Do Robot Girls Dream of Nerdy Boys?

A "My Life as a Teenage Robot" Fanfic

Chapter two:

Experience

"He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once."

-Neil Gaiman

Commander Jonathan Emerson was having a bad day

The days he spent on the Space Station Atlantic had never been the most enjoyable for Commander Emerson. This wasn't to say that he resented his position as second in command, but rather that he had particularly enjoyed his last assignment on the UEN Starship Musashi. And to be frank, the space station was not exactly living up to his expectations

Daily life had been far much more orderly on the Mushashi than the Atlantic. For one thing, everyone on the Musashi had been UEN navy, and while Emerson appreciated the civilian presence on the station he never thought of it as conducive to order (The Space Station Atlantic served primarily as a mobile weapons platform for Earth Defense but was also a notable government research facility, causing the need for quarters and facilities to maintain a large amount of civilian researchers. They never really seemed to have any sense of urgency in their dealings, and Emerson hated that) At least, he had consoled himself, he wasn't in Skyway patrol.

Emerson liked to be in control, though perhaps he enjoyed it just a little too much. As a young child he had very nearly came close to being diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder due to this need for control. In reality It had turned out to be a rather mild case of Aspergers syndrome. A disability in some peoples eyes; it had probably been the leading cause for Emerson's tremendous successes in officer school. Emerson had made his greatest weakness his strength, and that was the sign of a great solider.

Life for the Commander on the Atlantic was a static existence, which suited him just fine. Every day Emerson would wake at 0400 hours. He would spend five minutes to dress, one minute to make his bed, two minutes to brush his teeth, three minutes to floss, and exactly thirty seconds to collect himself before he headed for the mess hall. Emerson would then travel to the mess hall, taking the same route every day without error. He would take two right angles, navigate three sloping curves, pass one security checkpoint, and ride one elevator, always arriving at 0429 hours when the mess hall ovens finished cooking the days first meal. Emerson would take ten minutes to eat, and then head for the bridge in the most efficient manner possible (One elevator, one right turn, two left turns, a staircase, and another security checkpoint) which would take him a scant eight minutes. From there he would monitor the stations status until 0530, when Captain Presley would arrive and give him the day's assignment. After that, Emerson would spend one hour of recreation time, and then thirty minutes preparing for bed.

It was a good life.

What was eating Emerson about this day was his apparent lack of control concerning several upsetting daily events. This very morning his cabin door had become stuck, forcing him to fix it with a pen and a pit of dental floss. The repair had taken 45 seconds, fifteen of which had been spent in disbelief of the faulty equipment. Later, Emerson had arrived at the first of his two daily checkpoints to discover a new marine manning the post. His inexperienced fumbling while checking Emerson's clearance had cost the commander four minutes. For a few fractions of a second, Emerson had considered verbally chastising the marine, but he decided against it. He had lost too much time already.

Emerson arrived at the mess hall at 0433 hours, only to discover the ovens were due for replacement and inoperable. Emerson had to settle with a cold and damp salad rather than his typical bacon and eggs (Being second in command of a Space Station did have its perks) He arrived on the bridge 0451, a total of four minutes and forty five seconds behind his daily routine. The On duty officers and ensigns did not even notice Emerson's tardiness. This was perhaps due to the fact that Emerson's shift did not start until 0530 hours.

This was of course unacceptable, Emerson decided. Obviously his routine was not properly calibrated, or otherwise he could have been on the bridge four minutes and forty five seconds earlier, even accounting for the unnecessary delays (and that unappetizing salad. Why they sold them he would never know). Perhaps he needed to prepare contingency plans, or other courses of action to be enacted in situations similar to this. His lax participation in his own schedule galled him to no end.

After all, if he had been on time perhaps he could have caught the reactor before it went critical.

Contrary to the poor state of affairs that had befallen Commander Emerson, Jennifer Wakeman was having a splendid morning.

The time was 9:00 AM, and it was a beautiful morning. The sky was a shining, vibrant blue, the birds were singing, the monitors were blessedly silent, and she was about to go hang out at Mezmers. It was a good day.

