Unusual Chance Encounter
Joey is a pervert.
There's really no other way to describe him. Joey is a pervert, but not in a fun, quirky way like those old men in Japanese cartoons. No, there isn't anything amusing about Joey. He doesn't train protagonists to shoot lasers from their hands or anything. No, none of that. He's a guy who wears sunglasses to ogle women on the streets. He's a guy who visits gyms to take pictures of yoga classes. Only the fear of reprisal stays his hands from any truly heinous deviancy.
His perverted tendencies, in fact, are the reason for his current residency in a changing booth.
Short story long? Dickens.
Long story short? Pretty much what anyone would expect. As it turns out, after openly leering at enough women in public, at least one of them would file a complain with security. When security equips guards with cattle prods and assault rifles, a wandering pervert is a good enough excuse to declare open season and unleash the full might of the Second Amendment. Lucky for Joey, a lifetime devoted to carnal desires has rewarded him a set of swift feet and clever eyes, and it wasn't long before he found a good hiding spot, evading the swarming of bullets and electrified pain, at least for the moment.
Ordinarily, the story would end here, with the guards victorious and Joey's face plastered across the local papers as a modern scarlet letter. However, in this one specific scenario, the story continues. Indeed, today is actually a very good day for this voyeur.
See, the changing booth was, in fact, already occupied.
Because Joey was previously fleeing the wrath of American law enforcement, his attentions were understandably devoted elsewhere. Now that danger had momentarily subsided, Joey was busy contemplating his next course of action when he accidentally bumped into his fellow occupant. Startled, he quickly began stuttering an apology, trying in vain to stop this stranger from alerting the guards.
Lucky for him, the other inhabitant of the changing booth did not respond. In fact, she wasn't really moving at all. There was a stillness in her posture, an unfocused, blank look painted over her eyes. Joey's sputtering apology trailed into silence as he realized his companion wasn't doing much of anything.
At first, Joey thought it was some sort of mannequin. After all, he's in a department store. Given how still this woman is, that could be a reasonable guess.
As he stood before her, trying to make sense of the situation, he noticed something wrong with the air. It smelled acrid, almost burnt. Whatever it was, the smell made Joey uncomfortable, and, given the sparse contents of his immediate surroundings, it could only be coming from the woman.
A nobler man would have hesitated. Joey is rather lacking in nobility, and his hands suffer little indecision. With a single swift motion, the woman is disrobed, and the problem is made evident. From an oval-shaped indention set in her stomach, small wisps of ashen air leaked into the air, tainting it with the unmistakable stench of burning.
"That's weird", Joey muttered to himself. "Did some kid shove a cigarette in this mannequin?"
He runs his hands over the inert form, trying to identify the source of the smoke. As he pores over the smouldering abdomen, his hands apply a little more force than he intended. At first, Joey is simply confused as to why a clothing store would spend the time and effort to give a posable model realistic flesh. Then, there is a click, and he notices that the downward pressure had dislodged the abdomen panel. Moving it aside, he realizes that he's not looking at a simple mannequin.
Mannequins are typically simple plaster molds supported by wire skeletons.
This thing is packed with mechanisms and wires.
The sight did little to perturb Joey. If anything, he was intrigued. As a student of mechanical engineering and computer science, he was aware that machines of this nature were becoming commonplace, but he wasn't aware that they were cheap enough to be deployed as a mainstream workforce. This one must've been a store employee, albeit one suffering from some sort of hardware failure.
Once again, Joey is a pervert. It's not a kind description, but it does drive many of his actions. Regardless of his justifications, what he does next is not an act of kindness.
Lifting the gynoid to a standing position, he examines the open stomach cavity and quickly identifies the problem. The cooling fan had stalled, snagging on some unknown obstruction, and several fuses had burned out. In addition, whatever entity responsible for upkeep was clearly terrible at its job; little else could explain the fraying wires, loose insulation, and stripped screws keeping the frame together.
