A Gift Of Maternal Love
A Gift Of Maternal Love
Part 1
The old home stood just as he had once remembered it, but the Quinoaflakes Quest breakfast food plant had fallen silent, now that both men who used to run the place had passed on within days of each other. Peter Sen chuckled at his old memories of Papa Sen and Uncle Chigger hazing and literally at each other's throats, his father's faked dementia slowly shading into the actual thing so slowly it had broken a few hearts when they had found out too late. He was here to simply pick up the last belongings of his father, having come in every other month for a year to strip it down of its old furnishings and resaleable or collectible items of liqudatable or treasurable worth. Having gone through the entire setup, he winds up with one large box marked "Sarah's Room".
Peter sighs softly. Sarah had been his real birth mom. She'd had three good years with him and though he hadn't remembered much of it as a baby, he did remember how upsetting it had been when she passed from ill health, especially once he'd been kidnapped to be raised by an evil corporation and a slimy ex-wife to be heir to a nasty concern for a few years. Oh, he'd gotten away eventually, and he did benefit from a few years of not being concerned about money in self-improvement, but he had had a good idea when he left before they claimed their dues for all of what they gave him.
And he did meet his wife too. Peter gives a good chuckle as he thinks back to his wife of two decades. He would never have children of their own with her given... certain realities and his preference for a quiet life, but he had settled for helping out at an orphanage near his offices.
He thumbs through the content of the box. old clothes carefully wrapped and packed into plastic bags, Gimpshopped photos of him with Papa Sen and Mom at various ages, her face aged by AI to match them as a family rather than remaining eternally youthful. He finds an old Health Personal Guide, the battery still working, with his mom's old records. The new models these days had extra security on them and could only be unlocked by the owner, their carer under law, or a medical professional, but this one was literally a case of unfolding the tablet and clicking through the pages with the naked eye.
He blinks as he finds a small notebook, filled with a fantasy of sorts. Pages upon pages documenting a fantasy of sorts, with simulated facial photos of his mom at various ages and supposed body measurements every few years based on the kind of life Papa Sen had wished they had the chance to live. A weird hobby, but probably little more perverse than, say, tinkering on toy trains on weekends. The pages end a few years after he'd been 'exiled' away from Archigan by the Mad Scientists, though he suspected it had been done to keep him safe rather than punishing him like they had his dad... He'd stopped probably because he'd really forgotten and gone to seed mentally.
He sighs and puts it away. When he goes home, it goes in an empty room that he hasn't figured out how to use in the house, since it's a little too big for just two married lovebirds.
"What do you mean, Patricia is retiring?" Peter is shocked, over his cup of instacaf. This was not good news to him in one way or another, he felt.
"It is as I said, she's getting on in years... And with that, we might have to rethink our staffing needs a little. She was a very good worker. In fact," the manager frowns as she looks through her papers. "I'm actually surprised at how much work she did and how much sooner she should have retired. The girls aren't going to be happy."
"I guess they'll just have to take more turns, just like me." The staffing of the Gracetree Orphanage had been essentially a roundabout house of loving but part-time volunteers and lowly-remunerated folks taking half their fair pay in affections. There were procedures in place to keep ongoing concerns about the kids from falling through, but sometimes, it felt like the kids could have three different foster parents caring for them in just two days.
"Nobody wants to do this job anymore, Peter. it doesn't pay well or not at all, since most of the money goes to making sure the kids have a decent life till they're adults or adopted." Manager Frissa laments. "I'm going to have to learn from the old fogies myself if this keeps up." She winces. She was better at the hard needs of an orphanage than the soft needs - the gentle, soft hand of support, the firm rebuke at a misdeed, the praise for a moment of excellence of note. She would rather focus on the money the orphanage needed, gladhanding its supporters and previous adoptive parents and adoptees, defending its right to exist when threats came on the doorstep.
Peter shrugs. It was not his place to interfere, only help out when rostered, and sometimes more in a pinch. "We'll all have to. it's not a one person thing here, Frissa. I think we'll be okay."
Peter comes in through the door and goes to the nearby altar, making a soft prayer to his departed uncle and father and mom, before walking in further. The house is dimly lit, the end result of Akane having left this day in the morning for another three month stint to shill the benefits of EducationalAssist to another college. She'd toned down the topic hopping and now focused on two topics at a time for the whole semester, but her thorough prep and guidance had not vanished. In fact, the three topics were usually interrelated enough that she would now read across them in terms of finding new opportunities and ideas for her charges...
