“Is this tight enough?” The mechanic asks.

When she screws in the bolt a little more, you wince. Not because it hurts, just out of reflex, out of the tightness in your back growing. Your back has never really been that tender– none of your body has ever really been tender. Titanium and brass don't have a very high sensitivity. Pain isn’t something you experience when it comes to outside sensations.

“Yes, that is good.” You rest your cheek on the cold slab you’re lying on. The direct contact makes the display screen of your face a little buzzy. 

“They feel solid? No wiggling or wobbling?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Sure thing. Can’t have you walkin’ around with your back about to fall clean off.” She guffaws to herself and moves onto the next one, tightens it exactly as snugly as the previous. A talented touch from a talented worker. 

Cherryh is your usual mechanic, she has been for years. Every month, like a check-up, she tightens your screws and checks your shell’s structural integrity and cleans in between the slim, hair-thin seams of your joints. She chatters about whatever she feels like talking about, and you occasionally respond with a limited social vocabulary. It’s a trip to the spa mixed with a trip to the dentist– a relaxing time spent getting a check-up and check-in.

“You’re keepin’ your chassis in good shape, real clean, but you gotta be careful when your joints ‘n plate holders get shaky. No good having a shiny shell if it’s not attached to your body.” She always has input to offer about how you take care of yourself. It is always something you already know, but you still value it.

“Wise words. I shall keep that in mind.”

“You’d better, you fuckin’ behemoth.” 

She enjoys reminding you of your size. At eleven feet, saying you have an imposing figure is something of an understatement. She has to open the hangar to her workshop in order to let you inside. It makes you feel huge. You don’t know if feeling huge makes you feel good. You don’t know what feeling good even feels like, and this line of recursive thinking brings you to the conclusion that you don’t mind.

“I promise.” You say.

You can hear her rolling chair roll away behind you, over to the tool table. Picturing her bent over the many different implements, tapping her round chin with a short little finger, wondering how to modify you next– it excites you in an interesting way. Will you get a new casing today? Perhaps she will recommend something. Whatever she offers, you will take it. You trust her opinion. You trust everything she says and does.

After a few moments of contemplation, her little hums carrying gently through the air, she rolls back over. You imagine her slipping a pin into an anchor lock on your neck, restricting all movement in your head. And then another, further down your back. Then another in your arms, in your legs, until you're left immobile. You imagine her continuing to hum her little song as she turns you into a completely still hunk of metal, unable to do anything but flash your screen coyly, protest weakly, “what are you doing?” “i don’t recall my unfinished pet project having a vocal program installed, don’t say anything unless it’s yes ma’am” “yes ma’am”--

It is hard to not let yourself slip into these fantasies. Cherryh is a beautiful woman, short and stout and with enough confidence from her aura alone to fill up a room. She is humorous and has an air of authority and experience. You’ve only been worked on by her for years. But she’s a professional. She would never up and surprise you by rendering you immobile, making you surrender all control, existing at her whims and her whims alone while you lay there like an object unable to resist–

You aren’t quite sure what you feel when you imagine this.

“How does a robot like you have so many screws loose?” She chuckles from directly behind your head. You jump. A charging cable drags across your calf and connects at the port between your shoulder blades. Customary charge-up with every appointment. It sparks hot on your neck, and the flow of energy begins pushing its way into you.

“That is what I ask myself every day.” You chuckle a bit too forcefully. “I, ah, just push myself a little bit more than I need to sometimes. I do not tighten them as much as I should.”

The buzz of the charge is pleasant, and you can feel your energy return to you. Normally, you would “close your eyes” and “relax” while you felt the surge of life return to you– but never would you ever cut a conversation with Cherryh short.

“You’re gonna end up losing some plates if you keep operatin’ like that.” She walks down the length of your body to the end of the slab—potentially to put away a tool. It takes her a little while to make the trip down the length of your body. “I know you can get repairs, but you still have to treat your bod right, otherwise it’s gonna start falling apart on you.”

“That’s fine. I have you to put them back on.”

You can’t see her expression from where you’re laying. The charging port is on your back, so you must lay on your belly to be charged. You hope that there is no look of disgust on her face, a look of revulsion– or even worse, a look of complete neutrality. A wave of relief pushes through you when she laughs.

“Relyin’ on me like I’m your personal servant or somethin’.” She mutters in a playful imitation of exasperation.. “I can’t believe you, Ren.”

