Page 12 of Time Traveling Space Bastards

T orrek was better at this bodyguard stuff. My owner didn’t want me programmed with any knowledge of fighting. He wanted me docile if anyone got rough with me. I didn’t know how to fight back, but I usually did because I didn’t like it. That usually led to me being factory reset again.

While we were waiting for Big Daddy to be built, Torrek taught Kuka and me how to fight. I was better at it than I was before. I was pretty sure I could take on a human. I was pretty indestructible and I couldn’t be recycled here.

I was highly suspicious of this man bringing donuts. This time of the morning wasn’t really safe in certain areas of my planet and her neighborhood looked similar to some of those areas, just a little bit nicer. What if he was bringing donuts and crime?

“Hey, sorry, thank you so much for coming out at this time.”

“Thanks for the super generous tip.”

I scanned him. He had a weapon on him and that made him dangerous. I stepped between Baxter and the man with the donuts. I wasn’t a Saki, so it would probably be way less impressive if I growled at him.

“Are you intending to hurt this woman?” I demanded.

“What the fuck?” Baxter asked. “He’s bringing donuts.”

“He’s got a weapon.”

“Yeah, that I can legally carry in case someone tries to hurt me when I’m delivering food.”

“Seems suspicious,” I said, leaning in. I wished I could scent him like Torrek could. “I don’t like the look of you.”

“Brooo,” she slurred. “You’re going to get me banned from getting food delivered. Delivery drivers get robbed all the time and sometimes they deliver to paranoid recluses that shoot at them for pulling into their driveway by mistake. It would be weird if he didn’t have at least pepper spray.”

“Fine. You can proceed.”

“Sorry about that. He’s a cyborg and doesn’t understand human customs, much less American ones.”

Wow, she just said that after everything she went through talking about us.

“No worries. My buddy also gets total asshole-caveman protective with his girlfriend when he’s drunk. At least he’s not drunk enough to assault me.”

I wasn’t drunk. I didn’t even know what that felt like, but I’d been around it enough to know she’d had a little too much. Still, I didn’t want a repeat of her past. We couldn’t go back and change it. Time was a weird thing. She only wrote our holy texts because of us. We didn’t know that until we did it. If we changed things so her past was less traumatic, she never would have written them and it would change everything on our planet and maybe not in a good way.

“Sorry. I am very drunk,” I said.

I wasn’t. I was eventually going to have to try getting drunk if I could get up the courage to try food.

“Well, I’ve never been threatened by a drunk cyborg before, so I guess I have an interesting story. Enjoy your food.”

He handed Baxter the bags and left. I was a little surprised. She said no one believed her and bullied her over it.

“He believed you about me?”

“Oh, no. Unless you get like, super racist, homophobic, or transphobic, you can say whatever you want when you’re drunk and everyone just assumes it’s because you’re fucked up. Like, I could tell him that bus stop was really a time machine called Big Daddy, and he’d just nod and smile because he’s going to assume I won’t remember when I sober up. He just thinks you’re an asshole when you’re drunk.”

“I’m not programmed to be an asshole. You have to pay extra for that or get it done on the black market.”

“Assuming I was on my period was an asshole move, bro. Have you ever considered you are more than your programming? You’re pretty sentient. Just because someone didn’t stick a USB up your ass and tell you how to be doesn’t mean you can’t learn it. Aren’t you a super computer?”

“My port is behind my ear, not in my rectum. But point noted.”

It was a good point. The Enix were designed off of her books. She wrote her books off the Enix she met. Me. That was probably just as weird for all of us as it was for her to find out why we called her the Devouring Mother.

Some of us had been beaten down and told we weren’t capable of anything other than what we’d been programmed to do. I was learning I was more than that with Torrek and Kuka.

I know she wasn’t intending to, but she was the architect responsible for my being. If she said I could eat, drink, or be an asshole, I probably could.

I mean, I didn’t want to be an asshole, but I was ready to try food for the first time.