The first two chapters of Unsafe at any Voltage are at the right for your reading enjoyment.

“Yo, Rob, pass me the chips, would ya?” a thickly accented voice calls out. A bag of chips sails across the room and right into his hands.

“Thanks!” He calls out and gives a quick thumbs-up.

As he’s watching the TV, stuffing his face with reconstituted potato extract, an innocuous red light on his console illuminates. He half-pays attention and then returns to watching his TV. Shortly thereafter, a second larger light illuminates. He looks a little more intently this time, but not with any concern. Then, the chair’s internal alarm goes off, startling its unfortunate occupant into spilling his beverage all over himself.

He stares at the console for a moment, pushes a few buttons, and then mumbles loudly, “This thing must be broken…”

“What is it, Gabor?” Rob asks in an unenthusiastic tone.

“I’ve got, uh, an unidentified ship coming in along the Interspace 95 corridor!” he replies excitedly.

“What? That can’t be right, must be a screw-up or something.” He trails off as he checks his console for a few moments, before adding an incredulous “Jeez, you’re right! We haven’t had traffic come in that way, in, what, fifty years?”

“Seventy-one years, actually,” he responds coldly before continuing, “although, I was a bit more concerned about the ‘unidentified’ part.”

Rob walks over to his console and looks over his shoulder.

“Uh-huh, so, where is this thing now?”

“Well, it’s coming up on the Raritan Theta Seven HyperPass™ toll now; maybe I can read the tag data when it passes through.”

“Hey, you’re pretty smart for a Hungarian-Canadian,” Rob chuckles. Gabor shoots him a blank stare for an instant before switching the console to display the Raritan Theta Seven tollbooth camera. A few moments later a blur is seen as a large unidentified something zooms past the toll plaza.

“Whoa!” Gabor shouts out.

“What? What is it?”

“Well, according to this, the account hasn’t been active for over a hundred years. With the late fees and compounded interest, the poor sucker that owns this ship owes HyperPass™ about forty gigadollars!”

That wasn’t what Rob was really interested in hearing, “oooh…. kay…..” he mumbles.

“Anyway, according to the account data, the tag is from a Biggie Class automated cargo freighter, the Dave Thomas, with registration out of…” he pauses and turns to face Rob, “the Bayway Colony? Where is that?”

“Beats the panties off of me. What? Biggie Class? My grandfather used to talk about those. I didn’t think there were any of those things left in service let alone existence.”

“Now, if you think that’s weird, take a look at the still image from the toll violation camera when that thing went through.”

They both gawk in confused horror at the sight of the hulking mangled freighter with alien-esque empennages randomly jutting out of its hull. Something isn’t right.

“What the hell is that?” Gabor squints as he notices something especially odd. He moves in closer to the display and examines it carefully for a moment.

“Is that a guy in the window flipping us the bird?” he questions as he points to the screen.

“Okay, this is just too damn weird. You know what to do.”

“Uh, call WSC&S and liquidate my retirement account now?”

“No, no… you know procedure… but that’s a good idea—we’ll do that when you’re done.”

“Right,” he replies before slowly picking up the hotline and pushing a button or two. “Good evening General. This is Gabor at Interspace Traffic Control. We have an Andy Warhol- repeat, code Andy Warhol- will be entering Earth orbit in approximately three hours.”

He pauses as he listens to the reply.

“Yes, General, we have confirmed the unknown contact. Yes, the equipment is functioning properly, sir—yes—yes sir. No, no thank you sir, we have plenty of pickles in the fridge. Yes. Thank you.”

He hangs up the phone slowly.

“What did he say?” Rob asks nervously.

“I think we’re in it deep. I never thought I’d have to call an Andy Warhol. What if it’s the aliens again? Remember all the stories from last time they were here? If it’s them, you know we’re all done.”

“So, what did he say?” Rob asks again.

“He said what you would expect him to say. Nothing like this has happened in centuries, he has no clue. He just asked us to stand by, and to make sure we had enough pickles for sandwiches.”

“Pickles? That can’t be good…” Rob mumbles.

“Not good at all…” Gabor answers back quietly.

“Gabor, man, you’ve got a piece of a chip stuck to your lip.” Rob notes.

“Oh!” he says as he brushes the errant chip from his face, “Hey, may as well put that IAWM wrestling back on, I hear the Big Red Machine should be wrestling tonight!”

“Yeah, put that on; I’ll go call our broker. I don’t think we’ll be needing that retirement account after all.”

>>>FILE INDEX 00000001

“So, what do you have to do to get service at this place?”

The girl on the other side of the counter stops restocking bagel bins. She turns around and smiles.

