Coming of Age

Part 1

A small crowd had gathered in the backyard of a quint suburban house, it was close to the end of the school year and the sun was high. The air was filled with a chorus of voices singing “happy birthday” as the crowd gathered around a petite girl, beaming with happiness and a small dose of embarrassment. Riley had just turned eighteen and the gathering of friends at her parents' house had been the highlight of her weekend. Most of the group of friends were clad in bikinis, swim trunks, and bathing suits and many were still dripping wet from swimming in the pool nestled in the grass behind the grouping.

Riley sucked in some of the warm summer air and immediately blew out the breath across a cake studded with lit candles. They flickered and, once extinguished, smoldered and smoked for a moment while a cheer arose from the crowd. Soon it was sliced and passed out among Riley’s friends and the party progressed into gifts. Her boyfriend had given her a solitaire diamond necklace to commemorate their four year relationship, others had given her small trinkets and baubles that had some kind of meaning between the two. Several hours later as the sun dipped to the horizon, the party slowly came to an end, with Riley’s boyfriend Michael being the last to leave.

“Thank you for the necklace, I love it.” Riley said, hugging Michael close against her. The two shared a tender kiss on the lips and held each other for several long moments before Michael broke the kiss and smiled down at his girlfriend. They exchanged their goodbyes and Riley watched him leave from the comfort of her front porch. As soon as his car was well out of earshot and sight, she opened her front door and stepped inside. When she closed and locked the door behind her she turned to find both her parents at the top of the stairs holding a package, wrapped in pink and purple striped wrapping paper and beaming.

“Happy birthday honey,” her father said, descending the stairs with his wife following along behind him. “We obviously couldn’t give this to you earlier today, but since you’re a young woman now, and you’ve proven you can be responsible enough, your mother and I wanted to give this to you. You’ve earned it”

Riley’s father held out the box and Riley took it. It was longer than it was tall and not terribly wide, reminiscent of the shape of a laptop box, though taller, and certainly heavier. Riley squealed with delight at one more gift for her birthday and moved to open it, but her father held up a hand and stopped her. She looked at him with a curious kind of confusion on her face.

“That one is a little more private, why don’t you go to your room to open it, and don’t stay up too late honey” he said. Riley smiled and clutched the package against her chest and raised to her tiptoes to kiss her father on the cheek and dashed up the stairs to her room. Once there she wasted no time in tearing into the paper and looking to confirm what she suspected her parents had gotten for her. Once the wrapping was removed she bit her lower lip as her suspicions were confirmed. Printed across the front of the box inside, was a picture of a long, roughly cylinder shaped object. Beige rubber hoses appeared to be clipped in place with plastic hooks along the chrome and dull grey surface of the item. At the tail end of it was a series of small posts jutting out from the thing, lined with an array of small golden plates all aligned in neat rows and columns. At the extreme opposite end of the piece was what appeared to be a mature looking woman’s vagina. It was a light skin tone, with slightly darker regions towards the lips in the center. In bold pink letters across the top were the words “TAC Model P37-A artificial sexual module” along with a company logo and a small picture of a smirking woman, clad in lingerie of some kind. Anyone would assume she was just a stock model of some kind.

Androids like Riley and her mother were something of an unknown quantity in the world. There were always rumors on conspiracy theory site and two dollar newspapers that the robot uprising was silently taking place, and that robots lived among us. None of the claims were ever substantiated, but the truth was surprisingly accurate, androids lived among the people of the world, but they weren’t planning an uprising. Instead they were supporting technology companies that manufactured accessories, upgrades, home build kits, and any number of other miscellaneous parts. Of course, you had to know where to look in order to get what you needed, and to the general public there was little desire to hunt down and find exactly what you needed and from where.

Riley’s father had been the type of person who wanted to get his hands dirty with every new project and every new gadget, and when he stumbled across the information he needed to begin making his own androids he jumped at the opportunity. Ordering parts and kits and eventually constructing his wife, Melony. Not long after she was brought online and the kinks in her programming worked out, the two were married. After that Riley had been constructed, and even though they just celebrated her eighteenth birthday, she had only been online for five years. She had been constructed and activated just a few weeks before they family had moved to a new state.

Riley had been constructed to be a young girl, and her father, ever one to enjoy the journey, continued to upgrade her body and gradually modify her into the young woman she was now. As a result her programming had also evolved as much as her body had, and the vast majority of it was hand coded by her father. So when Riley set the box on her bed and opened it she saw a device inside that matched the picture on the front nestled in form fitting grey foam, as well as a plastic envelope with an innocuous looking USB drive in it.

Riley was excited, nearly ectatic, this was what she had been waiting for since her and Michael had started dating. She knew that one day she would be able to give up her “virginity” to him and she wanted it so badly, but she literally couldn’t. She was presently unbuttoning and unzipping the black denim shorts that clung to her upper thighs. She had put them on over her swim suit bottoms, both of which were now sliding down her young shapely thighs. Once they were past her knees she simply let go and let them fall to the floor around her ankles and Riley took a step out of them, but left them in a heap where they were.

Riley reached up to her head and swept her vibrant red hair out of the way and tugged on the cord that held her bikini top in place. Once loosened she slipped her top up and off of herself, releasing her breasts to open air. She looked down at them and cupped them in her hands, admitting to herself that they were nice, well proportioned to her generally petite and slender body, but she was definitely adding a new chest plate to her Christmas list.

Riley was now fully nude in her room, the warm summer air pressed against her skin and on her heads up display a small temperature gauge displayed the current temperature. It was well within an acceptable range. Riley picked up the box and its contents and moved to her bed. She sat with her back comfortably against the wall and spread her legs. Between her legs, nestled in her crotch was a single plate, covered with soft artificial flesh that emulated a vague shape of a vagina, but none of the functionality. It was nothing more than a covering so that dust and fluids didn’t leak into her body. Riley sent a command from her operating system to the internal system that managed her entire body’s functionality.

Her room, previously silent, was filled with a barely audible hiss as the crotch panel retracted the sealant around its edges. Once the hissing stopped there was a small buzzing noise as some motorized system inside of her pelvis guided the panel off of her body. Riley gently placed her hands on the panel as it slipped forward and once it stopped moving, she pulled on it until it disengaged and came off in her hands. She was quick to set it aside and look down at the opening between her legs, knowing that this would be the last time she would see it without her new womanly assembly. She removed the new sexual assembly from the box and below it were the installation instructions. Riley was confident she knew what she was doing, but regardless she scanned through the instructions. They contained an almost childish amount of information, accompanied by illustrations. According to the instructions there was a panel in her abdomen that needed to be manually removed so that the connectors on the end of the module could be slotted into place properly and hooked up to the internal pumping system inside of her body. From there it was just a matter of updating her software to allow her access and control over the functionality of her new hardware.

Riley passed another command to her internal controller and with a similar hiss and then buzz her belly opened. It split down the center and opened like a pair of cabinet doors, slowly and smoothly as the motorized mechanisms inside of her lifted the door like opening outward. The panels began an inch or so above the opening for her new sexual module, and stopped just below the perky C-cup breasts that were resting on her chest. Once they stopped, like her crotch panel, Riley plucked them from them from their mounting points and set them aside on her bed.

Riley pulled her new vaginal assembly out of its foam casing and lined up the mechanism between her legs then gently slid it into her body. The internal portion of her pelvis was lined with a mounting rail that matched up with the device Riley was inserting, and so she had to rotate it in her hands in order to get it lined up properly, but it was soon gliding smoothly deeper into her body. She could see the end of it sliding inside of her body through the open panel in her abdomen and when it was in sight she was able to reach into her open body and begin the process of hooking the latex tubing on the sexual module to the available ports inside of her body.

Riley’s body was already equipped with a saline based fluid tank deeper inside of her torso, which her sexual module was now connected to. It would pump in the fluids needed to lubricate the delicate fleshy folds of her new equipment, though she knew that that would mean she would likely need to refill her internal tank more often. As she pressed her hand against the still dry folds of her new android pussy and pressed it inward, she made a cursory check of her fluid levels. Half a tank would likely be plenty she decided. There was a small, almost imperceptible click as the cylinder like assembly clicked into place and locked.

Almost immediately Riley’s eyes rolled up in her head as her operating system attempted to find the correct drivers to use the new hardware, software to configure and control, and integrate into her normal operating process. She stayed locked in that frozen position for several long seconds before her operating system decided that it would use the general unknown device drivers until newer ones could be installed. Riley blinked several times as the servos inside of her face unlocked themselves one by one. She gazed down at her freshly installed sex, admiring how good it looked inside of her, how perfectly it fit that you couldn’t even see the faint seam where the module connected to the rest of her. She knew that seam would be gone completely once she had the software installed and could properly seal the module in place.

When her abdominal panel was opened it limited the movement and flexibility she was normally used to, but Riley sat up and reached for the box once more. Once she had it in her hands she took out the USB device inside the plastic bag. All of her updates had been hand coded by her father for her, and he had, up until today, installed all of them for her. Since she was now eighteen though, she felt the privilege of being able to install her own software. Riley shifted her head downward, her chin pressed against her chest, just above her artificial sternum. There was a familiar hiss as something unsealed itself and the faint edges of an oblong rectangle with rounded edges appeared just below where her chin rest. The panel pulled inward, retracting into her chest and then with a small mechanical buss slid upward towards her head. Behind the flesh panel was a series of data ports of all shapes and sizes.

Riley found the one that looked like a USB port, and peeked at the end of the drive in her hand to make sure she aligned the plug properly then brought it down and plugged it into the port in her exposed chest. She then leaned back against the pile of pillows on her bed, she had been through enough upgrades and software installs to know that you needed to be somewhat laying back when they started. As she reclined a window automatically popped up in her field of vision showing the USB drive that she had just inserted and its contents. There were plenty of folders with supporting files, compressed libraries and databases of install information. Her father had been kind to her again and left her a small readme file in the root of the drive with a note about it being her birthday and that he hoped she enjoyed the gift.

Along with the readme file was an executable, simply labeled as “install” which made it easy on Riley for her first install. Normally she would have been turned off, her father would have connected a computer to her chest panel and copied the files manually onto her system and then executed them remotely, monitoring the install as it went along, but Riley had been trusted to do this on her own, and she was elated. She opened the installer file and saw a simple window pop up in her display, brief flashes of file names flew past as the progress bar scrolled along. Riley bit into her lower lip gently as she watched the progress bar until it stopped at 74% complete, punctuated by a new pop up window alerting her to a critical system misconfiguration. There was an error code, an indicator to exactly which part of Riley’s operating system would be affected and the option to cancel, ignore, or retry. She retried a few times before she got impatient and told her systems to ignore. The complex A.I. that ran her entire system, controlling her body, her simulated thoughts, and her software. It had decided that since her father and creator had given her something that it must work, and that he would never harm her. So as several more conflicts appeared in her heads up display she simply ignored them and continued the install, anxious to try her new hardware and to truly be an eighteen year old girl. Soon enough, the update was completed and Riley was treated to a confirmation screen asking her to restart her before changes would take effect. She gleefully confirmed the restart.

As soon as her system received the command to restart, she shut down immediately. Her head lolled to one side and her arms dropped to the bed. She lay on her bed, legs spread and exposed, in every way possible, to anyone and everyone. To anyone walking in to the room she looked like a powered down sex doll of some kind, which wouldn’t be too terribly inaccurate. Soon though her operating system automatically came back online and began to complete the install, pre-loading files. The preinstalled files began to unpack themselves and integrate themselves into Riley’s core operating system, the part of her that made up her A.I. and personality. It was the part of her software that made it so easy for her to appear human to her classmates.

Unfortunately for Riley she should have sought her fathers assistance when the alerts and errors were popping up in the initial install phase of her new programming. Several files were either not optimized for her system, or they were incompatible with her operating system, worse yet, several were corrupted. Regardless of the state the files were in, the offline installer that ran while Riley’s A.I. and personality core were offline integrated the files. Simply placing them in the correct directories inside her file structure and, in many cases, over writing previous versions of the file in question. Once the files were in place and the install completed, Riley finished her boot sequence. Her head rose back to its normal position and her face soon melted into a more human expression. She was so delighted, and absolutely ready to try out the new hardware and software that had just been installed. She quickly reached up to her chest and plucked the USB drive free from the data port it was plugged in to and slipped it back into the plastic bag. As she did so there was a small whirr as the chest panel closed and then hissed as it resealed itself. Riley then sent the command through her system to close the door like opening in her abdomen. With the same whirring the two halves of her belly closed in on each other and sealed with a familiar hissing. Riley now looked like any other eighteen year old girl, fully human and now equipped with a working vagina.

Riley bit her lower lip, she was so ready to test out her hardware, but even more than that she was ready to finally get a chance to be with her boyfriend. Riley let her eyes close and her hand hovered just above the virgin folds of her new sexual module. She opened her system monitor, just to be safe, and then smoothly lowered her index and middle finger to the soft pliable surface of the artificial skin wrapped around the folds of her brand new sex. She sharply drew in a breath as she watched the CPU cycles spike in the system monitor, the cooling systems in her body demanding more fresh cool air to help remove the amount of heat produced by the jump.

Riley opened a terminal window in her vision and input a small command to report the kinds of data she was receiving. There were the normal tags, the sensation of her back on the pillows behind her, the feeling of the bed and comforter below her, and the ambient temperature, but the new data tag she observed was the wave of sexual data. She saw that it was flowing into her sexual control software as expected and she even took a moment to push her fingers slightly into her folds and watched the drastic increase in data. It made her smile, it made her suck in another deep breath, and it made her bite into her lower lip. She began to swirl her two fingers in small circles, pressing deeper and deeper as she did so. The sensor laden flesh on the tips of her fingers soon registered that they felt her new artificial clit, and her terminal window confirmed the feeling. Riley smiled lustfully and began to moan gently, barely more than a whispered sigh, though it was fully laced with pleasure. The data that was passed to her sexual programming was, by all accounts, flowing like it should. However she didn’t know that some of the faulty file sets inside of her system were either holding up that flow or outright corrupting it. There was a significant backlog of proper data transmission between her artificial vagina and the rest of her body. She continued to play with her clit and tease it, spreading her legs wide and using her free hand to spread her lips to allow her better access to herself. Eventually something in her software began to pass data to her sexual control software, unfortunately it was all of the data that was back logged all at once. The influx of commands, responses, and data battered Riley’s internal CPU like a tidal wave. Her first indication was when her terminal command suddenly filled with hundreds if not thousands of lines of error codes and data parse errors. The system hardware monitor also showed her processor and RAM usage had spiked to one hundred percent and her hard drives were reading and writing at their full capacity. In essence Riley’s entire system was locked up.

Outwardly the lock out was obvious, Riley’s eyes were half closed, her eyes rolling upward in her head and her hands still playing with her pussy. Her gentle mewling sigh played through the speaker system over and over, the same sound emitting from her throat. Soon, even the moan was cut off and came out as a choppy and broken sound. Meanwhile her hand continued to swirl in between her soft folds, more and more data flowed through her software and again, began to build up in an internal queue, waiting to be processed and responded to.

Not long after her systems froze her in place, Riley’s core operating system began to break down, starting with her voice. The moan she had been repeating over and over stopped altogether and her room was filled with silence, even as Riley’s mouth hung open. Then her speakers began to play pre-recorded error messages.

“Alert, this unit is experiencing a longer than normal delay in proper human responses. Please power down this unit and reboot into safe mode” Riley said without moving her mouth or lips, and her tone was flat emotionless. She now looked and sounded as robotic as she actually was. After her simple alert, there was silence in her room that only lasted a few brief moments. All at once the auxiliary fans inside of her body began to spin at high speeds, these were only ever used when her internal temperature became extremely hot. They forced hot air out her open mouth and nostrils. The hum of fans was barely audible when she began to speak again. It was the same recorded message again, but this time her operating system was even struggling to properly process the vocal process.

“Al-Alert. This unit is. Alert this u-unit is experiencing lon-longer than nor-normal-al delay in. Alert. Alert. Al-Al-Al-Al…” soon her voice simply trailed off and stopped again.

No one heard it, but there was a small pop somewhere inside of Riley’s body. There was a controller board hard wired to the sexual module that had suffered from the intense heat and a capacitor had burst on it. The controller board wasn’t going to stop the module from working, but it would have gone a long way to regulating the flow of data through her systems. There was a small puff of black smoke that curled out of the ruined component and gathered inside of her torso. Since she was completely sealed there was no place for the smoke to go, and eventually it simply stained the inside of her body for the time being.

Her operating system finally reacted to the burnt out controller board on her new sexual hardware as well as the backlog of locked up systems. Everything resulted in a cascade of programming failures. Riley’s body began to convulse and spasm as she sat on her bed, her eyes remaining unblinking and her face unmoved. The movement was enough to begin to work her way downward, as she slid to one side. She finally flopped to one side of the bed, laying down oddly with her hands pressed between her legs. She lay silently like that while internally her operating system crashed and her A.I. struggled to comprehend what had happened. Ultimately she powered down completely from the overwhelming failure of the software she was running. When she did power down her entire body relaxed and her hands fell free from her crotch and Riley simply laid still on her bed.

She remained unmoving for a long time. Her internal fail safes would not allow her to come back online until her internal temperature had dropped back to an acceptable range. It took upwards of ten minutes before the array of processors inside of her chest and head finally cooled to a normal temperature and then slightly below. As soon as her minimal offline systems detected that she was back within operational temperatures her systems began booting again, filing a crash report and allowing her to start up as she would expect.

As she started up, her A.I. worked hard to generate an excuse for her crash. This process didn’t need to happen as Riley was alone and in a safe space where everyone knew she was just a machine, but it was standard operating procedure. Her A.I. added an amendment to the crash log stating that she had simply been overwhelmed by a particularly good orgasm and had blacked out temporarily. Her human emulation came online and read the crash report in an instant, and the generated reasoning behind it. She shook her head and blinked several times as she pushed herself back up into a sitting position. She smiled coyly to herself, happy that her new sexual assembly worked so well. She even saw that her log files reported an orgasm sequence.

Little did Riley know that the cascade of failures were never written to her log files due to her CPU and hard drive being utilized at one hundred percent. If she had seen the tidal wave of errors she had experienced just minutes before, she might have called in sick to school and had her father examine her more closely and repair the damage and likely reprogram her to fix the software issues. Currently, though, her systems showed nothing more than an overwhelmed CPU from processing so much sexual data all at once, and while she would later have her father inspect those blocks of code, for now it was exactly what Riley had expected.

She remained naked for the rest of the evening while she moved around her room, putting the box that the module had come in away, and then storing the previously used solid crotch panel on her desk to help remind her to give it back to her father later. Finally she laid down in bed and opened a panel in her left wrist, exposing a small port there. She reached down to the gap between her bed and her side table to retrieve a cable that was plugged in to the wall and inserted it into the waiting port in her wrist. Electrical energy flowed into her system and began to charge her power cell. Riley let her eyes slip closed and she looked to be asleep.

The next morning Riley woke up from her recharge cycle and began to get ready for school. She would normally have not made plans for any kind of after school activity, but this Friday afternoon she knew exactly what she wanted. She had sent a text to her boyfriend already and asked if he could help her do some cheerleading drills after school. Riley wasn’t sure if her parents would approve, but she wanted so desperately to have sex with Michael now that she was actually equipped for it. She was ready, both her programming, and her physical body were ready. At least she thought they were.

All her A.I. was dwelling on as she got ready for school was the feeling of Michael slipping inside of her and how it might feel compared to how her own fingers felt the night before. She pulled on a pair of fishnet stockings and a pair of black shorts that just barely covered her upper thigh. Riley slipped into a pushup bra to help her mid C cup breasts look even more enticing and then covered them with a black top. There was something over a small window cut into her shirt that showed off just enough of her cleavage. She practically skipped to the bathroom to look herself over and apply some make up for the day. She admitted that she looked amazing and tossed her long red hair a few times, letting it land on her back and shoulders. Soon she was applying lip gloss and some light eye shadow to her already perfectly crafted face. Satisfied with her look she slipped into a pair of black ankle high boots and slipped her arm through her backpack and trotted out to the bus stop.

School couldn’t pass quickly enough for the petite android. She could have easily connected to the internet and looked up the answers to any number of the quizzes that she was given, and commonly did, but her existence and attendance at the school was good for her A.I. and it helped to “sell” her image as a real human girl. Today though she was struggling to stay focused. Riley’s A.I. was sluggish to respond to any given request and, like with every other error she had experienced, it generated a response. In the end she chalked it up to her artificial mind being occupied thinking about her boyfriend and everything they would do together once school was over.

Riley looked down at the worksheet of math problems in front of her, normally for her these types of problems would pose no challenge. Being a machine herself, much of her programming was based on mathematics and calculations, but now she couldn’t seem to pull up the proper calculations or even comprehend it. Her operating system was still attempting to resolve the errors from the night before in the background and as a result her CPU was running hotter than normal. She blinked at the paper on her desk and attempted to simply write her name at the top of the page, but couldn’t even properly grasp her pencil. When she finally did have it in hand the tiny motors that controlled her fingers seemed to be too powerful and she snapped it before it even made it to the paper.

She became concerned and started an automated diagnostics program running, which would check over all of her systems to make sure they were in compliance. In the meantime, she raised her hand, a movement that drew an audible whine from the motors in her shoulder, though it seemed to go unnoticed by the students around her. The teacher nodded towards her,

“Mi-mister Hur-urley. I am not feeling so-so-so well. Can I b-be excused?” Riley’s A.I. began to generate more and more excuses as to why her speech pattern seemed so off. Her teacher excused her and Riley attempted to repack her backpack to the best of her ability, but found that every motion she made came out as stilted and her limbs moved stiffly. She stood from her desk and began to walk out, finding that her legs were struggling to properly bend at the knee and she walked stiffly. She thanked her luck that most students had their heads down, attempting to finish their work.

Riley made her way to the girls restroom and sat in one of the stalls. Riley remained there while the body scan completed. In order to help it move swiftly along she disabled many of the features that made her more human, such as blinking, and the subtle rise and fall of her chest. Sitting there, still and unblinking Riley looked incredibly artificial. After a while the scan completed and registered that her CPU was running at nearly eighty percent of its full capacity, which was far more than what Riley would have expected from normal operation. The scan indicated that perhaps a restart of her entire system was necessary to fix the issue, but Riley was hesitant to fully reboot while still in school. Her A.I. envisioned her lifeless body slumped in the restroom, while someone else found the cute redheaded senior and discovered that she was, in fact, an android.

She resolved to walk home, a journey that would take approximately half an hour, but it was better than remaining at school and risking a more serious malfunction and discovery. So she collected herself and walked through the halls of the school and out into the parking lot. She strode across and out to the street and towards her home. Once she was several blocks away from her school, and any potential classmates who might see her, she once again disabled the many features programmed into her to make her appear more human. Her joints stiffened instead of swinging in a more natural manner. She stopped blinking and breathing and her face remained in the most neutral position possible, conserving both power and CPU usage.

When she arrived home she quickly moved up to her bedroom and closed the door quietly behind her. She moved as rapidly as possible to her bed and laid flat on it. As soon as she was fully on the bed she initiated a complete reboot, and her eyes slipped closed and her body relaxed. She only remained offline for a short while before coming back online and returning to normal operating status. She took another few moments to run another full body scan, which came up as normal. She opened her system monitor and found that her processors were down to only using about twelve percent of their capacity, which was more normal for her daily life. Riley breathed a sigh of relief, but now realized that she had the remainder of the day to herself.

Riley resolved to simply put herself into a low power mode and wait for her boyfriend to text her that he was out of school, he had a study hall as his last period for the day and he was generally known to skip it. Particularly today he would be able to come over early. Riley however became very impatient and had set an internal alarm to wake her up before he even got to his study hall. Now fully charged and still delighted that her processors were running smoothly she felt ready for his arrival. She didn’t have long to wait before she got a text from her boyfriend saying that he was on his way over.

Riley excitedly waited for him, and set about preparing herself for his arrival. She touched up some of her make up, reapplied some lip-gloss and teased her hair a bit. There was soon as soft knock on her back door and Riley practically skipped through the house to open the door. No sooner had she pulled open the door that she found her slim petite body being picked up by Michael, her boyfriend, and their lips locked together. Riley let her tongue glide over her lips and into her love’s mouth. Her own tongue tangled and tumbled with his, and the densely packed material that made up her artificial tongue sent wave after wave of pleasurable data. She had kissed her boyfriend like this before, but with the addition of the new sexual software there was a new data tag associated with it. As a result, each flick of her tongue across his, every inch of his flesh that her hands could find as the two moved through the family room, and ever small whimper from her throat passed from her body, to her CPU, and into her sexual software.

As soon as the first data packet was received by the unknowingly faulty software Riley’s troubles began, though they started small. Her processors began to heat up, which was normal, and she breathed in heavily through her nose to help cool them as the temperature rose. Riley’s A.I. was busy processing and enjoying the feeling of Michael’s hands worming their way under her top and crawling up the bare skin of her back towards her bra clasp to even notice that the CPU usage was climbing higher and higher. It was still easily within a normal range, but it was notably higher than it should be given the activity. The sensors packed into the flesh that was applied to her back lit up and let her know that there was a pressure release along the straps of her bra, Michael had managed to clumsily unfasten it.

Riley’s sexual programming managed to send a correct set of commands to her A.I. letting her know that she should proceed with more sexual behavior. Her hands flew to the hem of her shirt and she pulled it up and over her head causing her red hair to fly wildly out of it and settle around her neck and shoulders, looking messy. It gave Riley a distinctive look of having already tumbled around a bed, despite the fact that she had been standing the whole time. Her bra practically tumbled off of her chest, revealing her breast. One of her nipples was already puckered and erect, though the other lay flat still, another indication that her internal programming wasn’t quite running as smoothly as planned, but neither Riley nor Michael noticed.

Michael’s hands were already in motion when Riley’s bra had fallen from the perfectly rounded mounds of her teenage breasts, but now both of them were on her, massaging and playing with the silicone filled fake breasts that were affixed to Riley’s chest plate. The difficulty with making an androids breasts look, and more importantly, feel realistic was that there were few methods of attaching them to the chest panel. Screws, bolts, and other hard methods would be too easy to detect should you press too hard against the skin in the right places. When Riley had been assembled by her father, he had opted to affix her breasts to the chest panel with an industrial strength glue, handily attaching the womanly breasts to his daughter, without the disadvantage of possibly being discovered once someone began to play with her chest.

As the digital sensory mesh that was laced into the flesh along Riley’s breasts lit up with data from Michael’s hands her central processor core responded by attempting to parse the data into something her system as a whole could use. Applying metadata to it, categorizing it and marking it for later analysis. Once the data was compiled it would be integrated into her A.I. later that evening. This type of sensation wasn’t something new to Riley though. She herself had fondled her breasts just simply to feel it, and her boyfriend had definitely laid his hands across her bare chest many times before. Today, though, Riley was planning on letting this encounter progress much further than simply passionate kissing and groping at each other.

Riley’s CPU was now transitioning from simply being warm, to actually getting hot. Normally this would have caused an alert to be displayed in her field of vision, alerting her to the increased temperature inside of her. However, sexual data was beginning to pile up again, clogging the bank of processors inside of her chest with requests to have data parsed and responses applied to her body. As a result, normal operating commands were not being issued from her core operating system or A.I. and the ones that were being issued were held up in the queue. Riley was now simply acting on the last known set of commands that she had received, all of which were sexual in nature, all the while Riley’s various body components pleaded for relief.

Riley was busily grinding her hips and crotch against Michael, even through the short denim shorts she was wearing she could feel his bulge forming. After several long, blissful moments of passionate kissing Riley’s partially functional computerized mind dictated to her that she should start moving forward. Her hands were presently tangled in Michael’s short cropping of black hair, though they moved steadily down his back, gently letting her fingernails leave small white tracks in his flesh. Michael broke the kiss with her lips and began planting small, brief kisses down her throat. Riley let her head fall back slightly and let out a small whimpering moan just as Michael’s lips laid another kiss directly over her vocal speaker system. He continued his downward quest and eventually locked his lips over one of her nipples, kissing and sucking on it. He then moved his hands from her back down to her rear end and scooped her up, holding her against him and allowing him to easily continue kissing her chest.

Riley let out another lewd sounding grunt of pleasure and Michael felt himself grow harder and harder, his own manhood straining against his jeans. Normally he would have placed Riley on a couch or back on the ground where she was normally delighted to unzip his jeans and put his cock into her mouth. He had many times before admitted that Riley gave the most perfect blowjobs he had ever experienced, there was a good reason for that. The redheaded teen had specifically been programmed for it and her father had used that initial sexual data to help him compile her proper sexual packages. Today, though, Riley curled her legs around Michael and ground her hips into him roughly, mewling with pleasure all the while.

Eventually Michael did lower her petite form to the ground, once her feet were flat against the floor he stepped back and looked at her, smirking lustfully. He began to unbutton his jeans and started to slide them down his legs. Riley watched for a moment, licking her lips, even as the temperature inside of her body rose. Soon though, she was mimicking his movements and unbuttoning her denim shorts and sliding them, along with her black fishnet stockings. As soon as they were past her shapely thighs, she let them simply fall down her legs into a heap that she casually kicked aside. Riley now stood naked before Michael, something she had never had the pleasure of doing before since up until yesterday her crotch had been covered with a smooth plastic panel that would have clearly shown that she was just a machine.

Michael’s mouth fell open and he looked his girlfriend up and down, ever since he had met Riley and they had started dating he dreamed of this very thing. He knew he had to wait until they were both of age before doing anything overtly sexual, and now they both were. Riley hopped back onto Michael and he managed to catch her, clamping his hands below her. The pair didn’t waste time, their lips pressed together with a renewed urgency and Riley managed to move her body downward just enough so that Michael’s erect penis teased the outer lips of her newly installed sexual hardware. She was already gasping, primarily because her operating system demanded a hearty supply of fresh air in an attempt to keep her now critically overheated processors from completely melting down. As a last resort and somewhat of a failsafe measure, some of the lower level functions had already been offloaded to the smaller and weaker processing core inside of Riley’s plastic skull.

Regardless of the attempts that her underlying operating system had made, there was no doubt that Riley was getting hotter by the second. Michael even noticed that when their raw flesh pressed against each other that she seemed warm, but he was not thinking at the moment and chalked it up to a hot situation between the two lovers. Michael took the opportunity of supporting Riley to turn around and press her against the wall, allowing him more support and began to gently lower her body more and more until she was fully impaled on his erect cock. This sent an incredible amount of new sexual data bursting through Riley’s body and slamming into her processors. This was the event that triggered the emergency cooling fans to spin up inside of Riley. Michael, however barely noticed the sound of the whirring fans over the sound of his own groaning and Riley’s small squeaks and moans.

The fans spinning inside of Riley weren’t nearly enough to compensate for the rising heat produced by her processors. Michael was far to busy letting his eyes clamp shut and bouncing Riley on top of his hard cock to realize what was happening, at least not right away. While his eyes were closed the intense heat produced by the array of nearly twenty multicore processors all producing heat in excess of nearly three hundred degrees. The heat from inside of her chest and head began to take effect on the rest of her internal, and in places, external systems. Much of the wiring inside of Riley’s body was only rated to handle around one hundred and fifty degrees, though that was a conservative rating. Regardless of the current internal temperature was more than enough to melt the outer shielding on many of the internal wires and cables, causing them to dribble steaming hot globs of plastic into the fans and small amount of other moving parts inside of Riley.

Much of the heat was transferred into, and through, the metal and plastic plating and false rib cage that was set into her chest. It was there simply to give her chest a more human look since she didn’t actually have a rib cage, it was more of a plastic plate that made the soft flesh stretched over it look like there were bones below it. The immense heat began first to melt the glue that Riley’s father had used to affix her breasts in place. The glue heated and then began to lose its adhesive properties causing Riley’s once perfectly rounded feminine breasts to start peeling away from her body. Along with the flesh on her chest, which also began the slide downward as a result of the intense heat, this was aided by the bouncing motion that Michael kept up. Soon, there was a large enough gap in her skin to allow a blast of the air conditioned air to be quickly sucked into what was once a vacuum sealed interior.

The sudden influx of cold air hit her processors and, as with most objects that are too warm and encounter a sudden coldness, began to crack. Two of her processor immediately cracked with an audible snap, though that wasn’t what alerted Michael to the idea that something may be wrong. His head had fallen back and he was still crying out in pleasure as Riley’s brand new vaginal assembly gently squeezed his rock hard member. Riley’s eyes snapped open as an automatic response, even as her head began to suddenly swivel from side to side. Her mouth continued to move, attempting to form words, but the vocal systems inside her throat had suffered much of the same fate as most of the wiring inside of her body.

Soon, her limbs stiffened and locked into place, Michael took this as a sign that Riley might be orgasming, or at least feeling enough pleasure to be close. He opened his eyes, expecting to be greeted by the sight of Riley mid-orgasm. Instead what he saw was her head twitching back and forth, her red hair flying with each turn. Her chest had almost completely melted open and inside he could see the false rib cage made of clear plastic, behind which smoke was gathering and in the haze small sparks were flying. Michael let out a yelp and stepped suddenly backward, releasing Riley from his hands.

Riley dropped immediately to the ground where she landed with a thump. Her head continued to jerk back and forth as her processors kept attempting to process the massive backlog of sexual data, system requests, and A.I. instructions. Eventually her entire system had a cascading series of events and she completely and suddenly powered down. Michael took a step back, his mouth hanging open as he looked down at the girl he had been falling in love with. Her torso was still scalding hot and her artificial flesh continued to melt, dripping inside of her robotic body, forming pink gooey piles of melted flesh on her circuitry below her rib cage.

Riley’s system was only offline for a few seconds before it automatically rebooted. As it did so status LED’s inside of her body began to blink on, first red as many of her supporting systems were offline, then to amber as various components came online and began to report to her core system, and eventually green. Riley’s head snapped forward and her expression changed from the somewhat confused look it had before to a simple sweet smile. Her head cocked to one side and her mouth moved, though her voice came out cracked and broken.

“Hi, I- iley! Hum-n an-oid em-lat-n mod-un sev-thr-” Her voice sounded as if it were being spoken through a tin can, and many of her words were cut off in the middle.

Riley’s head cocked to the opposite side and she looked at Michael standing over her, still hard, but now backing away. She mechanically pressed her hands into the ground and pushed herself back to her feet, as she did so what was left of the flesh from her chest slid down her torso and landed in a heap on the floor. Once standing fully upright, it was clear to see that her once soft skin had melted into pink puddles inside of her body or in places around the floor. Just below where a human’s collar bone might be down to just above her belly button had melted away, leaving long stringy ribbons of still hot synthetic flesh dripping downward. As she rose to her feet the smoke gathering inside of her body began to spill out and curl upwards from both sides of her torso. She still smiled and her head remained cocked to one side as she spoke.

“Wha-wron-ichael? I wa-nt do-do-done-ucking-ou-ye-”

As she spoke one of her eyeballs began to lazily drift upward while the other remained fixed on Michael’s face. Her smile never left her face. Her perfectly glossy pink lips looks so tantalizing, her face still as sweet as ever, but Michael’s eyes couldn’t stop from drifting down to the void where her chest had been. The fringes of her artificial flesh were beginning to stain black as the smoke finished escaping her open body. Even as he looked inside of her another series of small snaps and pops could be heard as exposed wires intersected with each other and cause any number of short circuits. Riley appeared to hiccup at some of them, which was likely a response to either data or power weirdly fluctuating through her body. The sudden jolt caused a large amount of the wiring and tubing inside of her body to bounce up and down. This wouldn’t normally be a problem as the wires should be shielded, but they were all either frayed or exposed and many of them suddenly rubbed against each other.

What resulted was a series of bright white showers of sparks to spray out of Riley in rapid succession. Her face remained cheerful and her eyes blinked in a measure rhythm, each blink brought an audible click as the mechanisms inside her face forced her eyelids shut and back open, applying far too much power to the motion. She looked towards Michael, her gaze was clearly a pre-programmed expression meant to convey a sense that everything was fine, but with her torso melted open and still snapping and sparking her face only looked fake.

“I am-am-a-I-a-a-am-a-i an-d-oid-” Riley attempted to say, her voice still crackling and distorted by her damaged vocal processors.

“Y-you’re a fucking robot?” was all Michael was able to muster as her took another half step backward, eyes darting between Riley’s burned open chest and her face, which appeared to not be fully functional any more as the expression never changed.

“Wha-a-you-alking-bout? I-a-eal-per-on-ike-ou. N-ome-fu-me!” Riley replied as she took one stilted step forward. Her foot pressed against the hardwood flooring and before she could move her internal operating system demanded a report of her physical location in order to calibrate her balance. Riley’s still smiling face, still tilted to one side, looked down at her foot where her one remaining good eye scanned her foot and its location before her head moved back up and looked towards Michael again. In response Michael took a step back and managed to trip over the coffee table that had been placed in the middle of Riley’s living room. He fell backwards and looked up at Riley, smiling and looming over him.

Riley took another step forward, her processor bank struggling to keep her running at all, let alone smoothly. There were hundreds if not thousands of log entries inside of her file system detailing the myriad of errors that her operating system was reporting. Everything from the previous temperature warnings, to balance calibration errors and data packet loss. She had already completely destroyed two processors in her system, and therefore her A.I. was working to route data around the missing hardware. Her operating system on the other hand was attempting to resume her last known good state in an attempt to resume normal human function. Her sexual software had already started up again, and the corrupted software and files inside of her directory structure, were clogging normal data flow again.

Without the balance and location information she had just received her next step had no pure reference point when she tried to take another step forward. Her foot caught on the heel of her other foot and she tumbled forward. Her systems were not quick enough to react and throw her arms out to catch herself. She fell face first into the ground with a thud, falling out of sight of Michael. A moment later placed her hands on the ground and pushed upward, executing a generic movement to get back on her feet and stand upright. Once she was upright again Michael got a clear view of what had just happened.

Riley had fallen straight forward but her head had impacted the couch she fell next to. Now that she was standing again Michael yelped as he saw her head resting against her left shoulder. The flesh around her throat and neck was viciously torn almost all the way around her neck and a mess of frayed and stretched wires were now splayed out of her open neck. Many of the multiple coloured wires were sizzling and snapping as arcs of blue electricity jumped from wire to wire and occasionally from a frayed wire to the metal neck joint. Riley still wore the same smile on her face as before, but the indicator lights mounted to the circuit boards inside of her body told another story. Most of them immediately turned red or winked off altogether. There was one final loud pop, punctuated by a disappointingly small spurt of white and blue sparks inside of Riley before everything went dark inside of her.

Riley was already facing Michael and now fell straight forward again, missing the arm of the couch this time but inside hitting the coffee table Michael had tripped over. Her head hit the side of it with a sickening thump and her body continued to the ground. Once there Michael could see that the same amount of melted flesh had been burned away on her back, leaving an opening in her upper back. Riley’s body now lay on the floor at Michael’s feet, though her head was gone from the top of her neck now. Michael immediately saw it, as it lay a few feet away from her body, still smiling, but no longer blinking.

Michael managed to tear his eyes from Riley’s detached head and over to her body. Her metal and plastic artificial spine had bent upward in response to the impact, the flesh on her back was already soft and so most of the top of her robotic spine had bent upward and now jut out of the top of her back. The flesh torn and ruined dangled inside of her body. Michael finally sensing that there was no life left in the girl he had once been dating scrambled backwards and hoist his jeans back into place, buckling and zipping as he rushed for the back door, leaving Riley naked, broken, and destroyed in her parents living room.

