Despite Nero’s own assertions, Nila still wasn’t entirely convinced on the matter. Although she didn’t know for a fact, she had a feeling they’d lost their hand in an operation similar to this one, which to her was only further proof they shouldn’t go in there now. But as much as she wanted to pretend like she knew what she was doing, she really didn’t. For all she knew the minute the three of them walked in, Nero would be ripped from her and Dante’s grasps anyway. Taking risks had always been a part of the job, but this almost like a death wish.
Glancing back to Dante, she hoped to get some kind of nod of approval, or any kind of assertion she was in the right here. Instead, his attempt at playing the good cop seemed to fall on deaf ears, leaving all three of them back to where they’d started. “Fuck it,” she groaned, with a roll of her eyes. Removing the handgun from the back of her jeans, she checked to make sure the weapon was fully loaded before concealing it in a pocket inside her jacket. “We follow my lead, alright? And just maybe we’ll manage to pull this thing off.”
Stepping over to a solid steel door to the left of the garage entrance, Nila gave it a couple good hits with her elbow. Moments later, a pair of eyes appear, looking out from a small viewing window that’d just been slid open on the door. “Yeah?” a gruff voice called out, as the set of eyes look from Nila to her two companions.
“I need a repair job done,” Nila replied, before nodding her head in Nero’s direction. “Don’t suppose you got a few spare parts in there we could buy off you for a decent price.”
“Repair?” the voice asked, clearly not used to that kind of request. “You sure you don’t just want to hawk the thing? I could give you 3,000 creds for that thing easily.”
If this had been a year ago, Nila probably would have taken up the scraper on the offer. It wasn’t every day she could earn a quick and easy 3,000 credits like that. Scraping Nero though was a quick and likely deadly way to get kicked off the Erebus, which despite it all was far from her priority at the moment.
“No, just a repair job,” she shook her head.
“Suit yourself,” the voice replied, followed by the loud screech of the metal door being pulled back, revealing the salvage garage inside. The individual who’d talked to them then waved the three of them inside before they escorted them through the maze of salvage. Sidestepping the sparks of a nearby weld, they took the crew members to a workstation. “Depending on the quality of the hand, you’re looking at anywhere from 500-1,000 creds,” they called behind them. Stepping behind the station they turn towards a shelf lined with boxes, pulling two out with the word ‘HANDS’ scribbled across them. With a thud they set the boxes in front of Dante and Nero. “It’s an extra 500 for reattachment.”
They frowned as Dante leaned close and spoke about the possible need for an android-shrink. They were both looking at this as if they were a human, even if they did not realize it. While being dragged into a place such as this had not been pleasant when it had happened on Earth, they had done similar things themself so many times that perhaps it did not hit them in the same way as it might’ve. Their job, after all, had been fixing other androids, and sometimes that meant permanently turning them off, watching the imitation of life leave their eyes, sparking something closer to mechanical before fading to emptiness. It was not pleasant, but it was what they had done. Before they could remind them both of that, though, Nila seemed to give up the argument, and agree that they could come along.
As soon as she did, they gave her a grateful smile, but quickly fell into the halfway blank, vaguely pleasant look that had been their default before they had been freed, trying to assume the role of normal android again to help the charade. There was a moment, a split second of pause, that made them wonder if perhaps they were walking to their body’s death, that Nila might just take the scraper’s offer up and leave them here to die. They did not know her well enough to feel confident she would not. But after a second, she denied the offer, and they were finally led inside.
It was horrific, though, horrific in a way it somehow hadn’t been months ago, even though the similarities were numerous. Why, they were not sure. It was the same thing they had seen before, the same cruelty, the same assumption that they were things not truly living, but it hurt this time. They looked over at Dante despite themself, eyes a little wide, trying to see if he seemed to realize. And there it is again, the thought that perhaps neither of them care, that this is a trick to get them to feel comfortable enough that they won’t run when they sell them to the scraper. Processors whirling, trying to think of an escape plan, they stare in horror as the scraper sets the boxes of hands down in front of them. Suddenly, they did not care so much about the quality of the new hand.
“We will not need reattachment; he is a doctor,” they said, shutting down what felt like a chance of being taken again.
The box of hands was grim -- not in the fact that it was a box of detached android hands, but in the state of the hands themselves. Dante was no roboticist, but the basics of android manufacturing were the same as the basics of human anatomy: when science had asked how do we build a more human android, the answer had been recreate human, but with synthetic material. Every wire represented a nerve ending, every tube an artery or vein, every carbonfiber cord a tendon. Reattaching an android hand would have been the same process as attaching a prosthetic to a human arm, but with a little less mess. No blood, no pain, a satisfying click into place but with all the same complications.
“These are shite,” he muttered, as he started rooting through the box, shifting aside hands that he could tell, just by looking, wouldn’t work the way Nero needed a hand to work. Maybe a janitorial model could have gotten away with having fingers that all had to bend at the same time instead of independently, or with synthetic nerves that would lag by a few seconds before sending information back to the central processing unit. To charge five hundred creds for one of these was bloody highway robbery, far as he was concerned, but the box was large enough that there had to be something functional in here.
One, maybe two that still had undamaged carbonfiber in tact enough to connect it in place without any sensitivity loss. Anywhere else and he would’ve asked Nero to prioritize, to decide which features they needed to most to do what they did and which ones they could sacrifice for the time being until a better hand could be put together, but they were all pretending Nero wasn’t the kind of android that’d care, so instead he just squinted up at the scrapper.
“Look, mate, I dunno if these things were detached with a bloody chainsaw or if every android you get comin’ through here’s been through a crusher before you scrap ‘em, but if this is the best you got I’m afraid we’re gonna have to take our business elsewhere.”
