Published by Only Human.

  This novel’s story and characters are fictitious.

  Michael Cheney

  Confessions of a Trash Droid, Book 2, Illegal Operation

  2025, Michael Cheney / Only Human

  michael@michaelcheney.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Join Michael Cheney's free, Official Online Community and receive exclusive access to free previews of new books, behind-the-scenes shenanigans and more: www.michaelcheneyauthor.com

  Contents

  1. Chapter 1

  2. Chapter 2

  3. Chapter 3

  4. Chapter 4

  5. Chapter 5

  6. Chapter 6

  7. Chapter 7

  8. Chapter 8

  9. Chapter 9

  10. Chapter 10

  11. Chapter 11

  12. Chapter 12

  13. Chapter 13

  14. Chapter 14

  15. Chapter 15

  16. Chapter 16

  17. Chapter 17

  18. Chapter 18

  19. Chapter 19

  20. Chapter 20

  21. Chapter 21

  22. Chapter 22

  23. Chapter 23

  24. Chapter 24

  25. Chapter 25

  26. Afterword from Tedd

  For those who believed and those who didn't - thank you.

  Chapter 1

  “Ithink it’s dead,” says a man with a low, baritone rumble. “Watch this.”

  Something metal strikes my head.

  Another man, in a high, tenor tone, replies. “Well, doing that ain’t gonna help, is it? The boss wants him alive. If he’s dead, it’s on you.”

  “The fuck it is! I barely touched him,” says Baritone.

  “You broke both his arms when he came at you with his buzz-saw,” says Tenor.

  “They ain’t broken. They’re just detached.”

  It’s dark.

  So, either I’m playing hide and seek with Tweedle Dumbass and Tweedle Dickweed, or I’m coming around from another fucking blackout. There’s a faint smell of exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke.

  “Hey, I think he’s rebooting or some shit. He just twitched!” says Tenor.

  My visual system is back online. I open my eyes.

  I wish I hadn’t.

  I’m in a large basement. A naked bulb hangs from the concrete ceiling.

  And so do I.

  I’m hanging upside down. Chained to a hook by my ankles.

  And sure enough, I’m armless. But I ping them and get a response, so they must be close-by.

  The two fuckwits are wearing all black and pointing pistols at me. One’s big and bald – Baritone. The other, Tenor, is skinny with greasy black hair.

  Baritone is leaning on a yellow pallet jack. Tenor, a little further back, stands beside several green metal boxes stacked on wooden pallets. Stairs in the corner of the room ascend from the shadows to the floor above. The vertical balusters on the stairs cast a shadow cage on the floor.

  I crane my neck a little to peer past several metal support columns and spy a roll-up door at the far end of the room.

  The larger of the two idiots walks up to me.

  “Hey, roboturd! Are you alive in there?” He taps my head with the butt of his gun.

  I stay still, and he draws closer to my face. He’s an inch away from me now.

  “Self-destruct sequence initiated!” I bellow. “10, 9, 8, 7, 6 —”

  Baritone jumps back and trips over the pallet jack. He stumbles into Tenor knocking him to the floor.

  “5, 4, 3 —”

  “Run!” shouts Baritone, sprinting to the stairs.

  Tenor scrambles back to his feet. “Wait for me! I don’t wanna die!”

  “2, 1 …”

  I swing upwards in an arc and headbutt the hook in the concrete ceiling with massive force.

  “Boom,” I say. The concrete cracks and the hook breaks free in a shower of dust.

  I crash to the floor, the chains and hook clanking off my torso. A dust cloud shrouds the lightbulb, casting an orange glow into the room.

  Baritone and Tenor stare at me from half-way up the steps.

  “Gentlemen,” I say, “I’m going to need my arms back.”

  “You goddamn piece of shit!” says Baritone. He jumps down the steps and runs toward me, aiming his pistol at my head. “I should’ve killed you outside when I had the chance.”

  “I don’t think Percival would’ve liked that,” I say.

  He cracks his neck and lowers his gun.

  Tenor walks down the steps. “So, can you actually self-destruct?” he asks.

  “Only emotionally,” I say. “My arms, please.”

  “Here’s the thing,” says Baritone. “I’m only supposed to give you your arms back if you agree to work for us.”

  A slow tapping noise comes from the nearest metal box. The men look at each other with furrowed brows.

  Baritone takes a step backwards, keeping his eyes fixed on me. He reaches an arm back to the lid, grabs the handle and opens the box.

  Two middle fingers of metal hands raise and lower repeatedly. So that’s where my arms are.

  “Why, you piece of shit!” shouts Baritone.

  “Don’t take it personally, guys. I only left my prior position fairly recently. So, I’m not really in the market for employment right now.”

  “Listen up, smart ass. You can leave this room with your arms and a job. Or you can leave it with a fucking bullet in your metal head,” says Baritone.

  A gold tooth glints out from his smug grin.

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, fellas. Your kind offer has really grabbed my attention.”

  A metal clacking sound echoes on the concrete. Baritone and Tenor spin around. My detached arms are being propelled along the floor by their fingers.

