Hello! I love your posts and have actually been following you for a long time, but through hashtags. I really enjoyed your posts about ghost!ghost and cyberpunk au. I would be very grateful if you could write a short piece of fiction. ☺️
Sorry, English is not my first language and I've never made a request before! I'm hiding behind the fence and watching you. 🫣
Let's do more cyberpunk! I love my big android Ghost <3
You sit in a loose fitting tank and shorts, your goggles pulled over your eyes to guard against the soft glow of heated metal. It's boiling in your workshop, you'd try to fix it yourself but despite your mechanical know-how, you're not an air conditioning repair expert. Not that that's stopped anyone from stopping by your cramped shop to ask about it. You curl forward, rub the leather of your glove against the burnished surface of the bot you're working on. The filigree is coming along nicely, you always enjoy being able to add your own special touch to mechanics. There's a knock against your door frame. You ignore it.
"I can't fix the a/c, take it up with the captain if you're that desperate," You toss over your shoulder, pressing the super heated wire against metal again.
"That all you're hearing today?" Ghost's voice fills the air. You sigh and lean back to switch off your machine, pushing your goggles up to look at the android. The sleek black of his face plate is unreadable as always, but his posture is casual. His arms crossed over his chest as he leans against the wall to watch you.
"What's broken?" You ask, not bothering to rise to whatever bait he's throwing you. He takes the opportunity to push off the wall and pick his way towards you, stepping over tubes and wires, computer cases pulled open to keep them cool. You're doing everything you can to avoid a system failure here.
"Fingers are twitchy, need a screw loosened," He tells you easily. Thank god for diagnostic checks, makes your job a hell of a lot easier when bots know what they need. You reach behind yourself for an extra stool, pushing off the casing to make room for your newest frequent flier. You pat the stool and go to grab your tools as Ghost takes a seat.
Micro-screwdrivers for micro-screws, a mini-soldering iron, a few spare wires and circuit connectors, your magnifiers, you even drag the big light over. Ghost watches you, his cameras clicking as they adjust to the new light, as the adjust to your movements. He makes a quiet noise when you get tangled in the wires hanging from the ceiling that sounds suspiciously close to a laugh. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
You take your seat and hold your hand out for his. You trace the seams of his synth-skin when he gives it to you, looking for the latch on his hand. Synth-skin always makes you a little squeamish, something Ghost obviously doesn't share when he shoos your hand away and tugs the synthetic skin off his hand like a glove. You put aside how nauseous that makes you in favor of studying the new mechanics.
You turn the dial on your magnifiers to look closer at the intricate overlay of his hand. The mechanics of it are mostly familiar to you, but you've never seen anything quite like it. One of his fingers twitches and you shift your focus to it. Curling closer to his hand, your light follows your movements, shining clearly on the interlinking strands that slip around the wires and metal. You poke one of the white ribbons with your screwdriver and his hand flinches.
"God this is beautiful," You mumble to yourself, tipping your head to try and find a new angle to work at. You tap the metal plating at the tip of his twitchy finger, following the lines of spring and ribboning to the root. You're gentle as you can pushing wire and cording(?) aside to inspect the inputs at the base of his finger.
"Fuck," Ghost grits, you glance up at him, his head turned to look away from you.
"Sorry, trying to be gentle," You offer, unsure why you're even offering it, when you look back at your work, "You wanna walk me through the specs? Might help."
"What do you wanna know?" It sounds forced. Strange as that seems to you, you find bots are just as reluctant to peak at their insides as humans are. Traces of their creators still stuck to their servos.
"The tensioning," You decide that's what it is as you locate the offending screw and grab a different screwdriver from your kit, "I've never seen this material before, it feels almost organic."
"It is organic," Ghost's hand twitches when you look up at him, pressing a little too hard against a ribbon.
"What?" You frown, "No it isn't, no one manufactures with organic materials."
"I'm a custom job." Is the only explanation he offers you. You sigh and give his tight screw a good turn. You suppose that makes sense, military made, custom for... well for the 141 you suppose.
"Military really shouldn't be using organics," You grumble, "it's illegal for a reason." You push check the other screws in his hand. Precision is always the name of the game for androids, you don't see any sense in including something as unpredictable as organic material. Not to mention is all has to come from somewhere. You eye the ribboning, the tendons of his hand that lace mechanics together like muscle, likely feeding into some sort of neural net that reads the signals of it.
"Lot of things are illegal," Ghost grumbles, his voice slipping in and out of modulation as his tone lowers, "doesn't stop folks from doin' it."
"Hows the hand feel?" You ask, redirecting the conversation somewhere more comfortable. Ghost flexes his fingers, and you watch with gross fascination as his hand moves, the tendons tensing and releasing with the metal and wires.
"Better."
"No twitches?" You hear the soft processing noise of his diagnostic before he shakes his head. Ghost grabs his glove from the top of your tool kit and tugs it over his mechanics. He locks it to the rest of his synth-skin and flexes his hand again to check everything is in order.
"None to report." He stands, pushing up with his hands on his knees. You carefully replace your tools into their respective holders, try not to think of the feeling of his- your stomach rolls at the thought. This is exactly why you became a mechanic and not a doctor.
"You don't-" You start, unsure how to phrase the question, "you don't have any other organic matter in you, do you?" Ghost stares at you for a long moment, his face plate unreadable, not even the click of his camera could clue you in to his thoughts.
"No." He replies, and the relief that passes over your face is almost worth the lie.
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