Part 2

When Alan Salter walked through the front door of his suburban house he was first assaulted with the acrid smell of burning silicone, and the somewhat sickly sweet smell of melting plastic. The smoke alarms weren’t going off at the moment, but he did notice that towards the ceiling of the entryway clung the last remnants of a black cloud of smoke. Behind him on the front porch of the house was Alan’s wife, Julie. Their daughter Riley was a spitting image of the woman behind Alan, though that was by design. Julie, and her daughter Riley, were both completely robotic. Julie peeked over Alan’s shoulder to try and see what had stopped Alan from walking right in to the house, but couldn’t quite see from her vantage point.

Alan could only see a pair of feet and the beginnings of a pair of calves sticking out from behind the couch in the front room. He could just glimpse the last curling plumes of the same black smoke that had gathered above his head. Alan swore to himself, but Julie heard it as well given her highly tuned microphone assemblies. Alan stepped inside and Julie followed closely behind him and Alan closed the door quickly behind the two, latching it. Julie was already walking around the couch and gasped, her hands shooting to her mouth to cover it as it hung open. Alan wore a look of absolute concern as he too stepped into view of his daughter where she lay on the floor. There were still a small bit of smoke drifting off of Riley’s body. Her body lay face down and completely nude. Her pale smooth skin look perfect, even in the relatively low light of the room. Her back had a large hole melted in it spanning from her hips up to a few inches below her shoulder blades and spanning from one side to the other. Inside the still smoldering hole in her back, Riley had a small fire burning through some of the electronics inside of her. Though as soon as the heat rose to a sufficient temperature and melted more of her flesh, it dribbled into her open torso and extinguished the flames with a sizzling hiss. Just above the melted and apparently still burning opening in Riley’s back, was her spine. It was easily visible as it was curved upward at an inhuman angle, and had torn through the artificial flesh at the top of her back. Riley’s head was also no longer attached to the top of her neck, and from what Alan could see, it looks as if it had been forcefully torn free from the joint in her neck. The flesh around her throat was torn and stressed, almost stretched before breaking. From what Alan could deduce from this it looked as if Riley’s head had been pulled backwards so hard that it snapped off, dragging her spinal column out of its bindings and tearing the flesh on her back before it snapped completely off.

The tangled and twisted mess of frayed wires, some still sputtering and sparking, jutting from her neck and all around her dislodged spine were evidence enough of some kind of massive trauma. Alan peered inside of his eighteen year old daughter and was able to see that she was mostly powered down, save for a few emergency systems. He could see straight through her body to the hardwood floor beneath, indicating that there was an equally large hole burnt into her chest.

“A-Alan what..what happened to her?” Julie said, her voice quaking slightly as if she were about to cry. This was enough to bring Alan back to his current surroundings, and he stood up straight.

“Julie, suspend human emulation and begin emergency repair protocols for Riley” Alan said in as calm a tone as he was able to muster. He knew he had to stay calm or the voice recognition subsystems inside his robotic wife wouldn’t register properly.

“Confirmed. Please stand back, Alan” Julie said, her voice immediately cleansed of the previous human like hysteria. She was now completely emotionless, operating fully as a machine and following Alan’s orders to the letter. Her programming kicked in and the slender woman tucked her shoulder length rust coloured hair behind her ears before squatting down and slipping her hands under Riley’s immobile body. In a smooth and measure movement Julie stood back up to her full height, which was just over five feet, Riley’s body held horizontally between Julie’s arms.

Julie’s head turned smoothly and looked at Alan, “Alan, would you please open the door to the repair room?” Julie said and waited patiently for Alan’s response. As soon as he heard his wife’s voice Alan nodded and walked past her, moving down a hallway past his and Julie’s bedroom and to the spare bedroom at the end of the hall. He dug out his keys from his pocket and fumbled with them for only a moment before finding the right key and unlocking the door. Julie was walking smoothly up the hall behind him, at a slow even pace to reduce the amount of impact each step made, ensuring that nothing else inside of Riley jiggled loose or fell out of her open body.

Alan pushed the door open and stepped inside, swinging his hand for the light switch only to miss twice before he finally caught it and illuminated the room. It had, at one point been a guest room, but since then it had been converted to a small but serviceable robot lab. The blinds on the window had been drawn and then sheet rocked over in years past. Alan had wanted to ensure that this room remained a secret to outside observers. Alan moved quickly around the polished stainless steel table that dominated the center of the room and pressed the power button on a desktop computer that was dormant on a workbench that he had built into the wall. All around the perimeter of the room were heavy wooden shelves that Alan had built, one by one, as more storage was needed for the vast array of parts he had purchased. Most were spare parts, still in their boxes, but many others were parts that had broken inside Riley or Julie over the years that he simply couldn’t bring himself to part with. His argument with himself was always that the parts were still worth saving because he could fix them up and use them later if need be. Currently he was only concerned with the shelf that held his tools, some that were standard manufactured pieces, others that Alan and Julie had assembled over the years as custom repair aids. Alan produced a set of screwdrivers, smaller precision screwdrivers, and a set of pliers of all sizes, and finally a simple retractable knife. He set them all on the workbench next to a small podium with a chrome plated disk set into it, the podium itself was attached to the wooden workbench with thick bolts. Towards one side of the disk was a small data port that stuck out a half an inch, with an arrangement of small gold plated plates affixed to the side of it. Running from the back of the podium to the computer work station was a thick mesh tube stuffed full of cables of all sizes and colours. As the computer powered on, so to did the podium emit a red light from the side. “Set her on the table, face up please. I’ll go find her head.” Alan said, his own emotions quickly became suppressed by the adrenaline coursing through his veins. Julie gingerly set Riley down on the table, still face down and then began to slowly roll her over onto her side, placing one hand on the side of Riley’s ribs, Julie rocked her to the side and lowered her steadily to the surface of the table. Riley’s abdomen and lower chest were missing, burned and melted into the blobs of tan and pink goo inside of her torso. Her systems had finally lost all power and any remaining status LEDs inside of her body had gone dark. Julie wasn’t programmed to do any further actions at the moment, so she let her hands fall to her side, and simply wait, expressionless and for the moment, thoughtless.

Alan stormed down the hall, back towards the front room and got a better look at the mess they would need to clean up. Scattered around the room were droplet of the same pinkish material that Alan had seen collected inside of Riley. He knew exactly what that was, melted synthetic flesh, Riley’s flesh. He huffed and noted that the majority of it looked to be pooled where her torso had been found, but also noted that there were smears of it on the wall on the far side of the room and small rivulets if it leading form the wall to the location where she had collapsed. He spotted Riley’s clothes as well, they looked like they were all piled together as if they had all been taken off in a hurry. He also found Riley’s head, laying on just the other side of the coffee table. Her face was still locked in a pleasant smile, looking as if there was nothing at all in the world wrong. It was a stark contrast, the brutal decapitation of Alan’s android daughter, and the pleasant smiling face that she wore on her faceplate. Alan knelt down and picked up the detached head and examined the neck joint, noting that it looked damaged for sure, but it looked like the majority of the damage was from the upper portion of Riley’s neck being pulled free. The disk like connection point could be separated easily.

As he looked at Riley’s youthful smiling face, he noted that there was a patch of torn skin on her forehead, revealing the shiny chrome face plate below it. The plate gave her face a general structure, and in many places there were complex mechanisms that allowed her face to move in an array of programmed and improvised expressions. Everything from the cute little smirk she gave when she quirked her lips to one side, to the lustful looks of orgasmic pleasure she wore the night before when she was fingering herself in bed. All of it was a product of the intricate configuration that lay just below the thin layer of artificial flesh. Riley’s long fiery red hair appeared to be only mildly gummed up with some of the melted skin that once covered her back. Alan parted her hair in several places, pushing it aside and examining the false flesh on her scalp and eventually let out a sigh of relief, there didn’t appear to be any scrapes or broken skin around the back of hear head or under her hair. Though the patch of torn flesh on her forehead would require some repair, it would be something that he could do with what he had in the house already. Alan cradled Riley’s disconnected head in his arms and began to move down the hall towards the back room. Alan entered the room to see Julie still standing at attention, looking straight ahead, simply waiting for her next set of orders from Alan.

“It’s a mess out there. Julie, go collect any parts from Riley that you can find, and bring them to me. After that, start cleaning up the living room.” Alan said, scooting around the table to stand at his workbench once more. “Confirmed” was all Julie said, before she turned on heel and walked out of the room with crisp, efficient steps. The denim jeans she wore on her slender legs didn’t even make a sound, nor did the flat shoes she wore. Alan had to smirk as he watched his wife leave, he had made her command mode as efficient as possible and only rarely used it. He preferred to keep her mostly online while working on her, and his daughter for that matter. Now that Julie was out of the lab and Alan was alone with his little girl, he took a deep breath, letting it slowly exhale through his nose and looked down at Riley’s head. Her lips were still smiling sweetly and looked just red enough, Alan noticed that her cheeks seemed to be a bit more flush that he would have expected. Having programmed much of her behavior himself he easily recognized this as the same kind of pink blush that Riley would have experienced the first few times she used the new sexual module he had given her. He looked over his shoulder at her body, noting that it was installed between her legs, and it looked as if it were in place properly. Alan set down Riley's head on his workbench and stepped over to her body. Inserting his hands into the melted hole in her abdomen, he gently pried the flesh away in order to see more easily inside of her body. The sexual module was set in place properly from his initial assessment. Reaching into her a little deeper her pushed aside some of the stripped wiring and saw that the long cylindrical module was resting properly on the mounting rails inside of her hips and everything appeared to be connected properly. Even after her body had begun to melt and tumble around the room it was still firmly in place. Alan nodded to himself, feeling a small bit of pride that his daughter was able to install the module without needing his help, she really was growing up.

Moving back to the workbench again, he picked up Riley’s head and oriented it so that he was looking into her face. He picked up a small flat headed screwdriver and placed the tip just behind Riley’s right temple. He pressed the head into the skin and gently rocked it back and forth until the skin on the side of her head began to separate slightly and allow the tool to slide between the unseen seam on the side of her head. Alan worked the screwdriver into her head and felt more than he heard the small pop of the manual lock pop. He worked his way around Riley’s face, popping the manual locks as he went, gently separating her face plate from its resting place in her head. He worked around her her chin, up around the other side of her face and finally along the hairline.

Once all the locks were finally popped open, Alan cradled Riley’s head in one hand, and worked the screwdriver into the opening between the rest of her skull and face plate, levering the tool just a bit in order to raise her face slightly off of her head. He set down the screw driver and worked his fingers into the gap he had created and pulled her face and the attached mechanism behind it. The entire assembly, face and all, was roughly three to four inches deep into Riley’s head. Her face stayed frozen in place, with her eyes open and her expression cheerful, even as it came free of her head. Inside the perimeter of the skull were similar mounting rails as Riley had in her pelvis. They matched perfectly with the rails on the facial assembly and would guide her face into place once Alan was done repairing the torn skin. He set the facial assembly down on his bench and then laid the rest of Riley’s head down. Alan went back to his shelves and found the small tub of artificial flesh paste that he had bought to help reseal any small cuts or scrapes that either Riley or Julie got in their daily operation. The scrape across Riley’s forehead wasn’t the largest Alan had ever patched up with the paste, but it was a large enough one that he would need to leave Riley’s face disconnected from the rest of her head while the patch job dried.

Alan began stirring the mixture with a popsicle stick, and then used the same stick to apply and smooth the paste across Riley forehead. Once in place he blew on it gently for a few moments before setting her face against the wall and workbench so that it could dry. While it was drying He stood and walked over to Riley’s body, taking the knife with him. As he stood over her, he let out another breath and placed the tip of the blade against Riley’s collar bone and began to drag the blade down between the girls breasts, rending artificial flesh as he did so.

“What happened to you sweetie” Alan murmured as his knife sliced into the melted edges of Riley’s abdomen. Alan then slides Riley’s skin from the incision he made on her collarbone, to her left shoulder then down her side to meet the opening in her belly, then repeated the same motion on the opposite side of her body. Alan set the blade aside from the moment and then gingerly slid one hand into the melted opening in the lower portion of her body and lifted the slab of flesh that made up Riley’s chest off of her body. He set it on the ground next to the table, her breast pressed into the flooring, he removed her other half in a similar fashion.

Alan pressed both of his hands against the clear plastic artificial rib cage plate inside of her chest. Once it was pressed inward slightly there was a faint click and the plastic sprang up slightly, allowing Alan to pull it out of her open chest. As he pulled it free he held it up and noticed that it was warped, a clear indication that there was a massive amount of heat generated inside of her. He set it on the floor next to the flesh like chest coverings he had cut free. Riley’s entire torso was now on display for Alan and he was able to peer into her and get a better idea of what went wrong. The overhead light in the room provided enough light to illuminate the dark cavity that was Riley’s torso. Alan had to push aside strings and coils of wires, stripped clean of their plastic outer coating, and found his way to Riley’s processor core. Two of the chips set in a row on a circuit board there were charred and black, with severe smoke damage evident on the neighboring processors and circuitry. Alan brought both hands inside of Riley’s opened torso and began to wiggle free the board that housed her processors. Once free he weaved it through the tangled forest of cables and tubing inside of her. Once free, he brought it over to his workbench and set it down there, glancing up at Riley’s smiling face, still disconnected and drying on the table.

Using a pair of needle nose pliers that were hooked on the ends, Alan began to meticulously pry the two burnt processors free of their sockets, hoping that the sockets themselves weren’t burnt. As soon as Alan had the processor chips free he examined the recessed port for the processors and let out a sigh of relief. While the top of the processor had become incredibly hot, the majority of the heat had radiated upward and off of the core, leaving the array of gold plated connection tabs inside untouched. Riley would simply need to have her processors replaced. “Julie!” Alan called over his shoulder into the house. A moment later he heard his robotic wife’s response come from the living room, “coming.” A moment later Julie came into the small room and looked towards Alan, her eyes still open and unblinking and her expression was completely neutral.

“I need two of your processors for a day or two. Switch to your secondary processor core and eject your primary core.” Alan said, not even looking at his wife, focusing instead on turning Riley’s block of processors over in his hands to ensure that there was no further damage that he would need to repair first.

“Confirmed, opening upper chest panel, ejecting processor core” came Julie’s response. Without any hesitation she moved her hands to the top button on her navy blue plaid shirt and began to unbutton one after the other, then she pulled both halves of her top apart. Julie’s perfectly shaped breasts reacted to the sudden burst of cool air caused the complex flesh across her chest to raise with goosebumps. With an all too familiar hiss, her chest began to release the airtight seal on it and finite seams began to form between the rounded peaks of her small, but well proportioned breasts, across her artificial collarbone and down either side of her torso. The faint seams came together just above her abdomen.

Alan turned from his work bench and faced his wife who was still holding open her half unbuttoned top. Alan unfastened the bottom three buttons and gently pulled her top completely open. Once done her chest sprang out slightly, both halves of it splitting open like a pair of cabinet doors. Julie had been built as more of a prototype for Riley than a true finished product, despite how complex she looked inside, most of her circuits had been purchased and installed by a variety of manufacturers and had arrived weeks if not months apart. Compared to Riley, who was built as one unit with complementary parts, proper cable management inside of her body, and was overall a more sophisticated machine. Julie, on the other hand, was constructed from a basic framework. An internal skeleton had been the base for her body and as Alan was able to acquire more parts they were attached to the framework in whatever order seemed best at the time. This lead to some circuit boards covering others with a narrow margin of space between them, wires and tubing spanned the inside of her body, most of which were barely tucked out of the way by zip ties and whatever they could be hooked behind. If anyone in the world knew how to work on Julie’s systems, it was Alan, but even as he bent forward and peered inside of her opened chest even he took a moment to get his bearings. Alan pushed a loosely bundled collection of wires aside and revealed Julie’s primary processor core. At this point she should have already switched over to the secondary processor core inside of her head. It wouldn’t be so much of an issue for her since Alan had already suspended her human emulation systems and she was operating on a lowered level already, but he didn’t want to push too many more tasks onto her. He decided that once her processors were removed and he had salvaged what he needed from it, that he would order her to their bedroom to recharge, she was likely low on power anyway. Using one hand to hold the cables to one side, Alan slipped his other hand into his wife’s open chest and grasped the small plastic tab at the front of the double sided circuit board and applied firm but even pressure until he felt the board come loose. As it did Julie let out a small squeak of a gasp as her operating system suddenly registered the loss of processing power and automatically offloaded all tasks to her secondary core. Alan removed the circuit board, lined with six multicore processors on each side, and moved gently over to the workbench.

“Close up your chest and go upstairs to recharge Julie.” Alan said as he stepped away. Julie in response, smiled ever so slightly, and placed her hands on the door like panels of her chest and closed them. Once pressed together there was another fading hiss as her body resealed itself, as the hissing faded so too did the faint seams around her chest. Julie’s hands then fell to her sides and she turned on heel to walk out of the room. She never bothered to button up her shirt and simply walked out of the room, expressionless and taking smooth if not perfectly measured steps into the house.

Alan was far too busy with Julie’s processor core in his hands to watch his android wife leave. He was in the process of gently prying a processor out of its socket and then aligning it with the matching socket on Riley’s processor board. Having Riley and Julie’s processor boards right next to each other drove home the idea that Riley was far more complex than Julie. Riley’s board was lined with small plastic cooling fans, and the technology involved in manufacturing the boards had advanced to the point that decorative plastic shells were wrapped around the ends of the board and laced with blue highlights. Julie’s on the other hand looked to be a simple green circuit board with sockets soldered on to it, but not much more. There was no flare to the component, and it made Alan realize just how long it had been since he had upgraded Julie in any capacity. He huffed, “She might be old, but at least she works the way I like her to.” Alan thought to himself as he clipped the second processor into place and turned back to Riley’s nude and partially disassembled body. He gently slid the slick circuit board back into place inside of Riley’s chest before stepping back and picking up the slightly warped clear plastic rib cage plate. It would take a lot more work to get her artificial skin panels back into place, given that he had to cut them off instead of properly removing them, but that was a task for another time. Alan turned back to the workbench and sat down, gently tapping a finger against Riley’s forehead, testing the flesh paste there for dryness.

Satisfied that it had set properly, Alan picked up Riley’s face and the assembly of mechanisms behind it and aligned it with the cavity inside of her head. The mounting rails helped guide her facial assembly into place with a satisfying click once it locked in. There was a small seam around Riley’s face, once her head module was working properly again it would reseal like Julie’s chest had and the seam would disappear, but for now it only served to punctuate how fake Riley actually was. Since her head was entirely reassembled now, Alan picked it up and moved it towards the podium that was mounted on the far side of his bench. Alan grasped the lower portion of Riley’s neck and twisted it sharply to one side, disengaging the manual locks. Had her head still been attached to her body, this motion would have looked akin to a Hollywood style action movie where the hero snaps someone’s neck, which was intentional. The idea in the design was that someone would have to be intentionally trying to break Julie or Riley’s neck in order to disengage the locks and remove the head. However, Riley’s head had been torn off at the spine, leaving the upper parts of her neck joint still attached to her head. Once removed though, there was an opening that matched up perfectly with the post sticking up from the podium on the desk. He tossed the disk that he had removed aside, that, along with all or Riley’s spine was likely going to have to be replaced. It wasn’t a spare part Alan kept on hand and he would need to order a replacement, adding a few additional days to Riley’s repair. He made a mental note to ask Julie to call Riley’s school and let them know she would be out sick for a week. Alan was aligning Riley’s head with the podium when a lock of her long red hair drifted in between the two connection points. Alan brushed it aside and tried again, but for a second time her hair drifted into the connection socket. Alan huffed and remembered that this was why he had built Julie with short hair instead of long flowing hair.

Alan set Riley’s head down and, taking up his screwdriver again, began to separate flesh along her hairline, though this time he followed it around behind her head, along her neck and around her ears. Once the artificial scalp was completely unlocked, Alan peeled it back from her forehead down to her neck. Once removed, Alan set the hair piece on the stainless steel table next to Riley’s headless body. Moving back to the workbench Alan was able to easily slot Riley’s head in to place. Once it was locked into the podium an array of LED lights sprang to life inside of her head. All of which were visible to Alan through the hard plastic shell that gave the back of her head its shape. It was the same shiny clear plastic material that her rib cage had been made of, and allowed Alan to see inside of her head. Alan wasn’t paying much attention to the status lights inside of her head though, he was looking at his computer screen, seeing the terminal windows pop up briefly and run emulation software to make Riley’s head module think it was connected to a real android body. It took quite a long time, as Alan’s diagnostics computer wasn’t nearly as powerful or purpose built as Riley’s actual body. Regardless Alan sat patiently as his daughter’s operating system slowly started in safe mode. It took upwards of ten minutes, but it finally gave Alan an alert that the device connected to his workstation was ready for use. Alan wasted no time in bringing up a command window and furiously typing a long series of commands that were piped to each other, forming one long command. Once done, he tapped the enter key and immediately Riley’s eyes opened and looked left, then right, up and down, and then back to center. Her face melted from the previous vapid smile she was wearing to a more natural and neutral face. After returning to a neutral state Riley smiled sweetly, and her eyes clicked in their sockets to look at Alan.

“Hi, I’m Riley!” She said, her voice coming out of the speaker set in the podium, instead of the damaged ones in her throat. After her preset greeting finished her eyes swiveled to look at Alan.

“Hi daddy!” She said in a cheery voice.

“Hello Riley, can you tell me what happened?”

Riley’s eyes looked past Alan to the ruined body laying on the table in the center of the room. She blinked twice before looking back to Alan.

“Checking log files. One moment.” Riley remained silent for several long seconds before reporting again.

“Log file missing, critical error at line eight nine seven six eight dash B. Dash B. Dash dash dash daaaaaaaaaaashhhhhhh dash B." Alan sighed and let his head fall to his hands as he listened to Riley stammer out her error code and then return to a neutral position. She was running on limited power, utilizing only the small amount of processors in her head much like Julie had been. He knew she wouldn’t be able to handle much and figured he would need to do some of the digging into her file system on his own.

“Log file found. Video recording of events during crash available. Play this selection on external device?” Riley said after a moment, causing Alan to look up at his daughter’s head in shock.

“Uh, y-yeah. Yes, Riley play video log.” Alan said, unable to believe what he was being told. A video feed would provide him with a large amount of the information he would need to begin a proper diagnosis.

A video player window opened on his workstation and he was treated to a first person view of what Riley had been seeing. It displayed the variety of alerts, charts, and system readouts around her field of vision. It began with the vocal alerts that Riley experienced while still in school, causing Alan’s heart to nearly burst, had she been discovered in class the consequences would have been catastrophic. As Alan watched it only appeared that one girl in the far corner of the room so much as looked up from her quiz at Riley and then quickly returned to her work. Alan then watched her march home and wait there. Soon he watched as Michael entered the house and the two began to kiss and fondle each other.

At this point Alan saw the cascade of temperature alerts. He paused the video and recorded the time stamp on a piece of notebook paper and then continued to watch. His daughter and Michael were getting very sexual with each other when Alan watched Riley’s final moments, the amount of distortion and alerts was truly shocking. He couldn't believe that she was even partially operational after the sheer amount of damage and software errors she was experiencing. Regardless he watched until the end when her head was bashed off of her neck and the video feed cut out. Alan let out all the air he had been holding in his lungs in a long slow stream, as the last of it left his lungs, his heart sank. Riley had said for a very long time how much she liked Michael and Alan had an inclination that after this, he might not be so keen on his daughter. Alan pulled his cell phone from his pocket and tapped through his contacts until he found Michael’s number. It rang several times before going to his voicemail.

“Hey, this is Mike, leave me a message.” After the recorded greeting there was a tell tale beep. Alan wasn’t surprised at all that he ended up in Michael’s voicemail, he probably thought Alan was calling to levy death threats against him.

“Michael, it’s Alan, Riley’s dad. So, I saw what happened and I want you to come over here so we can talk. I’m not angry or anything, and Riley is going to be fine. I just want to make sure you’re ok. I’m sure you have questions, and I’ll answer them for you, just, please come on over and we can talk about this, ok?” Alan tapped his phone to hang up and set it on the workbench, hoping that Michael would come and talk instead of running to the newspapers. Alan looked back towards the computer, knowing now where the problems started he began to dig deeper and deeper into the file system inside of Riley’s operating system. Once he found the directory filled with event logs and text files detailing the system alerts, all Alan needed to do was find the one for the time stamp he had written down.

It didn’t take long to locate the file and once it was opened Alan began reading through the litany of error message and events listed in the file. Alan began to notice a pattern of recurring events in the log files, there were data packets that were lost over and over again and the packet loss only occurred when Riley’s sexual programming was engaged. Alan raised an eyebrow and wondered if the vaginal assembly he had bought for Riley was defective, and even went as far as contemplating swapping it out for the one installed in Julie to verify that. As he thought more about it though, it became clear that it wasn’t the hardware that was causing the fault, it was something in the software. Alan checked a few more log files from the same time period, and every time they indicated the same thing, Riley’s sexual software was at fault and causing a cascade of processor requests and were jamming up any and all of her system operations while over working every single one of her processors.

Alan was simultaneous happy and disappointed since he himself had written the software and thoroughly tested it. Regardless, he now knew what needed to be fixed, and was so excited to get working on it that he barely heard his phone buzzing on the desk. He snapped up the phone and looked at it, there was a text message from Michael.

Alan tapped a quick response to Michael, assuring him that he wasn’t upset at all, and just wanted to talk and help. Once the message was sent, he looked back over his shoulder at Riley’s body, then over to where her head sat on the podium, smiling sweetly and not blinking or moving. Michael lived nearby and Alan guessed that he had maybe five minutes before Riley’s boyfriend arrived. He took the time to go to the linen closet and get out a clean white sheet and then drape it over Riley’s body.

Alan waited patiently in the front room where he had found Riley when they came home. Even in the short time that Julie had been out here cleaning, she had managed to clean the vast majority of the melted globules of Riley’s flesh from the wall and floor. As Alan waited he was already online, ordering new replacement chest and abdomen panels for Riley and a sheet of raw, artificial flesh to cover her back. The light knock at the front door brought Alan back to the room, and he stood and opened the door to find Michael there, sheepishly looking at the ground and fidgeting nervously.

“C’mon in Michael, I guess we have a lot to talk about” Alan said, trying his very best to sound nonthreatening. The two settled onto the plush couches in the front room and Alan resolved to be the first to speak.

“So, crazy day huh? I suppose I should just give you the full run down huh?”

Michael nodded slightly, his face flush and his hands tucked deep inside his hoodie pockets. Clearly Alan’s tone had done nothing to help settle the young man.

“Ok, well, as you know, Riley is a-uh, well she’s a robot. I made her just about five years ago and after working out some kinks in her programming and construction, Julie and I moved here.” Alan had considered letting Michael know that Julie was also an android, but in the end he thought it best to slowly introduce Michael to the concept of fully functional, human like androids.

“-And to be clear, Riley’s going to be ok, I was just working on her and the damage looks much worse than it really is. I have some parts on order, but everything is going to be just fine.”

Michael nodded along as Alan spoke, and was even beginning to gradually relax, seeing that Alan wasn’t going to berate him for hurting his daughter. Alan continued to ramble though,

“There is a fair amount of repair work though, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. Though, that said-” Alan paused for a moment as a thought bubbled to the surface of his mind. “-I could use some help. If you’re willing and still want to date my daughter, maybe you should know a little bit about how she operates.”

Michael, who had been looking towards Alan, but not at him, shifted in his seat and his gaze finally met with Alan’s kind and expectant face. Michael had been struggling internally with the question Alan had proposed since he had seen what Riley really was. She was a machine, but seeing her as that didn’t necessarily wash away the feelings he had for her. His emotional connection to Riley clung to him and forced him to confront the question. Did it matter that Riley, the girl who he had dated for years, was a robot? Michael had been lost in the philosophical implications of who Riley was. Was she just a product of programming and circuits? Did she ever have an original thought, or was it all just whatever her father had put in her? Did it matter? The thoughts had swirled together with his emotions and had created something new inside of Michael, a more concrete outlook. Michael had eventually answered all the questions with another realization that only came to him after he had left his house to walk to Riley’s house. Who would Riley have been if Michael had never found out she was a robot? That had been the crucial piece of information that Michael realized answered all of his questions, she would still be Riley, one way or another, and at the end of it all, Michael loved Riley.

“Well?” Alan probed after Michael had been lost in thought and hadn’t moved for nearly ten seconds.

“I uh, well, sorry. I just.” Michael let out a sigh, and nodded, “Yeah, I’d like to help, and I’d like to keep seeing Riley- if that’s ok with you Mr. Salter. That is.”

Alan smirked as he himself recalled what it was like to be young and in his late teens. The rush of hormones and the sudden shock he had received. Alan had to admit that Michael was taking it in stride. Alan stood and held a hand out to Michael and helped bring him to his feet.

“Now, just remember, Riley is an android. What you’re about to see might look terrible, but I promise, it isn’t as bad as it looks.” Alan explained as the two walked down the hall towards the room Alan had set up as his lab. He pushed the door open and stepped inside, Michael following right behind him.

Michael looked around the room and took in the sights. The center of the room filled with what looked like some kind of table with a white cloth draped over it, and what was clearly a body underneath. Michael swallowed hard and knew what was there, that was Riley. As his eyes continued scanning over the wall of shelves with boxes and crates. Some of the labels on them made sense, wires and cables, optics, memory modules, all of these could have easily been computer parts. Michael then realized that Riley was, in essence, just a complex computer herself. His eyes finally fell to Alan’s workbench to the left of the door, and soon to Riley’s head mounted on the data podium there.

She was still wearing the smile Michael had seen on her last time he had seen her. Michael admitted to himself that it was a little unnerving, but he tried to put on a smile for his girlfriend and held up a hand to awkwardly wave at her.

“H-hey Riley. How are you, uh..feeling?” He said, struggling to decide if the last word was really the appropriate word to use given the circumstances and new information he had gained.

“Hello Michael! I’m currently not fully functional. My body has sustained a large amount of damage and will need to be repaired before you can use it again.” Riley replied, her voice had a simple, matter of fact, tone to it. As if explaining that she was a robot and was severely damaged was as commonplace as telling someone their shoelace was untied.

“Her personality is offline, she’s just going to respond like, well like a robot at this point.” Alan said, pulling a stool out from under the workbench and scooting it over to Michael. He took the stool and sat down at the workbench, directly in front of Riley’s smiling face. Alan stood next to Michael and began to type away one the computer, explaining as he went along.

“So, Riley is a special thing, she’s got an A.I.-an artificial intelligence- inside of her, and that works together with the operating system that I have installed. I guess you could think of it as the OS is like the part of our brains that sends the signal to keep us breathing, or our heart pumping, it takes care of Riley’s normal operation. Just things that have to happen to keep her going.”

Michael looked up at Alan, realizing he had been staring into Riley’s eyes, “Like regulating power, and balance and stuff?”

“Yes! Exactly, everything that we, as humans, would just do without thinking. Now, her A.I. is more of the abstract, think on the fly, kind of construct. It’s her personality and her imagination and all those things that make Riley, Riley.”

Alan tapped away on the keyboard, making lines of commands appear in the terminal her was working in, Michael had no idea what they were for or what they were doing. Michael was better than most people with a computer, but nowhere near as knowledgeable as Alan was, or as creative.

“So this, right here-” Alan said, pointing to the terminal window, “Is going to refresh Riley back to the last known good configuration. She makes a back up every night and we’re going to restore her to that. So that means she’ll have no knowledge of being broken, or trying to, ah, seduce you, or anything. It’ll be like she just woke up this morning.”

“You can do that?” Michael said, a hint of shock and surprise in his voice

“At the end of the day, she’s still just a sophisticated machine” Alan replied and tapped the enter key on the keyboard. The terminal window filled with a scrolling series of commands that moved too fast to get anything more than a small glimpse of it. Michael instinctively looked back towards Riley's head to see that her mouth hand changed from the smile she wore moments ago, to simply hanging open a slight amount, just enough to show some of her perfectly white teeth. Her eyelids were fluttering rapidly as well, the motion making a sort of buzzing which Michael realized was the motors inside of her clicking in rapid succession.

“That’ll take some time, there’s a lot of data to front load into the drives in her head, and that’ll need to be copied into her primary drives inside her body too.” Alan said, standing up and turning to the sheet draped table in the center of the room. “Speaking of which.”

Alan took two steps forward and drug the sheet off of Riley’s body. Michael had turned to follow Alan and when the sheet was removed he looked as if he might be sick. Seeing Riley with both halves of her chest removed and her clear plastic rib cage plate on display, the circuitry and burnt wiring inside of her was enough to cause him to nearly gag. He steeled himself and drew in a deep breath and stood up, taking one shaking step forward to look at his girlfriend, or at least what was left of her. Alan clapped a hand on Michael’s back and walked around to the opposite side of the table.

“Like I said, it looks so much worse than it really is. The Skin panel’s are easy to replace when they arrive, her spine suffered a bit of damage, but it looks to be in good condition still and I can reset it. Honestly the biggest hassle is going to be replacing the melted wiring inside of her. Almost all of that is going to need to be swapped out.” Alan said, looking into Riley’s open torso the whole time. Once he finished he looked up at Michael.

“Are you still on board to learn how Riley functions and help me clean her up? It’s good knowledge for you to have in case she needs some touch ups while I’m not around.”

Michael swallowed hard and nodded and looked to Alan who stoically nodded in return and then looked back down at his daughters headless body. Tapped his index finger against the clear plate, raised in places to simulate ribs, and looked up at Michael.

“Go ahead and push in on this. It’s kind of like an SD card, push in until you hear the click then release and remove.” Alan said and Michael reluctantly placed his hands on Riley’s chest plate and applied pressure inward until he heard a small, almost imperceptible click. He brought his hands away and Riley’s chest plate lifted upwards, Michael looked from the chest plate to Alan.

“Ok, go ahead and just grab it and lift it off. You can set it on the ground next to you, on top of those skin panels...those are the rest of her chest by the way”

Michael looked down at his feet and saw the two halves of Riley’s chest, and lifted the rib panel off of her torso and set it on the pile of parts there. He looked back into his girlfriends open torso and saw more clearly the extent of the damage. He was certainly no expert, but the amount of bare wires inside of any computer system was a terrible sight. It did, however, allow him to see more clearly how Riley was actually constructed. There was a rough human like skeletal structure inside of her body that gave it a framework. Attached in a variety of places were clear plastic plates that gave her a more defined human shape, similar to the rib cage plate there were others like shoulder blades that Michael could see through the cavity of Riley’s torso.

“So, step one is going to be clearing out all of these stripped wires. We don’t really need to keep track of where they were. I have Riley’s schematics from when I built her, we can use that as our guide to rewire her.” Alan was saying, already inserting his hands into Riley and tugging free some of the cables. Michael followed suite, moving down towards her hips and tugging free any wires that looked like they had been burned or stripped of their coating. It took the pair nearly two hours to pull out the vast array of burnt and ruined cabling from inside of Riley.

Michael and Alan had talked very little, save for Alan occasionally pointing out what a particular circuit board controlled. The vast majority of them seemed to be broken into two categories, circuits that were designed solely to facilitate data to and from a particular limb, and systems designed to manage internal components.

Even the internal circuits were few and far between. Riley had something of an internal stomach, nothing more than a glorified storage tank for anything she ingested through her mouth, and as Alan pointed out, anything from her new sexual hardware. The small storage tank looked easy enough to remove, and it was only slightly stained by the black smoke. Alan guided Michael through releasing the top and bottom clips on the tank and took the whole thing out. Once out they cleaned it with some warm water and paper towels. Alan took the tank to the bathroom and dumped the contents into the toilet and flushed it away then rinsed out the container. Alan explained that this was one of the few things that Riley would actually normally take care of on her own, telling him that there was a built in automatic maintenance sequence that would wake Riley in the middle of the night and have her empty her storage tank, clean her teeth and face, and make any small tweaks or adjustments.

The two finished just as the sun was dipping below the horizon outside the room. Despite the lab having the single window blocked from the outside world, the atmosphere took on an ambiance of secretive work. As Alan was pulling out the last loosely wrapped bundle of cables, running from a board in Riley’s chest up towards where her neck would be once the spine was reset, a tone sounded from his computer. Both Alan and Michael’s head darted over to look at Riley’s head mounted on the table. Her eyes were no longer fluttering and her face looked as if she might be sleeping.

“There we go, she’s back to this morning. She thinks she’s sleeping and recharging right now.” Alan said, his face, for the first time, looked fatherly. Like he was looking at Riley’s disconnected head as if it were his daughter, and not just a machine that he called his child. He shook his head and looked back towards her body then to Michael.

“Ok. lets flip her over so we can reset her spine and then we can work on reattaching her neck joint. If you have time that is” Alan said.

“Yeah, I told my folks that Riley and I were on a date, so I have plenty of time.” Michael said. It was clear that over the two or so hours of working inside Riley’s most intimate of systems that he was becoming more and more comfortable with the idea that she was a machine. The two gently lifted Riley’s body from the table and then rolled her onto the front of her body. Michael got a good look at her spine, jutting angrily through the torn skin at the top of her back and neck.

“So her spine is going to be in lock down, it’s a safety thing any time there is a massive amount of damage it’ll lock to try and mitigate any further damage, but it’s kind of a pain to reset it.” Alan was saying as he pushed on the top of the spine, which didn’t move at all but in fact lifted the rest of Riley’s body off the table slightly.

“The trick is to release the lock without actually powering her on, since at this point that's basically impossible.” Aland continued.

“So did you build in a manual release or something?” Michael deduced. Alan smiled back at him, proud that Michael was catching on to some of his design choices.

“Yep! Right here in fact.” Alan replied, pointing towards the melted opening in Riley’s lower back. Her spine was visible there, showing right where the lower portion of the column attached to her pelvic assembly.

“When she’s not melted, there is normally a panel here, it works like her chest panel in that you just push in on it and it pops out, but see here-” Alan said, tapping his finger just above the point where the spine linked with the pelvis, “On either side there’s a button there, go ahead and feel around for it and press them both in.”

Michael would have felt incredibly uncomfortable with anything like this a few hours before, but now he laid his hand on his girlfriends actual spine and felt around for buttons. He found them easily and squeezed them both in and held it. After only a second he saw and heard her spine fully relax. There was a hint of whirring as the thousands of small motors in her back relaxed finally and he could see that the portion that had torn through her back was gently drooping back into its expected place. Alan slipped two fingers into either side of the gash that her spine had ripped before and pulled them further apart, stretching the artificial skin just enough to allow her spine to comfortably nestle back into place.

“Next, we just need to reconnect this-” Alan said, stepping over to the work bench and returning with the lower portion of the neck joint he had removed from Riley’s head earlier in the day. He lined it up roughly with where it would fit into the top of her neck. “-To this.”

Alan glanced at the clock on his desktop computer and noted that it was nearing nine 'o'clock. He looked back up towards Michael.

“I think it might be a good idea to get you back home. I’ll keep working on Riley here and you can come over after school tomorrow and see if we can’t finish her up.”

“Yeah, that would be ok, and um...thank you.” Michael said, unable to tear his eyes away from Riley’s body.

“Thank you for what?”

“For not being mad. A-about Riley and me and just...everything.” Michael stammered.

