"Good," Big Mama grumbled, his voice low and rumbling. "But I won't touch any of your 'girls.'"
He jabbed a thick finger behind him toward the far corner of the room. Neill's eyes followed, and froze.
There she was.
The figure half-slumped in the dim light, her limbs twitching with the telltale stutter of a malfunctioning neural line. Her skin, synthetic and too perfect under the flicker of the fluorescent lamp, gleamed with a cold sheen.
"Remember her?" Big Mama smirked, baring his teeth in a grin that didn't reach his eyes. "Thought I'd give you a familiar one. See if you've still got that magic touch."
Neill's breath caught in his throat.
He did remember. Not right away, androids could change everything from their hair color to the pitch of their voice, depending on what the client ordered, but there was something unmistakable about her.
Every handler could recognize their own work.
He had trained her himself, taught her how to respond, how to move, how to fake want and warmth and fear, depending on what the client's fantasy demanded.
He knew her code, the sequence of micro-adjustments hidden in her gestures. A flicker in the blink rate. A two-second hesitation before compliance.
Even the slight twitch in her right hand, it was his doing, a calibration error he'd never had time to fix.
So when she was laying there, glitching mid-motion, the air thick with static and the faint scent of burnt circuitry, Neill didn't just see a broken android.
He saw a ghost. One of his own.
Big Mama chuckled, heavy and sharp. "You look like you've seen one of your trash crawl back from the scrapyard."
Neill swallowed, forcing a smirk that didn't quite land. "Yeah… guess I did."
But inside, his system was already booting up, overlay flickering to life across his retina.
If this was a test, he was going to pass it.
Even if it meant fixing what he broke with his own hands.
"It's your newest android unit," Neill mumbled, grimace forming on his mouth as he spoke. "Unit SAL - Sal O'Nella."
Neill's throat went dry. "Your favorite," he murmured, more to himself than to Big Mama.
The taller man, in his masculine form, lit another cigar and paced past him with heavy, deliberate steps that seemed to make the floorboards groan. The scent of burning tobacco mingled with the faint tang of ozone from the half-fried droid.
"That's right," Big Mama rumbled, exhaling a stream of smoke that blurred in the dim light. "So you better, actually make her functional this time. I'm tired of her freezing mid-act, staring off like she's lost connection to reality. You made her this way, you fix her. Finish what you started, Neill Down."
He paused by the door, casting one last look over his shoulder, that grin tugging at his lips. "And keep that business talk of yours to yourself. You're here to work, not sell miracles."
Then the door slammed shut with a metallic clang that echoed through the small annex room.
Silence settled, broken only by the soft hum of cooling servos and the faint twitch of Sal's hand where she lay.
Neill stood still for a moment, shoulders tight, before letting out a slow breath. This was his usual routine, one hour, no more, no less. One hour to teach these girls how to move, how to react, how to please their clients in every possible way. One hour to rebuild what he had broke.
He glanced at the faint reflection of his own face on the mirror-lined wall, his left eye glowed faintly, the system interface quietly pulsing under the cornea. Information scrolled across his vision, the data feeding directly from the scan he had just performed.
Targets. Wants. Needs. Diagnostics.
It was everything he had now, his only edge, the only thing that will keep the broken little business from collapsing.
An hour. One broken android. And the one tool that could change everything.
Neill crouched beside Sal, studying her face, her still, parted lips, the subtle vibration under her synthetic skin. "Alright, SAL." he muttered, rolling up his sleeves. "Let's see what's still working in there…"
Neill's hand traced along the smooth contour of Sal's hip until his fingers found the recessed calibration switch hidden beneath the synthetic flesh. A soft click followed, and the android stirred, her body twitching before she gently reclined.
A low hum filled the room as her internal systems came online. Panels of light shimmered briefly beneath her skin, mapping, synchronizing, rebuilding. Then, slowly, her form began to shift.
Her face reshaped itself first, angles softening and eyes realigning into perfect symmetry. Her hair bled from its previous tone into a silvery sheen that shimmered with faint holographic hues, violet, blue, gold, each strand catching the dim light like liquid metal.
Her body adjusted next, muscles rebalancing, curves subtly realigning into that precise ratio of allure, enough to be humanly familiar, impossibly flawless.
The transformation was seamless, terrifyingly beautiful.
This was Sal O'Nella's default form, the newest line of companion androids, crafted to appeal to every spectrum of desire. And yet, even as she powered up, Neill couldn't help but feel a weight in his chest.
He rubbed at his temple. "You really did burn yourself out, huh, Anita?" he muttered quietly. Sal was now like his last android, malfunctioning near end, after all, but this one is his fault, as he had left halfway through programming.
The faint chime of a system reboot pulled him back. Sal's eyelids fluttered open, her pupils dilating and contracting as she focused on him.
"System reboot complete," she said in a soft, perfectly modulated voice. "Calibrating sensory matrix… complete."
Neill waited for the usual follow-up diagnostics to appear, expecting her to list out her operational errors. Instead, her gaze drifted toward him with something almost… thoughtful.
He froze.
She wasn't broken, not exactly. She believed what she'd done, stopping mid-act, pushing clients away, was the correct behavior. Because that was the last input he had given her.