  “Shoot the fucking things!” shouts Tenor.

  “No!” shouts Baritone. “You’ll blow the boxes!”

  Tenor fires off a round. It misses my arms and ricochets off the concrete. It pings one of the metal boxes at the back of the room.

  “Stop shooting!” shouts Baritone.

  My arms are fast. They crawl up their legs in a flash of silver.

  The men frantically try to bash the arms off with the butts of their guns.

  But their strength seems to dwindle when the hands squeeze their testicles with a grip strength of two thousand Newtons – just 27% of my maximum, by the way.

  They drop their guns to the floor, followed by their knees.

  The writhing and groaning sound like whale song.

  They’re more receptive to an open dialogue now.

  “I’m going to walk away now,” I say. “Unless you guys think I should stay?”

  “Urrghh,” says Baritone.

  “Urrghh,” says Tenor.

  “That’s what I thought.” I kick both their guns under a pallet.

  My ball-crunching arms release their grip and crawl over to the metal stairs. Each one grabs a tight hold of a baluster and extends itself horizontally. I walk over and slam my right shoulder into the ball joint connector of my right arm.

  It pops back in. I wiggle my fingers to check it’s online. I repeat the maneuver on the left.

  “Well, chaps. It’s been emotional.”

  I give a salute and begin to climb the stairs.

  I’m just two steps up when an ear-piercing, high-pitched tone screeches at what feels like a million decibels. It’s as if my circuits are being fried.

  Pain. Lots of pain.

  I slam my hands over my audio sensors, but it makes very little difference.

  Baritone and Tenor are grimacing and covering their ears too.

  The sound’s coming from my neck. What the hell?

  I can feel a thin metal collar attached around my neck.

  The screeching sound finally stops and a voice crackles out of the collar.

  “Take one more step and she dies.”

  Percival. I freeze.

  “Who dies?” I say. I’ve got a horrible feeling I already know the answer.

  “Maybe this will jog your ailing memory, droid.”

  The feed goes quiet followed by muffled sounds. Then I hear her.

  “Tedd! It’s me, Tedd! Watch out, they’re going to—”

  The feed goes dead.

  Sarah. The bastard’s got Sarah.

  Chapter 2

  “Guess you’ll be staying here then, you piece of shit,” says Baritone.

  Tenor’s at the back of the room on his hands and knees next to a pallet.

  “I can’t reach the guns. He’s kicked ’em right under,” he says.

  “Hold up, I’ll get something you can use,” says Baritone, opening one of the metal boxes.

  I climb down the stairs and walk over to him. “Tell me where she is, otherwise—”

  Baritone turns around, lifts his index finger and shushes me.

  He reaches into the box and pulls out a robot arm with a ball joint at the shoulder. A sharp steel sword protrudes from its open wrist.

  “Use one of these,” he says to Tenor. He tosses it through the air, and it spins with a glint.

  Tenor stares wide-eyed at the approaching spinning arm-sword. He darts out of the way just in time as it crashes to the flo

or with a clatter.

  “Fucking hell, man! Are you trying to kill me?”

  Baritone chuckles.

  I move closer to him and flick open my right wrist. My blade whirs into action.

  “Tell me where she is,” I say.

  Baritone speaks with his back to me. “That’s not how this works. If you kill me, she dies.”

  “Who said anything about killing?”

  I lunge, trying to cut him with my blade. He dodges with a quick sidestep.

  “I got ’em!” says Tenor, clambering up from his knees with a pistol in each hand. He throws one to Baritone, who catches it, aiming its barrel at me. Tenor does the same.

  “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be,” says Baritone.

  “You’re not the boss of me,” I say.

  I spin my blade faster.

  “Whatever, robofuck. You’re forgetting how easily I ripped your arms out of their sockets the last time you pulled this shit.”

  Damn my fucking anomaly.

  “But the droid had you pinned to the floor, remember?” says Tenor. “I kicked him in the stomach and then you pulled his arms off.”

  Baritone gives Tenor a stern look and turns back to me.

  “If you want to see her alive again, you need to fall in line. Can your dumb chips process that? Or would you like me to draw a diagram?”

  “Did you bring your coloring-in crayons with you?”

  He grimaces, tightening his grip on the gun.

  Tenor puts a hand on his muscly shoulder. “Alive, remember.”

  I retract my blade and close my wrist. Baritone smiles at my capitulation.

  “Come on, droid,” says Tenor. “I’ll show you the ropes.”

  He walks to the far corner of the room, fading into the shadows. Baritone takes out another sword-arm by its ball joint and twirls it around in his hand, staring at me.

  I follow Tenor to the dark corner of the basement.

  “We’ve gotta go through every box down here,” he says, “and reclassify every component.”

  “So, what? I’m an inventory clerk now?”

  “Kinda.” He grabs the lid of a large box by its top handle and pulls it open with a creak. Inside are several shiny steel canisters with adjustable straps. Each cylinder is connected to a robot arm with a thick tube.

  “Flamethrowers?”

  “Components. We call everything down here a ‘component,’ okay?”

  “Seems legit.”

