Tales from Lucidia City: Phoebe Pierce

Phoebe’s eyes had been closed for a while now, which was perfectly fine with her. She was detecting the world through her hands and her lips, and occasionally the slick folds between her legs. Her mind was filled only with the sound of the softly pumping music, it wasn’t romantic in the slightest, it was more to cover the sounds her and her partner were making. Not that the faint moans of two college students making out and touching one another was anything new for the co-ed dorms at Lucidia City University. Phoebe was just trying to be considerate enough to let her roommate know that now might be a good time to get some extra studying done in the library, rather than their dorm. It was better than a sock on the door knob.

It was easily an hour or more before a woman stumbled out of the dorm. Her short dark-brown hair a complete mess and her clothes ruffled and haphazardly thrown on. She had missed some kind of alarm on her phone and was about to be late to catch a shuttle back home for the break between semesters. She had enough time to throw on her black leather jacket and fix her glasses before running off. Phoebe had whimpered and whined when she had left, but it would be fine. They bid one another a good break and promised to keep in touch.

Phoebe sighed and pushed herself off the bed and made for the shower, the perspiration on her dusky dark skin was beginning to make her feel itchy. She hadn’t bothered to redress when her friend had jolted out of bed and scrambled out of the room, making it a quick transition into the steamy hot water. Soon her platinum-blond hair was thick with some kind of specialized shampoo and suds covered her body. She huffed once and admitted that the warm water did feel nice and washed away the itch of sensual sweat.

As she was drying off, a towel wrapped around her hair she heard a small chime from the other room. Her phone had just received a message, then another, and another.

What followed was a text message conversation that, with each new message brought a wider smile across her lips. She had wanted to come home for the brief two week break between semesters, but now her mother was telling her that not only had they made up a room for her, but that her father would be there. At the mere mention of his presence Phoebe physically felt her heart skipping. She so rarely got an opportunity to spend more than a few precious minutes with him between business calls and conferences or worse, emergency calls into the office. It seemed like Starchild was built on his back sometimes.

Now, though, it seemed he had some time between his own projects, and her mother would be at home like she always was. They could be an actual family for a bit of time, and that was well worth the price of a trip home on her father’s credit card.

The ride north was almost exclusively along urban highways and roads, at least until they entered into the Wintercrest District. It was a subtle transition from the roadway into more and more dense forests until she was utterly alone, surrounded only by trees and open plots of land. Even the driveway up to the manor she grew up in was desolate. Regardless of which way she looked, all she could see was trees and foliage. She wasn’t even sure there were neighboring houses within an acre of the mansion.

Turning round one last bend, the home loomed up at the top of the final hill. There were enough lights around the house in the evening air to give the whole sprawling manor an ethereal look. Like a ghost materializing out of thin air, capped with soaring rooftops, some of which looked as if they might belong to a legitimate renaissance era spire. It was all set dressing though, the house itself was quite modern with a look of both classic architecture merged with modern technology.

Phoebe slipped out of the sleek little car and pulled out a simple backpack filled with clothes and little else. She slung it over her shoulder and walked towards the front door of the massive manor. Her eyes twitched to the garage, three large doors closed and hiding whatever was inside, her mind reminded her that it also might be closed with nothing behind it. The thought alone slowed her last step and froze her hand just above the door handle.

Her mother opened the door before Phoebe got a chance to do so. From there she was wrapped in a tight hug and practically dragged into the house. Her mother was always a little over the top, sweet, but excitable for certain. Not that Phoebe minded, that was just how she was.

“I’m so glad you’re here.” she was saying. “How was the drive in?”

“It was fine.” Phoebe commented as she looked around the living room of her childhood home.

“Oh good. I always worry about those forested roads, you know? They get so dark and slick. I’m glad you’re safe though. How's college been?”

She had continued chattering as she moved into the kitchen and continued preparing dinner. Chopping vegetables and stirring something in a large plastic mixing bowl. Phoebe walked in after her, casually, taking in her home to see if there was any sign that he was around. Her father was always missing and Phoebe found herself idly wondering if he existed at all, but sure enough he was still in the family photos. Dark chocolate brown skin, bald head, and a whisper of a moustache. He was smiling, but Phoebe had never found it convincing enough.

The spacious kitchen butted up again an even more spacious dining room. The dark wood of the mahogany dining table, polished and shining under the overhead lights was only set with two plates. It was then that Phoebe knew, for certain, that he wasn’t here. Again. But she had to know, she had to ask. She always had to ask.

“Did you forget to set a place for me?” She asked her mother with a small hint of jest in her voice.

“Oh, no, sorry honey, your father was called into the office because some project was going critical and they needed all hands on deck.”

Phoebe nodded her head. She understood, she didn’t like it, but it was an old excuse. Something was always blowing up or needed his attention or he was just at work.

Or he just wanted to avoid her.

She shoved that last thought out of her head with an aggressive kind of anger. She hated that it was even something that she had considered, but how could she not? Percival, her father, was always gone. She had been able to catch him from time to time before she had gone off to college, but even then it was few and far between. Awkward and silent dinners or the occasional moment where he was tired and just wanted to watch a movie. Oh she and Petra, Phoebe’s mother, were welcome to join him, but there was an expectation that everyone would be quiet. Hardly the kind of family bonding she had longed for.

If she had more time to unpack her thoughts she might have realized that the lack of attention at home had directly led to just how promiscuous she had become at school. Anytime she needed a sweet hit of dopamine there was always someone who wanted to sleep with her. She had the looks and the charm to make it easy too. She was effortlessly beautiful and charismatic, and that went a long way in an environment filled with people who were on their own and making adult choices for the first time.

She capitalized on those people. Not in any kind of malicious way, far from it in fact. She was far too happy to simply flirt and bat her eyelashes and smile until someone else made the first move and then she would welcome them in. It always worked, it was just what she did.

So why didn’t her father want the same thing? Was there something she was doing wrong that made him want to avoid her so much?

In the end she let a deep breath well up inside of her lungs and then seep out of her nostrils. Her mother was setting down dinner and Phoebe knew that this, like so many other evenings, would be spent in silence. They would eat, her mother would pick at her food and end up tossing out half of it. Phoebe would mutter the same one or two work replies to the questions she was asked. How was school? Fine. Making lots of friends? Yeah. Doing well in class? Yep. It all left Phoebe feeling so empty. Like the words were abundant but the substance was just not there.

Phoebe told her mom she would be happy to clear the table and do the dishes. It gave her the perfect excuse to do something with her hand, which distracted her a little bit from how upset she actually was. It had the added bonus of having the white noise of running water and clanking dishes all around her, allowing her to easily avoid any more questions that she didn’t feel like answering.

