An Inconvenience

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His wrist burned, forcing himself inward once more, and he focused on a message spiraling out of the band into his now normalized retinal displays.

"Keep all this to yourself, not even Benzo." It was the last message from Hector.

"Ok!" He moaned, standing. "Benzo and the rest of you in a briefing room. Mika, your lot are waiting to brief you. where ever they brief you.' He said, waving his arms up into the air mockingly.

Once in the room, he added Sally's full proof protection to it while asking her to prepare an explanation for later on why she had suddenly popped into the hector meeting the way she had.

"What in the earth's core's name have you been doing you dim whit. All you have done since I arrived is act odd and pass out like you're on some kind of new drug trip." Benzo paced the room.

"Yeah, Me and Demon here were having a perfectly tuned vacation of our own making when you unceremoniously yanked us from a beach full of very naked species of all shapes and sizes." Lighthouse frowned. The two of them were stalwart old military comrades, but the GOO pushed them into weird tastes.

"Look, my life isn't exactly what it seems nor a picture of fucking roses, you know." He sat heavily in one of the chairs rubbing the Android's furrowed brow. It annoyed him that it knew he wanted to furrow his brow, which annoyed him more; it felt real. He carefully spun the story together from Hector about ADJ4 and how he was illegally duplicated with the whole brains on his shoes, scene to provide authenticity. They would review the footage once comms were up, so he needed it to be authentic.

"Wholly shit." Demon replied in a very thick Scottish accent that he had always insisted he keep. "I haven't seen you in shit knows how many years, and now they are gonna just wipe yea like it was a daily task on a list?" He looked to protest.

"Look. The truth is, I don't want two copies of me running around. One is hard enough to deal with." They all burst out laughing at this—some much needed comic relief. "Also, I need you guys here; this is the most important shit we're here to do. We have to find out who's behind this, and we need someone alive without their brains blown out to question. We have to find out if there are any more surprises, or we might be in the next GOO flush." He regretted the term when he had used it, and the feeling was reflected in everyone's faces. "Talking of staying alive and torture, where is Marianne?" they all exchanged a look.

"Marianne, Spine stripper?" Benzo suddenly asked.

"Yes!" he protested. "She was on the manifest."

"There was an issue with her upload. She's uploading now." Sally played on a board NJI channel for the group.

"Mark II?" He enquired, scratching an itch again.

"Yes, and before you ask, I have not heard back on why we are not using Mark III models as communications are down for all of us." He took in Sally's comments, but the whole delay in Mark 3 versions of the combat android he was HER'd into was beginning to really bug him. He had made a real fuss about the failure, and typically his fusses were acted on fast.

"Ok, you will have to brief her for me Benzo, I gotta go. Once I'm wiped, I suspect they will open limited comms through the ADJ's, but it's going to be heavily spied upon, so be careful what you say, and don't freak the real me out until it's been uploaded with recent memories ok?" He stood.

"Why The Stripper?" Benzo complained.

"Because she's ruthless and will keep you all in line and save your arses when I'm not here to do it." He cracked a wicked grin. "Now go figure out who did this before Mika does, and I'll probably speak to you in a few hours when I'm rebirthed with uploaded memories." All that sounded odd, to say the least. It gave him a headache just thinking about it, and he didn't even want to consider how they would cope with him getting back from DE. The memory mash-up would be hard.

A few shoulder bumps and one hug, and he was off down a benign circular tube corridor with lights coming on as he walked, and then he realized not going off behind him, and the smell.

"What is it, Mika he said, turning. Once the comms are up, you can hassle the real me." He stopped and waited.

"You're up to something. I can smell it!" She insisted on invading his personal space a little too much.

"Hey, I'm the bloody victim here! Didn't your lot give you the load down on the botch up job?" He cranked his neck back to try and focus on her. She shoved him against the wall pinning him with her body, and kissed him. His stupid android read the pheromones, and his body reacted.

"What are you doing!" He physically lifted her off him and planted her a reasonable distance away. Technically they were both in the same Android units, and she was well trained; it would be a good fight. This actually aroused him properly.

"A good luck kiss for wherever you're going." She turned and walked back up the tube-way setting the lights on in the reverse direction. "I'll find out soon enough, DigBee." She called back as the lights between them began to wink out.

Even angrier now, he translocated to the HER deck where droids started to prepare his mind for the wipe.

"I don't know what happened with Hector. Something from your bracelet activated an encrypted routine in me I didn't know there, which it seemed activated Sarah/Sally the same way. It deleted itself immediately. I didn't even get to see what the payload was." His Sally told him as he lay on the bench. A medical bot instructed his Android to flood his body with some cool drug cocktails to calm him down.

"Do you want these?" Sally asked.

"No." He replied, so she flushed them straight out of their blood.

"Any idea of the plan?" he asked.

"No. SallySarah wants to talk." Sally continued.

"Now she asks permission! Sure." He said and lay still.

"Thanks for Everything DigBee, again; we cannot offer you enough thanks and emotional compensation for all this Inconvenience! I will make sure this part of DigBee's life lives on vividly in the real DigBee's memories."

"Thanks, and Sally's?" "of course," she said. "Goodbye"

Then things were taken out of his control. Sally gave power to SarahSally, and the last thing he heard was SarahSally ordering a total wipe; he panicked. 

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