A Displaced Samurai

We agreed Wendy would stay at the shelter until we found another place for her to stay. For now, we cleared out most of the bunk beds from one of the shelter dorms. That made things awfully cramped in the other rooms, and I’d have to get rid of some of the beds.

On the other hand, I ordered some other furniture in a style Arina had said she would like. Because I wanted Arina to have a place here, not only for her sake but also because I liked having her around. So Wendy’s current room would become Arina’s eventually. For the moment though, Wendy would make do with very spartan furnishing.

After moving the furniture I had dinner in the form of some of the cardboard-textured synthetic rations given out by Sanctuary. Wendy watched without envy, she knew the stuff was good to fuel your organism but not much of a delight.

Swallowing the last bite, I brought up an existential question. Namely backups.

“Wendy, I can offer you a sort of digital immortality. That is, a backup of your mind. I don’t know how the Macks uploaded you, but now that it happened? The AI in my augs has a program to extract a copy. If something bad happens to you, I could upload the copy to a new robot you. That other Wendy could then carry on for you.”

Still downplaying me as a stupid Little Aug? I’m wounded.

So Elya was jealous? Or was she only playing at it to tease me? I would have to think about it, but now Wendy had my attention. She was hemming and hawing a bit, but then she said

“I think I would like that, but I’m not entirely sure about it. I’d like to sleep on it, well sort of. The ramifications are so huge, I can’t imagine all of them yet. Would the new Wendy still be me?”

Heh. Sort of sleeping. Arina had told me that she did not really sleep any more, but she still needed some downtime to process her experiences. From other people’s point of view, she was awake 24/7 and always available to talk to. In many ways, she would make an excellent soldier even if her old teammates had left her behind in terms of raw power.

Wendy piped up again “Say, has anyone, well, tried out the whole backup thing?”

“No. You are the second person in a position where that would be possible, and Arina has declined. Said it would make her, quote ‘feel like a thing to be manufactured and traded’.”

“Oh. That is an aspect I had not even considered. Now I really need to sort of sleep on it!”

With a smirk I asked “Want a sleeping companion?”

Wendy looked as perplexed as I had expected.

With a big grin now, I pulled out the Kuddly Kitty I had manufactured the week before. It had roughly the size of a Main Coone and the weight to match, around nine kilograms or twenty pounds for the metrically challenged. But the extra large head made it look a bit kitten-ish and quite cute despite the size. The yellow-orange and black stripes intentionally matched a popular cartoon character. “Meet Garfield!”

“Oh god”, Wendy replied, “I thought you would, uh..”

“Just kidding. But I’d like your honest opinion on the critter” I said and activated Garfield. He hopped into Wendy’s lap, who caught him with a delighted squeal.

“He is adorable. Maybe a bit too heavy as a playmate for really small children, but if you could make more of him, he might be a bestseller!”

“Apparently, the original manufacturer failed to sell many of them, but that might have been due to excessive prices.”

Five months’ wages for the average employee.

I subvocalized to Elya “Who is the rights holder these days?”

Garfield the cartoon character belongs to Paramount. And despite skirting bankruptcy, they still fight ferociously to keep their copyrights. It will probably be a losing strategy, but we are not there yet.

The rights to the Kuddly Kitty still belong to the bankrupt company. And before you ask, the company is now in AI-administrative receivership. I could easily get that glorified pocket calculator to sell the rights to you cheaply. Say, for one credit.

I subvocalized again “Let’s do that!”

In the meantime, Wendy was happily playing with Garfield, who had started to purr. He gave a pretty good imitation of a large living tomcat.

As I had no other pressing needs, I started printing a DataSilo Mark II with the maximum capacity possible. If Wendy would agree to the backup scheme, the DataSilo would be large enough to hold a backup of her mind. In theory, it would even make her artificial rebirth possible without me, but that needed further arrangements.

