Static Crush {M/M} ✔

Chapter #16

They get back into the car, where Rayner leans forward and slaps a button on the dash. Hale wedges Ophelia carefully between his feet. The car starts with a trilling harmony of beeps and self-drives out of the lot and back onto the highway. Due to a combination of urban sprawl, extreme traffic congestion through the most expedient routes, and a long detour on account of construction, the GPS states their ETA is nearly 36 hours from now.

Rayner pulls up his HoloPhone to connect it, saying, "What kind of music do you want to listen to?"

Hale shrugs. "What do you like?"

"You'll be sorry you asked," Rayner says, selecting something on his phone. "This was my fave band growing up. They're called Gator Rats."

A cacophonous rage of shrieking vocals, synth overtures, smashed drum kits, and laments of electric guitars that deserved better fills the car. The unholy union of electronic and screamo blares through the speakers at decibel levels proven to damage human hearing. Hale jumps, it's so loud.

"I advise turning down the volume if you'd like to avoid tinnitus."

Rayner laughs. "That's half the point, isn't it? What do you think of it?"

As apologetically as he can, Hale tells him, "This is not music. This is noise."

Rayner bursts out laughing. "Fair enough. It's not for everyone. You can just tell me if you like something, all right? I'll flip between different channels. Here, let's try this."

He taps another playlist on his HoloPhone and the feral screams of the Gator Rats gutter out, replaced by a catchy, garage rock bass line. A man's high, creaking voice croons, I'm gonna fight 'em all. It's old—from the turn of the century—but far less offensive to Hale's ears.

"Better?" Rayner asks.

"Better," Hale confirms.

While it plays, Hale diverts some of his attention to the alteration of his appearance. It's one of very few areas of Hale's programming in which he has editing privileges. He tweaks the settings for hair colour and length, adjusts the measurements and parameters for his facial features. It gives him a jolt of excitement as the nanobots come alive under his skin to carry out his commands. The changes to his code are immediate, but the changes to his face will take the better part of an hour while the soft-structures grow and redistribute. Impatiently, he pulls down the car's sun visor to appraise his reflection in the mirror. It doesn't look that different, except for a few silver hairs and the wounded forehead.

He swats the visor back into place and swivels his chair a little to face Rayner, who swipes busily through his HoloPhone, queuing up songs for the journey. The soft, electric blue light of the car interior catches on the edges of his profile, on the wrinkle of concentration between his brows and jut of his lower lip. Everything else about him seems perfectly at ease.

Hale judges it a good time to ask the question he'd withheld at the rest stop.

"Rayner?"

"Yeah?"

"You're very calm for a man who just committed several crimes and joined a rogue android in a life on the run."

Rayner does look up, then. He wiggles his eyebrows. "Maybe I'm a thrill-seeker, and you just don't know me that well yet."

"That is my point. I know very little about you, but I have some inclination that you aren't all that you've told me. You seem to know a lot more about androids than you implied at our first meeting, where you supposedly didn't recognize me for one."