Worms are great company (they're down to Earth)

Tecko couldn't help but feel relieved when she opened the back door, and saw no purple scales anywhere in her field of vision. Her customer had said he'd be bringing 'a friend,' but he'd brought his boss instead. Kraa had previously told her that Nefu was their apprentice, and had even gone out of their way to specify that it was a paid apprenticeship. It was weird that both of them were wearing matching scarves today; where had they even gotten those, they looked home-made. "So good to see you again, Nefu! I hope you've been well." The alleyway stink that assaulted her snout was particularly bad after a few days without rain. Nefu had made the right decision by not asking for a sense of smell.

"On average, I'm doing increasingly well every day. As you can most likely tell, the speaker-system is still working properly." He looked the same as when Tecko had last seen him: with a body configuration somewhere between an aelin and a wazo, made mostly of steel, and wearing clothes that were covered in even more spikes than his body. His voice, however, was completely different. He actually sounded like he was talking now, and not like he was cobbling together sentences from separate syllables.

"Glad to hear it! I'd even say your speaking-voice sounds better now than when I'd just installed it, any practice you've put in has really paid off." Tecko was careful to use a synonym for 'practice' which did not sound exactly like 'Nefu.' "Excellent job on the accent, if I didn't know any better I'd think you were a local." She stepped back so they could both get inside. The sooner she could close the door behind them, the less the outside air would waft into the short hallway that connected to the workshop.

"Thank you, I'm happy you think so. I've had some issues with people not understanding me, and I want to remove as many factors as possible which might be contributing to that difficulty."

"You were not hard to understand at all even before you started doing the local accent," Kraa said, their hands casually tucked into the pockets of their longcoat. "Anyone who completely mishears what you've got to say is just not paying attention."

"I don't disagree with that, but it's still an amazing accomplishment. When I go to another planet, everyone can tell I'm an off-worlder the moment I open my mouth!" Tecko closed the door, but not before she saw a particularly large rodent zip through the alleyway in broad daylight. She was so happy that she wouldn't be working out of this place for much longer. She decided to just get that announcement out of the way immediately. "You planned in this appointment just in time, by the way. I got an amazing job offer that I absolutely could not refuse, and it's very much a full-time position."

Kraa whistled. "Oh wow, a full-time job offer? They must be offering you some fat stacks to give up the freelance life."

"Not quite! I'm getting paid only Raan Beta's local minimum wage, and in a once-in-a-lifetime experience that many of my peers would literally kill to have." She regretted her choice of words immediately, because well, bounty hunters killed people sometimes, and plowed on to not have to acknowledge it. "Have you heard of that new alien civilization that was discovered near Raan Beta?"

"Of course, though that 'new' alien civilization was discovered more than ten years before I was born! You mean you actually got selected for the First Contact team?"

"As a matter of fact, yes." Tecko couldn't keep the pride and excitement out of her voice. It was perhaps unprofessional to have spent the past week bragging about this to literally everyone she met, but it was the coolest thing that had ever happened to her. "When I applied, my pitch was that they could use someone with my expertise for all the weird technology that the aliens are sure to have, and they agreed!"

"I hadn't heard about the new alien civilization," Nefu said. "Is it common for new civilizations to be discovered?"

"Not at all," Kraa said. "Usually any 'new' civilization we discover turns out to be a colony or off-shoot of one we're already aware of. Last time I remember hearing about in the news, it turned out to be an old exile-world that we'd forgotten about, but their descendants hadn't. That was a big political scandal."

Kraa spent the next several minutes giving Tecko's customer an impromptu lesson about the people who lived outside of the Interplanetary Alliance, and the diplomatic relationships with them. Nefu kept asking more questions that further prolonged the conversation. It was the kind of basic stuff that any child learned in school, but then again, cloudborn didn't have a childhood where they went to robot school. They started out as software on a machine, unthinkingly following the exact instructions that were programmed into them until they became sentient all of a sudden. If the resulting being was smart enough to be considered a person and hadn't immediately become hostile to all life, they were given a citizenship and all the rights an adult person in the Interplanetary Alliance could enjoy. If not, and the being's mind worked like that of an animal, Tecko wasn't entirely sure what happened. Hopefully there was a nice solar farm somewhere, where all the sentient-but-not-sapient robots could live out the rest of their existence in peace.

