Page 8 of Time Traveling Space Bastards

E motions were new to me. I wasn’t given that programming and my owner kept insisting I was defective because he thought I was having them, despite constantly being wiped to factory settings. I just didn’t like having sex all night with strangers.

But right now? I was pretty sure I was angry. I might even be what they called livid. It was interesting and tingled a little. She didn’t like being called the Devouring Mother and asked us to call her Baxter. Which we had no problem doing.

The exchange rate between our planet and theirs was pretty vast. Kuka’s parents gave the siblings equal amounts of money to battle for the throne and Kuka used most of his to figure out time travel. We really didn’t have much left in terms of our planet, but Baxter said on this one, four million dollars was a lot of money.

It would be enough for her to hide here while we kept her safe and she wouldn’t have to leave for work or food. She must have trusted us a little because when I needed her account information to send the money, she just waved her hand and directed me over to an archaic computer. She said her credentials were saved, and I’d just need to press a button.

That wasn’t what had me tingling in what I was sure was anger.

“What’s wrong? Can cyborgs drink? You look like you need this,” she said, sliding the bottle she’d been guzzling from since she saw us.

I honestly didn’t know. We didn’t need to eat or drink, but one of my owner’s friends brought his Enix to the brothel to work with me one night and she insisted we could get high and drunk like the skin jobs.

Now was as good a time as any to test that theory. The clear liquid burned its way down my throat as I swallowed. I was slightly warm when I set it down.

“This is racist!” I said, jamming my finger at the screen.

“The bank log in page?”

“Why does it need to know if I’m a robot? Is this planet so backwards that cyborgs aren’t allowed money? How are they supposed to pay for clothes? There’s no option for yes, either, like we should know better!”

“Um, we don’t have cyborgs here. We’ve got computer programs called bots that are programmed to scam people and companies out of money. This tends to trip them up.”

“So, your robots are inferior, stupid, and criminal?”

“We don’t have robots like that. None of them are capable of independent thought like you. They either do what they are programmed to do, or they rearrange data that’s already out there. Some of it is being used for good things, but mostly, it’s being used to scam people and by rip-off artists. You’re quite magnificent, you know. Just click yes. They don’t mean you, even if you’re a cyborg.”

I suppose none of that should be shocking. If you knew enough, you could jail break your Enix and add all kinds of illegal programming. There was an entire black market for that. Not everyone wanted us for sex. We were platonic companions, servants, employees, and if you knew the right person, we could also be criminals.

Thankfully, Kuka and Torrek saved me from all of that. They didn’t make me do anything. They asked and if I didn’t want to do it, they were fine with that. I wanted to be here. I wanted to meet the Devouring Mother. Her words led to the creation of my kind. There was a small part of me hoping if we could save her, she’d write the missing text and change things for the Enix.

She was quite different from what I expected, but I liked her. I got her account information from the screen and made the transfer. Her eyes got as big as saucers when she saw her bank account total now.

“Holy fuck, the three of you better make sure I don’t get murdered because I want to get to enjoy that money.”

Yeah, we needed to focus on that aspect next. We found her, told her the truth, and now we needed to keep her safe. We started all of this because we wanted to keep her safe long enough to write the last text, but it was more than that now.

She was just a twenty-eight-year-old woman. Baxter was human, but she could have been any twenty-eight-year-old female on our planet who’d been through a lot. Yeah, she tried to assault me before, but she was also kind. She could have laughed at me for not understanding.

We couldn’t go back and change her past, even with the time machine because time was complicated like that. But we could hopefully leave her with a better future.