Hobby led them into the bowels of the Cybertronics building, not to his office but to his apartment; he also lived in the building. It was a large, elegantly furnished suite with the stale air of rooms that were seldom used. Pictures of a little boy graced the walls here and there, a little boy whose likeness was repeated on dozens of advertisements. A desk took up most of the space in the small living room he had refurbished into another office, clearly the most frequently used space here.
"What is it you wanted?" Hobby asked, his eyes for Tabitha alone, completely ignoring Joe, who hovered silently behind her.
"I want you to fix him," Tabitha answered, surprised at her own veneer of calm.
"Why? It would be easier to replace it," the professor commented, still not acknowledging Joe's existence.
"I don't want him replaced," Tabby replied with heavy significance put on the word him. " I want to keep him just the way he is. And your damned virus is eating him from the inside out."
"My virus?" Professor Hobby repeated carefully, stiffening in place just a little.
"Yes, your virus. We're not entirely stupid, you know," Tabby snapped.
"Blue Fairy," Joe whispered suddenly, his unblinking eyes forcing his gaze into Hobby's.
Staring at Joe, Hobby measured him from head to foot, studying his trembling hand and unsteady leg, then he shrugged. "There's nothing I can do."
"As there was nothing you could do to help David?" Joe hissed, enough venom in his tone to make Tabby turn and gaze at him in surprise. He appeared calm, placid as any Mecha, but something in his face made her uneasy and she shifted her stance so she was more directly between them.
A dull flush stole over Allen Hobby's face, hurt flaring there before he hid it behind anger. "It's simply a Mecha, easily replaced, even reproduced." Smiling a thin, sly smile, the man flicked his eyes to Joe, then back to her face. "The amphicopter you had to buy must have set you back. In fact, I would bet that it came close to draining your formerly quite large bank account. Was it worth the expense?"
"What . . ."
Ignoring Joe's obvious astonishment, holding up a hand to belay his questions, Tabby shrugged. "Yes."
"What makes it so important to you?"
"I love him."
Hobby's eyes widened, then he laughed, harshly, the sound glass-edged and bitter. "Love it? How can you love it? It's a machine. Do you love your car? Your toaster? Do you love the alarm clock that wakes you in the morning? How could you, of all people, fall in love with a robot, Miss Cooper?" As Tabby's mouth dropped open, the professor shook his head. "Yes, I know who you are. I realize that some may form inappropriate attachments to the more human-seeming machines, but you have been around them since you were a child. You should know better."
"How can you say that?" Tabby exploded, her breath leaving her lungs in the aggressive snorts of an angry stallion. "You helped to design them. You helped to make Joe an individual, as individual as you are. Not to mention smarter and more sensitive," she finished in disgust. "You helped make them as capable of forming their own reactions and making their own decisions as . . ." She paused, her eyes falling on a portrait of the man's son; the boy grinned from a beach somewhere, sunlight highlighting hair that was the exact color of the surrounding sand. "That's it. You made them too . . . no matter how you programmed David, no matter how much of yourself you put into him, you couldn't bring back your son. He could never be an exact copy." Stumbling back a step, the girl caught herself, shocked at the wave of painful sympathy she felt for the man. "I'm so sorry about your son, Professor Hobby," she said, her voice much less combative and more compassionate. "I really am. But you're making others suffer. Professor, people are dead . . ."
"That's not my doing," Hobby interrupted abruptly, his face whitening at her words. "I never hurt any people."
Tabby glanced back at Joe, who shook his head slowly. Neither of them had missed the harsh emphasis when he spoke the word people, or the undiluted hatred oozing over his features when he glared in Joe's direction. "Professor, please. Joe has never hurt anybody. He doesn't deserve . . ."
"David is gone because of him!" the professor snarled, his intellectual mask slipping completely away to reveal a man half-insane with hurt, a hurt made fresh by the loss of his son's copy. "He was my best chance at . . . at understanding . . ." His voice broke and he cleared his throat, straightening proudly, staring down on both of them. "He stole my project."
"You lost David yourself," Joe burst out, his own tones rough-edged and angry. "He was nothing to you but an experiment, made in the image of a little boy, with the brain of a child, and cast out because the Orgas around him didn't think he was quite perfect! I helped him. You only sought to exploit him, as all of my kind are exploited, used, and destroyed when it suits you!"
"What do you know of anything?" Hobby sneered. "You were made to be a whore. What do you know of children, or Orgas?"
