A/N: The properties I'm claiming for DCUVRAP sound unlikely until you consider that almost all of them are true of, for example, a foot-thick sheet of glass (which is liquid-proof, can be melted, but not quickly or easily, will not react with acids or bases, and can retard the progress of gamma particles). Ceramic would probably serve as well. The unrealistic part is that I'm claiming those properties for a flexible thin polymer, not that I'm claiming them for a single substance.
Sorry about the update delay. I normally write in spurts and I'm entering a dry spell. Rest assured, the story will be finished.
23
"Bell?" Xen said. "Changeling, did I do it wrong?"
"No," Changeling said. "It is probable that she is reacting to experiences she had while the collar was active."
"Is she going into shock?" Xen asked. "She's getting cooler instead of warmer."
"Negative. Temperature does not differ between her core and extremities," Changeling said.
At last, the silent screaming stopped. Bell lowered her hands to the collar. Thick fingers wrapped around it on either side. It snapped cleanly in half with a report like a gunshot.
"No!" Xen said, over the sound of Changeling's laser powering up. "Don't shoot her." She looked at Charon, but his shotgun was still on his back.
"Error," said Bell, and dropped the halves of the collar in order to put her hands over her mouth again. "Shit. Error processing stimuli. Please schedule this unit for diagnostic. Error goddammit to Hell -"
The static scream returned for a second, then cut off. Bell stood up slowly. She was three or four inches taller than Xen, on parallel with the adult women she had seen in Underworld. Xen saw with alarm that a light was blinking on and off in the back of one of her eyes, behind the black iris.
"Glitching," said Bell. Xen couldn't tell if she was speaking to them or to herself. "Always the damn glitching with new emotional stimuli, and on top of that I've got four days of gang rape to process and why the fuck did they do that? Error." She wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered. Xen winced. "Just because they can't damage my goddamn chassis doesn't mean they can't screw my interpersonal programming all to Hell. Please schedule this unit for Damn Commonwealth lab rats think that just because they wouldn't fuck a cleanup assistance unit with an ugly DCUVRAP chassis error. Error. Error."
"What's happening?" Xen hissed at Changeling. "This isn't a normal response to sexual assault, is it?" She guessed that the word Bell had pronounced "deck-kewv-wrap" was an acronym, but only because it didn't make sense otherwise.
"Negative," said Changeling. "Not unless she is having a psychotic break, and that does not fit other available data."
"Bell?" Xen said. The woman was pacing back and forth, muttering to herself. The word error continued to recur. This went on for a few more seconds before Xen's voice seemed to penetrate.
Bell stopped and turned to look at her, suddenly and closely focused. "Did you say something?"
"Do you need a stimpak?" Xen asked lamely. "Or a drink of water or, or something?"
"No," Bell said. "I need a memory wipe followed by two weeks' work with a qualified tech in a dark room. But that's what I ran away from, isn't it? That's why I'm here."
"Where did you run away from?" Xen asked.
"The Institute," said Bell. She ran both hands through her short hair, ruffling it slightly. Muscle moved and slid under the skin of her arms. Her entire body was sturdy and plain, utilitarian. "It's in the Commonwealth up North. Getting out wasn't very hard. They never thought a CAU would come down with the existential uncertainty glitch."
"You've stopped saying error," Xen said. "Why?"
"I'm responding to direct questions," Bell said. Her speech was rapid and a little flat in tone, but her voice was otherwise quite ordinary, her accent like that of any other Wastelander. "You canceled my auditory error processing. It's still running in background. I'm going to be about fifty percent sane for another twenty hours, maybe longer. I wasn't designed for sexual use by humans. I'm not even supposed to have to pass for one. The cleanup techs are mostly female and Asian, so the higher-ups thought it would be easier for them to work with me if I looked like this. Damn paternalistic of them, actually..."
"You mean you're a synthetic person," Xen said.
Ah hah. I thought I remembered the word Commonwealth from somewhere. I wonder what "paternalistic" means.
"Android," said Bell. "Although technically I'm a gynoid, but nobody uses that word. I'm a laboratory cleanup assistance unit. My designation is B2-09. Bell is a nickname. My total vocabulary was maybe a thousand words before I started glitching the first time. I wasn't supposed to be able to learn new things without direct software input. They must've been surprised as Hell when I left. Problem is, my base programming tends me toward social interaction and I'm bad at pretending to be human, and that made it easier for them to find me. Sorry about the chatter. It's part of the error subroutine."
"Um," Xen said. "That's okay. I'm Xen, by the way. This is Charon. The packbot is Changeling."
"Charon," Bell said. She folded her arms, shifting her weight to rest on one leg. "That seems appropriate. And Xen..." Bell raised a thin black eyebrow. "You have the wrong number of fingers on both hands. I saw it when you were taking out the collar's power source. And your eyes are different, too. I'd have pegged your skin tone for an indicator of poisoning or malnutrition in the course of normal diagnostics, but I'm guessing it's actually your natural one, right?"
"Right," said Xen cautiously.
"Well, that's one less thing to worry about. You're not going to turn me in," Bell said. She turned and paced, a few steps one way and then back the other.
"I'm not?" Xen said.
"It'd be damn stupid." Bell ran her hands through her hair again. "The Institute would just love to get their hands on whatever you are. Ha. I bet you're an independent experiment, right? Maybe something out of the Enclave before it blew up? You're about the right age. But that's not an Enclave-issued bot. Sorry, I know I'm digging myself in further here but I can't seem to shut up. I should do something to dispose of the bodies but every time I look at them I run another fucking error loop - "
"That's easy to fix," Xen said, glad to have her diverted away from this uncomfortable line of reasoning. "Changeling, burn them."
