceptible beneath the rain, as the onlooker’s tone shifted into something sharper, more fluid. “I have been standing here for hours in the rain, and nobody has come out, because the Tokyo Lift are all in Ohio. I have just spent three days in rice drying out. I do not need to spend another three.”
One should think that normally, T. Honeywell would have entered the building and shut the door behind him. But this night had already departed normal. And besides, T. Honeywell was a resident basement roboticist, not a cop.
“Stay in the lobby,” T. Honeywell managed, already ambling towards the stairs behind the elevator. It was dark, but he’d walked this path more times than he could count. “You’ll get lost.” His throat hurt. He didn’t remember drinking water recently. He’d have to do that at some point. Maybe after he slept.
He heard heavy wet footsteps behind him, thankfully not following him, and a body sinking into a couch. He was surprised that the onlooker had listened. Pleasantly so.
Maybe in the morning he would go back up to the surface, see what kind of person he’d let into the Legscraper after-hours. No, that was stupid. In the morning the storm would be over and the Lift would be back and the person would probably be gone.
T. Honeywell was rudely awoken at some late-afternoon time by a slow rapping at his door.
Really, it wasn’t his door, and really, it wasn’t rude. If he’d been rudely awoken, it would have been by whatever intruder stood behind the door waltzing into the basement, which could very well have happened, as it wasn’t in T. Honeywell’s nature to lock the door behind him. However, it was less than twenty-four hours into T. Honeywell’s post-insomniac siesta, and so he considered the very act of awakening rude, thank you very much.
The knocking ceased for a brief moment, then started up again, in some odd pattern that was more rhythmic than random. If T. Honeywell was more awake, he would have recognized it as Morse code, though wouldn’t have been able to translate it without a guide. But he wasn’t, so he didn’t.
The knocking repeated. T. Honeywell felt like his head was being drilled into. Three-sixteenth-inch drill bit, maybe. Five-thirtysecondth.
He had fallen asleep on the swivel chair that didn’t roll. At least it was within arms’ length of the door.
“Hi,” drawled the onlooker from last night.
“Come back later,” T. Honeywell snapped, almost automatically. His vocal cords felt like sandpaper. Somewhere on his list of priority lists was “drink water”. He wondered whether it should go above or below “fall back asleep”.
To his surprise, the onlooker nodded. “Sure.” They turned and began up the stairs in a motion so stiff it was almost mechanised.
T. Honeywell shut the door once he was sure the onlooker had disappeared from view, craning his ears on the sound of receding footsteps on corrugated metal until they faded from earshot. Only after he settled back into his chair did he realise he had doomed himself to a future appointment.
“Later” turned out to be multiple days afterwards, when T. Honeywell was lucid enough that he’d decided the entire experience with the onlooker was nothing more than a strange dream. Not a bad one. He’d had worse. But certainly strange, unusual. How many people you bumped into during a thunderstorm were six-foot-four with bluish skin and hair made of cables?
He’d heard somewhere that you had to have seen a face somewhere if it appeared in your dream. He was sure that he’d never seen the onlooker anywhere before that night. Maybe it had been in the background of some Blaseball game or other, before T. Honeywell stopped watching. Blaseball did seem to attract the strangest sorts.
“Later” happened while T. Honeywell was sitting in the same chair as he was in the dream. In front of him were the schematics for the certain brand of lightning rod the Legscraper favoured. To his right, and slightly behind him, was the door.
The door, which someone was knocking at slowly, methodically, in a pattern that seemed oddly familiar to T. Honeywell.
He spun the chair around—at least it could do that—and opened it.
He blinked. Rubbed his eyes a bit.
“Hi,” said the onlooker from T. Honeywell’s dream.
T. Honeywell was not a rude man. He preferred to end conversations rather than start them, and preferred silence to chatter and solitude to company, but he would not make these preferences explicitly known.
So that is how, despite what were probably his better wishes, T. Honeywell found himself sitting at one of his more table-like desks, pulled out at an angle from the wall to give the onlooker a space to pull up a chair somewhat across from him.
“Domino Bootleg,” the onlooker identified themself as.
“T. Honeywell,” T. Honeywell said in return.
“T,” Bootleg said. Paused. “You’re drinking coffee.”
He took a long sip, biting down the corners of his mouth to hide a smile. He hadn’t heard that one before, but he liked it—liked it better than the bear jokes, at least, but that was a low bar. Somewhat across from him, Bootleg’s mouth was quirked into a half-grin.