Peter mused a little on that. He hadn't programmed that into her. Was that always going to happen already if he'd started her earlier on this rather than having her be a super relief teacher initially? Ah well, it was happening now.
Peter opens the old storeroom and ticks on the light. All the EducationalAssist work was being done outside of his old home office now, and he had to go in more regularly to the actual office. There had also been less room for hands-on work - he loved the staff who now helped him run every aspect of the concept, but he wished ever so often that he was stuck back here doing all the work himself, with only his wife reprogrammed as a mousy little secretary every weekend for final reports. He'd kept everything he used at the time tidy and dust free, but it might have gone to seed a little without the same urge to check regularly for updates and upgrades to his gear.
He sighs a little and sits down in a disused charging bed. Life wasn't exactly perfect, but it was close now. If only he hadn't had the orphanage telling him about their incoming woes... He paused, feeling a familiar old itch. The same itch where he saw a problem and thought it was a chance to throw his skills at it. He quickly looked for a certain box full of hypotheticals and rushed to his old office to make a call to his boss of bosses.
Four days later, a large box and a small computer delivery came through the front porch. His boss had been strangely unsupportive, something about 'replacement goldfish' being banned in the office. He was at least willing to sponsor the deliveries, but maintenance and development would have to be done on his own time, away from time spent on his actual job or helping at the orphanage. He promised him that he would at least keep taking regular walks and proper meals no matter how busy this idea would make him.
He carefully uncrates the large box and carefully goes at the wrappings with a blunt knife to avoid slashing the contents, revealing a featureless but buxom female form missing it head. The MommyBot Mark 2 had been an attempt to challenge Ikanusk 9 in the Sovinhaya Space in the field of creating a machine capable of crossing the line between wife and mother. It had not... been a huge success. Production had ended early in favor of developing a new model that never came out, so there was an excess of bodies lacking actual heads sitting in warehouses, mostly used for spare parts by the few families that had committed despite its short comings, like a lack of realism, or stiff behaviors, and the fact that crashing into it for a hug was half-liable to put children in hospital, given its hard body shell
Peter quickly gives it a look over. It's undamaged, unused... not bad. Other people might have dismissed this and built their own prototypes from scratch or used a newer model, but Peter learnt from his dad that sometimes building from older stuff had its advantages. more stable product, for one thing. Many older models also had the problem of having too much hardware that they didn't quite know how to deal with, at least in earlier generations. For him this was a godsend - he could experiment more to get the results he wanted, and failures, even of the severe type, were at least cheaper to remedy or replace.
In the past four days, Peter had started working on a head for this unit. The specs were open, so he knew what connections he needed to make available to fit it on. He quickly wheeled the android into the old maintenance room and set it down in the bay, giving the new head a fit. He'd taken the last photo of his mom Papa Sen had simulated, a still youngish but clearly aging woman, wisps of gray hair trailing through a jet black blunt bob of staightened chin-length hair, crows feet slowly accumulating around the edges of her face where a lot of movement went on: brows, lips. It had formed the basis of the head he would use for this project, printed out carefully in soft synthetic plastic flesh with internal moving, protective and supportive parts like those you would find in a real human head and hairs carefully hand punched in with a nano-injector set to different lengths of permanent hair regrowth to match).
He smiles as he sees the head fits on the android's neck, but the unpowered body doesn't start connecting up to it yet. He'd also specified to the manufacturer that he wouldn't need an Operating System - he was going to work from bare metal and he hasn't changed his mind yet, he declares to himself as he slaps the body.
The faint clang of flesh against hard plastic gives him pause...
Clearly he would also have to replace a bit more stuff as well.
Peter wipes his brow as he stands back. In the past few days he has replaced the hard plastic exterior of the robot even while spending time on its insides, writing code to run on it on top of old open source libraries that would have come out through the main lifetime of the Mommybot Mark 2. It now perfectly resembles a bosomy cougar's body, lightly tanned to match her mom's simulated appearance, a cougar who has taken great care of her body despite her enroaching age, so as to continue baiting and entrapping young men. He wonders if maybe that was the right direction to take given what he intends this android to function as, but he decides that it was one way to make a soft body that wouldn't endanger a kid colliding in for a hug.
