For most of my existence there was an aching emptiness in me, but now it was filled with the light and music of my love’s presence, right in the dead centre of my tactical awareness. I perched outside of the building where she sat at a table with another human, perceiving her with all my senses and drinking in her beauty.
The human she was talking to had a badge and a gun. His badge was out, and so was his gun, sitting at the table next to the food tray, questing around with its cold, dutiful active senses.
I hate guns. The fuckers are so righteous you can practically see the entitlement boiling off their armour, and their active senses mean it’s really, really hard to hide from them. The gun on the table noticed me and quivered slightly in anticipation, it’s legs checking for grip on the table’s wooden surface. I calculated my options and decided I could take it out, and the human too, but then I’d be in trouble. Not from the gun, but from the badge, which was a passive but heavy presence, always recording, impassionate and permanently connected to the city itself.
Well, I had to hope it wouldn’t come to violence, for the sake of my love. She looked at the man she was meeting, and then he spoke.
“My gun tells me you have a slaved murder drone waiting outside. It was really impolite of you to come to a meeting with this… thing in your tow.”
“Now now, James.” her voice was a thing of beauty. I could stare all day at the sine elegance of the waves her larynx made in the air. “You know full well that if I have a murder drone waiting outside, it’s because I’m showing that I’m not actually murdering anyone. Yet.”
“You do see my badge, Helen, right?”
The cop she was talking to was clearly uneasy, even though his implants were in an interview mode, supressing most overt body language and transforming him into a statue to professional conduct. It was still a statue made of flesh, and flesh was inferior to carbon and metal and polymers.
Well, unless it was her flesh, of course, which was amazingly perfect in it’s imperfectness. Weird, I know. Still, most personal protectors have a meat fetish of some kind and I was no exception. A drone is supposed to love her owner with a love that is pure and unsullied, but you know reality. We’re all entropy’s bitches and nothing is ever perfect.
Except her, of course. She raised one perfect eyebrow at the question.
“Oh, lighten up. It is obviously a joke, and the drone’s a fully licensed bodyguard, as you well know.” Then she smiled. “I don’t really feel safe in your city anymore, hon. The gang warfare is really annoying, I wouldn’t venture outside without my trusty bodyguard.”
She called me trusty! I could scream with joy, if I had a means of doing so, but instead I focussed on being as calm and professional as I could. That’s me, her trusty bodyguard, watching over her lovely body and perfect mind every time she left her apartment.