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“Thanks for doing this for me… again,” Rosie murmured, her vocal synthesizer crackling with nerves. “I’d try to go to the repair bay myself, but they’re always full or closed when I go.”
“It’s no trouble, darling,” Casey replied, though obviously it was trouble. Casey’s ruddy skin was still covered in oil and grease from her long shifts in engineering and mechanics, and the lines of her body suggested tiredness. No matter how many times Rosie brought her carefully baked, not reconstituted, peppermint chip cookies, it never felt like enough. “Let’s get you all fixed up.”
Casey’s apartment was tiny—all of the mechanics’ apartments were tiny, to be fair. Rosie’s wasn’t much better, but at least she had a separate room for recharging. She could see Casey’s bed in one corner, the bed sheets mussed and pillow askew, and it wasn’t helping her to keep her mind on this is just what friends and neighbors do sorts of thoughts. Even more when Casey took her by her waist—nearly touching the faded “PZ” engraved into the plastine—and lifted her up onto the counter, her hands warm and callused, fingers thick enough to even make an android’s mouth water. Rosie spread her legs—only so that Casey could get closer to her. The mechanic needed the space to work.
“So,” Casey smirked in that way she always did, her bare arms akimbo, “what seems to be the trouble, sweetheart?”
Rosie’s face felt hot, and so did the rest of her—too hot, she wasn’t supposed to feel like that, like the sleek lines of her chest plate were about to literally melt off.
“There’s something wrong with my fans or coolant or something. Maybe there’s a line chipped? I don’t know.” Rosie’s fans hitched as Casey’s hand comfortingly or absentmindedly reached down and rested on her thigh. “I keep running way too hot—like a fever, if I were human.”
The porthole above Casey’s bed suddenly caught on vivid tangerine fire as the station finally cleared the planet they were orbiting enough that the light from the nearby star overtook the faintly buzzing electric lights. It bathed Casey’s face in a deep red glow, almost a pink, because she was facing away from the sunrise.
She was facing toward Rosie.
Casey hummed in response, not seeming to notice the way the light suddenly made her look deeply inviting, the contrast of colors a feast for Rosie’s visual sensors. Her dark eyes instead trailed down Rosie’s abdomen, and then she leaned in close.
“Well, I’ll just have to take a look then, won’t I?”
Casey reached around Rosie, the ghost of a hug, an embrace a little to the left, and Rosie stiffened, as much as that meant anything for someone made of plastine and metal. Casey’s fingers traced down Rosie’s back, down the dip that represented her spine, and found the switch for her nervous system near the base of it, flipping it neatly. Rosie remained perfectly still for it even though she was sure that if this continued, her CPU would start to smoke and whir audibly. It always did—thank whatever existed out there that Casey didn’t seem to have noticed yet.
“Thank you,” Rosie whispered, parts of the audio dropping out before they even got out of her voice box. The sensation of heat running like lava through her instantly cut off, in its place a void that was comfort just for the absence of its inverse.
Casey’s lip quirked, and she ran her hand through her hair, streaking the oily black with more of the same except the grease shone iridescent against the dawning light. She was close enough that Rosie could easily distinguish a drop of sweat as it ran down the tendon in her neck. “Don’t thank me yet, darling. I still gotta find out what the issue is. Are you ready?”
Rosie nodded, grateful that she couldn’t feel the way that surely, her entire heating system went haywire for the combination of those looks and that voice who belonged to someone who she could never repay and who never wanted to be repaid. Rosie’s abdominal plating was pulled away by gentle fingers, revealing the mess of cords and tubing and wiring and metal frames that made her function. The powder blue plate was set on the counter top, face down. Inside, it was a dull coppery color, no beauty or shine.
Luckily, Rosie’s attention was drawn away again by Casey when she leaned closer and down, seeing what she had to work with—seeing the malfunctioning core of Rosie.
“Your coolant line is a little… sputtery,” Casey said, fingers tenderly caressing—professionally, professionally or platonically caressing—said tube inside Rosie’s chest cavity, where her ribs would be if she were flesh like Casey. Rosie couldn’t feel it, but she could see it well enough.
And whose fault is that? Rosie wanted to retort, except she was too busy practically cracking the tile edge of the counter top as Casey’s face got so, so close to the plastine silhouette of her breast molds, close enough that if her nerves had been turned on, Rosie was sure she would have been able to feel her breath there.
“Mhmm,” she replied, instead of adding anything to the conversation.
“I think I’ve got the right size to replace it, if you want me to.” Casey snorted to herself, pulling back enough that Rosie could see her teeth the same color as the champagne they gave to high-end guests who disembarked briefly from their fancy cruiseline-class ships. “Unless you like leaking all over yourself like this.”
