the robot queen

The robot queen is only half. Her biological components were replaced over the years in a series of back alley operations, leaving her filled with ticking organs as imperfect and personal as prison tattoos. As a queen, she is not so much ruler as representative. She yells for the voiceless.

There are other humans who've had as much work done, but it's careful, it's cosmetically sound. Not like the robot queen, with her waxy preserved flesh banded by chains of rivets and puckered by access hatches and indicator lights. Those others, unless you ripped them open, pass easily for men or women, while the robot queen, naked before you, looks more like a dirty city.

You could say she does odd jobs. Or you could call her a whore, because there are stronger robots, colder killers, better cooks, more attentive maids. It's this that makes her a robot, though, this working to live which humanity left behind a century ago. While there is a servant class she is of it and the servant class is growing all the time. And tonight you're just lucky, you just happened to end up waving a fuel credit at the girl who runs the show as far as your kind is concerned. To shield her from this dirty work wouldn't be the robot way. You wonder if she even feels it. If she still cares what intimacy meant to her old body. There's no question her reproductive organs were scooped out to make way for something more useful. What about the nerves that made it worthwhile?

You can't tell and she won't tell. She watches you with dead eyes, not appearing to breathe, waiting for an instruction. So you summon her and she kneels. It helps you put it out of your mind, that this thing used to be human and your curiousity over how it experiences its work.

You've leaned your head back, watching the cracks of darkness that worm their way through the ceiling's crumbling plaster. The kife is so quick that you feel only the choking sensation and a flash of terror as you try to draw air and cannot. Then it ends, and she takes your wallet and is silently gone. And if you were still awake inside that organic shell you might realize that her leadership is what's left of her humanity, and the humanity all robots can't help picking up from their creators. They hate you.