The apartment looked different with most of the furniture pushed against the walls. Laz's microscope and other delicate equipment had been carefully relocated, leaving a makeshift operating theater in the center of the living room. Only his current experiments remained untouched in their corner, various solutions bubbling away in their beakers and test tubes, status lights blinking arhythmically.
"The beacon has to be integrated with the collar somehow," Laz muttered, examining the complex circuitry exposed beneath a panel in Bud's neural interface. "But these connections are impossibly small. And what is that?"
Bud felt Laz poke at something near the base of his skull.
“Careful!” Bud barked. “That’s my brain you’re assaulting.”
“It’s smaller than you'd have me believe,” Laz quipped.
Bud growled, but there wasn’t any menace in the sound. “I think that’s my EMP you’re prodding at.”
“Why do you have an EMP?”
“They told me to use it if my assigned cyborg ever demonstrated curious activity.”
“Curious activity?”
“Trust me, I think of using it almost daily.”
“Oh, please,” Laz replied, though the comment seemed half to himself. His lips were still pursed, examining the complex microscopy of Bud’s internal workings, gently moving wires about with a demagnetized probe.
"It’s a maze in here," Laz finally said, voice still distant. “Maybe we should ask the housekeeper to take a look.”
“I’d be more than happy to help, sir.” The android stepped into Bud’s line of view. Laz’s wife had recently taken to draping her dresses over it. Today it was dressed all in red.
“Absolutely not,” Bud yipped. Not a sound he often made, but Laz was still pawing around inside his exposed cranial cavity. “The housekeeper has about as much compassion as a walking can opener. I don’t want it messing with my neural net.”
”I assure you Langdog Unit DP-B04-UD-111-87 that your chances of brain death will be far lower if you entrust the procedure to me.”
“Exactly. See what I mean, Lazarus?”
Laz shrugged. "Its optical processors are far more precise than even my enhanced vision. And its hands will be far steadier."
Bud growled. He hated that Laz was right.
"Are you absolutely certain you want to do this? Maybe you’re just using this as a convenient excuse? Not that you need one. I certainly don’t expect you to do it."
"No, I'm sure," Bud replied firmly. "There must be a reason the FOG installed these beacons in all langdogs. I won't be their tool. I won't let them use me to hurt you."
"You're starting to sound like my wife," Laz said, shaking his head.
"Well, she's a smart woman."
"I won't dispute that." Lazarus sighed, running a hand through his hair. "Just don’t go getting ideas like that one she had last month about putting a wig on our android.” He gestured toward the housekeeper. It stood stoically to one side, awaiting a command. Laz chuckled to himself, but then sighed. “I appreciate your loyalty. I do. But I don't see anu way that I could separate the transponder from the rest of your neural net. Not safely, anyway."
The housekeeper stepped forward, its movements precise and economical. "If I may, sir?" The ebony orbs of its optical sensors whirred to life, spinning in their sockets as they zoomed in on Bud's exposed circuitry. Bud tensed but the housekeeper made no move to actually touch him. He had all the housekeeper’s access codes and could see everything it did. Part of him wished he couldn’t. It was u settling, looking inside your own skull.
Still, he realized immediately just how right Laz was. Where Bud’s owner saw only a maze of delicate connections, the android's processors mapped each circuit, running millions of calculations per second as it analyzed power flows and data pathways with mathematical certainty. There was no hesitation, no fear of failure—only pure logic and perfect precision. But that’s exactly what worried Bud. What if the housekeeper saw some outcome that it calculated as being favorable in the commutative but not for him individually? Bud couldn’t think of one, but that didn’t cure his skepticism.
“It’s there, sir,” the housekeeper said. The tip of one of its fingers flipped open, shining a light into Bud’s skull.
Laz squinted, shaking his head. “It might as well be a textbook on quantum entanglement for all I understand it.”
“Langdog Unit DP-B04-UD-111-87?” The housekeeper looked Bud in the eye, which was terribly disorienting since Bud was still accessing its visual feed. He had to fight down a surge of vertigo. “You have been accessing my vision processors. Do you concur that disabling microchip x-88L will likely sever the transponder’s connection with its master server?”
Bud had already performed the assessment and reached the same conclusion—.0037 seconds faster than the housekeeper had.
“Likely?” Laz asked. “What if you’re wrong?”
“Don’t answer that,” Bud snapped at the housekeeper. “It will work, Lazarus. Let’s get it over with.”
The housekeeper turned to Laz. He pursed his lips, glanced at Bud, then nodded. The housekeeper extended a finger, the digit transforming into a microtool. One with a pointy end. Bud shut his eyes and this time, he made no effort to access the housekeeper’s visual transmitters.
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Note: I wrote this story with the assistance of AI. To read about my process, see the following post:
buymeacoffee.com/dtkane/mars-174-years-after-earth-destruction