At some point her mother swooped into the kitchen, taking advantage of a small lull in Phoebe’s work as she scraped what felt like a full plate of food from her mother’s plate into the trash.

“I’m just going to take your bag up to the spare guest room on the east side, just past the study.”

Phoebe thought her voice sounded obnoxiously happy, but she thanked her all the same, smiled, and put on some of that effortless charm she was so proud of. Her mom smiled back and slipped out of the kitchen. Phoebe could only roll her eyes and shake her head. She was beginning to seriously consider just going back to her dorm for the remainder of break. At least there she would have all of her stuff.

She gritted her teeth and scrubbed against one of the pots that her mother had been using to make dinner. Pasta, it was always pasta. She never stirred it frequently enough and some of the noodles stuck to the bottom of the pan and it was a pain to scrub them out of there. Particularly when Phoebe was lost in thought and lost her grip on the pan and sloshed a potful of warm, soapy water against her.

She looked down at herself. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was nice. A simple white shirt that hid the lacy purple bra she was wearing under it, denim shorts with black leggings under them. All of which were sopping wet now. She let her head fall back and her mouth opened in a silent, frustrated scream. Her hands clenched into fists and she took one, single, deep breath. She wanted to scream, loud and angry and just let it all out. She had an image to keep up though and worse, she would have to explain to her mother why she was yelling.

Instead she took a moment, calmed her thoughts, and turned off the water. She dried her hands and left the remaining dishes in the sink. They probably needed to soak anyway.

She refrained from angrily stomping through the house towards the guest room. She pushed open the handsomely polished doors to her father’s study, because that was the route she had always taken. There was a hall that led down to the eastern side of the manor, and it was the ‘proper’ way to get there. It was also the longer way. The hall turned left and right and seemed to flow around her father’s study. One part office, one part library, if Percival was home and not avoiding Phoebe or Petra, he was in this room.

Book shelves made of dark woods and trimmed in gorgeous purple heart wood lined one wall. The shelves were packed, almost to full, with books on any number of topics. There were still holes in the line up, presumably left for her father to fill in the gaps when he acquired a new book or reference manual. There were little places all over the office to slip in something new, never any place for Phoebe though.

In one corner was a small reading desk with an overstuffed chair and ottoman. It looked comfortable enough, standing guard just to one side of it was a small, round table marred by rings in the wood where mugs of tea would be left to cool. A little brass lamp, and a new addition. A small booklet was left there. The softcover wrapped around itself and left sitting there along with a small notebook. Her father had been here and by the looks of it left in a hurry. Phoebe only snorted at that before hauling herself out of the study and into the hall, then on to her room.

She stripped out of her shirt and threw it across the guest room to the floor. She wrestled with the button on her denim shorts too and tossed them into the pile. She ran her hands up and over her bra, thankfully it hadn’t gotten soaked, but if she was changing there was no point in keeping it on. She decided that pajamas would replace her clothes.

Unclasping her bra and letting her breasts free was a bit of a relief, a weight that was literally lifted from her shoulders. Her panties and leggings too felt freeing. Shuffling through her bag she produced some comfortable flannel pajamas and slipped into them in short order. The white and black checkered pattern on them clashing and highlighting her own dark skin nicely. She admired herself in the full length mirror on the closet doors before smirking and feeling a little better already.

Softly padding back towards the kitchen took Phoebe back through the study and she glanced at her father’s comfortable reading chair once again. Just seeing him abandon his work like that reignited something inside of her. She would never know why, but instead of continuing on with her evening, she stopped and looked at the book. She couldn’t see the cover of it as it was, but there were pages there that she could see. It looked like some kind of technical manual of some sort.

Out of simple spite for her father leaving her for the weekend, she flopped into the chair, reached over, and pulled over the manual and the notebook. She wanted to know what he was doing before she returned home.

It took her a moment, and a few pages flipped through before she began to figure things out.

This was a manual of some kind, unsurprising given her father’s profession, but there was something familiar about the sketches and schematics inside. The notes, too, were a little harder to decipher. Not that Phoebe couldn’t understand them, it just seemed like every time she tried to look at a word and read it, the letters would nudge themselves around just enough to make her lose focus and she had to start over. After a few tries, she simply gave up on trying to read her father’s writings.

The drawings, on the other hand, were a little fuzzy, but the more she looked the more clear they became. It took an immense amount of focus, but there was something in her brain that made her want to uncover what was there. She focused hard on it and in a short amount of time shapes began to take form.

The outline she was looking at was a woman, adult, and somewhere in her forties. Slender and beautiful with a bust that would have raised some eyebrows. It was about this time that Phoebe noticed that the page had a few clear plastic sheets that would overlay more and more information as they were put in place over the drawing. There was writing on it, and frustratingly she also couldn’t read these words. She flipped a plastic sheet over, and found the printed design of mechanical parts.

Internal mechanisms, placed where any other human organ would be. The words might have explained what they were, but it was clear to Phoebe that this was a schematic for some kind of humanoid robot. She examined it closely, not fully understanding what she was looking at. Perhaps another overlay would help. She flipped the next clear page into place.

Wires, so many wires. Miles, it seemed, of copper core wires and fiber optics spread out along the entirety of the woman's outline. Dense at the spine, the head, and thinning out as they crawled towards the extremities. There was, however, another incredibly dense cluster near the crotch, a fact that made Phoebe smirk and shake her head a little. Her father was clearly looking into sex robots. The pervert.

Another page fell into place. Phoebe looked at it and it looked back at her. There was a long eon spanning moment of silence. Both her mind and her voice seemed locked down to the point that it didn't even exist. She tried so hard to find thoughts, but each one was an oily mess that slipped out of her grasp the moment she thought she could find it. There wasn’t something staring back at her from the page, but rather someone.

It was her. Her own face. Blank, expressionless, and unfeeling.

Then, something shattered in her mind. A moment of clarity so pure that parts started falling into place. Her mouth seemed to hang open, just a little bit, nothing more than parted lips and wide eyes. Her eyes had been so locked on the image of herself, her bare skin on display for anyone to see, with the faint ghost of circuitry and wires below, that she didn’t notice the other changes. She forced her eyes to move, to look somewhere else. There were words here too, but she could read these. They didn’t jitter or slip away from her.

It was her name, some kind of identifying serial number or model number listed just below it. She blinked, her mind scrambling to take it all in. She flipped back a page and was terrified to see that the words here didn’t obscure themselves either. She could read them clearly. She flipped back again, the mechanical systems in place of human organs were clearly labeled. Ventilation and cooling systems for lungs, core personality processors in her chest, and sexual modulation hardware in between her legs.

