Herpity doo da, chapter two

So k yeah same thing as the first one, but I would like to know if Glow's parts are hideously boring? I feel like I'm text-blocking all about his Feelings and I feel like that's stupid or something. So. Lemme know.

GLOW
She made me so damn angry. All the time. Now, anyway. It wasn't always like this. Sil used to make me feel safe. Like it didn't matter that I couldn't talk right, or get a full sentence out without flushing in embarassment or people staring at me or feeling like people were staring at me. We could just work next to each other for hours without saying more than a few words and it felt amazing. With everyone else I somehow felt pressured to say something, or risk them forgetting I was there, or discarding me as That Poor Guy Who Can't Talk. But with Sil it didn't matter. Nothing mattered.
And then things changed. I met her when she was just starting to race for Duke, the top dog masc on our level. Around our level, people still had medeival ideas about gender, and it seemed like the fem/masc movement from higher up couldn't touch it.
Then Duke came, climbing her way up from the levels below by pure ferocity. She was vicious and merciless. She literally shot men just for looking at her wrong--Duke could see it when they didn't respect her, either because she was a woman, a masc, or a woman making a name for herself among gangs. She built a gang out of equally vicious other mascs, and for their initiation Duke instructed them to track down rapists and castrate them. Then one of her mascs was gang-raped and murdered. After that, the rapists chosen for initiations didn't survive.
I'd been scared of Sil at first, of course. By then Duke had been around for a couple years. Everyone knew she hated men, and the only ones allowed near her gang were a few fem groupies. A friend and I were working the ground the local gangs had chosen to race on. People like us showed up for last-minute tweaks and installations. Most people were pretty possessive about their cars, so most of our work came from rookies or cheapskates that hadn't learn to treasure their cars yet or just wanted some extra cash that a race could win them.
A car I'd worked on before the race blew out in mid-air. The driver was ejected and parachuted to safety before it hit the ground, but then he came looking for me. My friend, Fuschia, was nowhere to be found. He pulled out a tazer--one of the few weapons that can do serious damage to cyborgs--and started beating the shit out of me.
Sil stepped in, and the rest was history. We'd been together for six years.
And I'd been trying to get her to leave the gang ever since.
For a while I was just angry at Duke. I didn't blame Sil. Duke was the one who kept pulling her back in. Duke didn't treat her mascs like she did everyone else. Duke's gang was treated like family. When members tried to leave, she didn't threaten them--at first. She offered them things. Money. A new car, or cars. When Sil finally made a serious effort to get out last year, Duke had even met her halfway. Duke wanted a business to run a chop shop through, but she didn't want to trust anyone outside the gang. So she set Sil up with this garage, and every few nights they'd bring a car through down to the basement. But Sil had to run it as a real business, and to make sure she didn't slack off, Duke required "rent". And we also had to pay actual taxes to the government on it. And we also didn't own the place upstairs--Duke hadn't bought that, so we had to pay rent for that too. And we didn't get any percentage of the cars Duke ran through, so all of our funds came from the actual business, which was split between normal people and black market people who didn't, or couldn't, take their cars to real mechanics. And, on top of it all, Duke still wanted Sil to drive for her. Not in races--I'd thrown a fit at Sil taking the deal, I would have walked away completely if she went back to driving those batshit insanely dangerous races. But as a getaway driver, or to steal cars now and then.
It was a shit deal. Sil knew it was a shit deal. I had also told her several times, especially in the past year after I actually found out about it, that it was a shit deal.
But she took it anyway, without even talking to me about it, and I didn't know why. It made me angry, her blatantly ignoring me, like people did when they didn't know what to do with me.
And then she'd stopped talking to me. It wasn't the easygoing air where we just didn't feel like talking, she just outright didn't answer my questions about what she was doing, or her answers were always short and clipped. I started to feel like she was building a wall between us and soon I'd be lost to her, suffocating on the other side under all the silence she piled up between us. It had been hard for me to make people understand me for almost as long as I could remember. And then the one person who did suddenly refused to anymore. It was awful.
Sil was sorry for it. I knew that. She was sorry for all the pain and anger she put me through.
