Jailbreaker

     Of course, I didn’t immediately panic. I’m reckless, not stupid.

     She didn’t even just come up to me. She left her table, zero preamble, and sat down at mine. Mutant Xweetok, big yellow eyes behind these retro round glasses — but her laptop wasn’t retro, it was just old. Blocky. I can’t judge, though, I work off a thin little chrome thing that howls when you ask it to open a second browser tab.

     It’s not that I can’t build my own rig, it’s more that in my line of work, you can’t afford to get attached to your stuff. You never know when you’ve gotta throw your whole computer out of an airlock.

     Except when you do know. And when that Xweetok came to my table, I knew.

     “You come here a lot,” she said.

     I closed my laptop, looking at her sleazily so I wouldn’t seem to be hiding something. “The network here is pretty fast.”

     “I noticed — gigabit speed.”

     “Yeah,” I said, scratching my ear. Sure, I’m not capable of feeling itchy, but I thought maybe fidgeting would keep me calm.

     The fur on my ears was starting to feel a little… off. Maybe picking at it wasn’t the best idea.

     “You know, I just graduated from VIT, and it’s weird — I thought, why does this random tourist cafe have such a good wireless network? I had a funny feeling.”

     I felt cold.

     “You know what penetration testing is?”

     I felt really cold.

     My eyes flicked to the side. I was here at the lunch rush because I was always here for the lunch rush, meaning I wouldn’t be able to get out fast enough through the cafe itself.

     “Finding network vulnerabilities. You think someone’s doing that?”

     She didn’t dignify my attempt to play dumb with a response. “Do you know what a pineapple is?”

     “You think I don’t know what fruits are?”

     “I don’t know, you seem like a smart man. The Thieves’ Guild is content to just physically smuggle things in and out of Virtupets, but you? You found a new frontier of crime. Someone was smuggling a ‘pineapple’ — a network spying tool — for cheap, and you took it for yourself.”

     “Agog, agog, I’m aghast. An unsecured wireless network is unsafe. Look, if you want money, you’re out of luck.” I rattled the green tea capsules in my cup at her. “These cost my last two hundred Neopoints. Go find someone else to blackmail.”

     “Well, you stole some data of mine — some very important data — but I think I can get that back, plus something much more valuable.”

     The Xweetok then tossed a file on the table. Like, a physical file, that she printed.

     That really should’ve scared me — that implied planning, that implied she’d been watching me for, at minimum, days — but it was so out of nowhere that I reflexively laughed.

     “These,” she said, “are the specs for a High-Autonomy Nuclear unit. An elegant solution to the annoying problem of robots running out of battery life. The Kreludan Mining Corporation prototyped fifty of them, but they were never put into full production.”

     From under the table, I heard the sound of a blaster spinning up.

     “Hm,” I said, scratching my ear again.

     The blue velvet was starting to peel. My fingers hit metal.

     “That’s because one of them went missing, and the company realized very fast that losing a robot with a miniature nuclear reactor in its chest is a PR nightmare.”

     “Interesting,” I said.

     The fans in my body started to whir.

     “I don’t want your money,” said the Xweetok. “I want you.”

     “Buy me dinner first.”

     And then I flipped the table and jumped off the balcony.

     Surely, I thought, flinging myself down two stories — don’t land on your feet if this happens to you, by the way, one of my shock absorbers snapped on impact — surely this lady wouldn’t be crazy enough to open fire in the middle of the recreation deck.

     Anyway, she opened fire in the middle of the recreation deck.

     I’d worked out my escape route in advance, of course. I’d browsed at Grundo’s Cafe often enough that I knew the fastest way from that balcony back to the hangar by nuclear-powered-heart.

     I tore into the hangar, past the techs yelling at me to put a space suit on, through the airlock, into my ship, and out of the station.

     I breathed heavily — not that there was any air for me to breathe — flung the laptop into the Faraday cage I’d bolted to the corner of the cabin — I couldn’t space it yet, not with the data still on it — and screamed out my frustration.

     In space no one can hear you, yadda yadda, you know the rest, but I’m pretty sure I busted my speaker doing that.

     Fun fact about space! Most of the stuff that makes spaceflight hard is the fact that it’s usually squishy animals doing it. You have to worry about life support — keeping the air in and vacuum out, carrying water and food, all that good stuff.

     I, on the other hand, can bop around in a shipping container with an engine strapped to it. Moral of the story: if the cost of living is too high, try not being alive.

     (This is only eighty per cent a joke. You’d be surprised how many ghosts there are in space, but that’s a story for another time.)

     All this to say that I got out of the station’s range faster than any proper spaceship would’ve. A heavier ship accelerates slower, and I wasn’t weighed down by life support. Not to mention that when you’re going fast, you generate G-force, and fleshy meat people are more sensitive to that sort of thing. The only thing really stopping robots from being the perfect space pirates is our batteries.

     Let’s talk about how intelligent robots were a terrible idea.

     Making a computer as smart as a person is hard, but not for the reasons you think it’s hard. Virtupets has had the programming figured out for years. They just didn’t use it.

     That’s because of the actual problem. I’m the last HAN unit they made before shutting the project down. I read at a fifth-grade level, and by robot standards, that makes me a genius. My brain draws as much power as an industrial steel mill to get me there.

     Hence the reactor, which is why I’ll explode when I die.

     The smartest person I know — sure, she’s a station security officer, but nobody’s perfect — runs on sandwiches, and when she dies—

     Well, I guess my heart would also explode, but that’s beside the point.

     The ding of my comms radius alarm snapped me out of sleep mode. I kicked the wall of the container to get over to the gadget I used to talk to my contacts.

     “Forsyth,” I crackled to the Bruce on the other side of the line. Yup, definitely screwed up my speaker — between that, the fake fur, and my left shock, I was now physically as well as economically broke. “I’m already having a bad day, so if this isn’t about a buyer, I’m coming over there and throwing you out an airlock in person.”

     Forsyth tsked at my misfortune. “Yeah, yeah, don’t get your circuits in a twist. I found a guy who wants to buy some passwords.”

     “Finally, some good luck. How do they wanna do this?”

     “In person.”

     “In person?”

     “Do you want the money or not?”

     I exhaled the excess heat from my servos.

     “Yeah.”

     “I’ll send you the coordinates. Oh, and heads up — he only wants some specific passwords and files, but he’s paying top dollar for them.”

     Strange. Usually, people buy info in huge caches. “Which ones?”

     “You lifted something from a girl at VIT. No socials, just code-related stuff. I don’t know what she cooked up, but this guy wants it, and he wants it fast.”

     “You don’t think something’s rotten here, Forsyth?”

     “No offence, but I think I’m the better judge of character here. I’m not the one drooling all over some broad working security.”

     My fans screamed. “You leave her out of this.”

     “If you want me to leave her out of this, say yes or no and stop wasting my time.”

     I sighed and minimized my view of Forsyth, taking me to the gadget’s wallpaper.

     She was too straight-laced to take a selfie with a criminal, so I settled for a picture of her employee of the month portrait. Straight-backed, orange hair pinned close to her skull, professional smile. I knew what her real smile looked like. I wished I could take a picture of that.

     She wanted me to file off my serial numbers, settle down, and pretend to be a normal Ixi. It was all I wanted to do.

     But I couldn’t do that if I was broken.

     My fidgeting hand dipped under my shirt collar for a second, touching exposed metal, like I was checking if my serial number was still there.

     It was — HAN-50, engraved into my neck.

     Whatever. It wasn’t like the sky would fall if I made the wrong choice.

     “Tell the buyer I’m on my way.”

     The End.