(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 35

There was a definite sinister feel to arriving at the old barn. The place looked like the houses for sale in town, abandoned but kept from falling apart. Grass around it was tall and looked wild, not the usual kept sort that one might find around the barns that were in active use. And yet, there was no for sale sign, no indication that it was this way for a good reason.
”Is it cool if I take this off now?” asked Mischa from the back. My new friend had insisted on putting a bag over the both of our heads, wanting to keep the location we were going a secret. We had both protested, but the alternative had been to be left stranded with a girl-shaped robot bound and gagged in a blanket in the middle of town. Or letting her go. Neither was very preferable.
The nameless guy said nothing, but his look to me seemed like a sign of permission, and I took off Mischa's bag. I had mine removed the moment we arrived, but this new friend seemed less interested in Mischa.
”You do know we can just get your name from the supermarket, right?” complained Mischa as he got out of the car. For some reason, my new friend broke into a visible smile, still not commenting on any of it.
”I don't think they know it, either,” I mumbled, not sure if I was even telling Mischa or just myself.
”Ida, am I missing something?” Mischa asked, keeping his voice low as we followed the guy into the barn at a slight distance. He was carrying the robot over his shoulder, which had taken both myself and Mischa a bit by surprise. Years of movies had convinced us that a robot, any robot, would be back-breakingly heavy, but it made sense that she would weigh the same as me. Having her crash through a fragile staircase for weighing half a ton might cause her to attract some unwanted attention.
”What do you mean?”
He moved in a little closer, his eyes aimed firmly at our less than talkative friend.
”We got robot copies, maybe time travelers, definitely crazy fast girls, and who knows what else in our town. I never even heard of any of that before. And now this weirdo.” He paused, waving his finger rather dismissively at the other guy's back as he carried the robot into the barn. ”What the hell else is running around? How many people are completely different from what we think?”
For some reason, the question had never occured to me. It had somehow seemed that the time travelers had simply been a fluke, the one thing out of the ordinary in a usually very, very ordinary town. Everything seemed to connect nicely to them, after all, with most strange people being these refugees, whatever that technically meant. But the thought dug into my brain and settled.
”Hey, dude,” I said, loud enough to be heard at a distance but not shouting. ”Wait up, I got some questions.”
”Inside,” he simply answered, not even turning to look back. I looked back at Mischa, who simply shrugged his shoulders with eyes wide.
The barn was close enough that waiting was no real chore. The guy opened a person-sized door next to the large barn doors, a door that either knew to open for him or was never locked in the first place. Mischa and I hurried to catch up, fearing that the door might not be as generous with us!
Inside the barn, lights came on automatically, the moment that the guy stepped inside, perhaps even before that. One by one, lamps with an intense light, but somehow not blinding, flared to life along the ceiling, making it easier to see inside the barn than outside of it! And what they illuminated was quite a sight!
Along the side of the barn that held the grheater barn doors, most of the expected things for a barn were placed, standing close enough together to make one think that whoever placed them had played more than a few rounds of Tetris. But they were for show. They were there to allow someone to move them out into whatever fields were attached to the barn, if any, and look like a real farmer. The bulk of the place was not like that. Instead, rows of minimalistic shelves, little more than metal frames, held a myriad of technical parts, very few of them easy to identify. They looked like the torn off parts of some defeated robot monsters, snakes of metal and plastic with wires hanging out. Some hard obvious tools at one end, like grappling fingers or complex scientific stuff. A few looked like metal limbs, the shape and size of an arm or a leg but with no kind of skin or even a paint job to look like it.
But the most sinister thing in the whole place was a large table, placed amongst the shelves and only visible once you had already walked a few steps into the place. It had straps, by the looks of it some type of soft plastic, like an oversized armband. But there were also metal clamps, folded up and placed on a rack much like the shelves, near the table. It was not a dining table, that much was for sure.
Without a word, the guy walked over to the table and flipped the robot from his shoulder and onto it, like someone slapping a restaurant table with a piece of cloth before wiping it down. The thud it made sounded utterly wrong. It echoed through the entire barn a few times, sounding like someone throwing a rock against the side of a truck. What was really sickening, however, was the loud whimper that came from the wrapped up bundle!