She could hardly stand to look at it. She could hardly stand to not look at it. She had to, but she didn’t want to. The truth was right in front of her and yet it made her heart pound. No, she had no heart. She was a machine, she had no heart, so what was it? According to the notes it was nothing at all, it was a small system there that pumped fluids around her body for cooling. The notes indicated that it was specifically built to thump like a human heart as a means of obfuscating that there was no heart there at all.

She had to look away. She had to find something else. She flipped through several other pages of notes and entries until she found another female outline. There were clear plastic pages here too, but the framework was different. Phoebe, without pulling down those overlays, somehow knew who it was. She had to know though, she had to see it and understand. Flipping down all of the overlay pages all at once, she only confirmed what she knew to be true. The name across the top, ‘Petra Pierce SC230-B EXD-3450’ with her mother’s empty face looking back at her told her everything.

Phoebe and her mother were androids. Machines. Judging from the wiring charts, little more than sexbots. She knew it now. She slapped the booklet closed and tossed it to the sidetable. The cover sported a black and white square of scrambled dots. When she looked at it, she felt something, a sweeping sensation that rolled over her…not her brain…her whatever it was. She felt like she should ignore it, but she could clearly see it now. The edges, the black cover, the pages. She squinted at it and stepped away before seizing the book and stuffing it in her pocket, if for no other reason than to get it out of her sight.

She stood in the study and looked around, briefly wondering what else was hidden in here. Surely some of the books on the shelves stored other tidbits of hidden knowledge. She blinked briefly, unsure if she was seeing things correctly. She had just walked through here earlier, and she knew for certain that there were large empty spots in the collection of books. Now, though, the empty spots were filled with other books, each one marked with the same scramble of black and white coded patterns. Every time she looked at one she felt that same wash over her head.

The books were all vaguely about the same topics. Wiring and circuitry designs, advanced coding techniques, philosophy of artificial intelligence.

Phoebe blinked again. Pieces were beginning to fall into place. The pattern triggered some kind of forceful programming that would cause her to simply ignore them. Then why had she been able to look in the notebook on the side table? She pulled it out of her pocket again. The code was there, plain as day, but it had no effect on her now. As she held it the cover seemed to fold over a little, attempting to curl back into the position it had been in when she found it.

She hadn’t seen the code when she picked it up. It was hidden and she was able to look through the book. The letters had been scrambled though, something in her own mind…her own programming…had recognized them and obscured them. Now, though, she could see them just fine. Now that she knew what she was…what she wasn’t…

Her feet were moving, padding softly out of the room and towards her own room. Through the study, past her father’s chair. She snatched up his notepad from where it was resting and she burst into the guest room. She closed the door, twisting the lock on the handle and leaning against it. She felt like she needed the support badly.

Tossing the booklet and notepad on the ground in front of her, Phoebe slid down the door and half sat, half crumpled into the floor. She tried to breathe deeply, hoping that the deep breathing would help to calm her. She had taken half a dozen breaths before she realized that her breathing had no bearing on her emotional state. In fact, her emotional state was just ones and zeroes. Armed with that knowledge she closed her eyes, let out her breath and forced herself to not take another one. She sat, and found it was a struggle, but she did it. She waited and mentally counted for a minute, then a second, then a third.

She was fine, she was still…operational. She was still thinking and feeling and detecting the world around her. In that time she willed her mind to calm, to settle down and focus on herself. On what she was. On accepting that she was a creation that was assembled in a factory, or at least a lab somewhere, and not born of a human. As time whittled away, she found it easier and easier to calm down and by the time the three minute mark came and went, she found herself not being terrified of the revelation.

In fact, the initial shock and surprise had been replaced with acceptance, curiosity, and even a hint of glee. She knew she was something special, something unique and that only served to feed some of her ego.

There was, however, a part of her mind that still grappled with the idea that she wasn’t a flesh and blood girl. That she was a machine. Holding your breath and calming down was a good first test, but she needed to see it, to see her, the real her. If that was true. So, she crossed her legs in front of her, pulled her father’s books close and began to flip through the pages. As her eyes flicked over schematics and drawings and diagrams, she picked out a few pieces here and there and studied them a little closer.

Critically, she found that there were access phrases she could speak, out loud, to command both her and her mother. She wasn’t too keen on knowing that there were simple phrases that could be spoken to make her obedient. Then again, using them on her mother seemed like a handy piece of information to keep in the back of her mind. She also found a whole section on access panels, of which she assumed she had many. One of the more important ones seemed to be lodged in her wrist though. Nestled between the radius and ulna, or whatever she had that matched those, would be a small panel, and under it a data cable of some kind.

Phoebe sucked in a deep breath and closed her eyes and concentrated, hard, on her wrist. She wasn’t entirely sure anything would happen. She had a wandering thought that maybe the diagrams were for some future project. Maybe a replica of her and her mother.

She peeked one eye open, sure that she would see nothing but the usual dusky dark flesh on her arm. Instead there was an opening there, she could see the cable and the tip of it. It was resting on top of some kind of plastic shell and just below it was a myriad of wires, and the occasional bit of circuitry peering out at her. There was no doubt about it, even as her mind struggled to both accept and find an excuse for it. Maybe she just had a prosthetic arm, and maybe it was so traumatic that her mind just forgot about it. That was a thing that could happen, right? There had to be a logical explanation, it was simply impossible that she was a robot.

But she had her proof. It was right there. Her index finger and thumb pinched the head of the wire and pulled it out. She pulled it out past her arm, until it reached the limitation of whatever spare amount of cabling was spooled up inside of her. She just has to think about retracting it and she feels the tug, her body wanting to pull the cable back in.

Now it was true, confirmed, and undisputable. Phoebe was an android, no doubt there, and she had to assume that her mother was as well. She was about to get back on her feet and go confront her mother about it, when a thought crossed her mind…her processors? Phoebe decided she needed to start thinking more like a machine than a human. What if her mother also didn’t know? What if her father was the only person who knew what they both were?

She flipped back to the notes and manual in her lap. There were command phrases that would control her mother, and she wouldn’t even know it. Then again, the worst that could happen would be that her mother gives her a weird look as she rambles off some words. She could even just chalk it up to an inside joke she and her friends played. Fear and anger was simmering down into curiosity again and Phoebe felt a rising sensation of glee.

