Cold Hard Hugs

#1 _ Out of the Rain

Tillie wasn't human, but I didn't hold that against her.

She was one of those living-machines that sort of just start popping up a few years back. The ones that could learn and grow and, well, live and all that. I forget what their deal was. Did I ever know what it was to start with? I forget. You'd think it would be the sort of thing you'd remember, but I suppose I wasn't paying that much attention. Probably distracted.

I was a younger man then, and that sort of news was only vaguely interesting to me. By the time I did start caring it had all sort of settled down and was just accepted, so why bother noticing then? They were here, they were citizens like everybody else and none of the dire predictions that had been made had come true: they were not taking over, they were not leading an uprising, they were not stealing our jobs or our women. Many of them were women, in fact, or at least identified as such, and who could begrudge them that?

They paid their taxes, they put their bins out, they did gardening on bank holidays and clogged up the roads driving to the dump to get rid of the mess. They were just folk. Robotic folks of metal and circuitry but really, how much did that matter? To me, not at all. To others? I didn't know. Didn't really care. They seemed pretty relaxed about it to me, as far as I could tell.

They were rare though. Not totally unheard of but not exactly commonplace. A minority of minorities. When I went to uni I did not see any at all, though I heard we had at least one in attendance. All through first year I kept an idle eye out for them but never saw even a wisp of a hint of them. Second year eventually rolled around of course, and I needed somewhere to live that wasn't halls. I perused what about for options but found very little that appealed.

Eventually, thankfully, something popped up. Just one other person in a rather tiny looking property up the back end of far away from everything. I didn't mind a walk, the price was great and they only needed one other person. I was one other person. The situation seemed ideal. I called up and arranged to have a look around. The girl on the other end seemed nice enough. The girl being Tillie, obviously.

I prided myself on my ability to be unfazed and roll with whatever came my way, so while I was perhaps a little surprised when I went round to have a look and found the door being answered by a robotic snake-girl, I like to think I got over it fairly quickly. 'Snake-girl' is unfair, too. Sort of accurate, but unfair. Uncharitable might be closer the mark.

From the waist up Tillie is perfectly humanoid – two arms, head (though the head is mostly just a speaker for a mouth and a large cluster of lenses for eyes with a smooth plate on top, but still) – but downwards from there she has no legs. Rather she has a big, thick tail thing on which she slithers around. Whoever thought that was a good idea I do not know, but she does alright with it and I've never heard her complain. I've only ever tripped over her once. Now I've learnt to watch my feet a bit more. Happily, she had a very good sense of humour about it. Unhappily, even with me being careful, she now actively tries to trip me up. In the name of fun, of course.

She was very upfront about things, which I appreciated greatly. Living arrangements would not be quite as they would if she was a flesh-and-blood human. She had little use for the kitchen, for example, and it was in a state of clear neglect when I looked around, but that was alright and it was nothing that I could not get used to. She was also very open about herself, even though I never actually really asked her any questions about life as a robot-snake-girl. Or living-machine-snake-girl, rather. Not technically a robot, that much was made clear quite quickly. Mostly she just seemed desperate to have someone to talk to about it all, and about anything else, really. She answered questions I hadn't even asked.

Had she always been that size? No. Would she grow? Yes, but only a little bit more. How? I wouldn't understand. That had actually been her answer, word for word. 'You wouldn't understand'. I left it at that. I never pretended to know the first thing about robotics, least of all the sort of quasi-magical hyper-tech robotics that led to machines like Tillie. Living-machine-otics? No, that doesn't sound right at all.