Chapter Text
Hauser-Shitamachi Construction Unit HSC56651253 enjoyed his job. It was good work, he thought. He'd been active for a decade, and he had long since earned his own price tag several times over, but unlike many construction units, he didn't quit as soon as he could afford to buy himself out and get an upgrade to a sleeker chassis.
He didn't blame other construction reploids. God knew it wasn't an easy living, and he had the dings to show for it, but it was satisfying, doing things with his hands and having whole buildings exist because of him. So much had been lost in the Maverick Wars. Entire cities, in some places, razed to the ground—but that was where he and the rest of his crew came in. He could point to entire neighborhoods in and around Abel City and say, 'We rebuilt that.'
HSC56651253, or Smith as the humans had decided to call him for some reason, worked for Alderman Materials and Construction. They'd purchased him and nineteen other units just like him in the rush to rebuild once the end of the Maverick War had finally come into sight. Work was not just plentiful. That would have been putting it too politely. They were underwater in it, unable to hire fast enough to fill the staggering number of crews they needed to fulfill government contracts alone, and never mind the private sector contracts.
As purpose-built units, the HSCs belonged to the company that bought them. As people, though, they owned their earnings, and could purchase themselves back. Smith didn't see anything terribly wrong with that. After all, he hadn't been cheap, and he knew that. His fellow units grumbled, but he didn't feel the need to join them. Grumbling just wasn't his style. He'd rather hang sheetrock or something productive like that.
Over time, the others trickled out, as they could afford to, and Smith stayed on. Jobs slowed down to a sane pace, and no new HSC units followed. After a decade of construction work at an absolutely breakneck pace, he was the only reploid left in his crew. It was a little boring, having so much spare time, but he figured there were worse things in the world.
"You ever think about doing something different?" one of his human coworkers, Jameson, asked him one day, as they were building a form around a section of what would become a concrete slab. He liked Jameson. Honest guy, who'd been in the business as long as Smith had. He'd been hired about a week after Smith and had never once given him any flak for being a reploid.
"Nah." Smith lifted his sledge and drove a stake firmly into the ground with three solid blows.
"Really? You've been here as long as I have. Ain't tired of it at all?"
Smith shrugged. "Are you? Am I supposed to be?" He lined up and drove another stake.
Jameson did the same on his side of the slab, though it took him quite a few more strikes. "Don't gotta be, but man, you ask me, I'd get the hell out and get a new body. Go into something cushy, like, I dunno, finance. You got a computer for a brain, right?"
Smith just laughed. "Sure do. Doesn't make me smart, though. Besides, I like doin' what I'm doin'. Ain't gonna buy a whole new me just to go do somethin' I don't wanna do."
Jameson worked in silence for a few minutes. Then, a little hesitantly, he spoke up. "Y'know…you didn't hear this outta me. In fact you didn't hear this at all. But, uh, just between you and me? You sure you never thought about changing careers?"
"Nope." Smith pounded his last stake in, and went around laser-sighting from corner to corner to make sure the mold was square.
"You're not quite picking up what I'm putting down, here," he said, voice dropping in volume. "Look, it's not me, I think you're great, but not all the guys are real big reploid fans."
This was news to Smith. "Am I not doin' a good job?" he asked.
"No, it's not that," Jameson replied, shaking his head but still dragging some slab bolsters over to lay in.
Smith nodded at the form. "Good, 'cause I know I know what I'm doin'. What is it, then?"
"Well, when we got you, y'know, there wasn't enough humans to go around, and we had a lot of rebuilding to do. So…"
Smith stared unblinkingly at him. "So…?"
"So…" Jameson hedged, then dropped his voice to a murmur, leaning in closer as they filled the form with wire mesh. "Look, you really didn't hear this from me, and I didn't hear it from nobody, but you ain't exactly safe. That's what I'm trying to say, here. I'm telling you this 'cause I like you alright, but the foreman and some of the other guys? They're not gonna say it around you, but I hear it when we go for beers after work. They're getting into some real bio-supremacist shit recently. If I were you, I'd watch the hell out around them."