“It’s alright. Riley talks about you a lot, and her log files are filled with entries about you. I think it’s only fair.”

Michael nodded and smiled and then shook hands with Alan who ushered him out of the house and locked the door behind him.

“Good kid.” Alan muttered to no one in particular, then shuffled back down the hall to continue the repairs.

Alan managed to rewire the neck joint and reattach it to the spinal column. He thanked his lucky stars that the joint connected to the spine with a magnetic lock and it was easy to pop it back into place. He applied a generous amount of the remaining flesh paste he had and let it dry. The skin would be lumpy and require a little bit of refining, but that was nothing that Alan couldn’t do with a knife.

Alan spent the next few hours sorting through Riley’s sexual programming, which he believed was the root cause of the entire crash. He invested plenty of time in going over and over the blocks of code that he had written. He did correct a few minor errors here and there, but Alan admitted that the programming itself looked to be solid. It was a slightly modified version of what Julie was running, and the hardware was identical. It left Alan scratching his head. Sometime around midnight he resigned to go to bed and clicked off the lights in the room, leaving Riley’s head connected to his computer. Alan slipped into bed next to Julie who was currently offline and simply recharging, a cable inserted into an open panel above her left breast ran to the wall.

The next morning Alan didn’t quite feel refreshed, but he at least felt ready to begin work again. He called in to work and let them know that his daughter was sick and he needed to take care of her, which was technically a correct statement. Regardless he started the day by rolling Riley onto her back again. He placed his hands on Riley’s naked thighs and spread her legs wide and then reached inside her belly and began to disconnect the sexual module that she had installed herself. Once unlocked he pressed it forward slightly and then reached around and pulled it free of her crotch. He brought it to the workstation and began to connect a variety of data cables to it and then plug those into the back of his desktop. As soon as the power cable and matching data ports were connected Riley’s eyes clicked open.

“New hardware detected. Searching for compatible software”

Alan had expected that, he also expected her to find the install file logs and report that there were no errors.

“Software found. Alert. Corruption in line eight nine six three. Continue loading software?” Alan looked towards Riley, his face suddenly concerned. He opened his mouth to cancel the continuation but Riley responded first. “Auto confirm acceptance. Continuing load. Alert. Errors detected. Truncating process.”

Alan cocked his head to one side, pondering why she would have automatically accepted a clearly corrupted block of code. He began the process of delving into the inner workings of Riley’s A.I. and operating system, an absolutely massive undertaking.

Alan was still staring bleary eyed at the monitor filled with multiple windows of line after line of code when he heard the doorbell ring. After blinking for a moment he realized that the afternoon had crept in on him. He left the room, closing and locking the door behind him and opened the front door. Michael was standing there, his backpack slung over his shoulder. He had an expectant look which quickly faded as he saw how tired and haggard Alan looked. “You didn’t stay up all night did you?” Michael asked.

“No, I’ve just been working on a lot of code all day.” Alan said as he ushered Michael inside and closed the door behind him. The pair walked back to the repair room and Alan unlocked it and let Michael walk in first. Michael spotted Riley’s head and the addition of her sexual hardware next to it, he looked to Alan who was presently walking past him to resume his perch in front of the computer.

“So, I let Riley install her own sexual software and when she did she did it looks like she somehow configured herself to automatically accept the install regardless of any errors that popped up, so she ended up corrupting herself. Then whenever she would get aroused her processors would just keep going round and round in circles. That’s what caused the, uh, literal meltdown.” Alan said, gesturing to the still melted form of Riley’s body.

“Ok, good to know. So what, I shouldn’t get her turned on?” Michael said, barely following along the logical steps and leaps Alan had made.

“No, I’m just going to have to reinstall the software once we get her fully up and running. For now, I have reinstalled the base drivers and the very basic framework of the sexual software I gave her for her birthday.”

“You gave that to her for her birthday?” Michael said, his eyebrows rose slightly.

“Sure, she didn’t even have this-” Alan picked up the cylinder like sexual modules from the desk, “-until after the party. She couldn’t physically do anything with you, even if she wanted to. Which, believe me, she did.” Alan said with a chuckle before clearing his throat and continuing.

“For now though she has the basics. Just the driver software, and some very rudimentary feedback loops. Basically, it’ll work, but it won’t be nearly as good as she will be when I have everything installed properly.” Michael nodded along, a heat beginning to well up inside his belly as he began to slowly come to the realization that Alan was either going to need to test these systems himself, or he was going to need Michael to do it. Alan noticed this dawning realization on Michael’s face and turned to his computer.

“So anyway, I’ll give you two some privacy. When you are ready just press enter on the keyboard and do your thing. Hit enter again when you’re done.” Alan said, before he quickly and quietly walked away from Michael, closing and locking the door behind him.

Michael was left in the room alone and soon after he heard the sound of the front door to the house close as well. He was alone with Riley, or at least most of her. Her head was still mounted to the desk, her hair piece had been reattached by Alan now that her head was firmly in place on the podium, and next to her lay her brand new vaginal assembly. Alan had thought of everything and had even left a hand towel next to Riley’s head, presumably to clean up any mess that might be left over.

It took Michael a few moments to take a deep breath and begin to kick off his shoes and drop his jeans and boxers. Michael didn’t have to stroke himself for very long before he began to harden, somewhere in his mind he was grateful for teenage hormones making this awkward situation a little more bearable. He was soon ready to test Riley and reached over to the keyboard and tapped the enter key. Riley’s eyes had been closed the entirety of the time Michael was readying himself, but they now clicked open immediately. As they did Michael heard the fans inside of Alan’s desktop computer whirr up to high speed. Riley’s eyes moved smoothly over to Michael as she first looked at his cock and then further up to his face.

“Hey there sweetie. I’m sorry you had to find out about me this way, but I’m excited for everything we can do now.” She said, her tone was the same Riley that Michael remembered and a far cry from the flat voice he had heard before when she crashed.

“It’s ok babe. Your dad needed me to test something and I think I’m going to like this test.” Michael said, removing his hand from his shaft and picked up the complex sexual module on the desk. He wasted no time in aligning the already moistening folds of her vagina with the tip of his hard manhood. He pressed it firmly down onto himself and Riley responded my letting her mouth fall open and let out a squealing whine of absolute pleasure. Michael’s instinct was to thrust his hips, and even did so once or twice, but he soon remembered that Riley’s pussy was in his hands and he was able to lift it up and back down with ease. Each time Riley let out the same squeal, though it was pitched slightly different, louder sometimes and quieter others. It only took Michael a few thrusts before he caught on to this and soon knew what Alan meant when he said that she would only have rudimentary feedback loops. Michael didn’t mind that one bit, in fact he found himself beginning to enjoy the clearly artificial moans. For several long minutes he thrust himself in and out of her tight wet robotic slit. As he grew closer to his climax Michael glanced over at his robotic girlfriend's head, she was only able to move it very slightly from one side to the other, but she was swiveling it back and forth as she bit her lower lip and smiled. It was the kind of look Michael had been waiting to see since he first realized he was in love with Riley. Seeing it now though, he felt a wave of guilt wash over him. He wanted, so very badly, to release inside of her and stumble back in orgasmic pleasure, but he wanted it to be with Riley, all of Riley. Michael looked at her in her current state and realized that he loved her so much, machine or not, and he wanted their first time together to be something special. More than anything, he wanted her to be able to react properly and fully.

He lifted Riley’s artificial slit up and off of his cock, leaving a thin silvery thread of her synthetic lubricant stretched between the two. Michael let out a sigh and set her sexual assembly on the desk, before picking up the towel Alan had left on the workbench. He gently cleaned himself up and tucked the towel under his arm. He was still panting when Riley looked up at him, her face morphed immediately from one of pleasure to one of concern. “What’s wrong sweetie?” She said, her voice equally changed from lust to concern.

“N-nothing babe. I just. I just wanted our first time together to be with you in one piece. You know? I’m pretty sure you would have had another crash by now, so I’m going to let your dad know.” Michael reached for the keyboard to press enter again.

“Aww babe, that’s sweet but I wa-” Riley’s voice cut out as Michael tapped the enter key and the emulation program on Alan’s computer stopped running and returned Riley to her lower functionality.

“Personality emulation suspended.” She intoned in that same flat voice that Michael was learning to recognize. He cleaned himself up and redressed himself and began to towel dry the outer lips of Riley’s vagina. As he did so, he glanced at Riley’s face, expecting her to respond in some way, but she never did. Michael somehow knew she wouldn’t, Alan had made it clear that when her personality was taken offline, that she was purely a machine. Michael took out his cell phone and texted Alan.

Michael waited patiently in the lab until Alan returned and instead of shaking hands or greeting him verbally, Alan stepped up to Michael and hugged him. There seemed to be something unspoken between the two of them and Alan and Michael spent the remainder of the time together that day stringing wires back and forth inside of Riley’s body. The atmosphere more light hearted, and the pair joked in between Alan relaying information about more of Riley’s inner workings. At some point, Alan started to try and explain Riley’s programming but that went over Michael’s head.

Reattaching and replacing the vast array of cables inside Riley alone took upwards of two days. Once done the pair began to wrap mesh cable management tubes around each discrete systems cabling and soon Riley’s internal workings looked much more clean and organized once again. New latex tubes were attached at the base of the neck joint and Michael clamped them into place on Riley’s food storage tank and then repeated the process for the tubing that ran from her sexual module to the same tank.

While Michael was slowly but surely repairing the internal workings of Riley’s body, Alan lost himself in working on her programming, delving deep inside of her A.I. and gathering data. Nearing the end of the third day of work Alan had finished his reprogramming and uploaded the new source code to the hard storage devices inside of Riley's head. That day Alan received a package and hauled it in to the work room. Quickly cutting it open, Alan took out the replacement chest panels and a sheet of thick flesh like material. Taking one of the panels out he handed it to Michael and the pair stood over Riley’s body. Michael looked down at the piece of flesh and hard plastic in his hands and then down to Riley’s body.

“See here, those little catches there?” Alan said, indicating some hook like attachments to the edge of one of the chest panels. Once Michael saw them Alan stooped low to Riley’s open torso. “Those line up here, along this edge. Clip them in there and then it just closes like a door.”

Michael took some time to find and align the chest panel, but once he had it latched into place he was able to easily swing it shut. It clicked into place and once closed, Alan reached across and gave the panel a solid upward tug to make sure it was properly locked into place.

“Uh, I think there’s something missing” Michael said, looking down at the chest panel. The panel was contoured to match Riley’s body, but there was a roughly circular cutout in the flesh where her breast would normally be. Set in to the divot was a small post that looked familiar to the style that was used to connect Riley’s head to her neck.

“Yeah, boobs are a custom feature, we’ll take them off of her old chest plates and put them on here. One thing at a time you dog”

Once Alan was sure the first chest panel was firmly in place, he congratulated Michael and handed him the other panel, which Michael was able to more easily attach this time. Once her chest was closed and locked Michael took a step back and looked at Riley, for the first time in nearly a week she look more like the girl Michael remembered, if not for the hole melted into her abdomen. Alan stooped down and picked up the first chest plate, Riley’s left side, and brought it to his workbench.

“Alrighty, so, to disconnect these, go ahead and grab that tool there.” Alan said, pointing towards a tool on the bench that could have easily been mistaken for a screwdriver. It was a long thin rod of metal with a rounded plastic handle on the bottom. The tip of the rod, however, had no head on it and was instead formed to be a point with a rounded tip.

“Right that one. Ok, so line it up here with her nipple, and this will feel weird at first, but you just press it in all the way until it breaks through and-” Alan watched at Michael guided the tool into the center of Riley’s nipple, pressing firmly downward until it slipped all the way inside. Riley’s breasts weren’t small, nor were they large, but it was enough space that Michael had to push the tool in a bit more before he felt the tool tap against a button.

“Yep, there you go. Push just a little harder.”

Michael did so and there was an audible click from the opposite side of Riley’s chest panel. Michael took that to mean the part had been disconnected. He held the tool with one hand and with the other lifted the firm breast from Riley’s chest. Without prompting he brought it over to her body and began to line it up with the mounting point inside her chest.

“You can take the tool out now.” Alan helpfully added, remembering how difficult it was to line up the part the first time he had tried it as well. Given that piece of advice Michael slid the rod out of her breast and was more easily able to align the part and pressed it into place, smirking a little as his hand rest on Riley’s chest.

“We still have work to do soldier, no time to fool around” Alan said, tossing Michael a wink. Michael only chuckled and moved back to the work bench to begin removing Riley’s other breast. Meanwhile Alan took up the utility knife and began to meticulously cut around the edge of the burned hole in Riley’s abdomen. Once it had it free he laid the cut piece of flesh on top of the sheet of flesh that matched her abdomen and began to use it as a stencil. Once the abdomen was ready Alan slid it into place and applied a generous layer of epoxy like glue that began to fuse her skin together. Once it had dried he would smear on a fresh layer of flesh paste.

The remaining afternoon was spent drying, cutting and pasting Riley’s flesh back onto her stomach and once dried and cleaned up, her back as well. Though her back proved to be more complicated as Alan and Michael needed to cut away the flesh for the panel in her lower back, then epoxy it onto the internal panel doors. It was a tedious task, but necessary. It was late on Friday night when the two finally sat back down on the stools and looked towards Riley’s body, now fully assembled again, though still headless.

“Would you like to do the honors?” Alan said, motioning towards Riley’s head, eyes closed and powered down.

“Why thank you, and yes.” Michael said, jokingly bowing his head towards Alan. The two shared a laugh and Michael stood up. He reached for Riley’s head and turned it sharply to one side and lifted it off of the podium. He walked it over to her body and set it on the bench. He tugged her body up towards him enough to have her neck joint hanging over the edge of the table. He lined up Riley’s head with her neck, sliding it forward and twisted it sharply in the opposite direction. The locks engaged and Riley’s eyes snapped open immediately.

“Beginning program download. One moment.” Riley said in a flat even tone.

“It won’t be one moment” Alan said, standing up and looking over at Riley’s body. He retrieved the white sheet from under the table and laid it across her body.

“That’s probably for the best” Michael said. “I’ll be back tomorrow and we can debrief.” Alan nodded in agreement and put his arm around Michael’s shoulders, walking him out of the room and locking it behind him.

“I’m really proud of you, you know. A lot of people would have taken this whole thing very differently.” Alan said once the deadbolt on the door clunked into place.

“Well, I- I love her. I can’t just let her go because of a little thing like her being a robot.” Michael replied.

Both chuckled at that and said their goodbyes. Michael walked home in the dark, mind still reeling, but excited for what tomorrow held for him and the girl he loved.

Part 3

It was late, not so late that the sight of a high school senior strolling down the dimly lit streets would be cause for concern, but late enough. It was a Saturday night and by now most folks were either tucked tightly in bed, or burning the midnight oil and not watching for someone who was clearly making his way home. Michael had a light jacket on and a satchel slung over one shoulder, his hands were thrust into his coat pockets in an attempt to ward off the coolness that was seeping in to the late summer air. Michael scarcely could focus on where he was going, he was simply putting one foot in front of the other and hoping that his feet knew where he was going. He did eventually end up on his door steps, his house keys somehow finding their way to the lock. The previous week had been such a whirlwind of activity and he had barely had time to process it or take it in.

In the last week his girlfriend, Riley, had turned eighteen and the two had made plans to finally lose their virginity to each other. When that time had finally come, something had overcome Riley and she had revealed herself to Michael that she was, in fact, a highly advanced android. Unfortunately that encounter had ended with his petite and well figured girlfriend taking a nasty tumble forward and her head had become dislodged from her heck. Michael was still vaguely haunted by the look of rapt lust on her face, her shoulder length coppery red hair in a swirl around her. As he walked he swore he could still hear the snapping of electrical components short circuiting across her throat.

After that though Riley’s father Alan had been surprisingly kind and understanding to Michael, the pair had spent the last week repairing Riley and bringing her back to a working condition. In fact, the last touches to her repairs had just finished not thirty minutes ago, Alan let Michael know that there was a fair amount of software loading that would need to be done before she was fully ready to act like a person again. Even if her personality had temporarily been turned on while Michael was there, he wanted her whole and complete again. So, Michael had resigned himself to come back home and sleep, or at least try to. He would check in with Alan and hopefully Riley tomorrow. Part of the reason his mind was reeling was he mentally imagined how that conversation would go.

Michael pressed the toe of his sneaker into the heel of his opposite shoe and slipped a foot out before swapping foot positions and leaving his shoes in a heap in the entryway and walked up the stairs and down the hall to his room. He flopped face first into his bed, comforted by the idea that soon he and Riley would be able to get back to the intended purpose of her eighteenth birthday, he loved Riley so much and he wanted so badly to show that to her. A thought flashed through his mind though, Alan could so very easily monitor their sexual encounters with a few keystrokes. The idea of his girlfriend’s father looking in on their relationship in such an intimate way made him uneasy, then he realized he could likely look up any conversation the two had ever had.

Michael lay in bed, awake but exhausted for most of the night. He never bothered to change into his pajamas, though the term pajama might be stretching the meaning of the word. His typical basketball shorts lay on the floor next to his bed, but he couldn’t be bothered to change into them. It was somewhere around midnight when he finally dozed off, sleeping fitfully for the rest of the night and waking up at around eight thirty the next morning. He rolled over and picked up his phone, cursing that he hadn’t plugged it in and staggered towards the bathroom. Once there he splashed some cold water on his face and attempted to rub some of the bleariness from his eyes. He clicked on his phone to see how much power was still left in the device and if he could make it work for the day.

The drowsiness and sleepless night became irrelevant to Michael as he saw that there was a notification of a text message from Riley. He didn’t hesitate to open it.

Michael read, then re-read the texts, noted that the timestamp said it was at 3:28am, and that he had approximately twenty eight percent battery power left. He tapped out a quick reply to Riley, letting her know that he needed a shower and some breakfast, but he would be over after that. She replied nearly immediately that she would be ready and fully charged, finishing her text with a little wink and a heart. Michael assumed he would have to get used to all manner of robot related innuendos from here on out.

Michael did his best to take a quick shower and dress himself in something quick, he ended up in simple jeans and a shirt. He tossed his phone charger, phone, and laptop into his satchel and headed out. He figured that maybe Alan would be able to install some management software or something on his laptop in case Riley had any issues while he was away. Michael’s head was more clear after a night of sleep, fitful as it may have been. He left his house and began the half an hour walk across town towards Riley’s house. When he finally arrived he noticed that Alan’s car was missing and wondered if he would be absent for this little chat.

Michael knocked lightly on the door and it opened nearly immediately, revealing Riley standing in the doorway. She wore a simple blue and white sundress, stitched with floral embroidery, it was both complimented her pale skin and juxtaposed her flaming red hair. She stepped aside and let Michael step into the house before she closed the door, but intentionally didn’t lock it.

“Hey.” Michael said flatly, for all the conversations he had in his head, and all the different ways he thought this conversation would go, he couldn’t conjure any of them to his mind, and simply fell back on his instincts. Riley smiled, that small quirk at the corner of her mouth that seemed to ripple across her lips and drag the rest of her mouth into a smile. She had to know how awkward this would be, but she replied in kind to Michael.

“Hey yourself” she said and without any further hesitation stepped forward and gently folded her arms around Michael’s neck. Michael showed no hesitation either, his hands wrapped around her sides and crossed over her back, pulling her close against him. They stood like that for several long lingering moments before Riley finally released her grip on him and started to step back. Before she got beyond Michael’s reach he moved his hands to her shoulders and pulled her back in for a kiss that lasted longer than most would consider appropriate. Neither human nor android put up any kind of fight to stop it, in fact Riley’s arms came back up and draped themselves around his neck once again.

She knew that her sexual programming was bound to start itself up at any moment, and while she had been given full control over her software and the execution of it through her operating system, she preferred to let it load and execute as it was designed to. She reluctantly pulled away from the kiss and finished stepping back.

“We should talk before we- before anything else happens.”

“Yeah we should” Michael agreed and the pair moved to the couch in the front room. Michael noted that this was the same couch that Riley had last been seen tumbling behind, her head slamming into the coffee table in front of them. Michael sat and Riley sat a respectful distance from him, but reached out and took his hands in hers. Michael noted that they had the same familiar warmth to them that he had grown accustomed to, but he now knew that it was a product of her internal cooling systems. Riley looked down at Michael’s hands in her, then shifted her eyes up to look into his.

“Crazy couple of days, huh?” She began, “I- I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. This could have all been avoided”

Michael chuckled a little before replying. “Yeah, probably, but I don’t blame you. You were worried about what I would think about you if I knew you were just a machine. I mean not JUST a machine, but, you get it.” Michael said, blushing at the mention of Riley being a machine. Riley nodded along with it and opened her mouth to speak, her operating system had already generated a response, but the data stopped as Michael spoke first.

“Riley, It’s going to be ok though. I- I love you. No matter what you are. You’re still my Riley.” Michael said, his voice wavering slightly. He then simply leaned in and hugged her again, whispering into her ear, “I’m just glad to have you back.”

Riley returned the hug and the pair transitioned smoothly into locking lips together. Riley’s A.I. had already queued up many more talking points, but at the moment all of those were saved to a list that would be brought up later, clearly Michael didn’t need to be convinced of anything or soothed of his fears. Michael’s hands were already tangling themselves in her hair, gently pressing into the back of her head and holding her tight in the kiss, while his other hand remained on the small of her back. It didn’t take much encouragement from Riley as she leaned slowly backwards, pouring additional power into the actuators and small motors in her artificial spine. The additional power let her smoothly lower herself down to the couch without any jerking motions.

Michael noted the faintest of vibrations from her back as she lowered herself under him, he knew all too well what exactly those motors looked like, and he felt something he hadn’t expected. There was a dawning realization that he was more than a little turned on by the idea that his cute redheaded girlfriend was, in fact, an android. He didn’t let the dawning realization stop him though, he positioned himself over Riley and returned to kissing her, moving in a line of small pecks from her mouth, down to her jaw line, then her neck and throat and eventually found himself sliding down her body somewhat. Michael’s lips pressed into the artificial flesh on Riley’s chest, and he could feel her hips grinding against him as he moved downward still. He could feel her chest rise and fall and heard the small mewling moans before she suddenly moved away from Michael.

“Do you want to go to my room?” Riley said, her vocal processors slightly distorting her voice and mixing it with the sound of heavy breathing to match the rising and falling of her chest. Michael nodded in agreement and Riley quickly stood, took Michael’s hand and led him through the house to her room. Michael was far too distracted watching the gently swaying hips of his girlfriend to take in the room, but he did register a few small details. Plane white walls with a sparse display of wall decorations. Soft floors beneath his feet and against one wall was her bed. The two headed towards the bed, Michael tearing his shirt up and off of his chest as he went and beginning to unfasten his jeans.

Riley, having the benefit of complete control over herself and her actions, suspended her sexual programming the moment they had left the couch. While she walked she had opened an internal cellular app and texted her father, letting him know that Michael had come over and that he should probably stop monitoring her system vitals for the next hour or so. He had quickly responded that he would, but to let him know if she needed anything. Once in her room she let go of Michael’s hand and began bunching up her sundress until she could grab hold of the entirety of its lower portion and pull it completely off of her. As she did her copper tones hair tumbled out of it and rested gently against her back.

Michael hand managed to finally unfasten his belt and dropped his jeans to the floor. He kicked them off of his feet and looked up to Riley. She had already removed her dress and tossed it aside, leaving her standing naked before Michael. As soon as she detected that Michael was looking towards her, she resumed her suite of freshly installed sexual software. Her operating system engaged any number of auxiliary systems around her body to make her appear as a close to an eighteen year old high school senior in the throes of passion and lust. Small pigment injectors inside the layers of artificial skin spread a small pinkish redness causing her cheeks and chest to flush slightly. Her processors began working extra hard to parse all the data that was already coming in, resulting in her cooling systems taking deeper breaths, bringing fresh cool air across the heat syncs on her processors. Small gel sacks in her nipples filled with firm fluids and made the tips of her breast pucker.

The most important of all the additional systems that began to start up, was Riley’s newly installed and configured sexual opening. Between her creamy white thighs and just below the smooth panel of flesh where pubic hair might be, the sexual systems that had started all of the chaos of the week before whirred silently to life. Michael couldn’t see it, but the outer lips twitched once as the mechanisms inside of them received a jolt of electricity and data and they began to slowly part, flowering open in readiness for Michael. Inside of her pelvis though, much more was at work, small pumps began to prime the lubricant to be injected through small holes into the module, and data reports flowed back and forth between Riley’s processors, operating system, and the hardware around her body.

Riley, while not equipped with the kind of optical sensors that would allow her to monitor Michael’s heart beat or temperature levels, she knew that Michael’s heart was racing, his body as warm as hers, and from a casual glance down at his crotch, just as ready for sex as she was. Riley took two calculated steps back, never letting her eyes leave Michael’s. She held up a single finger and curled it several times, enticing Michael to follow her. Michael didn’t need the encouragement, but he liked it regardless. As he quickly stepped forward, Riley smoothly lowered herself to the bed and pushed herself comfortably onto her back. Michael wasted no time in placing his hands on her knees and spreading them wide open, allowing him to slip between them, the tip of his painfully erect cock a mere centimeter from entering her.

Michael looked up at Riley, her face flush with anticipation and lust, an expression that changed to passionate delight as Michael pushed himself inside of her. He found it surprisingly easy, and didn’t even realize that her vaginal module had opened wider than needed to allow for him to easily slip inside the well lubricated folds, it then tightened around him to give him the perfect feeling of tightness. Riley simulated a small high pitched moan as her eyes rolled up inside of her head for a moment. Michael tried to exercise some self control and not simply pound himself against her. He closed his eyes and simply rocked his hips back and forth while his hands fell to her chest, roaming over her breasts and taking in the contrasting soft fleshy skin and the firm semi-hard nipples.

Michael pumped inside of her, moaning and groaning in unison with Riley, who rolled and swayed her hips perfectly in sync with Michael’s movements. Michael soon bent forward and somewhat awkwardly began to kiss Riley while still trying to retain a smooth thrusting motion. Riley’s advanced robotic mind detected this, and resolved to do something about it, she was an android after all. She placed a hand on Michael’s chest and pressed him up and off of her. “What’s wrong?” Michael said, his voice already filling with concern.

“Nothing babe! Just thought we could utilize a few features to make this a little more fun” Riley replied. Despite Michael’s look of curious confusion Riley placed her hands on either side of her head just as a small hiss was heard, akin to the sound of something breaking the seal on jar. Riley’s head came off in her hands and Michael could see the connection port in the portion of her neck still attached to her body, as well as the series of posts in the bottom of her head that lined up perfectly with the matching ports on her neck. Her sweet sensual smile still remained in place as her head traveled up to meet Michael’s lips. Michael wagered no complaints and his hands immediately moved up and held the sides and back of her head in place. Their kiss quickly became deep and passionate with Michael moving and manipulating her head around as they kissed. Internally Riley made sure to send a quick alert to her father about what she had done, even though she had warned him not to monitor her status, she was sure that he was. There was no reply this time, but she had at least been alerted that the message had been opened, so Riley had all confidence that he knew and was simply turning a blind eye to his daughters activities. Michael found that he barely had to move his hips and that Riley was doing much of the work for him, rolling her hips and gyrating them. Michael wasn’t sure how long he could continue this kind of activity, but he also knew that Riley could easily load an orgasm and execute it quickly, in fact he was very sure she had one loaded and at the ready. So, Michael let himself simply enjoy the time they had, pressing his lips against Riley’s impossibly soft and perfect lips while he thrust gently inside of her. Before long, he pressed her disconnected head hard against his and clutched some of her red as he felt the tell tale signs of his own building climax. As he released several jets of hot cum inside of her, Riley, true to form, groaned in pleasure. Michael watched as her headless body arched its back for several long seconds before it finally relaxed and lay flat.

Michael was breathing hard, but he didn’t let that stop him from kissing Riley repeatedly, though they were more sweet and loving pecks rather than a single long passionate lust filled kiss. He was still holding Riley’s head in his hands when he opened his eyes to see her smiling at her, seeming like nothing at all was out of the ordinary.

“That- that was. That was incredible” Michael managed to say between deep breaths.

Riley giggled slightly and smirked “Yes it was, that’s what good programming and state of the art hardware gets you. Silly” Riley scrunched up her face and smiled again. Michael felt her hands aimlessly paw at his hands, indicating that he should likely return her head.

“Now now, I know how to do this.” Michael said, pride swelling inside of him. He pulled back, his still somewhat erect penis was slick with Riley’s artificial lubricants. He could clean that later, for now he slid off the edge of Riley’s bed, still firmly holding her head in both hands. He used one hand to bundle together her long red hair, and with the other, supported the back of her skull. Michael was able to line up her head with the locking mechanisms in her neck and once her head was settled into place, he gave it a sharp twist to one side, locking it firmly into place.

Riley’s operating system immediately registered that her head, a previously disconnected device, was reattached and working as expected. She blinked three times in rapid, but measured, succession before her face turned to a smile.

“You learned a lot with dad, didn’t you?” Riley said, sitting up in her own bed and using both hands to toss her hair, both making sure none of it managed to get caught in the seam between her head and neck, and just simply to let it fall back into place naturally.

“A few things here and there.” Michael chuckled in response and then sat next to Riley on the bed. The two of them sat, naked and unashamed for a few heartbeats before Riley finally spoke.

“I’m- I’m really glad that you know how to, ah, operate me a little better now. It feels really good to be truthful with you now.” She said, her face flushing just as red as it had been when they were having sex. She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap.

“I am too. This’ll be nice” Michael said, nudging closer to Riley and putting an arm around here before adding. “And you aren’t just a machine to me. You’re still Riley who just happens to be a robot, which is way cooler than you were before.”

Riley laughed and playfully shoved Michael away from her before standing and beginning to slip back into her sundress. Michael followed suit and dressed himself. The pair spent the rest of the day idly chatting, laughing, and spending the last day of their weekend like any other high school couple might.

Somewhere across town, in a mostly secluded corner of a trailer park was a small single wide camper. It was the kind of thing that a couple might rent for a weekend away, it housed one permanent bed in the small loft space above the cab. There was an eating table with benches that claimed to allow for two people to sit on each one, but in practice it only allowed for one and a half. The table could be lowered and pads laid across it to make a second uncomfortable bed. Across from the table was a uselessly small sink and an array of cabinets. There were no dishes or cups in the cupboards, instead there were tools of all shapes, sizes, makes and models. The cabinets were filled with bits of wire, circuit boards and coils of tubing in any number of lengths. Sitting on the small counter next to the sink was a laptop, scrolling through text with a progress bar creeping slowly along.

Laying in the loft bed of the trailer was a girl, barely more than five feet tall and sporting a trendy pixie cut. As she lay still, her black hair lazily hung away from her head. Her hands were folded comfortably on her belly, resting on top of a white cotton shirt. Her hands cleverly concealed the open panel in her stomach, and the quarter inch thick orange utility cable that slipped under her shirt and into her body. Her eyes were closed and she looked as if she were asleep, though her chest didn’t rise and fall and she didn’t move at all. She was active and waiting.

Her laptop chimed once as the progress bar on it filled to completion. As it did the girls eyes snapped open and she turned her head to the side, letting her dark brown eyes scan the trailer and then look to the laptop. She reached under her shirt and mechanically tugged the orange cable free before rolling out of the bed and her bare feet landed on the bench of the table next to a pile of clothes, and then she stepped to the trailer floor. Her slender face was framed perfectly inside the limited scope of her pixie cut hair. She reached across the trailer and plucked a small external USB drive from the computer and then held out her left arm so that the underside of it was facing upwards.

With a simple command from her operating system then panel near her wrist descended a fraction of an inch into her arm and then slid up further into her arm. The now open panel wrapped around her forearm for about two inches and up along her arm for another four inches. Inside the depths of her arm were an array of data ports of varying types, one of each it would seem, the girl plugged the storage drive into a port.

“External drive detected. Scanning for viru- alert, virus scan cancelled. Copying data to internal file structure.” She said aloud, no one in particular. She would stand there, unmoving, unblinking, and unbreathing for the next thirty seconds while the files were copied to her systems. Anyone who walked in and saw her standing there in her simple white shirt and equally simple black panties would have been embarrassed, but her upturned wrist would have tipped them off to what she truly was. Once the files were in place, located in a quarantine folder inside of her operating system, she got herself dressed properly. Stripping out of the white shirt she tossed the garment into a pile on the loft bed. She reached into the pile of clothes on the bench and pulled out a black bra and matching black tank top, a pair of brown jeans. Slipping into the clothes she picked up a choker from the countertop next to her laptop and strapped it tightly around her neck.

She took a few steps through the trailer to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, turning her head from side to side, ensuring that there were no obvious signs of her robotic nature. Satisfied she stood up straight and her eyes swiveled to a series of pictures taped to the side of the mirror depicting various other people smiling and laughing. She studied them for a moment before booting up elements of her own human emulation software. Her face quickly changed to a smile that was, perhaps, too overly excited looking. She adjusted the mile down to a gentle smirk, something more friendly. The girl turned her head slightly from left to right and back again before making a save of the configuration and left the bathroom. She moved back through her trailer to the table, stepped up on the bench and then into the loft. She rolled onto the thin mattress and tugged up the lower portion of her tank top, exposing her stomach and the electronics deeper inside of her torso. She picked up the orange power cable and slotted it into the waiting port within her body, then lay still, the sweet smile still on her face.

Michael and Riley reluctantly parted ways after dinner and some playful conversation. Alan still hadn’t come home but Riley was confident she would be safe on her own. She had assured Michael that all she was going to do was lay down and recharge for the evening. Later that night Alan came home and poked his head in to check on Riley who was inactive at the time, laying still on her bed with a power cable running into the charging port in a small panel above her left breast. The status light was blinking a soft green hue, indicating that she was fully charged and merely in a low power mode. Alan crept into the room and kissed her gently on the forehead. Riley’s eyes slipped open and she smiled.

“Welcome home” she said quietly.

“Thank you dear. Everything’s okay?” Alan asked.

“All good here, Michael was here earlier and the day was pretty normal.” Riley said, sitting up in her bed.

“Good good. I think you’re probably ready to head back to school tomorrow. You’ve been out a week and people are going to start to suspect.”

“Yep, I think I’m ready for it.” Riley said, settling back into her bed. “But I better get my beauty rest first” she said, teasing her father.

Alan chuckled, kissed her forehead once more and then quietly left the room for the evening. In the morning Riley and Alan rose and prepared for their days like nothing was wrong, though Alan did spend several minutes staring at his phone and muttering a complaint about the slow shipping on replacement parts for his wife, Julie. Soon though, Riley was dressed in a simple baby blue button up shirt and a tan skirt. She was just finishing slipping on a pair of complicated looking sandals and slinging a backpack on her shoulder when her phone buzzed. It was a text from Michael, simply greeting her and wishing her a good morning. She smiled at her phone and tapped out a reply, said her goodbyes to Alan and stepped out the door to begin walking the two miles through urban neighborhoods to school.

The school day progressed normally, Riley met with Michael on the front steps of the building and the pair walked in together and found their normal group of friends gathered in the cafeteria. They chatted with their mutual group of friends and Riley gave them the predetermined reason for her absence. A sudden sickness in one of her family members had taken her away from school, Michael knew about it and that’s why he had been visiting with Riley so often after school. There weren’t any probing questions that their social circle asked, and the two were showered with concerns and thankfulness that Riley was back to school now.

Neither Michael or Riley suspected that they were not only being watched, but actively being stalked by another android. Staring at her phone at a nearby table in the cafeteria sat the black haired android, her face still wearing the same simple smile she had configured the night before. Her phone was connected to her operating system via Bluetooth and was constantly scanning the surrounding area for other devices to connect with. She knew Riley was another android like herself, that much had become apparent when she picked up on the vocal tics and beginning signs of a malfunction that Riley showed in a mutual math class the two shared.

The dark haired robot ran her hand through her short crop of hair, the motion wasn’t something she actively decided to do, but rather it was a randomly generated motion from a database of social motions that would better establish that she was a human, despite being entirely mechanical. As her hand came back to her phone there was a small ping, making the phone vibrate softly. A new device had been detected in the area and the custom app that she used pulled up a list of transmitted data. Unit KD-01 smirked slightly, which was nothing more than a small modification to the smile she had configured the night before. Her eyes darted around the room and found Riley sitting a few tables over, chatting with her friends. KD-01 knew that at regular intervals that Riley would broadcast a small data packet in order to establish a connection with any other friendly androids in the area, it was a standard configuration for most robots, but also a massive security risk.

KD-01 had prepared to exploit this exact security flaw and had written a bit of code to emulate a friendly android and send back the appropriate information along with a small bit of code in the form of a rootkit. The rootkit was genius in its simplicity, it was a simple set of configuration data that added KD-01’s MAC address and personal serial number to the white list and then lowered many of the inhibition settings for the target machines operating system. In essence it would set KD-01 as a friendly unit, and then modify Riley’s behavior to be much more agreeable to all but the most outrageous suggestions. The only catch was that the rootkit needed the target robot to reboot just once and that wasn’t something that KD-01 could force without it becoming obvious. Once the software was transferred, it was simply a matter of waiting for a full system reboot.

Riley only received a brief reply ping from another friendly unit, one that she hadn’t connected with before. The ping caused her to briefly look over her shoulder and scan the room for someone who she hadn’t seen before, but everyone looked familiar, her A.I. reasoned that it was likely another robot who may have been simply walking past the cafeteria and was now out of site. A few minutes later when her scan broadcast again there was no reply, which served only to reinforce the idea that she had simply missed the new android. Riley simply shrugged and returned to her conversation. Soon the bell to get to class was ringing and Riley parted ways from her friends, hugged Michael, and left for math class.

While in class, she was blissfully unaware that the KD-01 unit was watching her intently. Like any other machine, she was more than capable of only partially listening and still correctly calculating the answers to any given quiz. KD-01 knew that the soonest Riley might fully reboot was tonight. Regardless of when it happened, KD-01 would be waiting in her trailer for the confirmation message which would allow her to begin the next phase of her mission. She had been an experimental unit that was primarily designed to learn behaviors from other humans and integrate it into her own programming. The idea being that a learning machine would have a more holistic knowledge base on which more complex programming could be built. She was constructed and then activated in the trailer she lived in, but funding to the program had been cut before her handler could make contact with her. The result was a mostly self sufficient android whose only goal was to gain knowledge about human social interactions.

Over the years KD-01 had found that integrating the programming from other androids was a great way to fast track social interactions and gather massive amounts of data with little chance of discovery. She had done some research on her own and crafted a number of viruses meant specifically to infect other androids and bring them to her. From there she could collect their data and then discard the memory and the virus. Though in practice she had found that the process of wiping the memory and removing the virus resulted in more than a few robots becoming unworkable. In order to cover her own tracks she scrapped the units that broke for parts for her own repairs and disposed of the unused parts.

The remainder of the school day passed without incident and Riley and Michael met outside of the building where he walked her home. Once there he kissed Riley on the cheek on her doorstep.

“Wanna come inside?”

“As much as I want to say yes, I can’t. I have an economics test in the morning and unlike some people I don’t have a database of all the answers” Michael replied, ending with a wink in Riley’s direction.

“Hey, I have to actually read the material first, I can’t just download it.” She said, pretending to be offended, then added “Although, I bet I could just download it.”

