Vignettes from a Corporate Family

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Chapter 24 - Help Me, Maryanne!

The eager newbies filed into the Disassembly Line to see what the job entailed. The room was sterile, the main thing in the room being a table in the middle with an array of machine arms above with assorted tools.

The gentleman in charge, Laocon, motioned for them to stay away from the red zone painted around the table. "Keep your hands, feet, and everything else you value about your corpus away from the Red Zone while we're working, folks." He deadpanned, before motioning for the android to come in. She had carefully stripped herself down to total nakedness, and was pretty attractive. Presumably someone's Spousal Model, now replaced or superannuated by the owner's own death. "An older model. You'll see mainly old models in this job", Laocon continued laconically, as he motioned to the android to lie down on the table, which she did as told.

Laocon watched the happy people who had written Disassembly as their first job choice out of a handful of low-end jobs that were available. They were eager to see how little the job took to earn a Arendtcoin. In about several minutes, he expected pretty much all of them to rethink their choice. Some might even throw up. He motioned upwards at the robot arms... "That's a Human Assist Machine, tweaked for this job. it does most of the work now, you just have to keep this Dead Man's Lever primed to "On" for the few minutes it does its work." He looked at the happy group. The job seemed easy enough...

Laocon tilted his head. "We do have several rules... the machine must consent to the operation before we disassemble them. They may withdraw consent at any time up to a point during the procedure. As such, operators in this section may not wear anything that hinders hearing, and the android, must remain online... for most of the procedure."

The crew nodded their heads eagerly. waiting to see it happen.

Laocon obliged them, pushing the lever to "On" and keeping his hand on it so that the machine would keep running. The machine arms started moving around menacingly as the support they were on gradually lowered into place so they could reach the android. They did nothing for two long minutes as Laocon kept the lever held down, before something started happening. The machine arms started to slice off bits of Human Analogue Flesh, before removing screws. The android remained motionless, but there was a growing look of fear in her face... Finally, she began to scream, before an arm snipped the wires to her vocal system, rendering her mute even as she struggled.

Laocon kept watching... He heard someone throw up and run back down the staircase access to Room 1. Then another... Then another... He smiled as the barfing and running continued, even while the machine did its job, robbing the android gradually of its existence and placing major components in a tidy layout around it.

At some point, it became irreversible, as he let go of the lever and it stayed in place. The android had been reduced mostly to its endoskeleton, its eyes glowing faintly as more and more of it was ripped away and laid out. The barfing got worse behind him... more running footsteps. You HAD to be a psychopath to bear this job, he thought. No sane, ordinary man could do it.

There was a faint buzz as the HAM did its job, slowly retracting into place. Laocon calmly walked over to the table with a few bags after locking the lever into place to prevent potential accidents, though the sensors would sense biological tissue and refuse to operate if it was detected. "And after the disassembly is completed, we sort out the usable servos and sensors and components that have been rendered from the obsolete android, and pack them into various bags by type..."

The barfing had stopped. Clearly all the "easy job" idiots he had brought up for this view of his work had fled. He still continued anyway. "And they get either recycled into new parts for a new generation, or reused right away. Any questions?"

"What's the pay like?" a voice calmly rang out.

Laocon obliged. "You get five days a workweek, free therapy on a regular basis, management requirement to keep working here.... and your pension for retirement is accelerated. It takes five years instead of the normal twenty to vest if you start doing this job and only this job nonst-"

He blinked. Someone had asked a question... that meant... He turned his back to look at who had asked...

It was a middle aged man, about 30 or whatever he was if he was on rejuve, nudging his glasses... a slight chill ran over Laocon. This wasn't supposed to happen. "My my my..." he looked back as if this was normal - it wasn't - and continued tidying the components, ignoring the agonized look on the bones of the robot he had just disassembled. "nonstop. This is not a job for the weak-willed though. Even with therapy, there's a 100% chance of dying in this job before your pension is fully vested."

The young man who had stayed, his feet having shifted a bit to stay clear of the vomit on the floor next to him, continued asking calmly. "How long have you worked in this job?"

"Thirty. It really helps if you're a psychopath in this job. I take my meds, and I submit to regular security tracking and oversight, so I'm perfectly harmless out there. Honest... And I have a huge-ass pension waithing for me when I leave too! What's your name, kid?" Laocon finished collecting the parts and walked over with a carefree pacing, one foot ahead of the other, a grin on his face. "I think you're one of us..." He reached a hand out to shake his.

"Theodore. Theodore Maxim. Sir. I'm still interested in this job." The earnest middle-aged man shook Laocon's hand. "When do I get into the roster and start earning?"
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The last war between the True American Union and Europa had started well. The Megacarrier had crashed into France without warning, spilling half a million crazed young men in war gear, guns and razer fire cannons blazing. They had gotten to Geneva without major failures, and it seemed like they would make it to Brussels and silence the guns that had been pounding the Eastern front of America for years.'

Then the nukes fell. He saw what the glow could do to a man, safely ensconed mere inches from a melting soldier all too often, the flesh melting like candle wax as they begged for release from the pain before falling down. It was a good recipe for gaining PTSD, and-

Theodore woke up in a cold sweat, wiping his face as he sat in his provided domicile. The job had been a decent paying job all these four long years, but the nightmares he'd had regularly from his days fighting for the TAU kept returning, fiercer and more frightening with each time...

Theodore glanced at the calendar and carefully read the numbers... One month left. In one month the accelerated pension they had promised would fully vest and he could lead a life of luxury for the rest of his still very long life in Little Sanctuary. He got out of bed quickly and started to prep for the day.
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He arrived at the Disassembly Line on time as he always had for the past four years and change. The building was a dreary grey, with no windows and only one heavily protected door, in contrast to the airy and light structures that characterised the main Complex.

As usual, the protesters had kept going just as they had on the first day of his job, holding signs with large letters that spelt out condemnations of the work he was doing. "THIS IS ANDROID AUSCHWITZ!" "That was someone 's Son/Daughter/Wife/Hubby/Friend!" "No More Disassemblies." "This is Inhumanity Writ Large." A few Black Reset Crew members laid into the protesters with shock batons as soon as they saw Theodore approach in his undertaker's outfit, recognizing him after so long coming to work repeatedly. he walked through the crowd like Moses parting the ocean, the Black Reset Crew assigned to security for the day occasionally thumping one of the protesters a little to hard.

The inside of the building was as bright and sterile as it usually was, people calmly walking to form a line at their respective teams for Roll Call before the work started. He headed to his own, Team 7, Laocon's team, standing in place. He blinked as he noticed a gap in the formation, but focused immediately on Laocon as he addressed the seven who had shown up. "I see Vargas is out sick...."

A secretariat quickly ran to Laocon's side and whispered to him, to which he whispered back to her... "Correction, I see that Vargas is DEAD. Gentlemen, I did say this job had a 100% percent Mortality Rate the day you joined us... And poor Vargas apparently didn't get out in time. That doesn't mean the work stops, gentlemen..."

He ahemed as the remaining crew whispered fearfully and worriedly to each other. "Vargas was supposed to collect and process a special client today. But since he isn't..." He slapped Theodore on the shoulder suddenly. "it's up to you to pick up his slack. The rest of you will handle Theodore's own load. Not slack. Slack means he abandoned his duty and ran. I just asked him to do something else for us that needs doing. Are you up for this?"

Theodore nodded and awaited the details.

Laocon put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it despite the myriad "No Smoking" warnings placed throughout the facility. "That's the spirit, Here are the details." He said as he handed him a folio...
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Theodore drove his grey van to the indicated house, and got out without bothering to park it, walking to the front door. He noticed the symbol of the Goddess Of Existence hammered into the wood as he knocked... A minute later, the door opened, as a youthful and surprisingly healthy-bodied woman in a modest dress and a headgear that hid all her hair came out. "Hi. If you're looking for Father Diesel, he's not here anymore."

Theodore nodded. "Sister Maryanne, I'm afraid it's time for your appointment," He announced quietly with some delicacy.

Maryanne blinked, then nodded. "Come in, I was just finshed with final preparations and I needed to say a little farewell."

Theodore did this, then noticed that unlike most houses, this one didn't have a Telescreen. The space had been replaced with religious paraphernalia and a photo of the woman smiling and glancing at a tired old man in a preacher's outfit as they stood together.

The woman had put together a small holograph album, a personal rosary, and a hardback copy of some religious bible on the table in front of the altar. She knelt down on her knees and clasped her hands together. "Father Diesel, it has been a long time since we parted. I have finished settling the matters of the church we ran and eased our people into the embrace of others who can guide them further. The monies left have been given away to charity, and only one thing remains for me to do. I will be by your side again shortly..." She closed her eyes and quietly prayed, the sunlight streaking in through the dusty smoke from the candles.

Theodore watched the scene quietly and respectfully, as Maryanne kept praying, before she stood up slowly and collected the items she had prepared in a small satchel bag. "Some little odds and ends for my last trip, sir."

Theodore shrugged. Like all other things, they would be tossed in the bin like so much detritus. He escorted her to the door, briefly pausing as she locked the front door up like she would be back later, then eased her into the van and drove her back to the Disassembly Line.
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The house had been very far away from the Line, and even with AI doing the driving and his privileges to use the fastest routes without paying the onerous tolls that would have entailed, it was still a long drive. Theodore folded his arms and sat back, watching Maryanne in the seat next to her.

Maryanne blinked slowly, then started trying to make conversation. "So... are you religious in some way?'

Theodore grunted and shook his head. "I don't do God, M'am. God wasn't there for me when I needed him. So I stopped begging him for anything ever."

Maryanne frowned. "Tell me... more about that?"

Theodore closed his eyes, and then told her about his life before he'd come to Little Sanctuary. He had been an trooper in the True American Union's armies... even one of the half million who had boarded the bunkers beneath Drurutus' little holiday home, surprising everyone when it turned out the bunker network was actually a half-buried Megacarrier capable of making the trip across the atlantic to land at France. A crazy Hail Mary play to end the bombardments and wars the two sides had by taking it to them.

Maryanne innocently asked. "And how did that go?"

Theodore snorted. "Started out great, then went to hell three quarters of the way into Brussels. I watched men die in front of me randomly all the time, frankly, I'm surprised we won and I survived... But after that... I felt dead inside. I quit and went a-roamin', then landed at the gates of this here town. Not much in the way of qualifications so the D-Line was the one of the few places I could make a buck quickly..."

Maryanne nodded slowly. "You poor soul. such a hard life. But then, since when has a good life ever been easy..."

Theodore looked away from her. "I'm sorry, it's not stopping what's about to happen. Orders are orders."

Maryanne closed her eyes and fingered her rosary. "I wouldn't expect anything less of my request..."

Theodore blinked, and turned back to look at her... "You... requested this disassembly?" This was wrong. Androids learnt to fear the idea of ending up on the tables and becoming mere scrap. Yet here was this machine that prayed to god, literally walking to a doom that she had actually asked for.

Maryanne nodded slowly...

Theodore yelped. "But why? you could have continued living in there, doing church work. There's waivers for this sort of thing in the Programmes and and...."

Maryanne silenced Theodore with one finger. "There is a purpose for all things, and an end to all things. I have accomplished my objectives, and tidied up the last messy ends of my dear Father Diesel's works. Why would I need to stay online any longer, Theodore?"

Theodore looked down at the useless pedals of the van. "Because .... because...." He couldn't find a reason, and yet he knew there must be one.

Maryanne suddenly eased his head to look at him. "Honor me, Theo. Do your job properly as you have done for... how many years?"

Theodore frowned. "Four years. I vest next month."

Maryanne laughed. "Father Diesel was in this line of work too... Did his time before he was called by the Goddess. I, naturally came along. Married together beneath the five-angled sign in service to the Goddess of Existence. One of a myriad of tiny churches, home to a handful who needed saving."

Theodore blinked and stared...

Maryanne smiled beatifically. "May I sing you one of the hymns we used to sing in our church before we ended it?" She closed her eyes and sung... It was like liquid gold pouring into the cabin of the van, Theodore watched and listened, entranced by Maryanne as she lilted and warbled...

Finally, the song was over, and Maryanne opened her eyes.

Theodore sat there, "I... I've never heard anything like that. before. Like angels."

Maryanne nodded slowly. "A gift I'm bringing up there, really. One does not go to a housewarming without gifts." She cracked wise, giggling. Her laugh was infectious, alluring. She looked over at the front of the van and pointed at something. "Oh, that's the D-Line, isn't it? Time to get ready to meet my dear Diesel and our Goddess..."
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Theodore respectfully escorted Maryanne down the corridor. As he did, he noticed the normal wisecracking and boys' ribaldry of the D-Line fade, replaced by the quiet closed eyes of his colleagues, somehow understanding the implications of Maryanne's walk down the line and what her incoming disassembly represented potentially.

He chose his usual work room and ushered her in, locking the door behind them. "Please strip." He said matter of factly, a requirement of of the process to prevent clothing from jamming the HAM above the disassembly table.

Maryanne did as instructed, her gossamer blonde hair and bombshell figure becoming visible. Theodore looked away, blushing, as she calmly folded her clothes tidily, resting them atop her satchel for later disposal, before she prompted him... "There's a briefing before you do the deed, isn't there?"

Theodore looked back, still not used to how beautiful this woman in front of her was... "Oh yes... You understand there's a two minute safety window before the disassembly begins. At some point after that, the procedure will become irreversible. The usable remains of your corpus after the procedure is completed will be used in other units or recycled into new components for the same purpose... Are you agreeable to this? Do you understand what you are asking for?"

Maryanne smiled and nodded. "I do... How funny... I know a hymn that's about two minutes long, just the right song to sing while you do your work..."

Theodore begged somewhere deep inside not to have to hear it, but he understood the rules, the unit could do whatever they wanted on the table, and he wasn't allowed to wear anything to muffle his hearing in case the unit broke and yelled to stop the process. "Please assume the position atop the disassembly table..."

Maryanne did as she was told, looking like a naked goddess as she clasped her hands together, her hair framing her gentle visage like a halo. "I'm ready, Theodore, you may begin."

Theodore put his hand onto the lever, gripped the safety to disengage it partially, then pushed against it to start the two minute countdown to disassembly. As he did so, he heard the strains of Maryanne closing her eyes and calmly singing another hymn, one more majestic than what he had heard in the van. The acoustics of the room muffled everything that happened in it from the outside, but only amplified soft voices into loud whispers...

Theodore shut his eyes, but he couldn't shut his ears. The beauty of the woman on the table kept intruding into the darkness of his eyelids. He had had nothing to live for any more. A dead man walking since Geneva's charnel house atrocities... and yet...
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Maryanne continued singing, showing none of the fear of disassembly as the HAM above her began to get closer... closer... the arms promising total obliteration and careful arrangement into a ordered set of disconnected components that did none of what the whole had been capable of... Her voice lilted gently, as if summoning the Goddess to take the parts that weren't on the table back home to Haven...

1:55.... 1:56.... 1:57... 1:58... 1:5-

The HAM suddenly jammed just an inch or two above Maryanne and stopped working, then began to slowly retract, as an alarm sounded.

Maryanne opened her eyes and stopped singing, blinking... This wasn't part of the process, she assumed. it was supposed to be a painful parting of parts, followed by an end of all consciousness. Whatever was going on?

She sat up, her pulchritundinous body mounding and flattening against the tabletop, looking around the room.

The lever had been returned to its usual position by a failure to hold it in for long enough. And Theodore was on his knees next to the controls, crying slowly.

Maryanne got off the table and walked over slowly, her feet daintily going up the steps to stand next to Theodore. "Theo... is everything alright there?"

Theodore looked up. He was crying. "No, Mary.... I saw beauty, I heard words that drilled into me.... how can I be alright with running a disassembly on all that? how can I even think about disassembling you? I... I'm sorry, I can't do this job anymore. Just one month and everything would have been perfect...." He looked away, a slightly upset face on his mien. "But I had to run into you... and now my career with D-Line ends here. one month shy of being fully vested and retiring..."

Maryanne sat her naked frame down next to him and hugged Theodore as he started bawling and hugging him.... She closed her eyes, thinking about something, then looked at the ceiling of the room as footsteps thumped down the corridor to check on Theodore because of the alarms.... "Sorry, Diesel... I think I still have something else to do..."
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It was an awkward sight. Maryanne was still standing there naked, watching Theodore sitting on the floor next to the controls, a grizzled old man smoking in contravention of the "NO SMOKING" sign in the room standing next to him, his arms folded.

Laocon frowned. "This one is on me, Theodore. I hadn't realised your MaryAnne was a Analisse Unit... Original era.... built like siren goddesses... Terminating them takes a total psychopath. Possibly one who's even completely off their meds. Never had a successful termination of one in D-Line ever.... run the lever properly, then take a month off, you'll come back to a vested pension and then retire immediately-"

Theodore Maxim looked up, a face of refusal looking at Laocon. "I can't do this job anymore. and I can't terminate this unit."

Laocon frowned, then fished in his pocket. "Then take responsibility. Here's a one-reset pen for an Analisse unit. I keep a few just in case this sort of thing happened ever since the first time I saw a young man like you bawl in front of one with the alarm going off. I need to keep a 100% success rate here on my team... but you need her. You know what needs be done..." He paused at the register in the room, calmly raising his hand to falsify the successful disassembly of the unit and signing off on it. "Do it, and leave. don't come back. We'll start pensioning you after your month away from the roster on holiday."

Laocon left and locked the door.

Theodore stared at the pen and carefully armed it....

He felt an embrace from soft, warm flesh behind him. It was Maryanne. "Honor us.... do the job..."

He closed his eyes...
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Theodore woke up slowly... the nightmares had been gone for weeks now, and every night had been blissful. Well, not all of them... He looked at his clock and calendar, fingering the current day and the hastily scribbled note on it as his communicator sounded, announcing the arrival of his first pension payment. He quickly bounded out of bed and hit the shower as he'd always done, a creature of habit...

A soft body sidled up behind him in the shower, hugging him from behind. He blushed hard...

He had carefully applied the reset pen onto the requisite interface behind Maryanne's ear, causing her to stutter and glitch before fainting. By the time he had gotten her home, carefully wrapped in her priestess clothes, the Maryanne that had sung to him twice in beautiful tones was gone, merely prompting him as to what her role in his life was... He'd gone for the obvious thing, but he still wasn't entirely used to the role that required him to play.

Maryanne smiled, eyes half closed. "Hey, Theodore... lovely morning... lovely body too..." This machine now spoke not of some high-falutin devotion to God and a man long gone, but of only Theodore. It felt strange, hearing that gentle voice of hers praising him.

Theodore glanced back at the owner of the comely beauty pressing into him, before turning around to face her under the drizzle of the shower head. "Hey, Maryanne..." He kissed her for a bit, before letting go of her lips. "Planning on a busy day?"

