Chapter Text
.
.
When Gigi got sick, she shrugged it off.
In this age of cybernetics and implants, getting sick is a passing feeling. She’d avoided a lot of those in her childhood. The metal arms, the wires and cords and scary looking ports, everything that made people more robot than human- she’d avoided it. The problem came with heavy avoidance and finding that technology wasn’t waiting for her and how skittish she got around needles and the like. In order to power on her school laptop, she needs a wrist port, which she doesn’t have. She had to borrow her deskmate's hand constantly with an awkward laugh. Vehicles needed to be plugged in via the same port. It’s all about special ID now. Electrical ID, network ID, having your very own imprint in a digital world.
All her friends were getting tattoos. One had a port on his neck, a scary thing she couldn’t stop staring at when he talked. Did it hurt? Does it still hurt?
She doesn’t cave to peer pressure. She sticks to her guns- implants are weird. She doesn’t want any of that on her body. It’s a lot of money to buy the fake impact, the portable one attached to a wristband. It’s nearly the same price as her laptop. It makes her laugh at the absurdity of it, at times, the morbid amusement of having to pay twice over to use something she already owns.
The car thing wasn’t an issue. She was determined only to use transit her whole life if it came down to it.
Her whole life boils down to a piece of paper. It’s one that folds out in a scary way, explaining in critical detail her condition. Condition it says, as if she feels sick at all. She’d gone to the clinic to check on knee pain and had walked away with a scary amount of words detailing just how short the rest of her life is actually going to be.
There’s solutions. Surgery that involves a low survival rate, but it’s a quick overnight procedure. A recovery home, where she might get better, or it’ll get worse. There was the A.L.T.R. program, Aerial Land Traversal Robots that were designed for transportation and cargo. She spends long hours reading through the website. The details feel printed into her brain. The entire program is paid off by the robot itself- by the concept itself. She’d be put to sleep in a tank of healing chemicals and while in a coma, she’ll be able to consciously move a robot. At her will. Like a god. The website has pictures of smiling people hugging their families and doctors giving her their recommendations. She’s up till morning on a few days looking up lawsuits and horror stories.
She doesn’t follow through with any solution. She feels fine. For a whole month she continues on as normal, fighting to remain the same as she was. She doesn’t want to change. She wants to pretend things are fine.
The solution is made for her. It’s one night in the middle of autumn, right after midnight. She’d been playing video games when nausea struck her. It was ignorable at first, aside from muting her energy. It kept turning over and over in her stomach until she was throwing down her controller and racing to the bathroom. She thinks she ate something bad.
She pukes up blood instead of food.
The next morning, she calls the A.L.T.R. office.
.
.
She should have gone with the surgery. It’s a joking thought, mostly because she’s too afraid of death to consider it seriously. She has to go through eight visitations to even prepare herself for what’s to come. Each time, she thinks, I can’t do this. Multiple doctors sit with her, giving her comforting smiles, telling her that she won’t feel a thing. She won’t even feel like herself. You’ll feel brand new!
She wants to feel like Gigi, not ‘new’. New Gigi is a motorcycle. She only gets to see it once as herself, from behind the glass of a view deck. There’s about nine A.L.T.R.’s in the garage. Her primary care doctor gestures to one that’s orange, built on four wheels with a flat tail and says that’ll be you.
Gigi feels nothing for it. She stares at it to try and summon something, but it’s just a vehicle to her. It’s not her. She can’t even remember how it looks an hour later as she’s being ushered into a glass case. There’s four doctors moving around her. The bedding feels slimy and strange. She’s afraid, as she hears the machine whir to life, as glass slides over her with a hiss. She doesn’t remember what she said last. She tries to say something, but any witty last words are forgotten around the electrical haze in her mind.
Her first few hours as a machine are a nightmare of confusion. Everything feels backwards, remade for her and awkward to figure out. She panics when her head doesn’t move the way she’s used to, when instead her body is forced into this bent position. She feels like cattle, unable to look where she wants but directly in front of her. Information keeps coming to her too rapidly. She can detect the temperature of a room, the air quality of it, even how many people are around her. Her hands- her wheels are chained to the floor to prevent her from flying off her handles. She wants to move, but moving makes her body warm up to life and the engine roars. There’s a metal brace on her handlebars that prevents her from speeding through the wall. Engineers are crouched around her, speaking to her soothingly, checking her over.