“What brings you here?” T. Honeywell deflected, setting down his near-empty mug and reaching for the coffeepot.
“Long story,” Domino offered. They cocked their head, gazing intently at T. Honeywell refilling his mug.
To anyone else, at any other time, T. Honeywell would have replied, “Make it short.” When faced with Domino Bootleg, however….
Perhaps it was the line he remembered from that night that wasn’t a dream, about drying in rice for three days. Perhaps it was the other’s request for motor oil rather than coffee, and how he actually seemed to enjoy sipping the inky black fluid from one of T. Honeywell’s dingier mugs.
Either way, T. Honeywell responded, “Sure.”
It was well past midnight when Domino concluded the outlandish, bizarre, and outright contradictory tale of how it ended up at the Legscraper’s front door at twenty-two-hundred hours just six nights ago. Throughout this story, which was really three or four completely separate stories linked solely by virtue of the speaker’s identity as Domino Bootleg, scarce few facts remained reliable enough for T. Honeywell to consider taking as truth. Even those were borderline. But if he didn’t, he would know nothing about Domino Bootleg, which was an awfully small sum total of information to have gained after however many hours of listening and nodding along and strange captivation and inability to zone out even for a second.
So Domino Bootleg liked to be called Domino, and preferred no pronouns (but acquiesced to it/its when strictly necessary), and had a synthetic membrane for skin, which was not as waterproof as an observer might think it was, and had been in a Macedonian sloccer match due to a tournament bracket’s spelling autocorrect (this fact was consistently, including the ensuing 4-2 loss on aggregate, referred to at least thrice). Each story culminated, around the same time, in Domino’s rescue from sea by a Chilean freighter, and subsequent delivery to Yokohama and journey to Tokyo and arrival in front of the Legscraper one night under the thunder and lightning and pouring rain. That, at least, T. Honeywell could verify for himself.
“So why are you here?” he asked, once Domino’s story (four stories) was (were) said and done and the android was looking at him expectantly.
“Here, as in,” Domino cocked its head, “here in your basement, or here in Tokyo, or here in Japan, or here in the Eastern hemisphere, or here on Earth, or—
T. Honeywell did not like to interrupt, but he somehow sensed that Domino would go on to list every encapsulating location it could think of unless stopped. “Sure, Tokyo. My basement too, but why Tokyo?” Domino had said it had landed in Yokohama, after all.
“When we came ashore,” Domino took a sip of motor oil, “the first thing the crew did was gather in a sports bar to watch Blaseball. It was the Lift versus the Firefighters. And somehow, as soon as the game ended, I suddenly had this… not feeling. Deeper. Intuition, maybe. That I belonged on that field.”
T. Honeywell nodded. He was no stranger to that feeling. He’d felt it every minute of every day since Season 10 when the Tokyo Lift had become an ILB team. So many seasons and so many more years later, even when he’d accepted he’d never see active play, it still tugged at his gut.
“And then I looked up the roster, and there I was. Shadowed.” Domino grinned, flashing fluorescently bright teeth. “Gave me a sense of deja vu, seeing Domino Bootleg on a splorts lineup.”
“Sure,” T. Honeywell agreed, no longer trying to hide his amusement. Domino’s smile was infectious.
“Now that I think about it,” Domino raised an eyebrow, a dark black cable laced like a running stitch above its eye, “I remember a Honey or two on the roster. Kit, perchance?”
T. Honeywell coughed. “Excuse me?”
“I never got your name.”
“I told you. T. Honeywell.”
“T,” Domino mused, as if it were new information. Angled its gaze towards the mug in T. Honeywell’s hands. “You’re drinking coffee.”
Domino’s memory, T. Honeywell would later find, could be affectionately described as “lacking”. More precisely, it was unstable. Delicate. Touch-and-go. Facts would mutate, evolve, without warning. One had to take what Domino said with an entire shaker of salt.
Case in point, T. Honeywell noted idly, as Domino burst into the basement with the news that the Lift had un-lost five to three. They hadn’t. It was seven to five.
He was almost unsurprised at the intrusion. Domino had begun to make it a habit of hanging around T. Honeywell’s basement, which T. Honeywell was ambivalent about.