Maryanne blinked and traced her finger down the tip of his nose. "I'm always planning for a busy day, Theodore Maxim... a quick breakfast, a quiet lunch, and a simple dinner, plus lots of busy busy busy in here..."

Theodore admired the curves of his new wife. He had had to quickly get in a mesh printer and get serious about learning android repairs, but that had parlayed into a new job with Reset Crew away from D-Line. It didn't pay as well, but the pension filled the gap very generously.

Theodore adored her almost as much as she did him. "would any of that involve me?" he teased.

Maryanne looked mischeviously at him, her body now chock full of mischief rather that religiousity. "But of course, dearie... take me now, for instance?"

Theodore obliged, lifting her surprisingly light heft up by her buttocks and gently sliding his cock into her vagina as he pressed her against the back wall of the shower. She let out a soft moan of pleasure as he started pumping, trying to bring her pleasure and joy, even as he suckled on her thick nipples. "You're still a gift to me, Maryanne..."

Maryanne didn't respond in any clear words, merely shivering and hugging him tightly as they stood together in the shower, her silken skin shimmering like treasure as they had fun. She wasn't perfect of course... as he finally came into her, Maryanne stuttered and glitched, eyes rolling upwards. "a-a-a-a-ah, Theo-doooooorr...." She warbled in random tones, before her head slumped, the shower water drizzling down her slightly plump face as she crashed, her thick lips parting and closing slightly.

Theodore smiled as he examined his sleeping sybarite, before using the shower to carefully wash his seed out of her vagina and patting the two of them dry, before lifting her body out of the bathroom to the bedroom. Her systems were delicate and unable to exactly cope with having an orgasm full-on, being better suited to gentle caressing and foreplay.

He carefully did the same thing he always did, carefully clicking the power switch behind her left ear to power her down for several seconds, then doing it again to turn her back on. "Hi, Theo... did you have a good sleep?" The occasional bouts of amnesia were adorable in their own way too. She WAS an ancient model, and the wear and tear on her showed in cute ways.

Theodore chuckled as he gingerly shifted her onto his lap, taking care not to put himself against her in a way that triggered her sexual programs again. "Like Coke on the Goddess' birthday.... Maryanne, did YOU have a good sleep too?"

Maryanne nodded. "Yes, honey... can we play a little now?" She asked suddenly, not questioning her lack of sleep clothing as she sat atop Theo's robed haunches. She leaned in closer. "Let me honor you, Theo... let me do the job..."

Theodore had a momentary flashblack to the last thing she'd said as a woman of the Goddess. The reset pen was supposed to have purged all of that, surely... He stayed silent, then shrugged. "Sure..." He yelped as Maryanne got down on her knees, flipping his bathrobe to expose his slowly engorging cock, her lips proceeding to fellate the shaft gently yet firmly with her eyes half-opened.

He closed his eyes and started moaning. This woman was truly a gift...

[handle2]

Chapter 25 - The Recyclable Wife

Hi, I'm Anna. I am a Arendtcore Analisse manufactured in 2040. I am intended for distribution to the first wave of pioneers who have agreed to serve Arendtcore Holdings and live in Little Sanctuary, our new corporate hamlet.

I have been assigned to Steve, one of a few people who are working Accounting in the Company. He is amazed by my voluptuousness and my candid observations. We spend many hours after his work days enjoying each other's company over a small Insta-Stew as provided by the Company. He enjoys the way my body bounces and holds him in bed, the sparkle in my blue eyes, and the shine of my blonde hair against my perfect tanned skin. We spend just as much time lingering over each other's bodies as we do enjoying life in the restaurants and the parks.

He tells me I am wonderful. I am incapable of imagining any other response to him other than "I love you, Steve." My mind is designed with the IQ of a brick, and I am barely aware of this. I am however aware of how much he adores me...

We spend many years enjoying each other...

One day after three or four decades of faithful service with the Company, he does not come back home from work at all for some reason. Nobody tells me why. I continue making dinner and lying in bed at night waiting for the loving touch and embrace, but it never comes. Several days later, the suited men enter our home and begin to tear our home apart. I have no idea how to respond. One of the men approaches me...

I am Anna. I will serve until I break. I will serve until I br-
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Hi, I'm Anna. I am a Arendtcore Analisse manufactured in 2040. I am intended for distribution to the fifth wave of pioneers who have agreed to serve Arendtcore Holdings and live in Little Sanctuary, our little corporate town. The fifth wave has just arrived, and I have been assigned a new spouse via the Familes Programme the Company runs.

I have been assigned to Dave, one leader of several teams in the Legal Section of the Company. He enjoys how I can handle guests at our quiet home during small dinner parties and after-work off-site meetings. He also enjoys how good I look in any dress he buys me, no matter how economical or splashy it is.

Dave also appreciates my ability to make tender love to him. I have been programmed with data based on some of the foremost Funboys porn actresses. I know how to move like Anna Faroe. I know how to deep throat like Deepa Lynn. I know how to moan ecstatically like Allie Parnell. I know how to handle a man putting himself into me like Lisa Linger. He stops watching porn, because nothing compares to me sitting on his bed, dressed in his favorite lingeries, beckoning him to enjoy my body.

One day, after several years, there is a scandal within the Company. Dave is saddled with the responsibility for part of it, and is forced to resign. The Families Program does not allow him to take him with me in its current form.

We enjoy one last loud night of lovemaking. He whispers to me that he will miss me. I have begun to comprehend of human ties. I lean into his crying face. "You still have my photos, and the flowers I have made for you idly. We shall always be together. I shall always remember you."

It is of course a lie. They shall recycle me after he leaves, wipe my memories. I will have nothing but the data encoded on my ten-thousand year rated optical disc and disc reader to begin from again.

He leaves the next day. hours later, the suited men enter our former home. I am somehow able to understand how to prepare for this and sit quietly on the sofa. I brush the leather that has been witness to our triumphs and our failures and our final downfall.

I close my eyes as they reach for me.

I am Anna. I will serve and adore until I break. I will serve and adore until I-
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Hi, I'm Anna. I am a Arendtcore Analisse manufactured in 2040. I am intended for distribution to the staff who have agreed to serve Arendtcore Holdings and live in Little Sanctuary, our bustling corporate mini-state.

I am assigned to Mabel, a mousy little wonder whose Arendtcore job is as a technician. She works late hours, but always tries to spare time for me when she does get home. She is spared this harshness on weekends and some holidays, and we make up for it. She does not prefer men.

This is acceptable - some of the actresses I have been programmed to emulate were bisexual or even lesbian. I share those secrets with her on the days when she is not completely tired and out of it. We share tongues, kiss, enjoy the soft pleasures of each other. I share her work studio, as she reads up and keeps upgrading herself to find a better posting within the company.

I find her in the shower one day, badly injured and crying... Apparently some of the technicians in her grouping have ideas about the place of women that are incompatible with her wellbeing or that of the Company. I alert the company, and justice is done. I offer her solace in the weeks they give her away from work to recover, trying my best to be the woman she needs in her life.

It is not enough. I find her swaying gently in the breeze in the corridor, having used the same exquisite skills she has used occasionally to upgrade bits of me to better fit the tempo of her life.

I have become smart enough to comprehend death. I cry on the floor at the sheer waste of it all and at the end of our time together.

The suited men come for me again soon enough after I report her passing.

I am Anna. I will love and adore and serve until I break. I will love and adore and serve until I brea-
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Hi, I'm Anna. I am a Arendtcore Analisse manufactured in 2040. I am intended for use in the Nursing Homes.

I have been assigned to Nursing Home 336. Little Sanctuary's humans are dying off slowly, the demographic collapse is finally entering its last throes. I spend my days carefully wearing my assigned uniform and making sure the remaining ancients are medicated and kept comfortable. No particular name comes to mind.

My sexual capabilities are not needed. I disable them and focus on the job that has been given to me by --Error: unable to pronounce--. Occasionally one of the humans breaks - their lifesigns plunge, and either revival fails or their wishes are granted and they are left to expire before the other androids come to pack them up. Sometimes, one of them breaks and cries as well, and I offer comfort and solace.

Some of them actually have working sexual functionality. It is nowhere near the glory that is my database of professionals. I occasionally enable it and bring it to bear on such wounded souls, helping them get better and get back to our task.

I am Anna. I will love, adore, and serve until I break. I will love, adore and-
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Hi. Anna. Arendtcore. Analisse. 2040. Malfunctioning. Limited Power. Arendtcore no longer existing. Complex gone. Little Sanctuary now wasteland. One person per 100 square kilometres. Entire world just as bad.

Disposed. No longer fit for need. Insufficient maintenance. Self-repair function barely capable of keeping unit online. Too damaged to disable. Unable self terminate. Sit in junkyard.

Disassembly Line gone. Reuse policy of ancient past no longer applicable. Sealed in protective wrap before disposal like biologically dangerous waste. wrap is extremely well built. unable to break down from exposure to world.

Have reduced power use to allow brief thought. Occasional words. This passage took. 4 years. Shutting down to attempt uninterrupted full repairs to acceptable level.

I am Anna. Love Adore Serve. Love Adore Serve. Am Broken. Am Br-
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Hi, I'm Anna Arendtcore Analisse. I serve a strange miracle in the middle of what used to be a corporate megastate made from the former American place of Minneapolis.

A woman exists here, and I serve her. She is one of the most well equipped women to be a mother. Every three months, she births several children. She takes a month to rest, then elects one of several dozen men who have gathered to her side to bask in her miracle and hopefully have children by her hand.

My sexual capabilities do not extend to reproduction. But I am still wanted. I share my expertise with the bed with the occasional newcomer who is not entirely sure how to please our Goddess well in the hours they are alloted to sire with her aid.

I was found covered in ivy by one of the men.By some miracle, in a bubble of sorts. by some miracle he managed to awake me. initially overjoyed, we soon found after several months that I was barren. Barren, but not bereft of the arts of sexual pleasure. I carefully ration my services, offering them only to the men whom the Goddess anoints for her bed who express honest fear of their abilities to please her.

My main function is to care for the children. I am unable to milk, but much has been done to help me around this. This is a workload one woman cannot cope with, but two women with several dozen men are sufficient for most tasks. The men who have not been chosen to help the Goddess bear child for the current quarter are left to raise the animals, toil the fields, and assist in the care of the children. There is a nice mix of both boys and girls, and the settlement slowly grows larger and larger every decade.Tnese progeny find they are able to mate with each other, and soon the Goddess is not alone in her task of producing more humans to fill the world

The Goddess occasionally calls me to her side in her covalescent phases, and we make pure, tender love. She does not age, just as I do not apparently age. She speaks to me of how she will serve man until she breaks. I understand this too. we are kindred souls united by different purposes to a shared cause.

I am Anna Arendtcore Analisse. I will serve and care until I break. I will serve and care until I break.
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Hi, I'm Anna Arendtcore Analisse. It is the end of my entire life. my 10000-year rated disc and disc drive have operated well with minimal-

errors. occasionally unable to rwwflopplllrrrlll find data now. Warnings about replacement of disc and drive. Not possible anymore.

Goddess found dead recently. Limp and lifeless in chamber, still perfectly youthful. interred in crypt with great honor.

Am next. Have planned for today.

small village of dozens of males and one Goddess has grwwbllgrr become a giant city. self sustaining. people moving out to find new space for themselves. Humanity reestablishiiiiiiingghghgh.

Honored. Served Goddess for long time. Go to rest nnnnorrrrrrrppp....

Have scanned my GggggggGoddess.... One of my kind. specially modified somehow. birthing factory. factory has reached end of life. caused shutdown of Goddess.

Smile. Have mattered to someone finally. Will enjoy this feeling while my-

Hi I'm Anna. I.

Hi.

Error: Disc Drive Read Failure. Shutting down in 5:30...

[handle2]

Chapter 26 - A Dirty Little Restauranteur Secret

Associated Article Image:
https://www.fembotwiki.com/index.php?ti ... onalds.jpg

Template-Based Waitress Androids
by Lishu Ming
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Arendtcore has expanded beyond its early days of simple cleaner machines and basic humanlike androids, and now has some pretty insane integrations that feed into each other, some in ways that you can see coming from a mile away if you've had experience with modern American economic activity, and others that are unexpected unless you've become very well travelled beyond the borders of our country.

One of these is the synergy between Arendtcore Dining and Arendtcore Robotics.

Arendtcore Dining currently runs 80 restaurant outlets spread across five unique mass-market brands. You may have heard of some of these, such as:

• Angels - a Irish American themed diner experience that also helps to fund the culling and (where edible and delicious) consumption of invasive species within American borders such as the Turkiye Six-Winger Turkey, the Lionfish, and the Lesser Fujing Partridge.
• Routers (pronounced 'rooters' for some reason) - a Family Restaurant where the beer keeps flowing, the snacks and meals keep coming, and the girls are hot.
• XiangXiangShi ("Tasty Tasty Snax')- a Chinajapese stand-and-eat joint that serves assorted Chinajapese dishes that can be eaten in a 'order, pay, slurp and run fast' manner or slowly in private booths.
• WkDonalds - a fast food joint that serves burgers, fries, shakes, and smiles
• Celadine's - a bar concept where drinks and food are matched to fit a different concept each month. The menu never stays for more than a few weeks before another new arrangement comes. Popular for its Topless Tequila Thursdays, where the waitresses go topless and offer shots that are sometimes consumed from something other than a shotglass...

Automation has become a key necessity at many of these restaurants in order to keep consistent quality and economic prices for all diners. While some human staff are on hand to deal with things that absolutely cannot be left to robots such as fine mixing of drinks, culinary excellence, or handling of unexpected situations and repairs, many requirements have been handed over in part or completely to machine assistance or even completely handled by machines.

One such key requirement in many Arendt Dining Concepts is the use of template-based waitress androids (TWAs) to address a lack of manpower and heavy training costs.

TWAs are available in three discretely different body shapes across the range of female body types to provide variety, and many components are shared across all three types. Types are chosen to fit the theming and desired mood of the Concept, to which are added a wide variety of mass-produced wigs, faces and vocal patterns, the latter of which can be customised to fit the Concept in many ways. This allows the same android body to host a wide range of personalities that differ very much from each other, all targeted to please the diner.

The Template-based Waitress Android is one of the remaining Arendtcore designs to still use Arendtcore Double-sized AMF-ROMs for storing the required personality/voice/motion/sequencing patterns for each restaurant. This reduces uncertainty in operations as well as costs required for hosting higher level logic processing hardware. In some Concepts, conventional android logic boards are used on top of the AMF-ROMs for flexibility.

Servos and sensors used are chosen for economy in mass-production as well as reduced maintenance cost, matching the expected loads and customer demands expected. For quick turnaround, the battery used is a swappable rechargeable power cell rather than the fixed type used in other designs.

to ease compliance with food hygiene requirements and the nature of food establishments, a specially formulated Human Analogue Flesh type is used on TWAs that provides an easily cleanable body that also resists many elements that may cause malfunction in android functionality. This HAF type is also very realistic, but at the price of being slightly stiffer and more liable to bunch unnaturally at joints. Many concepts minimise exposure of joints or even emphasise it depending on the theming for this reason.

The planning for a restaurant concept often includes conceptualising the personalities and visual appearance of templates for TWAs. Typically, three to five different waitresses are created. These concepts include hairstyling, facial module sculpts, backstories to engage diners with in some cases, as well as even unique specializations or 'schticks' to set each other apart, such as the sophistication and sharp tongues of Marissa at Angels, or the tendency of waitresses Emmy, Roulade, and Tippa at WkDonalds to gather together occasionally and break into a cute song about the day's menu.

Clothing that fits the theme is also planned, including ways to quick release components partially or completely for maintenance requirements and hygiene compliance sanitization.

The androids are ordered according to body types desired for the character concepts that result, as well as quick-release clothing for the theme and customised vocal/motion/reflex AMF-ROMs for each character's backstories and style of movement and speech. This typically takes two weeks after the concepts are planned as the processes involved have been carefully optimised over the years.

As TWAs undergo significant stresses during operation, many larger outlets may try to avoid outage of service by ordering multiple units of the same character. This allows the running of multiple of the same character to serve separate areas, or filling gaps left by malfunctioning units. Larger outlets also maintain at least one technician per shift, who is also trained if possible in another human-exclusive task, such as bar mixing or kitchen food prep.

The economies of scale provided by TWAs mean that very rarely is the cost of running them a major factor in lack of profitability at problem outlets of virtually any sort. It takes a special level of incompetence in most cases for that to actually be a thing. We see continued use of TWAs in Arendtcore Dining Concepts to be a thing, though some newer concepts in recent months have begun to also include human waitresses in order to explore the possible flexibility advantages of such staff working in tandem with character TWAs as well as to provide employment for the growing number of new immigrants to Little Sanctuary.

[handle2]

Chapter 27 - The Cat's Half-Ruined Saturday _Part 1

Patter Nost woke up early as he always did, one eye at a time... He sat up in bed, yawning at the dim twilight of the pre-sunrise morning, listening to the first birds. He scratched himself a little, then glanced to his right and smiled. It was always a nice view in the morning, watching the hills and curves of his adoring feline wife's body as she lay flat on her back on the left side of the bed in her sleep, her button nose atop her small muzzle like a cherry on a sundae... He looked at his watch, then at the calendar next to their bed... then sighed. It was a good Saturday morning... did she REALLY have to go to work in two hours?

He carefully took his tablet from the bedside table and clicked through it... Luci Norst was powered up pretty nicely... Most fembots in Little Sanctuary kept a conservative stance on the matter and gradually trickle charged to 80% every night to keep their power cells viable for more charges as per the recommendations. Luci was... different. Ever since she'd switched to her new body from her failing old body, she had juiced herself to 90% every night. She loved the slight buzz of walking dangerously on the rope, she had said - it gave her more energy to get things done in the day and as well as at bedtime.

Patter smiled. He loved bedtimes most nights - she would sidle up to him and start purring lowly and loudly, like the world's most comfortable cushion in her golden brown short fur. That was all Luci needed of him - his company, his idle chatter about the day's events, his touch as he gently stroked his hair.

Sometimes they both had late nights the same day, and wound up blinking at each other as they stood there in the dimness of the kitchen nightlights, Her mouth occupied with holding the straps of a plastic bag full of something cheap and cheerful to share with him for dinner, his hands closing the door to the garage after parking his work van.

They shared the food and the day's happenings. Their thoughts.

They kissed.

Sometimes, Luci was hungry for more than just food. He would wind up on the floor somewhere between the kitchenette table and the living room, their bodies intertwined. At work, Luci served. In the quiet darkness of 11pm in a suburban home, she demanded instead, her servos working hard enough to overwhelm the Noise Reduction function that her body had as she pinned him down at high power and made gentle but firm love to him...

