“Wiiiick! Are we there yeeeet?” Hue whined from the back seat as the trio sped down the highway toward their destination.

“Not yet. But if you asking over and over wakes Kyras up, you’re walking the rest of the way.” Wick warned, stealing a side glance at the android passed out, charging in the passenger seat next to them. “Let him sleep, he needs whatever he can get right now.”

Without a working secondary external battery and two tiny replicants growing inside their womb component, chronic fatigue had been hitting their poor housemate like a truck. But with the little androids still taking on mass, Kyras wasn’t in a safe position yet to get their power systems fixed, and Chadwick was equally uncomfortable performing the sensitive maintenance procedure on his expectant friend.

“Mmn-…are we there yet?” Kyras mumbled, still fading in and out of lucidity as their eyes adjusted to the bright light of the afternoon and the scenery that passed them by as they drove.

“Speak of the devil, look who’s awake!” Mayhue grinned and learned forward in their seat to rest their chin on Kyras’ shoulder. “Feeling any more powered up?”

“Ah, a couple of notches I guess,” Kyras yawned and turned their head to plant a platonic smooch on her forehead. “These two definitely are.” They looked down at their expansive middle which had took up their entire lap and still forced his legs apart so that his low-set belly could rest on the seat. “Oof- way too energetic,” Kyras added as a strong, exaggerated movement shifted visibly across their belly through their shirt. With an exhausted sigh, the android’s hands moved to cradle their swollen abdominal piece and run his hands over where the twins struggled to find a comfortable spot to settle in their limited space, until the kicks and nudges settled.

“Lucky for you, it looks like we finally made it,” Chadwick chimed in as the trio pulled into the gravelly parking lot. “May, show him the thing we brought for them?”

“Yessir!”

Out of the corner of his eye Kyras saw Mayhue’s face vanish and replace itself with the grey blur of an object following some rustling from the back seat. May wiggled the shape for them to take and a short tail with a plug end followed after it when he brought it into the front seat for examination. The device was a thick bi-folded tablet the size of a pamphlet with a cord that looked like it would plug into their power socket. Carefully unfolding the two plates like a tanning reflector revealed three powerful solar panels.

“You can hang out on the beach and nap while we hit the water!” Mayhue eagerly explained. “I designed the form and the electronics and Wick wired it up at work. Dooo ya like it?”

Kyras nodded and felt their emotions swell at the gesture, a wise grin up his face to try and keep themselves from crying, but didn’t last long as they hugged the device to their chest.

“This is really great guys,” their voice wavered, immediately failing to keep their composure and bursting into tears. “I love you both so much!”

“We love you too Kyr,” Wick told their roommate sweetly as he leaned over the center console to wrap one arm around their shoulders and lay the other hand on their heavy belly. “All three of you. We’ve always got your back.”

~~~~~

Happy Mayternity! 😂

As far as Kyras knew, this wasn’t supposed to be happening. He had read about this sort of thing in the news, but everybody they’d told his suspicions to seemed just as surprised as they were. But it supposed that this was exactly what this appointment was supposed to be confirming. If anybody was able to determine that they really were pregnant, it would be his roommate.

The diagnostics lab was on their usual route home from work but the commute felt twice as long today. The broken stereo in his car filled the silence in his head with the same repeating news stories about androids going through spontaneous self-replicating cycles. Models around their own make finding dormant reparation hardware suddenly kick to life and start creating, well, life?? With nobody having a clear answer as to how long the manufacturing process was, or what the process might be like. It made Kyras feel like a ticking time bomb nobody knew how to diffuse. Stopping at a red light they looked down, surprised by their own hand unconsciously gripping their mid-section. When was the last time they’d felt so nervous?

Eventually they pulled into the shop, parked at the backdoor of the lab and slipped in through the side door, all while their anxious feelings continued to grow. Pregnancy felt like such a foreign and far away concept to them, something they’d never thought about or figured they might ever experience itself. But knocking on the office door now, behind their roommate Chadwick, Kyras could see three other technicians watching the doorway from over his shoulder.

“Hey Kyr c’mon in, take a seat. Sorry about these guys don’t mind them, they’ve never seen a Home Unit scan before and wanted to sit in.” Wick explained, closing the door behind them and drawing the blinds to the lab. If it were anyone else but him, Kyras might have objected to the extra company peering into a sensitive situation. “Let’s get started right away, I’ll drive you home afterwards, alright?”

Kyras nodded and slipped into the examination chair, reclining back into the bright overhead light. A monitor appeared in their peripheral across from the curious crowd and Kyras’ turned their to face it instead. Immediately with the plug of a cable into their systems, the display sprung to life with their hardware diagnostics.

“You’ve definitely got some battery power diverting into somewhere,” Chadwick noted. Looking from the screen to Kyras, he donned a stethoscope and stepped away from the monitor to get a closer look. “And you’re running a couple degrees hotter than usual, so something has you overclocking. I’m going to listen to your inner components then do an external ultrasound”

“Right, be my guest,” the android chuckled, trying to temper their nerves. Again their hand moved with a mind of its own to pull up its shirt, exposing their midsection to their trusted friend. Kyras couldn’t help but squirm at first when the cold instrument pressed into the slim sensitive space between their slightly expanded abdominal plates. All eyes were on Wick as his concentrated look searched for something out of the ordinary. Without much explanation, he kept the end of the stethoscope trained on one point while his free hand felt for the right type of probe.

More pressure met the Home Unit’s belly as another machine sprang to life. The ultrasound wand pressed deep and low into Kyras’ exposed, sensitive point of interest where Chadwick had been listening.

“Theeeere she is, or rather, there *it* is. The early assembly stages of a self replicating Home Unit, right in the womb component.” What looked like a jumbled mass on the screen, clearly meant something more to the rest of the room than to the host of the mass in question. But to the three bystanders, it caused them to erupt into a hushed murmur amongst themselves.

Kyras could feel their head begin to spin at the thought. They had been right…a baby…

“Fuck…” it whispered under its breath in shock and disbelief as it crashed down on them like a wave. “I uh…wow…shit, I-I guess…I guess we’re having a baby…?”