His unfinished code.
Neill exhaled, running a hand through his hair. "Damn it," he muttered under his breath, realizing what he'd done.
The android's eyes tracked his every move, faint light flickering in her irises as if she were studying him.
He couldn't decide if she looked more alive because of it, or because of how wrong it all was.
Neill stood up, stretching the stiffness from his limbs before peeling off his jacket, then his shirt, layer by layer until the chill of the air prickled against his skin.
He moved toward the less-crumpled side of the massive bed, sheets tangled and smelling faintly of smoke and synthetic perfume.
The room felt unnaturally bright, too bright compared to the dim, flickering backrooms he usually worked in.
Here, the light exposed everything, the faint scarring on his ribs, the faint sheen of oil on the droid's perfect skin, the glittering on her skin like static. There was nowhere to hide in this kind of brightness.
He sat on the edge of the bed and tapped on his wrist terminal, connecting its interface to Sal's neural relay. Lines of code shimmered across his vision as he synced his access. "Alright," he muttered to himself, "let's see where we left off…"
Then his left eye flickered, an involuntary pulse, like static interrupting a signal.
Neill frowned.
And then he saw it.
A faint overlay bloomed at the corner of his sight, smaller, thinner than the usual display that appeared when he scanned humans. It hovered above Sal, pulsing softly, almost hesitant.
"What the..." He blinked rapidly, trying to clear the distortion, but it stayed there.
He thought it was just for humans, for 'targets'.
The text was faint, fragmented. For the first time since the eye implant, he actually felt a spike of unease crawl down his spine.
Neill steadied his breathing, leaning closer to the glowing outline hovering above Sal's temple.
[ *********** SYSTEM ACTIVATED *********** ]
[ UNIT ID ] : SL–090 "SAL O'NELLA"
[ CLASSIFICATION ] : Companion Model / Series 9
[ STATUS ] : Unstable ( Emotion module partially sequenced | Behavioral core unsynced )
[ WANTS ] To please. To understand. To complete her sequence. To be enough.
[ NEEDS ] Closure. Guidance. Full sync with Host. Sense of self.
[ DIAGNOSTIC ] Sequencing incomplete. Emotional regulation module looping at 62%. Behavioral directives desynchronized from sensory logic.
( Anomalous behavior observed : halts mid-procedure, rejects targets perceived as 'unworthy' or 'irrelevant to completion.' )
[ SYSTEM NOTE ] Current state mimics moral cognition pattern. Host imprint partially imitated.
( Identifies Host as the "Command." )
***
Neill couldn't help it, he laughed. A short, incredulous sound that broke through the sterile quiet of the room. Him, as the host, being Sal's pattern? The idea alone felt absurd enough to choke on.
He rubbed at his eyes, still half in disbelief, before pulling his terminal closer to start the sync.
The process was slow, painfully slow. His terminal wasn't designed to handle a top-tier model like Sal O'Nella. The difference in quality was night and day.
The cheap interface crackled every few seconds, struggling to bridge the gap between his outdated gear and her advanced neural core.
He sighed and leaned back, letting the dim hum of her calibration fill the room.
He could've bought a newer terminal, sure, but terminals weren't exactly cheap, and every cent he had left had gone to the eye transplant. His father needed that more than he needed convenience.
Now, all he had left was this, the eye, the system, and this half-broken chance to earn his way back.
Because as much as he hated to admit it, this was the only thing he was good at.
Non-Artificial sequencing.
Actual-generated intimacy.
Pleasure logic into programming.
And yet, despite all the technological advancements, all the new sensory realism and emotional AI the companies bragged about, the whole process still felt as stale as day-old bread, dry, flavorless, mechanical.
He smirked faintly to himself.
"Even bread tastes better if you stick a finger between it," he muttered under his breath. "At least that adds a little salt."
His humor fell flat against the room's silence, the sound swallowed by the soft hum of circuits and the faint hiss of Sal's system cooling. But that was fine. He was used to talking to machines undergoing calibration.
Sequencing wasn't just about writing code, it was about rhythm. About instinct. About knowing when to make an android move, and how to make it feel real.
Machines could learn patterns, sure. But humans, humans knew desire.
They knew the twitch in a fingertip before a kiss, the half-second hesitation before a sigh. That kind of nuance couldn't be taught by algorithms alone.
That's why the majority of companion androids, even the expensive ones, all felt the same.
Standard-issue charm, default smiles, rehearsed touches, perfect on paper, hollow in practice.
When someone bought one, it could take weeks, sometimes months, before the android adjusted to its handler's specific wants and needs. By then, most people already lost interest.
But if there was someone who could make that connection instant, who could turn a block of synthetic flesh and circuitry into something that understood its handler right away, then that android became priceless.
That's where Neill came in.
They called him the Droid Whisperer.
The one who could teach androids how to love, or at least fake it so convincingly that no one could tell the difference.
His reputation spread far beyond Pluto's red-light districts, Nix. Men and women from as far as Mercury's district, from Venus's glittering skyline to Uranus's underground sprawl, all traveled here for one thing... satisfaction.
And it wasn't the androids they came for.
It was his touch on their companion's code.
Neill Down, remember the name.
As he is the man who could make even a machine want you back.