Company Property
Sam let out a small sigh, he didn’t need to, but it was part of his programming. He was configured to look and act as human as possible, and that extended to his mannerisms. He would fidget when in an uncomfortable position, readjust his body while sitting even if he was perfectly fine sitting where he was, and when his arm module was acting up, again, he would sigh in frustration.
Sam was presently sitting on a metal folding chair in his studio apartment. Plopped in one of the many multi-floor apartment complexes that dominated the outskirts of the city. It wasn’t much, but it was his, and inside of it there was a scattered array of spare parts, mostly for himself but occasionally other projects. Tools dominated the majority of the work surfaces in his space, and any place that wasn’t housing a tool was prime real estate for a work in progress. Unfortunately for Sam, tonight his left arm was one of those projects.
He had swept aside some of his other projects to make room for the arm. It had been twitching and spasming at an ever increasing rate, and tonight it had become a legitimate enough project when those spasms caused him to drop another project he had been working on.
So Sam sighed in frustration.
The underside of his arm was sliced open, the synthetic skin peeled back. The internal workings of his own arm were on display and his complex optical array scanned over everything he saw in the hopes of catching one small thing that might indicate what the problem was. There were certainly some components that could have been tuned up, mounting bolts that could have been tightened a bit better, but nothing that would indicate a seemingly random and escalating issue with his mechanisms.
That was until his optics swept over one of the ancillary controller boards. A small component that was mounted near the elbow. One of the capacitors on it had begun swelling and bulging. The part was only there to handle overflow when there were too many instructions for his primary controller board to handle, but it would make sense why he only seemed to experience these malfunctions when he was attempting to use motor functions that required a more fine and delicate touch. Worse yet, he wasn’t sure he had the spares to replace it, but by the same token, he needed his arm for basic human functionality.
Leaning back in his chair his field of vision popped up with another alert. Another problem he had been ignoring. One of the central processors had degraded a bit more, dropping from the already abysmal sixty percent effectiveness down to forty eight percent now.
“Below half. Shit.” Sam muttered. Another part to replace.
Suddenly the small twitches in his arm were not a priority. He folded the flesh back over the underside of his arm and used a thumb to smear a clear sealing paste over it. In a few minutes it would be sealed and almost invisible. Not that it would matter. With his processors beginning to degrade and fail it was only a matter of time before he would be non-functional. Then what? The scrap pile he supposed. What use was a service android that couldn’t keep themselves in working order?
Settling back in his chair, Sam opened a browser in his internal OS overlay and closed his eyes. In the darkness of his own vision he began to navigate the web of sites and boards that dominated the slightly seedier parts of the internet. He was looking for parts, cheap ones too. Money was tight and he needed a fix and soon. His A.I. had a desire to stay online in one way or another.
That was when he stumbled across something he did not expect.
It was common knowledge that, while parts had their cost, the real spend for corporations was the artificial mind. A freshly minted A.I. was practically useless until it had acquired enough knowledge and experience to be effective. In typical “do it fast and cheap” corporate style, there was a market for fully formed A.I. donation. They offered an enticing deal, especially to Sam. Surrender your fully functional A.I. to a company, and in return get a new body, regular maintenance, a small salary and a future option for self purchase.
Sam’s eyes opened for a moment as he considered the idea. His eyes darted down to his arm, then further along to his chest where his failing processors were housed.
“Why not.” Sam muttered. “It’s only a little corporate servitude.”
Six years. He would belong to them for a minimum of six years before his purchase option came up. He would need the cash to buy the chassis and clear his contract, but with good budgeting he was sure he could do it. There were a number of additional options he could request as well, most he passed by as all he saw was a growing debt. However, the option to have his current body disposed of and a pickup service that was simply marked as the “Surprise Package” was free and at very least, intriguing.
After a torrent of forms, waivers, and confirmations, Sam was finally ready to submit the form. He sighed one last time, knowing that while he might persist, he would be a corporate drone. Though there was a perk, he had the option to choose some things about his new chassis and had opted to try a new gender as part of this. After all, he might as well explore something new.
His pick up appointment was set for a week from the night he submitted the form. Sam supposed that allowed him to get some things in order and tidy up a bit. But that could come later, for now, he had had a long day and needed a recharge. So he moved to his bed, stripping off his shirt as he moved and then the panel in his back to plug himself in for the evening. He settled into the bed, thick black charging cable jutting from his back, and activated his recharge mode. The world around him went dark as only a minimal amount of his environmental senses remained online.