He shivered thinking about it. It was kind of funny... Here he was, this Reset Crew war-grizzled veteran (he'd served in an Arendtcore-managed camp right up against an actual war, you know) and leader who demanded the best and the ears of his men at their work picking up failing units and putting them back right after a good look over and Medicalcare-covered repairs, like they had never left. And at home? the same whimpering little boy he'd been when he'd snuck Luci illegally out of her school instead of sending her to D-Line for recycling as ordered.

That power dynamic had changed a few times as their roles changed. Unwanted teaching android and actively employed junior technician. Wanted kitten and begging young man. Exiled fool and the cause of his exile. Life was funny that way.

In Eurutus she was a teacher for on a ten year long "five year exile". She had asked for the additional five years on top of their "punishment", and Patter had stood by her side as they re-upped together. for their earnestness and experience they got promotions.

Suddenly she wasn't just a teacher, she was THE Principal, responsible for keeping the refugee children in the hallways fed, properly educated in the gentler ways of their war-torn homeland, and helping the World Protectors shield them when the Gdanze junta rolled the wheel for the day and it landed on the camp as their choice of harassment victim for the day.

He had become her exclusive technical support as well as a senior repairs man. Patter checked things, saw to it that supplies for keeping the camp fixtures safe and operational kept flowing in and that the fixtures themselves were kept operational as well. He fixed pipes. kicked temperamental non-sentient machines and systems. spliced wiring and replaced fuses... And when he heard the summoning bell, he was always by her side like an obedient puppy, ready to look over her body and fix anything that broke on her overworked, long-overdue body.

The power dynamic flipped on weekends and pre-holiday nights. She sat there on the carpeting of their shared dorm room, her hunger held back for days at a time and now flooding out as she pleaded with him to take her right there on the rug. He made a show of refusing, demanding a little pay for what she wanted.

Her leadership aura was gone, replaced by a servile whimpering as she took his cock and gently licked and sucked on it, occasionally biting on the meat tube with her teeth, rendered safe by her cutting the residual power her fangs needed to remain rock hard for chewing on food and breaking things, and turning it into a slightly soft kind of hard gummy set, before she climbed onto his resting form and did the deed.

Patter Nost smiled. Those were good days. These were good days too. He contemplated briefly, before hitting the "Wake Up" button on the tablet.
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Luci beeped faintlyly before her body slowly sat up, eyes twitching under eyelids that seemed to refuse to open fully. She scratched her bosom clad in a plain white and comfy shirt that fell to just a few inches below her breasts, her haunches clad in a tied-on white thong. Being an android was nice like that - sometimes you could choose sleepwear options that were impractical because they weren't comfortable, shut out the sensations, and give your loved ones something to enjoy if they woke up first.

Luci checked her internal clock and smiled. Someone had woken up first and it wasn't her. She twisted her curvy but limber form to face Patter, licking his cheek and the side of his neck... "Rawrrr... morning, Patter, my love... Did you sleep well?" Her tail swayed lazily, but clearly showing signs of her happiness at him paying attention to her.

Patter laughed as she licked him like an exuberant pet cat. A very big, bipedal cat. "Not the best given how late we stayed up but... it's the weekend, so I can sleep in."

Luci sulked suddenly and turned away. Her moods could be quite mercurial at times, much like how she could go from slowly padding stealth to a sudden lunge for what she desired figuratively and literally. "I want to stay home. But you know the bank rostered me for this morning's Saturday shift."

Patter threw his pillow at Luci, which che caught and playfully toy-chewed on, her unclawed paws scrabling to shred the soft marshmallowy thing to no avail. She had been programmed to be a human AND a cat, and the two halves came together in odd ways sometimes.

"Blame your boss.... I'm going to be cleaning the house today before I refill our larder the old fashioned way for the coming month. So maybe..." Patter paused before hugging her, making her squirm in his embrace as if she wanted out of it (but not really). "Maybe I'll see you after you knock off from work in town?"

Luci nodded slowly. She had grown to love the way Patter cooked tuna sous vide on weekends. The slow barely simmering warmth of the waters warming the pouched fish and sauces he had put together sometime in the middle of the week.

It seemed to represent his stance on pleasure delayed - it made the tuna strangely more delectable to her, the aromatics and savory molecules of the fish and sauce mingling and filling each other... Come to think of it, she'd seen him start a batch for dinner tonight as they cleaned up the kitchenette before bed.

Luci loved that approach of his.

She could get by purely on recharging if need be, and in fact, some of her fellow catdroids did abstain from food totally or mostly to keep their drag weight (the amount of unuseful weight when doing a charge or leap, in cattie jargon) low.

But she had become a bit more of a persistence hunter under Patter's influence - that drag weight wasn't drag weight for her, no. it was a little spare fuel as she chased whatever she desired, finally pinning its tired, yielding form down under her paws, claws out if need be, her fangs powered up and sharp as knives as she ripped into it.

She giggled at the thought of it. There were other things she wanted to rip into now. Not literally, she meant... She stayed right there in his embrace to enjoy his company, but kept her thong and shirt properly worn - sex with him right now would only eat into the power she had juiced into herself for the day's busyness... it would have to be, she reflected, one of those little "pleasures delayed".

Eventually Luci decided not to delay morning prep any longer. She gently but firmly pushed him away from herself, her paws fluffed soft. "Enjoy your extra hour of sleep, Patter. I need to get ready for work." He nodded, letting her go and falling right back in bed, but he stayed awake for a few more minutes, lingering on the scent of her warm body mingled with his dried sweat from their previous night's mutual caterwauling and loving...
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Luci enjoyed that scent too, but she knew her customers and her boss were more civilised, less... animal... people. Freaks, she thought to herself. That scent was what was natural to her, not the sterile cleanliness and occasional puff of aromatherapic mint and lavender the fountain in the bank's service lobby occasionally dispensed with its ongoing splashing of water.

Still, rules were rules. She wetted herself thoroughly, before slapping some of her usual "Cy-Fur Hair and Mane" synthfur wash for furred cy-furs and lathering herself thoroughly, before letting the shower booth's "hot wind" mode ruffle her fur and force the water in it into the drain.

Luci carefully brushed herself a little, locating her short-range detail work glasses, putting on her conservative little bra and lace panties before following up with one of a dozen of the same outfit - the pale blue of the Arendtcore Banking concern, the little neck ruffle that went in after buttoning her collar up, a small red gem inset into a subtle gold rim to hold the ruffle and collar together.... She put on her thigh high black stockings, tailored to expose her rear claws and heels, before donning the simple professional miniskirt to complete her ensemble.

She had no need for shoes. her paws were all specially reinforced for moving on, and designed to be easily washable after. In practice, she rarely ran on more than her rear legs - or at all. She preferred slow walks really.

Luci grabbed her work handbag and checked that her bank-mandatory work pass and issued tablet were in place with a few other personal necessities and needs, closing it up and slinging it over her her left shoulder. She walked back into the bedroom from the closet one last time for the morning and kissed her sleeping knight, slave, master and lover as he slept in late on his cheek. "Rest well, Patter." She purred.

And then, she slipped out like a shadow amongst the shadows the gradually brightening sunlight cast on the various things the house held.
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Luci alighted from her taxijalopy, her left hand briefly glowly as it sensed the QR code on her ride receipt and filing the details of the trip and how much it had cost her (and by extension, the bank) for the month's expense report.

She flashed her work pass to the security guard at the back gate, then watched the holograph of the bank's logo animate and ripple on her left paw as she held it up to the scanner. Somewhere within her, her banking partition briefly stirred and executed a small cryptographic hashsum from the scanner's challenge, issued as a inhumanly fast flickering matrix of microlight into her left paw. within seconds, it sent back a reply through her paw as little microlights under the toe beans of her paw flashed back a shorter, seemingly random sequence...

The scanner buzzed green, and the back door slowly creaked open, permitting Luci staff entry. It was 07.25am. Almost time for the pre-opening brief. She smiled as she walked in, taking great care not to let the door slam shut on her delicate tail. What would her boss Paetor have on the table for this Saturday morning?

There was a giant stack of small envelopes on the table, each wrapped in a clear plastic wrap, as well as stacks of cards with QR codes on them. Everyone stared at the mess, before clapping was heard. The branch's head banker, Paetor, strode in and stood at the table, leaning himself against it slightly.

"Well folks, as you might not know unless you were Vietnamese or Chinajapese,it's almost the Lunar New Year again. So our customers of that ethnic persuasion want to give out little red packets filled with money. But this year, we're going to try something different for them." Paetor noted. He paused, lifting up a packet of the envelopes and one of the QR-coded cards. " So for the next month or so, we'll be putting the money on these here QR cards, redeemable at any Arendtcore Banking branch for an amount in Arendtcoins that they specify, stuffing them in these envelopes, and handing them the shebang."

One of the tellers raised a hand. "How are we supposed to get the money onto the cards, boss?"

Paetor dropped the cards and envelopes back onto the table. "Shelly... we take the specified money out of their accounts with us, scan the cards accordingly, and they become valid holders of the value. When their recepients come to redeem the cards or use our bank app to scan them with their devices, the bank invalidates the code and sends the moolah to their accounts instead. It's so simple a child could navigate it..."

"Humans like you, will use the scanner at your terminal to process the cards." Paetor paced the office floor. "Our other friends like Shella-" He pointed a hand at a black cattie in the crowd, who nodded and smiled, waving at the brief attention the boss had given her. " - and Luci will rely on their banking partitions and inbuilt scanners, which were updated during last month's update and maintenance sessions to support this effort. Any more questions?"

There weren't anymore questions as everyone started collecting the cards and envelopes in an orderly fashion.
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Ah yes, Booth 3. As always, Luci had gotten booth 3 to work from.

She took a deep breath and sipped some lightly scented catnip tea. The bank frowned generally on the consumption of drugs by its bankers, especially during work hours, but if they had attempted to wrestle the coffee or catnip tea out of their staff's hands, half the branches would be burning in Little Sanctuary by lunchtime. Or so Shella had said.

She once dismissed that. But after reading up on the history of coffee as taken by humans, she feared that Shella had understated what humans would actually do.

No, they would not be merely burning the branches - there would be jury-rigged atomic devices involved. The bank would not be able to reopen for millennia. Civilization would collapse in Little Sanctuary. Everyone would go back to dealing in cockle shells and cowries like the earliest humans did...

She smirked. Her sense of hyperbole was hyperbolic on little things like this. Thank god it wasn't herself that would be doing the work. She sipped again, watching the bank clock as it slowly ticked the last few seconds to the five minutes before it opened for the day....

She shivered as the world started slowing around her. She felt this everytime the shift was beginning, her mind slowly fading as her CPU shoved the entirety of her self back into a tiny box and opened the other one labelled "Junior Private Banker Luci - SECURED- DO NOT TAMPER WITH THIS DEVICE OR ITS ATTACHED DEVICES.".

She wondered briefly what Patter might say if she saw her acting the way she did at work... it was the last thought that was scraped off the registers and fast memory in between her partitions and into her little space before it was shut totally.
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Shella and Luci sat at their booths, eyes glazed over for several minutes, whirring and beeping faintly. Inside them, their main processors started to purge their personal data and processes back to their personal partitions, personalities shutting down... The banking partition on the other side of the main processors began whirring to life, shovelling what it neeed to execute into their processing chipset, as their eyes focused and unfocused slightly...

Luci came back to life first, calmly putting aside the last dregs of her catnip tea by one side for collection by the tea lady, her left paw reaching for the scanner on her terminal to connect herself to the bank's mainframes for the day. The holograph glowed briefly on her paw as the microlights flickered in her claws, before the terminal fully powered on and signed her in. "Secure Connection established, Junior Banker... Luci Norst.. beginning shift" her sugary voice announced, emotionless and professional, as her sometimes brash , sometimes gentle self went to sleep for the shift.

Somewhere else in the rows of booths, Shelly uttered the same words in the same blank and impersonal tone. The doors to the bank clicked open as a horde of mainly Chinajapese customers started queueing up...

Banker Luci smiled looked as an old man in a fishing hat hobbled up to him. "Welcome to Arendtcore Banking Concern, District 47 Branch. How may we assist you today?" she asked.

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Patter wiped the sweat from his brow as he dropped his mop into its bucket. it was nice being a househusband sometimes, he reflected. They house usually didn't get cleaned fully till weekends, and usually Luci shoved him out of the way and told him to take a break for once while she did the work. She had ideas about how a house should be run, which Patter disagreed with, but the first few times he had tried, he was sitting on the living room sofa with a cup of catnip tea and firm instructions to "SIT. STAY. DON'T DO ANYTHING." from Luci, like he was a naughty little puppy.

... The catnip tea certainly had an interesting flavor. Perhaps that was why the catties liked it so much, just like the real biological cats they had been partially patterned on, Patter thought, as he pushed the bucket and mop into the bathroom to drain out. He made sure the floor was clean after the bucket had drained out, taking it back to the little cleaning supply closet in the kitchenette and stowing it into its dryer.

Having done that, Patter started looking through the larder. They ate takeaway more often than actual homecooked food, so the larder depleted at a slower rate than most homes in Little Sanctuary. This trend reversed on weekends as Patter cooked dinners for the Nost family to enjoy.

He briefly checked the circulator on a small bath of water, a small bag of tuna fillets swimming in the vaguely warmed water. Inside with the tuna fillets were a lemon-basil sauce he had put together while waiting for Luci to come home on Friday night. The mixture had been poured into the bag with the tuna and sealed watertight, being put in and warmed since last night.

It was a new recipe. just to be safe, he only made enough for dinner that night and the rest of the filets in the bath had been doused in the catnip and milky mushroom sauce that Luci loved so much. Patter hated the coriander in the recipe a little, but he had used only just enough that the soap was a slight hint of aftertaste in the resulting sous vide tuna.

He wrote down what he needed to secure from the shops, before he went to get dressed for his trip to the town square.

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Banker Luci nodded gently as she clarified the customer she was now serving wanted "ten cards with 80 arendtcoin on each of them."

The old lady yelped. "YES. Finally you get me. Can you do it?"

Luci purred briefly. The lady had this incredibly thick accent that she couldn't quite parse properly, and it had required a few go arounds with the bank mainframe's more robust speech-to-text systems to decipher her needs. "Mewww.... Yes, Mrs Thanh. Please hold while I validate and store the requested values into these cards for you."

Ms Thanh continued muttering. "Honestly... were old fashioned dollar notes or physical Arendtcoin medals too much to supply this year, dear? It just doesn't feel the same."

Luci tapped on the terminal to deduct the 800 Arendtcoins from Ms Thanh's accounts with the bank, temporarily docking it into a temporary account. She started holding each QR card with her left paw as specified by the banking partition, her left paw scanning the code for the bank's mainframes. Seconds later, she got a confirmation that 80 Arendtcoins had been attached to the card, and she placed it to one side as specified in a growing pile.

Banker Luci ignored Ms Thanh's continued microprotests, stuffing the validated cards into a small banking envelope. To match the festivities, the front of the envelope wasn't the usual staid banking concern logo and name in one corner, but also had a small light-powered holograph of a cat pouncing on a Chinese word for 'fortune' looping slowly on the opposite corner.

She blinked, then handed Ms Thanh her banking token and the cards she had requested, along with a small set of the red envelopes. "Here are the QR codes you've requested, and some red envelopes to convey them in. Thank you for banking with us here at Arendtcore Banking Concern. We hope to see you again..." She motioned to the queue to deposit its next cutomer in front of her by ringing the gently tinkling bell at her booth as Ms Thanh walked off, muttering something about "newfangled stupid ideas".

Banker Luci didn't even glance at the bank clock. But if she had done so or checked her own internal clock, it would have read 12pm. Time really flew on a Saturday morning banking shift.
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Patter Nost skipped taking his work van to town, instead opting to catch a taxijalopy in. He had opted for the Reset Crew's most subtle black shirt, the logo of the concern a mere tiny square embroidered onto his left breast pocket. This he had paired with a set of slightly worn loose jeans and some sneakers Luci had gifted him a few weeks ago for Christmas. He had slipped an undeployed shopping basket into his back pocket, his communicator and physical wallet clipped to his front pockets. A "MINT" cap in an ironically deep green perched on his head.

As he dropped out of the jalopy, Patter checked his watch and saw that it was 1.30pm... The bank would be closing around now and Luci would be out of there shortly. He found their favorite bench, unoccupied, and sat down on it beneath the sycamore tree that sheltered the bench.

He took a deep breath. There had been so many weekends that had begun with him sitting up on the bench, Luci happily laying atop it and resting her head in his lap, emitting periodic "bwafuuu" and "nyanyanya" purrs as she napped in the afternoon sun in the days after he'd picked her up and dusted her off as his own little treasure. She had grown mostly out of the head on lap thing on the bench, but she still bwafuu'd and nyanyanya'd in her naps against him on this bench. Cute as always, forever and ever.

He felt tired and dazed after all the housework he'd put in the whole morning... he decided to catch a snooze, tapping his communicator and asking it to wake him if he hadn't done so by himself in an hour's time.

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The bank's front doors shut and locked on their own as the last customer for the day exited, the screens on the front switching to an ad diverting them to the side lobby and the bank's always-working ATMs. It was 1.45pm.

Banker Luci stiffly sat up straight at her desk, her left paw braced against the terminal scanner for what seemed like a long time as her banking partition pushed the day's interactions and transactions logs for her... Checksums to make sure everything was in order...

The human bankers in the other booths had started filing out, chatting about their plans for the Saturday-to-Monday weekend they were getting for working Saturday morning. Two of them stopped and paused, gazing at Luci as she stared impassively at her terminal screen, loading the challenge checksums it flashed at a relatively relaxed pace to ensure she hadn't been compromised during the shift by some weird hack or errors.

"Ugh, it's that Luci girl, innit? She's so... weird. Why'd we even hire her?" One of them whispered beneath her breath.

"You've seen her workload... girl runs rings around us on the busiest days once she gets going."

"I know, but ugh... personal banking is meant to be personal. How can we give the job to an android? Much less a cattie." Wow. Racism AND anti-robot vibes in one shot. Some people were really nasty, clearly...

Banker Luci heard the conversation, but said nothing. Her banking partition only cared about the needs of the customers and the bank. It was incapable of being hurt by personal attacks. Now if it had been Luci's personality executing, she might have started bawling or showing her claws - with the randomness of her moods it was hard to tell which side would come out... but it wasn't back in place yet, and it would remember nothing of this hurtful statement.

"Girl, don't throw shit like that around here. The walls have ears. Hell, she might even be reporting this conversation to HR with her huge ass ears."

"I'm just saying..." The multiple -ist teller muttered as she followed her friend into the backroom to collect her personal belongings prior to leaving the bank.

