When he's rebooted, it is not with a sudden snap of awareness, but a slow, chugging crawl to waking. His senses don't immediately return. He can't see or hear. His restart protocols don't immediately produce an error report either, processing new data at a slothful pace. He remembers, with a jolt of terror, his predicament before shutting down. Bolting upright, he nearly head-butts Rayner standing next to him.

Hale's vision returns along with his memory and panicked reaction. He takes in his surroundings with quick, furtive glances. Rayner, holding Hale's shoulders and speaking fast. Hale can't hear him. His auditory systems still haven't turned on, delayed by the slow error report he still hasn't received. He's on a metal table in a workshop. Naked. The room is filled with tools, tech parts, and—dizziness washes over him at the sight—a dismembered android leg sticking out of a bin, still dripping blue fluid from the exposed knee joint. A garbage bin contains the shredded remains of Hale's t-shirt and pants, most likely cut off of him with scissors. His scans manage to grasp for and identify certain items cluttering the tables and shelves. All of them are hardware for the creation of androids.

Hale sees it through a film of horror, confusion, and dawning realization.

His hearing comes on, finally, and with it the hiss of Rayner's voice.

"Hale? Fuck, please tell me you can hear me. We really need to get out of here—"

"I can hear you now," Hale says. "Where— How did we get here?"

"Leave now. Explain later," Rayner says. "Can you walk?"

Before Hale can test the movement of his limbs, his error report finally completes.

>>Error. Cannot detect the following components.

"I'm missing stuff," he relays to Rayner. Then he wrinkles his nose. He hadn't meant to say 'stuff,' he'd meant to say 'components.'

"The guys who took you are scrappers, Hale. They take androids apart and sell the implants."

Hale registers that with a spike of nerves. "How did you find me?"

"Planted a tracker on one of them when I went back into the restaurant for my leftovers," Rayner explains quickly. Hale remembers his incredulity when Rayner had got out of the car and wandered straight past them into the restaurant. Even patting one of them on the shoulder. That must have been when he planted the tracker. Somehow, he'd known what they were after.

"Bellends," Hale growls.

Rayner gives him an odd look. They have little time to wonder at Hale's unusual choice of insult or the level of ire in his inflection though. Hale gets up, only to find one of the stolen components is his balance calibrator. He stumbles and collapses against Rayner, who struggles under his considerable weight. Because many of his components are made of metal and fairly heavy, he weighs a couple dozen kilos heavier than the average human of his height and body composition. Rayner wedges himself under Hale's armpit, and together they stagger across the room with all the grace of a newborn giraffe.

"Is anything in here going to help you walk?" Rayner asks.

Hale scans the room. He identifies a few parts with serial numbers matching his own and points towards a shelving unit. On it are his balance calibrator, vocabulary selection modulator, volume control, and zettabyte random-access memory drive. He reaches for them, trying to avoid looking at some of the other parts kept alongside it. One of the bits—a cybernetic eye—seems to look back at him though. It makes his insides feel as much like noodles as his limbs do.

Rayner silently takes the indicated parts and asks for instructions on where to install them. Hale walks him through the process, opening a panel on his chest. As he does, his error report finalizes, and an alarming list of missing components scroll past Hale's vision. On it are the items he's already retrieved, but one extra snags his attention.

Cybernetic genital hardware.

His thought processes freeze briefly on this last. He looks down at himself. In his panic, he hadn't noticed, which seems absurd. His skin looks unbroken, but the dark silver of his belly hair trails from his navel down to nothing. Just a smooth expanse of skin that tucks between his legs with a sexless, lack of definition where a penis and testicles once were. The scrappers removed his genitals, and the nanobots healed the skin over his chassis, leaving him looking doll-like down there.

The feelings Hale experienced upon first seeing the strangeness of his reflection repeat upon him, only before it felt like a whisper of unease, and this is full-blown turmoil.

"They took my trouser snake!" he exclaims, much louder than he intended to, and not with the precise words he intended either.

"Shh!" Rayner hisses, but Hale can't seem to modulate his reactions, and the frustration of using such an uncouth slang term for his penis riles him.

"I mean yogurt slinger! Rumpleforeskin! Russel the one-eyed muscle! Why can't I just say sex pistol?"

He realizes, too late, that without his vocabulary selection modulator, most of what comes out of his mouth seems sourced exclusively from a dictionary for slang. Rayner gives a stifled snort of laughter that he can't subdue, though his face is still pinched with panic too.

"Hale, you've gotta keep it down—"

But a voice from upstairs shouts, "What the fuck? Did you hear that?"