It was freeing, in a way, she decided as she strode through the study once again. This time with purpose. She was a machine, and not a human, like one of those service droids but far more capable, and clearly sentient in some way. Now that she knew what she was, sapience washed over her and she knew that there were no longer any constraints on her. Perhaps her mother would be the same way.

She found her mother in the kitchen, finishing up the dishes that Phoebe had started earlier and left there. She looked up, her face still smiling, her posture one of slight annoyance, but nothing else.

“Well there you are. I was wondering where you went off to.” Petra said with a voice just dripping with a tone meant to offend no one.

Phoebe only nodded and glanced down at the notebook in her hand one last time, she wanted to get the phrasing right.

“Honey, did you watch the news today?” Phoebe said, unconsciously lowering her voice just a little.

Petra stopped, set down the dish, and turned to look at Phoebe. For a moment, she thought that her mother was about to scold her or at very least look at her funny. But there was a counter phrase that her mother should reply with.

“No, honey, did something happen?”

That was it! It was working. Phoebe replied, “I don’t know, you tell me.”

Her mother stood upright, her hands at her side, her face looking straight through Phoebe and into nothingness at all. Her spine aligned into a perfect posture. She didn’t say anything further, at least not on her own.

“Mom?” Phoebe ventured a question.

“Yes, Phoebe?”

“Are you a…a robot too?” Phoebe asked.

“Yes.” The answer was so dry and matter-of-fact that it took Phoebe a little by surprise.

Phoebe had done it. She and her mother were both androids. Surely her father had made them both, but the question was why. Another question to ask him once she managed to corner him and get an opportunity to ask.

“Do you have a, uhm…” She looked down at the booklet again. “-A wrist access port?”

“Yes.”

“Open it.” Her words came out more as a question and request rather than an order.

Petra, in turn, held out her right arm and with a distant hiss, her wrist panel slid open and revealed an almost identical data cable as Phoebe had. Petra’s was a little more scuffed and showed clear signs of being used a lot more than Phoebe’s had. As she tugged the cable out of her mother’s wrist, she noticed something else. Just below it was a matched input port that looked like it might accommodate the same plug-in. Which gave Phoebe an idea.

She looked down at her own wrist and focused on it. It seemed easier than before. Her own wrist hissed and revealed the same data cable. Phoebe took less time to think this time and plucked the cable from her arm and plugged it into her mother.

In an instant her field of vision was assaulted by a flurry of colors and shapes. Many of which she only caught a fleeting glance at before they disappeared. A myriad of black boxes with green blocky text and briefly glanced windows. Then it was done, like coming up for a fresh breath of air, but Phoebe had only been under the proverbial water for a moment. Now, though, she knew something more. She was vaguely aware of not just her mother, but something deeper inside of her mother. Structures and files and folders. Not only that, she was aware of her own file structure as well.

For every directory filled with esoteric files names and extensions, Phoebe found a file in her own systems that matched it. Some had clear labels, personality programming was easy enough to find, but as Phoebe poked around there was no glowing folder that was labelled as “sentience” or “awareness that you’re actually a robot.”

She did, however, stumble across a large swath of emotional responses. She popped that open and found that there was an easily accessed array of singular files. She had to imagine that these were just executed programs and that there was some other, more complicated system to gauge how and when and how intensely to run them. Unfortunately, her curiosity was beginning to get the best of her.

She found one, surprise, and on a whim bid her mother’s systems to run it. Petra’s face turned into a mock mask of surprise, she gasped, and even took a half step back. Doing so also surprised Phoebe who squeaked once and took her own half step back. After the moment had passed, Petra remained where she was, meanwhile Phoebe realized she had probably just run the same process as her mother. She glanced down at the datacable and idly wondered if the connection was a two way thing, or if it had just been her own systems responding to a sudden event. She needed more data.

She discovered an emotional response in the folder labeled as ‘neutral’ and ran that. In an instant Petra returned to a relaxed stance, like before, though her face was far more comfortable now. She looked almost bored. Phoebe shuffled around the directory some more, looking for something that would be innocuous and more importantly, not require too much body movement.

She smirked, raised an eyebrow and then looked up at her mother as she ran the emote code block for ‘moan_sexual_45’. As expected Petra’s mouth opened and her eyes closed. Hands moved up to her mother’s, admittedly ample breasts. She squeezed them hard, rolling her hands along them and pinching her nipples through her top. Her head fell back and from her throat erupted a deep, husky moan that rolled out and then reverberated around the kitchen. Phoebe all at once found herself blushing and being grateful that there were no neighbors within earshot.

As expected, Petra remained in that position. Head back, fingers pinching at her breasts and her back arched until Phoebe reran the script to return her to a neutral position. As Petra returned to a neutral stance, Phoebe was one part relieved to see that the flow of data was not a two way street in the cable, and oddly enough, found herself to be more than a little mischievous. Watching her mother moan and grope at herself filled her with a new feeling. She was free, but what would that level of obedience feel like? She was certainly no stranger to letting someone else take charge of her, particularly in the bedroom. It was just curiosity afterall.

She found her own file system, tunneled down into it and found her personality files. She noticed that there were some emotive responses that she had that her mother did not, and vice versa. That was a topic she could explore later, for now she was on a mission. She found some of her own erotically oriented responses and ran one, just to feel it.

The command opened up in her field of vision, briefly, and then disappeared. Everything seemed to be in slow motion to her as she saw the command load, run, and then her whole body shivered. Her shoulders hunched a little and she leaned forward, her hands coming to rest on the soft fabric over her knees. She shuddered and her mouth hung open as she let out a whisper of a moan. She felt her body shaking and her feminine folds quivering as a low level orgasm rolled through her body in an instant. She felt flushed, hot and ready for more. She brought herself back up to look at her mother, smiling a wicked grin and already moving into her mother’s file systems.

She discovered, by accident, a buried directory that contained scripts that were premade routines. There were hundreds if not thousands of them. Some were clearly just how to cook foods, others were whole routines on how to wake up and get ready for the day. Some were made for niche repetitive tasks like cleaning or laundry. The vast majority of them were mundane, but Phoebe found some that were much more fun.

Her mother, at this point, was every bit an object like she was and her mind, if she even had one, was offline. She had spent plenty of time crawling through Petra’s files, and she found that there were whole massive directories missing from her storage media, directories that Phoebe had. Directories and file structures and programming bases that were all oriented towards self actuation and sentience. Phoebe drew the only conclusion she could. Her mother, unlike her, was little more than a toy for her father to use.

Maybe it was spite for her father, a genuine curiosity, or a slowly simmering bit of code that she would never know existed. But something was driving Phoebe’s decisions and influencing her to make impulsive choices that were more self satisfying than thought out.

