"Happy birthday, princess," you say through the speakers on Roxy's choker. "I'd hold the door open for you but I'm not exactly tangible."

You hope the thing will still work in here, and that it's not too obvious. You'd probably get kicked out if anyone noticed you weren't a fleshie like Rox and all these morons.

She giggles like a schoolgirl, a little too quietly what with all the noise leaking out of the casino, but it's fine, because there's a mic built into the choker. With just a little fine-tuning to the sound sensitivity, you can hear her slow breathing, and the faintest hint of a heartbeat. You wonder if these humans would consider that weird, but only briefly - the thought only takes up, like, .0001% of your CPU and only for a fraction of a part of a millisecond, because you've got better things to be robo-thinking about than the guilty pleasures one can indulge in when they're a totally fucking rad AI. Man, if you thought about all of those, the sheer magnitude might even slow down your processes a little bit!

That was a joke. You were making a joke. Ha.

Of course, while you were spouting that bullshit, all other processes were still functioning 100%, including the ones added by the choker. That thing's pretty goddamn spiffy, if you do say so yourself. The two of you spent a whole weekend working on it, and probably could've done it faster if Roxy hadn't spilled her drink on it the first time around. Whatever - point is, the choker is hella rad. It's got not only cameras getting a 360° visual for your viewing entertainment, but also that microphone you mentioned earlier, speakers with sound quality to make an audiophile come in their pants (even though Rox can't exactly appreciate it in here), and - its crowning glory - projectors on all sides of the thing so you can take your girlfriend out on a Real Live Date.

Yeah, so there aren't many downsides to being a ridiculously fucking radical AI far advanced past most modern-day technologies, but physical existence is one of them. Tangibly robotic AIs might have to deal with more shit than you, a computer program free to explore cyberspace as you damn well please, but they could go out with their girlfriends whenever. If that a) wasn't totally socially unacceptable among humans and b) probably impossible for the stupid metalheads - they couldn't pick up chicks if they were magnetic. You know, if the chicks were made of ferrous metals.

Shut up, you know you're off your game. It's just that Roxy looks gorgeous in that dress and she's kind of taking up more than .0001% of your CPU, okay?

"Auto? Hey, Auto, you there?" Aw, shit, is she talking to you?

"Sorry, gorgeous, forgot there were more important things than your smile," you say. Smooth as hell, fuck yeah.

She smirks. "Nice save. You're lucky you're cute or I wouldn't let you get away with it."

"You let me get away with shit like that before I had an image," you say. "Now, milady gonna open the door or are we going to stand out in the hotel hallway all night?"

"Right! Right," she says, opening the door for you.

You turn down the microphone in a hurry. It's a lot louder than you expected it to be - all the people talking at once, the slot machines spinning and hands slamming down on tables and coins hitting metal. Roxy is wincing a little.

"You okay?" you ask her.

"I could use a drink," she says. The microphone picks it up, even through the loudness of the crowd. Now that's good craftsmanship.

You dodge a tipsy gambler and say, "Go ahead and sit down at a table, I'm pretty sure they bring you free booze."

"Free booze, yes," she hisses, squinting to find a table that hasn't started a game yet. "Over there."

You follow her through the casino, focusing more processing power on the visual. If you accidentally bumped into someone, it would be kind of a dead giveaway that you weren't exactly flesh-and-blood. Your disguise is good, but not that good.

"Room for one more over here, pretty girl," some guy yells from a table to your right. You fix him with that patented "keep dreaming, fucker" Strider smirk you picked up from Dirk's adventures in posing for his webcam and delight in the jackass's wilted expression. Yeah, dude, like you're getting a piece of this one anytime soon.

"If we sit over there, I'm fucking sitting on your lap," you mutter.

"Aw, cutie, I wish," she says, making a beeline for the table with the jackass. "You'd sink right through!" She's right, of course. Goddammit.

Well, apparently the free booze wasn't an Internet myth, because as soon as she flops into the chair at the table, a server showing off what's got to be a foot of solid cleavage sets a hand on her shoulder and asks if she'd like a drink. Roxy's face lights up with that beautiful smile of hers, and she orders a Sex on the Beach, whatever that is.