Jenny stood up in her carpeted room, stopping just in front of the door. Before she went out, it seemed to be of key importance to admire herself in the mirror. A girl has to look her best, doesn't she? Or maybe it was a robot has to look her (its?) best. Logically It was a toss up between the two, but Jenny preferred to think of herself as a girl. It seemed right somehow.

Jenny had to admit though, robot or girl, she looked fine. This level of, shall we say, fineness might be exaggerated. It is a well known fact that around 45 percent of all teenage girls believe they are "Damn good looking" and are quite a "catch" (This they have in common with teenage males, however the boys who believe this are in the 97th percentile and neglect the "catch" part), the other 55 percent thought that they were "Too fat" (Despite their current weight, sadly, and no matter how thin they were). And since Jenny had been designed with a textbook athletic physic, she wasn't too big of a proponent of the latter.

Admiringly, she ran her hands over her hips, smoothing out imaginary wrinkles in her skirt. Then, carelessly, Jenny tugged at her skirt a bit. It was a pretty weird sort of clothing, she thought, being several segmented pieces of treated titanium. And short, Jenny noted absently, real short.

That was an odd part of her design. Really, what kind of mother gave their teenage daughter a miniskirt and a Tank-top anyway? Weren't those the kinds of clothing that mother's always told their children to stay away from? Apparently, Jenny conceded, mothers with an eye for efficiency gave their daughters miniskirts and tank-tops. The Miniskirt/tank-top combo did give her an unparalleled range of motion, even though it could put her close to dangerously exposing herself in a social situation.

It was particularly vexing, Jenny contemplated, that she wore a miniskirt, an article of clothing chiefly designed as a lure for boys, and could never even get them to look at her like anything other than a robot. Except for Sheldon of course, but he didn't count (Nothing Sheldon ever did really counted)

She was considering doing away with the whole thing (the Robot part, not the miniskirt. She only had one pair of clothing) But that was a project for another day. Today she was going to have some fun.

A knock came from downstairs causing Jenny's pigtails to move into a surprised position. Taking one last look at herself in the mirror, she dashed downstairs. In a few seconds Jenny was at the door, which she quickly opened. She was greeted by Brad and Sheldon standing on her doorstep in the bright sunlight.

Brad smiled and Sheldon gave a shy wave. "Ready to go to Mezmers?" Brad said, the tone of his voice was questioningly amused.

Jenny gave a happy smirk "I was built ready" She stepped outside and closed the door behind her. Exuberant, she skipped a few yards past the two boys, spun on her heel, and giggled. She gave a wide smile "Let's get going" she joyfully exclaimed.

"After you" Brad said, giving a half bow. Jenny didn't laugh

This was probably because her belly button began to flash an urgent and neon blue.Jenny, along with her two male companions, stared at the flashing light in her midsection. Their expressions were mixed. Jenny had an annoyed, incredulous, and resigned look on her face, as if to say "Why me?" Brads expression reflected excitement, his mouth open in a bit of a smile, with just a hint of envy. Sheldon looked like a deer caught in a car's headlights. Not only was there a flashing light (it was very pretty by the way) but he had an excuse to look at Jenny's belly.

"Dammit" Jenny grumbled "What is it this time?" Chewing on her lower lip in frustration, She raised her armored forearm palm face up. From it unfolded a thin and transparent light blue screen in a chorus of mechanical whirrs. In a sputtering cascade of light, words and diagrams of a massive space station scrolled across the screen. In the upper right corner there was an unpleasant and flashing radioactive symbol, staring at her like an angry yellow eye.

"Cool" Brad testified, looking at the technical readout. He sounded genuinely impressed. Sheldon said nothing; he was still having trouble looking away from Jenny's flashing navel. Questioningly, Brad looked up from the screen "What's with the nuclear symbol?" he inquired.

Jenny looked over at Brad and made an annoyed face. She made an exasperated noise and retracted the screen back into her arm. "The reactor on some space station is going to explode" Crossly, She folded her arms "Just my luck"

"Aren't there only two of those?" Brad mused "And that's a bad thing, right? The explosion?" he said, curious.

Sheldon nudged him in the arm with his elbow "Well, only if you think giving a near lethal does radiation poisoning to half of the planet is a bad thing" he said, having finally torn his gaze away from Jenny's flashing midsection.