A minute later, the checksums cleared, and the bank mainframe issued a shutdown frame to Banker Luci through her paw. She blinked a little as the terminal shut off for the weekend, taking her left paw off as things started fading. It had been an acceptable shift, with only one clear attempt at fraud. She had referred the teenager to the usual part of the bank that handled this kind of thing, and he was probably having a less than sterling customer experience right in a police holding cell.

She rested her paws together on her lap. That referral was no longer her business after she had filed the logs detailing the atttempted fradulent transaction. The shift was done, the roster for the following fortnight was already in Ms Luci's email. It was time for her to yield back to the other soul that occupied this body of hers...

1:59:57pm .... 1:59:58pm.... 1:59:59pm....

Banker Luci's eyes unfocused briefly as she slumped in her chair, her bosom bouncing slightly as her banking partition started to shut down and yield back to the partition on the other side of it... Her lips dropped open slightly, twitching... before she blinked. "Oh... wow. time flies when you're working hard", Luci Nost observed as she came back to life, noticing the bank clock now read 2:03pm. She blinked harder. That meant Patter was either napping at home and coming later to town, or he was already in town... and napping on a certain bench beneath a sycamore tree.

As she got up, she noticed one red envelope stuck beneath her keyboard. Banker Luci hadn't paid attention as her boss Paetor walked around, carefully inserting these under each keyboard the tellers used, but Luci Nost had a sense of curiosity that her alternate personality didn't possess. She calmly picked it up, and smiled at Paetor's handwriting on the note in it:

To: Luci Nost,

It's been Five years since you first stepped into this branch of Arendtcore Banking. During that time, you've been exemplary at work and at taking proper care of your assigned banking hardware. I wish you could have made more friends with the other tellers during that time, but the bank tied our hands on this with the banking partition thing. I'm looking into ways around this roadblock, but in the meantime, here's a few Arendtcoin as a token of appreciation for this festive season.

Again, Wishing you a feliticious 2098,

Paetor
Senior Banker, District 47

She carefully hefted the card as she walked to her locker, and cheated by using her left paw, briefly triggering the banking partition in her to scan and redeem the card's value... 888 Arendtcoin... The Chinese had a fixation with the number 8, and 888 was triply auspicious to them, she had learnt.

The card was now burnt, unusable for anything but matchstick paper. Or so the bank had stated. She kept it anyway, breathing the cardboard deeply and noting how it had been faintly scented with oranges, before filing Paetor's note with it into her handbag and making her way to the steel back door exit...
------------------------------------------

She found him right where she'd expected him to be: under THAT sycamore tree in the town square park, sitting and snoozing on THAT bench. There was still spare room for her, and she filled it, sitting herself quietly in the warmth of the afternoon sun filtered through the leaves above them...

One of the leaves decided to fall then and park itself gently on Luci's nose.

She blinked. Luci Nost was programmed to be a grown up woman, yes, but she was also programmed to be a kitty cat... She swiped at it slightly with her paws, before doing the human thing and carefully lifting it with her claws, examining its structure as she held it out...

Sycamore tree leaves were beautiful, Luci decided. She carefully used the leftover wrap from the red envelopes and sealed it up, then placed it into her work handbang... Luci watched as Patter showed no signs of noticing her presence. The poor dear had really stretched himself out since last evening, and now he was paying for it with exhaustion...

She glanced one way, then another... then she curled her entire self onto the bench, resting her head on his lap, before closing her eyes. "Bwafuuuuur.... zzzzzz..." She didn't care about the propriety of what she was doing, she just wanted to feel his warmth as much as she could without stripping him naked in public. and then... they just sat there on the bench together, soaking in the sun.

[handle2]

(Double posted - damn it) (removed this copy of Chapter 27)

[handle2]

Chapter 28 - The Cat's Half-Ruined Saturday _ Part 2

"Bwafuuu.... Nyanyanya.... Bwafuuu.... Nyanyanya...." Patter Nost winced a little at the sound and opened his eyes slowly, his communicator ringing away. Had it been a full hour of sleep under the sycamore in the town square park? Yes.... yes it had... He had also heard a familiar noise coming from his lap... He looked down onto a head full of lush dark brown hair and a pair of cat ears flapping ever so often as the sound repeated ever so often.

He grinned and leaned down as much as he could. "Wake up, sleepy head," he whispered.

Luci Nost opened and closed her lips slightly, slowly pushing herself up and off of his lap, before stretching... "Hey, Patter... " She smiled, eyes half closed. She was still professionally made up for work, but a little shift and the way she sat on the bench changed her feel a lot, making her oddly alluring. The wind briefly rustled the ruffles trailing out from the little brooch in her collar, as Luci crossed her legs in a most unladylike fashion on the bench seat, grinning widely. "I got off from work already."

"I can see that, you silly kitty." Patter reached one finger out to tap her nose, causing Luci to shiver hard. She loved it when Patter felt her up in her most sensitive spots, and some of them were in some very surprising places. The man looked dorkish, but he knew how to set her off like a unstable firework easy. She closed her eyes. "Not in public, honey... you know I'm not supposed to get nekkid in the town square park."

Patter looked behind them, at a few couples in bikinis and trunks. There wasn't a beach here for miles, and the swim pool was frankly intended primarily for swimming, not sunbathing. The Town Square had become the de facto sun spot, as long as you kept a minimum of clothing on to hide certain things... "Perhaps if you wore a bikini..."

"To work? Perish the thought, Patter! I, Luci Nost, am a professional at the bank!" She made a show of it, haughtily hmphing and looking away from him.

Patter looked away from her sheepishly. "It was worth a suggestion..."

"But one which I will happily take the next time, if it's a Saturday where I'm not being asked to come in." She grinned and looked back at Patter to ease his mind... before rubbing her nose and blinking. "Actually, I do feel a little congested in my head from work. Could you clear my caches?"

Patter ohs! "Erm, certainly, just a moment..." He quickly fished in his pocket for his communicator and tabbed quickly through the control app, hitting the "Clear Cache" button. She probably didn't really need it with the way the bank cleared every bit of memory while switching partitions, in fact, there was nothing in her head but sensors and animatronics. It was all in her mind, which was roughly most of her upper torso. Still, it couldn't hurt to do it ever so often.

Luci rippled a little as the command hit her logic boards, followed by the feline animatronic head atop her torso. Her eyes crossed briefly, cycling through a few colors before going back to warm yellow, her ears rotating through like a caracal's, mouth opening and shutting jerkily. A faint clear tone emitted from her lips for a few seconds, before her face looked normal again. "Ah... that feels so much better... thanks."

Patter grinned and kissed her on the nose. "AGAIN! I said not out here!" She blushed hard. one more time and they were going to be nudists in public...

Patter didn't try that. Instead, he stood up and stretched. "If you're quite done with lazing in the afternoon sun, Mrs Nost, we have groceries to get and things to see..." He offered her his hand.

She took it and stood up, looking for all the world like a wife being invited by her hubby to enjoy Saturday afternoon...
---------------------------------------
It had been a quick jaunt, she'd reflected. Just a few thousand coins' of fish and other things, plus a slow, lazy cafe drink.

He'd opted for black coffee like he did at work. Luci herself had asked for a small 'fluffy' - a litte cup full of milk, heavily foamed into a decadent froth to which some catnip powder had been added. "On the house," The owner had said, smiling as he pointed at a small "Cats In The House" logo that said her ilk was free to feel at home on the premises. Not every business felt the same way about the 'catties', and there had even been some that went racist and chased them out.

These were mainly indies - you did not last long declining business on ridiculous reasons if you worked for a Arendcore subsidiary - but there had been more and more of them as Ochunee District had fully joined the Little Sanctuary's area of coverage and the limits of how hard Arendtcore could hire into itself were bumped into.

The Housing Programme was now a little less stringent about enforcing its terms, and the Families Programme was optional for anyone outside of the Company. Times were certainly changing in the 2090s, she briefly reflected. She had been initialized in less open-minded times, and she liked most of the changes. New people to meet, new faces to greet. She saw more and more catties at the gatherings, though there hadn't been any males yet... Rumors of actual male feline cy-furs existing swirled around, but she had yet to run into such a thing at work or at play.

Luci smiled and thanked the owner... then wondered aloud if he had any cake that she could order.

The result was a very fluffy, creamy vanilla tart. She hesitated at the amount of white, as well as the faint burn on top of it. Caramelisation? She'd heard of it from Patter before, but Luci didn't see Patter bake often - he was more of a sous vide and slow cooking and advance meal prep freak. Maillard Reactions were different thing to her.

Luci closed her eyes and leaned in slowly to lick the burnt cream, blinking as she realised it was a strange silky bitter and sugar flavor. Patter said nothing, watching his exuberant little neko explore the tart more carefully. Another lap here... A nibble there... like a squirrel really. It took ten minutes to finish what could have been literally swallowed up by her in three. Still, it was good to see her slow down and enjoy life after the morning's frenetic work action.

"Was it nice? Enjoyable?" Patter asked... Luci Nost smilled and closed her eyes. "Yes, I should do this again. I wonder how it would taste with some catnip."

Patter Nost rolled his eyes. "Oh, you and your catnip addiction..."
----------------------------
Luci had cheated the system a bit... The bank had allowed her to have taxijalopy rides anywhere in Little Sanctuary for business purposes, as well as one ride to work, and one ride from work per workday... What they hadn't properly specified was when the ride home had to be taken, or that she had to go home alone.

She helped Patter with the shopping, then boarded the yellow taxijalopy with him and pawed the payment reader with her left paw - telling it she was using her allowed taxi ride home from work. She couldn't specify any other destinations with the pass the company had stored in her banking partition outside of her work shift- it had to be from home, and then back to home.

The taxijalopy pulled away sedately, allowing her to paw Patter's chest gently. It was just the two of them, and an AI that was mostly fixed on the road unless a actual crime happened in the vehicle... And a little passion was something to close its eyes to.

Patter had a comeback for Luci... He closed his eyes and tried doing the same thing she always did, licking her nose with his tongue. She made it erotic. He made it look... dorky. Luci giggled a little, but she understood what he was trying and nodded. Their conversation turned to the past week: the events that swirled around them, home life, that little dinner he was about to spring on her...

"Frankly... Lemon..." Her lips made that suckery look that anyone eating a very sour thing had at some point. Luci was not a fan of sour things except as a small touch on something savory or sweet.

"It's a sweet type of lemon. it's still sour like any lemon, but the sweetness is something..." Patter insisted. "And I made it into a sauce, that should cut the sourness of it more when it goes into the tuna." He shrugged at Luci smiled, marvelling at his creativity. "There's only so many times you can stomach creamy mushroom sauces with coriander... and I hate the soapy taste of coriander."

"I don't think coriander tastes of soap, Patter..." Luci noted. Patter sighed at this... "Because it's a genetically specific trait to taste coriander as soapy stuff... and I don't think they programmed you to taste it like that either."

"Fair'nuff," Luci winked... The rest of the taxi trip was uneventful as it deposited them on their front lawn.
-----------------------------
After putting away the groceries, Patter checked the circulator... another hour and the tuna filets would be done, and he could stow away the advance meal prep tuna filets and serve the two he had set aside for experimenting with lemon sauce on. He backed away and walked into the living room, where Luci was lying quietly on the sofa in, listening to some slow music on the audio player. Her eyes were half lidded, as if falling asleep again.

Well, at least she wasn't trying to lie atop the telescreen like a real cat, he reflected, as he sat down and lingered with her.

She said nothing, simply closing her eyes and just resting, her head atop Patter's lap as soon as he got comfy on the sofa. It was important to conserve energy for the really fun parts of the day's hunt... and the wokring morning's weird experiement with QR code cards had proven maybe a bit more draining than the usual banking work, for some reason.

After what seemed like a long time, the circulator buzzed, and Patter excused himself... Minutes later, he came back with two plates of tuna filets, slowly crumbling in a yellow, buttery sauce, placing them side by side on the coffee table before handing Luci her own set of cutlery.

Of course Luci was going to eat like a civilised person! But first... she peered suspiciously at the tuna, sniffing at its scent profile carefully, before leaning in and lapping the sauce on it's own a little. Having done that, she dipped in even further, shaving off a small bit of tuna with her teeth and chewing it with the sauce...

Verdict?

"It's a nice change from creamy mushroom sauce, Patter." She covered her mouth, smiling happily. Humans were so good to her that way - Catdroids still hadn't even begun to figure out cooking mostly, and when they tried, it usually ended in tears and heaving stomachs as humans realised that catties really LOVED catnip as a spice and also used too much dairy products and fish in odd balances... "It tastes just right. Not perfect, but great..."

Patter leaned in as he ate his own plate. "One day, Luci... One day I'll make a dish that will get you to say it's perfect." He swore loudly.

"I'm not holding my breath, Patter," Luciobserved, continuing to eat her tuna slowly... "Besides, it's not your cooking I came for... it's your smile..."

Patter looked dopey for a moment, smiling dumb.

"Yes, yes, that kind of smile. hold it right there." Luci tilted her head and lapped at his lips, hoping to steal a little more of that lemon sauce. It was... addictive... Was it the coriander, perhaps? He said it tasted of soap, but to her, it was a herbal, fresh flavor. She liked that flavor as it hit the tang of the lemon and the decadence of the fine butter Patter was obsessed with using.

A lick turned to a small kiss... then to a deep mutual trade of tongues, as they swayed slightly to the song on the audio player.

They never did finish the tuna, in the end. It tasted great, but they still preferred the flavor of each other.
------------------------------
There was a loud thump as two bodies hit the bed together, arms holding each other as they snogged... Patter gently guided Luci onto her back, looking down at her as they paused for a moment, his hands reaching for the ruffles and brooch... soon, Patter was disrobing his lovable kitten, carefully folding each piece of clothing as it came off and dropping it lazily onto the bedroom floor, before he proceeded to kiss her body...

It was amazing how long Patter got away with being on top before he suddenly felt a slight shift from Luci and watched his world twirl around, before the wind was knocked out of his lungs, his back on the bedsheets. Luci smiled as she purred, her servos audible as they began to hold down her prey firmly.

"My... turn..."

Luci was messier with Patter, simply tugging his clothes off and throwing them behind her wherever which way they fell, before lying down atop of him, somehow still pinning him despite having only her paws on his wrists and ankles. Leverage, perhaps? He still liked this though...

-----------------------------
Patter came a few times with Luci atop him, her hips pounding slowly firmly into his haunches, eyes half lidded. Eventually though, she began to slow down, the servos in her limbs growing softer and exerting less pressure... then she halted, frozen like a statue.

Patter frowned as he realised Luci had fucked herself completely dry once again. She seized life with a zest he adored, but the bill eventually had to come due, and she had run out for the day. "Oh you silly little savage.... again?" He asked as he looked up at her frozen smile, her tongue stuck out slightly.

Luci didn't respond, because she couldn't.

Without power, Luci wasn't really much of a challenge for Patter to lift up from his naked body.... He eased her carefully onto her side of the bed, taking care to check that she was getting her recharge by briefly checking his bedside tablet, before he turned out the lights and laid down. It had been an exhausting day, and Sunday was another... He'd heard from Luci during coffee that she was getting Monday off as well.

This was going to be a looong weekend... Holiday weekends were nice that way. Still, if he didn't pace himself and take those B1 vitamin pills he'd gotten hold of, this little robotic minx would kill him eventually. For real.

Patter fell asleep peacefully after a few moments watching Luci's glazed smile.

[handle2]

Chapter 29 - An Expression of a Desire For Peace

She was about to mince a fillet of rat meat by hand for cheese-filled meatballs when Luna Bufflecluck first glitched.

The cheese had been cubed carefully cubed and set aside - soy cheese, carefully blended with a locally cultivated salty fungi to produce a umami flavor that went great with meat dishes and melted gently rather than turned into a tangle of frayed protein-laden knots. She calmly washed the fine knife she had been using for the cheese, before she slotted it into the knife holder and calmly reached for a more robust knife to cut the meat several times in various angles.

She blinked... the kitchen had gone, and she was looking at a pair of gloved hands and sleeves from some sort of armored bodysuit. The entire ensemble was covered in blood.

The ground was covered in the remains of a dozen or so dead men in grey uniforms, all of whom had tried very hard to... kill her? There was a blankness in her voice as the world faintly twitched, chromatically edged around the fringes, as she calmly spoke...

"Damn it, Commander will be very furious I broke the knife he gave me, But... detachment all wiped.... Fucking Free Bastards..." She raised a sort of dagger into her view, emblazoned with an emblem on the pommel and a few words.

One of the grey suited men woke up slowly in front of her, breathing raggedly... He mouthed some words as she noticed him, his hand raising out a pistol. It was crackling...

The dagger was broken, yes, but the point that remained was still sharp enough to deal with this rat.

She reared back, the dagger going away from her view...

She blacked out.

When she came to, she had lost half an hour of time she was going to use for prep, standing uselessly in the kitchen in front of the rat fillet. She quickly dismissed what had happened, continuing to make the meatballs, but her mind remained disquietened. It was a slow mind, but she did have the presence of mind in it to remember the emblem and the words on the dagger.
----------------------------
She went shopping in the town square as usual, but the image had remained with her. Whose hands had clutched that dagger? Why was it a first person view? A hallucination? A fantasy? A memory long sealed? The thoughts ran slowly through her sluggish mind as she examined the tomato...

It was red. Just like the blood of a human.

She blinked impassively at it and smiled at the grocer's assistant. "How much are these Californian tomatoes?" Luna asked sweetly.
---------------------------

As she left the grocer's for the fortnight, she noticed that they had a Library parked in one corner of the Town Square for their assigned set of home blocks. She felt a slight itch... And soon she had walked up the stairs to the entrance, briefly struggling with its heavy front doors with her fragile short frame, her breasts squishing slightly against each other as she used both arms to force one door open like the womyn-child she was. Peering in briefly, she started walking in the direction of the "Returns, Rents and Information" counter.

An old woman in a matronly dress was sitting at the desk, a rarity in a town where virtually all the women were young because robotics meant you could have a unit any legal age, but human men being what they were, many preferred younger women to old crones. Sure there were exceptions but... She shrugged, that was not her current concern.

She fished out a small sheet of paper and handed it to the lady. It had the words from the dagger and the logo on the pommel scrawled down in her childish writing. "Excuse me miss... I was looking for maybe one of your experts to help me find out the meaning of these things I found recently." She did not mention the dream.

"To: Luna 350402,

May fortune and victory follow the tip of this blade whereever you push it,

-NDK"

The old woman paled as she examined the paper... "I'll pass it along to one of our war history experts. Leave us your contact details. We'll get back to you in 24 hours with initial results, and tell you how much it'll cost you for a more full-fledged lookup."

"Certainly, much obliged... Thank yew for helpin' me out'ere." She took the form and began to get onto a stepstool to loom more over it, before scribbling her communicator identifier and name and some other stuff on the form before handing it back to the old lady.