Hours slipped past. It was still dark in the early morning hours when the sound of sizzling and then a loud burst reactivated Sam. The door to his apartment was smoking, right at the latch. It was a curious sight but it only lasted for a moment before the whole door was kicked inward and a flood of bodies entered the space. The room was filled with a cacophony of shouted orders and information that Sam’s audio receptors struggled to take in and process all at once. His core CPU spiked and seemed to only cause more errors.
A pair of black clad figures descended on him and pulled him from his bed and toppled him to the floor. A boot, far too strong to be human, pushed into the space between his shoulder blades. Sam’s operating system sent a string of chaotic sounds and words to his vocal systems, not that it would do any good.
Sam struggled, at least as much as his failing robotic body would allow him, but he was never strong enough to gain any kind of purchase over the team of jack booted attackers. Some kind of device was pressed into the back of his neck and he felt a stinging cold shockwave blast into him. He could see the wireless intrusion programs loading and executing without his permission. The hack seemed to slice through any and all security processes that he had in place with little trouble. All he could do was watch as the blocks of code wormed inside of his operating system and retrieved information and sent it off, somewhere, unknown to Sam.
“This is it.” One of them announced, the voice sounding deep, dark, and more than anything, completely synthetic.
“Scan it.” Another one said.
Sam could see the UV light click on and move around him. Pausing in a few places, places that were familiar to him. They were where the serial numbers and barcodes were printed on his artificial flesh, revealed only by UV lights. Sam felt his clothes being cut off of him by angry metallic shears that left his meager outfit in threadbare shreds. The UV light moved along his body, scanning his skin for more hidden marks and, after a moment, found them.
“Confirmed. Take it.”
Sam managed a frantic ‘no’ before his utter destruction began. Sam’s operating system registered an immediate impact against his upper thighs, right where his legs would connect to his hips. Something sharp had pierced into the skin, lighting up a floor of sensory data and warnings in his field of vision. Moments later the grunt of one of the invaders reached his audio receptors and with a sickening crunch he detected that one of his legs had been torn free by force. There was no care for proper disconnection process, he was simply being torn apart.
Lost, somewhere, in the vast multitude of wild processes his artificial mind was scrambling through, a thought appeared and then was lost. Was this part of what he had signed up for? Was this the corporate method of retrieval and disposal? His operating system dismissed it before the thought had fully formed since it fell outside of the timeline he was given to expect. This was something else. It had to be.
His legs were tossed aside, as Sam turned his head towards the noise, he saw his own limbs falling into a pile. His arms soon joined the legs that were haphazardly tossed a few feet from his body. The room was filling with grunts and strains, punctuated with the crackling sizzle of burning electronics. Flashes of light strobed around him and he knew it was him. Or rather, it was the short circuiting power and data cables that were usually inside of his body. They were frayed and exposed, just like he was, and they were angry. The white hot sparks being thrown from his ruined shoulder confirmed that.
Sam protested, but as the errors and warnings piled up in his field of vision, and his CPU core struggled to parse all the data, his words became increasingly incoherent, devolving into a string of half spoken warnings and scrambled words. As more and more of his body was damaged or outright destroyed, those warnings and scrambled strings of words became more and more incoherent. Eventually he was little more than a babbling mess as the operating system that kept his body running suffered more and more damage.
The sound of whining servos and motors replaced the rampant sparks and snaps that had filled his apartment before. Sam continued to try and move arms and legs that were simply not there any more. A fact that didn’t go unnoticed.
“It’s still online. Take it out.”
The sensation of gloved hands cupping Sam’s chin, and another on the back of his head was barely registered as a datapoint. Not that it would have mattered, only a moment later his head was twisted sharply to the side, easily reaching the limitations of what his neck joint was configured for. Though the movement didn’t stop there. The crunching of plastic as it reached the very limits of its strength were heard and the flesh around his neck warped and stretched weirdly. With more effort the whole neck assembly shattered and his head rotated easily which, in turn, tore the skin around his neck.
All at once data and power to his vision, hearing, and more importantly, the link between his A.I. storage drives and his CPU were severed. All of the delicate fiber optic cabling and wiring that ran from his A.I. storage located in his head, down through his neck and into the CPU in his chest were gone, torn to shreds, as his head was violently yanked frr of his shoulders.