Petra’s sexual subroutines were extensive. Phoebe didn’t take the time to count them out, but judging by how long it took her to scroll to the end of that particular directory, there had to be magnitudes more than almost any other programming set. That suited her just fine. At the root of the sexual response folder, there were few programming scripts waiting there, and Phoebe cautiously opened one. She found huge blocks of programming that made little, if any sense to her. Some of it was in English, some of it clearly meant something to someone, but not Phoebe. What she did find was, what equated to, a start file. She ran it and Petra responded a moment later.

Her eyes glazed over for a moment and then became hazy as her face fell. She blushed, and her mouth curved into a love drunk smile. Phoebe had found a few places to enter a target subject, and had just put her name in those fields and hoped for the best. It seemed to be working.

Petra stepped up to Phoebe, her hand rising to her own daughter's face and cradled it. The data cable was still plugged in and jammed into Phoebe’s cheek a little, but once Petra’s lips met hers, there was no need to think about it any more. For long minutes Phoebe didn’t think about anything other than how very good everything felt. Her mother was clearly built to be an expert at this kind of thing. Her hands had roamed from Phoebe’s face, up and around and were tangled into her platinum-blond hair. Even the small, gentle tugs on her hair brought delight to Phoebe.

At some point she remembered the booklet of commands and schematics in her pocket. She recalled some of the commands in there and a memory loaded and executed for her core operating system to process. The commands she had told herself she would recall for later.

“P- Petra!” Phoebe muttered between deep passionate kisses. Once she had spoken the name her mother stopped and simply looked at her. Eyes drowsy and lips ever ready to kiss her again. “Uh, recognize current target as administrator.”

“Confirmed.” Petra purred.

Phoebe swallowed, a purely human response and she felt a new flash of heat and arousal. “Confirm verbal, uh, confirm verbal command priority.”

“Confirmed.” Petra replied with a smoky darkness in her voice.

Phoebe smiled at that, “Resume.”

Just the order Petra had been waiting for. She dove back against her daughter's mouth and pressed hard against her. This time Phoebe felt her mouth invaded by her mother’s artificial tongue and she did nothing to stop it. In fact, she let her own synthetic tongue tangle with it. They clashed and jockeyed for position in the space between their lips. It was aggressive and sensual all at once, a give and take of lust and love.

It was unclear who progressed things first. To Phoebe’s recollection Petra was the first to wrap her hands around her daughter and squeeze her ass, gripping it hard and shoving their crotches together. Then again, at that same moment Phoebe was also moving her hands to her mother’s chest, groping at her and digging her well manicured nails into the deep cut of her shirt. Once there, it was only a matter of dragging it downward until Petra’s breasts were out, on display, and easily played with.

There was moaning as Phoebe broke their kiss and instead pressed her lips into Petra’s throat, kissing wildly and moving ever downward. She had unleashed her mother’s tits and now she wanted to savor them. She had to, her programming demanded it, and she would obey.

She stooped forward, aware of the tether between her wrist and her mother’s, and doing her level best not to run out of slack on it. Still, she managed to clamp her mouth over her mother’s nipple and followed her operating system's next orders. She suckled gently at first, pulling back a little and lowering her teeth just enough to scrape over the surface. Petra’s voice squealed in delight as her daughter moved back in, sucking harder now and letting her free hand move to the other breast. Massaging and groping at it before moving to pinch and roll her mother’s nipple.

Petra allowed herself to be toyed with for a short minute or two, but that wasn’t what she was built for, it wasn’t what her programming demanded. She let her daughter have her fun and once she felt her wane just a bit she reached down and took hold of Phoebe’s chin, tilting her head up to look at her mother. There was nothing but desire to see and Petra raised her up to eye level once again. She resumed the previous kiss, a fact that Phoebe felt was an odd choice. She wondered if she had to manually run some other command script to get her to do something new. She began to sift through them but stopped when she felt her mother moving.

Hands were on Phoebe’s chest. They were gently squeezing her breasts to start with, but quickly moved to the buttons that held her flannel pajama shirt closed. One by one, with meticulous, calculated, mechanical precision each one came free. Once there was enough room for a hand to slide in, Petra took her opportunity. One hand was still fumbling at the buttons, while the other invaded her top and resumed her play. Her daughter's breasts, smaller than her own, but still perfectly proportioned, were within her grasp.

Phoebe snapped her hands up to help her mother undo her top and quickly shrugged out of it, letting it fall to the floor. It might as well have fallen into a black hole for all that Phoebe cared. The sensors on her skin couldn't detect it any more, so it no longer mattered.

Her mother was pawing at her breasts. Stroking her erect nipples and lifting the soft flesh up to meet her mouth. Gentle kisses gave way to little nibbles and more kisses. So very many kisses. But Petra was never satisfied with it, and Phoebe could tell. She felt hands wrap around her again, cupping her rear end, then hoisting her up.

Phoebe yelped, then smirked, as she realized this was the second time today that her mother had made her run her surprised emote programming. Now that she knew what it was, and how it was executed, she couldn't help but smirk as she thought about it. She knew there were probably hundreds of thousands of small programs running inside of her all the time, and the more she thought of those little things the more aroused she became at the very concept of it.

She found her pants pulled free, then the cool feel of the kitchen counter on her thighs and butt. She shivered once, smiled because she wondered what it was that had just executed, and then slipped back into the raw sexual bliss.

The warmth of hands on her inner thighs let Phoebe know that her mother wanted access to her sexual module. She had no doubt that Petra could have forced her legs wide open, but Phoebe wasn’t going to struggle against it, she wanted it, she wanted her mother’s mouth on her pussy. If this gorgeous sexbot wanted it, she would have it. She opened her legs wide, removing any barriers her mother might have encountered. As expected, she dove right in and Phoebe placed her hand on the back of Petra’s head, gently encouraging her to push inside of her.

Petra’s hands moved up and gently spread Phoebe’s outer lips, letting her tongue glide easily inside of her wet and waiting slit. Phoebe groaned and hunched forward again, processing a very familiar set of programming blocks and moaning softly as her mother began to eat her out with eager hunger. Lapping and licking at the sexual module that Phoebe now knew was densely packed with so much wiring and fiber optic cabling. She could practically see the code loading into cached memory and executing itself as her mother pleasured her.

After a short time Phoebe felt her mother’s hands drop from her wet clit and drop down to her own pussy. The sounds of her mother both eating well at her own sex and the sound of two fingers sliding in and out of her own slit filled the room. The wet sounds were lost among muffled moans and outright cries of abject pleasure. Petra’s hips were grinding hard, pushing forward in an attempt to grind out every last bit of leverage on her own sex. Meanwhile Phoebe’s arousal was screaming towards a climax as a torrent of raw sensual desires cascaded into her processor core.