  Tenor picks up a silver cylinder connected to one of the fla– components. He turns it upside down. It makes a faint sloshing noise. He points to something engraved on its base.

  “You see this?”

  His nail-bitten finger taps a number inscribed on the bottom of the cylinder. ‘MIL-027286.’

  “Wait a fucking second,” I say. “These are MilBot weapons. How did you get hold of these?”

  The high-pitched whine screams out from my collar again. Goddamn motherfucker! I wince and ram my hands up to cover my sensors. Percival’s voice crackles through.

  “Careful, droid. You’re here to work, not ask questions.”

  Tenor’s face has gone pale. His finger trembles, tapping out a rhythm of fear on the steel cylinder.

  “You have to reclassify every component,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “With your blade. Just make a cut deep enough to get rid of the number. But not so deep that, well – you know.”

  “Not so deep that I puncture the canisters of compressed, highly flammable fluid leading to a high-pressure release of combustible airborne explosive gas particles and the resulting disassembly of all nearby organic and inorganic structures?”

  “Yes, go easy. Otherwise – big bang.”

  “And what about all the other boxes?” I ask.

  “I’m starting you with the easiest component. The next box will be a bit … trickier.”

  “Well, excellent. I’ll try not to blow us all up.”

  “Oh, we won’t be here. Someone will monitor your progress. We’ll collect you once you’re done.”

  “Does this job come with medical?”

  He smiles.

  “Nah. But you get to keep breathing if you follow orders.”

  He walks over to Baritone. The two of them climb the stairs and leave.

  I’m all alone.

  I fire up my blade. These components aren’t gonna reclassify themselves.

  The canisters actually aren’t too bad.

  But Tenor wasn’t wrong about the next box along, though.

  Chapter 3

  Grinding away at flamethrower cylinders was bad enough. But I open the next box over and realize things have just stepped up a notch.

  Grenades.

  Lots and lots of grenades.

  Metal grinding a grenade is like peeling grapes. Except, if you make a mistake, you blow yourself into pieces in a horrible and gory death.

  So yeah, not really like peeling grapes, actually.

  Before I can even start cutting into their metal, I have to pluck each matte-black grenade off a bandolier belt. There are also several arm-mounted launchers inside the box. The thick six-chamber barrels sit on top of the forearm section of all the robot arms. It’s the same ball joint that fits into my shoulder.

  And yes, I’ve already been digitally salivating at the proposition of bolting on all these weapons and giving Percival a piece of my mind.

  But I’m almost certain he’s not in this building. I couldn’t fully track or ping where his feed is coming from, but I know he’s smart. I just can’t see him being around all these munitions. So, I need to get this work done and go along with what they want. For now.

  I make quick work of the launchers. The grenades are more fiddly, but I get into a groove.

  I quickly work out the easiest way to get this job done is to cup a grenade in my left hand and grind away at its serial number with the blade on my right.

  Everything goes swimmingly. At first.

  I grind away at the last grenade. But my mind wanders and I look over to the roll-up door at the other end of the basement.

  I try to calculate the odds of busting out of here and finding Sarah before they kill her. Slim to none is the result.

  There’s a subtle change in the sound of my blade.

  My processing drew some power, making it spin at lower revs.

  Rather than cutting into the grenade, my blade judders on it instead, turning it in my hand. A tooth of the blade nicks the grenade pin, ripping it clean out and pinging it half-way across the room. It lands in the darkness with a metallic tinkle.

  Fuck.

  One second … and counting.

  I instinctively spin around trying to locate where the pin went. I bash my hand against one of the metal support columns and lose hold of the grenade. It falls to the floor.

  Two seconds.

  Pin too far. Must throw grenade. I grab it and toss it toward the top of the stairs, aiming at a gap between the two upper balusters.

  Three seconds.

  It sails through the gap landing on the top step. Phew.

  But now it’s rolling down the stairs.

  Three and a half seconds.

  Bounce.

  Four seconds.

  Bounce.

  BOOM!

  I’m not sure this constitutes what anyone would call a successful first day.

  The grenade explodes, sending deadly shards of shrapnel in all directions. The lightbulb pops, plunging the basement into darkness. Metallic clinks and pings fill the air as pieces of grenade, concrete stairs, and iron balusters fire against the metal boxes.

  And my head.

  I pray to DOS this doesn’t lead to a chain reaction from whatever the hell else is in this room.

  The pressure wave rocks me to the floor. There’s a high-pitched ringing in my sensors. I can’t tell whether it’s from the shockwave or Percival. And frankly, I have more pressing concerns.

  I run diagnostics. Everything’s still online. Legs still present.

  Thank fuck for that.

  I open my eyes, but it’s kinda pointless. All I can see is a hazy cloud half-way down the stairs and a misty light coming from the top. A voice echoes down from above.

  “Everything okay down there?”

  It’s Baritone, the chickenshit.

  “Well, I’m still alive, if that’s what you mean. This job sucks. When do I get a break?”

  “Finish all the boxes, then the boss wants to speak with you.”

  “Grinding grenades is a little tricky in the dark, shithead.”

 

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