Smith wasn't sure how to process that. He'd always done his job well. He didn't argue about pay raises, or cuts for that matter—or anything, when it came down to it. He wasn't just an employee model, he was a model employee. This couldn't have been about him personally, he concluded. They'd probably gotten some bad ideas about reploids from the Maverick Wars, and it wasn't like he hadn't thought some uncharitable things about certain other reploids over the years too. So it was understandable, but he was, well, Smith. They'd always gotten along fine. If anything, he got on better with his human coworkers than he had his reploid ones.
In the end, Smith laughed, a single deep chuckle. "You're a good guy, but look, they are too. I've worked with them for years. They're not gonna go and do anything like that. There's no reason for it."
Jameson wiped the sweat from his brow. "You say so, chief. Just keep an eye out, okay? And don't tell anyone I told you anything or it's my ass next."
Smith finished work that day without event. And the next day, and the one after that, for weeks. Footings were laid, foundations poured, frames raised—and nothing happened. He put Jameson's warning out of mind, because he had better things to do than worry.
He was lifting lumber onto a crane platform one day, about a week later, when a conversation caught his ear from the other side of the massive pallet of two-by-fours he was picking from. People tended to forget that Smith could selectively control his hearing and while he canceled most construction noise, he usually left a range of frequencies unaltered so that he could better hear voices.
"Look, you know I can't do that," said a voice he recognized, though one that he hadn't heard often. Nobody had warned him the president was onsite today, but then, that wasn't really unusual.
"He's still company property," someone else said. Smith's foreman, he realized, and there was only one person they could be discussing, because he was the only person who belonged to the company as equipment. All the same, he continued to load the crane, because it wasn't any of his business…though he did increase his hearing sensitivity in that particular range of frequencies just a bit.
"It's not that easy, legally."
"Oh, bullshit it isn't, Chuck. Come on, man, you're not one of them robot lovers, I know it."
"No," the president protested. "Definitely not."
"You remember what they did to Greg."
The president sucked in a breath in an audible flinch. "It's been eleven years, and I don't like thinking about it. What happened to Greg was…a tragedy."
"A goddamn avoidable tragedy. The kind of shit you get when you let robots walk all over you. And wouldn't you rather be paying someone who's actually got a family to support? What's he even gonna do with it? He's supposed to buy himself and get the fuck out, right?"
"Usually, yeah, but it's not a requirement."
"Maybe you might wanna require it?" the foreman insisted.
"I can't," the president said. "Not officially. There's reploid labor laws about that, and I know you know that too."
"But unofficially?"
"Unofficially? It's your crew, man. We didn't even have this conversation."
Smith loaded the last of the wood for that section of the framing. So Jameson wasn't just full of it. Well, now what? he thought. He didn't want to quit. Maybe he could pick up at another company…except he was considered an old model for the industry, and when expertise could be programmed more cheaply than experience could be paid…
It dimly occurred to Smith that planned obsolescence was kind of a shitty thing to do to a person. Humans generally had long enough to earn a retirement, at least, before it happened to them, but reploids had different pay scales and depending on their industry could be rendered obsolete within a year or two, and then what could you do?
But grumbling was not in his nature, so he decided he'd just talk to his foreman when he had a chance and settle it, whatever it was. Cochrane, his name was. He wasn't a bad guy, Smith knew. If it was pay that was a problem, he could deal with a reduction in hours. He'd be bored, but maybe he'd have time to have his dents buffed out finally, catch up on sitcoms or something.
(Humans always seemed surprised to find out that he liked sitcoms, and reploids never were, and he'd yet to figure out what that was about.)
He lived far uptown and took the train to and from work, usually, though the closest station was a bit of a walk from the job site so he'd been carpooling there and back with Cochrane and some of the other crew. By the time he'd strapped everything down for the night, Cochrane's car was already gone. Well, that made sense, he thought, if Cochrane was unhappy with him.