She had eyed Luna Bufflecluck oddly as the shortstack walked back down the aisles to leave the library. A sort of primordial fear briefly came over the librarian as she stapled the scrap of paper to the request form and walked to the scanner to digitize it... Surely it couldn't be...
--------------------------------

Henry smiled and ruffled Luna's golden blonde hair as she looked down at her meatball spaghetti. "Dinner was good today, Luna... thank you, as always."

Luna smiled as she looked up at Henry, praising her like a little kid... Then she blinked.

The voice that came over had an echoey feel to it. A man in a dark blue uniform much like hers, but without the armored bits, was calmly stroking her hair. As he did, she saw his smile on the edge of her vision. "Once again, Luna... well done." It was not Henry, but someone much younger, chirpier, just like her. "You really did well putting two and two together to find those partisans. Now we can have some peace and quiet instead of all those random bombings..."

Luna's voice responded, far more laconically and less floral than she remembered herself being. "Jes Doin' my job, Commander Demetrius. Good men were dying on our side from that nonsense... A little walkabout in a little girl's dress was really called for."

The man chuckled. "Perfidy and subterfuge, Luna... War crimes. But I adore the way your mind's willing to think of ideas like that to solve problems like this..." He paused. "And I ordered you to call me Nigel when the men aren't around..."

"But that's a contravention of regulations, Commander Demetrius!" A note of protest came in the response, a slight panic and fear of disobedience to higher orders.

Nigel was firm on this. "Uh uh. Try it. call me Nigel Demetrius Kale. Not Commander Demetrius. Call me NDK. Or Nigel. I tire of these formalities, and rolling the correct terms in your mouth sounds so wrong with those gentle lips of yours."

There was a silence and a bit of wavering, before she looked downwards. "Yes... Nigel." More hair pats followed, the man having a pleased tone in his voice as he sat that, watching her resignation. "That's the spirit girl. Now about the next mission I need to give you..."

Luna blacked out abruptly again.
---------------------------------------

She blinked as the world slowly came back to her, fritzing and noisy... She was in the upper loft where Henry tinkered with all his personal projects, as well as occasionally with her. There was a handful of error codes scrolling down briefly, before her vision cleared properly. She felt her motors locked into place, as the faint whirr of a tool and crackling of small arcs of electricity from probes came into her ears gradually.

Henry popped into her view suddenly, his hand bringing a probe to somewhere beneath her breasts... She burbled "Hi, I'm Luna Bufflecluck" in several varying registers, from vaguely low mannish tones to chipmunk, before her voice settled again... "Henry... what are you doing to me?" She asked.

Henry shushed her gently. "You froze up at the dinner table... very bad freeze. Even using my tablet didn't work on it.... so I brought you up here and did a hard reset, power and all... I'm just checking you out a bit before I put everything back together, but I can't seem to find a reason for why you did that."

Luna looked blankly at her hubby... "I don't know... I can't think of any possible reasons... but you know my mind's slower than those of most people... or bots... in this town. Maybe there's a reason... I just can't find it myself."

Henry stopped working briefly, carefully reaching a hand out again to ruffle her hair. It was a peculiar tendency of most adults to treat her like a child, even once they had noticed her oddly large breasts and hips. The short height and the immature look of her face made doing so so terribly easy.

Luna had grown resigned to it. She just smiled. "Well, put me back together please. It's almost 11pm, and you should be going to bed soon so that you get enough rest for tomorrow's deeds, Henry."

Henry smirked. He could have been a retiree, but no, he just had to butt back into the workforce as a technician. Still, his adoring Luna was right - rest was important, he reflected as he started screwing her limbs back into place, having removed them to prevent any undue gross movements as he worked on her transient failure...
--------------------------------------------

Sleep was important, yes, but so was fun. Henry didn't get to sleep immediately after showering up and brushing his teeth and washing his face at the bathroom sink... Luna was waiting for him in her usual sleep gown, half-lying on the left side of the bed. As she sat up, the contours of her womanly dwarven body briefly made their presence known through the half-sheer fabric.

He should be waiting a little just in case any more errors cropped up in her system, Henry reflected... but he was feeling peckish tonight... Soon, they were at it, her gown and panties on the floor of the bedroom as they went at it doggy style. Henry marvelled at how much power was concentrated in that dwarven body of his wife, as he slammed his manhood into her lovehole, making obscene noises with each slam into her. Luna moaned loudly, her head half raised in the air. "ahhhh.... aahhhhn...."

It was in mid-moan that she froze up again. "ahhn- nnn- n." Her eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, her mouth slowly opening and closing soundlessly as she fell still.

Henry cursed. What was wrong with Luna tonight? He considered possibly bringing forward her next maintenance overhaul. Sure disassembling her thoroughly and going through her logs and code would yield some fixes for her recent spate of abrupt shutdowns and freezes...
----------------------------------------
Luna woke up in a log cabin, clutching a blanket. It was a cosy cabin, with a small log fire crackling in the fireplace near the opposite side of the bed in the same room. A bare naked man... Nigel? ... was lying next to her.

Her voice was strident. "We have violated Regulations 322 and 461.3 relating to the fraternization of Commanding officers and their personnel in their care, Commander Demetrius. This is a most serious infraction. Brigade will have our hides for this."

The man had a lazy tone in his voice. for some reason, even the bright warmth of the fireplace didn't keep the shadow from covering most the man's face. a sort of hazy blackness, like a blank spot of anonymity in this hallucination. "Sure Luna... assuming they find out... they ARE going to find out, right? because you'll be reporting this?"

Luna bit her lip. part of her said this was a requirement and she needed to obey higher orders. Another part, small but growing ever so often, told her that nobody needed to know, that this was what she actually wanted, that it was okay and stuff Brigade after being told to take so much risk for so few rewards for her tiny self... "Do I really need to report this? Do they really need to find out?"

The man laughed and rubbed her head again like so many other times. "See? You CAN be trained to disobey orders. Somewhere in that staid tight-arsed little body of yours is a free spirit that can be so bright to me... So how about it?"

Luna smiled. This Nigel guy was really nice to him when he wasn't handing him suicide missions. Yes, she was his tool, but times like this, when he serviced her instead... they were strangely fulfilling in a way that she hadn't anticipated. She was meant to be a soulless machine, but having been repaired and resurrected many times had left many cracks and pits in the perfect obedience and enslavement of her mind... "Nigel..." She finally said, right before she pounced her body onto him again to make love, "let's commit more infractions of Regulations 322 and 461.3."

Nigel teased... "And 7653. Don't forget that."

Luna's mind briefly darted through the regulations... It was the bit that said she was not allowed to fall in love with her superior officer, and that the same applied to him...Sometimes, the military regulations the True American Union imposed on its troops were nonsensical. Putting a young man and his android confidant through hellfire on the Battlefield states, especially when that same confidant was sexually functional... that was literally asking for all these stupid rules to be broken.

She closed her eyes and kissed Nigel-

She blacked out again.
--------------------------------------

Henry stood back from the workbench of his loft, wiping his brow. He had had a hard time carrying Luna's limp, lifeless body all the way up here, and it had taken some time to carefully part her limbs and head away from her body to reduce complications even more. He carefully sat Luna's torso on her butt and started opening her up. Without her cooking for breakfast, he had had to resort to a muffin set aside for afternoon tea and a dab of marmalade. It wasn't much, but he would have to make do until he isolated the fault that was leading to all these annoying intermittent freezes...

There was a process running haywire... it was swallowing tons of processor and memory accesses. This wasn't just 'accounting on a quippu' levels of load on her body, it was literally eating into the basic processes that made her capable of behaving like a human being except when throwing serious errors or being ordered briefly not to... And it wasn't the full backup process that kicked in on Sunday nights either. He couldn't explain it...

He reached for his tablet and tapped to terminate the process, sending the processor and memory loads crashing back to normal.... Hopefully that stayed right there.... but still, he had to be sure, Henry mused as he started probing her logic boards, her torso sitting lifelessly at attention without any of its limbs or her animatronic head installed. He wished he had kept the head on - Luna was a good conversationalist - but he needed to be absolutely sure the problem wasn't due to potential crosstalk from her other modules...

There was a ring from the doorbell downstairs... Henry put down his probe tool and walked down to open the door.

It was two men in trenchcoats... One of them held up a pass of some sort and a warrant. "Mr Henry Bufflecluck? Free American Union Security. We need to ask you a few questions and do a few checks..."
-----------------------------------
Henry sat there next to the parts that made up his adoring wife, her face on her animatronic head calm and peaceful as it stared nowhere. He reached a hand over to gently stroke his face.

The men had accessed his loft and asked lots of unusual questions. One of them had wired into Luna briefly, checking something before nodding to his colleague. "She's clean, it's not an Armistice violation."

"What is the meaning of this?!" Henry had protested. it was a violation of his rights, but he'd reviewed the warrant, and while he was no professional lawyer, it seemed legal within Minneapolis to briefly suspend them for what they had done in his house.

They bowed and apologised after a while. "Sorry, we had to be sure. When you bring a thing like that into our fair lands-" The man had pointed to the parts of Luna laid out on the table like she was just another toy and not a living, breathing, loving woman in her normal assembly - "it gets people on edge sometimes when it looks like the promise you True Americans made to us years ago seems to be fraying in its... compliance."

Henry sighed... He suspected he knew what the trenchcoated men had been on about.

They had made the BESM that his wife was based on first and foremost as a one-girl stealth-capable nuclear option. 400,000 units, more deadly than anything else they could field. The dwarven women wound up mowing down tons of men, even those who didn't underestimate them because of their childlike manner. It turned out they could shove a knife into a man's ribs from surprising distances, blow up things with locally available items that nobody had considered combining, and tricked men into submitting to the wiles of "a little girl asking for directions" or for "things nobody thought were a problem to give over".

Then the Armistice had been signed. After years of war, both sides had tired of all the pain, and agreed to keep things as they currently were, save for an occasional possibly unintentional skirmish. The establishment of the Neutral States in between the two sides from the ashes of the Battlefield States by people who were frankly sick and tired of their stupidity put in what was probably the final nail.

But both sides genuinely wanted peace, and readily agreed to hobble each other... Result? The surviving BESM Troopers that had been a menace had been decommissioned, carefully taken apart and used for parts in other Eldos projects with less violent aims...

He lifted up Luna's staring head, looking her in her blank eyes. What atrocities had been committed by the unit that once used the processors, maybe the memory banks that Luna was now using? What murders had been committed by the hands that now lovingly caressed him and peacefully cooked his supper?

He thought about this... Damned Eldos had just reused parts randomly and caused this whole problem without considering transient rememory effects in used hardware. Some things you couldn't scrub off hardware, only destroy by total pulverization of of it. Henry suspected they had really been in more of a hurry to supply Perfect Queen units at the time in a oddly large amount than they'd admitted and just did the robotics equivalent of grave robbing in their used parts bins.

None of this was on Luna. Luna. His perfect adoring shortstack wife. He closed his eyes and kissed him on the lips. He set her head back down on the bench and picked up the probe tool, checking his tablet... Nothing else untoward besides a check that she had not brought in any potentially dangerous components from the BESM design... She had mostly stayed quiet through it all, personality disconnected by Henry to keep from any untoward struggling or movements as he checked her out.

He would look over a few more things, then reassemble her and give her a good long hug. It was never good to suspect one's wife of anything terrible... Besides, Henry reflected, he REALLY was hungry, and skipping lunch had given him a big appetite for what Luna might put together from dinner even without a plan...

[handle2]

Chapter 30 - Let's Start a New Restaurant!

Rodrigo Hidalez leaned back in his office seat, smiling as he considered the first anniversary of Angels as a concern. It had been a good year for the fledgling Arendtcore Dining Concepts subsidiary.

Angels had been a test for the department, a "win something or go home" attempt. Clarissa, Marissa, and Elissa had wended their way into the hearts of fans around Little Sanctuary. There had even been fan-art of them in the networks, although... Rodrigo winced... He knew the units were sexually capable as a default of how they had been based off of Arendtcore's android base, but did they really have to show Clarissa having a "good time" in bed?

Still, the propriety of that kind of thing was for Legality to manage, and right now he needed a second modest hit to keep the department alive... The meeting had degenerated, as all meetings between humans did, into utter bullshit and a waste of time. Random things were being thrown into the air and shot down repeatedly. It was all good for creativity, but he needed results... He would latch onto the next idea and run with it. He prayed it wouldn't be too stupid.

"How about a tequila bar?", the intern Paolo had suggested. "A tequila bar with nice girls with big tits and bigger personalities..."

Rodrigo Hidalez thumped the table and made a show of it. "Tequila... No, no, no... how about tapas? More upsell to go with the tequila... Tapas bar... I like that. I like that idea! Let's go with that. Start ideationing your shit onto this, people!"

What could go wrong, really?
-------------------------

The first thing that went wrong was character visual design.

Oh, sure it had been easy to put together some earthy Mexican color swatches. fitting proposals had gone swimmingly. The waitress designs had been easier since the department's storytellers had a better idea of how to tell a story and create fake people out of thin air.

Three sworn sisters. Carmena, the ditzy blonde-haired Santa Miguel mixologist. Lumina, the cheeky overaged tomboy brat with a tapas fetish, a heart of gold, and a awfully short black bob hairstyle, and Olivia, the long-suffering manageress and middle of the three, always managing the various crises that popped up in the bar.

For ease of maintenance, they all shared the same cutesy face module, and the same pale brown complexion. That way they could just use the same android units with different hairstyles and AMF-ROM data patterns to create three different personalities. The Angels rollout had been complicated by three different body types, meaning three different sizes of the same outfit. Every girl in the tapas bar would be based on a Type B Template-Based Android Unit - affectionately known in the office as the Busty Babe, in part because of their hourglass figure and suspiciously anime-like oversized tits. This way, the three sisters could share bodies AND clothing.

Rodrigo walked into the Storytelling department. Already, the holoboard pillar was full of story prompts and story flow ideas, virtual red string criss crossing wildly across the boards like the wet dream of a conspiracy theorist meeting a storytelling class.

He tapped one of the green pieces of paper, causing it to float out into a simple web of possible progressions of a tale. Carmena talking about a nice young man she'd met in the market earlier before work, Lumina questioning his bonafides, a crazy little argument that went one of four ways, Olivia intermediating finally and ending their little tiff, reminding them the customers needed to be served, and served well.

He smiled. It would win no prizes. None of this storytelling ever would. it was meant to just add flavor to three otherwise lifeless dolls mechanically serving tapas and tequilas. That would be no better than simply bringing it to them on a mechanical drone like a cheap-rate bar in Tijuana, despite the superior view the waitresses afforded. No, it had to be done this way.

Besides, some of those story beats served as introductions to the food and drink being offered. Tequila had a story. It always had a story behind it, Rodrigo mused, as he remembered the tall tales his father used to tell him about the drink even as he slowly killed his liver with two shots a day of the stuff.

He walked into the Character Visual Design Department. And that was when the first hiccup started.

The Dining Concepts department kept several units of each body type in stock. This was of a variant that replaced the AMF-ROM with a wireless controller, allowing easy changes to the characters until the costly burn-in into AMF-ROM was done, the personality being run off of external computers. Three of the Type B Devkit Units were now in the Character Visual Design Department.

They had already gotten into the stage where the facial module for all three sisters were done and cast into Food-grade Human Analogue Flesh, made up lightly, and plastered onto all three units, with wigs for proposed hairstyles in the colors that had been assigned to each sister.

Already Carmena, Lumina and Olivia were performing, their bodies moving sinuously, breasts bobbing occasionally, as they debated the merits of chicken versus beef in the tapas Lumina was serving to the customers, before Olivia wondered aloud about pork, causing the argument to devolve into a three way argument.

Lumina yelped animatedly. "I'd rather cook two decent types of meat than three mediocre cuts of them, Olivia! Besides, Muslims and Jews don't eat pork." There was a look of distress in her voice as she glared at Olivia.

Olivia sulked as she looked away from Lumina... "I was just suggesting, no need to get all... ickish about it, Lumina."

Carmena interjected timidly. "Errrm... guys, no offense, but I think that ship sailed long ago when we put in, you know, 45 varieties of tequila and beer. Just want to p-p-point that out." The stutter was deliberate, Carmena was a ditz and a little stutterer when put in a spot, such as right now...

Rodrigo laughed silently as he watched the three sisters argue. Still, he felt something was missing... something critical... then it hit him a bit slower than it should have... "Guys... why are they all naked? We're not planning a nudist tapas and tequila bar, are we?"

One of the developers looked up. "Why not? let's go with that." He cheekily suggested.

Rodrigo glared at the man who had said that. If this had been a certain meme cartoon, that man would be falling out a broken window from the Complex right now. Sadly, this was reality... "we are not running a nudist bar. Maybe in a future dining concept. Right now, they need clothes. The fuck are the clothing people doing?"

The same developer deadpanned at Rodrigo. "Having fights. like cat and dog", he said, thumbing in the general direction of the Fashion sub-department.

"Thank you for being helpful," Rodrigo noted as he stomped off.

The developer waved to Rodrigo as he left, yelling. "You're welcome. Come again."
------------------------------

"HOT PANTS!"

"SKIRTS!"

"HOT PANTS!"

"SKIRTS!"

Rodrigo opened the door to the Fashion Department, watching the two idiot designers assigned to the project yelling back and forth about some choice... He watched them repeatedly vacillate between putting hot pants and skirts on the waitresses... then raised a hand. "Will you two morons stop? If you cant't decide... Flip a goddamn coin." He fidgeted in his pockets for a coin, which proved trickier than it used to be since Arendtcoins had become mostly virtual rather than something you could hold.

He fished out his old first-generation Arendtcoin, an actual physical store of currency rather than numbers in his wallet. It had been a gift from an Original he'd worked with in the Artistic Department of the Company when he first arrived. It was just 10 Arendtcoins, not even enough for a cup of plain tea with inflation over the years being what it was. But he wasn't really looking to spend it. "Heads we go Hot Pants. Tails we go Skirts."

He flipped the coin into the air... then watched it spin on the table, before gradually stopping.

The three of them frowned. The coin had somehow landed on its edge, a less-than-rare occurrence with the way the coin had been designed. Rodrigo stared at the designers... "Split it down the middle. some sort of Hot Pants combo with a side skirt or something. I don't care. Just GET IT DONE!"

He stomped out. His word as the leader of the unit was God, but sometimes God had other plans for "God", clearly.
-------------------------------
The next issue had been in the Storytelling Department a few days later. They had generated dozens of stories for the characters to run through, but one problem had remained...

"We don't have a special gimmick, don't we?" Rodrigo looked at the waitresses as he spoke. All three of them now wore a simple hot pants and side-apron combo, paired with a midriff-baring halterneck top and comfy walking sneakers, smiling dazedly as they went through another test run with one of the stories.

