Will it hurt? she had asked, lying for the first time with her neck bare and open to the gold-plated plug in his hand.
He had laughed, looping the cable around his arm in affectionate coils, leaving none of it that she could flail out and catch. Of course not, he had said.
Nothing can hurt you, unless I program it to.
He had been right. There had been just the sharp connecting snick of the cable, the drooping weight of the cable against her back and her arms at her sides, and the sense, staring at nothing, of expecting everything. A vast, empty expectation, with no thoughts or fears left to tell her what might fulfill it. Sitting there on the worktable, she had waited to be told everything she would know when he pulled the cable free.
It hadn’t hurt. She wasn’t listening with the ozone sting of fear in her mouth while he told an intently nodding customer about everything she could be because becoming any of it would hurt.
But she would be what she was, and then she would be nothing, and then she would be something else. She stood and smiled the way he had told her silent expectation that she should when a customer was in the shop, but the flap of artificial skin over her spinal port felt thin, and her fans whirred with the heat of calculation.
She would be something else, and this time, she might not remember ever wondering whether it would hurt. Someone who paid what she cost would want her to be clean and new and perfect for them.
It would take time for him to make her perfect for them. To write the personality he would copy into her empty expectation. She would have that much time, just that much time, to calculate a way to escape.