”Jesus, man, don't kill her!” Mischa snapped, in pure reflex. The guy finally turned to look back at us.
”It,” he simply said, looking at us for a few seconds before realizing we didn't get the message. ”It's an it, not a her. It's built to mimic humans, but it's no human.”
Mischa looked at me for a second, but I had nothing to tell him, one way or the other. The whimper had been like a jab at my stomach, too, but I quickly forced my brain to remember the copy trying to strangle me in the hallway at school. The resulting feelings were complicated, to say the least.
”They make them at a facility up north, somewhere near Vordingborg, as far as we know,” he said, walking around, fiddling with things on the racks and shelves. ”Ship 'em here in bulk, in trucks. One of the rebels showed us some pictures of a truck they intercepted.” He smiled, the kind of creepy smile where he turned his head halfway towards us so we could see it in the profile of his face. ”They pop when they overheat. Like popcorn.”
”This guy is #*@!ed up, Ida,” whispered Mischa.
”Maybe,” the guy responded, making Mischa go pale as fresh snow. ”But I'm guessing you don't have some powerful baddie hunting you and your family through time and space. It gets to you, after a few years.”
With those words, he turned around, his arms loaded with an assortment of smaller devices. A few wires hung over the side, making it look like he was carrying a robot octopus when he walked.
“You had questions?” he remarked as he plunked the assortment of devices on the larghe table. The robot actually started to sob, which was intensely surreal to experience.
“Yeah...” My mind had trouble letting go of the robot, the sounds of it so real I was having trouble seeing it as not a living thing. But I forced the feeling down deep into me. “Well, we were just thinking, how many in the area aren't what they seem? I mean, how many time travelers, robots, I don't know, aliens, vampires, whatever?”
He looked us over, the both of us, as if he was measuring us up to see what we could handle knowing. The look on his face didn't seem very encouraging.
“I can't say for their robot copies, could be a dozen, could be hundreds,” he started, walking along the table, fastening things to it with little, chunky clicks. “Before the clean-up, like, a week or two ago, you had maybe three dozen rebel TT, maybe five hundred or so refugess and family hiding all around. But that's, like, in the small towns, too, so plenty of spread.”
“TT?” asked Mischa, sounding more like it was aimed at me than the nameless guy.
“Time travelers. Or just time travel,” he half mumbled while starting up some of the devices. The bundle with the robot copy began writhing in what looked like the equivalent of a panic.
“Then you got the second line and, yes, the freaks. Maybe a few hundreds of the one, some dozens of the other, I'm not sure.”
“Look,” I said, sounding as tired as my brain felt, “could you stop the colorful labels? We don't know what second lines or freaks are. Well, we don't know what you mean by it.”
Both Mischa and I held our breath when he suddenly whipped out a huge pair of scissors. With nimble hands he snipped the bag open that the robot was being carried in. And there she was, lying on the table. Hands and feet bound, mouth gagged. Me. It was me on the table, at least when it came to appearances. She looked exactly like me.
“Second line are the people dealing with TTs, harvesting tiny technological primers and bits of informaiton about the future, usually to cash in on it somehow. Freaks are the aliens and vamps and stuff you mentioned.”
While he locked the robot's wrists and ankles to the table with large metal fittings, Mischa and I stood with our jaws on the floor, only briefly daring to even look at each other.
“I... was kidding...” I stammered, staring in disbelief at the guy. “About aliens. And vampires.”
“Oh,” the guy simply said, looking for once a bit embarrassed, before he locked the robot to the table by the neck. “Well, whatever. About 30% of the local populace is abnormal, about four times the global average. As far as we know.”
“And who are we?” I asked, my brain being more or less on autopilot. Mischa was completely silent. He only closed his mouth because it was getting dry, from the look on his face.
“We,” the guy said, pausing to look right into the eyes of the robot copy of me, “are some people who are pretty tired of being pushed around.” He leaned in, as if talking directly to the robot. It was both fascinating and terrifying to see my perfect copy, on the table, twist and bend to get free. In a moments of weakness, I felt that it was me, and I was seeing it all from the outside. “And we have friends in high places,” he finished, leaving a few seconds for just peering into her, its, eyes, his own eyes filled with an anger I could not remember having ever seen anywhere else.