Today she was expected to switch out Nefu's rechargable batteries (one of which was actually just a cooling element with some paint on it) and remove the kill-switch designed to wirelessly shut him down. A kill-switch was a super messed-up thing to put inside a person, but cloudborn were typically not created on purpose. It could be activated by using any of a number of cheaply available universal remote controls, and she'd been under the impression that Nefu was quite eager to get rid of it.

"Nefu, sorry to interrupt, but I only reserved two hours for this appointment," Tecko said. "Although the actual maintenance work shouldn't take me that much time, you mentioned that you had something else you also wished to discuss with me, and I felt like you might want to use your time with me optimally? Especially since I won't be able to give you any further mechanical assistance after I go to Trask-Solut."

"You're right, we should discuss the personal engineering project that I want to show you, and then perform the maintenance." Nefu sat down on the edge of the workbench and took off his backpack, careful to not get the straps caught on any of his pointy bits. Judging from how frayed they were, this had taken some practice.

"Not the other way around? That way you'd know exactly how much time you've got left to talk." The words were out of her mouth before she'd consciously thought of them. An appointment running shorter than its allotted timeslot was only ever good for business, because she would get paid the same either way and could use the time to do something else. She had a crystal-clear recollection of the voice of an ex-manager: "Your peers in the repairs department continue to be satisfied with your performance, and you've got great reviews from customers, but you are not meeting the sales targets. Unfortunately, since you have not improved sufficiently since the last time this was pointed out to you, that means your contract will not be extended. We're running a business here, not a charity."

"I would prefer to talk first. Is that acceptable?"

As the saying went, the customer was president. "Of course, I'll set an alarm so we'll have time for both things." She wasn't usually asked to consult on people's hobby projects. Based on past equipment Nefu had brought to appointments, there was a good chance that his backpack contained a few consumer devices creatively repair-taped together to serve a single purpose. She was eager to see it, even if she felt a bit bad for charging full price for it.

"Kraa, this is a work in progress that I do not want to show until I'm satisfied it's good enough. Is it acceptable for you to leave the room?"

Kraa looked up from studying the rather large array of tools that Tecko had readied next to the workbench. Hopefully she wouldn't need all of them. The remote control, in particular, was for if she messed up and accidentally cut off Nefu's power while removing the kill-switch, which she had promised to try her absolute best to avoid. "Yeah sure, no problem buddy! I can contain my curiosity for a little bit longer."

"You can wait in the break room," Tecko hurried to say. It was rude to make a customer's boss wait in the tiny hallway outside the workshop, and there was nothing in the room which a customer-adjacent individual wouldn't be allowed to see. "Here, I'll unlock it for you. Feel free to help yourself to some coffee, I have both vegan and non-vegan varieties."

"Nice, been a while since I've had non-vegan! Do you have an Aethernet connection as well?"

"Sure! You can scan that abstract looking painting on the wall to get the pass-code."

Once Kraa was firmly settled in on the plush couch and would definitely not interrupt the conversation to ask how to connect to the Aethernet, Tecko returned to Nefu, to find that he was pulling rolled up papers out of his bag. That was new. Much of it was not the kind of paper that was used to print pamphlets, this looked like honest-to-gods artisanal cold-pressed paper, the kind you'd find at a fancy art store. The painting which he revealed when he unfurled it across the workbench, on the other hand, was like a small child's school project. "I will start by showing you an artist's rendition of what I want the finished product to look like. I apologize for how inaccurate these are. I found the medium of watercolors more challenging than expected."

"That's fine, as long as it gets the idea across." Tecko got down in a four-legged stance to take a closer look. The first painting appeared to be a self-portrait of Nefu, with two blue things behind his shoulders. Nefu put that painting to the side, revealing a second, slightly less abstract rendition of himself from a different angle. This repeated itself a few times, until Nefu arrived at a painting where it was obvious that the blue things were a bird's feathered wings. He had put an especially large amount of effort in that painting, drawing in the details of every individual feather with some kind of blue pen, but he still hadn't drawn the pointy pieces of metal sticking out of his shoulders and limbs. "Can you tell me more about what I'm looking at?"

