Frustration

‘These lights are always so bright. Is that really necessary?’

The thought appeared in Carol’s mind, no, log files. She had no mind, at least not as a human might think of it. She was a machine and a damn good one at that. So then why was she on this table?

“Opening cranium side panel. Waiting…connection established to external device.”

That was her voice, she recognized it, she even recognized the pre-recorded files that had been made and strung together for this very operation. Not like the natural speech that she used when talking to her friends, co-workers, or anyone really. Those were generated on the fly, processed and passed into a vocal processor, spoken, and logged. This was triggered by someone else.

Carol could also feel something being plugged into the side of her head. It was like a pressure, an intrusion. Something was tapping into her operating system and rooting around inside of her file structure. The glaring brightness of the light made it impossible to see exactly who was accessing her systems, but she could tell they were taking things. No, copying them, leaving an original copy of who she was and what she thought, but taking a copy for themselves.

‘What are you doing to me?’

The words flashed across her eyes, but her voice never came out. Instead she had a flash across her field of vision, some warning that her vocal processors were not just offline, but missing. She couldn’t see that her throat was flayed open and the tangled mess of thick cables, fine wires, sturdy support structures, and small circuits were on display. She would normally have a complex array of speakers and controller boards nestled among the electronics, but those were some of the first things to go once she was plugged in.

A sudden alert let her know that her legs were being touched. The sensor laced flesh there lit up as firm hands, wrapped in latex gloves lifted one up. Another pair of hands pushed into her skin, pawing over her, moving closer to the manual latch on her hips. Then they found it.

She forced her mouth to open, to shout at them to stop taking her apart, to leave her alone. The words appeared only in her log files. Her face still screwed up into an angry mask though.

Both of her legs were gone now. She couldn’t detect them any more, and instead knew that it was just chrome plated disks. The wires and cables that brought power and data to her legs and feet were just hanging there, glimmering in the all too bright lights that illuminated her whole naked body. It wasn’t just her nudity that made her feel so exposed. She knew she was naked, her body exposed to whoever else was in the room. She had been constructed naked, and had been fully nude before, but the fact that her internals were being exposed and worked on, and taken away without her permission. That was her frustration.

She knew what she was, there were labels for her kind. Android, robot, gynoid, fembot. She was a rarer breed though. She knew what she was, there was no pretending to be human in her daily operation, not unless she wanted to.

She wasn’t sure if she had signed up for this though, or if it was the work of someone else who knew what they were doing and knew what she was. She was far from flawless, there were exploits in her software, she knew, but she trusted in her security software to help mitigate those.

Hands were on her arms now. Prodding again, looking for those manual overrides to detach them. She wanted so badly to gasp when they came off in those same firm, sturdy hands, leaving wires and cables trailing behind, dangling from where her shoulder was. She couldn’t even move her head to look over at it and get one last glimpse of her robotic body.

More hands were on her torso now. She was vaguely aware of the sensation of tools being inserted into her. They pushed into specific places and released her chest panel. Her vision only caught a glimpse of her chest plate as it blocked the light for a brief moment. She was in a laboratory of some kind, the people around her were wearing smocks and face masks. Then the light returned, searingly bright and ruining her vision.

Eyes widened in their sockets as circuitry and whole systems were removed from inside of her. She felt them, they were there, they were working and then suddenly they were gone. Once they were removed it was like a part of her personality and capabilities went with them, which was more true than she cared to admit. Her operating system wasn’t some monolithic repository of information, it was a traffic cop that directed data to subsystems and let them do the work.

Her arms and legs had their controller boards, they knew how to make the limbs move and balance and flex, not the hard drive and processors inside of her head. The more of her they took, the less of her there was left.

She wanted to scream, to shout and struggle. To writhe on the examination table, but her limbs were gone, and along with them the ability to remember how to move them. She had lost her ability to swallow as well, to pretend to breathe, to function like a human. She felt her body being scooped out piece by piece.

Then she couldn’t feel her torso at all. It was simply gone, and with it, most of what made her, her.

She, logically, knew now that she was just a head. Just a pretty face, a hair piece, and the limited amount of circuitry and internals inside of the cranium casing. She hated it. Loathed the very thought of it, but it was her existence now. She wasn’t an android, she was a computer in a head. Then she was floating, no, being carried. The foam lining all around her held her head tightly in place. She could only see a person for a moment as they brought something along with them, a long thin tool, and then pushed it deep inside of her ear.

The faint click of her internal power systems going off was the last thing she heard before her world went dark and non-existant.