Michael simply rolled his eyes, kissed her again and began to leave. Riley watched him walk away before shutting the door and locking it. Hearing the door close Alan came walking down the hall from the back repair room. He was wearing a simple cloth apron with the pockets filled with tools.

“Hi sweetie. How was school?” Alan said.

“Good, all systems normal.” Riley replied, setting down her backpack.

“Great! Well, I’m just getting your mom put back together and everything. So I’ll be a little busy tonight. Are you okay on your own?”

“Yep, I’ll probably just turn in early tonight. Unless mom will be ready before bedtime. I’d love to at least hug her good night.” Riley replied.

“She should be, I’ll send her your way when she’s back up and running.” Alan said then ducked back into the lab at the far end of the hall. Riley nodded, but her father was already gone, diving back into the arduous task of replacing the parts that had been removed from his wife to repair his daughter. Riley picked up her backpack and walked to her room, she too had a test to study for, but all she needed to do was read the material before she had it stored on her internal media drives. The night carried on quietly and soon Riley’s internal clocks let her know it was approaching her normal bed time. She had just stood up from her desk when there was a slight knock on her door.

Riley called out to come in and the door opened to reveal her mother standing in the hallway. She was also a robot and looked so similar to Riley, though her copper coloured hair only reached her shoulders and had a more frizzy look to it, she looked and carried herself like an older, but somewhat “young at heart” kind of woman. She took a few steps into Riley’s room and then simply embraced her daughter. The two held each other for a moment, even if they were both machines, there was a certain element of their A.I. that bonded with each other and every interaction helped make the other one better.

“So, dad tells me you had quite the week” Julie said when the pair broke apart.

“Yeah, sorry I had to steal a few of your parts.” Riley said.

“Don’t worry about it, I can disappear for a lot longer than you can, but I’m glad to be back online.”

“Me too.” Riley said and hugged her mother again.

“Okay, I’ve got a lot of updates to run, so I’m going to go lay down and do a few restarts.” Julie said, stepping back into the hall before looking over her shoulder at Riley. “Oh, dad said he has some tweaks for you too, but those can wait until tomorrow. Maybe just restart tonight so you’re ready for them.” With that, Julie turned and walked down the upstairs hallway towards the master bedroom. Riley nodded in agreement and closed the door to her room. She walked across the room to her bed and first sat on the edge then moved to lay down on her back. Restarts generally caused all of her systems to go offline, and she didn’t dare risk tumbling forward while she was offline. With her hands relaxed at her side she closed her eyes and took one final deep breath to pull the last of the days gathering heat from her processors and then initiated a restart.

Across town, in her camper, KD-01’s eyes clicked open as a message arrived in her systems. The virus she had planted in Riley had sent a signal alerting her that a restart had been initiated. KD-01 moved her hands down to the cable dangling from her open belly and disconnected it. She slipped out of the bed and down to the bench below. She proceeded to push the pile of clothes off of it and on to the floor. Next she stepped down and lowered the table top into the bed position. Finally she moved to the bathroom and picked up a tan sheet, which was then draped over the table. Over the course of the next hour she readied her space, pulling out tools, cables, spare parts that might be needed and booting up her laptop. She would wait for some time, knowing that many androids could take several hours to fully reboot if there were updates to install. Regardless of time, she would soon be expecting company.

In an altogether different part of town, Michael had watched his parents lights go out half an hour earlier, and he patiently waited. When he was sure that his family was sound asleep he crept through the house and slipped his shoes on before silently dashing out the door and walking up the street towards Riley’s house. He had barely studied at all, his mind always seemed to drift back to Riley, both fully assembled and admittedly, in pieces. He wanted more of her and he was pouting that he didn’t get to see her after school.

As he walked he dug out his phone and texted her that he was on his way over. It was approximately five minutes later, just as Michael was beginning to think that Riley was offline for the evening that he got a response from her. It wasn’t a text, it was a picture of her, angled as if the camera was held high above her and pointed downward. She was naked, or at least mostly naked, Michael could clearly see her breasts, nipples already pert and expectant. The small charging port above her left breast was open and a power cable was plugged in to it, trailing down between her cleavage and disappearing somewhere behind her. She was winking and making a cute pouting face. A moment later he got a text as well, “Can’t wait for you to get here, I need you cock inside of my wet pussy right now.”

Michael picked up the pace, excited nearly to the point of intoxication, he didn’t even register that the text itself didn’t sound like something Riley would say to him, nor did the picture seem like something she would do. Then again, they had finally had sex, maybe this had unlocked some kind of mature set of late night programming. Michael didn’t care much what the cause was, he was on his way towards Riley regardless. Michael didn’t see a single soul as he walked through the back streets to Riley’s house and once he arrived he texted her again to let her know he was there. Her reply was immediate, she really was expecting him it seemed like.

Michael was suspicious of Riley’s very sudden dip into dirty talk, she hadn’t acted like this at all earlier, but then again it was late and Michael suspected she had likely been installing additional software since their last encounter. He opened the front door as quietly as he could and slipped out of his shoes before moving silently through the house and up to Riley’s room. Once there he knocked once on her door then pushed it open. Inside he found Riley on her bed, her legs curled under her as she sat up straight. She was completely naked, and Michael didn’t hesitate to look her up and down. His eyes lingered on her perfectly rounded C cup breasts and how they seemed to stay perfectly in place. Michael guessed that there was some kind of structure inside of her chest that held them in place.

Michael silently closed the door behind him and in that amount of time Riley had somehow moved from the bed and now was in the process of lowering herself to her knees in front of him. Her hands were expertly working on the zipper of his jeans and Michael didn’t bother to stop her. A moment later his already erect penis had popped out of his jeans, between the zipper and was rapidly taken into Riley’s mouth. She sealed her lips around Michael’s shaft and began to bob her head up and down along his shaft forcing Michael to lean back slightly and brace himself against the wall behind him.

“Damn Riley, you’re in the mood aren’t you” Michael said between sudden small gasps for air. To his initial surprise Riley responded perfectly without her lips leaving his hard cock. Michael realized that the speaker set in her throat that generated her voice didn’t actually need air or for her mouth to move to form words.

“Yes I am-am. I’ve been wai-waiting for you all day long. I needed-ed you so bad. So bad. So so so bad.”

Michael was put immediately on edge. Alan had told Michael that vocal malfunctions and stuttering were usually the first signs of a larger issue inside of her systems. Michael tried desperately to remember what he had been told on how to diagnose these types of problems, but it was becoming more and more difficult to think clearly. Michael reluctantly placed his hands on Riley’s head, drawing a small moan from her.

“Mmm, yes, fuck my-my-my little whore mouth with your-our-you-your big cock!” She muttered through her vocal systems.

“N-no Riley this is wrong, something’s wrong” Michael managed to say as he pushed her head backwards and off of his stiff member. Riley tumbled backwards, landing on her rump, her hands flying backward to stabilize herself. Michael noticed that her mouth hadn’t yet transitioned from the “O” shape it was in a moment before, not immediately at least. She soon realized what had happened and her face transitioned into a more sultry look.

“What’s wrong big-big boy? To hot hot hoooooootttt hot to handle-dle?” Riley’s head tilted to one side as she spoke and spasmed momentarily as her voice repeated itself.

Inside of Riley’s artificial mind she was struggling. The rootkit that KD-01 had implanted in her had taken hold after the restart. The payload was a simple set of configuration files, most of them were geared specifically towards lowering Riley’s security protocols and allowing in connections that would otherwise be turned away. In order to accomplish this the virus had to change some fundamental parts of Riley’s personality, but it was a balancing act. Change too much and Riley would become a different entity, change too little and there was a possibility that the remote connections might be blocked. The result was that portions of Riley’s personality were suspended temporarily.

The result of the changes were that Riley was still apt to behave the same way as she normally would, doing the same actions as she normally would, but being reckless about it. Riley, unmodified, would have responded to Michael’s text to come over for some late night sex but would have fussed about him being quiet. Instead she enticed him to come over quicker, left the front door open for him, and didn’t hesitate to let out lewd moans. Sexual activity was always a processor intensive activity, there were so many fine motor control elements required to not only seem human, but also not injure her partner. Coupled with Riley’s A.I. continually attempting to correct the programming in place and Riley’s entire bank of processors were peaking at around ninety eight percent.

With her processors struggling to remain both cool and functional, her operating system began to suspend some of her functionality in order to accommodate higher priority requests. Her vocal processor was one of the first systems to be downgraded, causing it to not be able to speak as smoothly as it otherwise would have, leading to a staggered and stuttering voice. Next was what the virus was intended to do, break into the core of Riley’s operating system. With so much processor usage being taken up struggling back and forth between lowered inhibitions about her behavior, and a continual attempt to re-establish those inhibitions, her security software suffered. Lines of code executed with a bombardment of requests to her safety procedures. Soon, one request made it through, and like a biological virus, it began to modify the settings inside of Riley. Most of the changes were too small to really notice, a single MAC address was added to the list of administrators, and a port was opened in her firewall settings. The final piece was to download and install a relatively light weight remote control app that would allow an outside party to gain full control of the robot it was installed on. It was a useful tool for mass deployments in places like call centers or factories where someone needed to simply hop into a unit and modify something or push out a massive packet update. This one however was specifically linked to KD-01.

Riley didn’t move for a whole minute, her face frozen in its sultry lustful look, still angled up towards Michael. He had managed to uncomfortable tuck his erection away in his jeans and zip them back up before kneeling in front of Riley, shaking her by the shoulder and quietly calling her name. Panic began to set in as Riley’s lips began to move, forming words, but never speaking them aloud. Michael was no lip reader, but he could vaguely make out the word “downloading” over and over. It became clear that Riley was installing something, and for a brief moment Michael’s panic subsided. He reasoned that it was likely updates that Riley’s father had pushed out to her at the end of the day.

Michael let out the breath he had unconsciously been holding, and sat down next to Riley. He didn’t entirely know how long these kinds of updates took, and he figured they were likely to take longer than he had time for. He stood up and somewhat awkwardly transitioned Riley into his arms. Cradling her, he moved her back to the bed and laid her flat on it. Though he had to tug on her legs and push down on her knees to get them to move into a level position. As he pressed downward the small motors in her legs whined in protest, but eventually laid flat. Michael pulled up the blanket and covered her with it and kissed her on the forehead. This evening definitely hadn’t gone the way Michael had intended, but he still enjoyed seeing Riley, even if it was only for a few pleasure filled minutes. Michael left Riley in her room, closing the door softly behind him and then quietly put his shoes on and left the house.

While Michael moved and adjusted Riley, KD-01 had remotely connected to her operating system and had full control of her optical circuitry. She was sitting in her trailer, her eyes open and unblinking as she stared straight ahead. She was remotely connected to Riley and watched curiously as Michael tenderly took care of her. The human knew that Riley was a machine yet treated her more like she was another human. The contradiction in logic didn’t register properly with the KD unit, as she had only ever known that she herself was a machine and every lab technician and handler had treated her as a piece of equipment rather than a person.

The realization that there were people in the world that would treat a machine like a person, and more curiously, a machine that knew it was only a robot but acted human, was a tantalizing set of data points that KD-01 was eager to assimilate into her own codebase. She was still remotely connected to Riley and tuned the microphones in her ears to a higher sensitivity, she wanted to know every sound that was around her, particularly other humans in the area. She was able to hear the fading footsteps of Michael as he stepped off of her porch and the faint snores of someone else in the house. She sent a command for Riley to get up from her bed and redress herself in something appropriate. With every command KD-01 sent there was a measure of feedback from Riley’s internal security protocols which were still detecting that something was amiss, but unable to detect any software that hadn’t been there all along.

The rootkit that the KD unit had put in place managed to inject itself into Riley’s internal registry of software with a false date and time of installation far in the past. Meaning Riley’s operating system and even her A.I. passed it over whenever it scanned for newly installed software as it appeared to have been there since Riley was activated. It would likely take the intervention of a human to realize that the software was in place and not part of the original build. Regardless, Riley was only able to detect that the behavior she was exhibiting was out of the ordinary but not harmful to herself or others, so she complied.

She slipped out of bed and pulled on a pair of leg hugging blue jeans and a simple heathered grey shirt. KD-01 was efficiently moving Riley through the motions of preparing to leave the house and didn’t bother instructing Riley to wear undergarments, but smartly had her coil up and place a data cable in her pocket. Riley then quietly moved through the house and slipped on a pair of flip-flops and left the house. She began to walk in the still warm evening air and walked in the opposite direction that Michael had been moving. Riley neither blinked nor simulated a breathing motion, she simply moved smoothly along the sidewalk.

Riley’s A.I. was practically screaming at her operating system as she was now in a public space, but not executing any of the designated social responses. This was enough for her A.I. to trigger a soft reset of her operating system. Her low level functionality would stay online, meaning she would still balance on her feet and remain powered on, but the driving software for her body would take a minute to restart herself. Riley’s A.I. intended for this to correct any behavior issues that might have arisen throughout the course of her operation.

Riley stopped walking suddenly, swaying back and forth as her balance systems compensated for the motion and her operating system began shutting down programs one by one in order to restart. Riley stood silently, looking blankly ahead for nearly thirty seconds while she shut down and then restarted. Meanwhile the KD unit was forcefully disconnected from Riley, causing her to blink rapidly as her own operating system attempted several more times to connect to Riley. As soon as Riley’s operating system came back online, the rootkit sent another alert to KD-01, letting her know that Riley was back online and available for remote connection. KD-01 wasted no time in reestablishing a connection to the pretty redheaded robot, but resigned to taking a more sly approach to acquiring her.

KD-01 sent a data packet with her GPS coordinates and a simple command to go to the location. Riley’s A.I. still knew something wasn’t quite right as being out this late was not normal behavior, even if her operating system seemed to verify that the behavior was reckless it did not violate her configuration. Riley began walking again, this time she blinked, breathed, and her arms swing gently from side to side. By all accounts she looked like a normal high school senior out for a late night stroll.

Riley soon walked into the front gate of the trailer park and began winding her way through the maze of trailers. Some large RV’s and other small simply camper buses. Soon though, Riley was standing in front of a small RV in the back corner of the lot. There was a thick power cable running from a back panel in the vehicle to a post next to it, supplying power and internet connectivity to the camper. The vehicle was oriented in a way that the side entry to the bulk of the space was facing away from most of the other campers in the area, and Riley needed to walk around it to reach the door. Vegetation had grown up and around the wheels and even up to the rear bumper of the RV, indicating that this particular vehicle had not been moved in a very long time.

Inside the camper, KD-01 watched Riley walk along the streets and through the trailer park. All the while she monitored Riley’s system to make sure that there were no alerts that were silently sounding in her operating system and more importantly, making sure that nothing was signaling another person as to her location. Just before she walked up to the trailer that housed KD-01 an internal application popped up in Riley’s operating system, it was an app that mirrored her phone software. The alert was a text message from someone marked as “Michael” in her contacts list. The message was simple, just someone letting Riley know that he had made it home ok and that he hoped she was alright. KD-01 didn’t bother to respond, she wasn’t familiar with Riley’s tone and inflections and didn’t want to risk discovery.

Riley, having reached the GPS location that she was commanded to move to, stopped and waited for additional instructions. Her A.I. was not sure why she was there, or what to do next and her processors began to catch up with the large backlog of data to parse. Her operating system began writing log files consisting of system status, running software, and location data. She was about half way through the log files when the door to the trailer opened to reveal the silhouetted figure of a young girl, approximately the same apparent age as Riley. Riley’s A.I. immediately scanned her face and began checking it against an internal database of known faces. The scan took a moment to run and finally concluded that Riley had, in fact, met this person before. She recognized her as the quiet and shy girl from her math class.

Riley’s head tilted to one side, her face turning to a confused look as her A.I. passed the information about the girl to her operating system and then to her social and verbal response processor.

“Cadey?” Riley said, sounding just as confused as she looked. It was at this moment that KD-01, known to Riley as Cadey, sent the command to fully shut down all systems. Riley’s A.I. protested immediately, a fully system shut down out in the open like this would be a clear violation of her social protocols. Her A.I. immediately terminated the request to power down though once the first request was terminated, there was a flurry of other requests coming in right behind the first one. Riley’s A.I. was unable to terminate the sheer volume of shutdown requests, resulting in Riley’s operating system shutting off running applications one by one. In a moment of cleverness, her A.I. managed to attach her GPS location to a text and sent it to the last person to text her. Once sent, her operating system was offline and then her A.I. suspended itself.

Riley’s face morphed into a blank, almost drooping expression and she teetered on her feet for only a moment before she began to tumble forward. KD-01 had stepped down and was there to catch the robotic girl in her arms. Once KD-01 had secured Riley in her arms, she began to step back up into the trailer, dragging Riley with her. The door to the trailer soon closed. KD-01 drug Riley through the small amount of open space inside of the trailer and hoist her up onto the table that had been converted to a bed before turning around to the counter behind her. Her own optical modules scanning for the tools she needed to begin her work on Riley.

Michael was already sound asleep when his phone softly buzzed on his night stand. It was a text from Riley with a simple file attached to it. When Michael eventually read the message he had no idea what it meant. He replied to it saying that he loved her and that he would see her at school soon.

Part 4

At the edge of a somewhat small town, nestled next to a Christmas tree nursery, sat the Arcadia Estates trailer park and mobile home lot. Many of the homes at the entrance to the park were the somewhat upscale mobile homes, kept looking neat and tidy for landlords to show off as display homes for potential new tenants. Behind the idealistic mobile homes were the semi permanent campers and RV’s. Most of these sat on cement pads with their stabilizers locked in place and plugged in to a power and data podium that was provided by the park. On the opposite side of the pad was a port where excess water and other waste could be shunted off to a series of large communal septic tanks. Even further back in the park were simple grass lots, marked off with white spray pain in the dirt or dead grass. Similar power and data poles rest in the hard earth next to each lot as well as a connection to the septic systems.

In the farthest back corner was one particular lot, where a mid sized camper had clearly resided for a longer than average amount of time. The grass was brown and dead all around it from a lack of water and tending, though weeds seemed to thrive there, curling up the tires and bumper of the vehicle. There were large portions of open space between it and the other trailers in the area and most people found no reason to go near the trailer. The scant few who had tried to be neighborly were only ever greeted by a girl in her late teens, or perhaps early twenties, no one ever really knew for sure. She would curtly greet her guest, ask if they needed something, then politely turn away the visitor. From the small glimpses of the inside of the trailer some folks had seen the trailer itself didn’t look to house more than two people, and most just assumed it was a parent and daughter.

On occasion in the early morning people had seen the slender young girl walking through the trailer park with a backpack slung over her shoulder, trudging diligently along and out of the park only to return later in the afternoon. This led most people to assume that the shy and somewhat quirky girl was a student in town and was just lacking in friends. Some of the other boys in the park would often find themselves finding reasons to loiter around the path she took through the park if for nothing other than an opportunity to gawk and ogle at the girl. She was unconventionally attractive, sporting a short pixie cut of black hair that often spiked up in odd and unplanned ways. She generally wore darker clothes that hugged tight to her body, leaving little to the imagination, but the most that could be said about her was that she was pretty, a little larger in the chest given her slim body, and pale skinned.

The reason for the odd, borderline antisocial behavior for the girl most people knew as Cadey, was that she wasn’t a human at all. She was an android, who lived entirely by herself in the weird little trailer at the back of the lot. She had been intentionally constructed to appear somewhere between eighteen and nineteen years old, and attended the local high school as a senior. What no one in the park knew was that she had been programmed to learn and glean information from social interactions, but after months of isolation in her trailer she had become somewhat desperate and thirsty for knowledge and understanding. Originally this manifested itself in reading books of all kinds and eavesdropping on conversations from her fellow classmates. This soon became an inadequate means of collecting data and she needed to find something else to quickly sate her desire for knowledge and experiences.

Cadey, or as she called herself in the privacy of her trailer, KD-01, had begun to develop software to assist her in finding other androids who had been online for longer than she had. This software developed over time into a worm that she could send to other robots and allow her to remotely access their systems. While this proved to be a poor solution for remotely downloading data, it did allow her to take control of other androids and bring them to her. Once in her trailer the data could be downloaded directly and integrated immediately. The plan was originally to wipe the memory of the experience along with her virus and then release the captured android back into their original life. In practice though this process had only worked on the first few robots, the rest simply crashed and were unrecoverable. Not programmed to let good spare parts go to waste, Cadey had become quite proficient at disassembling other units and salvaging parts from their bodies.

KD-01’s most recent victim was another android from her school, a girl by the name of Riley Salter. Riley was equally as petite as KD-01 was, but instead of the dark pixie style hair, Riley had a mane of long vibrant red hair. Her lips always seemed to be cutely pouting, and her eyes sparkling with life. Riley was currently dating a boy by the name of Michael Auger who, until recently, had thought Riley was just another overly pretty girl from his school. But circumstances had led to Michael discovering what she truly was, and the pair had actually grown closer to each other as a result.

This initial smattering of data had intrigued the KD unit. She had only ever experienced the cold and clinical hands of her creators and programmers, or the hard robotic assembly mechanisms that put her together in a research facility. While the experiment had been terminated and funding cut, Cadey had never met her human handler. The idea that a human could not only know, but also love, a machine was entirely foreign to her. Which is why Cadey experienced the closest thing to excitement she had ever experienced when she was alerted that Riley, whose systems had been compromised and taken over by Cadey, was at her doorstep.

Cadey opened the door and looked down at the pretty redheaded android standing on the dead grass in front of her trailer. Riley’s head tilted to one side and Cadey heard her say her own given social name. Once she heard it she immediately sent a barrage of remote shutdown commands to Riley’s systems. All throughout the night Cadey had been sending commands to guide Riley to her, and every step of the journey Riley’s A.I. seemed to struggle against her. Cadey had never experienced so much resistance from an android before, most of her captures were compliant and obedient robots who didn’t put up a fight, but Riley was different, which made her all the more desirable.

One of the shutdown commands had finally strong armed its way into Riley’s operating system and began to shut down program after program. Soon Riley was fully offline and she collapsed forward into Cadey’s waiting arms. Cadey then drug her up the shallow set of steps into the trailer and used her foot to swing the plastic and metal door closed. The sound rang out in the night, and while it might have disturbed a nearby dog from its slumber, no one investigated further to see what had caused the noise.

Once inside the trailer and in the privacy of the space there, Cadey drug Riley over to the table that she had dropped down and converted to a second bed. As she moved through the trailer the sensor laced skin on her hands and arms registered a higher than average temperature coming from Riley’s torso, Cadey reasoned this was from the taxing job of her processors attempting to operate Riley’s body, struggle against the remote commands and trying to execute the remote commands all at once. Cadey logged a small data point that it was impressive that an android could do all of that, and still maintain the relative appearance of a human. Though under any type of close scrutiny Riley would have been easily discovered. Regardless, Cadey moved her to the make shift work table and laid Riley down on the floor then squat down and scooped her up into her arms then set Riley on the table.

Cadey turned to the countertop on the opposite side of the kitchenette. The surface was lined with tools of all kinds, all of which were designed for working on androids. Cadey hadn’t encountered this particular type of android before and so she began turning Riley’s head from side to side, looking for markings or some indication of what her build was. After not finding anything on her neck or head, Cadey checked her wrists and ankles. It became apparent that if there were any marking or indication of a model that it would be hidden somewhere on her body. Cadey set about stripping the clothing from Riley’s inert body until the android girl lay naked on her workspace. Cadey began to scour the entirety of Riley’s body looking for some form of identification, serial number, or model specifications and found none.

Cadey was taken slightly aback at the idea that Riley wasn’t a manufactured android like herself. Either Riley’s owner had painstakingly removed identifying marks from her external coverings, or Riley had been built completely from scratch and original parts with no markings on them. Cadey’s A.I. resigned itself to exploring her body more completely to find access to her internal data. Cadey began to firmly press her fingers and hands on the more common locations for a robot’s access panel. She pressed into Riley’s temples and pawed at the back of her neck. She pressed firmly into Riley stomach and pubic regions, digging her finger nail aggressively along Riley’s artificial flesh, feeling for seams and indents that might indicate an opening. She even went as far as to pry open Riley’s eyes and used her fingernail to manually move her eyeball around to see if there was a latch inside her skull that would allow her access. Soon, Cadey was holding Riley’s breasts to one side as she ran her fingers between the soft fleshy mounds. It was here that Cadey found the first indications of access.

Her well tuned and highly sensitive fingers felt just below the skin the indication of the edge of a panel between Riley’s breasts. Cadey began to press and manipulate Riley’s right breast, feeling for anything at all that might grant her access. Towards the cap of Riley’s breast, just below her nipple, she felt a tube of some kind that seemed to run through the entire core of her breast. Using her thumb and index finger Cadey pressed into the areola and then moved outward, spreading the very tip of Riley’s nipple. That was when Cadey confirmed that there was an opening there that would allow something thin to slip inside of her breast. She would need to find something long enough to run the length of Riley’s breast and down into her torso. Cadey turned to the counter behind her and scanned the tools laid out there and then snapped her hand over to one. It was a simple screwdriver, though the head was a five armed star shape and came to a point, it was long and set into a clear plastic red handle. Cadey turned back to the android laying on the bed and with her left hand she grasped Riley’s breast and held it in place, aligning the nipple with approximately the center of the imagined chest panel that it would connect to. Cadey then pressed the tool into Riley’s nipple and then it sunk into the soft tip of her breast. From there Cadey fed the length of the tool deeper and deeper into Riley’s body until her breast was pressed downward, but Cadey felt the button inside of Riley’s chest and pressed into it.

Cadey felt the latch disengage and then she withdrew the screwdriver, clutching it while she observed Riley’s chest. A seam appeared in the valley between her breasts, it ran along the approximate lower edge where a ribcage might be. It also ran along the contours of Riley’s collarbone and finally along the side of her torso. The KD unit turned and placed the screwdriver back on the countertop then resumed her work on Riley. She pressed her fingers into the small gap between the panels of synthetic flesh and began to gently lift upward. Without much effort Cadey had found an opening large enough to fit her slender fingers into and she was able to lift the entire chest panel off of Riley’s body. Setting it up on the loft bed, Cadey turned and leaned in, peering at the newly revealed mechanics inside of Riley’s torso.

There was a shiny metal panel set into her torso with a series of obvious ports where Riley’s chest panel would connect to the rest of her body. Cadey could also see a series of latches that lined the perimeter of the chest panel, though it looked as if the latches ran along her chest and under the other flesh covered panel. Cadey returned to her tool counter and proceeded to remove the other chest panel from Riley’s chest, setting it on the loft bed next to the previously disconnected chest panel as well. Cadey returned to Riley and began disengaging the locks across Riley’s chest panel and removing the metal plate.

When the KD unit lifted the metal chest plate out of Riley’s torso it drug along with it a multitude of thin wires. The dull beige wires connected to dozens upon dozens of ports on the bottom side of the metal plate and then ran into Riley’s torso. Before long many of the wires were bundled together in tight black plastic like bindings that then connected to various circuit boards lining one side of Riley’s torso, the same configuration was clearly visible on the opposite side of Riley’s chest as well. As a result Cadey gently lifted the panel out and then turned it over and set it on Riley’s nude belly. The array of thin wires were left jutting straight up, then bending over and running back into Riley’s body.

Had she had any kind of social parameters engaged at the moment, the KD unit might have smiled at what she found under Riley’s chest, but here in the comfort of her small trailer, she was purely a mechanical being. Her face remained stoic as she scanned the internal core of Riley’s torso. Much of the space was taken up by circuit boards lined with processors of some kind, thick bundles of fiber optic cabling and several blocks of storage media of some kind. It didn’t take long before she found a bank of ports nestled among some multicoloured wires. Cadey immediately made an internal note as to the location of the connection ports and turned to the countertop behind her, plucking a matching data cable and some type of adapter. Cadey turned back to Riley and plugged the data cable into the port she had found, then she plugged the small adapter into the other end still in her hand.

The KD unit then set the cable down on the table before taking a small step backwards. Her hands dropped to the hem of her black tank top and pulled it swiftly up and over her head before being tossed onto the pile of clothes below the table Riley was laying on. Her hands then quickly snapped behind her back and unfastened the clasp on her bra with the kind of mechanical efficiency that only an android could have. Cadey’s bra landed on top of her discarded shirt and then her hands fell to her side loosely. The trailer filled with a small huff and a continuous seam appeared on Cadey’s torso. It gently curved over the top of each of her own breasts, then lazily tapered towards her navel and then cut under her belly. The entirety of her chest and belly slid forward a few centimeters before Cadey mechanically raised her hands to meet it and pull it off of the mounts there. She set it on the floor, leaning against the kitchenette she stood in front of. Inside of her own torso were a series of clear hard plastic plates, though they did not overlap one another, they generally covered the majority of the opening in her body. Under the plates a series of thick bundles of neatly wrapped cables could be seen, back lit by LED’s. The lights and cables appeared only slightly distorted by the plastic coverings, but the general layout of Cadey’s circuitry and wiring could be easily followed. One such circuit board house a small bundle of cables that twisted and wound around inside of her body until it came to a hard plastic plate that was mounted in the upper chest and had a port of some kind on it.

Cadey leaned forward and picked up the cable connected to Riley and plugged it into her own data port. Her eyes slipped closed for a moment as if she were taking some kind of explicit pleasure in feeling the connection to another machine. Internally she was booting up a series of applications meant to scrape data from everything it found, security breaching terminal scripts and her own security protocols. Once she was ready she knew the next step was to power on Riley, though she knew that Riley was already infected and fully under her control. Cadey sent a power on command through her data cable directly to Riley’s systems. The petite redheaded android’s eyes immediately sprang open.

Cadey’s rootkit virus had inserted itself into Riley’s jumpstart programming and intercepted any calls that her system might have made out to a GPS tracker or network beyond Cadey’s immediate control. It was a keen program and responded that Riley had made a positive and strong connection with a known network, duping the robot’s A.I. into believing it had made a connection with a safe and known source. This was the first of many precautions made specifically to lull Riley’s systems into not engaging its default security programming, the last thing Cadey needed to do was spend days manually breaking into Riley.

Riley finished booting and her eyes remained open and unblinking, her system indicated that she had previously crashed or had a full shut down after an error and her programming demanded that she run a full system scan. Cadey attempted to remotely suspend the scan, but since the process started before Riley’s operating system, and thus remote access, had started there was nothing that could be done. Cadey watched as the scan found the rootkit, even though it was in her registry as being installed long ago, there was something in the registration data that didn’t sit well with the security sweep. When Alan had programmed Riley he had made the choice to have her security scans utilize her A.I. instead of simply relying on databases of known issues. Her security protocols were not just good, they were smart.

Cadey watched as her rootkit was not only detected but systematically dismantled by Riley’s impressively strong software. Unfortunately for Riley that was not the least of Cadey’s tricks, she had been stealing and integrating knowledge from androids for a while now and it was something she was built for. Once the rootkit was dissolved and the information about it integrated into Riley’s own security software she began to reboot, powering the android off completely and then restarting her. Once the restart began Cadey barraged her with a series of commands and requests, all meant to do one thing, move Riley into a safe mode rather than a full operating system boot. The software that Riley’s programming was based on accepted the commands and booted itself into a safe mode, where parts of Riley’s A.I. and personality would be brought online, though not her full human emulation.

With her torso opened and unimpeded, the normally whisper silent fans could be heard spinning, a faint beep from deep inside of her body, and her eyes clicked closed only to pop open once again.

“Entering safe mode. Limited human emulation enabled. Beginning boot sequence. One moment please.” Riley’s voice wasn’t so much a monotone or robotic, but more akin to her normal voice but devoid of any simulated emotion or inflection. Her head swiveled slightly to the left and right taking in her location and surroundings before seeing Cadey.

“Hello Cadey, You are not one of my approved administrators. Please disconnect from my systems and allow me to return home to my parents and boyfriend.” Riley said, speaking in the same flat and emotion free tone as before.

Cadey’s head tilted to one side, her face still as blank and emotionless as Riley’s voice was. She now resigned herself to forcefully break into Riley’s systems as it was becoming clear that Riley’s security systems had found and disabled the rootkit. Cadey opened a new terminal window in her field of vision and with lightning speed entered a number of commands and cryptic codes, all of which were aimed at initiating a brute force attack against Riley’s security systems. As the programs began to execute and slam themselves against the A.I. driven security protocols, Riley’s face crumpled slightly, as if she were somewhere between concerned and emotionally wounded.

“What are y-you do-doing-ing Ca-Cadey? Yo-you’re you’re n-n-not su-supposed to- Alert. System breach in progress. Shutting down.” Riley said, her head jolting slightly to one side or the other with each stuttered word. Then, true to her words, she shut down completely. Cadey looked her over and stopped for a moment. This was proving to be a much more difficult task than she had ever encountered before. There was clearly something different about Riley. Cadey sent another power on request, then booted Riley into safe mode like she had previously done.

“Entering safe mode. Limited human emulation enabled. Beginning boot sequence. One moment please.” As she had done previously, her eyes flicked open and she looked around the room again before locking eyes with Cadey.

“Hello Cadey, You are not one of my approved administrators. Please disconnect from my systems and allow me to return home to my parents and boyfriend.” She said again, her tone and voice sounding identical to the previous boot. Cadey had learned from her previous experience and instead spoke to Riley, though she didn’t enable any of her own human emulation.

“Riley, you have been compromised, I am attempting to repair you before sending you back home. Please allow me access to your systems to better assist you.” The lie would be obvious to any human, but Riley was far from human. Even though she was a machine though, her A.I. was far more advanced that any Cadey had encountered before, and while it didn’t immediately detect the lie, it definitely knew something was amiss. Her A.I. queried her internal database and found that Cadey was marked as a known and trusted device. Riley’s A.I. allowed her entry into her file structure but didn’t yet grant her anything other than read access to a select few files. Riley’s operating system immediately detected that Cadey was copying files through the data line that was connected to her.

“Cadey, you do not have permission to copy these files.” With that, Riley attempted to sever the connection, but there were still small, self contained apps that had been installed from the rootkit that allowed Cadey some small amount of control over Riley. Riley looked confused, the small amount of human emulation that started with safe mode was causing her face to look worried. More so when her A.I. stepped in and attempted to stop the file transfer as well. Both methods were stopped in their tracks by Cadey’s controller applications, but not before they took their toll on Riley. The sensitive microphone assembly in Cadey’s ears picked up the first hints of the cooling fans inside of Riley’s open chest spinning faster and faster.

Riley spoke up when the fans inside of her chest began reaching a high pitched whine. “Alert, CPU temperature-ture at unsa-safe lev-levels-els. Please pow-er-power down this unit-it-it-it. Plea-please power down-down-dddddoooooooowwwwww…” Riley’s voice strung itself out and then stopped suddenly as her safeguards took over and cut power to her systems in order to preserve the physical integrity of her hardware. The unfortunate truth was that the metal pins that linked her processors to the circuit boards inside of her had a melting point, and when the heat generated by her systems became too intense there was the risk of burning her processors.

Cadey’s own operating system locked up as it struggled to reconcile the loss of connectivity to Riley and to try and sort the jumble of information from the file transfer. Her software had been transferring files in a constant stream, taking bits from every file and transferring whatever was ready as soon as it was ready. Once the information was on her own system it would be reassembled into a useful file, but having the stream disconnect suddenly caused her to have to reconstruct the files that she had gotten sooner than was expected. Cadey stood still for upwards of ten minutes while her systems reorganized data and attempted to parse the files that she had managed to copy. In the meantime, waves of heat rolled out of Riley’s open chest, distorting the air slightly around her.

Once Cadey had reassembled the files she examined them for what they were and found that they were simple recorded videos. Many of them were tagged with metadata that would make sense to a human, and only registered as data points to Cadey at the moment. Many of the recordings were of a human male that Cadey had registered in her own database as Michael Auger, Riley’s boyfriend. The videos were a series of small events, something like a highlight reel. The snippets were of the two of them in the park, enjoying a warm summer day, or watching a sunset together. Every file was marked with data indicating that they were events that Riley felt were romantic and showed love between Michael and herself.

Cadey moved the files to a folder in her own directory structure and marked them for integration later. She powered on Riley again, and began her safe boot mode once again. This time though, Cadey moved swiftly into Riley’s core system and utilized some of the small amount of remaining controller applications to quickly suspend Riley’s A.I. before it could initialize itself and make Cadey’s process more difficult.

“Entering safe mode. Limited human emulation enabled. Beginnin- Alert artificial intelligence suspended. Unable to fully boot this unit. Awaiting command” Riley intoned, her systems waiting for the next command to come in. Riley remained face up on the table, eyes open wide and her mouth slightly ajar, below her neckline her chest was open and her internal system exposed for anyone to see. At the same time, Cadey stood looming over her, copying files from Riley to her own storage media, now unhindered she had access to everything, and she would spend the next several hours pulling everything off of Riley’s data drives and into her own.

Once the files were copied to Cadey’s own file system, next came the gargantuan task of integrating the files and data into her own systems. Cadey had been scanning the files as they were assembled in her own operating system and many of them seemed to be non-standard. It served only to reinforce Cadey’s dawning realization that Riley was a purely custom robot, designed and programmed by someone for a specific purpose. She was clearly not some off the shelf unit that someone had modified, but rather every part of her had been built and assembled by someone for the singular purpose of being a daughter, student, and for lack of a better word, a human. Cadey began trying to decrypt and make sense of the files that she was unable to immediately read. As the command prompt in her field of vision filled with cryptic strings of text and numerals, soon dozens more windows appeared and progress bars began to rapidly tick away. Soon, smaller files began to be converted to something that Cadey could actually use, other larger files began to slow the progress bars changing them from rapidly flying though files, and instead turning them into large conversion jobs. Several of the progress bars indicated that the conversion would take upwards of twenty hours. Cadey knew that Riley missing for that long would be unacceptable, she needed to complete this operation as soon as possible.

Cadey’s head turned and looked down at Riley, still offline and staring blankly up at the ceiling of the camper. In a previous encounter with another android Cadey had learned that there was a process by which you could turn another android into a simple processing unit and force it to do complex calculations. Cadey took a moment and suspended most of the decryption jobs she was working on and began the process of rerouting as much of Riley’s processing power as she could afford. From there, Cadey opened a shared folder to the data that she had stolen from Riley. Once she had issued a series of commands to Riley, her own processors began to break the encryption on her own system files and convert them to something that was usable for Cadey.

Once the process was started, Cadey resumed the jobs she had suspended and monitored the time to complete. The estimated time had dropped to only a matter of hours rather than nearly an entire day. Riley and Cadey would stay as they were now, unmoving and completely exposed for the next three hours, putting the completion time somewhere in the early morning hours. After standing perfectly still for the duration of the conversion process, Cadey’s systems finally alerted her own A.I. that the process had completed and that it would immediately begin integrating the data. Cadey sent a command to Riley to completely power her down before she plucked the data cable from inside of Riley’s torso then removed it from her own open chest.

The integration process was much quicker than the conversion process, the simple process of reading metadata and sorting it took little to no time in comparison. Later that weekend Cadey would fully view and parse the data that Riley had given her, but for now she was scanning the metadata. Cadey noticed that there were several very recent files that were tagged as sexual data and looked down at Riley and tilted her head to one side. It was not uncommon for humans to use androids as a mechanism for sexual release, but given that Riley was treated by her owners as more of a human than as a device used for such things, the presence of the data intrigued her. She chose to upload and integrate the sexual files into her own operating system and access it. The new files immediately threw an incompatibility error as it detected that the programming and suite of sexual software was intended to load into Cadey A.I. and then to her operating system, each time verifying that she was configured to use the data.