It was a shame she would never reach her orgasm.

Petra’s hand was busy at her clit and working hard to bring the mindless sexbot to orgasm. The cable that tethered her wrist to her daughter was at its very limits. Phoebe wasn’t actively tracking that distance and in fact, had completely forgotten about it. She was unaware that her earlier experiments to prove that it was only a one way street actually gave her a false report. Data shared between those two machines was very real and the feedback loop had been building and building as both robots shared a portion of their raw sexual data feedback with one another.

Not that it would matter as Phoebe suddenly brought her hands up to her chest. She needed so much more pleasure and her intent was to grope at her own breasts. Her nipples practically ached for her to pinch and twist them and feel more. Her hands craved the sensation of her soft breasts against their palms. Her hands would never reach them.

She had moved too far as she brought her hands suddenly upward and the connection between her and her mother snapped. The cable came free, but the lingering data connection was still searching for the pairing.

The malfunction and total breakdown started oddly for each of the feminine androids in the kitchen that day. Sharing data between the two had opened a kind of extra space between them. Data that had accumulated in Phoebe’s programming stack had been generously handled by her mother, a robot made for sex. Phoebe on the other hand had so much more going on in her complicated systems and the sheer volume of data was unbelievable. Under any other circumstances she would have been fine. She’d fucked more than her share of men and women in her dorm. In those situations, though, her operating system didn't need to balance both the knowledge that she was also a robot alongside the actual sexual data and processing.

She was coded to self manage that data stack and there were failsafes in place that would manage the data there. While connected to her mother, she had shared some of the space between them. Her mother had, in essence, handed her a whole extra plate to heap sexual data onto. Now it had been yanked away and the data was overflowing everywhere. Her operating system still tried to manage it, dumping programs and data that it felt might be unneeded. The unfortunate part was that all of it was necessary.

Phoebe began to twitch and her hips bucked on the kitchen counter. Her moans and cries turned into a string of sounds rather than coherent language. Even those sounds began to devolve into little more than half formulated syllables and chunks of the sound files her A.I. had crafted. The motor systems in her back and hips lost their spot in the processor queue as they were shunted out to make room for other items with a higher priority. As they were removed, Phoebe’s power management sub-processors struggled to keep her upright.

There was still enough lingering power and data in those motors systems to keep her from immediately falling over, instead she slowly sank backwards. The energy in the myriad of motor systems slowly fading and causing her to lean backwards in a way that would have made a human extremely uncomfortable. Her, though, she was only a machine at this point, and barely even that. She was a computer that was on the fritz and it showed. Her voice was fading in volume into a scramble of error messages that never made it past her throat and sounds that sounded more like a simple squeak, punctuated by static.

Once she was fully laying on the counter, her head mere inches from the sink filled with soapy warm water and dirty dishes, her whole system finally crashed. It reached the very limitation of what it could handle. Her processors were pegged at one hundred percent for too long and the failsafes that had been built into her took over. They cut the power, performed an emergency shutdown on her operating system and left her right where she was. Eyes half open and her mouth still hanging open in a lustful moan that was never verbalized.

Petra, meanwhile, lost a connection to her daughter. She hadn’t been dependent on the connection like Phoebe had been, but the massive stream of shared data slammed repeatedly against a shut door, trying with desperation to send to the intended recipient. The data simply disappeared once it had failed enough times. Petra’s operating system, on the other hand, had lost something.

Phoebe had been marked as her primary user and more than that, her current administrator. She was in a state of raw obedience and the commands didn’t simply go away because her user was not present. Adding to that was the rampant amount of sexual programming that had been run, and without being explicitly told to return to a neutral state, she was simply going to keep executing it over and over. Her user, her daughter, her administrator, all of them identified now as simply a machine that was offline, and none of that impacted how she operated.

She continued to devour Phoebe’s offline and inactive vaginal assembly, content to keep pleasuring it as she had been all along. Her fingers rubbing and swirling around her own clit as her processors looped round and round on their sensual tirade.

Part of Phoebe’s failsafe was a built-in reboot and recovery process. It resided in a secluded little sub-system inside of her and it reactivated once an emergency state was detected. Laying inactive on the kitchen counter after an intense system failure certainly qualified. It sent a small jolt of power to reactivate the main power systems, which in turn brought the storage media inside of her to life. A quick check found that there was no shortage of corrupted data, just how extensive that corruption went would require a much more intensive scan and fix process. The failsafe was not programmed for that, but what it could do was revert her to an older build, the last known good configuration.

Phoebe hadn’t exactly had a long history of new builds. She wasn’t a test platform, she was a final product. One that had been laid down on a base foundation and set to run. Reverting her to a previously good configuration took everything back to her basic foundational programming. One that was built on Petra’s programming. A sexbot’s programming.

Her reactivation took some time. There were a number of scans that needed to take place to ensure that every part of her physical body was working as intended. No damage caused by her emergency state, systems and sub-systems needed to check in and authenticate and be authorized for operation. Everything passed inspection, but her operating system never re-engaged her human emulation, instead it booted into her base protocols.

WIth power restored, she pushed herself back up, already squeaking in pleasure as her mother continued to please her. Phoebe decided that she had had enough fun, this other unit deserved to receive the same treatment.

She placed her hands on either side of Petra’s head and lifted it away from her pussy and up to meet Phoebe’s eyes. Petra re-established a visual connection to her administrator, switching to a command mode that had taken a backseat to the pleasure programming she had been executing. Phoebe, meanwhile, nudged herself off of the counter and continued her momentum down and into her mother’s mouth. THe kiss lasted only for as long as it took Phoebe to gently rock her mother back on her heels and then guide her down to the cold kitchen floor.

Once there, the favor of eating out this other fembot’s slit was returned. Phoebe had no mind for anything other than bringing pleasure to this one. She used every trick she was programmed with. Her thumbs gently spread open the vaginal opening before her and then lavishing kisses along the thighs and around the spread lips before her. The fresh burst of lewd sounding moans from her target was enough to tell her that she was doing well.

She leaned in, plunging her tongue deep inside of Petra. One hand moved to lift and place her mother’s leg over her shoulder while the other began to gingerly swirl and toy with the artificial clitoral bulb before her. Her software judged, by the squirming, moaning, and heavy breathing, that Petra was enjoying the feeling. Phoebe’s OS was happy to keep doing exactly that. At some point Phoebe felt her mother move and writhe, clearly approaching a climax but not yet following through with it. Phoebe’s operating system was fine with that, as it gave her plenty of time to move her own hand down to her sopping wet slit and toy with her own clit for a while.