But for all that she was sorry, she didn't change anything. She didn't try talking her way away from Duke again--Duke had already made it clear that from now on, Sil trying to leave would end in threats, not offers. And that was the whole vacking point I wanted her to leave in the first place. I didn't care about myself. Cyborgs are made up of billions of nanos--tiny, molecule-sized machines that form most of our body and keep our inner machinery functioning, and are capable of regenerating almost immediately--so it takes a lot to hurt us. Bullets, knives, anything that pierces our skin get absorbed and rebuilt on a molecular level to repair the damage. We can't age. We can't get sick--either organic disease or virus programs, as the second any nanites sense infection they destroy the contaminated nanites, purge them from the system completely, and rebuild new ones to replace them. Electricity is one of the few things that can hurt, as it causes us pain and will disrupt the communication between nanites if it's powerful enough. That can mean anything from frying their tiny circuits to interrupting construction, which means they'll fall apart and our bodies will temporarily dissolve. But nothing permanent could hurt us. We couldn't die.
In contrast, despite being over six feet tall, packed with muscle, and when faced with danger, the disposition of a rabid yet competent doberman, Sil was downright fragile.
I worried about her, constantly. The first years we'd been together I went through my days never knowing whether she'd come home full of bulletholes, or if she'd even come back at all. Races, where I'd once enjoyed them, became awful and nerve-wracking. When she went out on jobs, I couldn't power myself down to rest and I couldn't work on anything. Whenever she was with the gang there was the possibility of her getting in a fight with Gin, the worst troublemaker out of all of them, who always knew how to push Sil over the edge. Or she could get arrested and this time wouldn't make bail, or Duke would just leave her in there. Fuschia had been right when she told me humans and cyborgs together were a bad idea. After a couple decades, you got used to the idea of being stuck like this forever. Spending every day of your life with the very human woman you loved desperately made you painfully aware of her minutes ticking away, gone forever. It was awful enough knowing Sil was growing older and that I didn't know what to do about it, or how to deal with it when it finally became a problem. Knowing that just her mere, everyday life, her livelihood, could take her away from me with all the effort of a finger twitch--I couldn't live like this. Not forever. Not for however many years we would have together.
I was getting to the point where this awful, nauseating anxiety, and all my recent frustrations with Sil were beginning to pull even with how much I loved her.
I was getting to a place were there wouldn't be any more I'm-sorry's or second chances.
I was reaching a breaking point where I couldn't take it anymore, and I would just have to leave.
I heard the sound of someone hopping our chain link fence out back, and grabbed one of my heavier wrenches off the work bench. I was pretty sure I already knew who it was, but it always pays to be careful. I walked softly around the garage along the wall, edging my way over to the doorless garage opening that lead to the small gravel lot behind our building. As the footsteps neared, I steadied my balance and hefted the wrench.
I saw their shadow cast across the garage floor, followed by a loud knocking on the side of the metal sheet wall.
"It's me, Glow. Don't attack me or anythin'."
I grinned, lowering the wrench and stepping out into view. She towered over me, the two bunches of slim, vivid fuschia glowdreads cascading from either side of her head, contrasting brightly with her drab, tattered brown coveralls and drab plaid undershirt. As usual, she was barefoot. Whenever you weren't sure if a person was a cyborg or a human, you could check their feet. Cyborgs were the only ones in this city who dared walk around without any protection on their feet. Not all of them did it--not all of us did it--but it was common enough.
"Hey, Fuschia," I said, stepping aside to welcome her in. "It's been a while. How's things?"
"I was 'bout to ask you the same thing," she said, stepping in and looking around. "You broken a lot more shit 'n the last time
I was here."
"...Yeah." This morning I had snapped a few tools--by accident--and toppled one of the scrap shelves--on purpose. I was still pretty pissed at Sil, but I'd made myself stop breaking shit.
"You two fight again?"
"When are we not fighting, Fuschia," I sighed, tossing my wrench back on the work table.
"Swear to God, Glowbie, I dunno why you stay with the piece a' shit."
"Don't."
"She's a vackin' asshole, Glow. She's a dick to you and ever'one else, but especially you cause you let her get away with it."
"Fuschia," I snapped. "Stop it. What do you want?"
Fuschia looked at me sideways and I could tell she was sorry for pushing it.
"Skar wants to talk to you," she muttered.
I felt my circuits run cold.

SIL

I sat around outside waiting for Blondie at each club. There were about six. While he was inside, I pulled out our paper books and started working them over.

You didn't see paper in a lot of places these days, and it was damn expensive when you did. Living on the moon in a biodome doesn't really allow for that kind of thing to be as common a resource as it was on Earth. Hell, the only reason I had paper books was because an old friend of mine, Lyre Connors, and her parents were from a biodome that was primarily a nature preserve.Lyre's cousin made a nice living producing paper-based products and selling them to rich people, and she'd managed to get me some notebooks for keeping our finances in. The only trees in the dome were
in the oxygen factories, and average people only ever saw them once, when every school took the kids on a one-day field trip to the factories. You saw a lot of pictures of them everywhere though, promoting donations to the oxygen factories' research scientists and all that. A big percentage of our taxes went into them anyway--since, you know, there's not much point in having money and a government and a city and shit if there's no air and everyone dies--but willing donations got you some nice tax deductions on other stuff.
