The handheld mining drill was off, sleeping soundly in its equipment sleeve down below, yet its vibrations still echoed numbly through J4-72's fingertips. She lay on her coveted bottom bunk, staring at the aluminum slats above and waiting on her body to release the shift's tension and slip into rest. A shower would help, but the row of stalls was full, and would remain full until the lights shut off at 13:00. The pain would wake her later in the sleep shift, and she could use the stillness to clean herself, then sleep until the lights clicked back on at 17:00. An hour later, she'd be lined up for her next shift in the mines, and other synths would fill the barracks until she and her cohort returned at noon.
"Are you still on?" T3 asked flippantly, toweling off her neat blonde hair as she walked down the row of beds from the hall.
"I'm awake," J4 answered dully.
T3 climbed to the top bunk, letting the towel flutter daintily onto the floor for some poor laundry synth to pick up. "I don't know how you expect to deactivate with all this noise. Do you have any food?"
"Sorry. I didn't stash any today." J4 didn't have much of an appetite these days, and a surplus of food meant the opportunity to buy friends. If nothing else, her rapport with her bunkmate had improved. "Tomorrow."
No sounds of acknowledgement came from above. "Would they keep it down?" T3 complained.
J4 forced her heavy limbs to sit her up. Two male synths were having some sort of disagreement in the next row, while a few others gathered around the commotion. Synths were moths to a flame for any disruption in the rhythm of the days, and J4 didn't claim to be any exception.
F8-26 was seething up at an unfamiliar synth seated statuelike on the bed atop his. J4 could see from the stranger's face that he'd recently taken a trip to the SRB — none of the meek curiosity of a newly-created synth, just an uncomprehending void behind the eyes.
"Oh. Poor thing," J4 murmured.
"I hate looking at them," said T3, and promptly flopped onto her mattress to watch from a distance.
F8 kicked the bedframe, sending a shiver through the aluminum but ultimately accomplishing nothing. "You have three seconds, Reboot. Get. Off. My bed."
"This is my assigned sleeping unit," the automaton said blankly. His thick brows furrowed, just barely.
"It doesn't matter whether it's your 'assigned-sleeping-unit,'" F8 mocked his mechanical tone. "The early-gens don't care where you sleep. But you'll care when I wring your neck tonight, Courser Dropout. You'll miss all that training then."
"Hey!" B1-33, ever reliable, broke through the circle of onlookers to intervene. He parked by the bed and crossed his arms. "If he was assigned there, he was assigned there. Get over it."
"I will not." F8 glared daggers at both of them, rage burning his face.
"What is your designation?" B1 asked the stranger, his deep voice steady.
Measurably more confident, the synth answered, "My designation is M7-97." It was part of the initial data package every synth possessed, even the blank slates, but he still looked to B1 for approval.
Though J4 had over two years of uninterrupted memory, she'd never been able to parse out much of a difference between most letter designations. A V could do a job just as well as an L, and their appearances and personalities varied as much as any synths'. There were only three exceptions.
If he was an X, he was definitely a courser dropout — one deemed unfit even to do menial labor for the SRB — and was in for a very lonely existence. Rarer was the S series, experimental synths commissioned specially by Advanced Systems. If one was considered viable enough to escape termination, but uninteresting enough to escape the labs, he would sometimes end up in the general population. The only other special series was the highly-valued prototypal synth, designated by A. Only 21 of those had been made so far, each unit sporting more and more biomatter until the way was paved for the Gen 3s. Since then, the few A units still produced ended up as coursers, and she'd never met one.
So his designation didn't tell them anything, but that didn't mean he wasn't a dropout. A synth fabricated for labor was occasionally chosen to be trained. But he (or, more rarely, she) had to have the sort of serendipitous qualities you couldn't design into a unit. High intelligence. Boldness. Above all, ruthless competence.
And likely no small amount of loyalty, which could be a problem for the rest of them.
"He isn't an X series. Why do you say he was a courser?" B1 asked coolly.
"Because, a courser brought him in. Anyway, just look at him."
M7 was big even for a male synth, which explained why they'd stuck him on the excavation shift. Physical strength didn't prove he'd been in the courser program, but it didn't hurt. J4 felt a bit of revulsion at the probability, then tamped it down.
B1 seemed to feel the same; his lips tightened as he assessed M7. "Maybe so. But he's nothing now."
M7 cocked his head, just slightly.
F8 growled with renewed frustration. "Get off my bunk before I drag you off, Dropout."
B1 stepped into his way. "Try it." He was slight, created for skilled labor rather than brawn, but his eyes were hard and sharp as diamond as they stared F8 down.
J4's heart lurched. With F8's temper, he was doomed to be reset one of these days, and everyone knew it. He didn't mind hastening the inevitable, but she wasn't going to let him take B1 down with him.