It suited him fine, though. It was a cool night and he could use a little heat dispersal before getting in a closed cabin with a bunch of humans who'd probably overheat. He clocked out at the trailer and set off to walk to the station, whistling an aimless tune. Maybe he'd stop at the convenience store and grab one of those all-in-one self-repair drinks, Smith thought. He went through nanofluid materials fast enough in his line of work.
The next morning, he waited at the train station as usual, but Cochrane's car wasn't there. Now this was a problem. Smith didn't like being late. It had only happened four times in his entire life, and three of them had been because of Maverick activity, which at least was firmly not his fault. He called his foreman up.
"Smith," came Cochrane's voice. "Hey. Sorry I couldn't make it by the station today, some shit came up."
"Uh, it's fine, just checking," Smith said. "I'll grab a taxi. Don't worry about it."
"You'll have to find a different ride, I got a thing in the mornings now," said Cochrane.
"It's cool. I'll figure it out, you do your morning…thing."
"And evening," Cochrane added. "It's the kids, they got sports."
"Oh. Hey, good for them. Good exercise."
"Yeah. Anyway, see you onsite."
Cochrane hung up, and Smith eyed his phone with suspicion. Well…that put a crimp in his wires. It wasn't the end of the world, of course. He could just take an earlier train and walk from then on. And walk, then take a later train. Or the bus? One probably ran near the site.
Smith hailed a cab that he had to duck to fit into and got to work, punching in a few minutes late. He'd called ahead, though, so it wouldn't be an issue, at least. They had framing for one building to assemble and a whole foundation to get the forms up for another, so he got to work with a vengeance. Housing was seeing another post-War boom and work schedules had tightened accordingly. Something about humans reproducing now that they felt safer? He didn't really understand it himself, but it made enough sense.
Once he'd worked it into his schedule, it ended up not really being a problem that Smith had to take the bus to work. Nothing else seemed to come of whatever Cochrane had been discussing with the president, or Jameson's warning for that matter, and Smith was beginning to wonder if he'd misinterpreted the entire thing somehow. He got on with humans well enough, but he knew he wasn't really that great at understanding human-to-human interactions. Maybe there was some nuance he'd entirely missed.
They finished at their current site, and the foreman announced their next job. Smith looked it up on a map that night, and it was out in the middle of nowhere, awkwardly far from anything but a sporadic bus route that ran once an hour. He sent a few texts to see if he could get a ride, but everyone, even Jameson, seemed to have some reason they couldn't pick him up. If they even responded at all, that was.
Ugh, Smith thought. He had a commercial license and certification on every piece of heavy machinery he'd ever seen, but he'd managed to not have to own a car yet, and he didn't really want to deal with it if he could avoid it. Well, it wasn't forever. He could make it work, if he moved his defrag schedule a little bit. Not a big deal.
Except, he realized after the second day it happened, the bus tended to get stuck in traffic and drift off-schedule. Smith punched in late for the seventh time in his life now, frankly a little irritated with the situation. "That's not like you," Cochrane noted, filling out some permit applications in the trailer.
"Sure isn't," Smith agreed.
"Well, as long as it doesn't keep happening."
"Sure won't."
It didn't, but only because Smith began catching the first train in the morning, so that he could wait at the station for the first bus in that direction—which didn't arrive for another half-hour—and then get to work almost a full hour early, where he didn't have much to do until the rest of the crew arrived. Could be worse, he told himself, ever an optimist. He could still get to work without having to deal with insurance and parking. Still not a bad deal. They'd have a new job site again soon enough and then it would be a nonissue.
They built a new retirement community, which took the better part of half a year. By the end of it, Smith's systems were pushing the occasional E.33667-SYS: Defragmentation error., and it was starting to impact his work. But it wasn't the end of the world, he figured. He could catch up on a proper cycle or five now that they'd finished. Their next site was even on his end of town, and Smith internally rejoiced. He didn't like to grumble. It wasn't in his nature. Even so, it was hard not to feel a little put-upon when he was misplacing tools now and then due to being tired. He'd never had that happen before, and he didn't like the feeling that he couldn't even trust his own memory.
