"I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle."
- Sylvester Stallone, Terminator 2
"Warm flesh is better than wood and iron."
- This one chick in the Fevre Dream comic I'm reading
The factory garage on the lowest deck of the sky garrison was where faulty machines were sent to be fixed. It was a hospital and a sanctuary for anything that had a fuel injector. For the other kind who had hearts beating in their chests, it was a place best left unthought of. An El Dorado of cursed machinery and death.
One such machine parked in the garage was an imposing clockwork of stainless steel and cloudy blue glass. This confounding and tumultuous creature might have serviced as anything from an automated nitro cannon to a pumpjack for an oil well on the moon. It constantly emitted a low purr as its chimney simmered. Every once in a while, lightning would flicker from within the glass and make the whole thing crackle like an angry river eel. The machine must have been going to work on something, however slow and arduous it may have been. The blackened ends of broken cables dangled off its body like vines, suggesting it had started off as single component of a much more complicated invention. Perhaps being severed from its central module was its malfunction.
Just then, the shutters at the front of the robot folded open like the panels of a dressing screen. Enough steam to run a coal mine for a week spilled out of the machine's gizzards. As the steam thinned, a silhouette of a hazy pink figure began to appear.
The machine was housing an attractive yellow-haired belle of marriageable age. She had been dozing on her feet inside what looked like a furnace, where the robot had almost certainly shown her the extremes of southern hospitality.
There was a small projector screen on a vent beside the girl. It displayed the basic effeminate outline of her body scaled down to doll size and standing next to a list that looked like the scoreboard for a shooting gallery. The first line stated HOST was allegedly ENGAGED. The next line said MEMORY was CLEAR, and the following line after that mentioned something about AMEND being a SUCCESS. The SUCCESS part glowed red like it had been stamped with a hot branding iron. Her major organs—highlighted on the small diagram in different colors with their names abbreviated to eight characters—all tallied as OK.
A lasso of electrical wires unraveled from around the girl's forehead. A mask made of leather bellows attached to a snakeskin hose that had been covering her mouth and nose so she only breathed the fumes the robot prescribed her slowly pulled itself off. A pair of small brass funnels resembling ear trumpets was lifted out of her ears, while a fan-like contraption that had been regulating a steady flow of peyote smoke through one funnel and out the other retreated into a compartment behind her head. Hanging two feet above the top of her long, voluminous, elegantly groomed blonde hair was a fleet of mechanized scalpels that looked mean enough to file the horns off a water buffalo and precise enough to trim around the ridges of a human brain.
The vapors surrounding the girl continued to dissipate, revealing the real nitty-gritty of her situation. Standing aloof with her arms resting at her sides, she was naked of everything except for a pair of pink lacquer shoes and satin ballroom gloves—the safest way for transporting raw venison. She was around the size of an engine cylinder on a wrecker golem (a solid but rather compact part) and built like a spring on a munitions trolley. Crumpled on the garage floor beside her, just underneath another opening on the robot's cargo hold, there was pile of bronze scrap metal with two arms, two legs, and a hint of an hourglass figure. Whatever this thing used to be, it wasn't much more than a broken down training dummy now. The android's joints were mangled and falling apart at the seams. All of its neural centers were burnt off as if the AI had discarded its own casing.
The human gradually followed the arrows down the garage's landing strip. The place was set up like a boiler room with aspirations of being a saloon. Dim industrial lights washed everything in a single shade of barn house red, turning the robots into demonic siege weapons forged in the pits of Hell and making the girl shimmer like a crystal flask filled with cheap moonshine.
Her nose picked up the strong scents gasoline and kerosene all around her. The heat from a nearby demolition tractor testing its flamethrower made the tiny hairs on her spine tingle and her body glaze itself lightly with sweat. Every second was another learning experience in being a natural-grown construct of flesh and bone. She had a lot of slack to pick up considering she was inheriting the hardware some 20 odd years after it had first left its kiln. She was the only living organism on inventory, yet she felt completely at home surrounded by rows of whirring and screeching machines.
Warm brown eyes twinkled under the the soulless blue gaze of optical cameras. One of the walls in the garage was covered in electron chalkboards displaying x-rays of a human anatomy alongside the blueprints for countless models of artillery robots. Metal and flesh were prospected equally with the same relentless and invasive level of care.
The girl's nostrils twitched and her lips breathed at around the same pace as the intake/exhaust valves opening and closing on a line of idling prairie diggers. The light reflecting off her hair flashed like the sparks flying off a steel cutter at work. The portly corner of a hip brushed past the curved hull of a tank drone. The shallow trough along her bare back was a perfect match for the smooth aerodynamic lines molded into the roof of a raider buggy. The indentations of her collarbone on her fair skin mirrored the hydraulic pipes that moved an ammunition caddie's arms. The small protrusions of her ankle bones above her slippers shared the same basic curvature as the thin platemail protecting the ball joints that controlled the feet on most of the bipedal robots. Her satin fingers had the same number of articulation points as the claws on the auto-welders.
Lean athletic legs calmly swept past flexing locomotive pistons. She backed out of the way of a cyclotruck pulling into the garage, making her firmly developed tomato-tinted donkey flanks line up in unmistakable symmetry with the rounded hills and valley formed from the steel rocket chambers on a ranch hopper's jet pack. The darkened spherical regions of the girl's chest heaved with the same sturdy oscillations as two iron bombs cinched to the fuselage of a nearby buzzard sentry. Polished brass spark plugs were lined up on a welding bench ten paces away from raised pink areola nubs, while spools of silver steel wool moved down a conveyor belt just beside the gold tumbleweed tucked below the young lady's waist.