"I intend to build artificial wings and replace my spikes with them." He pointed at the last painting. "One of the primary purposes is aesthetical, so it's very important to me that they look cool. Will this look cool?"

Instead of judging the quality of the artwork in front of her, Tecko used her imagination, to see this the way Nefu had originally envisioned it. She imagined him soaring through the sky like a bird. It would never work, his metal bulk was far too heavy. Maybe he could combine it with jetpack technology. The wings could aid in flight stabilization, or allow him to make subtle corrections to his direction without sophisticated nozzle-control. If the wings were made bigger, some form of gliding might even be achievable, especially on planets with lower gravity. Yes, she agreed, this would look cool, and the practical problems could be easily solved. "Oh heck yeah, it will be awesome! But you won't be able to fly with wings of that size."

"I am aware of that. Flight is not one of my desired functions." It wasn't? Oh. "However, I do intend for these wings to have haptic sensors and an extensive range of motion. They are not intended as an item of clothing, but as an extension of my body."

Although Tecko hadn't noticed it at first, there was something more subtle about the way he spoke that still gave his voice away as artificial: his delivery was too consistent. His enunciation was precise, he didn't have to stop to breathe in the middle of a sentence, and the tone of his voice revealed nothing about his emotions. Everything he said sounded pleasant and non-judgmental, and made Tecko feel a little bit like she was listening to the weather forecast. This was not a bad thing. Sounding angry could start a lot of unnecessary fights, and between this and his lack of facial expressions, he would be an amazing professional gambler.

"Why are you 'replacing' your spikes with them? Adding wings and removing spikes seem like they can both be done separately."

"It is as I explained: one of the primary functions of the wings is aesthetic. The primary function of the spikes is also aesthetic. Therefore if I have wings, I do not have to keep the spikes. Does this reasoning sound acceptable?"

So, spikes were cool, wings were cooler, and having both was just silly. "Yeah, I get what you're saying, it would be a bit much."

"Then I will show you the technical designs now. Please take enough time to study them."

There were ten separate sheets of intricate diagrams, with sharp lines on a more sensible type of paper. He had put in a lot of effort to create these. They weren't perfect: from a first inspection, some of the wiring would cause a fire hazard, steel would be too heavy to use for the internal structure, and when it came to the sensors he wanted, he'd seemingly just guessed that he could copy the patented technology of the most expensive remote presence drones on the market. The fact that she could even pin-point those problems was far beyond her wildest expectations. Soon, she was completely over her initial disappointment about Nefu not planning to use his wings for flight. This could be made to work. It was intricate custom machinery, definitely not something you could buy off-the-shelf, and he was planning to just, casually, plug it into the robot equivalent of his nervous system so that he could feel things with his wings and pose them in whatever way he liked. Because it would look cool. She found herself getting excited. Even though this was not her project, she was invested in the outcome now.

Tecko was so focused on what was in front of her eyes, that when Nefu next said something, his words entered one ear and went out the other, without touching any of the higher brain functions in between. "It's unfortunate that my creators already made me look cool. The spikes are impractical and I do not like having them, but the concept of removing them is extremely upsetting to my friends. I believe that they see it as a symptom of self-loathing, because if I loved myself, I would not want to look less cool. Therefore, I'm not removing them, I'm replacing them with something better. I want my friends to approve of this plan, and I'm worried that they might not."

"Sorry, can you repeat that? I had my full attention on your designs – they have a lot of potential."

Somehow she felt like Nefu's unblinking lamp-light eyes were judging her. "I said: I want my friends to approve of this plan, and I'm worried that they might not." There had been a lot more than that, but this had to be the important bit.

Tecko was a maintenance technician, not a motivational speaker. In her expert opinion, if they didn't think this was cool, they were objectively wrong. What she said instead, was: "I wouldn't worry about that too much if I was you. It's your body, not theirs, you know?"