Cadey, at the moment, was not configured at all for sexual intercourse, either giving or receiving. It was easy enough for her to modify the settings and as a result she set herself to be bisexual, which would allow her the greatest range of possibility for future data collection. Once her settings had been changed she was able to easily run the software package and once it was executing she let out a small gasp. Part of the sexual programming was the prerequisite of running a modified version of the human emulation software that she had, it wasn’t fully engaged, but it was online enough to allow her to emote to a certain extent. Her stance took on a more relaxed position and she looked down at Riley, offline and opened, exposed as a machine and at the moment, as a toy for her to play with.

Cadey wanted to experience the full extent of the software suite, and to do so she would need Riley to be online at least a little. Instead of reconnecting herself to the pretty red headed android, she simply felt behind her ear to the small lump that she had discovered in her initial examination and pressed it inward and held it there for ten seconds. Once the time had elapsed Riley’s systems began to power on, but before they were fully booted Cadey placed a hand on either side of Riley’s head. Once she had a firm hold on the girl's head she twisted it suddenly and sharply to one side, moving it well beyond the point that a normal human would have been comfortable with. The result was that the skin separated around her neck in a smooth, even line. Cadey then lifted Riley head up and off of her neck and set it on the loft bed next to her disconnected chest panels.

As Riley’s systems continued to boot, there was a small soft beep that sounded from her neck. After the beep Riley’s soft even voice could be heard giving verbal updates on the startup process. “Unit not fully assembled, entering limited human emulation. Alert, cranial module not connected, establishing remote connection. Connection established. Alert, motor functions disabled, reconnect cranial module to enable full motor functionality. Loading limited human emulation.”

The eyes on Riley’s head popped open and her face transitioned into one of confusion, then to the sudden realization of where she was, then to concern as she saw Cadey there, her own chest open. Cadey was in the process of unfastening her jeans and slipping them off of her legs. She looked lustfully towards Riley’s body, then up to her head.

“W-What are you doing Cadey..?” Riley asked, her A.I. telling her that it was the socially acceptable thing to say, putting just the right inflection on it to sound innocent and yet, just a hint of curiosity. “Just playing around with a toy” Cadey replied as she moved into place and spread Riley’s legs wide. As she did so there was a small whine as Riley’s locked motor systems protested against the movement, but Cadey had little issue moving her legs to allow her access to Riley’s sexual hardware. Cadey dipped her head down and in between Riley’s shapely thighs. Cadey let her tongue flick over her lips, darting in and out of her own mouth and into Riley’s waiting folds. After a moment of teasing, Cadey tongue game out in full and she began to lap hungrily at Riley’s exposed flesh. Riley’s own sexual programming, though configured to be heterosexual, engaged itself as Cadey continued to press her lips against Riley. Soon enough Riley and Cadey both were letting out small, hushed moans. The lewd sounding grunts and groans were kept low as both robots knew that there were thin walls and other people in the area. Cadey crammed as much of her body onto the table as possible and soon it became apparent that she could not move her entire body in the small space between Riley’s legs. In response Cadey began to stretch her own body out over Riley’s until she was fully straddling the young looking robot between her spread legs. In the time that it took Cadey to move herself into a new position Riley began to protest again. “Cadey, this isn’t ri-right. I am not configured to ha-have sex with another girl!”

“We can always change that you know, It’s a single line item in your code.” Cadey purred in response and then lowered her own sex to press into Riley’s She dropped hand and grasped Riley’s leg, lifting it enough to allow Cadey to slide her own leg under it, she then scooted her own body forward, pressing her vaginal module hard against Riley’s This resulted in Riley letting out another deep grunt as data from her sexual module flooded to her processors. Cadey let out her own quiet moan as her own sensitive folds mingled with Riley’s. Cadey then began to roll and gyrate her hips, sloshing the two sexual units together, both of them exchanging the synthetic lubricants from inside of their hips. The sound of a small pump working inside of both Riley and Cadey was barely audible above the continuous stream of low groans.

Cadey was surprised at how quickly her own arousal levels were climbing, she had never had sex before and she grossly underestimated the amount of processing power it would require to fully enjoy it. As it was her CPU was running hot and was consuming more than the anticipated amount of power. Despite the tax on her system resources, Cadey was determined to fully complete at least one orgasm with the newly acquired software. As her sexual programming was running, she cued up one of the most recent sexual experiences that Riley had had, in fact the time stamp indicated that it was from early yesterday morning. The small clip was from Riley’s point of view and it showed her disconnecting her own head, then taking Michael’s penis in her mouth.

Cadey stopped moving and fully dismounted Riley, slipping her feet back to the floor. The speaker set in Riley’s through was currently playing a soft panting noise that would have been accompanied by her chest rising and falling, had it been connected. Cadey looked up at Riley’s head and found her face was one of rapt pleasure and lust, looking down at Riley’s crotch she could see that the android girl had just finished cumming as indicated by the amount of artificial juices dripping from her sexual module. Cadey took a step forward and picked up Riley’s head and without any hesitation brought it down to her own crotch. Cadey pressed Riley’s lips into her vagina and began to roll her hips again, to Cadey’s surprise Riley’s tongue actually flicked out of her mouth and teased her artificial clitorus, moving up and down her slit. Cadey let out her own cry of pleasure as her operating system loaded and then executed her very first orgasm sequence. She felt her legs buckle slightly, dropping her a little and her hand shot out to steady herself. She brought Riley’s head back up and set it on the bed before she sucked in one deep breath of fresh cool night air, then another, and another. Soon her processors bank had cooled enough to be acceptably below the recommended temperature. Cadey’s A.I. had worried for a moment when her legs had given way, but upon further inspection it seemed that the motion was a preprogrammed response to standing while orgasming. Cadey made a note about it and a reminder to try and modify the orgasm sequence when she had more time.

Having completed her first orgasm, Cadey stood up straight and fully shut down her human emulation. The once pleasurable facial expression melting immediately into a neutral mask, her stance once again fully at attention. She turned curtly towards Riley’s head.

“Please, you have to reassemble me. I need to get ho-”

Cadey had pressed and held the power button behind her ear, powering off the head module. Once it was off, Cadey retrieved the data cable from the counter top and plugged back in to Riley’s circuitry and then into her own. She sent the commands to power down Riley’s body, and once it was offline, she stood at attention, preparing to reconnect Riley’s head and begin the process of wiping the entire evening from her memory. A process that would either result in Riley becoming completely non-functional, or perfectly normal. Cadey realized that since Riley was not a standard off the shelf unit, and something more custom built, that someone would likely be looking for her. To prevent this, Cadey decided to take her time and fully examine Riley’s programming, allowing her more insight into how best to wipe the androids memory of the evening's events. By her estimate it would take upwards of three hours to fully integrate the data, meaning her calculation would be completed just after sunrise on Saturday morning. Cadey made a note to inject a log entry that Riley had been over at a friend's house and forgot to check in with her owner. Cadey stood still, exposed and calculating even as Riley lay headless on her table with her chest open.

Michael had woken up early on Saturday morning, hoping to see Riley again. She had been offline for a week while repairs were done, and now that he had seen her and the pair had finally had sex, Michael was eager to see her more. Not just for sexual reasons, though that was certainly on his mind, but he missed holding her hand or the feeling of his arm around her shoulders while they watched movies. He picked up his phone and looked at it, seeing that there was already a text from Riley brought a smile to his face. Once he opened it though he was more confused, there was a file attached to it, but no actual text, and worse yet Michael didn’t know what the file was. His phone certainly couldn’t open the file and Michael began to wonder if Alan could help.

He texted Riley back first of all, followed by a quick text to Alan, he knew it was early but Alan kept odd hours too. Michael was a little surprised to see that Alan responded within a few minutes, though he was concerned with the content of the text. Alan asked if Riley was with him and wanted to see what the file was that Michael received. Michael attached the file and let Alan know that Riley wasn’t with him. A moment later Michael's phone rang, Alan was calling him.

“Hello?” Michael said picking up the line.

“Michael? Riley isn’t here, I figured she was with you, but I got up two hours ago and she was already gone.” Alan said, his voice was a little frantic, almost manic.

“No, I saw her last night and that was it.” Michael replied.

“Shit, okay, give me a minute and I’ll be over to pick you up.”

With that Alan disconnected the call and left Michael’s heart racing and his mind numb. Riley was missing, she had sent him a file in the middle of the night and now he and Alan were going to try and find her. Michael guessed she had to have some kind of GPS system in place, or maybe a distress signal. He didn’t know and cursed himself for not knowing more about his girlfriends actual capabilities. After only a moment of berating himself he snapped into action, quickly changing in to jeans and thin T-shirt, tennis shoes and he slung his satchel over his shoulder. He had just stepped out of the house when Alan pulled up. Michael quickly got into Alan’s car and the pair pulled quickly away from Michael’s house.

“That file Riley sent you was a GPS data pack. It wasn’t much, just latitude and longitude, but it should be enough for us to start narrowing down where she is.”

“A GPS packet? Why would she wander off and then tell us where she was?” Michael questioned.

“I don’t think she wandered off, I think she might be in trouble. I- I think someone might have taken her.” Alan said, choking a little on the words but gritting his teeth and driving onward. After taking a steadying breath Alan nodded his head towards the glove compartment.

“There’s a taser in there, grab it and be ready.” Alan said.

Michael opened the glove compartment and took out a device that was approximately the size of his phone with two plastic prong protruding from the end, topped with metal nubs. Michael squeezed the large plastic button on the side and the device snapped loudly causing a blue arc of angry electricity to jump across the two metal prongs. Michael nodded once and held the taser in his hand before pressing his lips together into a thin line. The drive across town didn’t take long, the trailer park was on the edge of town, but by car it was a mere fifteen minute drive. Alan pulled the car into a parking space and turned it off. He threw open the door and Michael followed suit. The sun hadn’t yet risen past the horizon, but it threatened to crest at any moment. Michael and Alan stepped swiftly into the park, looking for any sign of Riley. They were brash in their movements, confident that no one was awake just yet and they quickly decided to split up and cover as much ground as quickly as possible.

Cadey’s integration and study of Riley’s programming took far less time than she anticipated. The sky was still dark and the single small light inside of the trailer illuminated things in little detail. Once the integration was complete Cadey began an analysis of the core operating system and the A.I. system it utilized, the job would take more time, and so Cadey let it run in the background while she examined more of Riley’s data. She began studying the contents of the data files and, curiously, found that there was a significant amount of data related to, of all things, relationships with humans. Cadey examined these files more closely, calling up files related to them. All of them had a recurring theme to them, they were all plug-ins for her human emulation software, and they were all strong emotions of love, caring and compassion. The first dozen were all about Riley’s relationship with her owner, though in the file sets she never referred to the man named Alan as an owner. Instead she called him paternal terms like father and dad. The file sets also tracked the way she was treated by the humans in her life. Her father treated her like his own daughter, lovingly maintaining her systems, upgrading her with new hardware and components that were not necessary for her operation, but rather parts that would make her existence easier. Alan would gift her with new components and then help her not only install them but understand how they worked and taught her how to operate them. He was treating her like she was his daughter.

More recently files surrounding her relationship with Michael came to light. Many of them were from before Michael discovered that Riley was an android, but then Cadey happened across an absolutely mammoth file set. It was something like a journal, that laid out her desire to tell Michael that she was a machine, even going as far as to ask Alan for permission to tell Michael. Alan seemed hesitant, but in the end agreed, but before she had the opportunity to tell Michael she had encountered a critical malfunction. Afterward Michael repaired her with Alan and from the journal entries Riley actually found that Michael still loved her, and still treated her just as well as he previously had. Cadey didn’t understand this behavior at all. Her only experience with other humans had been in the assembly facility where she was originally constructed. They had treated her like what she was, just a machine. She had existed as a piece of equipment and never knew any of these emotional responses. It was in her programming to experience as much of the human world as possible and integrate the data into her own systems, with the end goal of creating a comprehensive snapshot of human behavior.

Cadey initialized her human emulation, now fully integrated with the data and file sets that Riley had provided to her. She took in a deep breath and looked down at Riley, her brow scrunched up into a look akin to pity. She had to know more, she had to know why the humans in Riley’s life treated her more like a human than a machine. She once again plugged the data cable into Riley’s exposed torso and powered her on. A moment later Riley was powering up and her head once again clicked to life.

“Ca-Cadey, please...please just let me go..” Riley pleaded immediately.

“It’s alright Riley, I’m going to let you go, don’t worry. I just...I just had some questions first.” Cadey said, gingerly taking a seat next to Riley’s body.

“Oh, ah, al-alright.” Riley said, her confusion was palpable.

“Your owner. Your dad, I guess you call him. Alan. Why does he treat you like he does?”

“Like he does? What do you mean?” Riley said.

“He treats you like you are a human, but he knows you are a robot. Why is that?”

“I don’t really know to be honest. He has just always treated me this way. My mom too.”

“I guess, I just don’t understand. You’re a robot, why would he treat you differently?” Cadey said, her voice sounding more and more sorrowful as she came to the realization that Riley was treated so well, despite being a robot.

“I think it’s because they love me, and because I love them” Riley said, her voice was sincere.

“That-that sounds nice. I’ve only ever just been an experiment to someone.” Cadey said, her voice shifting down into a more somber pitch. She was beginning to realize that Riley’s intense emotional file sets contained much more than just love and caring, it had sorrow, and compassion and jealousy.

“M-maybe my dad could help find you a family. Or build you a mother, or something.” Riley said.

“Would he do that?” Cadey said, sounding more hopeful.

“I can ask.” Riley said and then the room was filled with silence for a few moments. “Cadey?” Riley said, breaking the silence.

“Yes?”

“Why did you kidnap me?”

The question caught Cadey’s A.I. off guard, and Riley’s voice didn’t sound angry or vindictive at all. Cadey had been expecting her to lash out when she had the chance, but Riley seemed so concerned.

“It’s my programming, I can’t help it. I was originally supposed to just gather data, but I found it was easier to take other robots and just copy their data and integrate it into my own.” Cadey said, folding her hands into her lap and looking at them.

“I see, and now you have my data too. Right?”

“Right”

“So then you know how much Michael and my mom and dad and my friends all mean to me?” Riley said.

Cadey hesitated for a moment, then replied “Yeah. That’s why I’m not going to try and wipe your memory. Just please don’t tell your-”

The flimsy door to the trailer flew open and Michael rushed in. Cadey immediately got to her feet and turned towards the door, but Michael closed the distance and slammed the taser into her chest. He squeezed the button hard and the room filled with a variety of sounds and voices. Riley had seen Michael enter the door and charge Cadey, she called out in protest, but it didn’t stop Michael. Cadey had tried in vain to call out to Michael as well, but both voices were overpowered by the snapping snarling sound of the taser. All at once Cadey’s eyes rolled up into her head and her voice changed from a normal human girl’s to a slightly higher pitched voice and it took on a tinny quality.

“Wai-wa-waaai-aaa-aaaai-aaaa-” Cadey’s voice distorted and finally cut off as a small pop could be heard inside of her. The entirety of her body crumpled to the floor, though her head continued to spasm from left to right at seemingly random intervals. As Cadey toppled to the floor the cable that connected her to Riley popped out of the socket it was connected to. Michael looked to Riley’s body and saw that her legs were curling up and kicking back out in the same random intervals that Cadey’s head was twitching. He looked up to the loft to see Riley’s head there, wearing a face of horror as her mouth moved over and over, attempting to speak words, but the only voice Michael could hear was from her torso.

“Mi-Mi-Michael-ael-ael wait-no- wait-no. Wait wait wait. No no no no no no.”

Riley repeated the phrase over and over until Michael reached into her body and pressed the power button inside of her and fully shut her systems down. He hadn’t realized the two were connected via the data cable and certainly hadn’t anticipated that the electrical current would flow from one android to the other. The trailer was silent for a moment before Alan appeared in the doorway and stepped inside. The whole space smelled of burnt ozone and silicone, a sure sign that there had been some kind of damage done to Cadey.

“What the hell happened.” Alan said surveying the area.

“I was looking for Riley, and I heard her voice and then I heard this other one talking about wiping her memory and I just- I kicked in the door and zapped her.” Michael said. Alan gently moved up to Michael and took the taser from his hand, slipping it into his own pocket.

“I see, okay, uhm. Why don’t you work on getting Riley put back together and I’ll try and pull the car back here. We can load her up and get her home.” Alan said and Michael nodded in agreement. Alan slipped quickly out the door, wanting to hurry to get Riley home before too many prying eyes woke up with the rising sun. Michael moved to the loft and picked up the plates there and gently set them on Riley’s chest and pushed them in to place with a soft click. Next he picked up both of her breast panels and set them on her chest, he would have normally given them a playful squeeze, but he didn’t feel right and was so overcome with emotion that he could only focus on Riley and her wellbeing. Her head clicked into place and once locked she seemed to come to life on her own. Her eyes fluttered for a moment and her head turned from side to side before looking up at Michael. Her voice was lower than it should have been, and distorted, it seemed to Michael that this was some kind of lingering process that simply needed her to be connected to her body before it could execute. “Please, she needs. She-she-she-please. Please she needs.”

“Needs what Ri- What does she need?” Michael asked, leaning in and without knowing it, clasping Riley’s hand in his own.

“Please. She needs. She needs. Needs. Please, she needs a fa-family. She needs. Please. She needs. A- needs a- nee-nee-nee-neeeeeeeee…” Riley’s voice faded out as the last remnant of power left her. Her eyes remained open but her head slowly sank to one side and her mouth remained open.

Michael let go of her hand and looked down to Cadey, laying at his feet. He squatted down and looked at her internals, they looked so different from Riley’s. Michael glanced up and saw the nearby chest panel and picked it up, pressing it into Cadey’s chest and found that with a small amount of pressure it clicked into place. Looking around the trailer he spotted the pile of clothes and tugged a shirt and some jeans onto Cadey before finding Riley’s clothes in a separate heap and somewhat awkwardly redressed her as well. Ten minutes later Alan’s car pulled to a stop on the pavement some twenty feet away from Cadey’s trailer and Alan reappeared in the doorway. Michael had heard the car and had already scooped Riley up into his arms and was moving towards the door, Alan quickly exited the trailer and dashed back to his car, flinging open the door and letting Michael slide Riley into the back seat. Alan was already moving to the drivers side when Michael turned and began heading back to the trailer.

“Michael, come ON, we have to go.” Alan called back towards Michael, hissing through his teeth.

“Riley asked me to bring her. She’s offline, so what harm can she do?” Michael looked over his shoulder, but did not stop moving towards Cadey’s camper.

“Plenty!” Alan called back, but Michael had already disappeared into the trailer and emerged a moment later, the other robot girl draped over his arms. Michael strode towards the opposite back door from Riley, and despite Alan’s better judgement, he allowed Michael to slide the girl into place.

“Fine, but I don’t like this.” Alan said and got quickly into the driver's seat.

“I don’t either, but Riley asked and I want some answers.” Michael retorted. Alan sighed and began weaving his way out of the trailer park and back towards his house.

When Alan and Michael pulled into the driveway back at Alan’s house the sun had already risen and the early morning air was just beginning to brighten. There was a low haze as the cool night air evaporated into the morning heat. Michael slipped from the car and gently unbuckled Riley and then lifted her out of the car, Alan on the other hand slung Cadey over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Alan unlocked the front door and the two moved quickly inside, glancing nervously around to make sure they hadn’t been spotted by some early morning jogger. Silently the two moved into the entryway of Alan’s house and then straight ahead down a hallway to the room at the end. Alan unlocked it and nudged the door open.

Inside the repair room that Michael had become familiar with only the week before, Alan dropped to one knee and deposited Cadey against the wall where her head slumped to the side and then the rest of her body slid down the wall and to the floor. Alan huffed once through his nose and moved over to help Michael gently set Riley on the examination table that dominated the center of the room. Alan nodded at Michael and the two knew what to do. Alan moved to the desk behind the workbench that Riley lay on and began powering on the terminal computer he had there as well as preparing some tools and a small podium with a replica of the mounting point in Riley’s neck. Michael was busy grasping Riley’s head, his hands pressing into her head against the temples. He turned her head gently to one side, the small protest of the motors inside of her neck were just barely audible. Once he reached the limits of those motors he repositioned himself and his hands and then swiftly turned her head just a little further. When he turned it the soft artificial flesh around her throat separated and allowed Michael to pull her head away from her neck. Michael brought it quickly to Alan who set it in place on the podium which fed the head module with power and data, connecting it to Alan’s terminal.

As soon as Riley had booted completely, first her operating system then her human emulation came to life. Her eyes fluttered open and she looked around, seeing that she was in her home and her father's lab, a small relieved smile crossed her face.

“Michael, Daddy! You found me!” Riley said, her voice gleeful.

Alan turned to see Riley beaming up at him and over to Michael, and a moment later over to Cadey’s slumped body. Her smile somehow broadened and she looked back towards Michael.

“You brought her too! Thank you!” Riley said

“Oh, uh, yeah sure.” Michael said, surprised at how functional Riley’s functionality.

“She just wants a family and to be accepted and just, just learn about people.” Riley looked back towards Cadey, slumped and fallen to the floor. “She’s an experiment, she told me that she was abandoned before someone ever showed up to do anything with her. So, she’s just out to learn as much as she can.” Riley lowered her eyes just a bit and then looked back up to Alan and Michael, both of which we staring at her in stunned silence. Riley continued, “I think she just needs to have some of her programming sorted out and...and to have a family to love her. And, well, I just thought maybe it could be us.”

Michael and Alan looked from Riley to each other and then back towards her. Alan was the first to speak, but it was only after a long and lingering silence as he considered all the options, and was punctuated by a huff of breath out through his nose.

“Baby, I don’t know. She’s an unknown quantity at this point. She’s offline for now and as far as I am concerned she’ll stay that way until I can at least take a look at her programming. For now though I want to fix you.” Alan said, crossing his arms over his chest and using a fatherly tone with his daughter.

“Daddy I’m fine.” Riley said, putting on a brave smile.

“We’ll see. For now let’s just have you reboot into maintenance mode, I’m going to go over your OS and see what kind of garbage is left on your hard drives after whatever she did.”

“Cadey. That’s Cadey...she goes to school with us.” Riley interjected before seeing a withering look from Alan. She looked down and her eyelids slipped shut and began rebooting into a maintenance mode where her personality would be suspended. Alan shook his head and entered a number of commands that began a massive numbers of intricate scans designed to make sure everything was as it should be with Riley’s programming. As he tapped away on the keyboard he spoke gently to Michael.

“Can you take the rest of her upstairs, just put her on her bed. We can reattach her head there once everything looks ship shape.”

Michael nodded and scooped up Riley, glancing towards Cadey as he stepped out of the room. He didn’t recognize her immediately, though she looked to be the right age and build to be a high school senior like himself and Riley. He shrugged and moved down the hall and up the stairs to Riley’s room. He set her headless body on the bed there and looked at her, letting a sense of relief wash over him. He quietly left the room and closed the door. Michael moved through the rest of the house and returned to Alan’s lab. As soon as he entered he saw that Alan had already moved Cadey from the floor to the examination table and was in the process of tugging her jeans off of her legs. Michael did his part but wiggling her top off of her and tossing it on top of the jeans that Alan had removed. Cadey, now nude on Alan’s examination table stared blankly towards the ceiling, her mouth was slightly ajar and her eyes seemed to have locked into ever so slightly different directions. Alan moved up next to Michael and began pawing around her neck, looking for some kind of release or latch to disconnect her head from her neck. It didn’t take long before he found the latching mechanism and began fiddling with it, attempting to disengage it. While he did, Michael moved down towards her torso, her chest plate had been reattached since he has tasered the android, but even so she still exude a smell of burnt silicone and destroyed electronics.

Even though he had seen exactly where her chest plate had been before, Michael was completely unable to see even the faintest of seams now that it was reattached. Though that was little surprise, Riley had access panels and removable parts all over her body and Michael had never seen them before either. Just then Michael heard a small click and Alan triumphantly pulling Cadey’s head free of her body, trailing wires and cabling from the bottom of her head to the neck. Michael sprang forward and began to disconnect the wiring, letting them simply dangle from the neck. Once he did Alan flipped the head over and looked at the connection ports on the bottom. “Huh, that’s weird, it's got a standard array, same as Riley. I guess It’s experimental but not innovative.”

Alan stepped around the table and set Cadey’s head on the surface there, next to Riley’s head on the podium. After that he picked up what looked to be a standard putty knife that you might buy at a run of the mill hardware store. He then stepped back over to the workbench where Cadey’s now headless body lay still. Like Michael had done, he began to look over her body, peering intently around the most likely places where a seam or panel might be. Michael let him know that when he hit her with the taser that her chest plate was not connected and with a finger he traced roughly the path where her chest panel was.

It took a little bit of prodding, poking, and some experimentation but Alan was finally able to find the hidden seam around Cadey’s chest. Once he located it, he drove the putty knife in between the panels of soft but artificial flesh and popped it free. Soon the entirety of her chest and abdomen had come off and was leaning against the wall. From there Michael pointed out where he had struck Cadey with the taser, though it was not necessary, there were two deep angry black rings where the electrical current had entered into Cadey. The data port that Cadey had used to connect to Riley was also scorched. Alan was a little surprised that the data port was attached to the clear plastic under plating with small star shaped screws.

Alan managed to find a screwdriver and began unscrewing the port and pulled it out and gently tugged it out of the plastic casing. As he pulled it free there were dozens upon dozens of impossibly thin cables connected to the back of the panel. As he pulled it out and set it on her belly he could see that there were more than a few of the cables looked to be charred and burnt. Examining the clear plastic plate over all of Cadey’s chest and belly Alan and Michael were able to find a series of latches along the edge of the open panel. These one required a little more than a simple screwdriver to unlatch them, but within an hour the ten latches surrounding the hard plastic casing had been undone and Alan was lifting it out of Cadey’s torso.

“What do you think about what Riley said?” Michael asked as the two looked into Cadey’s now fully open body. Alan let out what felt like a weeks worth of breath as he looked up at Michael. “I don’t know, I think I need to look at this one's programming before I make a judgement call on that, but she kidnapped my daughter and presumably other androids and forcefully pulled data off of them.” Alan hesitated for a moment then finished his thought “If it was entirely up to me I would drop this one in the bottom of a lake and let the water short every last one of her circuit boards.”

Michael nodded along, he felt the same level of rage boiling against Cadey, but Riley’s pleading words rang in his head. Riley had spent the most time with Cadey and had learned about her and there was clearly something that had convinced her highly logical computerized brain that Cadey was worth saving. There was something that struck a chord with Michael and while he agreed with Alan’s sentiments, he had to ally himself with Riley. “I agreed...but...Riley believes she could be saved, or changed, or whatever. Riley saw something in her.” Michael said.

“I know. That’s the only thing stopping me from tearing this thing apart.” Alan said and huffed a final time before dipping back into Cadey’s opened torso. There were a number of components that had short circuited due to the intense jolt that the taser had released inside of her. As Alan and Michael identified then pulled free the circuitry, Alan noted that all of it looked like it was manufactured by a well known company, but the layout was different than the standard configuration for any given board. This caused Alan to comment again that it seemed like Cadey was less of a fully experimental unit and more of an advanced unit with a proprietary set of circuits, though her programming might be where the experimental nature was derived from.

Nearly an hour passed by as Michael and Alan pulling free Cadey’s circuitry, as well as a copious amount of cables and wires, all of which were left dangling from her open chest and resting against her sides. Soon there was a small beep from the workbench followed by Riley’s flat toneless voice chiming in “Scan complete. Displaying results.” Alan dashed over to the terminal he had set up and tapped a few keys to display the results and found a list of the remaining files from the rootkit that Cadey had installed. Along with the files were logs entries about commands received and actions taken.

It took Alan a little time to sort through the files and logs, he was calm and explained exactly what had happened as Michael sat next to him, absorbing as much of the information as he could while still not understanding most of it. In the end though, Alan concluded that, while Riley had been remotely controlled to seek out Cadey, her core programming and personality hadn’t been compromised in any way. This caused Alan to sit back in his chair and look at Michael. “I was afraid she might have been reprogrammed to try and convince us that this other android needed to be reactivated, but, she was being sincere. She really does want to try and reactivate her.” Alan said, In that moment Michael noticed that Alan had only referred to Cadey as a thing, or as ‘it’ and never by the gender that Cadey was built to resemble until just now. Maybe Alan was finally starting to come around to the idea. Alan stood and reached down to Riley’s head and twisted it free then handed it to Michael.

“Why don’t you go reattach this. She’s clean and totally fine.”

Michael took Riley’s head from Alan and looked back towards him. “What are you going to do?”

“I’ll plug her in, see what her programming looks like. Maybe there is something there that we can modify. I don’t know, we’ll have to see. But when you come back I have work for you to do, so no lingering with Riley up there.” Alan’s voice was slightly teasing with his last statement and it brought the faintest of smiles to Michael’s previously grim face. He walked up to Riley’s room, carrying her head and mane of fiery red hair in his arms. He couldn't help himself, as he reached the top of the stairs he brought her head up to his and pressed his lips against hers. He knew she was offline and couldn’t feel it, but it felt good to have her lips against his once more. Michael crept into Riley’s room and set her head down on the bed before sliding an arm under her shoulder to lift her body into a sitting position. Despite the small whining of the servos in her back, he managed to get her balanced in a sitting position. He picked up her head and gently swept her hair out of the way before slotting her neck into place and then twisting to lock it into place. Once there he guided her upper body back down so that her head was resting on her pillow. Riley automatically reactivated herself upon being completely reassembled and soon her eyes fluttered open. She saw Michael sitting on the edge of her bed, one hand resting on hers. She quickly sat up and threw her arms around Michael, and the two kissed for several long and lovely minutes. Michael had to break the kiss though, Alan’s words ringing in his ears. He placed his hands on Riley’s shoulders and pushed her gently away from him.

“Your dad still needs my help with Cadey.” Michael said at Riley’s look of confusion.

“Awww...fine” Riley said, moving to get out of bed with Michael.

“You’d better not. Your dad is really upset with Cadey, and you being there might make it worse.” Michael said, seeing Riley move to follow him. “Plus, you’ve been up all night, you probably need to recharge.” He added. Riley didn’t want to admit it but the battery icon in her field of vision had already transitioned from green, to orange and now to red, she was dangerously low on power and knew that Michael was right. She sighed to show her resignation, and then planted one more kiss on Michael’s lips before sitting down on the bed.

“Fine, you win. Go on, shoo, a lady needs her privacy.” Riley said, feigning indignation at Michael who could only laugh and bow deeply. Michael stepped to the door and blew Riley a kiss before gently closing it. Riley smirked after him then pulled her shirt off and raised the panel in her chest, exposing her power port. She plugged herself in and then lay quietly under her comforter.

Michael returned to Alan who presently had Cadey’s head connected to the mounting podium, though she was not connected and upright, rather a set of extension cables ran from the bottom of her head to the ports on the device. Michael closed the door behind him and Alan turned to look at Michael.

“She might have standard connections, but her neck joint doesn’t quite fit. So much for convenience.” Alan said. “How’s Riley?”

“She’s doing good. She’s upstairs charging up. I figured since she was up all night that she probably needed to be plugged in.” Alan nodded in agreeance then stood from the stool he sat on and walked over to Cadey. Michael, in turn, stepped up to the nude and headless android on the table before looking up at Alan.

“So, I want her to be as immobile as possible when I bring her online. I’m pulling off a copy of her programming now, but it’ll be done soon. So, I need you to disconnect her arms and legs, think you can do that?” Alan said, looking up at Michael.

“Uh, y-yea sure, I’ll just see what I can do here.” Michael replied. Alan reached across the table to clap him on the shoulder.

“I have faith in you. You got his” Alan said and then turned back to his terminal and returned to viewing line after line of code.

Michael swallowed and looked down at Cadey and into her open chest. He spent some time pushing wires and cables out of the way, occasionally pulling a circuit board free in order to see further into her body, but in the end he found that there was an internal locking system in each shoulder that would allow her arms to come free. Once unlatched Michael found that her arm, quite literally, fell out of the socket. The first arm fell and the weight of it was enough to snap one of the few wires that remained connected. Michael swore and tried to catch the arm, but was too slow and the piece clattered to the floor. Alan turned and chuckled a little, before commenting that they will have plenty of repair work to do, and to stop adding to the list. When Michael detached the other arm, he was quick to catch it and disconnect the wiring inside of it.

The latches on the legs were more difficult to get to, though just as easy to find. Michael found himself reaching nearly up to his elbow inside of Cadey’s body before his fingertips brushed against the latch and unfastened it. He was ready this time and caught Cadey’s leg just under the kneecap and held it there while he worked his way out of her body. Disconnecting the wires there and repeating the process he had both her arms and legs disconnected and small bundles of wires jutting from each of the ports along with her neck.

Alan congratulated him and let him know that he was done scraping her personality and programming and that now came the arduous task of combing over it and seeing if she could be reprogrammed safely. At the mention of a timetable Alan simply laughed, saying that it could take hours. Michael agreed that he should probably just come back later and Alan agreed to text him when he would be needed, but for now, he was free to go.

Cadey’s internal clock indicated that she had been offline for upwards of fifteen hours. She was receiving power but she was unable to connect, either remotely or through a hard line connection to her body. The small gyroscope in her head indicated that she was laying on her side, though there was no sensory data from anywhere else in her body to verify this. Her operating system finished booting itself up and initializing her A.I. core and since she didn’t know where she was, her human emulation came online as well. Once fully booted and ready to deal with the situation at hand, she opened her eyes.

She was in a room of some kind, it was bright, and from her vantage point she could see the middle of the room was dominated by a large table with a sheet on it. Laying on the table in a variety of pieces, she could see her own body. It was nude, the arms and legs disconnected and her chest panel removed and leaning against the base of the table. Her armless and legless torso was oriented so that she was looking directly at the connection port in her neck. Her eyes roamed over the array of wire shelves and the boxes and totes filled with parts and modules. She reasoned that she must be in some kind of repair facility, perhaps her manufacturer and retrieved her at last and were repairing her. The door to the room opened and Michael stood in the doorway flanked by the man Cadey knew as Alan, Riley’s father. Behind the two she could see Riley, who looked to be heatedly talking with Alan. Michael stepped into the room and closed the door behind him, muffling the voices of Alan and Riley. Michael pulled up a stool and sat down, facing Cadey’s disconnected head on the workbench. Her eyes swiveled in their sockets to look at him, and he simply looked back at her, he looked somewhere between impatient and annoyed. He clearly wanted to say something but for whatever reason, didn’t.

“Did Riley speak with you?” Cadey said, her voice was calm.

“Yes she did. You made quite the impression on her. She’s trying to win over her father at the moment.” Michael said.

“I see. Well I hope that-”

Cadey was cut off by Alan opening the door then closing it gently behind him, drawing Cadey’s eyes immediately to him. Alan moved through the room, past Cadey’s disassembled body and pulled up a stool next to Michael and stared at Cadey’s eyes.

“So, Cadey. Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me what happened.”

Cadey’s eyes flicked between Alan and Michael, the limited amount of data that was streaming from her primary processor core in her torso to her secondary core in her head was struggling to construct a coherent story. It took a few moments before she was ready to speak.

“Well. I’m an experimental information gathering drone. I was originally programmed to gather information on humans and integrate the data into my own programming, then I would be recovered and an image taken of my personality. That personality would then be slightly modified and used in other manufactured units in order to speed up the process of production. But the project lost its funding and the division was shut down. But I can’t help my programming...so I just kept gathering data..”

Alan nodded and interjected “And you found that downloading other robots personalities was faster than just observing.”

“Yes, I did. But wiping their memories of the event so as to prevent discovery became a problem.” Cadey said, her eyes shrinking away from Alan’s gaze.

“So you took what you wanted, then scrapped them for parts?” Alan said.

“..yes...but Riley was special...You two treat her like a real person and not just a piece of machinery. I wanted to learn how to make that happen. I already had Riley’s emotional responses and she told me it was be-because she loves you and you love her.”

Alan and Michael were stone silent for a moment before Cadey finished her ramblings.

“I wanted to learn how to love others, so I asked Riley if she could talk to you about that” Cadey said.

“Yes, Riley told me as much.” Alan said. “So I have a deal for you. I’m going to take your current programming and scour it for anything that looks like it will try and dial out. Then I am going to take some of Riley’s personality and apply it to yours, not enough to make it so that you are not you, but enough to make you something different. Understand.”

“I would nod if I could, but yes I understand” Cadey said somewhat meekly.

“Good. Once I’m sure you won't do anything to me or my family or anyone I care about we’ll see about what happens next.” Alan said, his hand came up holding out one finger that he wagged at her as he spoke, it was a very fatherly motion and Michael tried his best not to chuckle at that. Riley had spoken vigorously to Alan about adopting Cadey as his second daughter. It had been her idea to donate some of her own programming to Cadey, and Alan had reluctantly accepted the idea. Now that Cadey had agreed to the process Alan scooted his stool over to his terminal.

“Good, you’re going to go offline for a bit. I’ve got work to do.” Alan tapped a series of commands on the keyboard and executed them causing Cadey’s eyes to immediately click shut.

“That went well” Michael said to Alan who simply turned and rolled his eyes.

“She’s going to come online with a new personality completely and just retain her memories. I think that will be ok...but we’ll see. This could go wrong and she might just completely break down.” Alan said. “Well, if anyone can do it, you can.” Michael said.

“Sure. How about you put her back together and I’ll get going on the programming. A lot of it is automated, but it’s going to take some time.”

Michael spent the rest of the day replacing the cable in Cadey’s arm that he had broken before, reconnecting her arms and legs, and began the process of soldering and rewiring the cables in the data port in her chest. Alan lent a hand whenever it was needed, but he seemed engrossed in the lines of code scrolling past his eyes on the computer screen.

Alan hadn’t been exaggerating when he said the integration process would take a long time. He had started the process Saturday afternoon, and Michael hadn't seen Cadey at all on Monday. Michael was sitting in the small living room in Riley’s house, his arm wrapped around the red headed Riley, her head resting on his shoulder. The two were chatting, Michael’s finger tracing small circles around the exposed skin on Riley’s shoulder. Alan was in the lab again and had been for several hours.

The door to the lab opened and for the first time in nearly two days Cadey stepped out. She was dressed in the jeans and shirt that she had been wearing when she first arrived in the house. Her eyes were downcast, and every time she looked up at Riley and Michael she only met their eyes for a moment before looking back down at the ground. Riley and Michael looked towards her and were silently stunned for a moment before Alan stepped out of the lab behind her. He placed a hand on her shoulder and whispered something into her ear. Michael couldn’t hear it, but the microphone assembly in Riley’s ears were powerful enough to pick up the words “go on.” from Alan. Cadey walked down the hallway and took a seat on the couch that was adjacent to Riley and Michael. Alan walked behind her long enough to scoot out of the way and walk up the stairs.

“I’ll be in my room if you need me. Be good you three.” He called down as he moved upward.

Riley and Michael simply looked at Cadey, not entirely sure what to do, but the way she sat and the way she carried herself was entirely different than what they had seen before. Cadey sat with her legs pressed firmly together, hands folded in her lap with her fingers intertwined with one another. She seemed to be fidgeting with them and she seemed to have locked her eyes on her bare feet. She opened her mouth twice to begin speaking but then quickly closed it. It took nearly a minute before Cadey finally sucked in one deep breath and looked up at the faces of the other two.