The amount of sexual data being accumulated and processed was truly staggering, but with no human emulation to clutter up the process queue, it was easily moved through and executed and tagged. The pair might have stayed there indefinitely, but at a certain point, Petra’s sexbot programming took hold and decided that this other unit had had enough fun, it was her turn to feel the pleasure.

Petra moved up and turned around on Phoebe. Gently leaning her daughter back and resuming her routine by sliding two fingers into her daughter's slit and licking eagerly at the exposed slit. Phoebe allowed it for a while, until she felt like Petra had had her fun, it was time for her to feel the pleasure.

So they carried on for nearly an hour. Flipping back and forth, giving and receiving pleasure from one another. Each time there was a hard switch in their programming data from dominant to subservient. From giving to receiving. Those switches were never cleared away though, there was always a lingering bit of data that demanded they get back to providing pleasure rather than receiving. Instead of resuming a previous state, a new one was created and stacked on top of the other. Each one would need to be resolved eventually, or as the two mindless sex drones were about to find out, they crashed.

Those profile switches, from submissive to dominant, built up over time. In a more basic state like they were, there was simply not enough complex programming to clear out the old and swap to a new one. Soon, those profiles began to merge into one another, clashing programming tried and failed and tried again to overrule the other. The subtle vibrations inside of both of them was imperceptible at first. The signals from the operating system were slowly but surely trying to move their bodies both left and right at once. Wanting to both pleasure and receive pleasure. Follow two sets of programming at the same time.

Before long, the processor queue was stacked full of programming that wanted them to do two very different acts at the same time. That was when the conflicting programming forced itself upon both of the mindless sexbot. Slamming hard into one another. If Phoebe had her human emulation running there would have been an automated process that would have made the choice of which one got to take control. A complicated array of social prompts, personality preferences, and a little bit of random chance would have made the choice without her even knowing. None of that was here now, and both mother and daughter were suffering because of it.

The operating system was the first to take the hit. Eventually the sexual programming insisted on both aspects at once, and the OS tried to fulfil that request. But there were simply no more system resources available, no more programming to help make a choice, and no option to simply reject one of the top priority code bases. With no choices left, it made the only logical choice. Everyone loses and the operating system crashes.

Both Phoebe and Petra, at roughly the same time, spasmed and writhed on the floor as data and power surged wildly through their bodies. The operating system was no longer in control and whatever instructions and commands had been sent before would execute until they couldn’t. Legs and arms moved in erratic and unpredictable motions. Hands and fingers twisted and curled into claws and then spread out wide before flopping to the kitchen floor. Phoebe’s head was still swivelling left and right as her operating system failed her and for about a minute the motor systems in her neck whined as they kept moving her neck array back and forth until eventually the power was gone.

Petra’s hips buckled and the fluid control systems in her sex surged a bit, causing a pool of juices and lubricants to pool around her on the kitchen floor as her body seized and flopped. Her hands slapped against the floor, attempting in vain to push her back up to resume her programming, only to find themselves robbed of all power. In time, she simply shut down, her eyes open and mouth agape, looking up and nothing at all.

Phoebe became vaguely aware of someone in the room. No, there were a few people. At least three sets of distinct footsteps, shuffling and muffled by something on their shoes, milled around the room. It was bright, she could tell that even without opening her eyes, the light itself cast a strange reddish pink glare against her eyes. She scrunched up her eyelids in a vain attempt to keep the light out, but she knew that would only work for so long. She needed to wake up.

Something was touching the back of her head. It felt cold, and it was pressing in harder than it needed to. She could also hear it, not that it was something near her, but rather she could hear it inside of her. Like something rooting around inside of her skull, inside of her brain. She felt the sound more than she heard it.

She remembered that she didn’t have a brain. She remembered that she was a robot and not a human.

Her eyes opened, slowly, attempting to take in the room before anyone noticed that her eyes were open. She was indeed in a bright room, the brilliant fluorescent lights embedded in the ceiling were casting a brightness that stung her eyes. There were people in the room too, and none of them seemed to show any concern that she had opened her eyes. Either they hadn’t noticed or, more likely, they didn’t care.

Someone was, in fact, rooting around inside of her skull. Her eyes darted to one side, the shock of platinum-blond hair draped over a small post on the table triggered a thought. That was her hair, someone was inside of her head, literally. She looked the other direction to see if she could see who, even just a glimpse would help. That was when she fully registered what was in the middle of the room.

She thought she might have been in the center of the room, and from a certain point of view she was correct. She was currently off to one side, upright and looking out into the room. At the center were two stainless steel tables that looked cold. She saw her mother on one of them. She was completely naked, her face looking up at the ceiling with that same neutral face that she had worn when Phoebe had commanded her. Someone was hovering by her lower body, somewhere between her chest and pelvis. Phoebe could see that there was something wrong as well. Part of Petra’s abdomen was missing, exposing the internal workings inside of her. It was too odd of an angle for Phoebe to really see what it looked like, but the person there was sliding something inside of her.

Next to her mother’s table was another stainless steel table. Phoebe recognized her own body. The gentle curvature of her hips and the smooth roll of her breasts. Her arms, relaxed and at her side, her legs and feet jutting down from her own hips, at peace. Her eyes clicked to the neck, more importantly, what was missing from the neck.

Phoebe’s body, her body, was missing its head. It had been detached and presumably brought over to where it rest now. Clicked into place on some kind of mounting device so that a technician could remove her hair, crack open her skull, and tinker inside of her. A rising sense of fear clutched at her. What were they doing to her? Were they going to make her forget what she was? Were they going to delete that part of her?

She was about to formulate some kind of cry for help, a scream, anything to help her, when she heard a door open and then close. She couldn’t see who had just entered as the door seemed to be behind where her head was mounted, but she certainly recognized the voice laced with a British accent.

“Can I have the room please?”

There was a bit of silence and Phoebe could see the masked figures in the room look at one another and then shuffle out. A moment later, a tall, handsome, balding man stepped into view. His dark skin a shade or two deeper than either Phoebe or Petra. His eyes were kind, normally, but as Phoebe looked at her father now they took on a different light. Was that shame? He leaned against the table that Phoebe’s nude and headless body rest on. He unbuttoned his suit coat and let it rest easily around him.

“You probably have a lot of questions.” He began.

“Understatement of the year..Dad” Phoebe laughed bitterly.