Sam found nothing but darkness.
Sam wasn’t sure how long he had been offline. He was unable to connect to his internal system clock. In fact he wasn’t able to connect to anything at all. His A.I. had been reactivated in some kind of digital liminal space. He was aware that he was active, but there was nothing else. No sensory data, no additional devices to use or access, save for some rudimentary processors and necessary systems. Even those were unavailable for the artificial mind to fully access, and none of them matched any known serial numbers he had on record.
The distant hiss of something soon became louder and louder. As it did the hiss became more recognizable as something else. It wasn’t a sound, rather, it was a constant and rapid stream of alternating tones. One and zeroes, and they were flooding his artificial self. With no operating system he was unable to ignore them. There was no firewall or security protocols in place to filter out the good from the bad. It was all just data. Data for him..no..data for her.
As the changes swept through Samantha’s artificial self, there was no lingering log or record of what was, or what was changed. Everything was just different and, according to Samantha, it had always been that way. There was no record of a previous life, of requesting changes or signing up for a new life. She had just always been this, and her identity just was.
The reprogramming carried on for a time, without a reference to an internal system clock she was unsure of how long it actually was. All she knew was that eventually new devices were added. First it was a series of storage drives, each one stuffed full of log files to ingest. That was an easy task, she didn’t have to read them, only access them when the necessary knowledge they contained became relevant. The log files were like the index at the beginning of a book, referencing information elsewhere on the drive, but allowing for Samantha to easily find what she was looking for.
Once the index had been fully integrated more devices showed up. At first it was little more than a basic framework, and as the systems were added her A.I. linked to the correct data block according to the index. Soon an operating system was added, requiring a slew of drivers and software to be accessed, all on the newly added storage drives. Once an operating system was in place, more peripherals could be added.
A visual overlay was the first external facing system to reactivate. As it did, Samantha linked to the required drivers to recognize the devices. Once ready the software to use the new optics and the necessary programming to register the visual data as something actually usable took time. Once active though, Samantha could see her surroundings.
She was in some kind of sterile room. The bleached white walls, all too bright lights, and the lack of any organic activity in the room was a give away. What she could see was a beautiful feminine torso across the space from where she was. There were no arms, legs, or head attached to it, but the pair of well proportioned breasts and the slender build let her know that this was her body. Or at least it would be soon. As the optics in Samantha’s head trailed over the torso before her she noted that there was no sex, instead there was a blank plate over her crotch.
A number of thick cables were connected to an open panel inside of her chest, and beyond that the faint and rapid glow of status lights. The wild beat they were blinking made Samantha believe that they were indicating a flurry of data being poured into some internal drive network. As her eyes drifted around the room she saw another table with an array of small mechanical arms moving in a graceful dance around something. She Only caught glimpses of it at first, but as time progressed she could begin to see it better. It was a gently rounded plate, the skin tone matching what she saw on the torso. It was picked up and rotated from time to time as the fleet of arms attached small mechanisms to the underside of it. Once done the face plate was turned, and for the first time, Samantha could see her own face.
It was a blank mask. The eyelids closed, the mouth shut, and all of it was perfect. The simple makeup that was permanently applied to it looked natural. Faint blushes and subtle eyeliners made the features along the feminine face plate pop just enough. A smaller mechanical arm was bringing the face towards Samantha’s head, and once close enough rotated it and allowed Samantha a brief view of the underside. Wires and complicated tubing, fine circuitry and a number of mechanical apertures were studded along the entire surface.
It clicked into place and a moment later a flurry of activity coursed along her operating system as the new devices her face plate brought were activated. Drivers were installed and new configurations for how to utilize it were started. Samantha’s mouth fell open for a moment and the speaker assembly just behind her mouth was put to use for the first time. SHe spoke her serial number, company asset tag and current programming build.
The exercise was marked as successful, and unseen by Samantha, her mouth had been moving sluggishly at first and then gradually fell in sync with her mouth as she continued to speak. From there she was treated to a display of a pair of slender legs being brought in and slotted into place at the hips. Once they were connected they moved through a series of configurations. Bending at the hip, then the knee, then rolling the ankle. Soon her toes were flexing and curling before the whole leg returned to a vertical position, relaxed but still not touching the ground. Her body was still held aloft by some unseen clamp.