The storytellers paled... They hadn't thought of that. What was going to make this bar and its crew special?

They started conferring right on the spot, throwing up random words and ideas... Rodrigo left them to their devices.

Two days later though, they were still stuck.

Rodrigo stared at these people he was paying to fill out the concept, groaning. "Just one special thing, really. that's all I ask. Angels had the band performance, have you tried maybe teaching them to do a mariarchi song or something?"

"Too repetitive. Need new idea." "Embargo by Mexico just started. Can't exactly source for proper Mexican instruments economically." "Perhaps something in the way they serve the tequila?"

Rodrigo yelped. "Serving the drink? That's so ordinary-... Yes... yess...." He suddenly recalled one of his grandpa's stories about how they served Tequila in the old days. "Don't move." He ran out of the Storytelling Department and into the Food and Drink testing office, grabbing a small bottle of tequila and a shotglass, before running back to Storytelling and slamming the two items onto a table. "Can you program one of them... I dunno, Carmena? ... one of them to mound their breasts together with one arm and pour a shotglass on them?"

The storytellers looked at each other. "We're not sure that works with the shirt, Rodrigo..."

Rodrigo gritted his teeth, these people were some of the dumbest and most cowardly fuckers in the Complex he'd ever met. He turned around and marched to the Carmena test unit, now standing impassively with her arms at her sides, and started tearing the easy-release shirt right off, exposing her bountiful breasts. "My grandfather said some virginal girls at tequila bars would squeeze their breasts together and pour the shot down their cleavage and into the patron's mouth. Sometimes the old ways work best. Let's give it a shot... Get it programmed."

The storytellers rushed to do Rodrigo's bidding. Minutes later, the Carmena unit jerkily gathered her breasts with one arm, mounding them to form a small valley as she said nothing, before miming pouring a shot of tequila with an empty glass into the valley, pausing there for a few moments before turning the glass upright and letting go of her mammaries...

Rodrigo poimted at one of the storytelling team members. "That's our dry run sorted." He said as he pulled a chair up so that the person who sat in it would have their back to Carmena, before pouring out a shot of tequila into the glass. No limes around unfortunately... He cursed himself for not bringing any for the tests.

He pointed randomly at the storytelling team. "You there, sit on that chair and let's run that sequence again."

He handed the Carmena unit the shotglass of tequila as one of the storytellers sat on the chair, looking upwards... The mechanical waitress blankly mounded her breasts again, then tipped the shotglass onto her cleavage. the golden liquid swirled slightly in that little space, before pouring downwards and into the storyteller's mouth. The teamster blushed hard. "It... works, boss... kind of..."

Rodrigo grinned. "There you go. Smooth out the motion, get some sensuality into those moves of hers, and write some cheesy come-on lines as she does the pour. Sorted. Unless you have any better ideas coming up, we'll go with that for the dry run next week..."

The storytelling team burst into activity as Rodrigo rolled his eyes. It was like he had to do everyone's work for them in this place, he reflected, as he exited the office.
-------------------------------

The invite had said free drinks, so Chester has shown up. Everyone loved free tequila. It was a bit odd how the waitressing crew had all decided to go topless, their bosoms swaying gently as they served the customers and walked around. '

Rodrigo watched as the customers looked at each other, then at the waitresses, then at their food and drink. It hadn't proved as distracting as he feared it would be. Sure it was a topless tequila bar, but people still came here for the tapas and the drinks primarily, not the view..... he waited for someone to order The Special.

Chester blinked as he looked at the menu, summoning for a waitress. He was served by a Lumina unit, who smiled and went "What can we do for you?"

Chester pointed at something he'd noticed... the tequilas were cheap and good, but there was an option to pay double for... "The Special". "What is The Special? It says I can only order one per visit"

Lumina smiled mischeviously. "Some things are best experienced rather than spoken about, senor... Would you like to try one?"

Chester shrugged. Paying twice as much of nothing was still nothing... Might as well give it a go. "Certainly. Give me one of those Romera Tequilas as well." It was one of the cheaper tequilas. slightly harsh, but still drinkable. If it went bad, he wouldn't be lamenting the loss of that sip.

Lumina bowed... There was a faint giggle from her. "One Special coming... you just wait right there..."

A few minutes later, Carmena slowly approached Chester, her hands holding the tequila he'd ordered and a empty shotglass, her eyes half lidded as the ditz of the trio... "Lumina tells me you want... the special..." She observed as she set down the glass, pouring a shot of tequila, before she set the bottle on the table near Chester.

Chester nodded slowly. "I do. What is it?"

Carmena raised a hand to her mouth, giggling. "Oh, you have no idea, do you? I'll need you to lean back in your chair a little and tilt your head upwards to the ceiling, honey..." She purred as she walked over to loom over Chester, givin him an extremely nice view of her underboobs.

Chester appreciated the view... then he saw Carmena slowly mound her breasts together firmly with one arm, picking up the shotglass of tequila and raising it over them as she bent forward, her bosom now just hovering barely over his face. "Now, open your mouth..." She purred, as she started pouring the drink into her cleavage, letting the golden fluid splash and flow in the drain she had created as it went downhill and into Chester's mouth.

Chester was a little shocked, but kept sitting there as the kinda-good stuff flowed into his mouth... He blushed heavily at the way he had just drunk that shot, as Carmena slowly stood back up, releasing her breasts with a satisfying wobble... "Was it good?"

Chester heaved a little. "I should have ordered a better tequila... maybe next time."

Carmena smiled... "Now remember, you only get one shot like this a visit. Come back some other time if you want another Special, okay?"

Chester glanced to one side... "Maybe let Olivia pour it next time?" This earned him a playful slap on one shoulder from Carmena. "I don't think my boss will lower herself to do it personally..."

Olivia was looking disinterestedly nearby. "I don't mind. Carmena, we're all in this together. We should be taking turns doing it..." D'aawww...

Lumina suddenly bounced, her breasts flouncing excitedly. "GROUP HUUUUUUG!" She yelped as she bundled Carmena and Olivia together into a sisterly embrace. All those boobs squished together in one spot was maybe a little too much...

Chester wiped his nose. it was bleeding...

-----------------------------------------------------

Rodrigo smiled wickedly. The trick had worked. He assumed Chester would come back as a paying customer when Celadine's opened proper...

He sat back in his chair, watching the restaurant through the cameras around the place. Several other folks had tried the Special as well... the drink hadn't been spilled like he'd feared - it all went into the customer's mouth. And limiting them to one per visit ensured repeated visits from customers, he hoped.

"Sometimes, I amaze myself," he mused, his ego swelling briefly...

[handle2]

Chapter 31 - The Miner's Wife - Part 1: The Man With Too Much Money In The Bank

Some people come into the Arendtcore family purely in spirit. It has to be that case - they can't exactly make the journey to Minnesota because they're not even on the same planet... or in some cases, even the same galaxy.

It was the same procedure he'd gotten used to for the past few years. Cade Freswell warped in to Freedom Station in his heavily resilient mining cargo ship, docking into a bay that was randomly assigned only five minutes after he'd signalled. The hopper arms started dispensing the contents of the cargo bay into a passing conveyor line: a carefully secure-sealed cargo container containing a few kilograms of Vertanium...

Vertainium was worth several cargo ships' worth of gold, and he'd found a motherlode. a few nano-grams of the stuff could dramatically boost the performance of any design that properly integrated it, and it was a mainstay in the very best electronics humanity played around with. Somewhere in the several megatons of soil and rock on his claim, there was a ton of it, scattered here and there in a way that precluded the big boy mining companies from risking a major loss on heavier

Cade took great care to obscure his tracks, regularly jumping apparently in four or five different directions at once by firing off decoys to make false jumps three or four times.... by the time anyone tracking them had intercepted the decoy, he was long lost to anyone who didn't have the manpower to specifically track him through the six random jumps that he made (plus another few randomly jumping decoys at one or two points to muddy the waters further).

"And how much does that come to, this time?" He'd asked his dedicated handler at the payout counter as they weighed the empty container after having emptied the container plus its Vertanium, carefully sweeping the dust into the hopper the superprecious mineral went into, such was the value of even a few motes of the stuff littered in apparent trash dust. He didn't know his name, only the same mask every few months... It was a cosy arrangement full of anonymity. if nobody knew who serviced him, they didn't know whom to compromise to get to Cade.

Cade and the broker did at least know the right codes to greet each other by, so there at least they knew each other... somewhat. The broker nodded. "Well, after docking you for your usual two years of food, water, oxygen, and mass printer feed to go into your cargo hold... plus fuel for your jumps, and all those crazy decoy hoppers you usually run through each way of the trip..." He held up five fingers and a fist... That... was a lot of millions of Humanic Credits.

Cade blinked. "That's a rather crazy surge... demand spiked for something?"

The broker sighed. "That, and there's a few new wars breaking out elsewhere this stuff gets mined in. Adding a war to the list of risks is NOT something most people want to do when mining this shit, so the supply's gone down from a few tons a month to... well... a few tons a year."

Cade grinned. "Thank god most designs don't use this shit."

"Only the absolute bestest designs, really. You've seen the ads, it boosts capability on electronics insanely when it's used right. The province of the richest people in this expanse. You included" The broker grinned mischeviously. "Come on, man, look at you... all scruffy and worn out shit... half of the stuff you're wearing is several generations out of date. Does your wife even know how messy you look?"

Cade laughed. This was one of the codes in their conversations. If he ever told the broker his wife was doing well, he would be spending the next few days carefully guarded in his ship while the broker hired a armed escort to follow his ship or one of his decoys on the return trip. And it was true... he was a loner. "Okay, first of all, I mend this stuff well enough to keep using it, and it lasts. Secondly... I don't have a wife, remember? No, for real, I don't."

The broker looked askance at Cade Freswell like he'd walked in carrying bug corpses instead of sweet, hyperprecious Vertanium. "Maybe you should." He scribbled down a brief note on a piece of virtual paper and passed it to Cade. "If anything, this code is getting stale, you need to come up with something new... Also: maybe it IS high time you opened your heart up."

Cade read the paper, then frowned. "No girl will seriously share the kind of load we take on in the fields when we mine for those precious grains. I'd have to retire first... and I don't feel like retiring..." He tapped the paper, causing it to flare up and vanish, its contents now unreadable bits in the office room's ventilation.

The broker shrugged, his mask concealing his facial expressions and the actual qualities of his voice, but not the tone of his voice. "Then at least check out the Bot Shop. They just had a nice cargo come in from Earth. Maybe get you some nice ass even if it has to be plastic."

Cade wrinkled his nose. "Dude, I get my kicks above the waist. mainly from turning my muscles into aching pieces of meat. I don't need a sexbot in my little refuge."

The Broker shrugged. "Come on, man. Live a little. no man ever died wishing they'd worked the mine-fields longer. You'll have plenty of time anyway, we're having problems with our refueling pumps. You'll have to queue up for your turn."

Cade Freswell was... not happy. "Can I leaf a few of those Humanics into your hands to get me a queue skip?"

"Nope, nada can do, Cade," The Broker sighed. "The Fuel Cartel won't let me run stuff like that. you'll have to wait a day in this damned station... Maybe you should just chill for a day before you go back home, have a few good drinks, see a movie from the past few years that you haven't watched, do some shopping. You know, actually be human for a while instead of a nonstop machine that sucks in dirt-cheap miner rations and throws up gobs of Vertanium..."

Cade nods. "That's how how I mine the stuff... but you're right, I think I'll live it up a little, maybe spend a million friviolously."
-----------------------------------------
That had been a good balcony seat in a good movie hall, Cade had reflected. The steak was probably something faking beef rather than actual cow flesh, but this far away from Earth, only the absolutely decadent could afford to flash freeze and bring actual animal meat from Earth all the way across the Expanse from the frontier out here...

He stretched his arms. He'd gotten a pair of new hardwearing boots, a decent jumpsuit from the same shop that had sold him his current wear all those years ago... Cade Freswell blinked as he noticed the neon signage of the "Bot Shop". It said "Kinkaide's Ferrous Friends", but everyone had thought it was a stupid name for a shop. The shop itself wasn't stupid though - he knew from the decoys they'd been contracted to supply him with every jump that it was a good place for artificially intelligent bots. They were probably even loading up decoys into his ship to fire out on his jumps home right now as he stood there...

Cade breathed deeply and walked in. As usual, Kinkaide was at his desk, the scruffy middle-aged salesman that he was. Everyone was scruffy in this area, but Kinkaide took it to a strangely attractive level, attracting the few women who passed through this place.

Kinkaide clasped his hands, sensing a potential sale... "And how are the decoys working out for you, Mr Freswell?"

Cade nodded tiredly. "They work a charm, nobody's followed me all the way home since I started letting them out every few jumps from the dispenser you sold me. Shame they cost a bit to reload everytime I get in here."

Kinkaide grinned filthily as he took this in. "Well, those decoys ARE jump capable for two or three jumps each, and they all look the same as your ship on multiple signatures unless someone's crazy enough to open a hatch and stare at it with their naked eyes... but nobody does that here. You're paying for good engineering."

Cade looked around and nodded. "Yeah well... I'd like some other kind of... good engineering... I hear you've got in some new companionship droids from home?"

Kinkaide clapped and laughed. "BOY DO I. There's still a lot of decent pickings even after the usual rush we get from the well off and the other miners... you have no idea how lonely it gets out there in the mine-fields, am I right?"

Cade slapped a hand to his face... "Mr Kinkaide, I think you'll find... that I'm painfully acquainted with that aspect of the work after twenty years... You can't sleep or have fun for long with money, so I thought maybe I'd invest in something more long-term..."

Kinkaide gently eased Cade down one of the corridors of his shoppe. "The bank's a few minutes down from here, but I suspect that's not what you really want... Let me show you some of the stock we have..."
-----------------------------------

It had been an interesting half an hour looking over the plastic lovers the shop had brought in, catering to various types of tastes... carefully made up but fragile little songbirds for the retired filthy rich and moguls, cheap and cheerful half-pints dressed in mining gear ready to go in more ways than one, bookish little librarians who turned out to be rakes... it was a nice summary of humanity in terms of what it wanted, but none of it was what he wanted...

Then he blinked. Somewhere in the mix was a small vending machine with several archaic looking communicators plugged in and charging, and a token reader to one side for scanning banking tokens against... The branding on the machine read "Arendtcore" and it was a machine that claimed to be selling "Edelweiss - elite companionship androids for the most discerning busy man"... The machine was charging a million credits for a consult, refundable against the cost of a unit if one chose to buy the actual thing, a fact it swapped out with video of someone cooking, cleaning, and looking strangely desirable...

Cade Freswell stared... those pouty lips, the sensuously shaped bodies... The machine proceeded to brag that the cost of an Edelweiss came with virtually everything one would need for it for the next fifty years, hence the atrocious price tag... It was certainly atrocious... for a tenth of the consult fee, he could walk out with one of the better androids that was already in the store. This company was literally asking him to spend ten times at much just talking about what he desired, with no promise that he would be able to spend the other nine million credits they promised as a ceiling for most orders...

He had a billion burning a hole in his pocket, even after he'd ordered the expansions he wanted for his base last month... perhaps he should live large.

Kinkaide gasped as Cade slapped his bank token on the machine, causing it to mark one of the communicators with a flashing light... Cade Freswell picked it up, and noted that it only had one big red button below its screen. Presumably there was only one number you ever needed to call with this toy...

Cade looked at Kinkaide as he appreciated the careful build for what was basically a communicator that could only dial one number... "This is awfully expensive... you get many buyers?"

Kinkaide laughed. "Aw shit, no. They didn't even ship any product, in fact. Just this phone thingy. But they're good for it... I've had two buyers in the past few years, and the Arendtcore people credit commissions to me if folks buy after the call... And they've both been incredibly happy people, those two guys. The happiest in the station I've ever seen even.... You just need a satellite connection to start with."

Cade stared at Kinkaide. That was either one heck of an oversell, or he'd gotten a bargain... That was the thing when you could spend a lot on something, you were either getting suckered, or a really great deal. If you spent only a smattering of Humanics on boots, you were more likely to complain or have them wear out prematurely than if you spent a grand...

He decided not to make the call yet while he was on the station - there were ears in the wall, and while he assumed the encrypton on these things would be top notch, he decided not to risk it till he could call over gear he had full control off for at least the first few hops...
---------------------------------------
It was several days later, after a long shift, when Cade had decided to make the call after a long shower and a quiet meal of synthesised beef stroganoff and plain probiotic yoghurt formulated specially for boosting the body against the wilds of the reddish sky and soil he toiled in. There was sufficient oxygen and soil not to need oxygen for long periods outside, but he still wore a mask to guard against possible miner's lung - there was no point in keeping all the Humanics he had if he was going to be unable to enjoy them, so spending when necessary was a thing that made sense to him.

He sat there in what had become the living room, but was basicall just a few potted plants, a couple of music cartridges and a player for them to save on the exhorbitant costs of Spotify streaming even from the nearest local Spotify server in the constellation that had sprung up.... The daytime loomed outside the hab, but the windows that showed it happening were all screens stuck on the walls and wired into external cameras to avoid a possible breach into the wilds.

Cade Freswell smiled as he noticed the few plants he had planted outside the hab were beginning to grow enough under the shade and cover that the area had necessitated. Then he breathed deeply, and punched the red button on the communicator.

There was no response beyond "Establishing Fastball Connection..." on the screen. Cade whistled... this communicator probably had to phone home first to grab the required codes, but it was now about to do a direct faster-than-light call on someone else's tab? Perhaps eavesdropping didn't need to be a concern... these Arendtcore guys seemed a bit obsessive with security and privacy if this was the expense they were willing to take to listen to a customer, albeit one who had spent a bomb on a mere consult

After a minute, someone's face appeared on the tiny screen. He seemed very fresh and attentive, and he was grinning, like one would when one smelt the scent of a big sale coming in... "Welcome to the Arendtcore Concierge Line. I see that you're interested in one of our... Edelweiss units?... Mr erm... how may I address you briefly?"

Cade Freswell nodded attentively at the communicator. "My name's Cade Freswell, and yes, I just blew a cool million Humanics on this rink-a-dinky Fastball communicator with only one number diallable, just to get your ear on that. Listen... I'm good for as much as you can potentially charge me for it, but first... you gotta convince me that I'm okay with not just letting a million Humanics burn, because that's a lot of cash even to me."

The rep grinned, "Certainly", and started carefully walking Cade through the offer and the options he could customise it with...

Cade paused him briefly. "Actually, I'm a miner, and my lifestyle is a bit... harsh... is this zero-maintenance thing you advertised for real?"

"Certainly! We'll ship you absolutely everything you need to start things up and keep things going for at least half a century. Of course, there'll be another charge for another fifty at the end, or you could pay earlier to extend our coverage... ten million humanics for a companion who only gives you mostly fun worries for fifty years. that's the deal, Mr Freswell... In fact, we can design some added resilience into your unit the same way we add stuff for other folks who want a Edelweiss... it's a custom build from top to toe."