Ironic how you see it as the opposite. “Only because your quality is unparalleled.”

“Flatterer... Alright, that should top you off.” The plug is swiftly pulled from your port, and the flow of electricity subsides. You are at 100% power now, and it is time to stand up, pay what you owe her, walk out the door, wait until your next appointment to see her again. About a month. Maybe more if you don’t have a reasonable excuse.

You should do just that. Get up, pay, go. But you continue to lay there.

A thought crosses your internal servers that you find nearly devious. Not once have you ever attempted to bring your fantasies into reality, but the idea is too tantalizing to ignore. It almost surprises you when your voice box activates.

“Actually…do you…” You know that a rise in temperature is a symptom of nervousness in humans. It is embarrassing when your internal fans kick on. “Do you also do neural network checks?”

“Yeah, I do. What’s goin’ on? Worried about something up there?”

You attempt to keep yourself at your typical composure level– calm, factual, even-toned. “No. I simply have not performed one in a few months. Routine updates on my condition are important.”

“You’re not able to run the diagnostic yourself?” Slight squeaking accompanies her voice. She’s cleaning her tools. The tools that will grant her access to your neural network, essentially your brain– Part of you wishes you could shiver. Part of you is glad you can’t.

“I am concerned that there is dust buildup in my modem.” You are not used to lying. Dust is the least of your concerns– but if it works as a sufficient excuse, you will claim that it is. “And I prefer a manual touch anyway.” 

She chuckles. “Good taste. That’s why you’re my favorite patient, Ren. Good god damn taste.”

“So you will?” You turn your head to look at her for the first time since you laid down.  Her bandanna has let a few straw strands of hair escape its hold, and her dark skin is reflective with a light sheen of sweat. Hard at work. There is a screwdriver in her hand, and she wields it like a pro.

“Sure.” She replies with a shrug. “No extra cost. Put your head back down, ‘n I’ll get to work.”

You would have paid any amount she asked for. Obediently, you rest your face back down on the slab. “Thank you.” You whisper.

“No problem.”

It doesn’t require strength to remove the casing on the back of your head. Just finesse. Cherryh has it in spades. The small screwdriver deftly spins over the screws of the plate that protects your access locks. The plate pops off for the first time since you were booted up. How she flicks her thumbs under your locks would make anybody gasp– the chirp that comes out of you when your neural network hub hits air is soft.

“You alright?” She asks.

“Yes.” You lie again. “Just surprised.”

Cherryh continues with the process, but you can feel her fingers hesitate. You wonder if she knows that this is not a regular maintenance check. If she does, maybe you should stop, backtrack and say that you have changed your mind instead. That course of action would be the most likely one to keep your professional relationship intact.  The excitement rushing through your circuits clouds your logical processing. You don’t want her to stop. You don’t want her to stop even if she knows about the joy you’re getting from being treated as a powerless machine. Soon, your network will be in her fingers, warm and pulsating, connected by a few fragile wires to your chassis. If she so desired, she could yank back, snap the tethers with a strong enough tug, effectively Renering them from you and rendering you into a husk instantly.

The thought is perverse. Abominable. A fantasy about being on the brink of death. It fills you with a joying that does not stop mounting higher and higher inside you. You wriggle slightly as your headplate is set down on the table with a gentle clink.

“Looks like you haven’t taken this baby out for a good while.” You can feel her eyes on it. The mass of glowing wires and motherboards threaded together, a digital consciousness kicking into overdrive. You’ve never seen it in person, yourself. Only in your manuals. “At least not since you were woken up for the first time. Do you really not do manual checks on your own?”

The words tumble from you. “It is a fragile piece of machinery. Someone such as myself does not have the finesse to handle it.”

“You’re selling yourself short.”

“I get nervous.”

Cherryh’s typical humorous disposition is melting away. “You look nervous. I didn’t even know robots could be tense… let go of your shoulders, Ren.”

You obey her command. Surrender. If it is what she wants, then you allow your body to go as limp as you can manage.

“I don’t have the specific tools to extract it fully, unless you brought them from your kit—“

“No,” Your tone is wavering. Composure is slipping away already. “Use your hands.”

“Wh— are you sure?”

“It was designed to be easily extracted in case it required emergency repairs. You can simply lift it out. No key code or special tool.”