Bell watched with her arms folded tight as the packbot began reducing the corpses to ash with her laser.
"That's not an Enclave bot," she said. "It's a home build, isn't it."
"Yes, she is," Xen said. She bit her knuckle, trying to decide what to do. "Bell, we still have a long way to go tonight. Why don't you come with us?"
"You can't afford to let me go," Bell said, cutting right through this. "If I get caught for real somebody else will know you exist and what you probably are. They can damn well pull that right out of my head even if I don't want them to, you know."
"I guessed," Xen said.
Bell shivered again. "I'll go with you. I have nowhere else to go. You're not going to find me easy to dispose of if you kill me, though. DCUVRAP is damn tough to break down -"
"I don't want to hurt you," Xen said. "I don't want to hurt anyone. It's just that things don't work that way out here." She waved a hand vaguely, indicating the Wasteland and the Metro and everything else outside the Lab. "If you don't try to attack us, Charon and Changeling will leave you alone. I so order it."
"Acknowledged," Changeling said. She had finished with one body and was moving on to the next.
"I unnerstand," said Charon.
"I won't attack you," Bell said. "When I think about touching anything alive I go suboptimal for a whole second and believe me, in here that's a damn long time." She turned and started to pace again.
"I'll bet it is," Xen said. "For the bots that's a subjective eternity if they're stuck in a loop. I remember that."
"It's not quite as bad for me as for a bot," said Bell. "I have integrated organic components, so I'm slower. But bad enough."
"What's DCUVRAP?" Xen asked. Bell seemed less disturbed while she was talking.
That could just be that she can't show external markers of her error processing and run interactions at the same time, of course, Xen thought. But let's hope.
"Dense corrosion and UV-resistant amorphous polymer," Bell said. She stopped pacing and turned to face Xen as she spoke. "The Institute's advanced humanoid models have organic flesh and blood. Those are useful when you have to pass for human, but they're a detriment in a cleanup assistance unit – too vulnerable to acid and radiation. The DCUVRAP looks more or less like skin, but it can't sweat and it has a very limited ability to grow hair. My hair and eyebrows are actually separate self-renewing components that grow out of my endoskeleton."
"And DCUVRAP is tougher than skin?" Xen asked, trying to assimilate all the information. Bell hadn't used a swear word in a couple of minutes. Maybe this was benefiting her.
"It's flameproof, heat-resistant, won't corrode even under 12M acid or base immersion, and is completely impenetrable to alpha, beta, gamma and ultraviolet radiation," Bell said. "It's fluid, cohesive, and can produce more of itself with minimal exposure to atmospheric carbon. Holes in it repair themselves. Not in a way that can pass for human healing, of course. I don't have blood. I'm semisolid all the way down to endoskeleton, and that's coated titanium."
"I see," Xen said. "So part of the reason they want you back is that you were expensive to build."
"Very," Bell said dryly. "Probably several million caps if you count the hours of work the techs and programmers had to put in."
"So they'll hire more mercenaries," Xen said. "Given their investment in you."
"Maybe," said Bell. "If I'm lucky. Your large friend here took them out in less than a minute. You won't get off so easy if they manage to free up one of the A3 units long enough to look for me. If that happens, I'd suggest you run, but he'll have orders to kill anyone who knows what I am. And he'll be aggressive about finding that out."
"He?" said Xen, with a sinking feeling.
"The A series are all masculine. They didn't think a combat gynoid would be taken seriously outside the Commonwealth," said Bell. "Which would result in unnecessary delays, combat wear and tear on the unit, and so on."
"And you can't defend yourself," Xen said. "Can you."
"Task complete," Changeling said. A faint drift of ash and a fading smell was all that remained of the mercenaries.
"I can protect myself from harm only if it doesn't involve harming a human," Bell said. "That's base programming. I can get around it given enough time and the right kind of logic, but I'll hesitate and it'll create more internal errors. Either way, I can protect myself from an A3. I'm stronger and more durable. That won't make a bit of difference against a faster unit with a gun, of course. Bullets do penetrate DCUVRAP. There's a reason why they send those units after the rest of us, you know."
"I see," Xen said.
"Shall I reiterate why bringing her with us is not a wise choice?" Changeling asked.
"You think your laser can break down the stuff she's made of?" Xen asked.
There was a flicker as Changeling's turret scanner activated. "Negative. My spectrometry functions are primitive, but they confirm the android's statements."
"Call her Bell," Xen said. "And assess. If we kill her and leave her here, if we hide the body, can we prevent an agent of the Commonwealth from finding her and tracking us?"
"Negative," said Changeling after a moment. "An android designed to hunt other androids will logically have means to locate one that is concealed, including a defunct unit. Tracking us will be somewhat more difficult, but again, if that is a base function of the series then it will not be impossible."
"So if it's going to track us down no matter what, isn't it better to have another functional android with us?" Xen asked.
Changeling was silent for a moment.
"I think you're being unreasonably stubborn about this," Xen said. "Respond."
"You assume that bringing Bell with us is safer than leaving her here," Changeling said. "I resist that conclusion. She is still not stable."
"It's the best we can do, for now," Xen said. "Charon, what do you think?"
"In light of current information, I must agree wit' Xen," Charon said.
Bell shivered again. "You think you're faster than an A3," she deduced quietly. "Let's hope you never have to find out."
"I couldn't agree more," Xen said. "Come on. We'd better get moving."