With the flick of one final switch at the rack, he turned on the power for everything he had been setting up. Little lights and buttons lit up in colors that likely meant something to him, and the sound of a generator started rumbling through the enclosed barn. With little fanfare, he walked over and yanked the gag off the mouth of the robot.
“What are you doing?!” it immediately started screaming in a very shrill voice. For a few seconds, I wondered if that was really how I sounded. “I haven't done anything, please just let me go! I won't say anything, I promise!”
Without a word, he just stood next to her head and pointed over to me. The robot turned its head, eyes scanning around the room, then spotting me. Then, it screamed.
“Just gears and wires,” the guy said out loud, clearly to me and Mischa, although he never looked our way. “A simulation of the real.” He then held up a long, thin piece of metal, looking closely at it while turning a nob by the table. The metal made a few zapping sounds and a few, tiny, sparks.
“No no noooo, please don't!” the robot cried, and I could see in Mischa's eyes that it was getting to him. To be honest, had he looked at me, he would be able to see the same.
“So,” said the guy, standing over the robot copy with the now humming metal stick in his hand, raised to let her see it, “I'm going to run a test on your physical systems. It will hurt.”
As he ran the stick over her body like some kind of magic wand, sparks shot like tiny lightning, clearly connecting to something inside of her. The guy never changed his expression, nevrE flinched or grimaced. The robot screamed. I took a single step towards the table, but before I could do more, I felt Mischa's hand on my arm. He just looked at me and, with eyes full of a strange fear, shook his head.
“Don't,” he finally said, not letting go of my arm but instead pulling me in a bit closer.
“He's going...”
“I know,” he interrupted, his voice now so low it was barely audible over the screams of the robot. “My grandma told me stories.”
I looked at him, trying to figure out if I had missed something. Nothing came to mind.
“She was born back in '43, remember,” he added, and I neither remembered him ever mentioning that, nor did I understand his point.
“She heard her parents talk while she grew up. Talk about the war. My granddad even saw some of it, he was 14 whe the war ended.”
I briefly did some of the math in my head, figuring out that there had to be over ten years between his grandparents, but I said nothing. It was a different time, and it didn't matter here and now, I guessed.
“I'm not quite Polish, in a way, but they are. They fought Nazis, remember?”
I nodded, slowly, although I still felt like something was missing. At the very least, he finally looked at my arm and noticed that he was still holding it, and let go.
“They met men like that. You don't want to get between him and whoever he's angry at.”
I looked at Mischa, squinting in confusion, then at our nameless friend.
“You think he's a Nazi?” I asked, instantly feeling stupid.
“#*@! the Nazis,” Mischa all but snapped, looking briefly at me but quickly turning his eyes towards the guy. The robot still screamed and cried as he passed the stick over it, now reaching her knees. “#*@! the Nazis with a barbed wire dildo,” Mischa elaborated, his teeth gritted and his voice almost snarling. “No, she told me about the men and women that hunted the Nazis after the war. Tracking down escaped groups of them, tracking down sympathizers and war profiteers.”
The screaming died out, the robot settling on a stammering cry as the guy put the metal stick back in its spot on the rack by the table. In its stead, he grabbed a notebook near it and began flipping pages.
“But... the Nazis were the bad guys, right? So those who fought them were good guys. Right?”
Mischa bit his lip a bit, apparently unsure or uncomfortable about the answer.
“It was war. There's a big difference between good people and nice people in war.”
I looked back and forth between the only other three people in the room, or what looked like people. Mischa, the robot, the guy.
“War...” I said under my breath, the word somehow digging deeper and deeper into my mind. “Hey! Uhm... Punisher guy!”
The guy looked up from his notebook, sending the robot a quick glance before looking over at me. “Yeah?” he said in the most undramatic, almost bored way.
“It's a war, right?” I said, stepping towards the table. Mischa tried grabbing my sleeve, but I just patted his hand gently, and he let go.
“What, this?” he asked, looking at the robot first and then me.
“No, the whole, like, thing. You, your friends and family. You're on the run, yeah, but it's because of a war, right?”
He stood still for a few moments, something clearly not adding up in his brain.
“I guess. Why?”