Smith finally got to fully defragment. It took a few nights before the errors stopped, but they did, and he went to work with a great sense of relief. Things could go back to normal, maybe.
Or he thought, except when he came back from talking to Cochrane in the trailer, his tool bag was not quite where he'd been working. He found it several feet away, just out of sight. Maybe someone had borrowed something from it? Well, they weren't supposed to, but it wasn't unheard-of. Everything inside was in its place, though, so he simply shrugged.
It kept happening. Smith never spotted anybody moving his things, but after the fifth time in as many days, he knew he wasn't just misplacing anything. He'd run a self-diagnostic and nothing at all was wrong with his memory. Someone was playing games with him, as much as he did not want to have to think about that as a possibility.
Smith was not stupid, whatever he might say if asked. He was slow to doubt, yes, and that could come across as stupid, but it was because he wanted to believe the best of people. He could still put two and two together and reliably come up with four, however, and now he was doing the addition and finding he wasn't a fan of the result.
And yet, even with that, what was he going to do, other than his job? The fact remained that he liked his work. He liked his coworkers, generally, even if the sentiment was clearly not mutual in some cases for reasons that he struggled to grasp.
Making decisions was not Smith's strong suit. He'd turned down a promotion to foreman once, back when he was working on a full team of reploids, because he didn't fancy himself any kind of leader. He'd been built to follow directions, and this was fine with him. It was a good role. Things didn't get done without people like him doing them. The unfortunate side of this was that when he didn't know what to do, and he didn't have someone to ask, he tended to do nothing at all.
Such was the case now. He didn't know how to deal with this, and he'd heard the president clearly enough the first time. Going up the chain wouldn't do him any good here. Lacking any better options, he put his head down and carried on, because that had worked up until now, and why not keep doing what worked?
Still, Smith began double-checking his tools, just to make certain nothing had actually been sabotaged. Over the days, he added more things to check. The strapping on loads. His safety harness, when he was working overhead. He felt paranoid for even thinking about it, but what if things escalated and someone got hurt? That it might be him getting hurt never even occurred to him. He was built to tolerate falls, drops, and impacts. Humans, on the other hand, were notoriously squishy and easy to injure on the job.
They moved sites again, this one downtown. Well, 'downtown,' such as it had been before the Maverick Wars. The actual center of Abel City had moved by a few miles since that time, and the rebuilding efforts were officially over. The rest was to be put behind a huge wall, to keep people out as much as to keep the mess in. That was sad, Smith thought, just leaving all those square miles destroyed. Wasn't that what he was built for? Repairing that kind of thing? Sure, the debris being the size of skyscrapers meant that the mess was a lot larger, but it was only a matter of scale, not kind.
The neighborhood itself was not good. It had been the near west side, which was already dodgy, and the looming destruction giving rebellious reploids and humans alike free reign to do whatever they wanted in the ruins was absolutely not helping. The wall, it was hoped, would keep everyone out and give the rest of the city a chance to heal. If and when they decided to reclaim the land, it would still be there.
Smith was not enjoying his work, he realized after a week or so and while he was setting up another section of rebar. This was neither really building nor rebuilding, and also his laser cutter kept wandering off and showing up again with a dead battery swapped into it, meaning he had to go all the way down the scaffolding and find a new one until he realized he could just put several into his tool bag. Then he realized he could put his cutter into the bag too and take it with him. Then he realized at long last that this was all stupid as hell, actually, and after dealing with what was rapidly becoming a full year of quiet, faceless harassment, it would be less of a hassle to find another job.