On the one hand, he wasn’t used to it. T. Honeywell hadn’t had this kind of constant company in years, ever since he and his ex-boyfriend had parted (on mutual terms; the ex had wanted someone he could grow old and die with, which T. Honeywell, a Blaseball player, even while Shadowed, was not). It must have been five seasons ago, the last time he’d been here regularly. The last time anyone had.
On the other hand, it wasn’t T. Honeywell’s basement. He’d been lucky to have it to himself for this long. It was part of the Legscraper, Lift communal property, and not exactly a personal room like the suites where some players lived. Eventually, another player would have had to show up and contest T. Honeywell’s unstated claim.
On the other other hand, it had been three days. Not exactly enough to consider a “habit”. And now, with the Lift out of the postseason, perhaps Domino would go elsewhere. The thought made him feel something, but he wasn’t sure what.
But Domino was here, now, so he supposed he would attend to what the other was saying. Which, at the moment, was nothing. Domino had this uncanny sense, T. Honeywell felt, of when he wasn’t paying attention to it. Not that T. Honeywell’s attention was allowed to wander elsewhere much in the first place. Domino’s hair alone could probably keep him captivated for hours. Some of the cables he hadn’t seen in decades.
“Hi,” the android began, when T. Honeywell was seated on one side (and Domino the adjacent) of the table that he hadn’t pushed back into place since he pulled it out the first time.
“Hi,” T. Honeywell responded.
“Have you ever felt,” Domino leaned forward, elbows on the table, “like something was messed up with your body?”
Sure, T. Honeywell moved to say. Is this about your memory, he moved to say—but before he could, Domino opened its mouth again to speak. T. Honeywell heard the clicking of a switch.
“My wires feel brittle, like they’re about to rust through. My chassis is too heavy. I was built for space, not constant gravity. I think,” they rushed to finish, having grown more frantic as they spoke, “I need your help.”
Click.
“You are, after all,” a more composed Domino continued, “T. Honey, resident roboticist for the Tokyo Lift.”
“Honeywell,” he corrected without missing a beat.
Domino stared deadpan at him.
T. Honeywell sighed. “I’ll take a look.”
Domino’s chassis was, as it had said, too heavy.
“It’s actually compressed.” T. Honeywell was more impressed than anything. “This structure, I guess it’s analogous to a spine. And it’s slowly crushing itself under everyday forces, like walking, with its own weight.”
Domino itself laid prone on a work desk T. Honeywell had cleared for the occasion, tools and spare parts scattered densely on the floor around the area. Its back was exposed, the azure skin-like membrane cut down the middle and peeled back to reveal the inner workings, the wires and motors and rebars, of Domino’s body. The whole arrangement was a queer mix of surgical and intimate.
He took a picture of the warped chassis and showed it to Domino, who made a face even before T. Honeywell pointed out the aberrations.
“Not good,” it groaned.
T. Honeywell made an affirming grunt. “We’ll have to replace it with something lightweight. Better for gravity.” He didn’t know why he said we, but it fit.
“Carbon fibre,” Domino supplied. “With additives for brittleness.”
“Sure,” T. Honeywell agreed. “There’s a good shop I know. Printed with them before.” He paused. “Just need schematics.”
Domino hummed a toneless note. “I’ve got the files. Any of the cables work.”
“Great.” T. Honeywell picked up a miniature Philips-head and began to put Domino back together.
It was a lengthy process, complicated by the fact that quite a few of the screws holding Domino together had stripped holes. A nonzero amount simply wouldn’t go back in. Some of the wires were stripped, too. The more T. Honeywell worked, the more a pit began to grow in his stomach. And this was only Domino’s back, which should be the least worn-and-torn part of it.
“When was the last time you…” he trailed off, trying to come up with the right phrasing, “…performed system maintenance?”
Domino was silent for a long time.
There was only so much T. Honeywell could do. He had a nasty feeling, when the final screw was back in and the self-healing membrane had quickly knitted back together over Domino’s plating, that he had done more damage than Domino had started out with.
“Let’s get to looking at those files,” he said evenly, trying to distract himself.
Domino sat up—stiffly? Was that more stiffly than normal? Had T. Honeywell done something terrible to its motors?—and rolled its shoulders in a shrug. “Works for me.”