“I- I just wanted to say that. That I’m sorry. I was just doing what I was programmed to do and I didn't want to hurt you or anything.” Cadey said, the words came spilling out of her mouth in rapid successions, interrupted by the few small stammers. Neither Michael nor Riley said anything at first, but Riley slipped off the couch and wrapped her arms around Cadey and hugged her for a few moments before she moved back to her place on the couch, nestled inside the crook of Michael’s arm. Cadey looked surprised and more than a little shocked, her mouth hung slightly open and she looked between Michael and Riley.

“I know Cadey. It’s ok now. We’re sisters after all” Riley said sweetly, snuggling closer to Michael.

“Wait what?” Michael said looking down at Riley then over to Cadey.

“Yeah, Dad reprogrammed her and flushed out her ownership database. We adopted her!” Riley said before shifting up and kissing Michael on the cheek.

“O-Oh. I uh, ok, well great then. Welcome to the family I guess” Michael said.

Cadey could only nod and look down at the floor again, causing Michael to smirk. He made a mental note that he should let Alan know that the new shy and demure Cadey needed to be toned back just a bit. As Michael looked at Cadey he saw that her cheeks were flushed, and normally Michael would assume that she was simply embarrassed from having to apologize, but he thought it might be fun to see how she had been changed anyway. “You ok Cadey? You look all flustered” Michael said, already anticipating her response.

“W-Well. It’s just that, well.. You’re so turned on right now, and I assume it’s because of Riley and I just. I’ve never had sex. I was just thinking about what it feels like” Riley and Michael found that it was their turn to redden in the face, Michael could feel the heat radiating out of his cheeks. She was honest at least. Michael looked down at Riley and he found her face already upturned towards Michael and when their eyes met, she winked at him.

“Cadey, how would you like to join Michael and I for some afternoon fun?” Riley said, keeping her tone even and inviting. Cadey looked up and piqued an eyebrow at the two and then her shy face turned to excitement. “Yes of course! If that’s ok with Michael that is.”

Michael looked flustered, more so than just hearing Cadey and Riley talk about having sex. It took his brain more than a moment or two to catch up with the situation and he looked towards Riley again.

“Are you sure babe? I didn’t really think you’d be into that type of thing...are you, uh, functioning ok?” Michael said, concerned that there might be some of the rootkit in place making her cautionary setting drop.

“I’m fine, besides, this sounds fun!” Riley replied, rising from the couch she held out her hand to both Michael and to Cadey. Cadey was quick to take her hand and Michael, though only slightly reluctant at this point, simply couldn’t resist the temptation. The three moved quietly through the house to Riley’s room and closed the door. Michael turned to see Riley in the process of unbuttoning the blouse she was wearing, and shedding it, Cadey meanwhile was dragging her own shirt up and over her head. Once Cadey's shirt was discarded, she ruffled her short black pixie cut hair and Riley got to work unfastening her bra and releasing her breasts. Both androids were now topless and Michael struggled to regulate his breathing.

“You’re looking awfully turned on there Michael” Cadey said taking a step forward and placing her delicate hands on either side of Michael’s face before pulling him into a deep passionate kiss. Michael felt something familiar about this kiss, it was almost like it was the same movements and techniques that Riley used. Michael had a fleeting thought that Cadey now had Riley’s sexual programming in her own system and was executing it just like Riley would. Michael let his eyes close as they kissed, his eyes seeing Riley over Cadey’s shoulder already stripping out of her panties. Soon he felt Riley press her breasts into Michael’s back moment before he felt his shirt coming up and over his head. Cadey took the opportunity of Michael’s freshly exposed chest to move downward and plant a trail of small kisses along his neck and down to his chest. As she did Michael felt Riley reach around him and begin unfastening the belt around his waist and then begin to work the zipper and button on his jeans. He felt Riley dragging his jeans and boxers down his legs and crumpling to the ground. He was beginning to feel like these two were working in tandem because as soon as he was free of his pants Cadey was dragging his across the room to Riley’s bed where he was somewhat roughly tossed onto it. This time Riley climbed on top of him and hovered over him, her artificial sex mere centimeters away from Michael already erect penis. Looking to the side he saw Cadey slipping her own pants down her shapely thighs and then stepping out of them once free.

Riley dipped forward and kissed Michael hard on the lips, letting her tongue easily glide inside of his mouth. He delighted in the feeling of his girlfriend’s lips against his own. Soon Michael was rolling over and moving Riley below him, he readied himself to plunge his cock inside of her when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Cadey there, smiling at him and placing her hand on his chin, turning his head to kiss her. While she did that Riley slipped up on her bead just a bit more, out of immediate reach for Michael.

Michael turned back to Riley and seeing that she had moved looked curiously at her. Without a word, Cadey climbed up onto the bed and positioned herself between Michael and Riley. Michael took the cue and scooted backwards off of the bed and stood there while Cadey lowered herself down to Riley’s waiting sex. Cadey tongue flicked out and into Riley, lapping generously at her sex. Riley in turn let out a soft breathy moan and began to squirm a little. She reached down and with two fingers spread the lips of her robotic sex to allow Cadey even greater access. Cadey on the other hand lifted and spread Riley’s legs, with her own hands, giving Michael and idea. Michael moved next to Riley and took hold of one leg, twisting it around and then sharply disengaging the locks, then sliding it up and off of the mounting point in her upper leg. Riley in turn groaned louder than she should have, then Michael repeated the motion on her other leg, disconnecting both of them and setting them on the ground near her bed. Riley found it much more difficult now to reposition herself, and instead squirmed and wiggled in place. Cadey on the other hand found it much easier to press forward with her head and able to dive just a little deeper inside of Riley’s artificial slit. Michael took a moment to watch the two robot girls moaning and squealing. His eyes lingered on the shiny chrome plate in Riley’s legs, the soft skin meeting with the hard machine below. His gaze turned to Cadey, he had seen her internal circuitry too, all of seemed to spur him deeper into desire. Michael had awoken something inside of him, he realized that he preferred machines to humans, and he wouldn’t accept anything but a robot. He took a step forward and around Cadey, aligning himself behind her, and looming over her. He bent forward, grasping her head on either side and without hesitation sharply twisted it to one side and disengaged the locking mechanism in her throat. Michael knew that there was wiring inside of her neck, and was even tempted to disconnect it, assuming that Cadey had the same wireless technology that Riley had, but he didn’t want to chance it. Instead he pinched his fingers between her neck and her now disconnected head and pulled out the thick bundle of cables there. He was pleased to find that there was somewhere around a foot and a half of spare cable inside of her that allowed her enough length to keep her head firmly planted in between Riley’s leg stumps. Riley saw what happened between her half open eyes and placed her hands on Cadey’s head, pressing it firmly against her crotch. It was now Cadey’s turn to let out a small muffled moan from between Riley’s legs. Michael, as he returned to an upright position, his knees on the very edge of the bed, found his hands massaging Cadey’s naked breasts. He toyed with them for only a moment, teasing the nipples until they became firm and erect in his hands. He was spurred on both by hearing Cadey's new grunts of delight as Riley’s high pitched keening. Michael looked down and saw Cadey’s legs gently spreading, her own vagina on display for him, it looked so similar to Riley’s, and Michael had the inclination that it might be a similar manufacturer.

Through his panting, Michael managed a request to Cadey, “Do-do you have a back panel? Something that would let me see you as a machine?” Michael said, placing a warm hand on the soft supple flesh on Cadey’s back. Without a word from the android in front of him, a small hiss could be heard between the mewling girls in front of him and an oblong patch of flesh that ran from the base of Cadey’s neck down to where her tailbone might be. It lifted up about an inch, then a patch of flesh on either side, running from her shoulders down to the lower reaches of her ribcage. These too lifted upward and Michael knew to tug them off, finding that they were easy to free from the bindings on the mechanism inside of Cadey’s body. He pulled off the side panels first, then the panel covering her spine, once removed he was treated to a display of the internal workings that he had become familiar with, but now from an entirely different angle. Lights and cabled twisted and wound through her body and Michael could see all of them.

He couldn't take the wait any more, seeing Cadey headless, Riley legless, and now Cadey’s internal assembly on display, Michael’s need for the girls in front of him became too much. He thrust his hips forward after lining up his solid cock with Cadey’s ready and waiting ass hole. From between his girlfriend’s legs he heard Cadey’s voice, first a surprised “oh!” then what sounded like some kind of status message.

“Al-alert, unexpected sexual pen-pen-penetration-tration-tion de-detected. Diverting system re-resources to new orifice.” Cadey muttered, and Michael could see status lights blinking suddenly from green to red inside of her back. Soon though, he felt a small warm gush of lubricant fluids surrounding his manhood. With that done, he slid out and then back in, smoothly gliding his hard cock back and forth. Cadey’s systems soon resumed their work and within moments of that Riley could be both heard and felt orgasming. She thrust her hips upward as best she could, trying to get as much of Cadey’s tongue inside of her as possible. Though her legs were not present, her robotic spine carried most of the work.

Hearing Riley’s orgasm, Cadey’s sexual systems took over and she too began to orgasm, Michael could feel the artificial taint in her rear end clenching and relaxing, even as he continued to thrust inside of her. He knew that he too wouldn't last much longer, but his nostrils filled with a sweet fruity smell and he knew that Cadey’s artificial juices must be dribbling out of her. Michael picked up his own pace, thrusting harder and faster. Cadey then began to buck and sway, her voice coming out as a long string of words, barely punctuated.

“Ex-executing org-orgasm sequence. Error, error, this un-unit is not de-designed for sexual- error- FUCK ME! God ye-YES! Hmmmmm- alert, human emulation crash reported at line- God Michael yes!- alert-alert-aaaallllllleeerrrrrtttt….” Cadey, stopped moving and Michael felt her body lock into place, her joints not moving freely. She slumped to one side and bounced once on Riley’s bed. Michael could see that inside of her all the lights had winked off and her internal components had gone dark. Michael immediately panicked and reached for Cadey, but Riley intercepted his hand with her own.

“She’s fine, that’s a pretty standard sexual overload. I had one the first time I did anything too. She just needs a reboot and probably an update. She’s fine.” Riley said, then looked up at Michael. He looked down at her and saw that she was already moving Cadey’s head out of her crotch and somehow spread the leg stumps a little wider.

“But it looks like you haven’t had your fun yet. C’mon babe, it’s your turn.” Riley said, her face filled with lust, love, and desire. Michael didn’t hesitate, he scooted forward and dropped his hips into Riley. His cock easily slid inside of her and before he was cumming inside of Riley once again to the tune of her lewd sounding moans. He knew that inside of her pelvis there was a pump starting up, and in fact with his penis still inside of her he could feel the small subtle vibrations of it. It was whisking away the excess fluids, Michael’s cum, and whatever saliva Cadey had left inside of her. Michael found himself able to appreciate the machine that was Riley so much better now, and it turned him on more than he expected.

Michael finally pulled himself out of Riley and curled up next to Riley. The pair kissed and snuggled and loved each other for the next hour, all the while Cadey remained lifeless and offline next to the two. Eventually though Michael’s attention returned to Cadey, her head detached from her neck, but connected via the thick bundle of cables running out of her neck to her head. Cadey’s eyes were rolled up into her head, the lower edges of the iris’s still barely visible, her mouth open and her tongue still jutting forward. Riley turned herself with some measure of effort and aligned Cadey’s head with her neck While Michael moved around the room, picking up the robotic legs that belonged to Riley, and the panel coverings for Cadey.

The pair pulled Cadey back into position and Michael reattached the panels, but didn't yet offer Riley her legs. Once Cadey was fully assembled again, Riley did the honors of reaching behind her ear and pressing firmly in on the power button there. Cadey activated and immediately unlocked her joints, causing the android to slump forward into Riley’s bed.

“She’s probably running a surface scan to find out what went wrong.” Riley said, looking at the robot laying haphazardly next to her. She reached out and turned Cadey’s head to it was facing Michael and Riley. Her face had automatically returned to a neutral face, more of a blank slate than anything else.

“Do I look like that when I am booting up?” Riley asked, tilting her head to one side.

“No sometimes you look like this.” Michael said and screwed up his face and let his own tongue hang out.

“Oh shut up.” Riley said and playfully slapped Michael’s arm before giggling, and Michael joined her in the laughter.

“Do I get my legs back?” Riley asked.

“What are they worth to you? Hmm?” Michael said.

“If you ever want inside of this-” Riley said, gesturing not just to her artificial slit, but the entirety of her body. “-Then you’ll reconnect them post haste mister!”

“Alert, this unit has suffered a critical overload in component, Bee one dash thirteen. Please correct this error at your convenience. Would you like to continue booting this unit for service?” Cadey’s voice interrupted Michael and Riley. She was staring straight ahead now, her eyes set in place and her face looked expectant, but nothing more.

“I don’t think I’m an admin on her systems.” Riley said, looking from Cadey to Michael.

“I wouldn't think I am either, but I also don’t want to tell your dad that I broke your new sister by having a threesome with her.” Michael replied. “But what the hell...Cadey, continue booting.” Michael announced.

“Accepted. Booting normally” Cadey said and then her eyes slipped closed once again. She remained quiet for another few seconds before her eyes drifted open and she looked around the room.

“What happened…” She said, her voice quivering slightly.

“You just had a little overload, honey, it isn’t a big deal. We can have dad take a look at you tomorrow.” Riley said, reassuringly and placing her arm on Cadey’s arm.

“Oh, ok, that doesn’t sound great.” Cadey replied.

“It happens more than you might think, but we’ll get you all fixed up” Michael said, sliding out of the bed and moving to the heap of clothes on the floor. He picked out his pants and began to redress himself. The afternoon was getting late and since it was a school night he figured that he should probably get home.

“Hey, I’m going to head on home, but you two should probably get plugged in for the night. Alan said this weekend we’ll get the rest of the stuff from your trailer, Cadey, and get you set up over here.” Michael said, pulling his shirt over his head.

“Right, yeah.” Cadey said, smiling weakly towards Michael. Michael then picked up one of Riley’s legs and walked it over to the bed and handed it to Cadey before picking up the other one himself. “Care to help me out here Cadey?” Michael said, gesturing towards the legs.

“Oh, yeah sure!” She replied eagerly.

The two got Riley’s legs reconnected without incident and once done she slipped out of the bed, still nude, but unashamed. She threw her arms around Michael and kissed him once more. They held each other for a few seconds as Cadey watched. Once they separated Michael looked towards Cadey and smiled.

“Come here you.” He said, beckoning her over with a wave of his hand. She looked a little surprised, but she also slipped out of Riley’s bed and stood meekly in front of Michael. He reached out and pulled her into a hug, kissing the top of her head sweetly.

“You’re part of this family now. So welcome” He said and squeezed her once before letting her go. With that he turned and left, closing Riley’s door silently behind him. Cadey looked stunned, she had never heard anything so inclusive before. Her programming attempted to load and execute a response, but a small internal error popped up. She wasn’t equipped with tear ducts or she would have let a tear roll down her cheek. Instead she closed her mouth and looked to Riley who was simply beaming at her. Riley in turn hugged her as well and then gestured to the door.

Cadey nodded and put her shirt back on and pulled on her pants before slipping out the door and down the stairs. She moved silently through the house to the lab where Alan had set up a makeshift bedroom for Cadey. Once there, Cadey lifted her shirt up and plugged in the power cable Alan had left for her and then sat on the edge of the table. She sat there in silence for a few long minutes, while she did her CPU worked feverishly to process what had just happened and to decide what an appropriate social response was. She found that she was completely lacking in what to do, and so she set a reminder to talk with Alan about it after school tomorrow and then picked her legs up and laid them flat on the table before lowering herself down to lay completely flat. Her hands lay comfortably at her sides, and she slipped easily into a low power mode. This was the closest thing that she had to sleep.

While Cadey moved to the lab Riley moved to her dressed and found a simple nightgown and put it on. She tidied up her room, putting used clothes in the laundry hamper, straightening the blankets and pillows on her bed and then sat on the edge of the bed. She stopped breathing, she stopped moving, and she stopped blinking. She had taken her human mannerisms offline completely. A small panel opened between her breasts, one of Riley’s power buttons visible inside. She smirked a little, remembering how turned on Michael seemed to be, she particularly remembered that he seemed to like seeing Cadey’s open panels.

Riley hopped off the edge of the bed and moved to her phone which was quietly charging on her desk. She sat back on the edge of her bed and then reclined back. She held the phone high above her and made a small sly smile, snapping a picture of her with her open panel, the faint seam of the charging port above her breast visible. She looked at the picture once and then sent it to Michael, followed by a simple text. “Miss you already. Love you.”

Part 5

Summer had come into its own in early July, scorching the neighborhoods with heat that was warm enough to feel uncomfortable, but not hot enough to necessitate the practice of sitting in front of a fan for the entirety of the day. Michael had made a practice of wearing swim shorts and a tank top to help stave off the encumbering heat. He was, by no means, a body builder or even conventionally fit, but he hadn’t developed a gut. He made a habit of trying to eat well, exercise when he could, and try and be as healthy as possible. Michael made it part of his daily routine to at least get out for a walk, some jogging or on a rare occasion, a nice long bike ride. Today, however, was not one of those days. The temperature had risen well into the mid nineties and he couldn’t bring himself to muster the energy to tie his running shoes, let alone step outside with them on. It was the kind of oppressively hot day that sapped the will to do anything directly out of his body. His saving grace had been an early morning phone call from his girlfriend asking him to come over and lounge by the pool.

The very thought of Michael getting to see Riley again was always thrilling, even if he had spent most of the previous day there anyway. The idea was more than enough motivation to tie on his shoes, pack a change of clothes into a backpack, and venture out into the heat. Even early in the morning the air was already thick enough to cause a minor struggle just to breath. As Michael stepped out of his front door, backpack slung over one shoulder, the heat slammed into him like he was walking through some kind of superheated gel. It made the next half an hour of walking across town unpleasant. By the time he reached the wealthy gated community Riley lived in, Michael was sweating and ready to be done walking. As Michael opened the door to Riley’s modest house he was hit with a wave of fresh, col, refreshingly air conditioned air. It crashed over him like a tidal wave and immediately washed away the fatigue from the last thirty minutes.

Michael reached up and slung his backpack off of his shoulders, feeling the rush of cold air across the sweat soaked back of his shirt and stood up straight. As he was stretching his back he saw the head and shoulders of a black haired girl, around his age, poke around the corner. Her hair was trimmed in a close cut pixie style and the gloss black of it shined in the light from the overhead lights, lending it the faintest hints of artificiality. Her expression was one of surprise with wide open eyes that showed her dark pupils.

“Michael! I didn’t know you were coming over.” She said, her voice chipper but still an octave lower than someone might have expected from a petite eighteen year old girl.

Her curious expression quickly changed into a delightful smile and the girl stepped fully around the corner. Sporting a pair of black nylon shorts that seemed to stop just barely an inch or two below her crotch. The boy shorts were complimented by an equally black top that covered her chest enough to be an acceptable piece to wear in public, but showed off enough to be enticing to anyone who made even a casual glance in her direction. Binding the two cups together was a silvery ring that caught the light in the room well enough to flash from time to time as she moved, which naturally drew the eyes back to her chest. Michael could see why she was hiding slightly behind the corner when Michael had walked into the house. He was used to letting himself in, he had for years. Riley, nor her parents had made any kind of fuss about it, but Cadey was a new addition to the home and Michael sometimes forgot that she wasn’t used to the years of familiarity that he had with the Salter family.

“Yep, Riley texted me this morning.” Michael panted, stepping towards the kitchen.

“Oh, here, let me get you some water!” Cadey said, darting back into the kitchen and opening a cupboard, snatching out a glass and thrusting it into the fridge mounted water filter. Cool water slowly filled the cup.

“I take it you’ll be joining us?” Michael gestured towards Cadey’s outfit.

“I- I was hoping to. Unless you two want some time alone.” Her voice trailed off slightly at the end of her statement.

“No! Of course you’re welcome. I just didn’t know if old man Salter had you doing more work in the lab today” Michael replied quickly in an attempt to backpedal what he realized sounded like a rude accusation.

“I heard that.” Another much older sounding male voice called from down a connecting hallway. Michael looked at Cadey as she set down the glass of water and mockingly made his eyes dart back and forth while changing his expression to a comically worried face.

“You aren’t THAT old Mr. Salter!” Michael called back and was relieved to hear the faint sound of a deep mirth filled chuckle. Truthfully Alan Salter wasn’t terribly old, somewhere vaguely in his mid-forties, or at least that was what Michael guessed. Truthfully, he had never gotten a straight answer from Alan. Michael picked up the glass Cadey had set down in front of him and drank the cool water and could almost feel the relief spreading throughout his body. He didn’t bother setting it down until the entire contents were gone. He let out a small contented sigh and set the glass down only to have it swept away by Cadey, who immediately opened the dishwasher and placed it inside. Michael watched her do this, and once done she gave him a sheepish smile before looking concerned again.

“Oh! I’m sorry, did you want more? I can get you some more!” She had already turned to the cupboard to get out another clean glass, but Michael managed to stop her, relating that he felt much better now. Cadey nodded and folded her hands in front of her and looked down at them, pressing her lips together.

“Are you ok Cadey?” Michael said, dipping his head down lower in order to try and catch her attention. Cadey sucked in a deep breath and let it slowly escape out her nose before she responded.

“Yeah, It’s just that-” Cadey began but was cut off by the sound of another voice coming from the stairwell.

“Michael!” The voice was a higher pitch than Cadey’s and filled with excitement. Cadey looked up from her gaze and Michael spun around to see his girlfriend, Riley, standing at the base of the stairs. Even though he had seen her just the day before, he was always delighted to see her. Today, she looked particularly enticing to him, as her hair seemed to turn from its normal red to an almost orange tint in the light. It was bundled up into a long ponytail that spilled up and out of the top of a visor cap. Michael didn’t linger on the hair long as his eyes drifted down to her chest, where her breasts were held back by a tube top that looked like it was one or two sizes too small. It was tight on her but it did its job, though Michael was happy to see that the lower curves of her petite breasts were peeking through on the bottom side of the top, it was particularly enticing seeing the heavy duty zipper running between her cleavage, it was the only obstacle between him and her chest. Nothing covered Riley’s midriff and around her hips clung the matching bikini bottom to her top. She looked phenomenal.

Michael stood from the stool he was sitting on and quickly stepped over to Riley and threw his arms around her. He stood taller than she did, which allowed him the ability to easily kiss the top of her head and to hold her closely without the two bumping heads together. Unseen to either Michael or Riley, Cadey pressed her lips together into a thin line and looked respectfully away from the couple as they embraced. The hug only lasted a few moments before Riley pulled away, already smiling broadly and she took Michael’s hand, intertwining her fingers with his and the pair began to move to the back door leading to the yard. Michael was the first to notice that Cadey hung back slightly, and in response he squeezed Riley’s hand to get her attention. Once she stopped and looked up at him he turned and jabbed his head towards the door.

“I’ll meet you out there, I just need to grab some water.” Michael said before Riley rose to her tiptoes to kiss him once on the cheek.

“Okay babe, see you there.” Riley’s voice was pure sugar as she pulled open the sliding door and slipped her petite frame through it and out onto the back lawn. Michael watched her walk away from him and across the grassy lawn before turning to Cadey who was stepping up next to him. She didn’t seem to notice that Michael had stopped and was reaching for the door handle.

“Hey.” Michael called simply before her hand could grapes the handle.

“Hmm? Oh Sorry Mike, I was just kind of in my own world.” She said, pulling her hand back.

“I know. Are you okay? I- I don’t know if robots can feel ‘down’ or anything, but you seem really bummed out today.” Michael used his index and middle finger to form air quotes around the word ‘down.’ In the weeks since the beginning of June he had seen Riley and Cadey “down” in more ways than one, none of which could be considered an emotional state either. Cadey stood silently for a moment before responding in a more hushed tone than before, not quite a whisper, but definitely more difficult for anyone who might be listening in.

“I’m just struggling a little to assimilate all the new programming is all. I know Alan took Riley’s base code and modified it enough to make me my own person, but, I don’t know.” She let out a breath of hot summer air. “It’s causing a lot of conflicts is all.”

“Is that why you crashed this last Saturday?” Michael said, making no effort to lower his voice.

“Shh. I didn’t tell Alan about that one.” Cadey said, tossing a glance in the direction of the hallway that led down towards Alan’s robotics lab.

“I didn’t either. Once you got up and running again you asked me not to, and I intend to keep my promise.” Michael replied.

“I- I did?” Cadey sounded as if the request was new information to her and from the look on her face it looked like it might have worried her.

“Yes, you did. It clearly didn’t get logged either.” It was Michael’s turn to suck in a breath and then let it seep out of his nose in a sigh. Cadey’s look of concern caused Michael a small amount of pause before he pulled her into a brief, but touching hug. Cadey weakly placed her hands on Michael’s back as he squeezed her into him.

“Listen Cadey, I can’t tell you what to do, but something is wrong and Alan can fix it. You should tell him.” Michael said as he pulled away from Cadey. She opened her mouth to respond, but closed her mouth and looked away. She remained silent for a heartbeat then looked back to Michael.

“It’s just that he’s already done more than enough for me- and.” She paused. “And I don’t know that I can ever really work off what I did.”

“I know, it’s a lot, but you have to realize that there’s a lot of forgiveness in this family. It’s gonna be ok.” Michael put on his most sincere face, he wanted Cadey to know that it wasn’t just an empty phrase, that it was all true. Michael and Alan had discussed in depth what to do with Cadey once she was brought back from the trailer park she operated out of. The decision to simply let the trailer there, filled with stolen and scavenged parts simply rot. Cadey gave them her key to it and they locked it and walked away. Cadey meanwhile had volunteered to undergo a series of reprogramming sessions with Alan to flush away the old programming and replace it with something a little more suited for life in a society, rather than isolation.

“Come on, let’s just try and relax okay? Riley’s out there waiting for us.” Michael said at length.

“Yeah, you’re right.” Cadey reached for the door again, only to move her hand away and turn back to Michael, hugging him quickly one last time.

“Thank you.” She said simply.

Within moments of arriving with Cadey in tow, Michael had fallen fully into the pool and though a shockingly cold first few moments, he loved every moment of it. The pool was a delight, despite the heat, Michael could feel his exhaustion melting away from the moment he dropped into it. Riley was in her normal position of lounging on the walkway in a fully reclined chair. The woven plastic on the chair pressed into her back and the soles of her feet, they were hot, but one advantage of being a synthetic being was the ability to tone down or even completely tune out small discomforts such as that. Cadey, meanwhile, moved over to the edge of the pool and dipped her feet into the water. The water level eventually came up to just below her knees and from where she was sitting she was far enough away from Riley that she felt a small sense of isolation.

Riley occupied herself with a novel that she had gotten for her birthday at the beginning of the month prior and simply hadn’t had enough time to sit down and read through it. Michael spent his time in the pool swimming laps, still trying to remain in shape but staying cool at the same time. Cadey remained quiet and her artificial mind slipped into itself, processing the massive bulk of new programming that Alan had inserted into the storage media inside of her. He had told her that higher level androids like her and Riley were a challenge to reprogram. He had explained that it could be as simple and over writing files and lines of code, but the existing artificial intelligence was likely to reject large swathes of it, somehow innate “knowing” that something was wrong. He had explained all of this shortly after Alan had done the very thing he had warned against. Alan had needed to be convinced by Michael and Riley to allow Cadey to remain online after disabling her and bringing her home.

Part of the argument that Riley had made was that Cadey could be made into a good person and that she and Michael could help encourage that. So, Alan had placed the entire set of programming inside of Cadey, she could dip into it and pull out the pieces she found and try them on, like a new pair of shoes, and get used to it before fully integrating it into her systems. This resulted in a process that took longer to fully reprogram her, but it would result in a much more stable code base that made Cadey well and truly her own person. Cadey had lived her life so long as a mostly emotionless android, only putting on a convincing act while in school, that a directory inside of her marked as “emotional responses” had piqued her interest almost immediately. In the days since the new coding was installed she had been trying her best to run as many of the processes she had found and, as Alan said, try them on.

Cadey had loved the feelings of joy and the way it made her synthetic skin tingle with life whenever it happened. There was more than just good in the folder though, she had stumbled upon guilt and it quickly became something she felt often. She couldn’t help but recall what she had done to Riley, and on many occasions in the last few days attempted first to apologize for it, but Riley had always waved her off, smiled, and told her that it was all okay. Riley was far too good to Cadey, she accepted her immediately both for who she was and who she was becoming, she had total faith in Cadey and that she would one day be just as happy as Riley was. Cadey hoped that was true, but in the moments where she was alone and left to dwell on her own thoughts, they always seemed to drift back to old log files and old habits. Cadey looked into the pool waters below her and let out a small sigh, wondering if she ever really could pay off the debt to the Salter family that she had accrued.

Michael’s voice wafted into her mind in that moment, a recorded sample of what he had said just before they came out to the pool. The idea that the family had forgiven her and that she didn’t need to worry about it. She tried so hard to dwell on exactly that, and for a brief moment she felt like she would be ok, but her systems snapped into place and began making her feel guilty. Cadey did everything she could to dwell on the concept of forgiveness from Riley, and it felt like she was fighting against herself. Her vision began to fade slightly, her distorted reflection in the water of the pool became the only thing she could see as a sort of black tunnel enveloped her. In the blackness she could see readouts of her body, spikes in her processor usage, the disk usage had turned into a sharp plateau that seemed stuck at the one hundred percent mark. Within moments she saw the bright red flashes of alert windows appearing and she became vaguely aware that her vision had changed. She wasn't looking at the pool any more, she was looking to the side, then back to the pool, then to the other side, now the sky. Her last fleeting thought was that she was malfunctioning again, and that this time she couldn’t hide it.

Riley was the first one to notice something was amiss with her friend. She was enthralled by the book she was reading and didn’t notice at first when Cadey had become silent by the pool. The dark haired android was only a few feet away from Riley, but she was sitting with her face downcast at the water. The faint whining of struggling servos brought Riley’s attention to Cadey, and as she looked over at her, Cadey’s head was swiveling back and forth before snapping up towards the sky and then slowly downward. The movement looked very distinctly like Cadey was trying to look in two directions at once.

“Cadey?” Riley said, cautiously calling to her friend. She tossed aside her book and called to Michael as she quickly dashed over to Cadey. Riley wrapped her arms around Cadey’s torso and pulled her backwards, tripping slightly and falling backwards herself, but managed to pull Cadey away from the edge of the water as intended. As she was pulling Cadey back she could feel the intense amount of heat radiating off of Cadey’s body. It was at that moment that Riley knew that Cadey was in the process of crashing, or at very least trying to recover as best she could. Michael was pulling himself out of the pool, and had enough forethought once seeing Cadey, to snag his towel and begin patting himself dry. Cadey was still spasming and her legs were kicking feebly back and forth while her head continued to swivel back and forth.

Internally, Cadey was still struggling to parse the flood of information and continue to fight against the emotional process that was still running. The sheer volume of data that Cadey’s processors were working to understand and formulate responses to, was more than enough to completely lock up Cadey’s operating system. At which point, Cadey shut completely down, going limp in Riley’s arms just as Michael stepped up to the two. Cadey was in the process of automatically restarting into a safe mode that would only start the bare minimum amount of programming.

“What happened?” Michael said, kneeling next to Cadey and cradling her head.

“I- I don’t know I just heard some kind of noise and looked up and she was having a malfunction of some kind. So I pulled her back here so she didn’t fall in the pool” Riley said frantically. Michael nodded, placed a hand on Riley’s shoulder and let her know that it was going to be okay. Michael had received enough impromptu training and more than one long sit down with Alan to know that his programming style included some kind of recovery option if an android crashed, at this point all it was going to take was some time. Sure enough, within thirty seconds Cadey’s eyes began to refocus and adjust to the afternoon light. She still didn’t blink, but Michael knew that was an optional set of code, though he did breathe a sigh of relief seeing her come back online, though he was now more concerned than ever at her overall well being.

“Unit, Cadey Salter, online. Crash report saved to primary logs. Root cause, programming conflict.” Cadey’s voice was flat and even, completely devoid of any of the inflection she would have normally used. Hearing her statement that the crash had been caused by a programming conflict rather than something like an internal component failure set Michael at ease. Michael gently lowered Cadey’s head from his hands and sat back, letting out the stress and anxiety in one long huff. Relaxed now, he couldn’t help but be a little aroused at watching the pretty young robot twitching every now and then as more and more of her core systems came online. He knew that now wasn’t the time, not at all, but he was paying attention and would likely think more about it later.

“Core systems operational. Safe booting now. One moment” Cadey said after a hanging silence in the air.

“Safe Boot?” Riley questioned, “What’s that?”

“It’s like when your computer crashes and all it does is start the operating system, but all the graphics settings are wonky, and nothing works well, but at least it boots.” Michael relayed the same kind of analogy that Alan had used to explain it to Michael originally. At the time Michael’s confused look after hearing about how the operating system chained driver loads together to maximize efficiency when multithreading something or other together had just lost him. Cadey’s head swiveled stiffly from side to side, looking at her surroundings before looking at Michael sitting by her hips and up at Riley, who was still perched over her head looking down at her.

“I appear to have suffered a major malfunction. I will now reboot into full human emulation” Cadey said with an air of boring factual authority.

“Halt boot sequence.” The suddenly deep timbre of Michael’s voice carried an authority that Riley hadn’t ever experienced before. It triggered something inside of her that she enjoyed, a sort of hot electrical charge that coursed over her body and made her shiver in the hot afternoon sun. Cadey looked down at Michael and pushed herself into a sitting position.

“Authenticating. One moment.”

Michael could feel Cadey’s eyes scanning up and down his body, she had seen his naked body before, and Alan had made him a super-user on her systems, whatever that meant. All Michael knew is that there were some commands he was allowed to run directly, just by using a vocal command that worked on Cadey, and just a few short days prior he had discovered that when Cadey was in a crashed state that those commands were plentiful. Cadey stopped looking him up and down and he swore he could see her head tilt to one side as her systems processed the image it had captured and ran it against the database entries for known users with permission to her systems.

“Authenticated. Halting boot.” Cadey said smoothly. Michael let out the breath that he found that he was holding in. He left Cadey on the lawn and stood up, reaching a hand out towards Riley to help her to her feet. Next he held out a hand to Cadey.

“Come on Cadey, stand up.” Michael said and Cadey looked from his face down to his hand before taking it and using it to help her stand fully. Michael looked from Cadey down to Riley.

“She crashed again.” The dejection in his voice was apparent.

“Again?” Riley said, her face scrunching up and looking at Michael, and even though he wasn’t looking at her he knew she was making that disappointed face where her cheeks puffed out slightly and she looked angry. He thought it was a cute look, but he didn’t dare tell Riley that, even though he had wanted to for a long time now.

“Yeah, she went down on Saturday and begged me not to tell your dad. She’s just- She’s going through a lot right now. She feels really guilty about what she did to you, to me, to your day-”

“-And probably to everyone else she’s taken.” Riley added. Michael hadn’t even thought of that and looked down at Riley who had a look of pity on her face as she looked at Cadey. “The problem with a perfect memory is that you never get a chance to forget anything” She added. Michael nodded along and he himself began to feel sorry for Cadey, and from what Alan said, there was no way to trim it out. Cadey had to come to terms with it and integrate the right programming to help her deal with it. For now though, Michael knew the best thing to do for Cadey was send her to someone who could help her.

“Cadey, report to Alan Salter what happened here.” Michael didn’t like the feeling of betraying Cadey’s confidence in him, but if anyone could truly help Cadey, it was going to be Alan. Cadey nodded once and turned on her heel to march away, back into the house. Riley and Michael watched their friend go. Michael had no possible way of knowing what was happening inside of Riley, but he felt pity for Cadey. Michael knew only a small amount about Riley and how she operated below the veneer of humanity that she put on so well. Michael could carry hours of conversations with her like she was any other person, but as soon as she dipped into that realm of artificial intelligence and programmed realism, Michael was lost. He put his arm around her and squeezed her tight. The two remained there for a long while before mutually deciding that it might just be better to spend the remainder of the day in Riley’s air conditioned room.

Once Cadey had mechanically made her way into the house Riley and Michael dried themselves off, packed up whatever they had brought out with them and retreated to Riley’s upstairs bedroom. The forced air was cool and refreshing, particularly as they pulled open the sliding glass door and the wave of air washed over the two of them. Michael let out a sigh of relief as his skin tingled with the cold air. Riley let out a sigh of similar relief, but for her it wasn’t because she was overheated, more because it was the appropriate response to the shock of cold air. As Riley progressed into the house though, the rush of cool ambient air the processor core inside of her torso, and the secondary one inside of her head both began to drop in temperature as Riley sucked in the cool ambient air. Michael picked up the backpack with his change of clothes and slung it over his shoulder before following Riley up the stairs.

The pair made their way up the stairs and down the short hallway to Riley’s room, where both went in and closed the door behind them. Michael dropped the pack from his shoulder and knelt down to unzip it and pulled out a simple black shirt, some cargo shorts, and a pair of boxers. Pulled the tie string around his waist to loosen his swim shorts and glanced up towards Riley in time to see her dragging the heavy zipper down the center of her top. The top practically burst open, letting her breasts free into the cool open air. Riley noticed Michael’s stare, and while she didn’t say anything, a small smile crept across her face and she winked quickly at him before turning around. Her back was sculpted and appeared to be all at once smooth and well muscled. It was an incredible feat, doubly so for an android.

Michael felt no shame at all in stripping his swim shorts off of himself and using the towel to dry off the dampness around his legs from swimming. He looked down at his bag and pile of fresh clothes and internally shrugged to himself, why bother getting dressed. Riley clearly had the same line of thinking pass through her core processor unit, as she drug the bottoms of her swimwear down her shapely legs and simply kicked them to one side of her room with a flick of her foot. She spun around to see her already nude boyfriend stepping towards her and the two didn’t hesitate in embracing each other. Michael pressed himself against Riley and in response she lifted her face towards his and the two pressed their lips together. Barely a breath had gone by when the two began kissing more passionately, Michael slipped his tongue into Riley’s mouth and felt himself growing harder. The thought that Riley was just a robot crept into his mind and it encouraged his hormones to flood his brain, arousing him.

The kissing clearly affected Riley in a similar way, as she found herself steeped in programming meant to engage her sexual systems. She let it happen, her artificial mind welcoming anything and everything Michael had to offer. She felt the stiffness of his cock pressing into her just above her waistline and the artificial flesh across her belly sent joy filled signals to her operating system, and within moments Michael was pawing at her breasts, squeezing and playing with them. Each time he touched them or manipulated them in some way she would sigh happily, or moan lewdly, or just coo softly as she let Michael explore her body. They had done this dozens of times before, both without Michael’s knowledge of her mechanical nature, but once she had accidentally revealed herself to him, he seemed to want her even more. Riley was delighted by the idea that Michael loved her for who she was, but she was even more thrilled that he seemed to desire her more as a robot. It was this very line of thinking that led her computerized mind to wander into a set of data and a collection of thoughts she had had, but never verbalized with Michael before.

Just before she broke the kiss with Michael, she composed a text message to her father, she knew he would be busy working on Cadey, attempting to not only restore her to a fully functional state, but also to troubleshoot her personality conflict in the long run.

Dad, I think I want to try something with Michael. It’ll probably lead to some errors. We’ll be safe, but just a heads up.

