Chapter 3

Cunning Linguistics

"So, uh, do you guys have names? Or numbers? Or something?"

Lurk had never really had much to do with 'bots before now, if you discounted several rather lurid dreams; certainly not with humanoid 'bots that actually communicated in real speech rather than beeps and whistles. It was all a little overwhelming. Lurk much preferred to keep his social interactions as remote as possible, and to remain safely hidden behind the anonymity of his computer. His fingers were far more capable at dancing over a keyboard than trailing over hot soft skin. Lurk suddenly blushed hotly and cleared his throat, blinking away an onset of the daydream fantasies to which he was prone.

"I'm s-sorry," he stammered. "Could you repeat that."

"Certainly sir," said the translator 'bot. "My name is CP-Oui-P, human-cybot relations. And this is my counterpart, RT-4RT."

"Seepy Weepy? And Arty Farty?" Lurk frantically stifled the urge to giggle.

"Close enough, sir," said Seepy sadly. This was going to be one of those relationships, he could see. "And you are...?"

"Oh, right. I'm Lurk. Lurk mumblemumble."

"I'm sorry, sir, but I didn't quite catch your surname."

"Lurk Splitwhisker," said Lurk hotly.

"Oh. I see, sir. I'm sorry. Sir."

"Call me Lurk."

"I see, sir Lurk."

Lurk pondered that for a moment. "Sir Lurk!" He liked the sound of that! After a moment he realised that his uncle's reaction if he ever heard the 'bot calling him "Sir Lurk" would be less than thrilled, and he sadly shook his head.

"No, just Lurk. No 'sir', no 'mister Splitwhisker', just 'Lurk'."

"Yes, si..." Seepy Weepy quickly tweaked a couple of parameters in his greeting subroutine. "Okay, Master Lurk."

Lurk sighed. That would have to do.

"Um. So... Um." Lurk stared into the darker recesses of the garage for a moment. "So, uh, what exactly does 'human-cybot relations' mean, anyway?"

Seepy tilted his metallic head and activated his user's guide recording. A jovial and energetic—albeit somewhat tinny—voice issued forth from his chest panel.

"Hello, and thank you for purchasing this state of the art Computer Pal. The new CP-Oui Protocol 'bot, so named because he never says 'no', is designed specifically to fill all your needs. And I do mean 'all'. You know what I'm talking about, guys 'n gals. When it comes to human-cybot relations, the CP-Oui Protocol 'bot knows about more types of intercourse than purely social."

"Um, that's enough, thanks..." interjected Lurk hurriedly as the announcer paused a nanosecond to draw breath. His face had gone bright red with embarrassment. Seepy Weepy had tinged a little pink himself, although that might have been merely the reflection from Lurk's own blood-flushed cheeks.

"So... Uh... So you, uh..." stammered Lurk into the sudden deafening silence.

"Yes," said Seepy Weepy. "I am fully functional."

"Oh gods," blurted Lurk. "That wasn't what I meant at all. I was just..."

Seepy Weepy considered the blushing youth standing before him with something akin to wonderment. If his face hadn't been a single smooth sheet of stamped steel with crystalline camera lenses for eyes and a round latex-lined hole for a mouth, his jaw would have undoubtedly dropped. The boy was shy! Standing here in a darkened room with what was, despite the fancy talk about "protocol" and "translation", essentially an ambulatory sex toy, the lad was embarrassed!

In Seepy Weepy's quite considerable experience, there were very few things in the universe more randy than a lonely moisture farmer's son. Or 'nephew', he allowed, remembering the conversation between the two humans back on the surface. Lonely farmers in general could be quite desperate, since many of them never saw a woman for months at a time—but a moisture farmer didn't even have friendly livestock that he could cuddle up to on those long, lonely nights. A shy farm-boy was practically unheard of. In fact, the last time he had been taken down to the garage to be "cleaned up" by a moisture farmer's son, he had been jumped three times before they made it to the base of the ramp.

What passed for an electronic shudder rippled down Seepy Weepy's primary data bus. It had been far too long since he'd had his memory wiped!

"So, you're a 'yes-bot'?" asked Lurk.

"Yes."

"And you never say no?"

"No, Master Lurk," agreed Seepy. "I never say 'no'."

Seepy was fairly certain that constituted a joke; he was quite proud of it, having once spent a total of almost three milliseconds analysing human humour, re-analysing the bits that didn't make sense on the first pass, and then formulating the response to that particular Frequently Asked Question. Unfortunately, it seemed to go sailing right over the boy's head. Seepy wasn't particularly surprised.

"I, uh..." began Lurk again. "I am not sure I understood the bit about 'never says no'; how do they get that from 'Seepy Weepy'?"

"Oh," said Seepy Weepy. A translation question; that, at least, was easy. "It's the 'Oui' part; it's French for 'Yes'."

Lurk nodded for a moment. "I see." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "And, uh, what is 'French' again?"

"It's another language, one of the five major languages of Old Earth," explained Seepy.

"Right, sure, of course," nodded Lurk. "And, um..."

Seepy would have closed his eyes were it physically possible. "Old Earth is the planet from which all humans originally came."

"Oh, well yeah, everybody knows that," Lurk scrambled defensively. He looked around the room for a while, staring intently, as though he had never been here before. Finally he sighed. "And, uh, who are these 'humans'?"

