Page 31 of Time Traveling Space Bastards

T his was a weird little town, but I loved it for the most part. I mean, I was going to leave it behind for an entirely new planet without looking in my rear-view mirror, but it served its purpose when I needed it.

It was a fishing town, but it had a decent music scene for such a small population. Kevin was a raging, pretentious asshole who refused to carry books he didn’t consider art, but his shop was still popular.

So, like, when I dumped a bunch of aliens in the back of this rideshare driver’s minivan and hopped in the front seat, he didn’t even suspect they were from another galaxy, and we were on our way for me to dick punch another alien because he was probably going to murder me.

In hindsight, humans were probably much weirder than aliens. Maybe that’s why there were all these rumors they kept probing us. Clearly, our heads were up our asses.

I hopped out and immediately knew what Valten’s time machine was. It was another bus stop. The first two books of my series took place on Earth and the rest were on another planet. When I wrote them, I didn’t have a car yet, and I also didn’t know how to drive. My parents refused to teach me.

There were a lot of bus stops in the first two books and Kuka was smart enough to use my descriptions to build an outer replica that would blend here. I knew this wasn’t a regular bus stop because of the slight differences to the other bus stops around town.

Torrek grabbed me when I went to march through the door.

“Not yet. Kuka has a Saki protecting him. All of Valtens’s bodyguards quit, so their parents eventually purchased an Enix for him. This Enix is not like your Enix. This one has been programmed to kill and follow orders.”

“So, this Enix might be the one who kills me. How do you punch a cyborg in the dick?”

“You don’t,” Enix said. “If he’s been programmed to kill, it will be efficiently and without emotion. He wouldn’t strangle and stab someone. If it was Valtens, he probably got rid of the evidence so there was nothing non-human at the scene.”

“Then you punch him in the dick. I’ll bet some cyborg-on-cyborg violence actually hurts.”

Enix pulled me into a hug and it was the first time he’d willingly touched me so far. I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed him because I figured we both needed it. It hurt like fuck to punch him, but hugging him felt like hugging a very muscular person. I couldn’t tell he was a cyborg at all.

“If he’s involved, I’ll make sure he pays.”

“Thanks,” I said, nuzzling his chest with my chest.

Being able to fold fitted sheets was cool and everything, but the real magic was in cyborg hugs.

“Can you scan and see if he’s in there?” Kuka asked.

Enix did his thing, but he didn’t let me go. I wasn’t complaining at all.

“I’m not picking up life signs, cyborg or person, but the solar batteries are just undamaged enough to power the cloaking and for someone who designed it to access the logs from the console to figure out what happened when it landed.”

“I’m still going first,” Torrek said.

That was my man…alien? Saki? Whatever.

Torrek and Omi went first and then popped their heads out to let us sneak in. I knew Kuka said this was all based on work he did in college and it didn’t work very well, but this was way more advanced than anything we had on Earth, even if it was broken.

The console was completely different and there was no way I could fly this one. I was so focused on figuring out the controls that I didn’t take in anything else until I heard Enix’s horrified gasp.

I followed his line of sight and there was a man slumped against the wall unceremoniously. He didn’t look a thing like Enix, but I knew he was a cyborg, just a different model. I walked over and took his hand.

“What happened to him?”

“We were designed based on the holy texts. I know you said you made everything up after you met us, but they were able to use everything you wrote about the Enix to make us. They added a failsafe that wasn’t in the texts. From what I’m told, it’s worse than being factory reset. There’s an option to shut us down and disable us. It’s like dying.”

“Can you be turned back on?”

“I know how, but remember, they aren’t all like your Enix,” Kuka said. “Yours is a bit of an anomaly. He’s always fought his programming, even when factory reset. This one is basically a soldier. He’s programmed to follow any order my crazy brother gives him. My brother could have shut him down with orders to kill us as soon as we woke him up.”

“He won’t,” Torrek said. “He needs you to take him home, and it’s a forfeit if you kill the competition.”

“Who is going to fact check him if we’re all dead?” I asked.

“He’s been shut down for a while,” Enix said. “It’s going to take him a while to boot back up properly and he’ll be disoriented. I might be able to get through to him then and try to convince him that we are more than our programming. He might tell us where Valtens is and what his plans are. If he wants to fight, I’ll shut him down.”

I grabbed Enix because we were hugging now and I thought he might need it again.

“You’d better be careful because I’ve decided you’re mine, however you want to be. If you want to because consent is a beautiful thing.”

He just gave me this beautiful smile.

“I’d be happy to belong to you. Let me just take care of this first.”

I swear to shit, no one had better hurt my cyborg.