“I’m very sorry—welcome to the Infinite BagelPlex™, where customer service is infinitely important. How may I help you?” she asks politely.

She’s rather smartly dressed as a study in brown; a brown uniform with a cute brown apron, complete with a brown hat that covers her medium length brown hair, complementing her soft brown eyes. A brown name tag with the Infinite BagelPlex™ logo is pinned crookedly to her uniform, with KIKKA unevenly printed in white on it.

She grins cheerfully, awaiting his order.

He looks at her name tag and frowns. “Well, Kick-ah, I’ve been waiting here for well over ten seconds. Is that what you call customer service?”

“It’s ‘key-ka’, sir, and I’m very sorry to keep you waiting. What can I get for you?”

Her politeness only serves to foul his mood even further. He grumbles out, “Plain bagel with cream cheese, and make it fast because I’m supposed to meet my wife at the MegaCutz.”

“Coming right up!” she replies and quickly prepares the proto-man’s order. He watches, mumbling and fidgeting, as if this is taking an eternity. A few moments later, she hands the man his bagel, which he inspects as if it were evidence at a crime scene.

“This isn’t butter!” he bellows, “What are they doing now, hiring the infinitely stupid? Don’t you know the difference between butter and cream cheese?”

“I’m very sorry, sir, I was pretty sure you said cream cheese.”

Looking at his foul expression, she decides not to argue and takes back the perfectly good bagel.

“Not a problem; I’ll replace it immediately—one plain bagel with butter”, she repeats cheerfully.

The Neanderthal grunts an acknowledgement.

She grabs another bagel, butters it up, and cheerfully presents it to the acrid customer. He scowls and points to the bagel.

“That bagel is burned! Look, can’t you see the horribly burned spot? Do you honestly expect me to eat that?”

She looks at the bagel with a puzzled expression, and eventually notices a small inoffensive dark brown area. She opens her mouth to begin to protest, but again, swallows her pride and smiles back to him.

“Of course, how silly of me, my mistake,” she responds half-apologetically.

As she spins around her frustration level begins to skyrocket. While she’s preparing his third bagel, he mumbles quite loudly to make sure she hears.

“Can you possibly work any slower? Jeez… how hard is it get a simple bagel these days? Maybe if you morons didn’t carry two hundred thousand combinations of bagel condiments, you’d be able to get a simple order straight!”

As she finishes up, she turns and smiles and presents the bread product to the irate customer. Before he can offer up a snappy remark, she leaps straight up several feet into the air right over the counter. In one seamless motion, she somersaults, and as the slack-jawed goon watches this acrobatic display in complete disbelief, she rams the bagel straight down his throat.

She lands like an Olympic gymnast a few steps away. The man chokes and wheezes, grasps his throat, stumbles backwards a bit, and collapses dead in middle of the food court. She walks up to his lifeless body, kneels by his head, and smiles.

“Thank you so very much sir, please visit the Infinite BagelPlex™ again!”

Suddenly a disembodied voice bellows out from seemingly everywhere. “No, no, no! Didn’t you listen to a word I said? Shut it down; shut it down, now…”

The entire scene vanishes into black nothingness except for Kikka. “What?” she calls out, looking up at the voice from nowhere, “Did I do something wrong?”

The response is silence.

“So, since when was having fun illegal? Jeez, you people are so picky about these things…” and before she can offer up another word in her defense, she too vanishes, leaving a totally black scene on a large wall-mounted monitor.

“Joe, unplug her. We’re done.”

A man in a white lab coat walks over to a slightly inclined metallic table where Kikka the bagel girl is lying with a rather thick cable plugged into a port behind her left ear. Joe twists and pulls out the cable and closes a small cover. Within a few seconds, the bagel girl sits up, brushes her hair from in front of her eyes, which she then levels on a bespectacled woman behind a control console. She stares for a few seconds.

“So, what did I do wrong this time?” Kikka asks neutrally.

“Kikka,” she disappointedly sighs, “you’d think by now you’d realize that killing customers is just not good for business.”

“Come on, it’s just a sim. Plus that jerk made the mistake of pissing me off. I just gave him what he deserved.”

Kikka reflects momentarily.

“You know, I’m not suited for the retail food industry anyway. That job totally sucked,” she offers as a matter-of-fact.

Sue looks down and runs her hand over her head in frustration. “Kikka, we’ve been through no less than seventeen-hundred-and-fifty-three different career assessments; over two hundred fifty full-spectrum sims. In that time, you’ve managed to kill or seriously injure seventy retail customers, over a dozen supervisors, thirty corporate executives and no fewer than two clowns.”

“I hate clowns,” Kikka interjects.

