Killing Time OST – 6a – iCraft Cool Tools

<< 5c – Shopping

I stretched my arm over my head and backward a bit. The joints cracked all the way up to my laced fingers. Relief trailed a second behind. Lorelei punched the night away in the training room while I fiddled with my frog to keep my mind going. I felt sore for her. I could swear this woman had too much energy to be entirely human but I knew better. Still, no amount of effort or security guards seemed to K.O. her. And people paid millions to have the physic she was born with.
So perfect.
So deadly perfect.
And it fell on me to make her even deadlier. Funny how I grew to enjoy this task. Since the beginning, I was grateful for her help but the job she gave me proved to be a nice change of pace. Not that working for Merrilyn Tech didn’t bear its load of challenges; the challenge just weren’t that healthy.
But then one could argue that working for a serial killer wasn’t healthy either.
Under the twist of my screwdriver, the frog jerked. Its recent death ensued from an overload of sensory input. I shouldn’t have used the first motherboard handy if I wanted it to process so much information. I knew better than to take shortcuts but I didn’t have the heart to disassemble my snake. I grew tired of that pet but didn’t wish it dead. Eventually, I’d get bored with reptiles altogether and I would level up to mammals. Getting the fur right was a bitch.
Maybe I should ask Lorelei for a real pet. I loved my private quarters – which were like my old place in the city exponent a hundred – but they felt empty. It bugged me that Lorelei was the only thing bringing liveliness to my universe, as if I was not depending on her enough already.
Sometimes I wished she was a guy.
My soldering pin and my naked wrist had a close encounter, effectively reminding me the current trail of thoughts was inappropriate. I had an anti-plasma-proof-glass gun to engineer. Fiddling with another project usually helped me find solutions for the things I should be working on. The grunting in the next room distracted me a bit too much. I turned on the music.
Lorelei didn’t pull me out of a life-threatening relationship so I could fall into another one. I spent enough time with psycho-exes before my fake death and despite the fun I had working for Lorelei or how hot she was, she wasn’t issue-free. In fact, I wasn’t convinced she could even have a real relationship; the woman was all anger and smolder, an explosive mix.
I really shouldn’t be thinking about her like that. Anti-plasma-proof-glass gun. What a mouthful! AP2G2 sounded cooler.
“A rubber device that can shoot, or at the very least apply, a gooey substance onto a vertical surface in a steady stream.” The frog croaked to keep the conversation going. “We obviously don’t want any kind of explosion near a barely stable chemical substance.” I crossed all gun-inspired contraptions off my mental list. “I think I’ll go with some kind of trigger activated piston.”
“Like the old silicon guns.”
I nearly jumped off my seat. I hated when Lorelei did that. Assassins’ sneaking powers should have an off switch encoded by default in the software. Once the surprise passed, I made the “no clue what you’re talking about” face. It happened every other day, when Lorelei referred to things from the days of yore only a historian cared to remember.
As expected, she sighed at my ignorance and swung her legging-hugged hips on the way to her computer. I found myself looking at the ceiling. I was getting too lonely for my own good. At least, when I was high on nanoroids, the passage of time had no hold on me.
No, Vexx, nanoroids equal evil.
After six months clean, Lorelei would kill me if I picked up the very thing she saved me from. One of them, anyway.
“The pertinent information is in the hologram, Vexx.”
I stumbled off my stool and joined my employer at her desk.
Employer, that’s a good word.
The hologram showed a picture of what I envisioned: a tube with a beak through which a substance was pushed by a trigger-sensitive piston.
“That’s what we used to pull joints around the bath before machines took over.” Lorelei explained. Her historical knowledge amazed me. She was a walking, sleep-deprived, plug in-free, human encyclopedia, an impressive feat considering most children in these neighborhoods had high school, college and university wired straight to their brains. Luckily, organic CPUs had their limits and you couldn’t just plug in more RAM or else we would be surrounded by rich bratty geniuses and I wouldn’t be any use.
“It’s the wrong material but yes. Would that do?” I asked. What it lacked in elegance, it made up for in simplicity.
“Yes.”
“I’ll have it done by tomorrow night.”
On a resounding “awesome”, Lorelei closed her computer and headed upstairs. A glance at the clock confirmed the lateness. After a quick stop in the kitchen, I heard her step reach the other stairs and, seconds later, water growled in the pipes. She’d be in bed in an hour. “But we have some more work to do, Frogcious. Frogster?”
The frog croaked in response. I programmed it to react to certain stimuli but had no patience to develop an artificial intelligence that would allow it to talk – buying one was cheating.
I grabbed a wax block from the deposit and began to carve the shape of the future weapon and-dash-or joint pulling tool thingy. Once my handy work satisfied my quality inspection, I tired my arm mixing the rubber. I wished Julia had legs; her robotic whip would have come in handy.
By the time I found myself wishing for artificial muscle enhancers, the rubber finally reached the right consistency. I poured it between the two walls of the mold and slipped small metal rods in the center of the goo. They would ensure the cylinder kept its shape and didn’t wobble about like rubber tended to do. It would be solid sometime around noon, ready to be heated up to retrieve the wax.
Until then, my empty bed awaited.

6b – iCraft Cool Tools >>