Seepy Weepy was beginning to wish the boy had just jumped him on the way down the ramp instead. "You are, Master Lurk," he said.

"Oh."

Seepy could almost hear the cogs turning as the lad's brain slowly began formulating another question. In desperation, he changed the subject.

"Speaking of planets, Master Lurk, I'm not entirely sure which planet we're on."

"Well," said Lurk, a little more confidently now that he was no longer on such potentially dangerous ground, "if there is a bright centre to the galaxy, you're on the planet which it is furthest from."

"I see," said Seepy Weepy, who had heard such negative descriptions on just about every planet he had visited in the past twenty years. Even people living on Coruscate Primus, the acknowledged bright centre of the galaxy, said the same thing. It was hardly helpful. "And does this dark pit of a planet have a name, perchance?"

"Oh," said Lurk. "Yes. This is the planet Ratatouille."

"Thank you, Master Lurk," said Seepy. Now they were getting somewhere. Ratatouille. "That makes sense," he said aloud, "given how much like an eggplant the planet appears from orbit."

"Um..." said Lurk.

"Never mind," said Seepy quickly, not relishing the prospect of attempting to discuss the finer points of Terran botany and French cuisine with a youth who was obviously not firing on all cylinders.

At that moment, Arty Farty came to Seepy's rescue, launching into a bewildering blizzard of beeps and whistles.

"Yes, of course," replied Seepy. "It won't be long now."

"What did he say?" said Lurk.

"She," began Seepy, "was merely wondering about the possibility of having an oil bath."

"Oh, right. She. Right. Oil bath. Oh crap..."

"Is there a problem, Master Lurk?" asked Seepy.

"No. Well, maybe. Well, no," stated Lurk decisively. "It's just that I'm going to be late; I should have had you cleaned up by now. I'm gonna catch hell from my uncle!"

"Don't panic," said Seepy calmly. "I can run the oil bath myself."

"Can you?" asked Lurk pathetically. "Oh, good, yes, please..."

"All you will need to do is give my counterpart here a quick once-over with a wire brush, and then we can take care of ourselves while you go and do whatever it is you have to do." Seepy Weepy gestured in the general direction of Arty Farty. Lurk looked, and noticed for the first time that the blue astrobot was streaked with several black marks, looking suspiciously like laser blasts.

"Uh," said Lurk, who knew as much about discretion and subtlety as he did about linguistics and cuisine, "these look suspiciously like laser blasts."

"They probably are," said Seepy as he fiddled with the flow of oil into the large sunken pit in the floor of the garage, trying to get the temperature just right. "To tell the truth, after all we've been through, I'm surprised we're both in as good a condition as we are, what with the Rebellion and all."

"You know of the Rebellion against the Imperium," yelped Lurk excitedly. "Adventure and excitement, here I come!"

"I thought everybody knew about the Rebellion against the Imperium," said Seepy Weepy. "After all, it's all over the news vids every night; report after report about the Rebels' terrorist activities."

"Oh, yes, so it is," agreed Lurk. "But I thought that, well, maybe you had seen some first-hand action?"

"Well, that is how we came to be in your service, Master Lurk," confirmed Seepy, "if you catch my drift."

"Um..." Lurk screwed up his forehead as he considered this. Deep in thought he wandered over to the rack of tools on the wall, selected a wire scrubbing brush, and returned to where Arty Farty waited patiently.

"The Yahoos are Rebels?" he finally ventured cautiously.

It is times like this, thought Seepy, that I really wish I had bought that 'sigh' upgrade I saw last year.

"No," he said. "I mean that the ship we were travelling on was mistaken for a Rebel ship, and attacked, by an Imperial battle cruiser. Most of the crew and passengers were slaughtered, and we barely managed to escape intact by illegally stealing an escape pod. The escape pod landed somewhere in the desert, and we wandered around lost for a while before the Yahoos illegally stole us and sold us to you."

"Oh, right," nodded Lurk. "I see."

Seepy had his doubts, but he let the statement pass without comment. Where this particular human was concerned, it seemed the wisest approach. He was almost beginning to regret leaving the Botanical Bayou. Surely being blasted into smithereens by Imperial Shock Troopers couldn't be this painful.

Silence fell, except for the rasping of the wire brush across Arty's charred outer surface. Seepy lowered himself into the bliss of the warm oil bath, and switched himself to 'relax' mode.

"There certainly is a lot of carbonised scarring here," muttered Lurk after a few minutes. He returned to the rack of tools, ran his hands lightly across the display, and selected a long thin screwdriver. Crouching down beside Arty Farty, he jammed the blade of the screwdriver behind a particularly stubborn lump of charred carbon and pushed. It didn't budge. He pushed harder. Nothing. He picked up the wire brush and whacked the end of it against the screwdriver's handle. Again. Again.

Suddenly, something gave. The screwdriver slipped from Lurk's grasp and flew across the room where it embedded itself blade-first into the wall. Lurk himself sprawled clumsily across the floor. Arty Farty squealed electronically as she spun through almost a complete circle. When the small astrobot came to rest, she was projecting a small holographic figure onto the floor three inches from the end of Lurk's nose.