Too bad we were too vacking poor to even do that much.
I growled and punched the roof of my car. I kept doing the numbers wrong, I knew I was doing them wrong, because I always did them twice to make sure, and I'd gotten different numbers, so I did them again and got another answer, and now for the fourth time I was getting yet another answer. I hated this. I hated numbers. I hated not being able to just pull out a calculator screen from my palmface and let it do all the hard work.
The car door open and Julian slid in, slamming it behind him.
"Hey," I snapped. "It's my car. Only I get to beat it up."
"Oh, oh, God, right, I'm sorry," he mumbled, and then he sniffled.
Warning bells went off in every part of my body and the urge to run surged through me. I always panic when a fem starts crying. I never know what to do with them.

"Oh. Um. Hey, hey, don't--it's okay. Okay? I don't care, I just--don't cry--"
Blondie sniffled again and shook his head.
"No, no, it's not you. I just--I lost something. Something really, really important, and I thought I'd find it at one of the clubs, but that was the last one and I still haven't found it--" his voice peaked at its highest pitch and broke. Blondie covered his face and started whimper-crying into his hands.
I was beginning to regret being so helpful. I'd driven him all over the local five levels because I wasn't ready to go back and face Glow yet. But this--this was so much worse. I hated when fems cried. Manly guys, you just patted them on the shoulder and pretended it wasn't happening. Girly girls, I usually just told them to buck up and get on with it, because seriously, girls cry too much over stupid shit. But fems...I was at a loss. I didn't even know the guy, I couldn't touch him or anything, and I couldn't say anything, and I couldn't fix it or anything, so...shit.
"...Uh," I said after a while. "Is there, uh...anything I can do? To help?"
Blondie sniffled and shook his head.
"No. Thanks. I just...can I just sit here for a while? I can't really go home yet."
I didn't ask why. I just sat there, quiet, looking everywhere but him. He stopped sniffling after a while and just stared at his hands in his lap.
I didn't know what else to do and I still had numbers to work over, so I sort of stealthily went back to scratching at my books again.
After a while I realized Julian was watching me. I kind of ignored it for a bit, but then I realized I didn't want some random kid seeing my finances, so I tilted it away from him.
"That's wrong," he said almost immediately.
I blinked and stared at him, confused. Not wanting a complete stranger to see my personal finances is wrong? Does he really have the guts to say that to me?
"What?" I asked, kind of defensive. He flushed and bit his lip.
"Um. That problem you're working on. It's wrong."
"...I know that. I'm trying to fix it."
"Can I...?"
I glared at him. And went back to scratching at the books.
"What is that, anyway?"
I sighed impatiently. I was getting restless and tired of sitting in my car in a lot and not going anywhere or doing anything.

"What is what?"
"What you're holding. And...writing on? Is it some kind of solid screen?"
Sometimes I forgot most people went their whole lives without seeing this stuff.
"Oh, uh, no. It's...it's paper. It's solid, and it's made from trees. And this is a pen, which gives out ink while I right. It's like of like...tattooing on tree skin." I was hoping that made sense.
Julian gaped at me, open-mouthed.
"Paper?" he exclaimed. "That stuff is paper?"
"Uh, yeah," I said, shrugging. I flipped a few pages past where I was working and handed it over. "Go ahead, check it out."
He stroked it softly, like he thought it might still be alive and would fall apart. I had to admit, paper looked awfully delicate the first time you saw it. Everything in our biodome was made out of metal, plastic, hologram, or a mix of them. Even our clothes were made out of hypersynthetic plastic--actual cloth stuff hadn't been used in mainstream for a couple centuries now. If you wanted to see it, you went to a museum.
"It's not really what I thought it would be like," he finally admitted after a while.
"What did you think it would be like?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Well...it's made from, like, leaves and stuff, right? I remember when we went to the oxygen factory in fifth grade. I thought it would be all, like, veiny, like the leaves. And, you know...green."
I snorted a little and he flushed again.
"Well I didn't know, okay?"
"It's not made out of leaves," I said. "It's made out of trees. The wood."
Julian flipped a few pages further, rubbing the paper between his fingers and touching it some more. I smiled a little at his obvious awe. I remembered the first time I'd touched paper, and I'd reacted a lot like he had. Lyre, my friend, had grown up with the stuff, so she was a lot less understanding and had laughed at me the whole time.
Then, before I could stop him, he'd flipped back to my pages of numbers and was studying them.