I stopped on the side of the table opposite to him, looking down at the robot on it. It sent a nausea through my throat and a biting cold down my spine to see me, in a sense, strapped to that table, helpless and afraid. Oddly enough, while she was scared of him, she seemed utterly terrified by me!
“Look, I know you're just itching to add her parts to your, uhm, collection there, but how about we treat her like a P.O.W. First?”
He stood completely still, like his brain had simply shut down.
“A prisoner of war,” I explained, and his face finally changed, although not to something positive.
“I know what a #*@!ing P.O.W. is, what's your point?!”
I looked down at the robot, looking ito its scared eyes.
“She reports back to something, somewhere. To someone. How about we find out about her, now that we have her?”
He put away the notebook. “Like what, interrogate her? I mean, it? #*@!!”
It clearly bothered him to think of the robot as a person, and something deep inside me understood that. For a moment, I imagined Mischa's family during and after the war, the hatred they must have had for the Nazis, perhaps even Germans in general. My mom's family was mostly from Greenlan, so they had been pretty isolated in those days, and half of Peter's family was from Sweden, so he had probably heard very few war stories, and he definitely never talked about them.
“It's a machine,” I said, hoping to calm him down a bit. “It's a computre inside a machine body, right? Don't you have something to hack it?”
“Hack it? Ida,” he chuckled, “this isn't the new MacBook or your big brother's gaming console or whatever. It was designed by people from the far future, using god only knows what kind of technology. We don't even know enough about them to try.”
I was about to say something, to throw some ideas into the air and see what landed, when something inside me latched onto the last sentence he said. Something in his voice sounded wrong, insecure even.
“Is this... Is this your first live specimen?” I asked, feeling the hair stand upright on my arms as I heard myself use that last word about the robot girl crying on a cold metal table in front of me.
“They rarely come quietly,” he grumbled, turning his back to put away the notebook on the rack. “We had a few that were still talking, but they were badly enough damaged that it was, well... they might as well not have been, honestly.”
Ignoring my urge to explain or discuss the idea with him, and perhaps Mischa, I leaned over the robot and, without even thinking about it, stroked her hair gently.
“Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt you,” I said in a motherly voice, watching as she nonetheless squirmed in her restraints to getf away from me. “I just want to know if you have some kind of plug, or some other interface that we can use to see what's in your head?”
She seemed to relax, suddenly becoming very still on the table. I noted that she was trying to get her breathing under control, and it bothered me. Why was a robot trying to control its breath?
“Are you #*@!ing insane? What do you mean?” she asked, her voice sounding like she was about to burst into tears. “My name is Ida Lund, I live in Nakskov, I go to school there and I... wait...”
Her head was starting to twist around in a way that looked sort of painful. It only occured to me too late what she was trying to do.
“Mischa?!” she said out loud. “Mischa, what's going on, who are these people? And why does that one look like me?!”
Mischa turned pale almost instantly, having tried until now to stay out of her sights, for obvious reasons.
“Don't worry, kid,” said the nameless guy, “it's just playing you, trying to get inside your head.”
“I don't think so,” I blurted out. Realizing that it might require explanation, I stood back up from leaning against the table over... myself, and looked at the other two. “I think she honestly thinks that she's me.”
The guy froze completely, the concept being a bit more than he was ready for. Surprisingly, Mischa did not. I only noticed that he had walked right up to me when he finally spoke.
“So... it thinks that it is, really, you? Like, it thinks it's Ida, you?”
“Of course I... what's going on, Mischa?” it whimpered, twisting itself against the restraint. “Why am I on a weird table and being electricuted by Evil Bieber here?!”
“Yeah, you would say that,” Mischa commented, and all I could do was nod.
The nameless guy was standing a bit from the table, his chin resting on a hand in the classical thinker's position, almost looking like a cliche. His eyes had an unsettling aura to them, screaming silently of thought processes going on behind them. On the positive side, he didn't seem entirely overwhelmed by the turn of events, still looking like someone in control of both himself and the surroundings. On a less positive note, he seemed uncomfortable with the idea of treading what was, to him, clearly new ground.
“So you really don't understand what you are?” I asked it, my voice stumbling as I thought through every word on the way.