Brad looked thoughtful "Yeah… that does sound pretty bad" He shrugged "You should probably take care of that Jenny"

Jenny's brow knit together in irritation "I'm going to" she replied. With a mental command, Her pigtails rotated toward the sky. They locked into place, and with a whine of nise, rockets unfolded from them "You guys head on down to Mezmers, I'll be back in about a half an hour"

"Well," Sheldon said, one of his feet grinding something into the sidewalk nervously "Good luck"

Jenny flipped the two a cocky smile "Luck? Someone this good doesn't need luck" And with that, she blasted off into the stratosphere.

When the air finally quieted and the smoke cleared, Brad and Sheldon were left standing their. They waited for a bit, watching Jenny recede into the sky. Brad sighed and turned to Sheldon "This seems to always to happen, doesn't it?"

Sheldon gave it some thought "Yep" he said plainly

The Space Station Atlantic was powered by an extremely impressive fusion reactor, nestled at the heart of the station. All of the stations activities revolved around, and was powered by, what was essentially a miniature sun.

In many ways the reactor actually was a real star. It provided the artificial gravity that held the station together, it provided the energy that was needed to maintain a viable ecosystem, and it was a mass of incandescent gas. And, just like a real star, it was prone to fluctuations and solar flares. Of course the fluctuations inside the reactor were much, much more dangerous, if only by the virtue that the reactor was only about seven miles away.

But who was worrying, right?

Oh, yes, I guess Commander Emerson was worrying. If this continued, Emerson was afraid he might not be able to keep the rest of his schedule.

Emerson knew what had happened. He ran worst case scenarios in his head right before he went to bed (He found it soothing to know that none of them would happen as long as he maintained order) he also had a direct video feed of the reactor room. More accurately though, he had a video feed of what was left of the reactor room. As it turned out, the temperature of a fluctuating fusion reactor is hot enough to vaporize a mostly stainless steel control room. The only thing that was preventing the massive ball of plasma from expanding and engulfing the entire station were a few beleaguered gravitics generators. And even those were about to fail.

In any case, the wild instabilities in the reactor were the cause of one negligent engineer. An engineer who somehow managed to cause a runaway reaction in the reactor, something that was considered by all scientists to physically impossible. Perhaps after this was over, Emerson thought he might try and figure out exactly how that happened. It was a scientific achievement all on its own.

Things were bad. Commander Emerson understood this. It was acknowledged. What annoyed him was that people were having such a hard time calming down. It was only imminent death; they'd been trained for this. So why did they all insist on panicking? It was insufferable.

The captain would know how to deal with these irrational reactions. A shame he had caught fire on the way to the bridge. Unfortunate for him, and it certainly made Emerson's job more difficult. Emerson found it extremely inconsiderate for the captain to die. It was just plain unprofessional really.

Ah well, what can you do?

What you can do is order an immediate evacuation, which Emerson had done. It had been easy enough, nearly half of the Civilian crew was already gone (Without even clearance, Emerson noted). You can also enact the basic containment procedures. These were having little impact on actual containment unfortunately; they were only slowing the reactor from going critical. This wouldn't be too bad if it had just been a fiery explosion of death; after all, the Atlantic was far enough away from the earth for the atmosphere not to catch fire. It wasn't far enough away to prevent a lethal dose of radiation from engulfing the Pacific Ocean though. Emerson didn't know the exact particulars of what would happen, but he guessed that it would be bad.

There was a part in the safety manual for this sort on situation (Chapter 12. Section a5. Paragraph 2, labeled Catastrophe and You) In the event of a catastrophic meltdown there was a release protocol that could be activated. Once activated the malfunctioning reactor would be jettisoned into space, hopefully far away from the earth (After that, it was officially diagnosed as "someone else's problem") A blunt but effective solution. A little less effective, Commander Emerson noted, when the automatic release was not functioning. The only other way to jettison the reactor manually, meaning someone was going to have to go down there. And the only person Emerson trusted to remove the reactor was himself. Idly, he wondered who the genius was that placed the radiation suits close enough to the reactor so they were of no use to anyone in an emergency like this.