"Hey!" I said, immediately irritated. "That's my money, kid, you can't just--"
"I can fix it," he said, cutting me off. I was about to rip him a new one when he looked up at me and his eyes were bright and shiney. Not shiney like full of tears, shiney like...excited. "I can. Just give me the pin."
"Pen."
"Please?"
I narrowed my eyes at him and he held out his hand and then he wrapped his mouth around this cutesy little smile that made me feel funny in the place I had for Glow. It threw me off a little bit. I tossed him the pen just to make him stop smiling like that.
It took him a second to figure out--like which end of the pen goes against the paper, and it was only one end, not double-tipped like most digipens--but then he was scratching away like crazy. There were a couple funny moments when he didn't know yet that you can't erase pen ink, and I laughed and he glared at me and I laughed some more, and then I thought about how it had been a while since I'd laughed.
After a while he handed it over to me. Like I said, there was some mess at the beginning before he saw the pen couldn't be undone, but after that all the numbers were kept in neat, clean columns. I could see all the numbers he'd carried and multiplied and everything. I stared at it so hard I felt like my eyes were gonna fall out of my head.
"It's all right," he said. "I checked everything twice. But I'm good at numbers anyway. I mean, like the simple stuff. Adding and subtracting and multiplying and stuff."
I went over everything he'd done.
He was right. It was all here. It was all right.
"How did you do this?" I asked, shaking my head. Blondie shrugged.
"Like I said. I'm just good with simple numbers. It's just moving them around and stuff."
I was getting an idea. And I was going to say something about it, but then my palmface went off. I started, surprised--I almost never got calls. From anyone.
...Which meant it was probably Glow.
I was already building up inside as I climbed out of the car. I wanted to get away for a half an hour--a vacking half an hour--and I couldn't even do that without him ragging on me, nitpicking the shit out of everything, demanding where I was, what I was doing, why I wasn't back yet. It'd been like this ever since he'd...figured out what my garage was really for. It was like I'd cheated on him. I couldn't take a shit for longer than five minutes without him demanding where I was and what I'd been doing.
"What," I snapped as I clicked in.
"Wh-wh-wh--where are y-you? You've b-been g-gone l-like thr-ree hours."
Holy shit. Three hours? Damn. It had taken a while to track down Julian's clubs, because I didn't know most of them and had gotten lost a couple times and then traffic had been a hell of a bitch.
"I'm still trying to ditch this blonde kid, okay? That's all."
"Y-you--wh-wh-wh-what? Wh-wh-wh--why? Wh-wh-how is it t-t-taking y-you s-so long?"
"Just because it is, Glow, okay? I'm sorry, alright, I'll be home soon."
"S-S-Sil--"
"What." But in my head I was backpedaling, I was realizing how bad his stutter was, that it meant something was wrong.
And then it was already too late. He hung up.
I stood there for a second, bracing myself against my car. I felt sick. I wanted to call him back, ask what was wrong, go home and hold him and say I was sorry, really sorry this time, that I wanted to fix things, that I wanted to stop this broken sick cycle we were stuck in.
And then there was this awful twisting in me and I was angry again. I hadn't done anything wrong. What had happened last night--he'd wanted that. We both had. Glow was a vacking cyborg, for God's sake, his muscles were made out of pure indestructible nanites. He could have stopped me if he wanted. He didn't like showing me up phsyically for the most part, because he knew I didn't like him showing me up physically, but if he'd really hated what was happening he could have stopped me. It wasn't my fault. If it was anyone's fault it was his.
He could sit on his ass and whatever until I damn well decided I wanted to come home.
I climbed back into my car and slammed the door. Julian pressed himself against his door like he'd been all morning. He was scared of me.
Good. People should be scared of me. I was a scary vacker. I deserved their respect.
"Do you want a job?" I asked him.

It was late afternoon by the time I dropped Blondie off at his apartment. It took forever because of the same reason cabs wouldn't go there--Julian lived in an area on one of the levels that had been affected by the big cold-fusion plant blowout a couple decades ago. The area was covered in debris and broken buildings, most of it all fused and twisted in one big web. A lot of it was curled over too, like an ocean of metal frozen mid-wave, a result of the massive blast from the plant's explosion. There was even some shit just floating the vack around--there was an entire block that had been rooted firmly enough in its gravity generators to hold itself together when everything fell apart. Politicals up on higher levels used to talk about fixing it up, and they had fixed up the higher levels--of course. But the project had lost momentum as they got lower and lower, and now they'd just forgotten about us down here. Julian was stuck on probably the worst level of all--ten higher than mine, but that meant they'd been closer to the blast and had more damage, and were still low enough for no one to care.
