my dad has some rolls of shop towels that he brings home from work that aren't perforated. they work just fine but they can be a pain in the ass if you need to clean something up in a hurry and you've dropped the razorblade you use to cut them.
ch. 5 is split into two parts
"Bonnie, how does a computer end up afraid of flying?" Michael asked. She startled and knocked over her mug as she reached for something on the other side of the workbench. Coffee spilled across the surface and onto Bonnie and the floor.
"Damnit, Michael!" she snapped. "Get me some paper towels before you ruin anything important." Ouch, but not uncalled for, Michael thought. He found a roll of red shop towles on a nearby toolbox. Something metallic clattered to the floor as he snagged the roll and hurried back to Bonnie. She'd been moving what looked to be various bits of electronics out of harm's way. He unwound a few sheets and went to tear them off, but the tough material didn't yield.
"They're not perforated," was Bonnie's tetchy response to his aggravated sigh.
"Oh, yeah?" he shot back. "No shit."
"Go find the razorblade, dumbass." Bonnie yanked the roll from his hands and started carefully mopping up the mess. The noise he'd heard when he first grabbed the paper towels must have been the razorblade falling. As this wasn't Bonnie's usual workstation, the ground around the toolbox was littered with nuts, bolts, screws, and all other sorts of metal detritus. A quick glance back at Bonnie spurred him to his hands and knees to paw through the mess of metal in search of anything sharp enough to cut the towels.
He found the blade fairly quickly, but the coffee-stained length of towels at Bonnie's feet told him he'd taken too long. As Bonnie took the blade from him as quickly as she carefully could, Michael was glad she was distracted. She probably would have killed him with it otherwise.
It felt like an eternity, but the wall clock showed that barely a minute and a half had passed since he'd startled Bonnie into spilling her coffee. Aside from some sopping papers and Bonnie's previously light blue shirt, nothing looked damaged. "Consider yourself lucky, Knight," she snarled. Michael relaxed a bit at that. "I'm gonna go get changed, and you'd better be gone by the time I get back." She stormed off without waiting for a response, and Michael made a hasty retreat to Kitt.
"What happened in there?" Kitt asked, alarm shading his voice.
"I very nearly became Bonnie's first victim," Michael said as they sped from the overgrown lot of the garage. They were far from home; the semi had broken down and sourcing a replacement fan belt was proving unreasonably difficult.
"First victim?" Kitt asked. Michael drew a finger across his throat. "Oh."
"Yeah. Oh," Michael agreed. "I spooked her and she knocked over her coffee." Something dawned on him. "Why weren't those towels perforated?" All the shop towels he'd used or bought in the past had been perforated.
"What did you want to ask her?" Kitt asked. "I might be able to provide an answer."
"I wanted to know why you hate flying so much," Michael said. "I know it's not the speed. No idea how fast most planes take off at, but we've outrun 'em before." He paused to give Kitt a chance to answer but continued when none was forthcoming. "It's not like being up on a lift, either. All your wheels are still on the ground." He knew from experience that Kitt absolutely hated being in any sort of position that exposed his undercarriage, even though Michael was pretty sure it had the same protective coating as his shell. He'd parked Kitt on top of bombs, and they'd come out all right, for fuck's sake. "Which leaves me with one possibility: you were programmed like that. What I can't figure out is why. If you were programmed to protect me, what good does you being scared of flying do?" Kitt remained silent. Had he even been listening? Michael had never known Kitt to not be listening. Even when he gave Michael the silent treatment, Kitt still listened. Michael knew that because lights on Kitt's dash would flicker in acknowledgement to Michael's voice, betraying the AI. Michael had absolutely no intention of telling Kitt that, though. Michael also knew Kitt listened because he'd usually bring up whatever had pissed him off in the first place. "You still in there, pal?"
"There's nowhere else I could be," Kitt retaliated peevishly. "I was reviewing my programming." Curiosity and a hint of uncertainty replaced the irritation. "I can't find anything to suggest I was programmed with a fear of flying."
"You were programmed to learn from your surroundings, though, right? Is it possible you learned to be afraid of flying?"
"I was indeed programmed to learn from those around me, but I doubt I just picked itup from someone on the streets. My programmers were very careful with my learning algorithms. Otherwise I'd be picking up everything from everyone all the time. That would overwhelm even my circuits."
"So how do you decide who to learn from, then?"
Here Kitt paused, and Michael wondered if his partner even knew how that worked. He had to, right? Then again, Michael had to admit he knew little about psychology outside of what was useful for their assignments, and he knew even less about neuroscience.
"I filter all the data I receive to determine its relevancy," Kitt said at last. "Most of the things I've incorporated into my databanks and therefore learned come from the people closest to me. You, Devon, and Bonnie, namely."
"Mostly me these days," Michael said. Again with the misplaced guilt! It wasn't like Kitt had learned to swear from him. Kitt still didn't like rock music and outright hated heavy metal. He chastised Michael for his one-night-stands and preference for greasy food. Nagged when Michael was hurt and reminded him to sleep. Kitt also elected to take risks he would have avoided even just last year. He sassed Bonnie more often and sometimes even gave Devon a hard time. Whoops.
"You're not as bad an influence as Bonnie likes to claim," Kitt reassured him. "You're no saint, either." Michael laughed at that. "I think I've been afraid of flying for as long as I can remember. Usually I can pin down the exact moment an encounter made an impression" – once more, with feeling: whoops – "but I've gone back to the very beginning of my memory banks and can't find its inception."
"Bonnie's been around you for the longest, I think," Michael said, thinking out loud.
"For as long as you've known us, yes," Kitt said. "In my early days, there were numerous scientists, doctors, and technicians around me. It could have been any one of them."
Kitt raised a valid point, Michael conceded, but had any of those people left such an impression on Kitt, he would have mentioned them. Or they'd still be involved in his life. "I'm not gonna blame Bonnie or anything if she had anything to do with it," Michael said with an easy-going shrug. "I'm just curious."
"And 'just curious' has always worked so well for you in the past?" Kitt challenged. Michael shot the modulator a dirty look.
"It's just Bonnie!" he protested.
"You told me when we left that lot that you were afraid Bonnie was going to kill you," Kitt reminded him pointedly.
"Oh, don't remind me. I made her spill coffee on whatever she was working on. I don't think she'll actually kill me for being curious."
. . .
Bonnie tracked Michael and Kitt to the edge of the lot where they sat watching the sun rise over the eastern plains. "Morning you two," she said by way of icy greeting. Michael offered her an apologetic smile and scooted across Kitt's hood to make room for her. She couldn't be that mad, right?
"I'm sorry about last night," Michael said once Bonnie had settled next to him. "I didn't mean to scare you. I didn't ruin anything, did I?"
"Except my shirt?" she asked. It might have been Michael's imagination and a little wishful thinking, but it sounded like she was trying too hard to be mad. When he found the nerve to look up at her, he was relieved to see her smiling. That smile broke into warm laughter at his contrition. "You yo-yo!" She affectionately punched his shoulder. "You didn't ruin anything. The only thing that still worked on that desk was the keyboard, and that only just. You did scare the ever-loving shit out of me. And don't you dare apologize any more, Michael Knight! What did you want to ask me?"
"Why weren't those shop towels perforated?" he asked. She frowned at him, confused. "That's not what I went to the garage to ask, but I gotta know."
"I've got some roll like that," she explained. "Sometimes they just don't get perforated properly during manufacture. You can usually buy those defective rolls at a discount if you ask nicely."
"Company still makes some money, and you get a deal on your shop towels. Win-win!" Michael said. "Ah. No. What I really wanted to know was where Kitt's fear of flying came from."