Still, a deactivated fembot is the opportunity of a lifetime. Luckily, in her discarded clothing, Joey locates a small assortment of hardware and tools. Evidently, her slipshod maintenance was her own doing. Carefully, Joey begins his work, starting with the blocked fan. With hands trained in the rigors of amateur PC design, the immediate problem is resolved, and he even manages to get several of the wires patched up, though it did take a bit more electrical tape than he would've liked. As for the stripped screws, well, there wasn't much to be done. Even with the time, tools, and parts, replacing stripped screws is never an easy task. For now, he had to content himself with screwing in a few loose connections by hand.
As Joey busied himself with an usually unruly screw, the fan suddenly whirred back to life. He barely had enough time to save his fingers as surrounding machinery stuttered to life. Too late, Joey realized that the fembot was actually still running when he found her; otherwise, the fan wouldn't have been making so much smoke.
However, now was not the time to reflect on poor decisions. Awakened by a chorus of beeps and whirs, the fembot became animate, subtle movements transforming a mannequin into a convincing facsimile of a living woman. Joey, realizing that he was about to deal with something with an unknown degree of sapience, immediately realized that any situation involving a strange man and a naked female won't end well. Before the situation could deteriorate any further, he made a made dash for her clothes to try and salvage whatever dignity a pitiful creature like himself could muster.
He could not have chosen a worse time.
Just as he was haphazardly reverse-engineering the complex clothing ritual of the human female, the fembot awoke. Upon regaining consciousness, it noticed two things.
Firstly, she is naked.
Secondly, there is a man groping her.
Naturally, there is only one logical response. Over ten thousand years of human evolution, for such encounters, one weapon was developed to reign supreme over all others. Engineered across every era of written and unwritten history, it has been honed to gleaming perfection, the first and greatest tool of combat.
That weapon, of course, is the fist, and all ten thousand years of its storied history are currently lodged in Joey's face.
Needless to say, it hurt. To this day, Joey isn't quite sure how he survived. Some would attribute it to a thick skull. Others, the power of horniness. Perhaps it's simply one of those things ordained by fate as part of a greater narrative.
Of course, at the moment, Joey wasn't concerned with any fortune telling nonsense, and, frankly, neither was the fembot.
"What in the actual fuck!" Understandably, her tone of voice was rather angry.
"I was just trying to help!"
"Really? Oh, I'm sorry, mister 'I was just trying to help'. In my part of the world, we usually don't consider getting our tits groped by some helpful! I just want to know, ass-muncher, is this how you treat all woman? Just how many other women have you 'helped', dipshit?"
"I don't know, how many loaves of bread have you eaten?"
If Joey intended on making a clever retort, his efforts were both wasted and heavily inappropriate for the situation. The fembot only got angrier, and Joey could clearly see eleven different forms of murder in her eyes. Grabbing his throat, she slammed him into the changing booth wall, leaving it rattling from the impact.
"Oh, so you aren't just content with molesting. You also have to be a wise guy! Tell me, shithead, what form of brain damage made you think that was in any way okay?"
While "oxygen deprivation" is technically a correct answer in this scenario, Joey's mental faculties were suffering performance issues due to the aforementioned choking. He was not in a position to make such a retort. Instead, he tried a more obvious answer.
"Well, your underwear looks sexy."
Once again, he is technically not wrong. Her lingerie really was more form than function, in a manner of speaking. In other manners of speaking, however, it did nothing to quell the roaring inferno before him.
"Oh, so I can't dress how I like without idiots like you leering at me all the time?" Such was her mounting fury that fire practically flew from her lips. "It's not even supposed to be visible! This is supposed to be private! Do they not teach that to you people in idiot school?"
At this point, Joey's windpipe was in serious danger of structural collapse. If it were tissue paper, it would be soaking, spinning in a flushing toilet. However, in a sudden stroke of luck, her grip loosened, and Joey was freed from her iron grip. Oxygen flowed once again down an unrestricted trachea, granting Joey once more use of his brain.