They ended up on a sagging couch (on the lower floor: down the stairs and two quick lefts, mind the paint can and watch your head), huddled together over T. Honeywell’s laptop with OpenSCAD open. Huddled, because even with an extension cord, Domino’s hair cable was slightly too short to allow it to lean back, so it was resting its head on T. Honeywell’s shoulder as they browsed the files and T. Honeywell saved each one to a flash drive. Call him old fashioned, he supposed. He just liked the design, which seemed fitting for Domino: a mechanical arm that flexed when it opened up to expose the connector. (He’d printed it back when he joined the Tokyo Lift. Back when he still thought he’d had a chance to play.)
“What’s this?” T. Honeywell wondered aloud as they loaded the .stl for the first file, Domino’s inner left forearm. Going off of Domino’s humanoid appearance, and the back chassis he’d seen earlier, T. Honeywell had expected some simplistic metal core, possibly with ridges and divots for tendon-like cords and motors to attach to, and a ball-and-socket joint with the upper arm. Instead, the file was closer to a human’s radius and ulna, with two crossbars between them. But that wasn’t quite right; the holes carved out between the crossbars were all the same.
“Modular components,” Domino piped up from beside him, voice synthesiser buzzing in a way that felt indescribably human against T. Honeywell’s body. “All connected to the motherboard. Swappable.”
“Fascinating,” T. Honeywell breathed.
Domino lifted an arm into view, then with its other hand pinched the membrane below the wrist, stretching the material into a more translucent state and revealing, surely enough, the slotted chassis pictured in the schematic, and within the visible cavity, a box that must be the modular component itself. As Domino did that, it pushed a button on the box, producing a click sound T. Honeywell had heard multiple times before, but never made sense of until now. “Three on each arm, eight on the chest, that I can swap out myself. One in the back of the neck that I can’t. That’s the personality module; everything else is less important functions, like this one here: it controls how much I talk. My current personality module prefers low levels of dialogue, so I only turn it on when necessary. Official name, loquacity module. I call it the Chatterbox.”
It grinned, clicking off the Chatterbox and lowering its arm, and T. Honeywell laughed.
“Just an on-off switch. Can’t fine-tune it.” Domino buzzed a medium-low note that T. Honeywell thought could mean a sigh.
“Bet I could,” T. Honeywell said, without really meaning it.
“Really.” The antennae on Domino’s head pricked up.
“…I’ll take a look while your body’s getting printed.”
The rest of the files went smoothly; Domino’s odd memory, at least, didn’t affect its data storage. By the time the sun was up, the flash drive had a copy of every one of Domino’s parts, and T. Honeywell closed the lid of his computer with a great sense of accomplishment.
“Running this up to the shop,” he decided, standing up and stretching. “Stay there. I’ll be back.” He didn’t mean to sound rude, and he hoped Domino understood.
Why did he hope Domino understood? He hadn’t cared about what people thought of him for… a long time. Usually, when he came off as rude, that was just the problem for whoever interpreted his brusque responses that way.
He thought about that during the long drive to the shop, and during the brief interaction with the technician where he billed the expenses to the Tokyo Lift, and during the long drive home.
“It’ll be three days,” T. Honeywell announced, plopping down on the couch beside Domino, who hadn’t moved since he left.
“Three days.” Domino made the most dejected buzzing noise T. Honeywell had ever heard. It sounded like a depressed bee. He tried not to snort.
“It’s not the whole siesta,” T. Honeywell tried to reason. “I can put you together in as much time.”
“Six days.” The noise Domino made had such a low tone, it sounded reality-warping.
“If I work on your wires now,” T. Honeywell proposed, “it’ll be five.” He stood up, shuffling over to the nearest workbench. He knew he’d left a pair of wirecutters on this table. Or was it the next one?
“Wrong.”
Domino’s opposition was out of left field. T. Honeywell had thought the android would be jumping at his offer. “Excuse me?”
“You,” Domino intoned from the couch, as T. Honeywell heard the telltale click of the Chatterbox, “have not eaten, drank, or slept in the thirty-two hours I have been present. Efficiency decays exponentially with lack of sustenance and/or rest.”
He crossed his arms, trying to come up with a retort while cross-referencing his memory to make sure Domino wasn’t pulling this out of nowhere like it usually did. But it had been a while since he’d done any of those things. And Domino had showed up… after the Lift’s last game. That was already over a day ago, wasn’t it?
“Additionally,” it intoned, as if its previous condemnation wasn’t enough, “you put unnecessary stress on your right leg when you walk, which could be avoided with a cane.”