An android rifleman in a worn out duster tipped his hat as the factory fresh daisy graced by.
She stopped to glance down at her personage when she reached the end of the garage. Which awful disease-infested apes did these humans evolve from? It must have been chimpanzees or gorillas, she thought silently. Humoring herself with atrocious insults and fiery condemnation, she mockingly thought this one may have evolved out of a bovine, judging by the mighty fine set of udders she had on her. The girl vowed to do a better job keeping them out of the mud than the last unlucky farm maid to ride along with them.
Her compromising thoughts were interrupted by the sound of rubber roller skate wheels screeching to a halt in front of her. She glanced forward and came grille to grille with a butler who ran on a salary of diesel fuel. He bowed his iron-cast head and communicated with a series of beeps through his vents. The two of them seemed already acquainted.
"No. The honor is all mine, P3T3," the girl said to the steward 'bot with a smile.
She got ready for her outfitting by stretching her arms like a straw woman in a corn field. The butler opened the storage compartment on the front of his painted tuxedo and unfolded the grand pink dress that had been scavenged and cleaned separately from the body it was meant to be worn over.
The butler spun behind her and strapped her into her undergarments with expert care. Next he fixed the frame for her hoop skirt around her waist. Her dress slipped over her figure without much hassle, and the butler quickly went to work strapping up the second layer of laces along her back. Afterwards he circled around her and tugged at the various bows, frills, and wrinkles to make sure everything ruffled out nicely. He topped her off by putting her flower-brimmed hat back on her head. She adjusted it herself so the front angled upward and didn't obstruct her eyesight.
The butler scrounged through another locker on his side and handed the girl her rifle: A lightweight and fully automatic affair with an infinitely reloading cartridge and an optional slot for a positron collider. She took a moment to inspect it and make herself familiarized before letting it rest at her hip. Mademoiselle and mechmonsieur bid one another adieu and continued on their separate ways.
The girl left the depot garage through a pair of pneumatic doors. Out here the lightning became less desolate and more friendly toward human sensibilities. She trotted lightly through riveted corridors that twisted around and steadily ascended for over a mile. As she made her way into the upper levels of the ship, she encountered mixed gangs of both robotic ruffians and human scoundrels. The flesh and blood components of the gang would stop what they were doing and fix their eyes on her as she quietly paced by. She made a mental note of every time she attracted attention, keeping a tally of which subtle poses and body gestures worked the better than others against human ilk. She was secretly mastering her new shell as a weapon of distraction and deceit.
She stepped through a final set of shutters and entered the front of the ship. Her skirt glided over a catwalk as she peered down on dozens of crewmen working at radar stations in the steel canyon below. Directly in front of her was a row of slanted windows peering out into the horizon. The sky garrison was in dry dock and had a perfect view overlooking a desert mountain range and a distant orange sunrise. The girl came to a stop when she was standing beside the captain.
He was a tall fellow in a long red coat. Everything about him said he was a sophisticated gentleman with a small undercurrent of the unscrupulous. Hands folded behind his back, mustache waxed and trimmed into a handlebar, eyes hidden behind dark spectacles. History knew him as the wyvern of the west, the dandy of the dastardly, the terrible tyrant of all tarnation, and the champion of the poignantly loveless. He was the outlaw mastermind simply named Kid.
"Top of the mornin' to you, AN1-E," he said in a cordial manner. He gave her a quick once-over out of the corner of his eye before turning his attention back at the sunrise.
"Glad to see you're well enough to come to the bridge. You didn't have any trouble breakin' in that wild mare the 'bots at the munitions tower wrangled up for you'uns, I reckon?"
"This lass handles smoother than an ace on a blackjack table," she replied. Her lips sparkled ruby as she grinned. "Just needed to get her headstuff raked through the electric washboard and have all the grime scraped off before my bit train settled right on into her station. I don't understand why you didn't send her out to pasture with the rest of her folks."
"You wouldn't believe how hard I tried," Kid shook his head as he sighed. "Back before their gal started stirrin' up a storm, I planned to just mow the whole family down and pry the gold out of their dead hands. But all the killin' spurred a demon out of 'er and turned her into one of the best shots in the whole country. I had no idea such a dainty thing could be filled with so much revenge. Sassy critter almost routed the whole depot before the defense cortex buttered 'er up and brought 'er home for some good domesticatin'."
His eyes shifted toward the girl.
"Now that you've saddled 'er up into a prize pony, I get her sharp trigger finger and all her riches. The bank will see the purdy hide you're wearin' and they'll let you waltz right through her family's coffers. All I'll need to dawdle with is that posse she bought."
"I've done plenty of thinking about them," the girl said in a mischievously sweet tone. "Those bounty hunting types only go violent when they're around 'bots or bandits, and I ain't liable to pass for either of those. I'll meet up with them while they still have reason to think I'm their client. I'll play the part, follow them around for a week or two until I know everything they know. Then I'll put them down when they're least expecting it. One slug a piece in the backs of their brains."
Kid rolled his head back in hearty hysteric laughter.
"Do that for me, suga', and I just might call off the whole plot. You can parade around in that slice o' steamed cherry pie for as long as you like."
"You flatter me, Cap'n Kid. I only suggested it on account of it being the best use of my resources," the girl said with a sly tongue. Her eyes gleamed like ambers under the brim of her lavish summer hat. Her lips curled into something wicked.
"After all, I'm only human."
Author's note: I have no idea how her name is supposed to be pronounced. I just thought it looked cool.