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abc prompts; k+s: law and order
They've been partners for three hours and nineteen minutes when he asks if the 'HRH' in 'HRH-327' stands for 'Her Royal Highness.'
She's standing over their first crime scene, balanced on two cement blocks to keep her shoes from getting muddy. It's practical, she says. Stopping to clean her shoes off would detract from their workday, and getting mud in his car would be seen as rude. Six minutes later, he calls her 'Princess' to get her attention. It sticks.
-
They've been partners for eleven days when she catches a bullet during an ill-timed driveby.
It rends silicone and destroys circuitry and leaves her glitching on the ground, fighting to execute the simple command of stand. In four minutes, he's shot out their tires, has them locked down and he's kneeling in front of her. She picks herself up and looks down at the coolant leaking onto the sidewalk. He wants to know if she's okay. She picks herself up again and looks up at his face. Her basic motor functions took a hard hit, but her social indexes and comprehension software are all intact. He looks concerned. She tells him yes.
-
They've been partners for seven weeks and two days when a massive power failure leaves all the opbots on prioritized energy rations.
As a discontinued operations model, she doesn't make the cut. Neither do six of the opbots, but their partners make do. Hers does, too.
He watches her eyes and her LEDs while they're on patrol; he's seen them fade from blue to green on a long shift, but by lunchtime today, they're amber yellow, and she's been forced to shut down a number of processes to conserve energy. Her colloquialism routines are the first to go. The stiff speech discomfits him, but she only cares until she kills her EMP programs. After that, his reactions are simply catalogued for further analysis.
When his driving takes them off-beat, he tells her they're taking an early lunch. She catalogues the breach of protocol for a later report. Then she catalogues his lying, too. They're not headed toward any known restaurants, and he stops the car in front of a dubious-looking walk-in clinic.
There's a man inside in a worn-out labcoat, poring over a holomodel of some nanocircuitry. He seems happy to be interrupted. There's a charging station in the back of the clinic, where she's ushered and wired up. 'Eat your heart out, Princess,' her partner says. She catalogues his smile for later.
-
They've been partners for five months, three weeks and one day when a hotheaded detective takes his bad day out on her.
He fires an ESG into her mouth while she's talking. She short-circuits and wakes up to twenty-seven lost hours. Her technician tells her to return to the charging bay, that she's off-duty for two weeks. She can't work without a human partner, and the department won't assign her to anyone temporarily. She's a liability.
She finds the incident report and suspension order easily. Her human partner suckerpunched the detective within the same minute she was shot. She interfaces with the cameras in the bullpen to watch the playback.
There was a split second of disbelief when her body dropped between her partner and the detective, and then he took a long step over her and planted his fist in the detective's gut. Amidst bids for oxygen, the detective said he should upgrade to an opbot that talked less. The new models weren't as hot, he added, but they sure made better cops. He got punched again before a pair of uniforms subdued her partner.
She says hello to the hotheaded detective every day for two weeks.
-
They've been partners for nine months, one week and six days when he nearly blows them both up.
While they're clearing a building, he finds a pressure plate wired to enough CL-20 to blow a city block. He finds it with his feet and all one hundred seventy-two pounds of his weight.
She hears the click, sees the wires and she tells him not to move. He freezes without question. She gives the order to evacuate the building and a three-block radius around it, but gets only silence over the comms until he backs her. Then it's a scramble to get everyone to safety, except the two of them.
He tells her she should leave, that the bomb squad will be here soon, but she's already found the timing device. They have three minutes and forty-one seconds to defuse it. She gets to work.
At one minute and nine seconds remaining, she successfully disconnects the bomb from the pressure plate. Her partner steps off and breathes, his vitals still soaring.
Their captain addresses her on the comm, asks for an exact location. She gives the coordinates, knowing what's coming. The timer reads fifty-four seconds when the shield goes up, just wide enough to contain the bomb and the opbot defusing it.
His objections are strenuous and strongly-worded.
It's all she can do to focus, despite a lauded capability to interpret multiple data streams simultaneously. When one stream is a vital diagram of wires and leads and the other is the sound of her partner shouting their captain down across the comms, she has to compartmentalize. She shuts down her audio input and hears nothing at all for the next forty-two seconds.
At four seconds, she clips the final wire. The timer goes dark.
Her audio input is still resuming when he grabs her. If she'd heard the shield deactivate, it might not have been such a shock. If she'd seen him before he turned her around to face him, she might have been able to anticipate what would happen.