He scowled, but had no counter. It was a matter of principle, he wanted to say, but the argument fell flat, picked through even by his own mind. There were people younger than him, visibly healthier than him, who used canes. It wasn’t as if there was anything wrong with doing so. Why didn’t he use one?
“When was the last time you “performed system maintenance”?” it echoed. The worst thing about it was Domino’s perfectly even tone, without a hint of bitterness or malice. It was almost genuine.
Maybe it was.
Click.
T. Honeywell was silent for a long time.
He didn’t remember when he finally fell asleep, or how long for. But he woke up, and Domino was there, sitting on the other end of the couch, the way it was so many hours ago.
Domino nodded when it noticed him awake.
“Eighteen hours,” it remarked.
Breakfast was coffee for him and motor oil for Domino and a convivial silence for the two of them, and within the hour they were back to work, Domino on the table, back open and wires exposed, T. Honeywell posed over him with a toolkit, determination, and enough energy to rival the Sun(Sun).
Work went much, much smoother than T. Honeywell expected. He fell into a rhythm; wrapping wires that were still mostly intact in electrical tape and replacing stripped ones entirely, reconnecting those that had fallen out of their sockets or snapped. Before the sun had risen (T. Honeywell had awoken during the early stages of night) the entirety of Domino’s upper body was sporting shiny new wirework.
It flexed an arm admiringly, slowly bending each finger. “Didn’t work before,” it noted, tapping its left ring finger and manipulating its joints in ways that both awed and disgusted T. Honeywell.
The legs were more difficult, with plating under the membrane and tensile cords under the plating before the motor wires could finally be reached. But T. Honeywell was not deterred, and with the help of Domino and caffeine, the legs were re-wired by noon.
Domino sat back on the couch, sipping motor oil. T. Honeywell sat back on the couch, sipping the last dregs of the coffeepot.
“Two more days.” The pitch of Domino’s buzz was low, despondent. “Might die of boredom.”
“We could watch something,” T. Honeywell suggested. He reached over to the next table for his laptop.
“Watch something.” Domino sounded indifferent as ever, but its antennae were pricked. It rested its head on T. Honeywell’s shoulder as he booted up the computer. Even though this time it didn’t need to.
“You choose.” He hoped the terrifying, delightful feeling welling up in his chest at Domino’s contact didn’t make it out through his voice.
T. Honeywell had seen Mobile Suit Gundam before. So had Domino, by the way it mentioned its “favourite part” coming up every time they started a new episode. But the familiarity was calming, rather than the choking boredom he usually got from rewatching things.
At some point, he must have fallen asleep again, or at least dozed off, because his eyes drifted open, and Domino’s head was on his shoulder and his head was on Domino’s. Slowly, he raised his head, then thought better of it and laid it back down. Domino didn’t seem to mind. Time passed indistinctly through glazed eyes; all he could concentrate on was how warm the processors and motors made the android’s body.
Abruptly, he straightened up. There was something he had promised to do.
“I need to fix the Chatterbox.”
It was simple, really. He didn’t even have to touch any programming, for which he was glad; just replaced the binary button with a scaling switch, the one resistor with a set of five, which Domino had said was a good number: not enough to get indecisive about, but enough to have more options than “less” or “more”.
T. Honeywell crossed his fingers as Domino installed the module, hoping he hadn’t gotten anything wrong. What if he’d wired something backwards, and it was about to short-circuit? What if he’d damaged the chip?
Click. Domino flipped the switch to 2.
“You kept the sound.” Domino grinned after the statement, evidently pleased with how it had just expressed itself. “I like this a lot.”
T. Honeywell exhaled, all of the nervous energy from moments ago pouring into an exhausted smile. “I’m glad.”
The third day passed much the same as the second, with Domino leaning on T. Honeywell as they watched Gundam together. With precision that wasn’t quite surprising but still startled T. Honeywell, every four hours on the dot Domino would ping and remind him to get up to drink or eat.
It was around dusk when Domino reached over to the laptop and pressed the power button. T. Honeywell had drifted into a haze, and so it took him a few moments to process what had just happened. Belatedly, he turned to Domino, who had raised its head off his shoulder.
“Get some sleep,” it said. “Tomorrow you’re fixing me, remember?”
“I’m not tired,” he muttered. He was tired, but it was always so hard to explain to people that that alone didn’t mean he could fall asleep. Nine out of ten times he tried, he’d just lie in bed for hours and hours, staring at the ceiling, agonisingly waiting for the hours to pass. So he generally tended to work through the night, and then the day and then the night again, until his body finally gave in and he’d wake up some unspecified amount of time later, and repeat.