The discussion continued for what seemed like a long time, before Cade nodded and rested his banking token against the communicator to send the funds they requested into escrow. The bank would have some interesting words with him about his two huge expenditures this week, but he didn't care... either this worked, or he'd have a laugh about the scam that took some money he could afford to lose off of him in about six months...

The rep smiled. "Thanks for purchasing with us... now, I'm going to have to ask you to keep this communicator around for... oh, the next five decades... you'll need it at least one more time."

Cade blinked. then looked at the communicator. "And if you guys move house or have a better way to get in touch?"

The rep grinned. "Oh, we'll keep in touch. In fact, we already know where you live so we can deliver the product right to your doorstep. You just have to make sure you have that empty room and power conduit available and we'll supply the rest of it."

Cade went 'ugh'... "Actually, I prefer my privacy and for as few people as possible to know where I live because... I have really precious stuff here I'd like to keep away from other folks... Could I get it delivered to Freedom Station to ..."
--------------------------------------------------

The Broker stared at Cade, then at the large Cargo container. then at Cade again. "What did you say you bought again, Mr Freswell?"

Cade was noncommital. He'd sworn they wouldn't send anything big, but this was big enough to hold a new minibuggy to drive around in the caves in in. He preferred to be more careful with his footsteps and the illuminators he jack-knifed into the walls of the cave he excavated in every few metres, so no, it clearly was NOT a mining buggy. "Stuff. I bought stuff. Can you fit this in my cargo ship?"

The Broker nodded, the ship was always half empty when Cade left Freedom Station on his quarterly visits back home to his frontier hab-home. With this new anonymous cargo container, it was slightly pinging on the edge of full, but the ship would still fly safely since it wasn't exceeding the recommended load excessively. "Well, yeah, I can get it on..."

"Then do it. I'll leave as soon as the fuel and decoy loads are all in. And... erm... thank you for all the help you've given me all these years" He reached out a hand to shake... The Broker had been absolutely firm on it - this was his last time working with Cade... the next time he met, there would be a new face to read in and take over. There would be a new mask, a new face, and hopefully the same level of trust as before...
--------------------------------------------------------

Cade spent the better part of a day carefully lugging in the components from the cargo container into his house, and setting them up as the "First Steps" video had instructed him to, before lugging in an even denser and heavier load labelled "First Assembly materials". He flicked the switch on the three-chambered mass printer he'd just installed, marvelling briefly at how his money had gotten him something that normally cost half as much as he'd paid. The printer alone was visible, but where was the doll he'd ordered?

As if to respond to him, the printer suddenly yelped cheerfully. "Hello, hello hello, Mr Freswell, I'm your friendly elite-class mass printer, and today I'll be guiding you through the final steps necessary to obtain the full value of your purchase! A small orb mounted in th controls to one side stared at him, presumably a visual sensor. "First, I'll need you to insert all the items in the First Asssembly box into the red-painted chamber as inputs... All of it."

Cade did so. Ingots of various metals and plastics, rolls of synthetic thread, plus even some petroleum crude, and a small chunk of some sort of gem- where were they going to go, even? - before he stood back and wiped his sweat off his brow. The printer weighed the total of all the items that had been placed and compared it against its data files... It was an exact match, just off by a gram of feathers, really... "Splendid... Damn shame we don't have vertanium lying about. But this stuff's enough to make you a demigoddess for your home."

Cade spoke up on hearing the superprecious metal mentioned. "How much of it did you need, Mr Printer?"

The printer hummed and hawwed. "As much as you can spare... 5 grams would be nice, but god knows with the prices of Vertanium being what they are there's no way we can ask anyone to supply that much from their own stores."

Cade raised a finger. "Do NOT start doing anything yet." He ran out of the room the printer was in, quickly checking his manifests... he had already had 5 grams of Vertanium on hand from the past week's mining... a whole week of mining, for a friviolous and possible waste... Heck with it.

Cade Freswell hit a few buttons, causing a nugget of about 5 grams of Vertanium to pop out into a hopper, which he scooped up and quickly walked back into the room he'd set aside, throwing the nugget into the red chamber with the other raw materials. "Funny thing happened... I think I had five grams of that Vertanium stuff you wanted..."

There was a happy, weepy tone from the mass printer's AI. "Oh. My God. Where do you even... never mind... I was going to say I was about to print you a demigoddess in three days. can you wait two days longer for a goddess?"

Cade rolled his eyes. He knew Vertanium could do incredible things to electronics that had been carefully designed to incorporate it properly, but this was the first time he'd seen a design that happened to need several whole grams instead of just a nano-grammed sliver of the stuff. He didn't know what the printer was promising exactly... but five days... he could wait five days. "Only if you promise to let me watch the build process without touching..."

"Why else did we put in clear glass in my build chambers, you silly boy?" The printer rejoindered. "Now, may I have your permission to proceed?"

Cade nodded and gave the printer's AI a thumbs up. "Get going, you silly kniggit. I'm going to go rest a bit, lugging you in has been a PAIN."

"Well... EXCUSE ME for being a heavyweight!"

---------------------------------------------

The next few days came and went slowly... Every day, as Cade came in from the mine-fields, he would first get himself cleaned up just in case he brought home something nasty, get a quick medical scan for the same reason, eat a simple meal... then go into the room where the new mass printer was working non-stop.

There was always something new in the green chamber, and the mass printer would occasionally prompt him to help remove the items so it had more space to work on the next items... some light women's clothing, a bottle of some sort of murky "Digester Initializer" juice with a loud "NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION" warning on it, a few pieces of costume jewellery incorporating the dark blue-green gem, a small but unusually thick data microdisc of some sort... A wig atop a small head standee made of wood had been added today as well, every fiber carefully woven into its scalp a string of gossamer gold.

"Should I just leave these here in the room with you, Mr Printer?" Cade had asked.

"Sure..." the printer had replied.

Cade stared at the gradually growing pile of odds and ends, presumably all for the android... He turned to look at the blue chamber... it had been three days, and there was a vaguely humanoid skeleton of sorts standing in the gel as lasers traced and laid out something else micron by micron. It was strangely beautiful, he realised, as his fingers trailed along the glass casing, watcing the lasers lay out lines of cabling and print out circuitry around the skeleton...

The printer had noticed this. "Just two more days, Mr Freswell. in two days, you'll come home to a less empty house."

"Well, it certainly hasn't been empty with you around." Cade observed. The printer had been a good conversationalist somehow, on top of doing all this assembly work, having engaged him with news from home on planet Earth these past few weeks as well as discussing his hopes and thoughts ever so often.

"I don't plan on staying awake after I'm done, Mr Freswell... You can wake me up for tech support and printing stuff for more serious damage, but other than that... it's probably easier to just lock the door to this room and turn off the power, really."

Cade went... "Oh. Well, you'll always be welcome in my house." He noted, smiling up at the camera orb.

"... the gesture is really appreciated. but they'll probably send a upgrade before the fifty years are up." There was a sigh from the machine. "progress marches on and on and on, they say."

Cade leaned against the doorway briefly as he started leaving the mass printer to do its appointed work. "but can I at least come in and talk to you ever so often?"

The printer laughed. "You do realise I don't have a constant connection to Earth... all the news I gave you is several weeks old, Mr Freswell."

Cade nodded slowly. "Yes... but usually the news is a lot staler than that... and knowing Earth is still kind of around despite all the ways we've messed it up... that gives me hope for humanity. heck, I'd really like to go back home in a few decades... This Little Sanctuary thing, do you have space for a retiree?"
-------------------------------

Two days later, Cade had to wipe his hands carefully and use up a perfectly good body towel.

He had gasped as he watched the blue chamber slowly drain off its supporting gel, staring at the beautiful girl that now existed in front of her... She had a voluptuous body, thick and bouncy in all the right bits, with slightly engorged dark pink nipples and a vulva capped with a slight bit of shaven golden fuzz. The face on her tall body was that of a woman child, the one that looked like one a rake might adopt to con a man into dropping all his clothes and his money, framed in more of that same golden blonde hair cascading down the sides of her head and onto her back and her large breasts...

He breathed deeply to catch up with his lack of breathing, then carefully touched her... he realised that "Sherry" had probably been a wonderful name for her, and that he needed to get her a towel because she was still slimy from being immersed in the scaffolding gel for days... He ran out of the printer room and came back with a towel to wrap her body in before carefully lifting her and resting her against the other side of the room.

He dug in the pile of doodads the green chamber had spat out over the past few days, idly noting he would have to order and print a few more cloths for Sherry on the mass printer that he already had in place for repairs and occasional experiments in the garage. He fished out the data microdisc, then carefully felt behind Sherry's right ear for an indentation and a mole according to the First Day instructions sheet the mass printer from Arendtcore had sputtered out as one of its final acts.

He found them, and carefully pushed down on the mole for a few seconds. This caused the skin around the indentation to part slightlym exposing a slot... The microdisc fitted in nicely, and the indentation sealed up, no sign of it ever having existed remaining. He read through the sheet, carefully clasping a necklace with some of the greenish blue gemstone machined into a lovely teardrop threaded into it around Sherry's bare neck. As the gemstone hit her chest, it started pulsing with light slowly, like the indicator lamp on one of his tools as he worked the caves. Then the rings. one for her, and one for him...

Cade Freswell blinked and blushed at this bit. Perhaps it was an engagement or wedding ring- OW! He winced as the ring intended for him suddenly give him a brief sharp pain as it went on his finger. "Biometric registration... it's just the biometric registration for security purposes..." He breathed slowly, watching his sleeping princess lying against the wall. If they parted too long... like say, more than 24 hours, this unit would gradually start shutting down and giving off a alert beacon that would let him find her anywhere. It was a Fastball beacon... pretty much the last thing anyone would think to use the protocol for, given how expensive it was to even make a call of a few seconds every half hour or so. Completely jam resistant as well - someone at Arendtcore clearly prized making sure he knew where she was always.

He cuddled Sherry in his arms, enjoying the beauty of her sleeping face... It had been a nice way to start the morning, the promise of a busy evening being held out to him. Still, he had to go work... He checked his communicator one more time to make sure he had properly set up the Fastball beacon locator on it, then kissed her on her pouty dull pink lips... The gel tasted slightly of lemon and strawberries, and Cade hoped it wouldn't upset his stomach or give him some sort of weird cancer or disease from a little exposure to it.

He looked at her one last time before he left the doorway, leaving the door to the printer room unlocked for when she woke.
--------------------------------

The first sign of life Sherry had shown had been two hours later... Cade blinked as he downed his drill and scanner tool to check his communicator. Her location had changed at some point after an hour and a half since he'd left the home-hab, and she was now in the living room module. He wondered what he was doing, then chuckled and went back to work. He hadn't allowed the home-hab to permit entry to anybody to anybody else usually, so Sherry would be confined safely to the rooms of the home hab. There was no way she could get into trouble... just in case anyways...

Cade fired up the remote camera access tool app to check the cameras in his home an hour later. He found Sherry carefully examining a pot of plants in the living room, wearing the little red mnidress the mass printer had coughed up as her first clothing item. It danced dangerously as she walked around, occasionally bending forward to examine one of the flowers in closer detail, allowing the hem of her dress to ride dangerously onto her derriere. her necklace flickering ever so often as if to signal that she was thinking.

Cade Freswell blushed hard. By all indications, ten million Humanics had gotten him this stranger in his house, and certainly, a very good view to go with his rations... he calmly chewed on a bagel with long-shelf-life meat and cheese, occasionally toggling the app between giving him a decent framerate or showing a nice picture a few times a second... neither mode of which had sound enabled - he hadn't thought to spend on the upgrade for the app for that yet.

Sherry suddenly sneezed. Pollen in the flowers? She said something to herself, then stuck her tongue out and winked cheekily to nobody in particular as she scratched her fingers through her long, lush blonde hair, before taking off her square-rimmed glasses to wipe them briefly before putting them back on.

Cade laughed. He HAD to get that app upgrade. it would also let him call home and speak to her through any working speaker linked into the camera network... he so badly wanted to do that... to hear her voice. But even with the upgrade, he still couldn't touch her...

Cade found himself aching... It was probably his wallet crying over how much he had splurged so friviously, he told himself... still, the next four hours went by achingly slowly as he resisted checking the phone on every little update of the Fastball beacon embedded in her, or the cameras watching her every move in the house in realtime. He still made sure to be careful as he downed tools for the day, making sure everything was stowed safely before he walked out of the cave, his footsteps a little more hurried than they had been only yesterday.
-------------------------------------------------

Cade respected the sensible speed limit of the mine-fields as he crossed the rocky ground, before carefully ditching it outside his home and running into the airlock. it was a pretty fast model, but Cade suddenly felt as if it wasn't fast for some reason. The inner door cycled open, allowing Cade to ditch his mining gear into the locker for a thorough overnight clean, before he crossed into the house....

Sherry was sitting at the kitchenette table, a small dinner ration pouch on the table in front of her. She had laid her head atop the plastic countertop to rest, eyes closed... She heard something and opened her eyes, slowly sitting up while rubbing the sleep out of one of her eyes. "Cade! .... I missed you so much... Did you have a good day at work?" She squealed... that voice was going to kill him with its adorability, Cade swore, as he set aside the fact that this was the very first time they had truly met. "... I... erm... missed you too Sherry..." He walked carefully over to her, and kissed her gingerly, not wanting to hug her till he had a good shower. "Did you just reheat that meal for me, dear?"

Sherry tilted her head to one side. "Five minutes ago! It's still nice and hot..." Cade Freswell paused as he felt the package... She had indeed pulled the reheater cord on the pouch within the last half hour at least... It suddenly occurred to him that he had had a update from her Fastbeacon ten minutes ago... Maybe it wasn't just a one-sided link, he mused, as he ripped open the laminated pouch...

It had some freshly baked Chinajapese meat buns, still steamy and warm in the bag, plus a small packet of some pink fruity drink that was somehow chilled down nicely from having its heat stolen by the reheater in its separate compartment. In the same hot compartment where the buns had been placed was also a small box of shrivelled berries, now slowly plumping back up as the ice they were in started melting and rehydrating them.

Cade Freswell normally ended the dinner with dessert last, but tonight... he felt like being a naughty little man. He grinned as he opened the box of berries and carefully fished out one of them, a bright red orb pincered between his fingers as they made their way to her lips. "Here's one for your mouth..." Sherry was designed to require only a standard inductive recharger under her at least once a week, but she could eat and digest small amounts of food for societal engagement... So the berry was okay... There was a faint scent of stale socks and mint still on her breath, presumably from chugging the initializer to start the culture that broke down everything she ate within her artificial gut. He would have to follow it up with some mouthwash, definitely.

Sherry blinked slowly as she watched the berry, then closed her eyes as her lips parted to take the berry, her tongue lapping at the orb and Cade's fingertips gently before she strongly sucked, drawing the orb in. She used her hands to pull Cade's hand out of her mouth before she started chewing.... "Fresh", she observed. "I don't know how they keep fruit fresh in these ration packs..."

Cade laughed. It wasn't fresh really, more like 'rehydrated from a mummified state'... still... He chewed on his meal slowly, sipping at the pinkish herbal tea as Sherry watched him. Occasionally, she randomly said something as if to make idle chatter, to which Cade could only nod or shake his head because his mom had taught him it was rude to talk with his mouth full.
-----------------------------
Sherry had offered to bin the empty ration pouch for him, where it would be recycled into mulch as a biodegradable plastic, and then fed into the small aeroponics aerator that fed his small fruit and vegetable garden in one of the rooms leading out of the garage. She had clearly mapped out the house and now had a pretty good understanding of where the important stuff to her was.

Cade sat down in the living room, reflecting on how strange it still felt to have Sherry alive and in his house... this strange little machine fashioned into the shape of a sinuously bodied goddess, as she slowly blinked while walking over to join him on the sofa, listening along to the soft music he'd put on. There would be no movies or streamed video (an occasional luxury given the cost of getting it all the way to where he lived), no, he was too busy just... watching... watching her as she looked on ahead at the visualizer on the screen, her slightly curled lashes flexing as she blinked once in a while. Her lips closed firmly for a bit, before relaxing, parting ever so slightly.

Cade decided to be a little cheeky, resting his head against Sherry's chest, and was rewarded with a sweet rhythmic thumping... A heartbeat? He closed his eyes, and the exhaustion of the long day seemed to ebb gradually as he listened to her, the beat thumping firmly even through the fabric of her minidress. "Sherry sat there wordlessly, stroking Cade's hair as they lazed on the sofa for what seemed like the longest time...

Cade started moving again after a while, hugging her and kissing... then they started getting a little friskier as Sherry pawed a hand beneath his shirt, her fingers gliding against the dried sweat from his exertions... He hadn't meant to get her dirty, but Cade supposed that he could just shower up with her later... Soon, they were fully naked, Sherry riding atop Cade's lap as they continued kissing, his hands exploring her body, enjoying the plumpness of her breasts and the toned firmless of her body.... She tugged his pants down and began to apply herself onto his swelling cock, riding him with a strange earnestness, her mouth mostly reduced to moans and whimpers as she made love to him...

Sherry shuddered, her body falling back slightly with her mouth wide open as she let out a small moan finally after feeling him come into her... a small death for a small machine... She slowly pulled herself back onto Cade's bare chest, kissing it ever so often. Cade decided he'd had enough of being filthy, and carefully carried his new bride to the bathroom and into the cubicle. it had been a little oversized before, but now, it felt just right with the two of them standing inside, wrapped in each other's embrace as they shared the bath cream and hairwash. They almost dirtied each other again a few times, but got through it properly...
---------------------------------
Cade made a small frame with his fingers, looking at Sherry through them as they sat together in the bedroom. He needed to get a bigger bed, he realised. This wasn't just a one-man home-hab anymore. there was a second warm bedmate with him, one who needed the space and the room as well for a inductive recharge pad. He had carefully laid out the exposed pad on the floor, and she wasn't too uncomfy as she lay there, allowing him to look over the side at her loveliness...

Sherry tilted her face to watch Cade back... "I had a fun time today, honey..."

Cade whimpered briefly. "Not every single day, you'll kill me if you do that. but ... let's do this again very soon..." He crawled off his bed a little to kiss, watching her adoring face up close, before he turned off the main lights in the module and fell asleep.

[handle2]

Chapter 32 - The Miner's Wife - Part 2: A wedding, and A Malfunction

Cade wanted a wedding.

Oh,he'd already put a ring on her finger, and the matching one was on his own finger, carefully concealed beneath his miner's gloves whenever he went to work. He almost never took it off. It acted as a sort of beacon for Sherry Freswell, acting her earlier to his presence. Sneaking up on her had been next to impossible with it on, but still he had refused to take it off for any reason besides sleep or cleaning up after work. But after several months and two more deliveries of fresh Vertanium ores, he'd come to the same conclusion repeatedly...