Rayner curses under his breath and gives the zettabyte RAM a shove until it clicks into place in the cavity of Hale's chest. It causes an immediate surge in speed to Hale's slowly unspooling thoughts. The sluggish fog that plagued him when he first woke finally clears.

Pocketing the other components, Rayner tries shuffling them towards the door to a storage closet. Footsteps thunder closer from upstairs. Then a pair of boots appears on the stairs leading down into the basement. Rayner opens the closet, ushering Hale inside, but Hale tries to step over several scrap metal struts. The loss of his balance calibrator makes him clumsy, and he trips instead, causing a loud clamour and crash of metal. He looks toward the stairs, where the faces of the two men from the restaurant appear on the stairwell.

Both gawp at the two of them.

One recovers quickly, though, his face splitting into a grim smile. "You went to a whole lot more trouble for that bot than it's worth."

Rayner doesn't answer, just snatches something out of his jacket and points it at them. It looks vaguely like a stun gun, but a quick scan shows it's just Rayner's electric shaver.

"Let us go, or I'll put fifty thousand volts through you pricks."

Hale manages, through fear and trepidation, to be impressed by the vitriol in Rayner's tone. So long as they don't recognize the razor for a ruse—

If only they could be so lucky. The second man points at it and says incredulously, "That's just a shaver!"

They advance down the steps. Under nearly every circumstance, Hale's programming forbids him from causing harm to human beings. The threat to Rayner, though, supersedes that programming. Impulsively, Hale lunges for the nearby workbench and picks up a wrench. It's heavy in his hand. He turns, wobbling a little, and raises the wrench to brandish it in as threatening a manner as he can manage on trembling foal legs.

Unfortunately, his balance calibrations fail once more. Overbalancing, he flings the wrench overhanded at their attackers. It hits the first man square in the face. An expulsion of blood bursts from his broken nose. For a brief moment, he stays on his feet then collapses with a meaty thud, unconscious. His partner stops in his tracks, staring from his felled friend, to Hale, and back again.

Sweat beads on his forehead as he regards Hale again. The fear there gives Hale a thrill he can't quite identify. "You killed him!"

"KO'ed with a busted nose and maxilla," Hale corrects, annoyed again because he hadn't meant to say it like that. "And fewer brain cells."

"I'm sure he won't notice," says Rayner.

"It's not allowed to hurt people," blusters the scrapper.

Hale just hefts another random part that looks heavy and brandishes it, this time without accidentally throwing it. "Protecting my symbiont takes priority."

Rayner says, "Get out of the way, man."

Eyes round with fear, the man backs up against the wall. Hale judges that he's sorely regretting not bringing a weapon down when they came to investigate the source of all the noise. Rayner helps sidle them past the scrapper and his prone friend.

Before they make their way up, Hale stops to turn and demand with renewed anger. "Where's my long dong silver?!"

The man looks a mix of terrified and perplexed. "Sold it," he squeaks.

Hale releases a snarl he didn't realize he had in him, but Rayner's arm around his chest keeps him from lunging at the scrapper or falling on his face. It's unclear which is more likely.

"We'll get your penis back, Hale, but we gotta go."

Hale is silently thankful at least one of them can say penis. With rage still boiling in his chest, he turns and stalks up the stairs with Rayner. The upper level is much like the lower, only slightly more organized and with a customer-facing store front in the form of a sliding metal grate through which illegal merchandise is purchased and bartered. On a metal coat hanger, Hale spots something familiar.

"My jacket. Your jacket. The jacket you lent me," Hale says. He still isn't sure what to make of 'gifts.'

"Your jacket," Rayner says for him.

Next to the coat rack is a small table with a ring of keys too. Rayner snatches up both the jacket and keys.

They proceed out the back door into a torrential downpour. Immediately soaked, Rayner leads them through a muddy car park surrounded by ramshackle, dodgy storefronts like the one they left behind. Their rental car is nowhere in sight. Instead, Rayner helps Hale into the pickup truck from which the scrappers had hijacked them in the first place.

It makes sense. The electric self-driving car, convenient as it was, is also vulnerable to cyber attacks and is traceable if the scrappers decide to come after them for revenge. No such risk with an old petrol truck, but—

"Do you know how to drive?" Hale asks

"Uh, in a manner of speaking," Rayner says. "Dad made me learn when I was 16. You know. Make a man of me and all that chest-beating boloney. Just, I haven't done it since then."

Rayner fumbles the keys into the ignition. It takes him a few tries to shift the truck into drive. Then, with a few halting steps on the accelerator, he manoeuvres them out of the car park and onto the narrow streets beyond.