Peter also notices that he seems very excited with this project. Too excited. The last time he'd been this excited was when he'd built Akane Sen her new body to transfer her old functionality into from an even more decrepit model than this. Possibly a little aroused at times, like right now. Even without the peach fuzz, the exposed innards gleaming through her back as she sits up give this android the look that he favored sometimes with his wife - partially opened up, her true self exposed beneath the veneer of soft flesh and honeycomb bones.
He takes a deep breath, may as well test it a little. "Sarah, override command: vocal test." A series of slightly age-worn but still honeyed tones come on as the android starts uttering a few syllables. "... Testing. story telling. random story. Once upon a time, a farmer had a goose that laid a golden egg every day...."
Peter continues detailing Sarah Mark 2, as he'd grown used to calling it in pitch meetings at the orphanage (no funding there either, but they gave him the approval to give it a go that he needed). He carefully maneuvers the nanoinjector array to make sure it evenly covers an area, before jabbing billions of hair-growth nanomachines into the flesh. it wouldn't turn her into a wookie, but if done right, Sarah would have a nice even layer of peach fuzz. It was probably overkill on a purely utilitarian machine, but Peter was betting on it reducing the uncanny leap and making Sarah more acceptable to the younglings of the orphanage on top of her kind, rounded motherly (to him at least) face. The gentle tones of her voice reciting one of several hundred stories he'd found stacked up in the Noosphere Storage noosite had a soothing effect of sorts as well.
After a while, and three or four stories in, Peter moves over to in between Sarah's bent legs, spreading them apart, before lifting the nanoinjector again and tweaking it to put out slightly longer, darker hair. He puts it to a patch of skin near her warm pink labia, and then... pauses... Did she really need this level of detail, when even most androids intended mainly for sex just went bare in the pubic hair region. He steps back to think, as Sarah tells a story about a competent and generous one-legged ruler.
"Well, if you have a real woman who's got other priorities than looking good for a porn shoot, they might shave or wax down there a little less or not at all... hmm. okay. " He decides to just go for it, but just punch in fewer nanites to create a slightly trimmed but not barren look, Sarah not flinching at all as her body reads all the needle impacts as garbage data to be ignored. The job takes much less time too.
Peter puts down the nanoinjector tool on the side table and picks up the laptop that had come with the android. Just like it, it was an older model, but still sufficient for his needs. It would serve a few purposes: a wireless tool to access her inner functioning outside of hardware emergencies (the children would probably freak out if she had to be popped open in front of them, so best not to pop her open in front of them unless absolutely needed), an update tool for debugging and adding code and new data as needed, a scheduler to tell Sarah what the orphanage would need of her during her workday and when, and... things. To play it safe, he'd bought THREE sets of the same laptop (thanks, Black Friday) and was regularly mirroring developments on one laptop to the other two. He would give the orphanage Manager one of the laptops and teach her how to set up the scheduler, and keep the other two for use/development at home and as a backup.
Peter taps out a few commands, then goes over to seal up Sarah's back. He pauses to linger his fingers around Sarah Mark 2's perfectly flawed skin - the Ceasarian scar where they would have had to extract Peter during her problematic pregnancy from the original Sarah. two or three birthmarks littered around her body where his dad had observed them during his foreplay and obsessive initial documenting spree, a surgical scar on the belly where the original Sarah once had a liver surgery performed... if the children when in to shower with her, their questions would be more a matter of the life she lived rather than the unnaturalness of her true self.
Peter slaps the laptop shut and starts walking back out of the Maintenance Room. In a few minutes she would wake up, dress herself fully in beige support garments to help keep the sensual shape of her body up in the face of 'oncoming age' in a display of 'vanity', and slip on a simple long white floral nightdress before walking to her bedroom (the old storeroom, properly redone to house her between her shifts at the orphanage) and lying down in her new single bed to recharge, in the same manner any sleeper would recharge.
Peter would take her out for a test run in the morning after a good night's sleep... and breakfast. he'd absentmindedly specified two eggs and a slice of toast as part of her first commands in the morning after recharging.
Peter gives a yawn and walks out, leaving the light on so Sarah Mk 2 can see her surroundings while following her first commands.