Friday, September 25th, 2048

I spent the morning mostly on the telephone, looking for an apartment for Wendy. Her own finances still needed untangling, and she was not very comfortable with my offer to unleash Elya on her financial affairs. Also, I had promised to help out.

Meanwhile, Wendy was looking on the internet for people buying surplus bunk beds. When she showed me an ad by a potential buyer, I did a double take. That sounded a lot like Alan, my sniper buddy from the militia. So I just called him. “Hey Alan, is that you who is looking for cheap bunk beds on BarterBoard?”

“Yes, are you selling?”

“I have plenty of these.” I said and sent him a picture. “Really cheap too. I don’t like waste, otherwise I might just trash them.”

“Great. I could use four of them, that is, eight sleeping places in total. Is it OK if Roger and I come over tomorrow to get them? Say, three PM?”

“Sure, see you tomorrow.”

Saturday, September 26th, 2048

Roger and Alan showed up as agreed on, Ellen in tow, and I introduced them to Wendy. We helped them to load up the beds, and Alan started to flirt with Wendy. Using horrible pickup lines too. Such as “How much does a polar bear weigh? I don’t know either but it breaks the ice. Wanna get a drink?”

Wendy demurred “I can’t drink right now. Medical condition.”

That was perhaps not the smartest way to try and hide being a robot. All three of our visitors did a double take. Roger remarked “I’ve heard stories about girls captured by the Macks that came back as robots.”

Wendy’s eyes shot daggers at me “Are you having fun telling everyone about your robot doll? How many other people did you tell?”

Well, that cat was out of the bag. I answered “I was not talking about you. My robot doll is officially Arina.”

Next, Ellen the gossip queen demanded with an unholy gleam in her eyes “What, robot girls? Robot lovers? Gimme the dish!”

Oops, I had not exactly been discrete as well. But at this point trying to hide the truth would be futile and only damage whatever trust we had. So I continued “The Macks have indeed captured some Magical Girls. I have heard about two, but the exact number is unknown.”

Which was technically correct, as Wendy never was a Magical Girl. There were Arina and the Type 42 I had helped interrogate. Of course Ellen didn't know or care about such details. She immediately pounced and asked

“So, Wendy and that Arina? I have to meet her!”

“Arina and another Type 42 Mack girl I don’t know the name of. Which is not Wendy by the way.”

Next came our ex-military guys who still had a keen sense of the value of intel. Roger remarked “I have never heard about a Type 42. Are the Macks sending humanoid infiltrators now?”

Thus temporarily saved from questions about robot girls I knew personally, I said

“Not exactly infiltrators as far as I know. More like Dark Magical Girls who will fight in the open. They are quite dangerous too as you can imagine. While we’re at it, the Macks have fielded another new and dangerous unit. I call it the Battlecat because its stature resembles a large cat, perhaps a jaguar.”

I refrained from mentioning that I had one sitting in the workshop. That would only lead to more questions.

Even so, my guests had a lot of questions and comments. And of course, there was no escaping Ellen. As soon as the guys ran out of Important Military Ramifications to discuss, she started prying again.

“You have to tell me all about…”

But before she managed to complete the sentence, we were interrupted by a cheerful female voice at the door. “Hi Cait, I managed to get tickets for the Dragonsbane concert tomorrow! I know you love Metal!””

“Hi Arina! That’s great. If the concert is not sold out by now, we could invite more people.”

Such as Wendy, if she liked traditional Power Metal. We had not talked about our favorite music styles yet, so it was worth a try.

But first I had to make some more introductions. Ellen, Roger and Alan had not met Arina yet. That went well until Ellen started to ask about the specifics of being a robot. Fortunately, Roger reminded her that they both had other places to be, so Ellen, Roger and Alan said goodbye and disappeared with their load of bunk beds.

The rest of the evening, Wendy and Arina bonded over music and Garfield. It looked like they might become friends. At least, it did not look like I would have to deal with jealousy.