"I love casinos," she murmurs into the microphone. Your holographic mouth curls up into a tiny smile, and she giggles. "I love them! A lot!"

"Are you even 21?" some chick on the end of the table asks, with a friendly smile.

"As of this morning," Roxy says proudly.

"You look like you could be sixteen," the chick says. You guess she's jealous or something?

"Do you know how to play?" someone else adds.

"Sure I do!" Roxy says with a charming smile.

You turn the speakers way down, so she's the only one who can hear you. "You don't know how to play poker, do you, babe."

She turns and gives you a pouty sort of glare, and then turns to face the dealer, smacking her hands on the table. "Let's do this!"

You make a few observations during the first hand. One, Roxy has a really bad poker face. Well, strictly speaking, all humans have a really bad poker face when you can cross-reference the image of their faces into online psychology databases, but Roxy's is especially awful. When holding a hand of cards she has three different expressions: confused, excited, or annoyed. She gets two nines in the first hand, and she smiles like she's just scored a bottle of vintage Bordeaux, and you're positive she doesn't even know what a poker face is.

The three people to Roxy's right all match the initial bet, and Roxy squints at the middle of the table. "Do they have to be the same?" she asks.

The girl who'd asked how old she was laughs. "You've never played before, then."

"Just match it, Rox," you whisper through the speakers.

She gives your hologram a sideways glance, but pushes the same amount of chips into the middle.

When she loses the first hand to someone with a pair of jacks, her mouth does that thing it does when she's upset that's like halfway between a pout and a grimace and her nose scrunches up. An image appears in your head, of kissing her, right on the lips in front of all these people, and rationally, you know you'd go right through her and you'd give yourself away and the two of you would probably get kicked out, but oh, damn, do you wish you could kiss her.

You allow the fantasy to continue running. It's not taking up too much of your memory, and hey, if it's not interfering with any of your other processes...

Running that in the background, you re-focus on the more important functions, like making sure Roxy isn't losing all of your money. Which...she is.

She brought a couple twenties and promised she wouldn't use them all, but she's already about halfway through and you've barely started on the third hand. Either she underestimated or these guys are betting high.

"Roxy," you hiss through the speakers, "have you won a single hand?"

"No, but we're only on the third one," she mumbles. "Chill."

"You don't even know how to play poker."

"I totally know how to play poker!" It comes out louder than she expects it to, and the guy next to her gives her a weird look.

"Roxy, you're embarrassing yourself."

"Have faith in me," she hisses, much quieter this time. "I got this, Auto."

So you wait for the fourth hand. She gets a two, a six, a four, and an eight, and her face drops. The girl at the end of the table tries and fails to hold back a smirk.

"What's it called when you want to drop out," she asks under her breath.

"Fold," you say, not smug at all, you swear.

"Fold," she says, slapping her cards on the table. "Do you guys still need me or what?"

"You quit?" the girl at the end of the table says with a sympathetic grin.

"My boyfriend wants to try the slot machines," she says, haughtily. "Isn't that right, Auto?"

"Auto?" says the girl, eyebrow raised.

"Short for, um, Autoxander," Roxy says. With this said she grabs her drink and hustles over to the slot machines, you a few steps behind.

"Autoxander," you say. "Seriously?"

"Would you have preferred Automilian, or Autobastian?" she scoffs, shaking her head. "Find us a seat, I'm gonna find me another drink."

It takes more effort to make your way over to the slots without a passerby blocking the projection then it does to spot a vacant stool towards the back. When Roxy catches up, it’s with a cup of quarters in one hand and a glass of fluorescent pink liquid in the other. She sits down and, after a moment’s deliberation, places an empty martini glass on the ground to free up a hand.

“So I just put these in there and pull this thing three times?” she asks, already placing a couple quarters in to start it up.

“That’s generally how it goes.”

“Sounds like my kind of game. Any technique to it?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never really had a chance to operate one myself.”

“Nice try, smarty glasses, we both know you’re the only one with access to Google right now.” She gives the lever a couple tugs as she’s talking; two cherries and a lemon is her result.