Her tail is a wild thing she can’t control. It knocks out a shelf and a chair before they strap it down to the floor. She can’t feel it when they touch her. When they adjust the metal plates on her body- this robot- she doesn’t feel it all. She’s numb to all sensations aside from sight and sound.
“It’s a learning process.” An engineer had said in some vain effort to ease her into it. “You’ll get used to it.”
She doesn’t get used to it.
Day one rewards her with patient smiles for things she breaks. They take the boot off her and the chains, but she ends up almost breaking someone's leg getting an idea of how her motor control works. The transition is a success, they say. She doesn’t know what success is supposed to look like. She flexes her elbow, but she doesn’t have one, and instead she leans to the side. She’s aware of the kind of controls she has. There’s a button that turns on the radio. A speedometer. In the hull of her spine, just below the rider seat, her heart rests. A plasma battery barely strong enough to support an A.L.T.R., but perfect for the size of the vehicle she’s entrusted with.
For everyone, it’s another day at work. For Gigi, it feels like a bad dream. Other Altrs cruise around her, adapting to a rider and their job far quicker than her. She feels like she’s the only one stumbling out of the starting line. The A.L.T.R. contract was simple- she was comatose, recovering, and her work as an A.L.T.R. would cover all those expenses and a bonus if it took longer to heal. As a motorcycle type, her job was taxi work.
The garage she was in featured eleven other Altrs. Half of them were motorcycle types like herself, sleek and brand new. The others were larger, car shaped Altrs. Big, bulky, and expensive. It wasn’t an easily accessible service. Gigi’s first few customers renting her out ended up returning her, citing poor cooperation. It’s not her fault that she doesn’t like someone sitting on her! It made her uncomfortable!
Unfortunately, only the engineers have ComPro wristwatches that she’s able to communicate with. It felt like she was talking to a brick wall. Not only was speaking through it uncanny, it felt unreal. She could visualize it in her mind like a black box that she could fill with words, then those words would appear on the wristwatch. She was texting but it required focus, otherwise she’d end up spamming the watch with emoji and nonsensical symbols. More often than not, the engineers have their ComPro muted while her mind cooks up a million messages to go absolutely nowhere.
The customers. That’s the worst part. She can’t stand how some sit, or how some drive, or ugh, how they touch and move her around. She has autonomy in most cases, but she has a port jacket in her interface. Someone can take their little USB out of their wrist and plug into her and it swims her brain. She can feel like they’re thinking like her, or seeing her, or looking right at her. She hated it the first time, her tail recoiling and smacking the customer clean off her. She couldn’t handle it and it made the engineers frown. She got less customers. Less traction. One of them sat down with her, gentle-like, and told her you won’t make enough to cover your medical expenses. It’s not like they’ll stop the procedure, it’s just a warning of the colossal amount of debt she’ll land herself in.
She tries to grit her teeth and take it. To deal with customers, even if they make her impatient and twitchy. She feels like writhing, angry, uncomfortable, as she’s driven through the streets like a joy ride. The guy she’s carting around isn’t drunk but he sure acts like liquor is his favorite pastime. He’s got three other biker friends riding her tail, smacking at it with drumsticks and hooting at the metal clanks it makes.
It takes one slip of the footrest, one stumble, and the motorcycle is careening off the road into an alleyway dumpster. It’s not a bad wreck. She doesn’t feel a thing aside from the pressure of her nose crunched like a soda can. Her windshield is cracked. The front plates of the motorcycle are tarnished. The dumb guy is laughing as he rights her back on her wheels and rides her back out again-
Another crash, this time into a traffic sign. It leaves a massive gash in her flank. It’s outside a bar they park at. She has no idea the rental fines on the damages for her. When they come back out of the bar, she’s had enough, and she uses her tail like a baseball bat on one of their heads.
She doesn’t know how a motorcycle can be reprimanded but she is. She’s frustrated. The engineers try to tell her she’ll be okay if she just tries. I am trying! All of this sucks! Don’t you get it?!