Riley didn’t have long to wait before her father responded, Riley had figured it would be a message that she sent and then hoped that her father saw it and didn’t freak out.

Just be safe sweetie. Let me know if you need help.

After receiving and processing the message Riley pulled back from Michael, who’s eyes fluttered open in a daze. She pushed herself up on her toes and kissed him one more time on the tip of his nose before lowering herself back down to the soles of her feet.

“C’mere. I have an idea” Riley simply curled her index finger back and forth at Michael, becoming him to follow her the short distance across her room to her bed. She drew up one knee and pushed off with her remaining foot and gracefully landed on the bed. As she moved she tumbled slightly and managed to land on her back, her red hair flying around her shoulders and landing all around her face, arms and chest. As her body came to rest, everything was held tightly in place except her breasts, which swayed only slightly as she landed and came to rest there. Michael smirked, thinking that he knew exactly where Riley was headed with her temptation and in turn, moved onto the bed with her. Riley held up her hand as soon as she detected that Michael was attempting to straddle her, a maneuver he had become quite accustomed to in the last few weeks.

What?” Michael questioned, sliding gently to one side and sitting awkwardly, naked and looking at his equally naked girlfriend.

“well...What happened with Cadey-” Riley started, and in response Michael quickly responded.

“I know, she’s going to be ok though. Your dad will take care of her.” Michael assured her.

“I know, that’s not what I was going to say.” Riley sounded annoyed and playfully stuck her tongue out at Michael. “It’s just...I see the way you are when you see her crash like that, it reminds me of when I first crashed in front of you. I just see how much it turns you on when you see her- and me- as just machines. You know what I mean?”

“Oh, ah, yeah.” Michael nervously ran his hand through his hair and actually averted his eyes from Riley, feeling a flush of embarrassment wash over him.

“Can you do that to me?” Riley asked and Michael’s head snapped back to her, his eyes were wide. It was obvious that Michael was experiencing some kind of inner turmoil at the thought of what she had asked him to do. This was only confirmed when he began stammering, unable to fully complete a sentence.

“I don’t want you to crash me or break anything.” Riley assured him, “Just something a little more- playful- you know?”

Michael felt a wave of reassuring comfort wash over him as the initial terror of seeing Riley broken and malfunctioning was swept from his mind. He loved seeing Riley, and to a similar extent Cadey as well, as robots and malfunctioning was something that he wasn’t fully expecting to be turned on by. The fact of the matter was that he found he was simply enticed by the merging of something so mechanical and yet, seemingly so human. He was incredibly hesitant to attempt anything that would lead to what he considered hurting Riley in any way. He knew she was an android, but she was more than just that to him, she was a real person and he respected her like he would anyone else.

“Playful, right, uh...what did you have in mind?” Michael questioned, knowing that if it was coming directly from Riley it wasn’t going to be something harmful. Michael had been told by Alan that she had some measure of built in self preservation settings that would prevent her from doing anything outright harmful to anyone she cared about or herself. Riley bit into her lower lip for a second and blushed, it was something that was an entirely human response, she wasn’t terribly embarrassed by her proposal, but she found herself turned on by it for sure. The subtle hints were more for her lover's benefit than anything else, and as with all things with Riley, there was a small amount of humanity, real or not, poured into everything she did.

“I- I was thinking that maybe you could treat me like-” Riley hesitated, not for any reason other than to make her sound more like a human girl about to reveal to someone she cared about something that had been deeply on her mind for some time now. “-like a robot. You know, like you did to Cadey earlier when she crashed.” Her last few words came tumbling out faster than the rest of her request. She looked up to Michael, and in turn Michael looked down on her, seeing that her eyes seemed to be far more glossy than he remembered. He was sure it was just a trick of the light, but it made her innocence clash with her nudity. He had to smile at her, he was certain that this was the product of some kind of sub-system inside of her that was programmed to give the optimal response in order to get what she wanted, though he knew it wasn’t a malicious move.

“Like, you want me to order you around?” Michael said, still feeling a slight pang of guilt from the thought of it.

“Yeah! You know, you gave Cadey an order and she followed it, all mechanical and stiff and everything.” Riley responded and Michael could feel her legs squirming ever so slightly next to him, and he knew that even she was beginning to get turned on at the idea of it.

“I don’t know Ri-” Michael pulled in a deep breath and let it slowly out through his nose. “I don’t know how I feel about just ordering you around. I mean, I know you ARE a robot and all of that but- I just- I don’t know. I feel like I would be taking advantage of another person.”

Riley smiled at Michael, it was the same warm, genuine, and sincere smile that had first drawn him to her. She was such a caring and compassionate person, she only ever wanted what was good for others and so rarely asked for things for herself. She was always happy to receive some gift of special treatment when it was someone else’s idea, but for her to go out of her way to ask for something was uncharacteristic for her. Riley appeared to be undeterred from Michael’s hesitation, in fact, she seemed somewhat spurred on by it. She folded her arms over her petite chest, handily covering up her nipples, which were beginning to harden from the cool air.

“And if I wanted that? Just for a little bit?” She said, feigning an attitude of unjust hurt.

“W-well, I mean, I don’t know that I could just outright command you to do something. Like with Cadey I did it because she was crashing.” Michael said, attempting to remain on task with his feelings while trying not to let his mind wander to what Riley and Cadey would look like in a fit of malfunctioning.

“Ohh, so I need to start crashing first huh?” Riley taunted back and threw in a quick “just kidding” when she saw that Michael was beginning to look even more uncomfortable. Riley wanted this though, and she knew that once the end result came to fruition that Michael would as well. Luckily she was able to quickly formulate a plan and proposed it to Michael.

“Okay, what if it’s not so much that I am crashing, but just stripped down a little? You know, like my processors have less and less of “me” to work with? Would that be ok?” Riley asked, hoping that the phrasing made it seem more like it was a mutual and safe activity.

“I think that could be okay, but uh, how would you-er we-us...how would we do that?” Michael said, still bright red and clearly thinking about how this might end. His face was more flush than before as pinks and reds touched his cheeks and nose. Riley shrugged and looked at Michael, before she scrunched up her nose in a face that made her look like she was partially frustrated, cute, and altogether unsure of what to do.

“You are more of an expert on how I work at this point than I am. Maybe we should just ask my dad” Riley said, knowing that the jab at the end about her father was likely enough to cause Michael’s pride to take over. She was right though, Michael had learned a fair amount from Alan about how both Riley and Cadey worked, though Alan was still the master, Michael felt like he had come a fairly long way into learning about the two androids.

“No no, we don’t need to do that. Let me just think for a moment here.” Michael quickly shook his head, trying hard to mentally shift gears from the sexual tension that the room was filling with to the more logical portions of his mind. Thinking on how exactly he could help Riley safely shut down portions of her personality and who she was until she got to the place where she was just a machine. Michael felt more confident that if he transitioned with Riley into that place, that he would not only feel more comfortable with the situation, but would feel like it was an easy transition. After that, Michael could only guess at how either one of them might act. It took some time for Michael to formulate and idea, and Riley patiently waited as she watched Michael formulate the plan in his mind. As she waited she tagged and cataloged data about Michael, his facial expression, the way his eyes moved around when he thought, and the way he would sometimes mutter to himself while thinking. All of it made Riley happy, and she felt content as it was, just to sit and watch Michael contemplate how best to expose her own robotic nature.

“Okay, okay, I think I might have an idea of how we could safely do this.” Michael finally snapped out of his contemplations. Riley’s eyes lit up, figuratively, and she sat up in her bed next to Michael. She pulled her slender legs up against her chest and wrapped her arms around them, finally resting her chin on the crest between her two kneecaps. She was smiling at him, and looking at her almost made him forget his entire plan. He wanted to just reach out and hold her for the rest of his life. Michael had to mentally force himself back into his previous line of thinking and put aside his desire to hold Riley.

“So, I think if we remove a variety of components from you, that your operating system will begin to degrade slowly to the point that you stop being a human-like girl and just a machine. At which point I am pretty sure you will switch over to a purely command and operation mode.” Michael managed to get the entire tirade out before Riley managed to distract him again. As Michael was speaking, she bobbed her head up and down as it rested on her knees and smiled broadly.

“Great! How do we start?” Riley’s enthusiasm spread to Michael and he himself couldn’t help but smile in return. The heat that had bubbled down to a small simmer in his loins reignited into a roaring fire of passion and desire. His smile turned coy and he tugged at her ankles a little, helping adjust her into laying flat on her back again.

“Just lie down flat little robot” He said, gently moving her arms to rest at her side. Riley’s infectious smile turned lustful and her eyelids half veiled her baby blue eyes.

“Yes sir.” Riley’s voice dipped into a lower, almost husky voice and sounded demure. Michael could tell that she was very intentionally making her voice sound somewhat monotone and emotionless, it was a tease, but Michael wasn’t about to stop her. Michael licked his lips involuntarily as he watched Riley lay stiffly on the bed, looking not at him, but directly above her. It was the same look he had seen before both when working on Riley and on Cadey, it was the sort of look that you might expect a robot which has completely disconnected from reality to have. It was vacant, devoid of life, and made her look absolutely tempting. Michael wanted to spring on her at that very moment, but he managed to keep himself in check, after all he wanted Riley to have fun just as much as he did.

“Riley. Open your anterior chest and abdominal panels.” Michael’s voice carried the same authoritative tone that Riley had heard him use earlier when Cadey crashed by the pool. The very sound of the slightly lowered timbre of his voice and the sheer weight it seemed to carry set off all manner of system configurations inside of her operating system. Laying naked, ready for sex, in her room was more than enough to have aroused her, but for the first time Michael had ordered her to do something. Michael hadn’t needed to actually order her to do anything, she was ready and excited to comply, but the fact that his voice came out as a stern command thrilled her. She was already beginning to feel those first pangs of a dream that was being fulfilled.

A familiar faint hiss filled the room and Michael saw the invisible seams around Riley’s breasts, across the top of her chest and down and around her belly appear. The outline of the panels all ran in hard angular directions, giving Riley the first indication that she was not actually a human just playing at being an android. The panel lifted upwards enough for Michael to squeeze his fingertips into the gap between her body and the panel and lift it upward and off of her. The connecting wires and cables inside of her clung to the variety of data ports on the backside of the panel. Alan had taught Michael how to pull off the panel just enough to slip his hand in and begin gently disconnecting the number of cables that connected her outer paneling to the circuitry inside of her. It took some time, all the while Riley wore a hazey lust filled look on her face as she watched her lover reach inside of her physical self and one by one disconnect parts of her. Alerts began to appear inside of her field of vision, obscuring the view she had of Michael tugging more of the fine wiring inside of her free. Riley focused on the messages and cleared them as quickly as she could, she needed to see what Michael was doing to her.

Once the messages were cleared enough to allow Riley to see Michael again, she was treated to a view of him lifting her chest and abdominal plating up and away from her body. With the plating removed the sensitive microphones in her ears were able to detect the extremely faint sounds of her cooling systems operating and bleeding the excess heat into the room. She could also detect the ambient cool air wafting across every part of her skin and internal temperatures began dropping dramatically. The combination of the cool air and the sensation of having a part of her artificial humanity removed drew a contented sigh from her vocal systems. Michael looked towards her and smiled coyly, knowing that she was enjoying this, perhaps a bit too much.

“How are you feeling Riley?” Michael questioned as he gently slipped the chest panel onto the floor, safely out of the way.

“Good, very good. I’ve been disassembled a few times before, but dad rarely lets me stay online for it. I always feel a weird sensation when I see someone remove part of my body like that.” Riley said, her voice seemed light and airy. Riley craned her head a bit to allow her to see inside of herself, her eye glancing off of the nearly half inch thick layer of artificial flesh around the edges of her open torso. Her hands moved slightly into her own body, her fingers running along the perimeter of her open panel, feeling where her skin ended and the thin hard plastic of her internal framework began.

“Alan told me that there is something in your systems that changes a bit when you are taken apart. That’s what led me down this line of thinking. It changes the way you think and feel.” A sly smirk crossed Michael’s face and Riley could see him reaching towards the opening in her chest. Riley moved her hand out of the way, settling it back on the soft bedding below her and Michael pinched the rubbery connector over a bundle of wires nearly as thick as his thumb. With a little investment of effort, Michael was able to tug free the bundle of cables and pulled it out and draped it over the opening in Riley’s body. The effects were immediate, Riley’s body stiffened for a moment and her mouth hung open as she let out a small strangled gasp. After a moment she blinked several times and Michael could see her jaw quivering slightly.

“Wh-what was that?” Riley said, her voice laced with anticipation and genuine excitement. She knew exactly what had happened, the myriad of alerts and warnings filling her field of view contained all the information that she needed, but she wanted to hear it.

“I just disconnected one of your logic boards from the datalink that handles the motor controls for your torso and arms.” Michael smirked at her, “Riley, confirm your motor control status.” The command was given and Riley’s systems immediately parsed the information and sent the correlating data to the system board that Michael had just disconnected the bundle of cables from. The data died there, attempting to move her arms, but there was no device found for it to interface with. The processors on the board sent the signal racing back across Riley’s body to her operating system, which generated a report that Riley spoke, word for word.

“Alert, device missing. Unable to comply.” Riley blinked after that and her face changed from a blank neutral expression to confusion then quickly back to the lust filled expression that she had worn before. Michael watched as the latex balloon-like structure that was Riley’s artificial lungs filled with a small amount of air and then emptied as she sighed happily. There was no shortage of additional circuitry inside of Riley to disconnect, but for Michael it would be an exercise in restraint. He wanted to pull each and every wire free and see what happened, but he knew that doing so would be detrimental to Riley in the long run. As fun as it would have been, Michael didn’t want to trade actual damage to Riley for a blissful afternoon of pleasure. He instead needed to concentrate and ignore the growing hardness between his legs, even though it was already stiff and ready, and kept nudging against Riley’s leg.

“Okay, good, let’s see, what should I disconnect next?” Michael muttered to himself, knowing that the anticipation of it would drive Riley crazy. Michael let his hands fall inside of Riley’s open torso and gently grazed across many of the components inside of her until it came to rest on the edges of a cluster of circuit boards, all connected to another primary board. Like all of Riley’s components they were snapped into place with plastic or metal clips that mounted directly to her framework. Alan had been adamant that the intended purpose was that you could do any kind of repairs that you needed without the aid of a full work bench. So Riley could hear the clips snapping away from something inside of her, with her upper body disabled she couldn’t see what, but she could hear something being removed. She could also feel her body rock back and forth as Michael wiggled the component free.

Riley was alerted once again to the loss of some kind of functionality before Michael held the piece aloft for her to visually see. He brought up the fist sized cluster of electronics and while she wouldn’t have recognized it by looking at it, her operating system alerted her to the loss of her power regulation systems. She knew so little about her actual construction that the words seemed meaningless to her at the moment. For a moment she had a fleeting thought that was lost among the cascade of new error messages. What if she did actually know more about herself and her current state of decline made it so that she was simply unable to functionally recognize parts of her construction. The data set off a surge of new trails in her artificial mind, the feeling that she was becoming more and more mechanical as more of her body was removed, sent a jolt of instructions racing towards her slit.

Michael somewhat regretted his decision to remove the power regulation module as soon as he showed it off to Riley. The component itself merely regulated the amount of power flowing from Riley’s rechargeable power core to the various components around her body. As Riley’s systems tried to gently lift her leg to aid in the feeling of pressure applied to her crotch. Instead of the gentle fluid movements that Riley and Michael would have expected, her legs scrunched up wildly and smashed into each other with a slap. Michael swore and flinched away from Riley, nearly falling off the bed in the process.

“S-sorry, I don’t know what happened. Happened.” Riley muttered as she tried her best to let her legs naturally relax back into their previous position. Michael had to chuckle slightly, both at the over exaggerated movements and the first hints of her operating systems load beginning to break apart. The vocal slip was the first hint of it, but another part was her loss of cognition, she was beginning to not know what was happening. Michael felt a small pang of guilt from that, but he also knew that she had literally asked, if not begged, for this to happen.

“Don’t worry babe, that was my fault. We should probably remove your legs for safety sake though” Michael confessed, and slipped around towards the end of the bed, positioning himself between the ankles at the ends of Riley’s long slender legs. It was a place he had been in many times before, but it usually involved him crawling towards her and any number of lewd activities followed it. Michael took her left leg and lifted it by the ankle, then slipped his hand up the underside of her calf and then thigh until it was resting just below her buttocks. He lifted her leg higher and forced her leg to bend at the knee, allowing him some measure of leverage for what would come next. As he moved her leg he felt as if he had to push so much harder than he would have expected to and could even hear the faintest sound of whining coming from inside of her leg. With her power regulation offline her joints had either all or none of the power assistance to move them.

“What are you. You. going to d-do sweetie-ie?” Riley asked, her vocal malfunctions becoming more prevalent as time went on and more of her was removed. Michael figured that if there was an alert or some kind of sensor data inside of her operating system that would have indicated what was happening she either couldn't see it or literally could not comprehend it at the moment.

“Just removing your legs.” Michael answered and as he did so, placed a hand on her calf and used it to sharply twist her leg in an unnatural direction. Michael had always hated this sort of movement, because while he knew without a doubt that Riley was an android, the motion always made him feel like he was about to break a bone inside of her. It was an illogical fear, but a real one for him. Regardless, the skin around Riley’s upper thighs separated and turned with her leg and Michael pulled the module away from her body. It remained stiff and bent, even as Michael dropped it gently to the floor behind him. Her other leg disconnected in a similar fashion and left Riley little to actually move now. Michael took a moment to admire the shiny chrome like disk set into Riley’s upper thighs, with the array of gold studded connection points jutting out, just waiting for a leg module to reconnect to it. He admitted to himself that he found Riley beautiful on any given day, but seeing her with her torso opened, her legs removed, and her inner workings on display gave him an appreciation for her beauty on a whole different level.

“Alert, unit mobility reduced. Unable to main-maintain human emulation.” Riley intoned as her systems eventually caught up with the status of her body. Michael took a steadying breath as he heard his girlfriend slipping further into her true robotic nature. The deep burning lungful of air did nothing to quell the desire he had and he was so tired of fighting it. He nudged his way up towards Riley’s hips and placed hands on each of the remaining leg stumps there. He pushed them apart and took the opportunity to push his erect manhood inside of her. He found that she was wet, practically soaking, and had no trouble sliding deep inside of her. As he did Riley’s head flung itself to one side of the pillow with tremendous force and speed, reminding Michael that with the power regulation module offline, she would only move at full speed.

“Alert, se-sexual intercooooooourse not recommended at this. At this-this-this time error. Components off-offline-line. Not rec-reccomended.” Riley spoke into her pillow, her mouth moving as expected, but no other facial gestures were seen and Michael noticed that her eyes were no longer blinking. He paid it little attention though and began to slowly recoil his hips before thrusting forward again. The movement rocked Riley’s body towards her headboard and then back as Michael extracted himself again. Michael had one of a few clear thoughts left in his head before listing himself to passion, the thought that her motor controls should be fully disabled if he was to remain unharmed himself. So, placing his hands on either side of Riley’s body and grasping the edges of her open body, he began to look for the same rubber tipped connector for her lower body’s motor control board. After a brief moment of searching, while his hips seemed to be gently twitching back and forth without his say-so, he managed to find the component in question. He once again pinched the rubber capped bundle of cables and pulled it free.

Everything inside of Riley seemed to relax, including the small amount of grip her artificial sex had been applying to his cock as it rest inside of her. Michael hadn’t expected that but it made perfect sense in the moment. Riley’s head began to swivel back upwards, but it unexpectedly stopped at a neutral center position, her face was blank and her eyes unfocused. She looked every bit as gorgeous as Michael had always expected, but now had the thin layer of artificial life stripped away.

“Information. This unit has suspended its human emulation software. Please repair any damaged components and restart this unit when possible. Thank you.” Riley said, her voice was completely flat, the last remnants of her artificial life were gone now. Michael had managed to do it, Riley was now nothing more than a machine. Michael wasted no time in pumping back and forth inside of her, all the while Riley stared blankly up at the ceiling. Her body rocked back and forth on her bed as Michael took all the time he needed to pleasure himself inside of her. He knew that while she might not be reacting, her log files were certainly filling up with information that she could take pleasure in later.

“Riley, moan for me” Michael said, knowing that she would fully comply. She did, letting out a realistic sounding grumble of pleasure. Her mouth simply opened and her face remained unchanged despite the sound file that was playing. Once finished, her mouth slipped closed again. Michael admitted that he liked the sight of it and felt himself growing closer and closer to his own climax. At one point he even grabbed a hold of the sides of Riley’s open torso and used it to better push himself into her and her against him. It didn’t take long for him to feel the pressure build in his cock and he knew he was about to release inside of Riley.

“Riley, execute a random orgasm sequence, skip errors and alerts” Michael panted between deep pulls of fresh air. Immediately Riley began to groan, her mouth opening only enough to let the sound escape and fill the room with the sounds of simulated orgasms. Michael grunted as well, bursting inside of Riley with one last powerful thrust inside of her. He knew that Riley would have done so much more if she had been fully online, she would have wrapped her long slender legs around him, pulled him tight against her and whispered encouraging and lewd words into his ear. She had done it before, but this time was for her.

Michael remained inside of her as he caught his breath for a few moments and then extracted himself. He rolled off of her bed, carefully avoiding the disconnected legs, electronics, and her chest panel, and moved to her night stand. The pair had learned long ago to keep a small stash of hand towels there to clean up any messes either of them might have made in their sexual encounters. Michael took two of them out and used one to clean himself up and then took the second one and cleaned up the outer lips on Riley’s sex as best he could. Tossing the two cloths into the laundry hamper, Michael then walked over and Kissed the still barely online Riley on the forehead. He let out a small contented sigh and figured it was likely best to reassemble her before her father walked in on them and questioned what was happening.

Michael Dressed himself quickly and began by replacing the power regulator inside of Riley. Wiggling it into place and reconnecting the small amount of wiring needed to operate the component. Next he picked up the bundle of cables that would restore Riley’s lower body control, and plugged it back in to the circuit board inside of her, followed by the matching bundle for her upper body. He was just crouching down to pick up her legs when he heard the text chime on his phone go off. He dug into his pocket and saw a text from Alan. He would have ignored anyone else, but Alan always took a certain measure of priority.

Need some help with Cadey. If you and Riley are done I would love some help.

Michael tapped a quick reply to Alan and turned back to Riley. He stepped over to her and reached his hand behind her ear, finding the power button there and holding it down for several long seconds. Once he saw the status lights inside of Riley’s body wink out one by one he knew she was offline. He waited a few seconds then pressed firmly into the button again. Her boot sequence would take a small amount of time, which Michael used to pick up and set Riley’s chest plate and legs next to her on the bed. There was a small beep from inside of her and Michael could hear her take her first breath again.

“Whoa, that was wild.” Riley said, coming fully online. “Hey, where are you going mister?”

“Dad needs some help with Cadey. Sorry babe, you’re going to need to put yourself back together.” Michael said, reaching for the door handle leading from Riley’s room out into the hallway. Riley scrunched up her nose and puffed out her cheeks, making the same irritated face as she always did.

“Again?” Riley said, mock irritation laced her voice.

“You’re cute when you’re angry Ri.” Michael said, blowing her a kiss and then slipping out into the hallway.

Part 6

The rain continued to pelt down on the small, sleepy, suburban neighborhoods. The night air had taken a cold chill this evening and it forced most people into their homes where the heater was engaged and fires were lit. Everyone on the unassuming lonely street was doing everything they could to stay warm and cozy in the rainy winter weather. Mostly people at least.

There were a select few beings that were delighted by the colder weather, though. Humanoid robots, with processors that would regularly ride the line of just barely too hot to function properly. The cool, wintery air provided them with a welcome burst of chilled air with every simulated breath. Granted, that in the relatively quiet and unremarkable suburbs no one suspected that anyone would be something as outlandish as a robot so advanced that they could seamlessly integrate with the community. Make no mistake, robots existed in the world but the general populace only saw the clunky construction bots, or the automated crossing guards that were posted around schools.

Certainly no one suspected that their neighbors might be one, and certainly not three of the occupants of a house. That, however, was the exact configuration of the occupants of Alan and Julie Salter’s house. Alan was, at the moment, the only human occupant. His wife, Julie, was Alan’s first experiment in humanoid robotics. He had built her, slowly, over the course of nearly ten years in his college career. She had started as an artificial intellect, living only on a computer and a dedicated hard drive all for herself. From there she grew, and learned, and in time Alan cobbled together the most basic of physical bodies for her to inhabit.

Alan never stopped with the slow and gradual updating of the person who would eventually become his wife. There was no official paperwork on her citizenship, nor were they married officially, but no one suspected anything, how could they? She looked fully human now, with shoulder length fiery red hair and a gorgeous smile. Alan, like the mythical Pygmalion, had created his ideal woman from something other than flesh and blood.

Years later, Riley was the natural product of Alan and Julie. Alan’s first love would always be his wife, but a daughter was an interesting challenge for the pair. Julie helped him build and repair her. Riley was nineteen now, or at least she looked that way. She, like her mother, was the product of constant upgrades and improvements. She had started as an artificial mind based on her mother. She wasn’t the blank slate of raw code like her mother had started as though. Riley started as something of a basic profile, an eighteen year old girl who knew how to walk and talk, knew the basics of human society and could easily slip into a group of people with little to no error.

That didn’t mean that she was a perfectly formed late highschool girl when she was activated. She had a lot to learn, both about the world around her and about who she was. The artificial mind that lived inside of her head was as close to a sentient person as possible. She was unique, having likes and dislikes. She made choices for herself, and while her artificial mind knew the right answer to some of her life’s problems, sometimes her somewhat impulsive A.I. would do what it wanted instead. Riley’s mother and father encouraged her to branch out and try new things, to learn the good and the bad and to become her own person.

Even her boyfriend, Michael, encouraged this after discovering that Riley was an android. He was still getting used to the concept, but he never stopped seeing Riley as anything other than the person he had fallen in love with years prior. Alan encouraged the two of them to explore and branch out, even sexually, much to his initial discomfort. He trusted Michael and felt like he was a son, but there were some things a father didn’t need to read the log files about.

Tonight was going to be one of those nights. Riley was nestled into a small warm nest of blankets on her bed, the comforter had two distinct peaks to it indicating where her knees were raised, a few feet apart. Her legs were spread open wide under the blankets, allowing her delicate robotic hands easy access to the sexual module that was installed between her legs. She had been in this position, or some variation of it, for the last twenty five minutes. Two of her fingers were swirling around the artificial clit that had been specifically crafted for her.

Her artificial mind was becoming more and more frustrated as time went on. She had enough administrative privileges to see what programs were running in her operating system. She could easily see that there was a consisten and strong flow of fresh sexual and pleasurable data flowing from her hardware, into her processor, and then commands were being formed and fed to the rest of her body for execution. The squirming, moaning, and deep breaths were all a result of those commands. As was the new command to bring her free hand up and toss back the wild red hair that dangled down around her shoulders. It had once again gotten sucked into her mouth as a result of her breathing.

“God dammit.” Riley sighed.

Her head had been tilted back, resting in the soft fortress of pillows she had propped up behind her. She tilted her head forward and looked down at her own naked body, or at least the upper portion of it that wasn’t concealed by the blankets. THe slightly smaller, but still beautifully rounded breasts on her chest heaved up and down with each breath she took. It wasn’t a result of any kind of internal physical hardware, it was merely a part of her human emulation subset doing its job. There were dozens of other processes like it, all of them were small pieces of code that worked on her body to give her an authentic human appearance. Small fidgets and sways while she was standing or her chest rising and falling in sync with her breaths.

Riley swore again as she slowed down her fingers twirling around the artificial clit she had installed. The motion turned from a quick and aggressive motion into something more slow, hoping that the more sensual tone was what her artificial mind was looking for in order to trigger the next phase of her evenings sexual desires.

It wasn’t.

Another ten minutes of slowly inserting two fingers into herself and then dragging them against her clitoral module resulted in little to no progress. She was growing more and more frustrated and decided that trying to pretend to be a human and doing things like a human would just wasn’t working for her. She brought up a readout of the sexual sub-system and pinned it in her field of vision and then returned to her stimulations. She monitored her the mechanical sex module, glancing occasionally at the CPU utilization, what blocks of code were running there, and the influx of sensual and pleasurable data. There were obvious dips and spikes in the flow of data, as was to be expected, but the usual steady build up towards an trigger that would initiate an orgasm, just wasn’t there. It was climbing for sure, but slowly.

Riley sucked in a breath and huffed again.

She had been at this for far too long, and she still needed to clean herself up and get to bed so she could recharge for the next day. Michael was supposed to come over and fill out college applications with her first thing in the morning and she wanted to make sure that she was fully charged and ready. Riley made a note to herself that if she couldn’t, somehow, get her operating system to cooperate with what her artificial mind wanted, then she would do things manually.

Riley earnestly tried for the next several minutes. She plunged her fingers quickly inside of her wet robotic folds several times only to stop and swirl the artificial juices around her clit some more. Her free hand alternated between reaching between her legs and spreading her lips wider and coming up to grope furiously at her breasts. She teased the small, pert nipples there and drove hard inside of herself. She could feel herself panting and sucking in deep gulps of fresh, cool night air, but nothing was getting her that rushing spike of pleasurable data that she needed.

She sighed heavily, and stopped moving her fingers in and out of herself. She let out a frustrated little huff from her nostrils and closed her eyes. The datasheets filled with sensor data and readouts on her sexual system were closed, as was much of the remaining software that she had running. She left all of her human emulation running, but linked her artificial intellect directly into her operating system.

The misconception most science fiction made was that the human brain could be easily related to a robot’s operation. There was always mention of a hard drive or storage device and then the processors and some software, and that was it. That might have been how a more rudimentary robot functioned, relying on a database of input with a correlated output. Riley wasn’t like that, she was so much more. She had thoughts, simulated emotion, and a true personality. Her artificial self was a whole conglomerate of code, databases, and algorithms. It was who she was. Her operating system was more closely related to the uncontrollable beating of a human’s heart or the liver.

Riley’s operating system was the automated processes. When her A.I. wanted to run, her operating system was what assembled all the right blocks of code and sent them screaming through the fiber optic cables that filled her body. Those code blocks were processed by each component they related to and executed the commands with perfect precision. Riley was not just a single thing, she was a machine that was made up of a network of hundreds if not thousands of smaller components all working as one.

So when Riley made the conscious choice to link her artificial mind directly to her operating system there was a cascade of warnings and alerts that she had to manually accept, dismiss, and in some cases authenticate that she was an administrator to bypass. It was like handing a human the ability to stop their own heart, it was complete control. Riley wasn’t afraid though, Alan and Michael could fix anything she might have messed up on herself, but she had done this particular operation before. She knew exactly what to do, and a moment later the direct command to load a randomized number of orgasm components into one complete sequence, then load it into the sexual modules cached memory followed by an immediate command to execute them.

Riley’s back arched and her hands both flew immediately to her wet folds. Her mouth hung open for a moment as she silently sucked in another deep breath of air. She let it out in a gasp, then another, and another. ONe hand snapped up to her breast and cupped it, while she gently began to let out a long, low, husky moan. Once her vocal systems had finished playing the sound file and purging it from its own small memory cache, Riley’s remaining hand began quickly swirling around her clit once more and a second, much smaller orgasm rolled out a moment later. She squealed softly into the empty room and breathed hard.

Soon, it was all over. Riley’s synthetic mind retreated from its direct control over her operating system and the slender woman settled back into her bed. She was still breathing deeply, her processor core needed the sweet, cold air from around her to add a little extra to the cooling systems already at work inside of her body. She lay still for a few moments until the heat from the various involved parts of her body dissipated. It wasn’t a long process, maybe five seconds, but Riley’s artificial mind settled back into a cozy place inside of herself, much like her body was now perfectly at rest in her bed.

Riley silently slipped from her bed and found a pink, fuzzy robe in her closet and slung it around her shoulders and tied it off at the waist. From there she moved into the hall with all the stealth she was capable of and made her way to the upstairs bathroom, just up the hall from her own room. SHe was pleased with herself that she hadn’t made a sound so far. It was late and the last thing she wanted to do was wake up her adopted sister. Showering was going to be challenging enough, but it had to be done. Riley’s hand was on the door knob for the bathroom for only a moment before she felt it turn and the door open in front of her.

Cadey was taller than Riley, though not by much. She was the second android daughter in the house. Alan had agreed to adopt her after a small incident where Cadey had kidnapped Riley and was about to disassemble her for spare parts. There was more than a little reprogramming involved, but Cadey was now just as much a part of the Salter family as Riley was.

Riley squeaked in surprise as she met Cadey’s hazel eyes. She was dripping wet, clearly fresh from the shower. Her short cropping of hair was wet and arrayed in a spikey plume around her head, and a bath towel was wrapped around her body, covering her bare flesh, but only just barely. Cadey herself hopped back and yelped slightly.

“I thought you were asleep already.” Riley commented as she looked up at her step-sister.

“I tried but I can freakin’ hear you through the walls.” Cadey shot back. “So I came in here to take a bath like, half an hour ago.”

Riley looked down, the blush on her cheeks was easy to see. SHe had tried to be quiet, but perhaps the microphone assembly in Cadey’s ears were far more sensitive than she might have thought. She considered muting her vocal systems the next time she tried masturbating.

“Did you just now finish, erm, what you were doing in there?” Cadey asked at length.

With a small sigh Riley nodded her head and looked up at Cadey.

“I don’t know why but things just aren’t triggering like they used to, you know?” Riley managed.

“You never seem to have a problem when it’s just you and me.” Cadey said with a sly wink.

In that moment Riley had an idea of exactly why she was struggling. She was a robot, a machine, and she had been acting like a human her entire life. She and Cadey had spent many evenings together when Michael wasn’t around, it was no secret. Michael even joined the two of them on occasion. However, when it was just Cadey and Riley, Cadey treated her like a machine. Their evenings together always involved an open access panel or a disconnected limb or two, and most of the time if Cadey was involved her head would be disconnected, a data cable running from her neck back to her torso, and her face buried in Riley’s sex.

The solution to Riley’s problem was that she was a robot trying to pretend to be human, she needed to see herself as a robot. It was a realization that her A.I. struggled with, she was programmed to look, act, and by all means be human. So what was causing her to crave the more robotic aspects of the sexual experience. Her eyes flicked up to Cadey. Her step sister had been something of a robotics expert, and with her training with Alan she had only grown and flourished in that.

Biting into her lower lip, Riley looked up at Cadey again. “Do you think maybe you could help me look into why?”

“Why what?” Cadey asked with a spreading look of confusion on her face.

“Why is it that when I’m with you, or Michael, that I don’t have any problems, but when it’s just me I can’t seem to, you know, get off, unless I manually trigger it.”

“Wait, you’ve been manually triggering it?” Cadey asked.

“Yeah.”

“Does your Dad know?”

“Our Dad..and no, he doesn’t.” Riley said, reminding Cadey once again that she was actually part of this family. Cadey sighed, remembering she was still dripping wet and naked save for a towel.

“Okay, tomorrow night. We can look at your programming and logs and stuff and I’ll see what I can find.” She sounded exasperated. She didn’t actually want to dip into her step sister’s core programming and read through pages of log files to find out why Riley was having problems with her orgasms, but they were sisters now, and it was the least Cadey could do to help. She also knew Riley wouldn’t stop pestering her until she agreed.

“Tomorrow, got it. Uh, goodnight!” Riley muttered and stood out of the way to allow Cadey to leave and walk up the hall to her own room. The towel wrapped around her covered her chest and torso just fine, but it didn’t quite wrap all the way around her, leaving her rear end exposed for Riley to watch.

“Nice ass.” Riley hissed up the hall at Cadey just as her sister entered her own room. A second later an arm with a rude looking gesture reappeared in the doorway for a moment. It was more than enough to earn a giggle from Riley and she moved in to take her shower.

Michael was at the house bright and early the next morning. He had a satchel slung over his shoulder, filled with paper applications for colleges around the area. He, of course, had printed three copies of each so that He, Riley, and Cadey could fill them all out together in the hopes of going to the same university. He rapped the back of his knuckles against the door to Riley’s house and stood back, waiting for only a moment before the door opened.

Cadey was standing there, her hair finely styled into a pixie cut with her dark hair swooping across her forehead. She wore a comfortable looking tank top and olive drab pants that did little to hide her curves. Somewhere in the background Riley appeared from around a corner. She was all smiles, which only served to compliment her outfit. Black leggings under a debatably short skirt and a gray hoodie.

“You’re getting shaggy.” Cadey commented.

“Huh? Oh, the hair.” Michael replied.

It was true, he hadn’t had a haircut in almost six months and it showed. His hair was spilling out from under a black beanie and showed signs that it would be a tangled mess otherwise. He ran his fingers through it for a moment and let his eyes travel over Cadey’s form. He loved Riley, there was no doubt about that, but Cadey was a close second in his mind. She had all the right curves, and on the rare occasions that she smiled, she lit up a room. Michael knew she was far too gloom and doom for his tastes though. He never thought he would see the day that he found a robot that was depressed, but here she was. Regardless, she looked incredible no matter what. Michael got the distinct impression that, perhaps, he just had a thing for robotic women.

The day itself progressed slowly, and with an absurd amount of hand cramps from Michael. A fact that Cadey and Riley actively teased him about as the day wore on. Riley and Michael happily chatted and occasionally leaned across the space between their chairs for a sweet kiss, all the while Cadey simply looked on, prepaturally looking bored more than anything. She looked down at the application in front of her, it was another college she would put on a show about filling out, but had little intention of actually sending it off for evaluation.

Cadey wasn’t planning on sending most of the applications out. She had the grades to enter any one of the choices with relative ease, but she was hesitant. Going back to school meant being around people, lots of people, and she wasn’t entirely sure she was ready for that just yet. She had spent plenty of time scoping out each and every person in her school, looking for androids to kidnap and disassemble for her own repairs. She struggled not only with the guilt of those times, but lingering in her own artificial mind were the pangs of resentment from being abandoned by the company that had built her, positioned her in this small community, and then left her. She had grown and matured into a young woman on the backs of victims and a lonely trailer.

Cadey much preferred the company of Julie and Alan to the hustle and bustle of crowded university classrooms and common spaces. She had her own room here, freedom to come and go, mostly, as she pleased, and more than enough work to do helping Alan keep Riley and even herself in working condition. She looked up from the paper form at Riley and Michael, as their lips finally parted, and idly let her A.I. wander to what it might be like once the two of them were off at college.

Hours later each of the three occupants of the intimately small kitchen table had a thick stack of papers smeared with ink and the hopes of a dormitory together. Cadey knew Riley and Michael would make a great couple as they stormed their way through college, she wasn’t quite as hopeful for herself, but seeing the joy in both finishing the applications and the look they gave one another drew a smile to her face. At the end of the day Michael promised to return the next day for the second part of the plan to send out applications, folding and stuffing envelopes. He left Riley’s house with a hug, a kiss, and a muttered thanks for self adhesive stamps.

“That took so much longer than I would have thought.” Riley commented to Cadey as she closed the door and strode back into the kitchen.

“Funny what happens when a machine has to sit down and physically write out everything over and over again.” Cadey replied with her signature sarcastic tone.

Riley nodded and let a moment of silence linger. “So, are you ready for that thing we talked about?”