You almost expect her to be disgusted at the idea. Perhaps it is a symptom of some kind of shame. But then you remember that you are a robot. A machine. Just cogs and gears and wires. Cherryh is a mechanic. She studied to fix those cogs and gears and wires that make you up, to handle and rearrange them to her will. 

Without a noise, she fulfills your wish.

Using the steadiness of a surgeon, she nestles her fingers in the space between the head shell and the modum. There is a wide enough berth that she can comfortably rest her digits in there, but the uneven ridges and bumps of your interior create a strange, mechanical pattern she must follow in order to reach the base. You absorb her movements. On all sides inside your cranium, the unfamiliar sensation of flesh scrapes softly across your metal. Immediately, you feel a jolt like you’ve been shocked from the points of contact. There are bare calluses sliding across your motherboard. She has taken her gloves off to handle you.

A gentle sound escapes you with this knowledge. It is strained and high. You think it may be a moan. Humiliation should set in– but it doesn’t. Skin to modem contact, so intimate, so raw and uninhibited… It is just too warm and too soft and too much.

She freezes, hands stuck where they are. That sound you made, so desperate and pleading, hangs in the air.

“I won’t drop it.” She whispers. This whine was perceived as fear. It is. But not just fear. “I’ll be gentle.”

A tight and frantic little nod. You can’t speak– you’re too overwhelmed to form words. It takes immense power to not tighten your body in anticipation— you remain a rag doll.

You can feel her digits shift across the underside of your network, lighting up sparks inside your wires. Body heat mixes with manufactured heat, sweat making direct unfettered contact with oil. The heat is pulsating from her in sync with her heartbeat, you can feel it. Of course, you’re tender there. The vulnerability is akin to having another person hold your brain in their hands. Those jolts continue, consistent and ever-flowing zaps as if you are being overcharged. Never did you expect to be this sensitive– your entire body seizes when she lifts it full out of your head in its entirety. Nothing but thin wires connecting you to life, and they could effortlessly be snapped or snipped or tugged and toyed with—!

It is impossible to remain limp, and your fingers curl involuntarily over the rim of the slab. Every swing of the cables is a rush of cold air across raw open nerves. The shifting of her fingers is fresh electricity blazing over new and untouched swathes of your insides. Keeping this vice grip is the only thing tethering you to reality, to not completely falling into a pit of pleasure and unmitigated delight.

Whatever shame you could have felt before is gone. It is replaced with a vying desperation for her to spread her fingers around your modem, your most sensitive core, and hold onto it tight, letting the shock spread until you grow numb.

“Are you okay like this?” Her thumbs brush against the sides. You can feel each minute flex of her muscle against you.

Your fingers are wrenched against the edges of the slab, on either side of your head. The metal dents underneath your force. Gripping on for dear life, you hope to shield your facial screen from her, not allowing yourself to betray your sensibilities any more than you already have. But it is so, so difficult. A strained beep drawls from you, long and heavy.

She is holding you. She is holding all of you. Never in your life have you felt held, in your entirety. You feel so small and so powerless.

“You look like you’re overwhelmed–” There is worry in her voice. “I’m going to put this back–”

The ferocity with which you shake your head creates a clanging on the table. It is desperate and wild, and you almost forget the very thing that gives you life is thinly attached to the open insides of your swinging cranium. Your shoulders pulse in a way that could be compared to human panting for breath. How humiliating to be reduced to a mewling waif, a creature at its absolute mercy and begging for more pleasure-pain.

A thick exhale. “You… want me to continue?”

You nod with the same exhilaration, tight and frantic. A shrill beeping noise comes from you, affirmative. Rendered nonverbal by ecstasy. There is no denying what this has become.

“Okay,” She says. “Okay. I… I won’t stop.”

You hear a stiff swallow. Cherryh has absorbed this reality. She has accepted it. She has consented to be a part of it, wordlessly. Your metaphorical heart soars, an involuntary delighted trilling warbles from you.

“You’re very excited.” Is all she can say.

Shyly, you nod again. You can’t lie. Not to her. Not when you’re like this.

Cupped palms turn from a cradle into a true grip. In those delicate yet hardy bare hands, she pulls it out so there is no slack left in the wires connecting it to your chassis. They are taut and stretching like rubber bands. The pull is tight and sharp, but not painful. It is pleasant, making you crane back your neck, the pressure resonating deep inside your head. Her thumbs rub circles over the smooth surface, and you arch your back.