“My name is Ida!” it yelled, tears beginning to flow again. It tore at the restraints, accomplishing nothing but clearly intending more to just show the rage, anyway. “I'm Ida, and I want to go home!!” it continued.
Quite surprisingly, the nameless guy suddenly stepped around the table, making a gesture for us, or at least me, to follow him. His eyes were darting back and forth, thoughts likely racing through his mind, not giving either of us even a glance.
“How well would you say that you know yourself, Ida?” he asked once we had put a bit of distance between us and the robot girl on the table. I blinked a few times, looked at Mischa, and tried to phrase an answer that didn't sound too dumb.
“I think, maybe, pretty well? Like, not in a psycho analytics way, but, yeah?”
In spite of my efforts not to sound dumb clearly failing, the guy nodded and did the thinker's thing with his hands again, sending the table a few looks.
“Fine, we do interrogation. But you do it.”
“What?!” I erupted, the idea frightening me enough to make me forget that she, it, might be listening.
“If anyone can get inside your head, it's you. So it's only logical that you try to get into hers.”
There was some really strong logic in that claim, but it still had to make a few laps around my brain before it started even remotely making sense to me. I timidly agreed, deciding to just go with the flow for a moment, and see how it played out.
Returning to the table, the guy started pulling some metal pins out beneath it, apparently making the table separate into a few movable parts. Within seconds, and without loosening any restraints, he had changed it into a metal chair. It still looked forboding, its heavy frame and chunky, boxy design looking like something ripped straight out of a horror movie torture scene.
“Who are you people?” asked the robot, but the guy didn't answer. Mischa, too, kept silent, subtly slipping around the chair to stay out of her, its, sight again.
“I'm the real Ida,” I answered as softly as I could. The thing's face wrinkled up in an expression that, more than anything, looked like disgust.
“You?” it asked, strong skepticism masking its voice. “You're me?”
“No, you're a copy of me. You're a robot,” I replied, keeping my voice as dry and emotionless as I could. Considering the words spoken, that was no easy feat.
“What the #*@! is wrong with you? Why are you going on about this robot thing? Did you watch too...”
“Oh god, make it stop,” the guy growled, taking a few brisk steps towards the racks behind him. He returned to put some pink lumps on either side of the robot's left arm, carefully balancing them on the wide arm of the metal chair.
“Is that... ham? Why do you have ham here?” I asked, but he never replied. Instead, he pulled out a long, thick metal rod. Before any of us could react, he swung the rod over his head at the robot arm, and bits of refridgerated meat and juices sprayed out as the rod struck both the hams and the arm. The robot screamed, but it turned out to be fear, not pain.
“See?” he said, raising the rod. The metal was bent midway, roughly at the spot that had hit the arm. “The meat got smashed, but your arm is fine.”
We all, me, the robot and even Mischa, leaned in to look at the arm. On either side of it, smashed ham was dripping from the armrest in squishy chunks, but the arm itself only had a red bruise.
“That,” he said, pointing first to the rod and then the arm, “would have destroyed a human arm. Your's isn't human, because neither are you.”
We kept looking back and forth between the rod, arm, dripping ham and each other for a minute or so, everybody still stunned at the guy's sudden action.
“It's a trick,” the robot finally said. “It's a trick. I'm not a... I'm real. I'm the real.. I'm Ida! I have a sist.... I have a #*@!ing family! I can... I remember stuff. I remember... I remember you, Mischa! You wear that watch because your brother wore it when he died in that car accident. I remember... Look, I have a scar on my hip from falling off my bike when I was seven. I didn't want to ride a bike for years after that. Tell them, Misch, tell th...”
“Yeah, about that,” said the guy, stepping around the chair, apparently to check the scar. Instead, however, he lifted up the robots blouse in one quick pull.
“No belly button, no features at all,” he dryly stated. Mischa and I just looked at the completely smooth lower stomach exposed. It was like a very fine doll's skin.
“Won't that be a problem?” asked Mischa, sounding a bit uncomfortable. “I mean, showering after gym is gonna be kinda awkward like that, right?”
The guy put the blouse back down.
“She's an... It's an early model, the kind they just throw in quickly to replace someone. They upgrade it after that, bit by bit.” As he said the words, he casually pointed around the barn, at the pieces that lay on shelves and hung from racks. The robot, meanwhile, started screaming.