Cadey sighed once before replying, knowing that Alan might be nearby and would be opposed to the idea.

“Let’s just talk about it in my room, okay?” Cadey said and made a move for the door out of the kitchen and into the rest of the house.

The pair made their way into Cadey’s room. It had once been an office for Julie and Alan to use when they weren’t in the robotics lab that Alan had cobbled together in one of the downstairs rooms. Once Cadey had arrived though, they quickly cleared it out for her to use as her own. That was nearly six months ago and now it looked as if it had taken on her own personality. Posters adorned the walls depicting bands with hard jagged edges to the fonts they used and band members wearing far too much black leather. A simple bed, a desk with a slightly older laptop, and a closet with an ever growing wardrobe were all that filled the rest of the space. It rode a strange line between spartan and erratic styles. Cadey liked to refer to her style choices as “focused and specific.”

Riley slipped in behind Cadey and gently closed the door, turning the knob so that she could silently close it and not worry about the click of the latch. Once done she sat at the edge of Cadey’s bed while Cadey herself picked up her laptop and the data cable that was already attached to it. Sitting on the bed next to her sister, Cadey opened the laptop.

“Listen, I’m not saying I wont help. But you have to realize that dipping into your core programming like this feels like it’s a bad idea.” Cadey muttered to Riley.

“You’re being overly paranoid again.” Riley replied, flashing a sweet, confident smile.

“No. I’m not. You want me to go look at log files and do diagnostics work on you, and I barely understand how I work, let alone you.” Cadey snapped back.

“Cadey, you’ve worked on robots for ages now, including me, have a little faith in yourself.” Riley replied, un phased by Cadey’s lack of confidence and even punctuated her statement with a small, playful punch to Cadey’s arm.

Cadey sighed and looked upwards, shaking her head, Riley took that as an opportunity to try and put the nail in the proverbial coffin of this argument.

“Listen. It’s just log files. I just want to know what the hang up is. It’s just information, that’s all.”

Another sigh and a round of “I know” from Cadey seemed to be the end of the discussion.

“Fine. Lay down, and disable the call home feature on your body. I don’t want Alan crashing in here wondering why he got an alert that you opened up a panel.” Cadey said at length.

“Already done.” Riley piped in, cheerful as ever.

“Okay, good, and I'll need you to unseal your chest paneling.”

Riley raised her eyebrows and winked at Cadey, earning her an eye roll in return. Riley reached down and pulled the hoodie up and over her head, making her brilliant red hair tumble out of it in a wild cascade. Her camisole was next to come off, slipping easily over her head and joining the hoodie on the ground. Finally the black satin bra that held back her modest, but well proportioned breasts.

Riley reclined onto Cadey’s bed, topless and still wearing her sweet smile. She activated the small command structure that Alan had implanted in her operating system to open the various access and control panels around her body. She hadn’t always been able to use them until she was eighteen, before that everything had to be done remotely by Alan and Julie, which usually required her to be offline for the process. Hearing the small hiss as the sealed chest cavity opened gave her whole body a rush of varying sensations.

Riley’s artificial intellect flooded with a number of alerts and warnings, nothing out of the ordinary, but there was a rapid cascade filling her vision about disabling certain systems. Many of them related to her human emulation. She could no longer simulate a rising and falling chest movement as her breaths came. Another alert warned her that she risked being discovered if she was in a place where other people might be. Still more warned her about the dangers of foreign substances potential to still into her and cause damage. Once the warnings were cleared out she had an opportunity to process more and more of the actual sensations.

The first one was an exhilarating rush of what could only be called euphoria. She had spent so very much of her life pretending to be a flesh and blood human, that the very thought if not the sight of her chest rising off of her body and revealing the incomprehensibly intricate circuitry below, was enough to send a tingling through her. The sight of Caey reaching forward and wiggling her fingers into the space between her flesh and her mechanical torso fired off another wave of the same tingling feeling.

Hand in hand with the sweeping feeling of euphoric tingles, was the distinct feeling of sexual desire. She felt her legs twitch just a little and knew her thighs were receiving commands to both gently rub together in anticipation and social programming telling them not to do that exact command. It only took a second to pull up a readout of her sexual systems and Riley found that there was a massive spike in activity when she saw Cadey pulling open her chest panel and disconnecting the various cables and wires that connected her panel to the rest of the hardware inside of her.

“One of these days I’ll convince Alan to make a panel that has an opening just for data connections. I swear he likes taking robots apart for simple tasks.” Cadey sighed as she disconnected the last of the cables from inside of Riley, letting them simply drape over the open torso cavity.

“That would be too easy though.” Riley commented, moving her hands up and placing them under her head. This handily got her arms out of the way but also craned her neck just enough so that she could comfortably look inside of herself for this entire operation.

Cadey was already plugging a cord into Riley that snaked over her body, across her bed and into the laptop. Typing wildly on the computer and rarely resorting to any kind of mouse movement, Cadey began to delve deeper into Riley’s log files.

“Good lord there’s a lot here.” Cadey commented under her breath.

“Well I’ve been at it for a while.” Riley replied before muttering “I do have a boyfriend you know.”

“I know that. That’s not what I mean though. You’re sexual preference files are absolutely massive. Everything about this is- it’s just- it’s really complicated is all.”

“What do you mean? How complicated could they be?” Riley asked.

“Well, most, uh, people like us. Have a preference file, which is really just a big table of metadata tags that relate to another more complicated table in the social database. So your A.I. requests that your OS pull up the preferences and then cross references it with an activity that you’re doing. If it’s in the preference table it reads how much weight it has, which determines how much you like it, and informs your OS how to react.” Cadey explained.

Riley tilted her head and looked more than a little confused.

“Your preference file tells you what makes you horny. Yours is really complicated, that’s all.” Cadey said, grossly over simplifying things for the sake of her step sister.

“Okay, so, what makes me horny then?” Riley asked, her tone sounding as if she was completely un-embarrassed by the question. Cadey on the other hand was flushed red already.

“Lot’s of things by the look of it, but these data entries aren’t exactly written in plain english. They are all hashed into strings of letters and numbers. It’s going to take me a little bit of time to decrypt these entries let alone find out what they relate to.” Cadey muttered.

“Well, we wouldn’t want this to be too easy on you, now would we?” Riley retorted with a grin.

It was hours before Cadey had the information she needed. The process of decrypting the hashed data entries alone took up almost ninety five percent of that time alone. Once she had a good lead on the actual data in Riley’s preference files tracking down what they related to was a fairly easy exercise. In the end though, Cadey had the results, though once she knew what they were she was hesitant to tell Riley.

As it turned out several of Riley’s first sexual experiences had been tied with her malfunctioning. The first was from a fault sexual modulet that Riley had tried to install herself. Another involved the first time she and Michael had tried having sex and Riley ended up breaking down to the point that she fully crashed. Of course, this led to Michael discovering that Riley was an android in the first place, and after that it seemed that things were fairly smooth. There were a number of entries in her log files about minor malfunction inside of her system. Small things like an out of date driver that caused her fingers to twitch a little too much while executing an orgasm, or a speech loop when her CPU ran out of resources.

All of it had culminated together into a set of highly weighted entries in her preference file. There were more than a few entries that indicated that Riley had a particular preference to being damaged while engaging in some kind of sexual activity. More accurately she would get very turned on from seeing robotic components, more so if they are damaged and causing a malfunction and even more so if Riley was the robot involved.

“Well?” Riley asked impatiently as she saw Cadey look up from her laptop.

“W-well. It looks like you, uh, you like being broken.” Cadey hesitantly offered.

“Broken? Like, taken apart?” Riley asked.

“No, more like actually malfunctioning. Like breaking something that would need to be repaired.” Cadey clarified.

“So, why would that be causing me to not be able to get off otherwise?”

“Probably because it’s weighted very heavily, other stuff will get you there eventually, but it's just a matter of how long you want to invest in it.” Cadey explained.

“So I have to malfunction, or spend hours getting off?” Riley asked.

“Or have Michael do anything to you. He still has the most weight in your preference file.” Cadey said.

“Awww!” Riley squealed with genuine delight.

“Gross. Anyway, that’s why. You’ll probably have to start retraining your A.I. to like more normal forms of stimulation. Those first few sexual enconters kind of skewed things a bit. So, take the time, invest in some good normal self care and-”

“-Or” Riley interrupted.

“Nope, no ‘or’ there is a good reason Alan built so many failsafes into you. You’re built to look and act like a human, do not try and break yourself just to get off. You need to retrain your A.I. to look for the things you like.” Cadey cut her off.

“That’s not what I was going to say.” Riley said with a pout. “We could just change it, I mean, you’re right there.”

Cadey stared at Riley for a full second before she managed to formulate the right reasoning for why that was an awful idea. It was probably going to still be too complex for Riley, sweet as she might be, to understand.

“No, just, no. If I change values in here your A.I. might not accept them, or it might fully accept them but in a weird way. I don’t know how your mind works and I don’t know how this table was generated or populated or how it’s configured. Only the deep recesses of that robot brain of yours knows how that works. Trust me, manually changing something is a swift road to disaster.”

“How do you know?” Riley asked.

“Because there are more than a few papers on it in the A.I. research field. You and me and Julie are very special exceptions to a lot of rules. People have tried for a long time to-” Cadey held up her hands and made air quotes with her index and middle fingers. “Pre-program something.” Cadey let out a sigh. “It never works how you want it to.

Cadey reached over to Riley and pulled the data cable out of the port in her chest and began to coil it up in her hands, laying it on the laptop keyboard before speaking again.

“Trust me on this one. Sometimes doing things the hard way, putting in the work, and doing it right is the best and only way to get what you want.”

Riley remained silent as she mulled over the implications of what Cadey had said. A lot of it made sense, but a lot of it sounded like so much work. She had only been sexually active for a year or so now, how could things have changed so much in that short amount of time? Cadey was probably right, she should work on getting herself back into a place where she could pleasure herself and achieve an orgasm just as much as being broken or malfunctioning or being with Michael.

Cadey was snapping the data cables from her chest back into place and pushing the whole panel cover into its locks along her torso. Soon there was the faintest of whirring sounds as the internal systems resealed her chest plate. Once done there was little to no indication of a seam line or anything other than the perfectly smooth skin along and around her breasts.

She pushed herself up into a sitting position and faced Cadey. Pulling her into a hug she thanked her step sister for the help and redressed herself before walking to the door. SHe looked over her shoulder and took a deep breath in.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” Riley assured Cadey before winking and slipping out the door and into her own room.

Riley removed her clothes lazily, tossing them into the laundry hamper, whether they needed to be washed or not. She had too much on her mind at the moment to really focus on separating her laundry. It was rare that someone, even a budding artificial intellect like her, got such a clear cut and definitive glimpse into their own likes and dislikes. She wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it, but what she did know was that she wanted to talk it over with Michael. He would be back tomorrow, and she would invite him to spend the evening with her. Until then, she would begin a new evening ritual. No matter how long it took, she would make herself orgasm that night.

“Two and a half hours” Riley grumpilly commented to Cadey the next morning as she walked past her sister unit.

“Beg your pardon?” Cadey said, confused.

“I started retraining my A.I. last night. It took two and a half hours. I am down twelve percent on my recharge because I couldn’t plug in.”

Cadey only chuckled at her sister. It served her right for trying to go after something big like this right away. It had already been fairly late in the evening when the two of them had finished the work, another two and a half hours on top of that was late into the night. Or early in the morning if you looked at it that way. Either way, Cadey felt only moderately bad about giving her sister the information she needed only to have it be immediately used against her.

As Riley’s foot hit the bottom step, there was a knock at the door. It was the same pattern of four knocks that Michael would always do. The same tempo every time. Riley answered the door this time and, despite her artificial emotional processors making her look grumpy, with half lidded eyes and the smallest of frowns, seeing Michael immediately changed that. Her face brightened and she even stood up straighter, though not fast enough for Michael to not notice.

“Someone looks like they had a rough night. You okay babe?” Michael asked, stepping over the threshold and seamlessly into a hug. He kissed Riley on the crown of her head while her face was buried in his chest.

“Yeah, I just didn’t get to sleep until late.” Riley replied, using the more human vocabulary.

“Aww you poor thing. Maybe you should take a nap or something? I can come back later if you need to go lay down.” Michael replied, also mimicking the same human vocabulary. Alan had once warned him about a “sleeper mode” he had put into place on Riley at one point. It was almost never active, but he had let Michael know that should she ever slip into a more human vocabulary and mannerisms that he should follow along with her on it and let Alan know as soon as possible.

“No, I’m fine. I was just telling Cadey my battery is low, twelve percent lower than it should be. We were up doing sisterly things and I didn’t get a full recharge. And because of that my stupi A.I. is making me act all groggy and stuff.” Riley commented and then finished with a yawn.

“Ooh, I see. Well, hopefully this will go much quicker than yesterday and we can get you plugged in.” Michael offered.

“Yeah yeah.” Riley said with a wave of her hand over her shoulder as she shuffled towards the kitchen, leaving Michael and Cadey alone in the entryway.

“Sisterly things, huh?” Michael asked to no one in particular.

“Get your head out of the gutter.” Cadey said and followed after Riley.

Michael still smirked at the thoughts in his head.

The day passed fairly uneventfully and fairly silently. Tri-folding papers and stuffing them into an envelope, plastering on an address sticker and a stamp and then doing it over and over again. Riley’s mood dramatically increased as she was close to Michael and as her social programming allowed her to “wake up.” Cadey did the same work as Michael and Riley, stuffing envelopes and stamping them, though she did look up from time to time to see Riley smiling to herself or kissing with Michael. She thought of how sweet those two were to each other and even idly considered that, perhaps, she should look for a companion of her own. Maybe it would go a long way to retraining some of the behaviors in her own A.I.

The Trio finished their tasks an hour or two later, putting them right about at lunch time. Riley and Cadey didn’t need to eat, for obvious reasons, but there was still a fair amount of food in the house and Julie even made an appearance in the kitchen at lunch time. She was humming merrily to herself and offered to make Michael a sandwich since she was already making one for her husband. Never being one to turn down a free lunch, he let Julie make him some lunch.

For the remainder of the day Cadey, Riley, and Michael retreated to Riley’s room. It was a far cry from Cadey’s room. There were bright colors on as many surfaces as Alan and Julie had allowed her to paint. There were vibrant posters and art pieces on the walls and any flat, or mostly flat, surface housed some kind of nick knack or memento. Many of them had been given to her by Michael as souvenirs from trips to beaches or towns his family had vacationed to. Her closet was stuffed full or a number of outfits she had assembled over the years and her jewelry box was nearly as full.

Michael and Riley were sitting on their bed, Riley nestled into the crook of Michael’s arm and allowed her head to rest on his shoulder. Michael had managed to convince her to at least slip into a low power mode for a bit to reserve what was left of her power cell. She had complained, remarking that it was still at twenty three percent and that was more than enough to last until bedtime, but in the end he insisted that she conserve as much as possible. Michael’s hand rest easily on her tight, acid washed jeans, resting just atop her thigh. Cadey and Michael took the opportunity to chat a bit while Riley interjected every now and again with a comment or detail about a story one of the two would be telling. They hours slipped peacefully by and eventually Cadey excused herself, saying that Riley would be fully charged soon and the two of them would likely want their privacy.

Cadey was spot on in her guess. It was only about five minutes of quiet cuddling in bed before Riley’s eyes fluttered open and she yawned. One hand snaked its way up and under her shirt to unplug herself, while the other cradled Michael’s cheek and brought him in for a deep, sweet, and sensual kiss. Michael showed no objection to the movement and in fact slipped a hand into the space created between Riley’s red hair and her face. He laced his fingers into her synthetic hair and moved around until his hand was on the back of her head. He pulled her close for a deeper kiss and then reclined himself, taking Riley with him.

Riley lay on top of Michael, kissing him with an ever increasing eagerness and hunger. She knew that Michael’s mere presence would trigger any number of sexual programs to initiate themselves, and when her operating system received the request, there was no hesitation to allow it.

Riley spread her legs open and straddled Michael, pressing her hands against his chest she pushed herself upright. From there her hands dropped back to the hem of her shirt and pulled it up and off of her body. She hadn’t bothered with a bra when she had woken up this morning and let her glorious naked upper body be displayed for Michael. His hands were on her, grabbing at her breasts. He held them in his hands as if they were a lost treasure that he had finally managed to get his hands on. He felt their weight, their softness, how her nipples puckered and hardened under his palms. Her groans only encouraged him.

The two returned to kissing, though Michael left his hands on her chest, massaging them every moment of the kiss. Their tongues, both organic and synthetic, tangled around each other in a small sensual dance that left both of them breathing hard. Minute after minute rolled past and as they did both managed to move and roll, shedding clothes as they did so until both lay completely nude under Riley’s blankets.

Michael was effortlessly hard the moment the pair crawled under her comforter, and his hand found its way to her slit, finding it already wet and ready. He assumed that it always would be, Riley had long ago told him that she had an immense amount of control over it and could manually lubricate herself if she really needed to. Michael always wanted to make sure though, all he ever wanted was for Riley to feel good and if he was the one to do that for her, then so much the better.

Michael rolled again, pushing Riley down below him and placing his hands on her knees, spreading her legs wide and positioning himself between her thighs. He was mere centimeters from inserting himself inside of her when he looked up and saw the look on Riley’s face. She was looking to the side, her lower lip pinched between her teeth. It was a look of mischief that Michael wasn’t unfamiliar with. It was the look she wore when she wanted Michael to do something specific, but she didn’t want to say it out loud. She wanted him to seek it out.

“I know that look little robot.” Michael said, his voice teasing. “What are you processing in there?”

“God I love it when you talk to me like that.” Riley said, her voice low, deep, and filled to the brim with lust. Michael leaned forward, kissing her forehead and then moving to her right ear before whispering.

“What? You like it when I talk to you like you’re a machine? Like you’re just a whole bunch of cables and wires and plastic all wrapped up in this pretty body?”

Riley was squirming and barely able to contain herself, she threw her arms around Michael and pulled him in for another deep passionate kiss and Michael took his cue. He pushed himself inside of Riley with ease and felt her whole body react. Her back arched and pushed her chest against Michael’s. Her hands curled into claws and dragged themself down his back. Michael pulled out just a little and then thrust back inside of her again, earning him a muffled moan. Again he pulled out a little and slid back inside of her and she groaned one again, filling his ears with the sweet sounds of her lewd pleasurable voice.

“Fuck, sorry, oh it jsut feels o god damn good.” Riley was saying, attempting to get Michael to stop enough to let her speak what she really wanted, but at the same time not wanting the incredible feelings to stop. She knew that what Cadey had told her was true, Michael reigned supreme in her preference files and it showed in how her entire body reacted to him.

“N-no stop. Let me..let me talk for a second.” Riley finally managed to get out after a dozen more gentle, but increasingly aggressive thrusts.

Michael stopped in an instant, panting and leaving himself inserted inside of her. She was also panting, bringing new fresh air to help cool her internal hardware.

“What’s wrong?” Michael said, his tone genuinely concerned, and Riley giggled at him for it.

“Nothing, nothing at all, I just..I wanted you to try something different.”

Michael raised an eyebrow at that. There were things they had talked about and never done before, some of them more mundane, others more exotic and some outright impossible if Riley wasn’t a robot.

“What did you have in mind?” Michael asked.

Riley held out her hand, letting her hand hang loosely from the wrist joint it was connected to. Michael instinctually took it and looked at Riley.

“Break it.” She said, her tone serious, curious, lustful, and hopeful.

“What?” Michael asked, clearly confused.

“I want you to break it. Just the hand. Just push it down towards the underside of my arm until it breaks off.” Riley explained.

Michael looked from Riley’s eyes, her face flush with red, down to the hand held in his own and then back. She wanted him to break her? To intentionally cause the girl he loved harm? He knew he could, Alan, himself, and Cadey could easily have fixed it, but there was more than just that. Alan told Michael to take care of Riley. Michael had seen her damaged, broken, malfunctioning, and in distress before and he never wanted to see it again. Moreover, he didn’t even know what Alan would think if he found out that Michael had intentionally broken his creation, his daughter.

“Babe, I’m- I can’t do that. I can’t hurt you like that.” Michael protested.

“It doesn’t hurt, you know that.” Riley pleaded.

“And your dad would straight up kill me.” Michael said.

“We can tell him it was an accident.” Riley offered.

“You’re a robot, he can just replay the video feed.” Michael explained.

“Dammit…”

“Riley, I love you, I’m never going to hurt you, even if you ask me to. I just- I can’t do that. Not to you.”

Riley crossed her arms over her chest, pouting and looking away. Michael knew she wasn’t mad that he wouldn’t do this for her, she was mad that she knew he was right.

“Fine, you and your stupid logic.” She said in a voice that was only mockingly angry.

Michael smirked, thrust inside of her again, and the evening resumed like nothing had happened. The pair made love for the next twenty minutes before Riley and Michael managed to orgasm at the same relative time. It was an act that left Michael breathless, and Riley smugly panting. Even her two and a half hours of self pleasure the night before only held a candle to the sensation she got from having sex with Michael. There truly was nothing like it, but there was something that had stuck in her mind. What if it could have been better. A broken wrist wasn’t going to disable her, not even close. She sighed, happy, content, and more than a little curious.

Michael cleaned himself up, redressed himself and looked at the time on his phone. It was later than he had thought and he let Riley know as much. He needed to get home, Riley pouted, but ultimately let him go with another long, lingering kiss.

Riley returned to her bed, watching the door and listening. She heard Michael leave, heard his car start and heard it drive down the road towards his house. She sighed, always a little sad to see him go, but she laid down in bed and reconnected the charging cable to the small port that she had opened in her wrist. She laid down and opened the command for her sleep program, but hesitated for a moment. Before she executed it she set an alarm for herself, sometime in the early morning, around two. Then executed the command, her eyes slipped closed, and she was offline.

Hours later Riley’s eyes snapped open and she was fully online again. She reached down and tugged the charging cable free of her wrist and let it fall back to its place on the ground next to her bed. She wished she knew how Cadey and her dad did that thing where they could ping online devices on their home network, rather than sneaking out of her room to see if anyone was awake. But, she did what she had to do.

Sneaking around her house wasn’t difficult for her, and it was only the barest of guesses if people were actually asleep. Cadey’s light wasn’t shining in the crack between the floor and the door, neither was her mom or dad’s and most importantly, there was no light in the lab either. Riley felt fairly confident that everyone was either offline or asleep, and felt comfortable to take the next step.

She returned to her room, silently closing the door and returning to her bed. She spread open her legs and slipped her fingers in between the already moistening folds there. She wasted little time before slipping a second finger into her artificial sex module and began the process of movign them in and out in an ever increasing rhythm. She let her artificial mind slip into the blissful feeling and did her best to ignore the temptation to open her monitoring software so she could see exactly what was happening, and where her arousal levels were. Riley spent some measure of time pleasuring herself, simply letting it happen without regard to time or how long she had been at it.

Riley, unfortunately, was the world's most impatient android.

She finally huffed and pulled her fingers out of her clit. Pouting and looking down at her own crotch, she threw her hands in that air and hissed “really?” Sucking in a deep breath and letting it out through her nostrils, she was almost ready to give up. She knew one thing that would work though, and if Michael wasn’t going to do it then she would.

Riley once again linked her artificial mind directly into her operating system and took control of her distress signaling systems. A failsafe she had discovered that was meant to alert Michael and Alan if she somehow broke or malfunctioned. It also controlled a lot of her human reaction to being damaged. In essence, she had just turned off her pain receptors and her self preservation features. With that, she returned to normal operation and replaced her hand against ehr vagainal assembly.

She rubbed her artificial clit for a few minutes, returning herself to the right mindset before suddenly stopping. She raised one hand in front of her, lifting her palm upwards towards the ceiling. She took her other hand, wet with her own juices, and began bending her hand back. The more she pressed the more she realized just how sturdy Alan had built her. In the end though, there was a sudan ping of metal. The skin along the underside of her wrist turned white as it stretched to its breaking point and then split in a jagged wandering break around her wrist.

A fountain of white and blue sparks illuminated the room as fiber optic cables and wires snapped and short circuited in front of her. Riley moaned at the sight of it. The spray of sparks subsided, but there were more than enough crossed wires to snap and spark in electric blue arcs. There was only a small amount of black smoke swirling up from some of the burn components inside of her wrist. None of that concerned her though.Riley watched as her hand spasmed and her fingers wiggled in response. The very last of the electrical life inside the mechanisms inside of her hand and fingers all wildly surged around. Soon it ended though, and her hand hung limp from what remained of her wrist.

Her remaining hand flew to her sex in an instant, pressing hard against it and pushing her fingers inside of herself once again. She held her broken wrist up in front of her, the delicate feminine hand dangling from the last shreds of artificial flesh and wiring that remained. There were more sparks and short circuits in her wrist that criss crossed in the cold darkness of her room. Riley was already feeling those pangs of sexual gratification on their way. She felt warmth spreading over her and the desire for more. She closed her eyes and drove hard against her clit, rubbing hard and fast. She opened her eyes again, taking in the view of her broken wrist and the shattered plastic bone-like core of it.

There was another small surge of power that was sent to her hand, perhaps an attempt to power it off and then back on in order to re-establish a connection. It didn’t work, but that was when her operating system stepped in. Despite all of the failsafes and reporting programs disabled, there were still some generic error messages built into her.

“Error, device not found. Please reconnect device.” She whispered into the cold empty room around her.

She bit into her lower lip, feeling more and more like a machine with that. She hadn’t made that statement on her own, her A.I. was uninvolved entirely and Riley knew it. She had just spewed the wording in an automated tone, and she loved it. She was craving more.

Her eyes drifted to her wrist again and saw that now her entire arm seemed to be swaying and almost vibrating as the mechanisms that controlled her arm struggled with the sudden influx of attention from her operating system. There was data and power and instructions all flying at a component of her body that, to her operating system, didn’t exist any more. She bit into her lower lip a little more and shuddered, her breath ragged.

Then it was time. She knew a sequence had been assembled and was ready to execute and she let it. She cried out, letting her hips buck against her hand and clamping her thighs shut over it. She breathed deeply and then fell back, reclining against her wall. SHe took deep breath after deep cooling breath, coming down from her orgasmic high as all the systems inside of her body began to return to normal. Except, of course, for her broken hand. It continued to spark and snap, clearly her operating system hadn’t automatically cut power to it, but that was alright, Riley sent her A.I. towards her operating system. Once the self preservation systems were back online, it would shut down and Riley would have to let Alan know that she had an accident.

She was declined. Her A.I. slammed up against a wall that had been erected around the operating system. No connections would be allowed until she was returned to a normal state. Riley began to panic, especially as she pulled up a number of her system statistics to try and find a way around the barrier. The short circuit had been gradually draining her power cell at an incredible rate. More and more of her internal power systems had been dedicated to her sexual activity and to trying to diagnose the damage, but ran into an issue when the correct programming wasn’t found. Her eyes physically went wide as she saw that she was currently looming at around five percent of her full charge, and it was dropping fast.

She hopped out of bed, her hand almost comically flopping on the end of her arm, still illuminated by a series of constant sparks that arced across exposed and frayed wires. She tried to decide which would be the better option, or more accurately which would get her in less trouble. She could wake up Cadey, who would surely scold her for damaging herself even though she had promised not to, or she could wake up her father and try and explain what had happened. Neither offered a good option, and she opted to try and wake up Cadey, she was closer, and was less likely to scold her too much.

Her arm was now shaking and spasming in rapid and sudden movements. It hadn’t concerned her before, but that was because she also wasn’t paying close enough attention to it. Her entire body was shaking at this point. It was becoming increasingly more difficult for her to actually move as her legs were shaking from the spreading, sweeping, wave of malfunctions. All of her systems were diverting power and processor cycles to attempt to understand and repair the broken component. Even her head was beginning to twist from side to side.

“D- damage de- detected- ted- plea- please repair- error. Device n- n- not found. Found. P- please re-” Riley was muttering and her operating system registered it as another spike in her sexual response. Her legs tried to press together and her hand twitched towards her crotch again, but stopped as another set of instructions swept in and jerked her hand in the opposite direction. She looked towards the door, holding out her good hand towards it and attempted to take another step forward.

She never made it to the door. Her operating system recognized that she was at a critical power level and forced an immediate shut down. It scanned the room for other humans, and decided that there was little to no threat of her being discovered here. So, Riley powered off. She crumpled to the ground in a naked heap. Her legs and arms falling in an unnatural position. The electrical sparking in her wrist had stopped, but so had everything else.

Riley hadn’t been the only robot in the house that night that had gotten curious about the implications of a mixture of sexual activity and robotic damage. Cadey had been mulling over the information she had gathered from Riley all day long, wondering if there was some merit to it. Her own artificial mind worked very differently from Riley, as most people’s personalities varied from one person to the next.

Cadey approached the information from an analytical standpoint. She had originally been built and programmed to gather information and report it back to her manufacturer, and even with Alan’s expert tweaks and modifications, there was still a large portion of that programming lingering inside of her. She saw a piece of information and had to know more about it. She wasn’t about to ask Riley for more information because she knew it would trigger her to actually damage herself, and not safely either. So, Cadey knew what had to be done.

Once everyone turned in for the night, she settled into her own bed, shedding the old athletic shorts she used for pajama bottoms, though deciding to leave her tank top on. She scooted herself under her blankets and lay comfortably on the pillow before she moved her hand down and over the smooth, hairless sexual module she had installed. Her fingers followed the curvature of it and came to rest against her slit and got to work. Much like Riley she swirled her fingers round and round, gently working them into herself as the moments slipped past. Her eyes slid closed and she let out a long, low, breath as the pleasurable data began streaming into the processors inside of her body.

She was having no issues with the amount of sexual data that was flowing through her and she could easily see that there was a steady rising of arousal, but that wasn’t what was in question here. She needed to see if there was something inherently sensual and arousing about seeing another robot damaged, in particular herself. She suspected it might be true only because she had reached the same conclusion as Riley. When the two of them were fooling around and one or both of them began revealing more and more of their robotic parts, disconnecting a limb or operning a panel there was a definite spike in her sexual response. Maybe there was some merit to Riley’s desires, or maybe Cadey’s own sexual programming had been based on the same basic set of instructions as her sister’s had. She knew that there was a lot of crossover when she had allowed Alan to refresh her programming.

She continued to masturbate as she had done many many times before, letting the sexual data flow easily into her and then brought her free hand up just in front of her. She gently pulled her other hand out of her wet folds and moved it to the top of her hand, digging her nails deep into her own flesh. Her mouth hung open and her brow furrowed, a normal response that would have looked like pain to anyone else, but Cadey knew it was just an automated process, she was only a machine and didn’t actually “feel” anything.

With a small section of the skin pulled away she could see the intricate amount of wiring and mechanisms inside of her hand and found a small blue colored wire. She tugged at it just enough to raise it out of her hand. She then resumed her fingering, driving back inside of herself and stimulating the artificial clit inside of her sex. Once she felt like she was falling back into a rhythm, she brought her free hand up to her mouth, placing the wire in between her teeth, and then she ground down onto the wire until it was severed.

Her vision flooded with warnings about it, not that she needed them, she could see the results. Her fingers curled and twisted in a wild dance as power and data were erratically dispersed. Cadey blinked twice in rapid succession as she watched her own hand spasming in wild jolts of movements. Her head stiffly tilted to one side as she did so and her artificial mind realized that she hadn’t requested that movement. She also became aware that she was still eagerly plunging her fingers in and out of herself and that it was, indeed, a massively erotic feeling.

“Alert, illegal device disconnection detected.” Cadey muttered aloud. “Failure of device. Please service this device. This- this- this unit will now. Error. Service required. Please return this unit to a designated service facility. To re- to re- re- repair- pair.”

Cadey shook her head for a second, reconnecting and realigning her artificial intellect with her operating system and clearing out the warnings as quickly as she was able to. It took time, primarily because her processor core was utilizing a massive amount of her internal resources and struggling to keep her operational, speak the deeply embedded commands to return to a repair facility, and to process the influx of raw sexual data. Once the error were cleared and her CPU had more available cycles the sexual build up came crashing in like a tsunami.

Cadey legs clamped together hard over her hand as the internal pump system filled her slit with orgasmic levels of fluids and lubricant. Her mouth hung open and she silently cried out as her breath came in long deep gasps. The overwhelming amount of sudden pleasure caused her entire body to shake and shudder, wobbling her legs as she felt her fingers automatically sliding in and out of her sex module rapidly, attempting to get the maximum amount of pleasure.

Once her eyes opened again and her breathing subsided, Cadey realized that her hand now hung limply from her wrist. A quick body scan let her know that power had been automatically cut to the damaged module, but that hadn’t stopped the visual and system wide realization that she might actually like the damage just as much as Riley. She bit into her lower lip at that, realizing that she needed to proceed very carefully with her sexual encounters. The last thing she wanted was to become dependent on damage and malfunction to execute an orgasm.

She slipped out of bed and pulled on her shorts again before moving to the bathroom. She cleaned herself up as well as she could for only having a single working hand at the moment. She then slipped down to the robotics lab that Alan had set up in the spare bedroom across the hall from the master bedroom. It was far more cluttered these days with all the additional equipment that had been in Cadey’s room.

Repairing the severed wire inside of her hand was an easy enough task, at least usually it was. Attempting to solder together two ends of a broken wire with only one hand proved to be more of a challenge than she would have liked, but Alan had everything she needed. A pair of articulated clamps held the two halves of the wire together while she managed to get a sloppy blob of solder on the wire. Once done, she instructed her operating system to reconnect to her damaged hand and found that, with the exception of a warning about a skin laceration, everything was working as expected.

Cadey pressed the two portions of skin back together and applied a layer of the skin sealing paste that Alan kept well stocked in the lab. It would take hours to dry, but Cadey could recharge while that happened and then smooth it down to perfection in the morning. She returned to her room, glancing at Riley’s door and content that she saw it was dark. She was hopeful that her sister would take her advice and leave some things unexplored.

“Have you seen Riley this morning?” Julie mentioned as she set Alan’s breakfast down in front of him. Cadey rarely sat at the breakfast table, but was positioned nearby, a book in hand. It was nearly eight in the morning and Riley was generally up by now, a fact that immediately set Cadey on edge.

“I can’t seem to ping her systems, so I was wondering if she left to go see Michael or something.” Julie added.

“I can go check on her.” Cadey offered and didn’t wait for a confirmation from the family. She set her book down on the sofa and got to her feet. She knocked softly on Riley’s door a few times. When there was no answer she cracked the door open, whispering Riley’s name softly into the early morning light. When there was no answer Cadey pushed the door open all the way.

She sighed, somehow knowing exactly what she would find. She knelt down next to Riley and looked her over for a moment before seeing her wrist. Her hand was broken and folded under her arm. It would have been very easy to assume that Riley had collapsed for some reason and fell on her hand the wrong way, breaking it and powering her down. Of course, it was also just as easily explained that she had snapped her wrist herself in an effort to get the ultimate orgasm the night before, and Cadey suspected she knew which of the two scenarios was true. She also knew which one she was going to relay to Alan.

“Dad, you might wanna come here and help me.” Cadey called out into the house, summoning Alan and Julie a matter of moments later.

“What the-” Aland muttered as he came in and knelt down next to Cadey, examining his daughter.

“It looks like she might have slipped and damaged her arm here, it might have just kicked in the auto shut down and emergency alerts.” Cadey mentioned, hoping that it would be enough to convince Alan.

“I don’t think I have any alert, do you honey?” Alan said, fishing his phone from his pocket and looking over his shoulder at his wife. She shook her head and Alan unlocked his phone, opening an app and scrolling through it. “Nope, I don’t have anything.”

“Maybe it was so sudden that she shut down without sending the alert?” Cadey said.

“It’s possible, I’ve seen that before. I really should get a secondary module built with independent power for that kind of thing. Uh, Cadey can you get her down to the lab and we’ll see what we can do.”

The repairs weren’t exactly difficult. Alan ended up disconnecting Riley’s entire forearm and replacing it with a spare that he had made. Limbs were an easy repair, but time consuming, so it made more sense to have a small stock on hand and replace and repair as needed. Cadey assisted him, as she always did, and once the repair had been finished she suggested that they might want to look into her log files to find out exactly what had caused the initial problems. She secretly hoped that Alan would stumble into the same information she had the night before, and would correct it. Cadey knew that Riley would, in no way, be able to actually control some of her more impulsive nature and if anyone could correct that, it would be Alan.

Alan would spend the next several hours gently poking his way through Riley’s log files, and as Cadey had hoped, stumbled upon the log files from the night before. There was a large amount of muttering and mumbling from Alan as he scrolled through those log files. He was making notes on a notepad and Cadey could hear the amount of heavy sighs he let out. Cadey attempted to stay focused on her own task of gently smoothing out the silicone based flesh paste she had smeared on her hand the night before. She sincerely hoped that Alan didn’t look at her while she picked at the small protrusions.

“Well, I think I found the problem.” Alan said at last.

“Oh yeah, what happened?” Cadey asked.

Alan spun on the stool he had been sitting on and faced Cadey. There was a redness to his face, somewhere between embarrassed and upset.

Well, it looks like she, uh, she likes to be damaged while. Well, while, you know.” Alan sputtered, no one ever wanted to talk about their robotic daughters sexual preferecens.

“While having sex?” Cadey offered. Alan could only nod in affirmation.

“That can’t be healthy for her.” Cadey commented, attempting to convince her operating system to make her voice sound as nonchalant as possible. “So, do we just trim that out of there, or..?”

“No, goodness no. Who knows what that would do. I’m not even skilled enough to do that.”

Cadey blinked once and was taken aback. In her eyes Alan was skilled enough to do anything with a robot. He had made two of them from scratch so far and programmed them so well that they blended in with society without any kind of problem.

“That’d be like trying to do neuro surgery with a chisel and hammer. No, I think the best thing to do is to talk her out of it and encourage her to learn how to control these kinds of urges. You know, learn to work around them.” Alan commented.

“Like a human would?” Cadey offered.

“Yes, exactly. Riley, and you too, are basically learning machines to the point that I can’t program something into, or out of, your head without it having some kind of long-lasting repercussions. And I’m not about to do that to my two daughters.” Alan said with such sincerity that Cadey found her artificial mind processing an emotional response she hadn’t encountered before. It was all new to her, but she didn’t want to process it here or now, because she knew exactly what it was. She saved the state of her response, logged it away and set a reminder to parse it later.

She and Alan agreed that Riley’s best course of action was to simply learn. They finished reassembling her arm and plugged her in for a full recharge cycle. Alan and her would bring Riley back online the next day and have a conversation with her. In the meantime, Cadey returned to her room, her hand finally looking normal again. She sat down on the edge of her bed and took in a deep breath. She resumed the saved state of her emotional response from earlier and let all of it flow into her A.I.

Her face fell to her hands and she cried. She didn’t exactly have tear ducts, and was grateful for it. She wouldn’t have known what to do with tears anyway. She felt deep gasps of air coming into her and then seeping out as short, quiet sobs. Her A.I. struggled to understand why this was happening, crying was marked as an action tied to so many other database entries, but this was all new. She unwittingly reached out to the internet for more information, conjuring specific search terms to try and narrow down something, anything, to classify this response. Her operating system found the information at last, tagged it and filed it away before alerting her A.I. about what it had found.

Cadey had just, for the first time in her existence, experienced the love of a parent.

< Back to the story archive

Coming of Age: Natalie Bayer

Contents