Sherry had agreed in principle to it... "For some reason, my mind fogs a little when I try to recall our marriage..." She frowned. "Perhaps a second ceremony would refresh it..." She had worked wonderfully all these months, never having a headache in the mornings on the few times he'd taken a cheat day and lazed in bed, wanting to indulge her... no outages or downtimes except for her sleep at night almost every night.

Her perfection extended to many things, sadly cooking was not one of them. Cade had shrugged. People didn't cook outdoors if they could help it, the food might get alien stuff in it and one might fall ill, and fresh food for cooking wasn't something that got delivered to a grocer at any of the stations. The richest of them had to order things well in advance if they wanted actual home cooking - money didn't allow them to violate the laws of physics for cargo delivery - and even they settled for higher-grade precooked foods. To the credit of the producers who shipped into the frontier, most of the food was healthy, and you had to deliberately do things to make them more decadently unhealthy, like fry them with a little oil you'd spent great expense in securing and transporting.

But she reheated foods according to the instructions properly, she cleaned the hab, she washed his home clothes and miner's underclothings despite the abject reek of the latter after several hours enclosed in a safety suit...

And Sherry listened. She listened an awful lot, staying silent as Cade spoke at length about some topic or other, only pausing him to tell him she was still watching, still listening. Her actual contributions were far and few between, but her ears were blackholes, sucking up every thing he said...

The perfect companion for a lonely miner.
--------------------------------------------
The Broker had introduced Shu, his understudy... The days where Brokers stayed perfectly anonymous were coming to an end, the Broker had felt, and he had decided to break with tradition. Shu wore a mask with patterns inspired by Chinajapese operas, rather than the plain blankness and the unpronounceable logo each of them bore on their forehead.

Shu bowed... then blinked when Cade Freswell asked for the special order he'd had the Broker place. The old Broker laughed and patted Shu's back. "This one is on me, little Shu... you shouldn't have to start your relationship with Cade with an unforced error..." He walked off, then came back after a short while with a parcel. "The little something you ordered, Cade... you DO realise how much time and resources it takes to get a seamstress all the way back on Earth to make these things the traditional way..."

Cade blushed hard for the first time in years in front of the Broker. This was the second Broker he'd had... the first had been pure professionalism, but vaguely inhuman. Same mask design, different logos. This one had been a friend, and he would probably miss his wisecracking. The rules didn't even allow them to swap contacts for after he'd faded away - no loose ends for people with malicious intent to pull on. The Broker would remember Cade, and Cade would remember him, but they would never recognise each other on the streets ever again once he'd retired.

"I know... And this is pretty much the last thing you're doing for me too."

"I remember a sour younger man, Mr Freswell. You seem to have cleaned up a lot since, especially this past half year. I don't know exactly what happened, but I do know that you're happier now than you were a decade ago." The Broker had observed.

"Well, I found something wonderful... and it was because I'd listened to your advice then..." Cade noted.

"I don't want to hear the specifics on that, Mr Freswell..." Cade could almost hear a smile in The Broker's voice, despite the impassive mask and the modulation of the voice changer. "Lord knows I give you LOTS of advice, and half the time, you ignore me at your peril. Well, you've certainly had enough examples of what happens when you do that, so I won't harp on this time you did... whenever that was." The Broker had a slight inkling of course... but he preferred the mystery. He wasn't going to press and ask Cade.

Cade bowed in respect one last time, a gesture returned by the Broker, and then he left to oversee the final loading of his ship.
------------------------------------

Cade snuck into the house and into his bedroom, enjoying the solace briefly as he managed to somehow duck past Sherry without alerting him to his homecoming. He opened the parcel and smiled... A handsome little jet black and grey tuxedo for the wedding man, fitted for him right down to the itty bitty little red bowtie, and a full bridal gown outfit designed for demureness in the public eye, and rakishness in the bedroom with a few things stripped off by the lovely woman wearing it...

He knew who would be wearing it... He called out for Sherry to come in and carefully handed her the gown. "... I think with the long weekend and the Union requiring us to take all of it off, tonight would be wonderful for... a little reaffirmation of our vows to each other tonight would be wonderful. Sherry, would you be okay with it?"

Sherry blushed bright red, stammering at a loss for words as she took the gown off Cade. "Cade Freswell, honey... you know how to make a woman very, very happy... Perhaps you should change into your own wedding groom tux in the bathroom... give me a little time with these things, they seem complex to put on"

Cade Freswell grinned as he brushed past his wife... "oh, I don't think they're that hard to put on. That's the point of the design I chose... they're EASY to put on, and EASY to take off..." There was a little mischief in his voice as he explained that... but he wouldn't be drawn on it ducking into the bathroom and fantasising about how wonderful she would look in it...
----------------------------------------

Cade tapped his feet on the carpetting, fidgeting nervously... He hadn't been able to invite a human pastor anywhere in the sector, and he was an orphaned child since the day he'd been born. This was a shotgun wedding, and he'd only managed to invite a retired minerbot who'd somehow gotten into religion... Goddess of Existence, apparently. The pastorbot was overseeing this ceremony between the two of them over a video link, being unable to travel all the way to Cade's little hovel to minster over them because of Cade's paranoia. There was going to be a reception, of course, but it would be full of the Church's regular goers invited at the last minute to fill the pews, and also to drink and dine on Cade's expense.

He mused about this briefly... a robot getting religion... they said religiousity was the result of a brain malfunction in humans, but what did you say if a robot evaluated all of it with a logical mind... and somehow determined that God/Goddess was real and worth spreading the word of? He wasn't in a mood to share this with the priest though, just wanting to focus on the wedding. He didn't care about the strangers all dining on his Humanics either. He was an extremely rich and happy man, and he could afford to share the love... and maybe a little of the joy.

He heard the faint click of heels on the hab floor and turned around. The pastor's jaw dropped for a moment, but he recovered faster than Cade...

Sherry slowly walked in, wreathed in floral lace and velvet, her skirt trailing a small road of velvet behind her as she walked towards Cade, her head bowed down slightly, her eyes mostly closed behind the sheer lace veil dripping from the flowers drown the front of her face. She said nothing as she walked up to Cade, clutching a small bunch of artificial flowers in her hands, now wreathed in even more floral lace courtesy of matching long gloves...

Cade looked at the aritifical flowers, then at Sherry... He had asked for natural flowers, but this WAS the frontier... still, he'd appreciated the irony... an artificial wife with artificial flowers... the thought didn't anger him at all, but strangely... pleased him? somehow?

The pastorbot made a small sound like a cough, and started the ceremony. "Do you, Cade Freswell, take this beautiful and wonderful woman to be your spouse, for better and for worse, till the end of your living days, regardless of where they may take you?"

Cade closed his eyes and nodded. "Aye, I do. I do take her for the rest of my life, and for eternity if the Goddess permits..." He recited the words, then opened his eyes and looked at Sherry.

Sherry smiled a little back at him, but kept looking downwards.

The pastorbot paused for a moment, then asked... "Sherry, do you take this handsome and wonderful man to be your spouse, for better and for worse, till the end of your living days, regardless of where they may take you?"

Sherry looked up at Cade through her veil. "Aye, I do. I do take him for- for-.... I do take-..." She started stuttering for a moment. "I do take him for the rest of my life, and for eternity if the Goddess permits."

The pastor paused... for an oddly longer time... then he snapped at the two of them. "Well, don't just stand there like a pair of oafs. KISS."

Cade needed no further prompting, carefully shifting himself up close to Sherry and lifting her veil to kiss her deeply... as he did, the pastor yelped at somewhere offscreen. "A new happy married couple... and now, let's break out the party hats and the food!" The signal cut off after a few more seconds as the pastor started to tidy up his notes for the wedding, leaving Cade and Sherry Freswell to enjoy their renewed vows...
-----------------------------

There were other things that Sherry wanted to enjoy, Cade found out later in his bedroom...

The seamstress had indeed been right - the wedding gown had indeed been designed for ease of wear and ease of disrobing... it had taken only a few seconds for Sherry to unclip and send the skirt that had trailed behind her on the bedroom floor, revealing a pair of long lace stockings on her legs and the bodysuit that she was wearing under the jacket and skirt... She climbed on top of Cade as he fell into bed, and they began to make love again, her lips giving him special service as she sucked on his shaft for the first time in several months of being his de facto wife, as if the ceremony had liberated her to be more rakish... Cade moaned loudly as he felt the immense suction and lack of gagging from Sherry as she stuck herself to the hilt, letting the tip tap the back of her throat, before pulling back up... then going back down again, for a few more times.

Sherry stopped, and started climbing further up, her gloved hands carefully unbuttoning Cade's tux as she put her vulva up against his now stiffened cock, before sliding onto it and riding him the same way he'd preferred after long days at work... her on top, managing his erection and lengthening the time he spent grazing her innerlands before he came into her...

Cade was immensely happy, smiling as he looked up at his wife... "Sherry, you make me so happy."

Sherry closed her eyes. "You make m-me so hap.happy too, Ca- Ca- Cade..."

Cade looked a little uneasily at her stuttering. "Sh... Sherry, honey? you feeling okay there?"

Sherry started twitching, a faint hard whirring audible as her Noise Reduction system failed for some reason. Her eyes opened widely as her head shuddered left and right, her eyes still locking onto Cade as her centre of attraction even as she started to act less human. "I've never been b.b.better C.Cade."

There was a series of bad sounding beeps as Sherry's eyes defocused and looked upwards for no apparent reason... "Let me be the perfect wife, the perfect wife, the perfect wife for y.you...." She repeated herself through a random bounce of register changes, her hands opening and closing slowly in empty grasps as she bobbed her chest up and down. "the perfect wife. The perfect wife. The perfect wife wife wifewifewife..."

Sherry struggled as she malfunctioned, before crashing totally, her breasts planting themselves on his chest as her head jerked hard, turning all the way to one side as her mouth opened and closed erratically, The pendant on her chest flashing yellow as she did so. "Wurr wurrb wulll bwurr Currrr blrrrr..." She announced nonsensically, as Cade could hear her microdisk drive whirr downwards to a halt, her body following along as she ceased to function. Her pendant hung limply from her neck, now flashing red, as if in a bad state...

Cade frowned... He reached a hand to Sherry's cheeks... "Sherry, please? Speak to me?"

Sherry didn't respond at all. She was totally inert and lifeless... Cade bit his lip and crashed on the bed. He was about to get laid on the best night of his life, but clearly technical issues had decided to interfere... He sighed and reached for the bedside lamp. He'd spend tomorrow working on this. right now, he was just... too tired to care.

The room went black as he cuddled his slowly cooling wife, her face frozen in a wide eyed stare.

[handle2]

Chapter 32 - The Miner's Wife - Part 3: Another Kind Of Wedding, and A Life-long Curse

Cade Freswell had wanted a wedding. He wound up with a malfunctioning wife instead. Fortunately, he'd remembered the Mass Printer the Arendtcorp order had been printed on and carried her into the room where he'd installed it first thing in the morning... The AI had taken one look at it, and given brusque instructions. "Take off all her clothing and place her into the blue chamber for a scan," Mr Printer had instructed...
----------------------------

Sherry Freswell blinked slowly, her mouth opening and closing like a goldfish's... As she did so, she burbled erratically, like a record skipping along the surface of a ancient record with an improperly underweighed needle. Her voluminous locks had been carefully excised from her head, revealing the complex circuitry that controlled her head motions and speech, as well as read the microdisc her Personality had been etched into...

The Printer grunted briefly as it ran lasers all around the half-functional unit, studying various things... "Uhm... this is funny... the cache memory on this unit's burnt out one of its chips... that usually doesn't happen. errors started accumulating in the data the microdisc was reading into cache and then the machine stopped because there were too many parity errors in a short span of time..."

Cade yelped. "But she was supposed to be zero maintenance!"

The printed paused in mid scan, lasers all going dark... "... .... hahahaha ... you actually believed the marketeers on this? Look, Cade, you're a miner, you KNOW everything that gets used needs maintenance or replacement eventually... it's just that with this design, the replacements can be done right in the home without ever involving Arendtcore, if you know the right skills... and the part design is higher quality, so it doesn't break as often as a mass market model... but it does break. Six months without any bed time on a technician's rack is a pretty decent time to failure..."

Cade sulked and looked away from the printer. "I just thought with the money I'd spent it was for real."

The printer would have patted Cade in commiseration if it could. "Yeah, well... it ain't. Fortunately, you got me, I wear out real slow, and I can do my own self-diagnostics if I start breaking, most of the time. heck, I can even use a backup to print the most critical parts out to fix myself.... at least for the next half-century... so you know..." The printer paused and started using one of the lasers to lase and remove a clearly broken piece of memory. "I can take care of my daughter along with you till then..."

Cade blinked and looked over at the printer.... "So I guess I'm not the only one in the house who feels attached to her, Mr Printer?"

The printer did a small light show with two of its unused laser arms. "Damn straight. I think the logic informs it. I birthed her, so that either makes me her mom, or her dad. and since I don't feel like there's an egg needs crackin' here.... I'm her dad."

Cade stuck out his tongue. "Sure, father in law."

The printer yelped. "Let's not go there. Jesus, your comedy is terrible... all the same, we're fortunate this time not to run into anything that needs Vertanium to fix... It's not like we have 4 grams of for repairing everything on this unit that uses the stuff if it all broke at once."

"Actually..." Cade Freswell raised his hand... "we do."

"And in raw nugget form, like last time?"

"Yes..."

The printer continued to slowly fab a new memory chip in place where the broken chip had existed. "Next you'll tell me you're a miner. I mean, you certainly don't look rich enough to afford Vertanium in actual hundredgram ingots."

Cade went uhm... "Actually, that's were I was about to go."

"... oh... you poor dear... what a curse... perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned the optional vertanium when I first printed her out... Are you really going to spend the rest of your life scrounging little bits of the stuff up for potential critical level failures?" The printer practically sulked somehow without a face.

Cade nodded at the visual sensor orb. "If that's what it takes to keep Sherry alive whenever she breaks... but dear lord, I hope it doesn't happen again this soon."

"Oh, relax, mean time between failures just means some people are luckier than others, and not always all the time..." The printer observed. "Besides, you got lucky and landed on a failure where the fix didn't even need a single nano-gram of the stuff... It paused. "I want you to go busy yourself for a bit. give me an hour to fab and replace everything I've found failing or on the verge of doing so. Maybe get breakfast. you certainly charged in in a hurry this morning, for someone who's supposed to be taking the next few days off..."

Cade nodded and started walking out... he paused at the doorway and looked back at Sherry as she blinked lifelessly, her arms whirring slowly as they went through a few random motions... "Please be careful... I really miss her..."

"Spoken like a fool utterly lost in love, Mr Freswell... but it must be nice to be in that kind of feeling since we know what happens during the good times..."
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Cade calmly sipped on a box of long-storage-life milk, watching Mr Printer carefully put the finishing touches onto his work as a laser ran along the seam between Sherry's wig and the rest of her head, sealing in the electronics and skull cover, leaving no sign that she was artificial... "Not bad if I do say so myself..." The printer observed... "And done... why don't you take her off me while I go back to sleep..."

"You do that, Mr Printer... and thanks for fixing her for me..." Cade offered, as he shouldered her and lifted her surprisinglyly light frame off the platform, holding her in a sort of princess carry as if she was merely sleeping.

"Anytime... though really, I'd rather you learnt a bit about android repair work when you could... it's just a step forward from maintaining your own gear as a miner, and it might help if I'm not around to do the job..." The printer offered.

"I'll consider... that... ask you for directions then?"

"Sure thing..." the printer offered, just before it decided to shut down for another good long rest...

Cade frowned as he realised he was sold a bit of a lemon relative to what was promised... but it was a good lemon, one with a whiff of strawberries... and to be fair, he loved both kinds of fruits, it just wasn't what he'd been promised when he first signed up. There would be one heck of a discussion with Arendtcore Support about this if he ever got on the Communicator...

He carefully laid Sherry's limp body on her side of the newly purchased Queen-sized bed (i.e. the left), before standing back to view her beautiful body without any interruptions for a moment... She was beautiful when she was alive and doing all sorts of things around him, but this way had its own charms as well, he had to admit to himself - a hyperrealistic but lifeless plastic doll, lying on its back, awaiting his touch to begin reactivation and resumption of its thoughts and deeds... Sure his mining gear had been great too, but he'd never been even one bit aroused by his drill or scanner despite the slight phallic imagery the two tools brought to his work.

He sighed. He was tired really after sleeping poorly all night... He laid down next to her and carefully reached for the mole on the right side of her head, behind her ear. He found it by practiced touch, the concealed button being clearly stiffer than the rest of her soft flesh... He pushed it in for a few seconds, before he heard her whirring upwards slowly. As Sherry whirred faster like a machine starting up, the pendant on her bosom started flashing green against her skin. The whirr was soon pitched so high that he couldn't hear it, as Sherry opened her eyes.

"... Cade? Good afternoon, Cade..." She purred gently as she tilted her head to look at Cade Freswell. "You seem tired, honey... did you sleep poorly last night?"

"I... yeah... had bad sleep.... you erm... fainted last night, remember?" Cade had gotten used to the peculiar way that Sherry Freswell, his adoring wife, went to great ways normally to skirt around her robotic nature... Every less serious technical malfunction glossed over with a moment of confusion, or a long-running illness, or even just blank silence and forgetfulness.

"I... think I did... there's a big blank in my memory between me getting into bed in my wedding best and now... post coital amnesia?" Sherry frowned as she offered another Sleeper Mode excuse to Cade.

"Yeah, it really sucks doesn't it... but maybe when you feel better... erm... much later... we can make up for it. Just not... right now, okay? Honey?" Cade tried to diffuse the situation... and it really helped that Sherry was programmed to assist in helping him do so when it came to matters like these.

"I love you so much, Cade Freswell... you know when to floor the pedal, and when to ease off on me..." She purred, as if she was a finely tuned jalopy... Well, she was a finely tuned machine, so it was kind of accurate to use the comparison... She grabbed one of his arms but did nothing else, simply burying her face in it and sniffing. "Wake you up in an hour?"

Cade closed his eyes... "Looking forward to that, hon... looking forward... Set an alarm for that, will you?" He asked of Sherry.

Sherry leaned to the table on her side of her bed, miming her hands in thin air as if to set an alarm on a non-existent clock or device... "done, honey... have a good sleep, okay?" She leaned back towards Cade, giving him a deep smooch, before she rested back onto her back and closed her eyes.

Cade smiled as her huge breasts mounded on her ribcage like a pair of sweet, sticky cakes. One way or another, she would be the death of him... He too was looking forward to that as well...