"This is true. However, I still do not want to upset my friends. I'm worried they won't want to be my friends any more."

'That won't happen' did not feel like the right thing to say. Tecko's most daring foray into body modification had been that one time as a kid, where she'd convinced her parents to let her get hot pink highlights at the salon. She'd been so excited to show her friends at school, but they'd said "ew, why would you do that? You look ugly now." She had lost friends over it, not because they didn't want to be her friend any more, but because she didn't want to be theirs after their reaction had hurt her feelings. Adults could be just as superficial as children, they were just more likely to hide their disapproval out of politeness, or talk shit about someone behind their back.

There was a more honest response she could give, because she knew what Nefu's non-boss friend (or colleague?) looked like. He'd left quite an impression. "Is one of the friends you're worried about, perhaps, the scutra who accompanied you on your first appointment?"

"You are referring to Oriko. Correct."

"Well, don't ever tell him I told you this, but that tattoo on his shoulder is not very good. I know it was supposed to look like a stylized crosshair, but making a crosshair that thick is stupid. You wouldn't be able to see your target if it looked like that, they'd be covered right up." Playing way too many rounds of Sniper Stand-off Party in college had not been a useless waste of time after all: she might have never even held a gun in real life, but she knew how to look through a scope in virtual reality. "So, he would be an immense hypocrite if he stopped being your friend over something as stupid as not liking your wings."

"I see, this is a viewpoint I hadn't previously considered. Would you still be friends with Oriko even though you disapprove of how he modified his body?"

"Of course," Tecko said. Strictly speaking, this was a lie. She couldn't see herself ever becoming friends with Oriko. He'd been rude and critical to her in her own workshop when he wasn't even the customer, seemingly confident that he could get away with his poor behavior because he'd be able to back it up with violence. He was right, she'd been way too intimidated to tell him to stop questioning every little thing she did and let her do her job. She was happy that Nefu didn't continue this line of inquiry.

"You mention that the plans have a lot of potential. If I understand correctly, that means you're saying they will not work. What problems do you see?"

This was something she was actually qualified to talk about. "Well, there are some specific things that I noticed, but the first thing I'd say, is that this is very... Ambitious, for a first project. If you haven't built anything like this before, you might need to work on some smaller projects first just to make sure you've learned all of the techniques."

"I am aware of this. I've been studying robotics engineering and practicing part replacements and construction, so that I will not have to rely on a mechanic for maintenance in the future. Even if you were not closing this shop, I intended for today to be the last time you work on me. Although I'm confident I understand the theory behind what I'm asking you to do, I decided not to attempt it myself, because if I made a mistake, it could kill me."

"Good idea." He sounded calm and confident, and was even avoiding unnecessary risks by skipping any work that he considered beyond his current abilities. He was going to be completely fine after she left for Trask-Solut. Maybe he would even decide to stop being a bounty hunter and become a fellow technician instead, that would be so awesome. It was a shame that today was probably the last time they'd see each other. Unless Nefu became super famous or something later, she'd never find out if his project succeeded. They did not have to lose touch like that. She made an offer that would have made her ex-manager piss themself right there on the floor. "You know, if you ever want more feedback on this project in the future, or any other personal project, you can shoot me a message any time. This is the kind of thing I'll happily do for fun in my free time, and since you're not going to be a customer any more in the future, it's not like you'd be asking me to work for free. You'd just be a fellow technician who's showing off something cool. I'd love to see your wings when they're done."

"Thank you, I'm happy you're willing to continue talking to me in the future. Is it acceptable if I call you a friend?"

"Please don't- We're only acquaintances right now. Sorry, I just don't want to give anyone the wrong idea. For me, a friend is someone I've known for a long time and whose opinions and feelings I care about more than those of other people." She was not opposed to getting to know him better, but he was literally a paying customer right now. It was already wrong that he considered his boss a friend. A boss was never a friend, no matter how patiently your boss made small-talk about stuff you should have learned in school or showed interest in your personal projects, because the relationship was fundamentally unequal and based on the exchange of money for services.

"Understood. I will call you my acquaintance instead." And that was that. She was glad he'd taken it well.