But she doesn't know a thing until he's kissing her, hands tight on her shoulders, and all of her sensory circuits go live with a vengeance. She can hear his heart pounding, can feel it telegraphed through his fingertips where they press into her arms.
She marvels as her humanity gets the better of her. She kisses him back.
-
They've been partners for two years, six months, three weeks and three days when he flips the car off an overpass and into oncoming traffic.
Her language and translation processes are knocked out by the impact. She becomes aware of voices around them, but she can't make sense of any of it. She also can't move her left leg. She pries the car apart around it and crawls free.
He's there beside her, slumped over a mess of steering wheel and dashboard, blood running down his face from a gash at his hairline. He's bleeding from his stomach, too, where a shaft of aluminum tubing protrudes, slick and red. His vitals register as a flicker and a crack across her displays, completely unreadable.
She rips the windshield and crumpled hood apart to find the open air, and all she can think about is how upset he'll be when he sees what she's done to his car. He always did love a pretty machine.
The sunlight reflects off the other wrecked cars around them, off her own exposed titanium. She can't see when she lays him out on the asphalt. She's reaching for medical protocols, but her archives are damaged. There's no information there.
She lays her head down on his chest and struggles to listen to what's below her, to tune out the babel of the accident scene. The voices are loud and persistent, and she can't hear anything but their nonsense syllables. She needs to find his heart rate.
Her shattered displays make it difficult to manipulate processes. When she can't find her audio input to disable it, she reaches into her ears until she can break the hardware in her fingers. Only then can she focus on his heart under her palms.
But she can't feel it. Her tactile circuits must be damaged, she thinks, even as she distantly registers hot asphalt against titanium and broken silicone. She can't feel his heart because her tactile circuits are trashed.
The bioscan runs. She can't read the output on her displays, so she digs his phone from his pocket. It's in one piece, somehow, with just a lone fracture across the photo of them on the main screen. She interfaces with it and uses it to process the scan results.
Maybe the scan needs to be recalibrated. She can't do that with her displays in this condition, but she'll make sure it's done when she sees her tech next. Her bioscanner was obviously damaged in the crash as well.
These results can't be accurate.
-
The captain decommissions her four days later at her request. The very last of him dies with her circuitry.
She's standing over their first crime scene, balanced on two cement blocks to keep her shoes from getting muddy. It's practical, she says. Stopping to clean her shoes off would detract from their workday, and getting mud in his car would be seen as rude. Six minutes later, he calls her 'Princess' to get her attention. It sticks.
They've been partners for eleven days when she catches a bullet during an ill-timed driveby.
It rends silicone and destroys circuitry and leaves her glitching on the ground, fighting to execute the simple command of stand. In four minutes, he's shot out their tires, has them locked down and he's kneeling in front of her. She picks herself up and looks down at the coolant leaking onto the sidewalk. He wants to know if she's okay. She picks herself up again and looks up at his face. Her basic motor functions took a hard hit, but her social indexes and comprehension software are all intact. He looks concerned. She tells him yes.
They've been partners for seven weeks and two days when a massive power failure leaves all the opbots on prioritized energy rations.
As a discontinued operations model, she doesn't make the cut. Neither do six of the opbots, but their partners make do. Hers does, too.
He watches her eyes and her LEDs while they're on patrol; he's seen them fade from blue to green on a long shift, but by lunchtime today, they're amber yellow, and she's been forced to shut down a number of processes to conserve energy. Her colloquialism routines are the first to go. The stiff speech discomfits him, but she only cares until she kills her EMP programs. After that, his reactions are simply catalogued for further analysis.
When his driving takes them off-beat, he tells her they're taking an early lunch. She catalogues the breach of protocol for a later report. Then she catalogues his lying, too. They're not headed toward any known restaurants, and he stops the car in front of a dubious-looking walk-in clinic.
There's a man inside in a worn-out labcoat, poring over a holomodel of some nanocircuitry. He seems happy to be interrupted. There's a charging station in the back of the clinic, where she's ushered and wired up. 'Eat your heart out, Princess,' her partner says. She catalogues his smile for later.
They've been partners for five months, three weeks and one day when a hotheaded detective takes his bad day out on her.
He fires an ESG into her mouth while she's talking. She short-circuits and wakes up to twenty-seven lost hours. Her technician tells her to return to the charging bay, that she's off-duty for two weeks. She can't work without a human partner, and the department won't assign her to anyone temporarily. She's a liability.