It seemed like as good a day as any to die.

Jenny loved her nerves, she really did.

Her nerves, however, did not like hitting the atmosphere at somewhere around Mach 10. If pressed, Jenny might say that she did not like hitting the atmosphere that fast either. But only because her nerves thought so, they had a lot of political pull with her.

You know, with the agonizing pain they dealt out when they hit the upper layers of the atmosphere at Mach 10 and all.

Jenny wasn't used to her nerves yet, she wasn't used to them at all. Jenny knew how to use her nerves though. She knew how to feel with them, how to use them for even more delicate motor control, and how to use the slight changes in the air pressure to predict when someone was going to move (That one took some practice) However, she hadn't got used to turning them off.

In retrospect, this was something she should get used to very quickly.

Her parents were not stupid, not by a long shot, and had expected that as a crime fighting global defense robot Jenny might run into situations that would cripple a normal person with pain. So to circumvent this they had added the ability for Jenny to control the sensitivity of her nerve endings, including the ability to simply shut them off (McKinley had whimsically given the levels of tactile awareness the names of diseases. The lowest setting was "Leprosy") Jenny could do this with a thought, but she was having trouble remembering she could before it was too late. Though, this mishap might just have shocked it into her memory for good.

In any case she needed to keep moving. People were in danger and the earth needed to be saved, and here she was floating aimlessly in the vacuum of space. And the quicker she got this done, the sooner she could go to Mezmers. She would get this done, Jenny resolved. No amount of blinding pain could stop her.

Unless of course it actually did blind her. That could really put a damper on things.

As Commander Emerson prepared for his last act alive, he idly wondered what was going to happen to his body.

He probably should have been more nervous, but he had crammed himself with combat stimulants a few minutes ago. They had left him with a warm feeling, like everything was right with the world. They also had left him with a preternatural awareness of the area around him and, unfortunately, in a few hours he would have a splitting headache combined with an overwhelming weariness. He really didn't expect it to get that far though.

Maybe he'd be posthumously rewarded with a medal. He liked that Idea. Not as much as he liked the idea of surviving and getting the medal in person, but enough to go ahead with his course of action. He'd just put this little act of duty down as his assignment for the day (A little early he knew, but his schedule had already been shot to hell anyway) the remaining crew onboard would understand.

Grim faced, Commander Emerson prepared to undergo his suicidal mission. The remaining crew watched him suit up into a nearby pressure suit stoically. Emerson liked that. Everyone was being so orderly now. Perhaps he should do terribly dangerous things more often; it seemed to get him what he wanted.

Radiation must have already leaked to the bridge, The Commander thought; he was already having auditory hallucinations. It sounded like something was banging on the side of the station, and doing it hard. Emerson shook his head. He didn't remember phantom noises being a symptom of radiation poisoning. You learn something new each day Emerson thought. Strangely enough the rest of the crew looked like they heard it too. Well, it couldn't have been an asteroid, he thought, the shields would have deflected it. Come to think of it, He should disable the shields and divert the power to the containment of the reactor; it might buy him a few more minutes.

Over the Alarm Klaxons, a nervous voice came over the ship wide PA system. Emerson made a face. That was weird; the only people left on board who weren't on the bridge were down in the ship bay. The voice that came through the intercom was definitely one of the soldiers though. It sounded unsure "Ummm… Commander?"

Emerson was perturbed, there must have been a better was for that marine to address him "What is it marine?" He said brusquely, not given to wasting much time before the reactor exploded in a blazing ball of radiation and plasma. He hoped this was something important, every second he spent talking was another second he could have spent dislodging the reactor.

The Marine continued. "Well, um, sir. We have a bit of a weird situation here."

Another voice came thought the Intercom, just a tiny bit more rugged than the last "Weird? It's downright freaky man"

"Yeah" the first voice said "Freaky. Commander, we have a white and blue girl floating around by the airlock"

Emerson sighed "People do turn blue when they freeze I suppose. Why is this important?"

"Well, sir…" The voice paused for a few second, obviously nervous. Emerson was beginning to loose his patience right when the Marine continued speaking "She's made of metal. And it… It looks like she wants in" Emerson paused for a few seconds, thinking.