“It’s very… warm.” Whatever astute observations she had to offer simply died on her tongue.

You nod, enjoying the feeling of the cables tugging ever so slightly when you adjust your neck. As if it is even in your own control whether or not the wires snap.

Divots along the edge of your hardware are not very deep. The modem is sleek and refined, but an experienced eye knows where to look in order to find the tender spots. Her fingers glide over your inseams, tracing the lines where the motherboards were fused together. The electricity worms its way inside these gaps, burrowing deeper inside and causing you to groan and trill. It is heavenly. You coo as she feels you up, oscillating in pitch, higher and higher the more sensitive you become. A slight pressure builds at the inseams of the very back of the structure, where they meet together. Her thumbs dig into them and you yip.

“Does that feel good?” Her voice is low. 

You nod again, excited.

She presses harder, just shy of making the slits yield and crumble around her fingers. The shocks have reached your core, and are now feeling like something akin to a friction burn. It overpowers you, sending tremors through your body that you cannot control. You’re reduced to mewling, made pathetic and small. The squirming has turned into writhing. A white hot pleasure-pain is building not only where she touches, but it spreads, blooms like a flower, eats into your circuits and your joins and your chassis. It crawls into your vision, behind the space where your eyes would be if you had eyes. The response is stronger than electricity– it is as if your charging cable is powered by lightning.

As she nestles her thumbs into the divot, the rest of her fingers curl. Tightly, deeply, they sink into whatever crevice they can fall into. The modem is not soft like skin. It is metal and plastic. But she treats it as if it is flexible, as if it will bend to her will. It will not. It will warp and snap if she presses too hard. This knowledge delights you, and it delights you even more when she releases a hand so she can wrap a bundle of wires around her finger, like a lock of hair, and tug. You feel the wires pulling from their base looser, and looser, and you wonder with intense glee what essential functions would be shut down if she pulled them clean out. Maybe your body would lock up. Maybe your memory would be erased. Maybe you would simply shut down. It is all too tantalizing.

“Responsive hardware.” She whispers, and drives her thumbs in deeper, together.

The searing feeling washes over you in strong waves, and your body convulses, hips slamming onto the slab in a futile attempt to hump. It is a complete mystery as to how these motions, so human in their nature, come from you. Perhaps this is an orgasm. A noise screams from far away, and you realize that it is your voice box opening, a glitching and fried voice warbling with joy. Your shoulders are heaving once more. You’ve hit your limit, and in an instant, you are overstimulated and rendered as a thing. The high lasts for nearly ten seconds, and you can feel the urge to shut down plo into you as soon as you crest the top of the wave. All energy has been sapped from you, as if you weren’t charged to full moments ago.

The talented mechanic that she is, Cherryh reads your body language and relents after you have ridden out your peak.

“That’s enough.”

Her fingers release their grip. The wires fall slack. She no longer digs her thumbs into your modem. You are limp once more, the aftereffects of the scream still trilling. They turn into whimpers and electronic sighs. You float in an exhausted bliss, the chill of the slab welcome against your overheated chassis. Your fans audibly kick into overdrive once more.

“How was that?” A faded voice from behind you asks.

“Goo— good. Good.” Even after showing your innermost parts to Cherryh, moaning and whining, cumming like an uninhibited animal right in front of her, you cannot bring yourself to sing any praises. You are a creature of logic and reason, after all. “Very good. Thank you.”

“Yeah, no– no problem. Happy to help.”

Collecting yourself, you begin to find feeling in your legs. There is a shakiness, now that you can control your movement again, but you push through it as best you can. You stand and face her, with Herculean effort. After finishing, the lust drained from your body and was replaced with that familiar feeling, shame. Is this what they call “post nut clarity”? Keeping your display screen neutral is a challenge. Her own face does little to betray her. Always the professional.

There is silence. To think this room was filled with your screams a moment ago is chilling. What is there to say? You certainly don’t know.

“…Same time a month from now?” She asks, wiping down her hands with a ragged cloth. Her eyes shift slightly to her feet. You know that the inside of a robot’s circuitry can get warm– but the flush and sweat on her face can’t only be from work. The knowledge of what occurs hangs thick in the air. It is an innocuous question on its surface, but you hope you are not presumptuous in assuming what it is an invitation for.

“Y-Yes,” You nod. Your modem shifts slightly in your head, now a little loose after being adjusted. “Please.”