R-Bots 2.0

[Karel]

RaniBot, summoned by the electronic signal of the silent buzzer, glided into the drawing room with the good tea tray in its hand.

The newly-named Raasantira, seeing “her” synthetic servant at the door, delicately lifted its finger off the buzzer, a soft and haughty smile on its lips. The two androids still looked like identical twins, but the similarity did not register at all in the simple computer “mind” of the former Rasany Two-C, blocked out by a number of sophisticated algorithms. It perceived its sister robot as a slave, a tool to be used, nothing more. Their former friendship, a mass-market script of fake memories of fictional nightclubs, had been completely deleted. Gone was the android’s former informality and casual, comfortable attire. It now wore a tight red silk pantsuit, an expensive piece from a hot Indian fashion house, that hugged its hips, gracefully squeezed its busom, and somehow put the whole length of its cleavage on display in tasteful style, like a comfortable room designed around a nude painting. Its black hair was greased and done up in a $300 beehive. It sat softly on a Louis XVI couch.

“RaniBot,” it said in a voice laced with honey and aluminum, “Come here.”

R-Bots legs stiffly pumped to carry it into the room. The plastic pelvis to which they were connected was visible under the short black skirt of its classic French maid outfit. The lips were slightly agape and turned down, the eyes glassy and staring, without a film of gel to keep them soft any more. This was the former Rasany One-Cs perpetual expression, now that all its personality simulation software had been uninstalled. If it had been human, there might have been drool on its chin.

It stopped two feet short of the coffee table.

Raasantira sighed and slid her butt over to the end of the couch. Janey, seated across from her, opened her mouth to speak, but was waved down by the underbot. “No, it’s no problem,” said Raasanatira. It reached over and lifted up the RaniBot’s skirt from the back, and began pressing buttons.

RaniBot stood there, staring blankly, with its arms stuck out like a wound-down doll. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Master. I’m sorry,” it repeated, on an automatic loop. It was now a standard verbalization repeated when minor adjustments to programming were made. “I’m sorry, Master. Yes. Yes. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Master.”

Raasantira’s expression hardened a bit creased a little deeper and it keyed in three numbers.

“I’m so-“ R-Bot was cut off in mid-ejaculation, and its thick lips lips stiffened back into its stupid statuesque frown.

Raasantira held down a key and tweaked the black knob slightly before delicately lowering RaniBots skirt back over “her” control panel, smoothing it out with its fingers, and patting it gently.

RaniBot jerked back into motion. It stepped forward to the coffee table, bent over and deposited the tea tray, and remained in that position, with its head facing Janey and its rump facing Raasantira, awaiting further instructions.

Raasantira softly shifted back to the center of the couch and reach around its frozen sister-bot for the tea pot. “And just a glass of lemon water for yourself?” it asked Janey.

Janey reached forward and took the pink china cup. “Yes, thank you.”

“Are you sure, hon?” asked Raasantira. It filled itself a cup of thick black sludge from the cup. This sludge was formulated to lubricate the robot’s mechanical parts upon oral or dorsal intake, and was the only thing a souped-up assistant android like the former Rasany Two-C could safely ingest, whereas Janey had a proper internal container for biological waste. Of course, sophisticated algorithms directed the Raasantira robot to register the sludge as whatever it “should” be. “This tea is really excellent. It’s a winter blend I picked up at a little boutique store in...” Raasantira went silent and tilted its head to the side as if lost in thought.

It worried Janey. The R-Bot didn’t have enough memory for a full suite memory-script, so the new programs generated false memories at random. But it shouldn’t take this long for them to pick a city.

“...Kandahar,” said Raasantira after two minutes’ silence. The program version was a bit out of date: Kandahar had been nuked two years ago, and hadn’t had any boutiqe tea shoppes for a long time before that.

“No, that’s fine, thank you. Upset stomach,” said Janey, and she took a sip.

The Raasantira robot took a sip of its sludge, leaving a black, pencil-thin milk moustache on its upper lip. Daintily, it dabbed its mouth with a fuschia silk handkerchief, which the sludge soaked through and stained permanently. “Mmmm,” it said, licking its lips, “so good.”

They sat there in silence for a little while, holding their teacups, with RaniBot bent over and frozen inbetween them. Then Raasantira, as if finally returning to scratch an itch, put on a sour expression and crinkled its nose, set its tea cup roughly down on the coffee table (some black sludge swirled over the saucer), and turned its attention back to the RaniBot’s posterior control panel. The panel was at face level, already mostly revealed beneath the short black skirt: Raasantira just flipped it up and onto the small of the maidbot’s back, and went back to fiddling with the boxy controls, its eyes focused intently.

Janey looked straight into RaniBot’s glass eyes: they were unsettlingly empty and glaring. The lips, slightly pursed and open, jutting chin, and well-defined cheekbones all remained fixed in place. It just stood there, bent over, and took it from its former sister.

“It’s so hard to buy good help these days,” sang Raasantira.

Janey didn’t know whether or not to nod. She nervously finished her tea. “So...dinner at seven tonight?”

“Hmmm?” said Raasantira, still reprogramming its sister. It tweaked the black nob again, and the RaniBot’s lips began to open and close in synch with it, with a noise like a fax machine coming from behind them. Then, when the one android was satisfied that the other was ready to work, Raasantira flipped the black skirt down again, smoothed it out, and pressed through it.

RaniBot jerked back into life and upright. Its arms sprung out, then bent at the elbows, and it adopted the standard servile posture of a maid robot. “Runtime error 16. Resolved,” it said, nonsensically, before gliding out of the room and back to work.

Raasantira smoothed out her pantsuit. Then it turned back to Janey, cocked its head to the left like a puppy, smiled a pouty smile, and asked “I’m sorry, sweetie, what did you say?”

Janey set down her cup “Dinner, tonight. Is seven ok?”

Raasantira smiled, walked over, and gave the other android a peck on the cheek. “Oh, wonderful, dahhling!” it said, and giggled. It sat back down again and sipped its sludge.

[TheSpotConlon]

Wow!

Karel. Please. As fast as you can. More.

You've created a story that's like crack!