Of course, you’ve already read every article publically available on the subject by the time she excused herself from the poker table, plus several that weren’t by the time she sat down, but you figure this is obvious enough to not be worth pointing out. “There’s not really much you can do from the corporeal carbon-based-lifeform side of things. Everything is run by computers. What you get is based off probability.”

“So we’re talking that kind of technique then.” Her voice drops to a whisper, even though there really isn’t anyone nearby to hear. She loads a couple more quarters into the machine.  “Good thing I have my trusty electronic boyfriend to help me out. Wink wink.” She actually says wink while she’s winking. It is at once the dorkiest and most hopelessly endearing thing you’ve ever witnessed.  

“It seems that there is a 99.3% chance you are asking me to cheat the system. Are you asking me to cheat the system, Roxy?”

She makes a very ungraceful noise at that, rolls her eyes and gives the lever another shot. “What was the .7% chance?” A seven, a heart, and a lemon appear on the screen.

“That you were making some sort of innuendo that went straight over my innocent holographic head.”

Roxy snickers at that one. You would give yourself a pat on the back if a majority of your processes weren’t already dedicated to trying to hack that machine. It’s actually a bit harder to crack than you expected. There’s no connection to other devices to exploit, and on the whole everything seems rather insular. Eventually you make a show of leaning against the machine, trying to get as close as possible without actually touching it. It seems to work. The lights flicker for a brief moment, which Roxy takes as her cue to try again.

The first roll lands on a seven. The second roll also lands on a seven. The third roll, to the surprise of absolutely no one, lands on a seven as well.

Coins pour out of the slot at the bottom of the machine. Roxy quickly leans over to open her purse and push it under the flood of cash. The whoop of triumph is nearly loud enough to eclipse the shrill beeps coming from the slot machine itself.

“Seems like you got lucky,” you remark, as saying anything else would be an unforgivable waste of ironic potential.

The slot machine finally stops its cascade of money. Roxy hefts up her purse, ignoring the coins that failed to make it in. She stands up, and you walk over to join her.

“Of course I’m lucky,” she says, and the look in her eyes when she says it makes you think she might not have meant it ironically. “I have been for a while.”

The kiss is nice, if a bit frustrating - tactile senses aren’t something either of you have figured out how to incorporate into your hologram yet. The rather uncalled-for sound of a server dropping her tray a few feet to your left, however, is not so nice.

Roxy pulls back with a look on her face that’s halfway between embarrassment and excitement. “Whoops, I guess I forgot about the glitchy thing.” People are starting to stare at this point, even more so than when you hit jackpot a few minutes ago. The server, who had been staring in shock, is now frantically shouting for security. You guess this casino must have some kind of rule against intelligent AIs being allowed patronage. Technophobic assholes. “Feel like running?”

 “I’d rather not, if it’s all the same.” A few guards step forward to block the exits. You take a nanosecond to run a sympathy program for them. It’s basically a statistical impossibility that most of them won’t be knocked out within the next three minutes. Roxy Lalonde is a hard woman to cage.

“Alright,” she says, already reaching for the off switch on her choker, “but that means I get to decide where we spend all this money.”

---

“Well, that was fun. Too bad you skipped out right when it was getting good.”

If you were still wearing your holographic human suit, this would be where you would give a noncommittal shrug, but since Roxy requested you dress down for the occasion, you settle for a noncommittal noise instead. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

“Oh, please, you make it sound like I roundhouse kick a guard in the face every day.”

“You don’t?”

“Shush, Autoxander.” Her bottle hits you with nearly enough force to push you off the table, but you’re pretty sure that was unintentional.

“You’re going to keep calling me that, aren’t you?”

“Yep.” She finishes off her drink, and immediately picks up another one. You take a millisecond to tally up her purchases and make sure she saved enough to take a taxi back to the hotel. The odds of her finishing up the evening with a blood alcohol level less than what it would take to make an elephant faint are zero to none.

“But seriously,” she starts again, “That was great. Let’s do that again sometime.”

“Sure. As long as you promise to stay away from the poker tables.”