Well, he thought that's certainly is new.

It's hard to communicate in a vacuum, Jenny noticed.

She had been banging on the airlock of the Atlantic (A strange name, she thought, for a space station that orbited the Pacific Ocean) for a while now and screaming at the two dumbstruck marines inside, or mouthing words at them, as the case may be. There really wasn't any air to transmit the sound between them. And even if there was air, there was still another several feet of steel between them. It seemed to be a futile attempt to communicate in such inhospitable conditions.

This is bad, Jenny thought. Her internal Geiger counter was chirping alarmingly frequently, the little blips of radioactive detection spiking. And From her readings, the entire Space station was bathed in lethal doses of radiation. If she couldn't get inside within the next twelve minutes, everyone inside wouldn't need to be rescued anymore. They would need to be carried out in body bag.

And that was assuming the reactor didn't explode before then.

She pounded on the airlock again, and while she could not hear her fist clang against the metal, she could see the indentation her fist left (If her nerves were on, she also would have been able to feel the vibrations travel up her arm).The Marines inside the Station had made no move to open the airlock, and were just chatting nervously on some sort of intercom. She was forced to cling to the hull of the Station like some sort of teenage spider

To make matters worse, she couldn't risk breaching the station. The decompression caused by even the tiniest pinprick might kill everyone inside the Station, and that was saying nothing about what would happen if she tore a hole large enough to allow her entry. Jenny grunted silently, this was going to be a tricky matter to say the least.

With an abrupt warning, Jenny's internal motion detector alerted her to a harsh blast of pressurized gas coming from the airlock. She gave a quick smirk; it looked like the marines were letting her in after all. Sure enough the steel doors of the airlock slowly opened, revealing a room lit by red light. A digital display on the wall scrolled an endless list of warnings in garish yellow font.

Without wasting a second Jenny propelled herself into the airlock. Then, she rotated 360 degrees around and grasped the slowly opening doors in her white hands. With a grunt of exertion, she halted their outward movement, and slammed them shut. There was a noticeable vibration as the doors magnetically resealed. Satisfied with her work, Jenny turned her head to face the Marines on the other side of the airlock. Crossly, she motioned for them to hurry up. The marines just stared back blankly.

Suddenly, The marines began to make urgent motions out of her sight, and a few seconds later Jenny heard the comforting sound of repressurization. Jenny fidgeted, uncomfortable that this was taking so long. Time was of the essence, and every second could potentially be their last. If she didn't get this done soon, a lot of people would die and she wouldn't get to Mezmers on time.

A few more tense moments passed and Jenny tapped her foot irritably. Then, without warning, the airlock doors opened with a whine of gears. Before it was even fully open, Jenny wiggled her way thorough. An exasperated "Finally!" escaped her lips as she pushed her way into the stark white Airlock antechamber.

An emergency terminal protruded from one of the walls and was painted an urgent color of red. Standing beside it were the two marines from before, they wore coal grey body armor and clutched their rifles nervously in jittery hands. Half visored helmets hung snugly on each of their heads. One of them, a much taller and robust looking one, moved toward Jenny. "Um… Uh, State your name and business on-"

Jenny shoved him aside as she made a beeline for the emergency terminal "Yeah, whatever spaceman. Just get out of my way" She wouldn't normally be so gruff, but she was stretched for time and she was frustrated. She pressed passed the marine, who was too flustered to speak.

The Other marine was not as easily cowed, and positioned himself between Jenny and her intended destination. His mouth drawn into a line, He brandished his rifle menacingly and let the end of it gingerly hover over Jenny's midsection "I'm afraid we must insist ma'am." The marine said, as polite as he could manage "But our commanding officer needs to speak to you. Quickly."

Jenny frowned "Not enough time for that. Excuse me." She made to move past the marine. Quick as lightning, he jumped backward a few paces, bent his knees, and stuck the rifle point directly into Jenny's face. Jenny looked cross-eyed at the barrel of the rifle bemused.

The Marine cocked the rifle with a palpable menace "I don't think you're taking this seriously, I am authorized to shoot you girl. You're coming with us." Nervously, he fingered the rifles trigger.