Honestly, at this point, he should've fled. The secret technique of graceful retreat is difficult to execute, but even the most unpolished of strategists would've urged Joey to count his lucky stars and take his chances outside the murder chamber. In defiance of common sense, those same stars clearly had different plans because Joey decided to hesitate.
The fembot was malfunctioning.
The acrid smell of smoke, previously quelled, once again filled the air. Evidently, her violent outburst had exceeded the cooling capacity of her systems, causing several important processors to overheat. Unable to cope, she had collapsed to the ground, visibly shaking as she tried to regain her previous posture.
At this point, there was a lot Joey could've done. Many in his position would do some very interesting things with a malfunctioning fembot. Because the gynoid was well aware of these things, there was visible fear in her eyes as Joey approached. This was it. Perhaps, this would be her last day as an independent person. There's no way he'd forgive her violent outburst. If he was already sleazy enough to have his fun with an unconscious woman, what would he do with one under his total control?
Would this be the last time she could form a coherent thought?
Would this be the last time she wanted to be alive?
Joey opened up her panel. As he suspected, his slapdash repair job was not adequate. Some of the electrical tape had literally melted during her meltdown, and the fan had come loose again. Also, there was a whole host of problems he had overlooked before. Problems really become obvious when they start causing problems. Oh well. At least he saw some simple stuff he could jury-rig for the moment.
As he worked on her internals, the gynoid watched in confusion. Wasn't he supposed to borderline rape her? Take advantage of her helplessness and destroy whatever volition she still had? Why is he helping her?
For a moment, the two locked eyes. The fembot didn't know what to say. Joey thought for a moment, and, in a rare victory for rational thought, said something situationally appropriate.
"I'm sorry", he apologized.
The mechanical woman was at a loss for words, not from the written redundancy, but the apology. The best English approximation of her response can be described as "wait what why".
Joey sighed. "I'm sorry for what I was planning on doing. I was being an ass. I got carried away, and I forgot that you're a person. I can't take back what I did, but I can at least try to fix you again."
A bit melodramatic, but at least he was honest. She asked him, "You were trying to fix me?"
"Yeah."
"That...that kind of makes my angry outburst earlier an asshole move, doesn't it?"
"No, I still feel bad for what I wanted to do."
The mechanical woman fidgeted. "It's been a long day. I have to work here, and people kept yelling at me. All those moms with their kids, all those imbeciles with their coupons, and my manager with his stupid 'lol just work harder forehead' lectures. I just get so pissed. There was this one lady who kept yelling at me, and I kept yelling back. She wouldn't listen, and I just kept getting angrier. Don't really remember what happened next, just that I tried finding somewhere private to cool off. Then, I woke up here, and, well, you know."
"Wow."
"Yeah, wow."
There was an awkward pause.
"I'm Joana, by the way."
"Oh, um, hi, Joana."
There was another awkward pause. This time, Joana at least decided to get dressed. Awkward moments are much more awkward when naked. After she finished, she gave her panel another check. An interesting thought crossed her mind, and she turned to Joey with a bit of a sly grin.
"Hey, you're good at fixing things, right?"
Joey knew where this was going. "Well, kind of."
"Well, I usually can't get proper repairs these days."
"If you give me your make and model, I can--"
"As I was saying", she interrupted, "I usually can't get proper repairs. Not a lot of good mechanics willing to work on a woman like myself. If only there was some guy out there, probably guilty of some sort of wink wink nudge nudge kind of crime, that I could, I don't know, blackmail to give me a free check-up."
Joey blinked. "Wow. You are actually evil."
Joana smirked. "Look, you coming over to my place or not?"
"...okay", Joey finally replied. That was probably an empty threat, but he didn't want to take any chances. Besides, it sounded interesting, and this encounter really needs to wrap up.
The two exchanged contact information and agreed to meet sometime later. As they said their farewells, Joey made a mental note to check out a lot of books on computer repair. It is as it is, this minutia of existence.