She pushed into the fray, startling other onlookers. "Enough. Switch beds with me. There's no need to fight."
Looking unhappy to take his eyes off his opponent, F8 glanced over. J4's bed was a bottom bunk like his, but closer to the door. Biting his cheek unhappily, he grunted and stepped back. "Fine. Bunk with the SRB puppet. It makes no difference to me."
Anxious to leave before someone else got the last word, he elbowed through the small crowd, dropping onto her empty mattress without more fanfare. T3, still lounging above, looked scandalized, and J4 winced apologetically.
She turned back to the scene. B1 was leaning against the bed, coming slowly off his adrenaline high. "Quick thinking. What would I do without you?"
"You were about to attract an overseer."
"F8 would have stood down." B1 huffed in exhaustion. "The overseers don't notice fights under a certain decibel level."
"Gen-1s don't. 2s keep track of troublemakers. Even if they don't intervene, they notice."
He rolled his eyes, but not at her. She didn't think. He glanced up at M7, who still watched them blankly from his perch. "Show me the back of your neck."
Unhesitating, he obeyed. B1 reached up and swiped a finger over an angry red scab. "They're about four days old. Your emotions will return soon. I'm sure you've already noticed the fear."
M7 turned back, with no indication whether he'd understood.
B1 patted his cheek gently, with a bit of condescension. "You'll be fine. Now thank J4 for helping you."
"Thank you."
"Oh," J4 hesitated, somewhat uncomfortable to be addressed by the synth. "It was nothing." She hadn't really done it for M7. And maybe being farther from the hallway would help her sleep.
"Thank her again once you're able to mean it," B1 added. "Walk with me," he ordered her, and left their barrack for the relative privacy of the hallway.
J4 followed, uncertain. She still wasn't happy about the risk he'd taken. B1 had gone all of his four years without having his memory erased, and in the meantime he'd developed something almost human about him, something beyond programming. He kept his defectiveness under wraps, but there was no hiding it from other Gen-3s. They liked him, trusted his experience.
He settled against a wall, and she wordlessly followed suit. She studied him — long nose, dark hair, quick mouth and quicker eyes — and wondered what was going through his head this time.
"Thank you. For ending that argument."
Her face burned. "You would both have ended up lobotomized like M7."
He nodded, slowly. "I couldn't stop myself."
"Sometimes your malfunctions scare me."
"Not malfunctions," B1 corrected her sharply. "Feelings, impulses. They're only errant because we aren't allowed to have them."
"I - don't mean to insult you. Only that they make you act illogically, B1. And I don't want to lose you."
That made him smile, and the tension diffused. "If we were purely logical, we may as well be robots. There are things deeper, better."
"Not if the SRB takes them."
He conceded with a shrug. His motions, they were so natural. In his duties as a repair synth, he was able to study the humans closely, and he could even talk like them when he wanted to. "One of these days, they will. If I can't accept that, I spend the rest of my days in misery. Better to live while I have the chance."
Live. Not lungs-respirating, cells-dividing, but really live, in that mystical ensouled sense that humans did. Could a synth even be capable of that? The idea was irrational, but there was an air of temptation to it. Maybe B1 had value beyond his design specs, his usefulness. Maybe she could too.
"Jay," he said softly. Even the nickname was a high crime. "We aren't broken." His hand found her unruly dark hair and smoothed it back, mimicking the casual touches shared between humans. She was unable to make herself stop him, so she filled the silence.
"I would prefer to stay that way."
His hand slid down, past her deep blue-gray eyes, knuckles tracing her cheek, a thumb brushing against her lips. She pulled back in alarm.
"B1, please." That had gone beyond friendly. And while she wasn't surprised that B1's hormones had overtaken his neurological functioning, it made her blood go cold even as her face burned hot. The thought that a synth was capable of feeling... those things... was unacceptable. There was no better way to corrupt your programming than by touching another synth like this. And no better way to find yourself reset than getting caught doing it. "Your glitching is dangerous. For both of us."
"Love isn't a glitch. You're capable of it too. I can teach you."
"No."
"It's worth it. I promise you."
"No." Over her pounding heartbeat, she heard the robotic joints of a Gen-1 overseer walking by, so she fixed her gaze on the opposite wall as it passed. B1 did the same, collecting himself.
He opened some distance between them. "It's painful," he mused, his voice laden with it. "To live this way. Every day, I work, I eat, I sleep, and all I can think about is how trapped I am. How alone."
"I know, B1," she said softly. "Maybe it's for the best that you won't be this way much longer."
He iced over, but his stare was sad. "I hope you live to understand how wrong you are."
The lights in the barracks clicked off.