And of course about a mile above all this was the big, squat, hovering black metal diamond that contained the Facility. There was some big long official term for it, but it ended in "facility" and after the meltdown, people had shortened it while talking about it on the news. It had stuck.
The Facility had been installed because of the contamination. Cold-fusion plants actually put out a lot less radiation than nuclear plants, because they fuzed atoms instead of splitting them to make energy. But to do that they had to achieve something called absolute zero--the ultimate cold, the cold that was so cold that even atoms stopped moving. And the only way to fuse them was to do it while they weren't moving.
The problem with cold is that it's contagious. It infects what it touches, as long as whatever it touches isn't warmer than it is cold--and nothing living is warm enough to balance out absolute zero. So when the plant melted down, the containment cores failed and waves of absolute zero winds had gushed out. Most of the dome had already extended forcefield shielding, as the plant had been in emergency mode and broadcasting warnings for almost two days. The blast had been pretty contained, and by the time it had started, the order was already going out to open the vaccuum tunnels closest to the plant, which was right next to our dome's wall just in case this sort of thing happened. Most of the absolute zero winds were sucked right out into nothingness.
But a lot had already been contaminated. So they'd shut it up in the Facility to keep it from spreading. And they'd put a lot of scientists in there with it, to try and figure out how to reverse it--because the spread hasn't stopped. At least, that's what they tell us. They have to keep using gravity bombs to compress what remains inside there every few months, and then they keep feeding it so they can keep studying the spread of the contamination. They wanted to find a way to stop it, I guess. I don't know why they don't just g-bomb the shit out of everything in there and shoot the last of it out into space. It would be easier for everyone, rather than having this big hovering black diamond thing taking up a fourth of our living space. Population regulation limits rose about 4.6 per cent every year because of it. We were already running out of room before the meltdown, and the Facility made everything worse.
After two nerve-wracking hours of weaving my levehicle through tangled webs of gnarled metal, glass, and of course, other levehicle traffic, I managed to get us both safely to Littleville Apartments, which was the complex he lived in. Though actually, he didn't live in the official complex. Over time the landlady had sort of taken over the few empty buildings next door--one used to be a skyscraper that hosted, going by the scuffed up sign, SOLAR CO., and another was just a multi-tiered warehouse--and even though they were officially condemned by the government as unsafe, Mrs. Pottsworth still rented them to people who couldn't afford better.
I really could have gone the rest of my life without knowing, or even caring, about any of this. But Blondie just wouldn't shut up the entire damn ride. I guess he was happy about me hiring him to keep my books and watch the register or something. Or maybe he thought that made us friends. Or something. I don't know. But I got to hear all about Mrs. Pottsworth, who no one knew whether she was married or divorced or a widow, and there was a rumour she had killed her husband one night with a hyperdense steel kettle because he was abusive or something and he dissed her potroast, so she snapped, but she was perfectly nice to everyone else, just don't mention the Mr. or her potroast, and anyway she collects little porcelain kettle miniatures, whatever the hell porcelain is, so if you're behind on your rent if you get her something for her collection she'll wait a little longer, but you'll still have to pay her eventually and she starts getting really impatient after about three months no matter how many damn little porcelain kettles you get her.
God. Just...God. I did not care. I could not have cared less. I would have told him to shut the hell up, normally, but I didn't want him to start crying again. And when I thought about it--and I had a lot of time to think about it, because I tuned him out after he started talking about his nextdoor neighbor who had to be the noisiest slut in the entire dome, like seriously it's okay if you want to hump every person ever every damn night at every damn hour, but you could at least do it quietly--sitting there and letting his babbling wash over me was a lot better than him crying the whole time.
So yeah, I got us there, without ripping up my car squeezing through painfully tight spaces in the metal debris, and without hitting the eject button on Blondie's seat. I dropped him out on a dangerous-looking slab of concrete that clung to the side of his building like a fat, long, hulking animal. It had cracks all through it, deep ones, and I couldn't believe anyone could stand on that thing without it giving way.
"Thanks for the ride," he said, smiling at me again. "I seriously really appreciate this. And the job. And last night. Seriously. Thank you so much."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever," I muttered warily. He almost looked like he was going to try to hug me or something. "Just be there tomorrow morning at six."
"I will!" he said excitedly, grinning and waving goodbye.
I grunted and and sort of lifted my hand in response before turning and driving off.
That kid. Something about his smile...it didn't make me, like, feel glad too or anything. It just made me feel bad if I didn't do something back.
I was halfway out of the debris when the first explosion rocked the sky.