Jenny made a face and put her hands on her hips. "And I think you're underestimating me. Whatever, I don't have time for this" She said, in a deadpan sort of way. Then, without batting an eye, she calmly reached up and bent the barrel of the rifle in half in a symphony of screaming metal. She Smiled at the dumbstruck marine "What was that again?"

The soldier's eyes grew as wide as dinner plates and began to mumble to himself. Rolling her eyes, Jenny effortlessly moved past him. She was confident she had intimidated both of the marines sufficiently, or at least had distracted them long enough for her to get rid of the reactor. She positioned herself in front of the bright red security console and looked at the ever repeating scroll of warnings on the screen. Disinterested, Jenny reached behind one of her pigtails, and drew forth a long, silver-blue wire. With a quick and fluid motion she slapped it into a nearby access port.

She had been getting a lot better with the S.E.E.R since she last had to use it. She had gotten faster at hacking, and a lot more efficient. And if she got a hard line to a consol she could perform complicated tasks in seconds. However, it did put a lot of strain on her processor, and it ate up a lot of RAM. She braced herself as she dove into the computer mind of the Atlantic.

The journey was quick, uneventful, stressful, and done in four seconds. Her right eye twitched as a rush of knowledge assailed her. She pushed aside the failing security procedures on the Atlantic and did a complete scan of the station. It was a particularly odd sensation, learning that much in such a little time.

She gasped as she unplugged herself from the terminal and shook her head violently. "I am never going to get used to that" she spat and steadied herself on a nearby ledge. Blinking furiously, she stood up to her full height and moved toward a nearby door, one that would take her into the heart of the station.

"Where- Where do you think you're going?" One of the Marines managed to say.

Jenny spared a glance over her shoulder. She laughed derisively as she went through the portal "Guess!" she called out behind her as she left.

Jenny Wakeman hated getting decontaminated.

Jenny sat in the middle of a specially made containment room deep below the Wakeman house hold, designed with the Teenage robot in mind. There were magazines, a bed, and a TV inside to keep her occupied, and besides for the piercing white interior, it was a rather pleasant place to be. Of course that was like saying that besides the fact that she was currently contaminated with a sizable amount of nuclear radiation she was perfectly safe to hang around. She actually was safe to hang around though, providing you had a hazmat suit.

Everything had been going so very well back on the space station. Jenny should have known that wasn't going to last though. It was almost as if the universe was out to get her (Science has proven that this is not the case. The Universe in not out to get anyone, and has no interest in how we conduct our daily lives. However it has been proven that all teenagers will blame all of their problems on the universe. The universe has failed to comment about this) How was she supposed to know that prolonged exposure to the reactor would irradiate her? And how exactly was she supposed to know that the damn thing would explode just as she got it out of the earths orbit? I mean come on, just when she got it out of orbit and when she was still hanging on to it? That was an irony she wasn't prepared to acknowledge as coincidental just yet.

So apparently she was contaminated with a near lethal dose a radiation, courtesy of Malfunctioning UEN equipment (not particularly lethal to herself, but rather the fragile humans around her). And those idiots from the government had the gall to threaten her and her mother with an environmental protection lawsuit. It wasn't like Jenny had chosen to crash in a national forest; it was all of it was the reactors fault. And the forests fault, doing all of its growing and all.

And the lecture her mother had given her! Jenny could still hear it ringing in her head.

Ex-Jay-Niyun, I have never seen such disrespect for international regulations in any robot on earth, let alone my own daughter! You assaulted a UEN marine, hacked a Navy base, destroyed a piece of machinery worth billions of dollars, and to top it off, crash landed in a National forest. And as a level five radiation threat no less! I don't even know why I let you go out of the house at all. All you seem to do is try and take shortcuts in your work. This is what I get for letting you listen to your father I suppose. Did it even occur to you that the Captain would have had a plan besides 'I'm going to throw the dangerous object into space?' Honestly, did you even run the probability equations. Oh, that's right, you had a feeling it was going to work. Well listen up, feelings won't help you save the day. Maybe those new nerves are interfering with your neural processes. If I took them away, might that help, hmm? And you should be glad that the UEN is thankful you at least saved the majority of the station, or else they might have given us a lawsuit that would put us back into the dark ages. And another thing…

Jenny slumped back onto her temporary bed, allowing her hands to cover her face. Today had been a disaster. She missed her day out with Sheldon and Brad, she barely got to try out her nerves at all, she nearly exterminated half the planet by accident, she dinged herself up in an uncontrolled reentry, and to top it off got yelled at. The only good thing about this day was that it was over. What she needed now was a deep hole for her to crawl inside and die.