Her fuse is short. Her next customer is a guy with sunglasses and a face carved like stone. He goes driving out to the suburbs to pick up his girlfriend. Gigi doesn’t want to go there and hard breaks on him, nearly sending him out of his seat and into a fatal crash. He gets mad at her, shoves her to the side of the road and leaves her there. She’s alone for an hour before he returns with his truck and two of his friends. They haul her into the bed and chain her down. It’s there that one of them gets technical, unscrewing a plate on her side and cutting off her A.L.T.R. tracker. They drive her out of the city. She tries to fight back, her tail snapping around like a fish, waiting for someone to be unlucky enough to be within range. She’s not lucky. She feels like she’s being disassembled. They don’t even take anything, they’re just unscrewing parts and tossing them aside, seeing how she works. They get too close to her battery and she shrieks the gas, letting the tires burn from how hard she runs them. They cut her loose from the truck and let her fall, tumbling down a desert hill and into a pit of trash. She’s way off the beaten road. She hears the trunk tailgate close. The rev of an engine as it disappears.
It’s fine. She thinks. She wonders if this is how skeletons feel, unable to move, dead, the bones of a robot that’s been flayed alive. I’ll be rescued eventually.
.
.
Three days pass in that ditch.
Loneliness is a nauseating thing, coupled with boredom that makes her brain numb. She’s stuck in the same position, unable to look around on account of her damage. She can’t even look up properly to see the stars. She’s stuck with her nose buried against a smashed six-pack of beer. There’s a broken billboard and other trash pinning her wheels against the ground. Old junk.
Footsteps.
Gigi doesn’t dare to hope. If it’s anyone out here, it’s that asshole with his stupid truck again. She’ll invent a way to bite him to death. She’s too scared of what will happen if she can’t defend herself.
“Woah.” A girl's voice breaks the stupor, quiet under the rustling footsteps. Gigi hears her slide down the hill, coming to a halt when her heels meet Gigi’s seat. “You’re new. What are you? Let me get a good look at you.”
A careful foot stepping over her. In hazy sunlight, she can make out messy blonde hair. She’s wearing a jacket, zipped up to her chin as she bends over to look at Gigi. She hooks her fingers into Gigi’s broken shoulder plate and lifts, huffing as she frees Gigi’s wheels from the garbage. With tremendous effort, she’s pushing the motorcycle to roll. Gigi can feel how flat her tires are.
The girl doesn’t sound disappointed by this. She’s whispering, “Holy cow, are you…? This can’t be a 700, they don’t look this stylized. An XR 800?”
A what? Gig thinks woozily. She thinks I’m a normal bike?
“You look sleek as hell though.” The girl grumbles. “Unless they were taking you apart for scrap? Damn. Wait. Should I check you for drugs?”
Gigi nearly wails. Oh god, they stuffed me with drugs?!
The girl says, “I’m sure it’s fine. I can see what’s wrong when I get you back to the shop.” A strained exhale as she pushes against the handlebars. Gigi helps as best as she can, even with flat tires and broken equipment, getting what she can to move at least helps the girl wheel her out of the ditch. She’s wiping at her forehead with the back of her hand.
“Sheesh.” The girl runs a hand over the dented metal. “You’re gonna need some work, girl.”
Gigi doesn’t know why that makes her perk up. The wounded part of her that’s had to lay on her side for three days really like the way girl was said. She moves herself forward when her rescuer pushes her along. She pauses for breaks occasionally, panting, but walking her along with determination.
Twenty minutes later, Gigi is being wheeled into the parking lot of a gas station. An auto repair shop is connected to it, a garage that opens when the girl punches in a code. She ushers Gigi inside, carefully steering her around the toolbox on the ground. There’s a workbench hugging one side of the shop and two car lifts taking up garage spots. Gigi isn’t placed on either lift, but moved to the workbench and placed against it.
The girl steps back, her shoulders sagging with relief, “Agh, I’m tired, that was too much. I need to get some water. I’ll be back out later for you.”
Gigi is, unfortunately, facing the wall. She can hear the garage door close and the girl’s footsteps as she goes into the shop through a door. It leaves her alone, blinking rapidly, at a loss for words at her situation.
I am kidnapped. She surmises. It’s, funnily enough, not such a bad thought.
.
.