Was that Rosie’s CPU? It must have been. Though she was sure that Casey was so far into work mode—humans seemed to have patterns of behavior, same as androids—that she hadn’t caught the… innuendo, it didn’t stop her language processor from gifting her with several other contexts those words might be spoken in. Rosie’s legs twitched at the hips, and she had to give another command to those joints to abort their intended movement—to latch around Casey’s hips.
“I think my boss wouldn’t like it much if I stood from reception and there was a puddle there,” Rosie finally managed.
Casey hummed and then knelt down suddenly, opening a cabinet below and using the door to nudge Rosie’s legs even farther apart than they already were. She rummaged around, but Rosie was focused between her legs, on Casey’s dark head of hair, short and slick with sweat and streaked with grease.
“Found it, love—the tubing and the fasteners. Let’s get you in tip-top shape again.”
Casey stood up again, and got to work. Rosie loved watching Casey work, as much as it was terrible for her. She loved watching Casey’s forearms flex, all sinuous and organic and dusted with dark hair. She loved the focused glint in Casey’s eyes when she clamped down Rosie’s tubing or soldered together a new piece of plating. She loved the little journeys Casey’s lips went through, all the little twists and turns as she made Rosie serviceable again, with only what odds and ends she’d managed to scrounge up out of the scraps from the engineering bay. Casey was brilliant, an absolute master of her craft.
So, how did the universe conspire to get her here, to a space station out in the middle of nowhere that only served as a filling station for cruise ships on their way to much more prosperous and prestigious locales? How did the chips fall so that her hands were all the way up in a reception droid’s guts, patiently servicing spools of tubing and wire to stop entropy from taking its due?
Again, as she often did, Rosie wondered how Casey had gotten to this point. She herself had been manufactured and sent to this station at some point, one Rho-Zeta of a million who could generally only stuff a semblance of uniqueness into the cracks between the programming, but humans tended to make choices, didn’t they? She had seen, one time, an open box that was usually tucked in a corner under the bed. There had been printed pictures of Casey—or who Casey used to be, with strangers Rosie didn’t know, on some far-flung planet with a real atmosphere of azure blue. Being a woman suited Casey well, Rosie thought. She looked happier here than she had in her old pictures.
But Casey had looked downright morose when she’d noticed Rosie looking at those things, so Rosie didn’t dare ask about any of it. She wanted to, though. She wanted to ask Casey about her past, and in return to give her own secret away: Rho-Zetas weren’t designed for reception work. When she’d asked Casey to remold her chest plate to have the shape of human breasts, she’d lied about hers being a manufacturing defect. When she said she didn’t mind that the consignment shop didn’t sell dresses for androids, she was lying. The powder blue of her plastine wasn’t its original color; she’d painted it over how she liked it, using scrupulously scrounged tips from her coworker droids who all seemed content with their programming to buy the paint. She couldn’t go to the sanctioned repair bay because they would melt her parts back to the manufacturer’s specifications; Casey was the only one who understood her, even before Rosie knew that in some intimate way they were the same.
Most of all, she wanted to tell Casey how much she liked it when Casey’s fingers were on her, whether that was for maintenance or a hug or that thing Casey did sometimes when she was very pleased—she would reach forward and squeeze her hand around Rosie’s upper arm, fingers flexing against inflexible plastine as they chatted.
Little nonsense syllables fell from Casey’s lips as she worked, as her hands cradled Rosie’s insides and put her back in order, all gentleness and restrained strength even though Rosie couldn’t feel it. There was a clamp, a snip of the tubing, the splutter of coolant against wretchedly-hot insides, all coming together to make a symphony Rosie was fairly used to. It seemed nearly every couple of weeks something had malfunctioned; it was the price of getting older, she thought. Fortunately she had such a good friend as Casey, even if Rosie’s one-sided, silly little crush always kept her a little tongue-tied (a human expression that made little sense for Rosie’s physical form, but nevertheless compelled her) around the suave, ever-affable mechanic her servos lit up for.
Casey’s hands drew out of Rosie’s chest cavity, and without taking her gaze away from the tube she’d repaired, she absentmindedly wiped her fingers on her undershirt, staining it with coolant. Rosie resisted the urge to squirm when that dark gaze traced up to her face, over the plastine plating and dull mouse brown camera lenses representing eyes. They kept eye contact for one, two, three seconds, the constant isochronal ticking from Rosie’s real-time clock the only sound other than Casey’s breath, the slight shifting of fabric as her undershirt stretched with the movement of her ribcage.