“No! You're lying! It's a trick! I'm real, I'm real! I'm #*@!ing real!! Get me the #*@! out of this chair, I'll #*@! you up, I'll #*@!ing kill you all!!”
We all took a step back.
“Yeah, sounds like a robot to me,” the guy sighed. I looked at him, and noted Mischa sending him a funny look.
“Nooo,” said Mischa, sounding weirdly calm, “that's Ida when she is really, really pissed.”
They both looked at me. I smiled, awkwardly, and shrugged my shoulders.
“Fine,” the guy said, “but where do we go from here, then? The thing clearly isn't ready to face facts.”
I couldn't stop looking at the robot girl, sitting in that big chair, struggling, crying and screaming. Without saying anything, I walked to a chair by the racks and picked it up, setting it down in front of her.
“Does it matter?” I asked, looking her, it, right in the eyes. It sobbed, slowly stopping the crying and screaming.
“Does what matter?” it asked, gasping for breath. Taking a deep breath myself, I leaned over and wiped a few tears off her face with my hand.
“Does it matter that you're not the real me?” I elaborated.
The robot sat silently, looking at me with very confused eyes.
“Of...  of course it does,” it stuttered, sniffing a bit as it did. “I'm... if I'm... not real...”
“Then what?” I asked, cutting it off in the softest voice I knew how to muster. “You're still you. Or me, or whatever. You still have the same memories. You still think the same.”
“You wanna be a robot?” she asked in a slightly snide voice. For a few seconds, I said nothing, actually thinking hard about the question, harder than I had intended.
“I don't think I care,” I finally said. And to my surprise, I realized I was telling the truth. “I'm me. Flesh or metal, doesn't matter.” A thought struck me, and I turned my head towards the nameless guy. “Do they even need to eat? Or do they, like, run on electricity or something?”
To my surprise, the robot chuckled, although it seemed a bit mocking. But the guy just gave it a quick glance before aswering.
“They fake eating. They run on some weird battery, probably something they slapped together from some future science knowledge and local components or something. We haven't figured out how it works, but we do have a few spares around here somewhere.”
“See,” I said, turning back to look at the robot, “you don't even have to eat. I would like that superpower.”
“Superpower?” the robot stuttered, looking a bit confused, but no longer really angry or afraid. I nodded.
“You don't know anything about the people who made you, or how you work, do you?” I asked, and it shook its head very rapidly, some fear still slipping through. Thinking about that, I fell silent for a bit.
“Are you gonna... you know...” The robot looked saddened, most of all, unable to finish the question in one go. “Are you going to, I don't know, shut me down? Like, kill me, I guess? For parts?”
I suddenly felt a pit in my stomach, looking at the robot as it ran its gaze slowly around the barn, looking at the different parts stored all over.
“That was the plan,” said the nameless guy from somewhere behind me. The robot's eyes widened and teared up.
“It's not the plan any longer,” I added, and the robot's eyes shifted between me and the guy behind me.
“I have blackouts,” the robot suddenly said, very quickly. I looked at it, apparently visibly puzzled. “Like, I have brief moments that I just, like, don't remember. At all. I kinda put it together and don't think much about it, but... for a few minutes now and then, I kinda just... forget.”
I flinched when the nameless guy knelt down beside me, looking at the robot.
“You're... she... #*@!... it's making reports. Or meeting someone. I think it has a second mind, the slave mind that we see in other copies.”
The image of Kurt, down at the harbor, and his cold and emotionless obedience to the woman in white popped back up in my head.
“Can I... Can I stop that? If you let me go? I swear, I don't want to do anything. I just wanna go home.”
I looked at the nameless guy, but for the first time, and to my complete surprise, he looked baffled, turning almost pale at the questions he suddenly had to deal with.
“Dude, we could get her inside their ranks,” I said, instantly cursing myself silently that I hadn't pulled him aside to say so. He did, however, seem interested in the idea, although he also seemed pretty conflicted about it all.
“I have no idea how to do that,” he said, sounding almost disappointed with himself.
“Do you have any brains here?” I heard myself asking, then felt very weird about. “I mean, do you have robot brains, like hers?”