But if she did that, Jenny reasoned, she would never actually get to give her damn nerves a test drive. And she wanted to do that so very badly.

Her Mom had at least allowed her to give Brad and Sheldon a call. They weren't happy, but they took it OK. Apparently they were planning on going to the movies and had already bought her a ticket. She felt really bad about that, and had offered to sneak out of the house and go with them anyway. Brad had then reminded her that she was still a radioactive hazard. That had put a damper on any ideas of escape. Sheldon had been pretty broken up about the whole thing, but then again, Sheldon was always like that.

She grabbed a pillow and threw it high into the air. As it came back to earth Jenny idly snatched it and tossed it into the air again. She needed to do something with the time, and she just didn't feel like watching T.V., or reading for that matter. She blew out a bit of artificial breath with a belabored sigh. As the pillow came down to earth again, Jenny caught in her iron clad grasp. Instead of throwing it into the sky again, she held onto it and pressed it against her chest. She lay there for a few long seconds.

It was nine o'clock now, and she had nothing to do. Worse yet, it would be another seven hours until she was completely decontaminated. She rolled over onto her stomach, her lower lip pouting ever so slightly. She yawned.

It was a weird thing, Jenny yawning. In all honesty she never needed to. She didn't breath, so she couldn't run low on oxygen and she wasn't susceptible to the whole "you yawned so now I have to yawn" thing. It was just a weird habit she picked up from humans, whenever her internal batteries were low, she would yawn.

Jenny made a face. It was pretty early for bed, but when she checked her internal energy reserves, she noted that they were nearly depleted. She looked annoyed, obviously the whole reactor thing took more out of her than she had expected. She yawned again, stretching her arms wide. Maybe she did need a bit of Shuteye. After all, she would be completely decontaminated after an eight hour sleep cycle, what was there to lose?

Tomorrow would certainly be a better day.

Jenny slept soundly in the darkened decontamination chamber, her head resting gently on a nearby pillow. Her hands lay in half curled positions by her face. They twitched slightly as she slept.

A blanket was draped over her, the wrinkles and folds gently outlining her lithe body. She didn't need to sleep in her armor anymore, and with her nerves activated, it was uncomfortable to do so. A simple nighty was sufficient for a comfortable nights sleep, and she had been assured it looked rather quite fetching on her. Jenny was oblivious to this at the moment though, her chest gently rising in sleep. She didn't breathe, but it was rather a side effect of her recharging systems which were siphoning off power from her own internal generator.

She lay motionless for a few seconds, and then rolled over in her sleep. The gentle motion set into place a cascade of processes inside her head. A few electrical signals began to fire, sending a complex system of zeros and ones through a matrix of synapses. The signals quickly reached her dreamchip, and a series of programs began to run. Slowly, her eyes began to flutter as she entered REM sleep.

And somewhere in the room, something laughed.

Well, it's two weeks late, but I did it. I finally uploaded another chapter.

Sorry for the delay, but work is just kicking my ass. To top it off though, this was not a particularly easy chapter to write either. Did you know I went through three full and completely unrelated drafts, and six different intros? It was madness, difficult to write madness.

And do you know what? I still don't like this chapter. It feels awkward.

I did have some fun with this chapter though. And the final editing was surprisingly easy. I suppose that was a karmic backlash from the whole three drafts thing. Or it could have been a coincidence. I'd also like to thank my partner Wikipedia for her invaluable help.

Things to say though: The last chapter holds the review record now, good for it. On my last story, the largest amount of reviews was three. The last chapter accumulated four (score!)

Before I go though…

Review me! I've been extra nice. And if you don't review me, they're going to take me off to Nova Prospekt for trans humanization surgery. I don't want to be combine, I don't want to be Combine at all. So review me. Please?