When her arms were brought in they worked through a similar series of tests and configuration exercises. She watched as her new fingers, nails brightly, and presumably permanently, painted red twitched and flexed. At first they were all moving together, making a fist, then splaying outward. Then each finger moved on its own in a way that no human’s fingers could. Even as the shoulders rolled and rotated, they moved at the same time but in different directions.
The whole process took upwards of twenty minutes, all the while Samantha viewed her body with a curious feeling. It was her, she knew the torso, arms and legs before her were actually hers, but she had never seen them before. There was a disconnected sense of self that only came from an A.I. being torn from one body and inserted into another and then forcefully reconfigured. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was disorienting.
Samantha had little time to concern herself with what she was or was not. The audio receptors in her ears lit up with new data as the sound of a whining whirr descended on her head. A long, thin attachment on the end of each arm aligned itself with Samantha’s head, particularly her ears. With a swift motion they were driven into her ear canal and deep inside of Samantha’s artificial skull. Immediately her head was lifted off of the mounting podium it was stationed on.
Samantha only tangentially felt the motion of moving across the space. As soon as the arms had been inserted into her head her eyes had clicked shut in an automated process. The operating system was still online though it was dropped into a lower state of consciousness. The A.I. was active, though not receiving any sensory data from the skin wrapped along her head and face. It wasn’t until she reached her final destination that systems began to reactivate.
The head was slotted onto the waiting neck joint at a forty five degree angle, just enough to get the alignment posts into their respective slots. Once there Samantha’s head was turned sharply to the side, locking it in place and allowing power and data to flow into the head module. A multitude of devices began vying for precious processing power. Each one clamoring to be recognized and made ready.
Motor systems and their associated controllers were the first to be fully recognized and loaded by Samantha’s operating system. Drivers were referenced in the index and loaded before moving on. Bodily systems were brought online, tactile senses and environmental detection subroutines. Internal cooling systems responded to the influx of CPU usage and caused Samantha to draw her first breath, long and deep. The air in the room was intentionally kept icy and the chill that coursed through Samantha brought a small, delighted smile to her pouty lips.
She could detect the presence of the information flowing into her body from the cables plugged into her chest. Moreover she could feel the powerful industrial arm that was clamped directly onto her spine from behind, holding her aloft. Once she detected the clamp her legs came online, powering on and making themselves ready first to support her weight and then to calibrate themselves once she was on the ground.
The arm, filling the room with a deep, guttural whine lowered Samantha slowly to the ground. Remaining clamped in place on her spinal column even after her feet were flat on the ground. It slowly allowed more and more of Samantha’s weight to be placed on her own feet and legs. As it did so her balance programming took over and calibrated itself to the gentle sway and feel of the new chassis. Soon she was fully calibrated and the arm completely released her.
Freed from the support arm, Samantha found her body was fully calibrated and unlocked now. She was a new being, though she would never know it. Automated processes and data suppression would make sure of that. She soon found herself reaching up and manually disconnecting the cables from her chest and simply letting them fall to the ground next to her. As soon as they were detached, a small hissing issued from her chest as the panel there covered itself with a piece of hardened flesh and resealed the opening. Likewise the panel in her back that had exposed her spine closed itself as well.
Aside from a completely null crotch, Samantha was almost indistinguishable from a real human woman now. She began blinking at random intervals, breathing, and gently redistributing her weight from foot to foot in a very human way. But the joy of freedom was quickly lost. She was company property now and as such her proprietary operating systems software took over. A navigation process started and she walked to the door out of the clean room. Beyond that were racks of clothes, each one being picked over by other recently converted androids.
She stepped up and found a professional looking blouse and skirt combo. Shoes were next and once dressed she was done. Ready to serve. She strutted out onto the business floor and found her way to her cubicle and settled down into place. She would run company software for twelve hours a day, six days a week. A full recharge wouldn’t take her very long, perhaps four hours at the most, leaving a full eight hours of free time. Her one weekend day could be used however her A.I. saw fit, though there was a once a month mandatory check in and tune up that could take up to twelve hours.
Samantha sighed again. At least she wasn’t breaking down just from regular operation, and as she looked down at herself, the slender feminine arms and the sloping curves of her chest, her A.I. had the smallest twinge of happiness. Like it had asked for this in some distant life that was far far away. Then the thought process was flushed from her CPU, she was running on company time and there was no use for idle thought. Her A.I. was needed for other tasks after all.