She finds the incident report and suspension order easily. Her human partner suckerpunched the detective within the same minute she was shot. She interfaces with the cameras in the bullpen to watch the playback.
There was a split second of disbelief when her body dropped between her partner and the detective, and then he took a long step over her and planted his fist in the detective's gut. Amidst bids for oxygen, the detective said he should upgrade to an opbot that talked less. The new models weren't as hot, he added, but they sure made better cops. He got punched again before a pair of uniforms subdued her partner.
She says hello to the hotheaded detective every day for two weeks.
They've been partners for nine months, one week and six days when he nearly blows them both up.
While they're clearing a building, he finds a pressure plate wired to enough CL-20 to blow a city block. He finds it with his feet and all one hundred seventy-two pounds of his weight.
She hears the click, sees the wires and she tells him not to move. He freezes without question. She gives the order to evacuate the building and a three-block radius around it, but gets only silence over the comms until he backs her. Then it's a scramble to get everyone to safety, except the two of them.
He tells her she should leave, that the bomb squad will be here soon, but she's already found the timing device. They have three minutes and forty-one seconds to defuse it. She gets to work.
At one minute and nine seconds remaining, she successfully disconnects the bomb from the pressure plate. Her partner steps off and breathes, his vitals still soaring.
Their captain addresses her on the comm, asks for an exact location. She gives the coordinates, knowing what's coming. The timer reads fifty-four seconds when the shield goes up, just wide enough to contain the bomb and the opbot defusing it.
His objections are strenuous and strongly-worded.
It's all she can do to focus, despite a lauded capability to interpret multiple data streams simultaneously. When one stream is a vital diagram of wires and leads and the other is the sound of her partner shouting their captain down across the comms, she has to compartmentalize. She shuts down her audio input and hears nothing at all for the next forty-two seconds.
At four seconds, she clips the final wire. The timer goes dark.
Her audio input is still resuming when he grabs her. If she'd heard the shield deactivate, it might not have been such a shock. If she'd seen him before he turned her around to face him, she might have been able to anticipate what would happen.
But she doesn't know a thing until he's kissing her, hands tight on her shoulders, and all of her sensory circuits go live with a vengeance. She can hear his heart pounding, can feel it telegraphed through his fingertips where they press into her arms.
She marvels as her humanity gets the better of her. She kisses him back.
They've been partners for two years, six months, three weeks and three days when he flips the car off an overpass and into oncoming traffic.
Her language and translation processes are knocked out by the impact. She becomes aware of voices around them, but she can't make sense of any of it. She also can't move her left leg. She pries the car apart around it and crawls free.
He's there beside her, slumped over a mess of steering wheel and dashboard, blood running down his face from a gash at his hairline. He's bleeding from his stomach, too, where a shaft of aluminum tubing protrudes, slick and red. His vitals register as a flicker and a crack across her displays, completely unreadable.
She rips the windshield and crumpled hood apart to find the open air, and all she can think about is how upset he'll be when he sees what she's done to his car. He always did love a pretty machine.
The sunlight reflects off the other wrecked cars around them, off her own exposed titanium. She can't see when she lays him out on the asphalt. She's reaching for medical protocols, but her archives are damaged. There's no information there.
She lays her head down on his chest and struggles to listen to what's below her, to tune out the babel of the accident scene. The voices are loud and persistent, and she can't hear anything but their nonsense syllables. She needs to find his heart rate.
Her shattered displays make it difficult to manipulate processes. When she can't find her audio input to disable it, she reaches into her ears until she can break the hardware in her fingers. Only then can she focus on his heart under her palms.
But she can't feel it. Her tactile circuits must be damaged, she thinks, even as she distantly registers hot asphalt against titanium and broken silicone. She can't feel his heart because her tactile circuits are trashed.
The bioscan runs. She can't read the output on her displays, so she digs his phone from his pocket. It's in one piece, somehow, with just a lone fracture across the photo of them on the main screen. She interfaces with it and uses it to process the scan results.
Maybe the scan needs to be recalibrated. She can't do that with her displays in this condition, but she'll make sure it's done when she sees her tech next. Her bioscanner was obviously damaged in the crash as well.
These results can't be accurate.
The captain decommissions her four days later at her request. The very last of him dies with her circuitry.