Casey took up Rosie’s abdominal plate with one hand, and with skillful fingers placed it back, hiding Rosie’s guts again. She reached behind Rosie again, and Rosie only knew that she was flipping her sensory switch once it had already happened, when her CPU found itself suddenly under its normal load again, as the temperature of her insides and the outside was fed to her, as she became aware of the firm press of the tile counter top underneath her thighs and the feeling of Casey’s workpants rubbing rough on the inside of her thighs.
Only for a moment, though. Casey stepped back languidly, knelt on one knee again like she had to pull out the equipment she’d needed, but instead she pressed her lips against the seam of Rosie’s plating, where she’d taken Rosie apart and put her back together again. She always did that—she kissed it like it was a scar, though it was so faint as to nearly be invisible because that was how it was designed. It stood out now more than it had when Rosie was young, when she had still gone to the sanctioned repair bay, before she had taken it upon herself to ask Casey to modify her so that she liked being.
Rosie was happy that Casey was proud of her hard work, glad for the way she liked to appreciate her craftsmanship a moment after each repair job. Rosie just didn’t know why her nerves needed to be on for this—all it did was give her sensory feedback that made her insides do cartwheels.
Casey’s lips lingered for several moments, and when she spoke Rosie could practically feel the drag of them from how they were chapped. “Can you feel this? You’re all put together again, good as new. I didn’t fuck anything up in there, I promise.”
“You never do,” Rosie assured, though there had been a few close calls in recent memory—not Casey’s fault, just entropy’s. “I’m fine, thank you. I feel—” So much, all for you. “—great, really.”
Casey stood again, tall and broad in a way that made Rosie’s mind static-y, a soft smirk playing on those lips which had just been against Rosie’s plastine, leaving an imprint of their warmth. She raised her fingers and wiggled them playfully. “Of course you do—these fingers are magic, baby.”
Rosie felt warm, but nowhere near the boil she had before Casey had fixed her. “Mhmm.”
Casey laughed, smooth and genuine, and she leaned against the counter, showing off the long line of her back from her shoulders to where her undershirt disappeared into her work pants. She snatched a cookie off the plate Rosie had brought, breaking off a piece of it into her mouth. Rosie liked watching her, watching Casey enjoy her baking. It hadn’t been nearly so pleasant in the beginning—there was a lot of trial and error in baking, for a being that couldn’t taste or smell or eat. But Rosie was pretty good at following recipes now, and so Casey let out a throaty groan of pleasure upon tasting the sweet treat.
“These aren’t going to last the day, you know that? You’ve gotten too good at this.” Casey’s gaze flicked from Rosie’s sleek face to the porthole where the vivid golden light of dawn streamed in unabashed. “Ah, shit, it’s that late? I gotta go to bed—got another shift in seven hours. Hate to boot you out, but unless you want to watch me sleep…”
Casey looked meaningfully at Rosie, and Rosie understood exactly what she meant. She articulated her mouth into a small smile.
“It’s alright; I could use a charge so I don’t have to plug myself in at the reception desk anyway.”
Casey sighed. “Sure, yeah, that makes sense.”
Casey helped her down from the counter, which was very kind of her despite the fact that Rosie didn’t strictly need the assistance—even if her nerves had still been off, the motors and pressure pumps in her joints worked unless there was a catastrophic failure. And then, they were in the door, unsealing it and looking out into the grimy hallway that characterized the dorms in the lower levels.
“See you again next week, sweetheart.” Casey pulled Rosie in for a quick hug, and because Rosie’s nerves were still coming back online, she nearly thought Casey had kissed her temple. It made her squeak in a mortifying manner, the electronic sound shrill and echoing. “Let me know if anything feels or looks weird anytime, any hour, yeah? If I’m working you can just come down to engineering; I can give you my access code.”
“Mhmm! I will, Casey. Thank you so much!” Rosie pulled back sharply, fearing what she might do, how she might ruin their friendship if she were allowed to linger in the undeniably warm, undeniably human embrace of the woman she had such a deep affinity for—a crush, even.
Love, even.
“I always… I appreciate you,” Rosie mumbled, her voice scuffing out at points, and that was as close as she could get for fear that her romantic inclination might topple what they already had. This was enough, more than enough.
Rosie retreated down the hall, warm but not boiling underneath her plating. She pushed the button for the lift at the end of the corridor, careful not to let herself crush anything. She turned her head eighty-five degrees to the left, and caught the sight of Casey watching her, relaxing against the door frame with her arms crossed and posture relaxed. Casey was wasting precious moments of sleep to make sure Rosie got on okay—even though humans were worse with inadequate sleep than droids were with inadequate charge.
Until next week, provided nothing went wrong. And nothing would—Casey truly was a masterful mechanic, better than any Rosie had ever seen. Rosie almost wished that she was a little less skilled, so that Rosie would have an excuse to see her more often.
On that thought, the lift opened, and Rosie waved at her mechanic one last time before getting on.