"I know what I've seen, and what I've seen done, and what has been done to me," Joe growled. Tabby clutched at his arm with both her hands but he shook her off, limping towards Hobby. She reached out to tug at his jacket, but Joe evaded her touch easily, too easily for the condition of his body. Staring into his face, Tabitha's mouth and throat went completely dry.
Joe smiled, his usually gentle eyes blazing, hot as the center of a star, not glowing but holding a look that had the same effect, not in the least human. He stalked towards the robotics engineer, fast and graceful even with a heavy limp from the that virus degraded his neural systems, moving like something that should have been on four feet, hunting in the night, alien and utterly predatory. And every particle of that malicious, bloodthirsty attention was focused on Allen Hobby.
Gasping, Tabby lunged between them, facing Joe. There was nothing in his eyes but insane hate, no recognition, no hint of his personality. He lurched forward and even managed to lurch gracefully; the long limbs that a moment ago had been awkward, as if he'd had too many to control, were now tight and ready.
"Joe," Tabby breathed, her heart tearing, part of it lodging in the base of her throat. "Joe, please listen to me. You don't want to hurt us. Please, Joe, I know you can understand me." She kept moving as he circled, keeping herself between him and Professor Hobby, though she knew those slender hands could rip her apart with deceptively little effort.
Joe never made a sound. He kept circling, looking for an opening past her, and that gave her a small hope that buried somewhere under the damaged software and degrading logic circuits, Joe was still present. "Joe," she tried again. "I know this isn't you. Don't do this."
The robot didn't pay her any attention, even when she caught his wrist, her fingernails digging deep into his skin hard enough to scrape the metal underneath. Lunging at Hobby, he moved to sweep her out of the way, showing no reaction to what should have been a painful stimulus. Ducking under his outstretched arm, Tabby knew she had to find a way to incapacitate him before he got within reach of the cornered scientist. His pleasure receptors were possible to overload and cause a super-intense, if short-lived, flare of pain, and there was only one place within reach that had a large concentration. Grabbing him by the collar of his shirt, she pulled herself close and slammed her knee into his groin.
She was going to have a bruise, at the very least. His molded epidermis didn't provide much padding; her patella cracked against his metal body with a sharp, painful thud, but at least she'd stopped his forward impetus. Unfortunately he didn't fold and drop as a human would have, just staggered and bent at the waist. The Mecha straightened too quickly, but the delay gave Allen Hobby a chance to get out of the corner and behind his desk. "I'll replace the damn thing for you, girl!" he cried, half in fear, half in anger. "Just keep it away from me until it runs down! It'll only take a minute or two!"
Forgetting Joe's plight in the wave of white rage that exploded through her body, Tabitha whirled on the professor. "What . . . did . . . you . . . just . . . say?" she hissed, advancing. "How . . . dare . . . you . . ." Snarling and almost incoherent, the girl ducked behind the desk, backing Hobby up against the wall.
"It's just a lover Mecha!" Professor Hobby protested, holding his hands up, trying to calm her.
That was the wrong thing to say. "You son of a BITCH!" Tabby screeched, and punched him, her entire body swinging behind her fist to add momentum.
The roundhouse connected with Allen Hobby's jaw, hard enough to send his head solidly into the wall. His knees sagged for a moment, his eyes unfocused, and Tabby stood back, panting and shaking.
"Tabitha . . . don't . . ."
The quiet shock in Joe's tone brought her attention back to him. He was staring at her wide-eyed, his mouth agape. Both hands cradled the wall, holding him up. "Don't . . . hurt him," he continued, his voice barely carrying. His gaze froze on her face, surprise changing to vague bewilderment, and his legs gave out, collapsing under the weight of his body. Joe stated to slide towards the floor, helpless.
Giving an wordless yell, Tabby vaulted to him, driving a shoulder under his arm in a vain attempt to keep him on his feet. The best she managed to do was keep him from falling any faster, kneeling to follow him down. In the end he was cushioned in her lap, head against her chest. His arms and legs were limp, unmoving. "Joe?" she whispered.
The Mecha's eyes were open, but empty. It wasn't the blank look of his neutral expression, it was the nothingness of an empty, hollow room with no personality there to add a hint of lived-in warmth. "Joe, please," Tabby choked past the suffocating lump that took up most of her chest, squeezing her lungs in a suddenly too-small space. "Please, damn you. Don't leave me." Tears filled her eyes, burning like acid, blinding her, trailing down her face in a wash of hot liquid. "Please," she begged, knowing it was useless and foolish. Burying her nose in his soft hair, she rocked him back and forth gently, as though she were comforting a child.