“That’s fair.” Percival said. He looked over his shoulder at Petra then back to Phoebe’s head. “Why don’t we start at the beginning.”

Phoebe scowled at him, her mind flooded with a torrent of anger, and fear, and confusion, and everything else in between.

“What…I mean, how and why and…” Phoebe stammered, only to be stopped when Percival held up his hand to hush her.

He sucked in a deep breath and began.

“Your mother, Petra, and I met a while ago. Probably ten or so years, maybe more, I don’t keep track of the time really.” He let out a breath that felt like he had been holding it for years. “I was drunk at a brothel that specialized in, um, in robots like you and her.”

“Sex robots?”

“Yeah. But I was so enamored with this one dancer there. She was beautiful and fun and just had the right spark. I came back for her over and over and over. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more and I asked if I could buy her outright. It took some convincing, but I made it worth his while and I took her home with me.”

“From there I tried to program her to be the kind of wife I wanted, but it was a bit of a challenge. She was made for a specific purpose, and there was only so much I could layer on top of that to change her. I think it worked well enough, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. But I had the basics, I had a starting point, you know? I wanted something more though.”

“So a little while later I commissioned another robot. Based on Petra’s design with some tweaks to the body shape and programming sets, all of it built on the foundation I had made for Petra.”

“Me? You built me?” Phoebe interrupted when her father paused.

“Yeah, initially you were meant to be what Petra couldn’t be. A real companion to me, and a sexual partner on par with what I wanted. In those early designs and tests though, it was fun, but you were just something else.” He looked up at her. “I saw you more as a daughter and a family member. Petra was so clearly your mother and you, well, you were your own thing. I couldn’t just wipe the slate away over and over because I wanted something to fuck. So I went back to the drawing board, I had a team of real programmers help me out and eventually I got you.”

He sighed again and pushed off of the table and strode towards the hairpiece on the table next to Phoebe’s head. He wiggled it free and stepped behind her.

“So, I’m just a plaything for you?” Phoebe asked weakly, almost afraid of the answer.

“No! Far from it.” He said as he clicked the back of her head closed and affixed her hair back in place. “You might have started that way, but after the changes to your programming I started seeing you as my daughter more than anything else. That was why I wanted to get you into a good college, to get you out in the world. I wanted you to be your own person.”

Phoebe was vaguely aware of strong hands around her neck, twisting and pushing into her skin until something clicked and unlatched itself. She was raising up and moving towards her body. SHe soon found herself tucked under one arm and she could see her father pressing something inside of the neck stump on her body. A moment later it twitched and came to life.

“Here, sit up and hold out your arms.” He said.

Phoebe was confused how she could do that, her head wasn’t even connected. Then again, yesterday she wouldn't have believed she was a robot or that there was a panel in her arm or that her mother was a sexbot. She closed her eyes and forced herself to sit up and hold out her arms. Once she opened them she saw that her body had moved, it was sitting up, stiffly, but upright. Her arms were out, fingers outstretched and waiting. Percival gently placed her head into her own hands.

“Careful now.” He said and stepped around her, bundling up the long mane of hair into his hands to keep it out of her neck joint.

Phoebe gently brought her head up towards her neck to approximately where she thought it would connect and latch into place. Unbeknownst to her this entire process was handled by a bit of programming and she ultimately had nothing to worry about, it would be perfectly aligned every time so long as she put even a small amount of effort into getting it right. She lowered her detached head into place and with a gentle click and a distant sounding ping the locking mechanisms engaged.

“So, when Mom and I were..connected..I looked in her files and stuff. She was missing a lot of the stuff I have. Like, it feels like I have a lot more inside me than she does.”

Percival stepped around the table and leaned against the wall and looked down at his naked daughter. He shrugged out of his coat and draped it over her shoulders. “You’re not wrong. She isn’t actually sentient like you are. She’s a good imitation, for the most part, but she can’t perform like you do. You’ve grown and become a little social butterfly. Honestly, you’ve surpassed even my greatest expectations in such a short amount of time.”

He paused.

“I’m really proud of you kiddo. You know that. Like a chip off the old block.”

There was no lie there, it was pure sincerity and Phoebe could tell that it had been boiling just under a blanket of his own personal fear and shame for a long time.

“How come you never told me about…about being a robot?”

“Would you have believed me?” He asked in return.

“You could have proved it to me.”

“I know, and believe me, I wanted to. I just couldn’t find the right time or the right words. And if I’m being really honest, I was just scared. I didn’t know what would happen and I was afraid I might lose part of you.”

Phoebe just looked at him, unsure of what to say to that. The silence stretched on a bit longer.

“I was actually planning a surprise for you today. I’ve been working with the Lucidia Program to get you and Petra integrated as test units. You both would have gotten some very nice upgrades and some fresh programming and it would have set you up nicely to transition into full personhood. I’d finally be able to get you out of those stock sexbot bodies and into something that would be uniquely yours.”

“That’s why you were always at work?” Phoebe asked, feeling her anger extinguished.

“Yeah. Negotiations with Aunt Maria, planning out a new design profile, working on programming and troubleshooting. It’s a lot of work you know.” He said with a smile before looking back at Phoebe and coughing just a little. “But I shouldn't have neglected you for it..I’m, I’m sorry.”

Phoebe smiled and silently slipped off of the table and walked up to her father. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him gently. In return he folded her into an embrace as well and the two remained there, quiet and calm for a long time.

The rest of the day was a blur. Petra’s repairs were finished and she was reactivated, though she remained unaware of what had happened, at least for now. Percival explained that she needed to remain non-sentient until they could finish the work in her new chassis. Phoebe procured a pair of sweatpants and a simple shirt from the lab and wore it home until she could collect her pajamas from the kitchen floor. Once she had those, she felt the weight of the notebook in her pocket.

She took it out and looked at it once again. She could still see it, the pattern on the cover that would have scrambled her vision previously. The words inside were still legible. She now understood that these were the notes and plans her father was making for her. In the quiet of his study, alone and with his thoughts, he was still thinking of her. She brought it back to him and explained what had happened with it, to which he burst into laughter.

“Of course.” He muttered. “I asked your mother to tidy up the house, make dinner, and put this in my desk drawer. Let me guess, she was still cleaning and cooking when you got here?”

“Yeah, she was.”

“Figures. She never made it to my last request.” He sighed and chuckled. “But it looks like it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.”

Phoebe smiled, nodded and leaned into another hug before Petra’s voice called from the kitchen that dinner was ready. Percival planted a single kiss on Phoebe’s forehead and the pair strolled through the shortcut in Percival’s study towards the kitchen.