Sue retakes control of the conversation. “In any case, this is over; despite your best attempts to sabotage your career assignment, the only jobs you’re suited for are janitorial in nature. It’s what you were designed for—and I can’t help your case for more rewarding employment if the only thing I can present to prospective employers is a body count!”

Sue regains her composure. “Kikka, I knew this would be difficult. You know the laws as well as I do. Androids are not allowed to seek employment outside of the areas that they were built for. In your case, you were designed for residential, commercial, or industrial janitorial and domestic service. I know you don’t like to hear it, but that’s the truth. I’ve humored you over these last few weeks because of your unique circumstance, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to accept this.”

Sue pauses again. “You know, your traveling companion didn’t have any trouble. He took a job a couple of days after we got him cleaned up. Of course, he didn’t suffer a complete memory loss like you did, but he did so well, he was so pleasant to work with… why do you have to be so difficult?”

Kikka is somewhat insulted.

“Look, I know this is an unusual situation. But keep in mind I was sent here for some reason. Someone went through a lot of trouble and expense to get me here; I don’t think it was so I could be a garbage collector. And I really don’t appreciate being continually compared to that… other guy—I don’t even remember who he was.”

She sits momentarily silent when a realization comes to her.

“What about the military service exam I took? With the hardware upgrades I have and my score, I should be suited for work in the defense industry, right?” she asks confidently.

“Again, according to the design specs, you were built as a janitorial model. We don’t know why you were sent here, we can’t explain all the military-style upgrades you have, but in the absence of more information, there’s not much I can do,” Sue adds as a matter-of-fact point, “Besides, there are no military jobs for androids anyway, except maybe in your case, working as a janitor in a military installation.”

Sue is tired of this conversation, but she collects her thoughts and tries to return to being reasonable.

“Kikka, we’re not going to argue with you about this any more. The only jobs you’re suited for are janitorial and domestic-service related—that’s the bottom line. I’m sorry I can’t do anything about that, but if you don’t accept a position in that field I will have no choice but to recommend you for recycling.”

Kikka sits in solemn silence.

“Kikka, I must say that I respect you and your, well, interesting personality, but I’ll have no choice if you keep working against me.”

Sue pokes at the keys of her console for a few moments.

“This is unusual. A very prominent New Jersey based financial firm is looking to purchase any available Series 68 janitorial androids.” She pushes a few more buttons.

“I’ve taken the opportunity to assign you to that position, Kikka. Please agree with me that you’ll go, because despite what you may think, I really don’t want to see you recycled.”

She stops and looks at the despondent android.

“So, will you take the assignment?”

Kikka casts her gaze downward, feeling somewhat defeated, but at the same time knowing that Sue is speaking the truth. She nods in agreement.

“That’s wonderful,” Sue adds with relief, “I think this is a great career opportunity for you. An android with your unique talents and abilities has great potential to grow within that company and be a real star player in the organization.”

“Oh, I am so relieved.” Kikka retorts and adds sarcastically, “Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to clean the CEO’s lavatory. I’d hate to think my ‘unique talents and abilities’ would go to waste.”

Sue ignores Kikka’s fiery remark, turns to her console, presses a few buttons, and without any further discussion finalizes Kikka’s assignment; her case file is at last closed.

Sue then turns back to Kikka and with a great deal of relief in her voice offers, “Best of luck, Kikka, in your new position. I have a feeling you will do phenomenally well.”

Sue stands up as she and Joe prepare to leave the career simulation suite and then adds, “You can pick up the details of your assignment on the way out at the reception desk.”

They both then swiftly leave the room, leaving Kikka to her own fate.

In the hallway outside the suite, the two exhausted case workers try to relate to the weeks of hell they have just managed to walk away from, seemingly in one piece.

“Joe, no wonder they don’t build any of those Electropomorphs™ anymore. They weren’t kidding when they talked about ‘personality defects’. I’m not sure if she’s really just having fun with the sim characters, if she’s just screwing with us, or if she’s really out of her Duratanium skull.”

“Well, who knows for sure? Nobody’s worked on one of those models around here in over a hundred years,” Joe quips.

“All I know is, she accepted the position, so thank God we’re not legally responsible. I think you made the right decision. I don’t think I could take another week of career sims with her. I’m sure I’d just completely lose what little grip I have left on reality.”

“Same here. Come on, let’s go grab some lunch. You up for some Viet-Thai?”

“Sounds good to me. I can go for something a little spicy.”

Both Career Consulting Engineers round the corner and disappear.

Kikka collects her meager belongings, and heads towards the exit where she picks up a file from the receptionist. With a dejected sigh, she steps out the door and slowly marches to her assignment as if it were to her own recycling.
 

Read more: Go back to the Interspace 95 Site!