Chapter Text
The Deco District, Rouge City, Pennsylvania, USA, September 14th 2142, 7:25 PM
The new mecha dancer arrived at The Show Club on a rainy Thursday evening, walking behind an adult-sized cryostasis pod set on a wheeled base, with the stylish black collar of its long jacket turned up as if against the cold. Two of Maximus’s personal human guards, Broad and Burley, strode in front of it, clearing a path to let the stasis pod through. The conspicuous guns on their hips encouraged the anarchic crowds of Rouge City to get out of their way, smart.
Serafine, who was standing under the marquee of the Club, smoking a cigarette, watched the crowd part to let it through from beneath half hooded eyelids permanently tinted purple and blue. She was already dressed for the early evening performance, but she wore a drab old greatcoat that hid her scandalously revealing bodice, which was embroidered with colourful vintage silk thread and studded with brilliant paste jewels. It had once belonged to another Seraphine, a famous performer at the Moulin Rouge, from whom she drew her inspiration: every time she put it on, she could feel the weight of history clinging to her skin.
The strange robot drew inspiration from the past too. It was tall, dark, and handsome, clearly a 1920s matinee idol. Its smooth hair was glossy black, its features sculpted to classic masculine beauty, and even across the dim street lit with flashing neon, Seraphine could see that its eyes were brilliant green. She pegged it instantly: a late model lover robot, of a type that was still popular at old-fashioned clubs like Here Kitty Kitty. Just one of thousands of types of sex mecha that could be found in the City of Sin…
… yet something about it caught her jaded eye. She had seen most of those thousands of types of sex simulator at one time or another — hell, they had a model of that general type working in The Show right now, but something about this machine set it miles apart from even an ubermech like her friend Justin. Mecha tended to focus on one thing at a time, but this robot’s eyes were scanning the crowd, and there was a brightness in its gaze that had nothing to do with physical illumination. And when it looked at the stasis unit in front of it, something in its face — something about the eyes — softened its mask with a quality that reminded Serafine of tenderness.
The very short male orga walking beside the mecha said something to it, and the mecha’s face did something that Serafine had never seen before: it’s finely drawn black eyebrows tightened even more, its eyes narrowing and its full-lipped mouth quirking upward on one side as it scanned the front of The Show Club, an expression eloquent of critical evaluation. The configuration was so human that for a moment, Serafine was almost confused: what was this creature who came to dance at the club on sexual display, wearing such depth of response on its inhumanly gorgeous face?
“Well well well,” a coarse voice drawled beside her, “there’s a piece of iron I haven’t seen in a good long while.”
It was Serafine’s turn to frown. She took a drag on her cig, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and turned her head just enough to look sidelong at the club’s janitor. “You don’t say.”
“Oh, I do.” JJ’s hard blue eyes were even colder as he watched the Mecha come closer and closer. “Last time I saw it was the night my career as an entertainer ended — and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t right at the heart of the whole sordid business.”
Serafine’s eyes narrowed even more. Maximus had officially declared that there was nothing to see when it came to JJ, but everybody with half a brain — even most of the mecha — knew that once he’d been known far and wide as Johnson-Johnson, purveyor of a grisly spectacle of brutal mecha mass destruction known as the East Coast Flesh Fair Spectacular. For nearly twenty years he’d overseen the deaths of thousands of robots who were innocent of any crime beyond being within his reach... but one cold night in Barn Creek, New Jersey he’d come to the end of his run in an utterly unexpected and fantastic fashion. He’d put a child — some said it was a mecha, others that it was human — on display under buckets of acid, and the crowd had rebelled at the sight. That was where he’d gotten the nasty scar that crossed his face from his right cheekbone down to his lower left jaw, taking the tip of his nose with it. He could have had cosmetic procedures to repair the damage, but Serafine was certain that he enjoyed the way people flinched at the sight of such conspicuous disfigurement.
There had been another robot chained to the torture device along with the child — pictures of them together had circulated widely afterwards. Pieces of data clicked together in Serafine’s brain. “You’re saying that that’s Gigolo Joe? The mecha accused of murder?”
JJ snorted, his gaze never faltering from the new mecha’s face. “And he did it too, I’ll be bound. What’s he doing here, of all places?”
Serafine shrugged and took another pull on her cancer stick. Her next few words emerged in little puffs of bored smoke: “Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you. You know that just as well as I do.”
“Hmph. I’d give three month’s pay to know who’s in that stasis pod.”
That was something that Serafine herself didn’t know. But she had ways of tracking down the truth. “Shouldn’t you be sweeping out the lobby?”
JJ gave her a sour look, turned on his heel, and headed through the stained glass doors without another word, trailing a black cloud behind him all the way.
For her part, Serafine almost turned to butt out her cigarette against the wall of the club and tuck it into her pocket, then shook her head fractionally and dropped it on the damp ground, where it rolled a short distance and lay smouldering. Let some down-and-outer have a hit: a couple of street people in the flow of pedestrians had already stopped to eye it avidly. Certainly Serafine was flush now, enough to spare half a cigarette for the cause of social justice.
She opened the stained glass door on the right and clicked through on her high-heeled kinky boots. The lobby was dimly lit and the size of a cathedral but she knew the way to the backstage swinging doors in her sleep. Just before she reached them, Gregore, the concierge of the club, pushed through at speed and strode toward the street, granting her a quick nod as they passed. That made her smile, slight and wintery: Gregore was a constant blur of motion, and no doubt now he was going to greet Gigolo Joe and his handler...
... if that’s what the shorter human was.
Some deep instinct told Serafine that this particular robot was probably unconventional in all sorts of interesting ways.