Free Vampires Don't Sparkle! by Michael West

shook his head. “It took two people to put her back in place, and she repeated the same incorrect moves again. We stopped her from falling off the stage a second time, of course. But I take that to mean she wasn’t damaged.”
    Idiot! Gentoshu shuddered. He wiped sweat from his brow. For all of the handler’s emoting, it was Gentoshu’s ass on the line if tonight ended in a disaster.
    Fortunately, all of Jinan’s delicate circuitry was protected by several layers of shock-absorbing foam and a final outer layer of hard but malleable plastic. She could take some punishment, and you wouldn’t want to arm wrestle with her if she applied full strength.
    She danced, she flipped. In theory, she could carry a full size human over her head if the choreographer called for it, but that had yet to be put to the test.
    He looked Jinan over one last time, checking for any signs of damage.
    At a glance, Jinan looked like a twenty-something petite woman with a dancer’s body. Head to toe she stood just at five feet. Her face looked attractive while not beautiful. Her average bust and under-emphasized hips downplayed her sexuality. She stood on long pale legs. The outer skin layer hid the knee joints, creating the illusion of smooth, shapely limbs.
    Standing in bare feet, she lacked toes, much like an action figure, for optimal balance. Preserving a basic foot shape enabled her to accommodate a wide range of off-the-shelf footwear — just about anything but toe sandals. Today, a pair of silver pumps sat at the ready next to the platform, matching her all-silver costume.
    The haunting peach-pearl texture of Jinan’s skin covering always made Gentoshu pause. She was not just a technological achievement, but an artistic one as well. Her hair, short and dark, was a wig created from human hair and sewn to the scalp. The scalp-cap and hair detached as one piece to allow internal maintenance. Today, the assistant had parted the hair down the middle, pulled her bangs back and tied a silver ribbon to either side of her head.
    Jinan observed the world through a pair of oval-shaped eyes with dark irises to obscure the pair of mini-video cameras. Upon activation, Jinan could move her head to scan a room with stereoscopic imagery in a way that mimicked the living.
    The face artists shaped a button nose for her, cute but functionally useless. Her small, pouty mouth stood frozen, open in a half-smile that served as her fallback expression. They painted her lips a permanent red, but tonight the assistants applied a fresh coat of lipstick to make them gleam.
    She could walk a hallway, strut on the stage, and most important to her growing group of fans, she knew all the latest dance moves guaranteed to thrill a crowd.
    Gentoshu hated admitting the role he played in their current dilemma. These upgrades should have been ready days ago, with plenty of time to find any further bugs. But the new code proved more complicated than he anticipated. Now it was exhibition night, and it came down to letting Jinan perform without the code, and she’d definitely fail, or adding the code without a field test, in which case she might fail.
    He told himself the adjustments were necessary, but minor. An easy lie to swallow, much easier than admitting he acted to save face with his supervisors.
    Gentoshu removed the portable disc drive from around his neck and pressed it into the data slot of the tower computer containing her master behavioral subroutines. The new lines of program dropped into a separate window while Gentoshu scrolled through the master program. He found the proper insertion point and erased the previous subroutine.
    The hourglass popped onto the screen.
    “Five minutes!” Toshio cried.
    “She can be a few minutes late if she has to be late,” Gentoshu snapped. While the hourglass spun, he copied the new subroutines in full and waited. “Your screaming will not help me go faster.”
    The program unlocked after what seemed like an eternity (though