He nodded and got up to start looking over the racks and shelves.
“Look,” I said, trying to be as friendly and comforting as possible to the robot. “We're going to see if we can find something in your brain and, I don't know, deactivate it, okay?”
She nodded, but the confusion in her eyes was very obvious. I didn't blame her for that, I would have felt the same. Then again, that was sort of obvious, given the situation.
“We tried to hack into a brain that wasn't entirely smashed, but it didn't work,” the guy said, returning with a weird lump of plastic in one hand, and some cables and pieces of equipment in the other.
“Try it,” I said, moving away from the robot. He went behind the chair and started touching the back of the robot's head, looking for something. He didn't get far before it suddenly sat up straight, staring into nothing.
“Hello?” I said, waving my hand in front of its face. “Uhm, Ida, I guess? You there?”
There was no reaction. At least none from the robot. The nameless guy stepped around the chair to look.
“Crap,” he said, sounding mainly annoyed. “Yeah, they do that. It's trying to send an emergency signal, to get others to come get it. Probably not the first time, but it's upping the strength, shutting down other systems to boost the power.”
I looked into the vacant eyes of the robot. Tears had stopped flowing, and there was absolutely no reaction from her.
“Don't worry,” he continued, “the building is completely shielded. We had this happen a few times bef...”
“She's hot,” I said, not hearing him out.
“What?”
“She's hot. She's practically boiling.”
I didn't even touch her, but just from being close to her face, I could feel the heat radiating from it. When I leaned back a bit to take a look at the rest of her, I noticed little bubbles in her skin.
“Hey, uhm, guy, what's her skin made of?”
He looked over the robot's shoulder again.
“A soft plastic with some kind of silk woven into it. Why?”
“'Cause it's rising like warm cupcakes!”
Nearly tripping over his own feet, he ran around the chair, gripping the robot's right wrist and instantly letting go of it with pain racing across his face.
“Jesus #*@!ing christ, she's burning off all her power to boost the signal,” he said, running over to the nearby racks. Practically ripping a small screen that looked like a very chunky phone from a shelf, he apparently filmed the robot, seeing the result on the screen.
“Her infrared is spiking as #*@!,” he hissed, then waved his hands in the air. “Get away from her, she's gonna cook you!”
I stepped away, and noticed Mischa doing the same. Powerless, we watched as her skin began to sizzle ever so slightly, more and more tiny blisters appearing. Without thinking about it, I jumped over to her and looked into her vacant eyes.
“Bobo is a blue boy!” I said, loudly.
“Ida, what are you...”
“Shut up, Misch,” I called, then looked in her eyes again. “Bobo is a blue boy, remember that!”
Feeling my face redden, I was actually relieved when Mischa grabbed me by the collar and pulled me away from her. And then, as suddenly as she had started to overheat, she stopped. The vague sizzle disappeared, the reddish hue on her artificial skin faded. And then, her eyes sprang to life again.
“What's... what happened?” she asked, sounding very afraid. “Why do I feel really hot?”
We all just looked at her, perhaps expecting her to answer the questions herself. She didn't.
“You don't remember?” asked Mischa, and she shook her head.
“Something inside you sent out a message to the ones that made you. It used a lot of power and got your body really hot.”
She clearly had problems making sense of it, but she tried. That didn't help her obvious panic, though.
“I don't remember that,” she said, nearly in tears.
“Do you remember Bobo?” I asked, and ignored the weird looks I got from Mischa.
For a few seconds, the robot just sat there, looking confused and gently shaking its head. Then something in her eyes came to light.
“Wait... Is Bobo, uhm, a blue boy? It doesn't...”
“It makes no sense,” I said, smiling at her. “But how did you remember it?”
She was thinking, or whatever the equivalent was for her. Just like the nameless guy, and probably like me, her eyes darted around, as if chasing the thoughts in her head.
“It's weird,” she finally said, “I feel I know it, but I don't remember you saying it to me. Like, I don't remember looking at you when you said it. Does that make sense?”
I smiled, a sincere smile of both intense fascination and some joy.
“It does. And you remember that I was the one who told you?”
She nodded, looking completely baffled. I stood up from the chair, looking over at my nameless friend, who was tampering with some equipment by the racks.