Being himself, though, Smith decided this silently and while working. Bending the rebar's ear wouldn't actually bend it, after all, and it didn't have ears. (Neither did he, but details.) He'd go home tonight, make the payment up front, and put in his two weeks as soon as it cleared. Yeah. That sounded like a plan. Not his favorite one, but it was a plan. He'd get out of Cochrane's hair, Cochrane could do whatever the hell it was he wanted to do that didn't involve reploids, and he'd go…maybe repair heavy machinery or something. He was good at that, basically being heavy machinery himself, and most of it was old enough that his own age wouldn't be a problem.
Smith punched out at the end of the day, the sun having long since dipped below the partially-constructed wall. The bus stop was a few blocks away, and as he was tall, broad, durable, and not carrying anything interesting, he didn't think much of cutting through the alley to save himself a few minutes. He'd already learned that the bus tended to show up off-schedule and not wait for anyone who might have been coming, so the less time he spent getting there, the better.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
In hindsight, he should have seen it coming, but that was the thing about hindsight; not that the sudden blow actually did much to him, other than startle him, give him a new minor dent, and make him whirl around defensively.
"The fuck?" he demanded. Whoever it was, he wore a black hoodie and a face mask, he carried a crowbar, and he had three friends. Smith was built for punishment, though, and he'd had worse than that fall directly on his head with no ill effects.
Evidently the man was just as surprised as Smith was, but his buddies were on top of the situation, surrounding Smith. Wrenches, crowbars…
…All of them with the same Alderman Materials and Construction decal as he had.
Smith squinted in the dark. "...Cochrane?"
"Shut the hell up," Cochrane snarled. "You stupid, God-damned piece of junk, you should have just taken the hint ages ago."
"I'm quitting," Smith said. "Put it down and walk away, man. This isn't worth it."
"Little late for that, fuckin' computer asshole."
"I don't care, man. I won't say shit to anybody. Just let's go talk this over, it doesn't gotta go like this." He should probably have been afraid, Smith thought. But what were they gonna do? A crowbar swung by a human didn't worry him. He was built to handle worse.
"Yeah, right." Cochrane swung the crowbar again, faster than Smith would have given him credit for, and it bounced off of the forearm Smith raised to deflect it.
"Come on. You're a reasonable guy. We can—" A wrench caught him in the back.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
He turned to say something to that guy, whoever he was, and three more blows rained on him, in rapid succession.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
"Fucking stop and listen to me," Smith growled. Alright, they had his attention. One human with a crowbar was annoying. Four was a problem, and a few of those strikes had actually hurt. "I don't even know what your problem with me is—"
Cochrane swung again, high and overhand, and the straight claw caught Smith in the face, digging into his synthetic skin and scraping a double path down and across his face, eyebrow to cheekbone. His optic lens cracked, and his field of vision exploded into an overlay of static and critical warnings and pain. He staggered, pressing a hand to his face.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected. W.07112-SEN: Facial synthetic skin region B4 punctured. W.07113-SEN: Facial synthetic skin region B5 punctured.
"You can walk and talk like a person, but you ain't one," Cochrane raged. "I had about enough of you fuckin' objects getting paid overtime while I'm breaking my goddamn back trying to keep up. And you don't even have the sense to leave when all the rest of your fuckin' toaster buddies already fucked off."
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
Smith raised his other arm, trying to shield his face. He'd never been damaged before; not really. Not seriously. Nothing like this. He'd never really felt pain before. He was made to not register much except structural malfunction, and between good work habits and regular maintenance, it had never happened to him.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
"Stop," he rasped.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
"Please," Smith begged.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
His Three Laws logic reeled with each strike. He could not hit them. He might hurt them. They were hurting him. He could try to stop them without hurting him. They would not be stopped. He grabbed at a wrench, but a crowbar struck his hand open. He was not allowed to hurt them. He was not allowed to hurt them. He was not allowed to hurt them. He was not allowed to hurt them. They were hurting him. He was not allowed to hurt them. They would not stop hurting him.
Fuck it. He was not going to die here. He would do what he had to do, and the TLR alerts could all go to hell, because he sure as fuck wasn't going there himself.
Smith pulled the first heavy thing from his tool belt that his free hand fell on, and swung with all his might.