Domino crossed its arms. “You’re yawning.”
Somehow, T. Honeywell figured out that he wasn’t going to get anywhere by arguing. He stood up and made his way to the mattress in the corner of the room, turning the lights off on the way there. Domino’s luminescent yellow eyes followed him until he laid down and half-heartedly pulled the blanket over himself.
Maybe now would be the one-in-tenth time.
He didn’t feel well-rested when he got up again, but at least Domino was happy with him. Or maybe it was happy that, surely enough, T. Honeywell had a message on his answering machine that the parts are ready to pick up.
When he pulled up to the Legscraper with a borrowed minivan full of new chassis, he was surprised to see Domino out in front.
“Thought I told you to stay sitting, not to compress things worse.” He tried picking up a box and winced. The parts were lighter than what Domino was currently using, but that wasn’t a very high bar.
“Rather you didn’t fall down the stairs and become unable to fix me.” It lifted a stack of three, shifting the weight. “Take it easy. I’ll get this.”
It took much less time for Domino to take everything down the stairs than it would’ve T. Honeywell. He stood at the workbench that they’d used all those times before, fidgeting with a screwdriver.
“Shutting down completely for this,” Domino reported as it sprawled on the bench. “Easier than disengaging every motor consciously.”
“Sure,” T. Honeywell said, then paused. “…You trust me that much?” It was meant to be a joke, but came out more of a genuine question.
“I trust you,” Domino said freely. “Have since day one.”
Some strange weight lifted from T. Honeywell’s shoulders.
Domino gave a thumbs-up. “Power button’s on the motherboard.”
T. Honeywell worked as quickly and efficiently as he could without making mistakes. It was odd working alone, and he found he didn’t quite enjoy it. He tried to chalk it up to the fact that Domino’s outer membrane didn’t self-heal when it was powered down, or that the motors were unnaturally floppy, or that in general he felt like a mortician. But he’d taken apart robots before, including some very near and dear to him. It was something different.
When he took a long gulp of coffee, he couldn’t deny it to himself: he missed the presence of someone else next to him. A certain someone else sipping motor oil out of one of T. Honeywell’s dingier mugs.
He couldn’t be falling for Domino, could he? It was an android, right? Could Domino even reciprocate? It certainly “liked” and even “loved” TV shows, but was that the same? Why had he used the term “reciprocate”? Didn’t that mean he did have feelings?
He shook his head to clear his thoughts. Domino trusted him, and here he was ruminating like a teenager just finding out he was gay. Back to work.
(He worked a little faster when he reminded himself that he’d be seeing Domino again at the end of it.)
Four limbs, five un-and-reinstalled personality-tweaking modules including the Chatterbox, six outer platings, countless motors and tensile cords, countless-squared fiddly wires that T. Honeywell was very glad he’d repaired earlier rather than now, and one midlife sexuality crisis later, T. Honeywell had moved Domino from one body to the next.
With bated breath, he connected one of Domino’s cords to a power outlet and hovered his finger over the switch. A single mistake in wiring, in breadboard connectors, in motors, could have catastrophic consequences. At best, it would render a limb inoperable. At worst, a short-circuit could….
Domino had trusted him. And T. Honeywell hadn’t failed Domino yet.
He turned the power on.
A few months later, T. Honeywell, resident basement roboticist for the Tokyo Lift, sat back on a sagging couch, sipping coffee, computer tuned to the televised broadcast of Season 21’s Opening Day. On his shoulder rested the head of Domino Bootleg, resident basement robot. Against the couch laid a simple metal cane.
“Can you believe this,” T. Honeywell grumbled. “They don’t even give a speech about the Sun-Sun. Just “Play Ball” like usual.”
Domino shrugged beside him, shoulder digging into T. Honeywell’s arm. The Lift scored. “You jealous?”
He turned away from the game to look at Domino and hummed indistinctly. “Sure.”
Domino buzzed back a note that matched his tone. “Me too. Like to test these new parts on the field.” Domino gestured towards itself. “But if they brought me up, you’d be lonely.”
“If they brought me up, you’d be lonely,” countered T. Honeywell.
“Both can be true.” Domino raised its head off his shoulder, tilting its face towards him. Their eyes met.
“Sure,” T. Honeywell conceded, and leaned in to give his partner a kiss.