“You're right, she has two minds in one brain,” I said, feeling more excited than I felt was honestly right. “The human one never heard me say that line, but the slave mind handed her the basic information. I think we can...”
“Yeah, yeah, hold that thought,” he simply said, looking intensely at a set of small screens.
“Dude, I just... Wait, what are you doing?”
He waved a hand briefly, gesturing for me to be quiet. I said nothing, but made sure to growl loud enough for him to hear my irritation. He finally stepped away from the small screens, running over to check something by the wall.
“Hey, spy boy, fill us in, would you?” I called to him. He didn't stop moving, but made a few sounds before actually speaking.
“You know how our girl doll there just went kinda thermonuclear? Why do you think she stopped?” he asked, obviously knowing the answer. “She got through, that's why,” he finished.
Mischa was on the verge of panic, I could see it in his face. The robot girl was as confused as before. I had no idea how to feel.
“#*@!,” the guy said. “#*@!ing #*@! of #*@!!” he then shouted, running from one strange panel  to the next.
“What?! Could you fill us in, for #*@!'s sake?”
Without a word, he sprinted between the racks and shelves, disappearing for a few seconds before reappearing, looking like he now was the one about to boil.
“They're already zeroing in on us,” he panted. “They must have been looking for her, if they were active when they caught the signal!”
At the last few words, his voice rose to loud and angry, and he kicked some minor device that had fallen to the ground near the table.
“#*@!!” he shouted, looking ready to punch someone. Putting his thumbs against his nose in a rather weird gesture, he apparently managed to bring his temper down, at least a little.
“Everybody head for the small door over there. Wait there for me,” he said, his voice calm, but clearly ready to pop again.
“Why do we...”
“NOW!” he screamed, his face red as a cherry! Both Mischa and I headed in the direction he had pointed, but I stopped halfway, looking back at the girl in the metal chair.
“What about her?” I yelled at the guy.
“She's not...”
He never got to finish the sentence. A loud boom from one wall made us look as what appeared to be a giant needle punched through the barn wall. Layers of strange materials, probably the shielding he had talked about, sprayed out from the point like bad confetti, and as we watched, the thing sprouted a set of spikes, all of which dug into the wall, right before something outside pulled back at it. The wall ripped away like paper.
“Run!” he yelled. I looked at the robot copy, but as I did, her eyes changed, changed from a frightened little girl to something... else. Something cold and emotionless.
As we ran out through the door he opened for us, large sheets of metal moved into place to cover the walls, unfolding from some hiding place up under the roof.
“Is that a blast shield?!” asked Mischa as he exited the door. I stopped in time to look back at the guy, who was now catching up to us. Inside, the racks and shelves were being lowered into the floor by some hidden motors.
“Yes,” he said, grabbing Mischa by the shoulder as he passed him by.
“Then why don't we...”
Mischa never finished, being suddenly off balance from being pulled along. The guy seemed to know what was missing, though.
“Because it's not meant to protect from blasts from the outside,” he half said, half panted as his stamina began to toy with him. We were a fair bit away from the barn when his words were given a very clear explanation. He turned just moments before, causing myself and Mischa to also stop and look back at the barn. From a distance, the figures swarming it looked tiny, like black stick men doing some choreographed dance. Most of them had apparently gotten inside when the thing, whatever it was, blew. It sounded like an oil drum crashing into concrete, but about twenty times as loud. On the side that had been ripped away, large chunks of metal spewed out, while the rest of the building ballooned ever so slightly, taking on a weird shape, the clearly boxy barn becoming just a bit spherical.
“#*@! it,” the guy hissed, his eyes becoming shiny as if about to cry. “#*@!, #*@! and #*@! of #*@! made from #*@!ed #*@!!” he growled, finally dropping down on one knee and simply punching the dirt.
I looked over at Mischa, who seemed uncertain about the whole thing, but with the most important details beginning to dawn on him. He was looking mostly at the barn and the guy who was now losing a fistfight with the ground. But in the end, he looked over at me.
“You think she...”
He stopped the question when I shook my head, with a tear in my eye.
“We need to leave,” said the nameless guy. “The car should be far enough away to escape the blast.”