Tales of Syntech 3
Lia adjusted her tight fitting, jean-shorts onto her golden brown thighs and smoothed her pink shirt down along her generously full, C-cup breasts. Looking in the reflection of the store's window she adjusted her platinum blonde locks and smiled as she walked into the store. Getting a job at Small-Mart had been a trial as the employment comittee had her jumping through a lot of hoops to work there. Still, at the level of pay she started at it would all be worth it.
A strikingly attractive woman in her early thirties approached Lia. The woman's long, burnished blonde hair was tied into an attractive pair of braids and pinned up on her head to keep them out of her way while she worked. Her figure was average, with little fat or blemishing but a pleasing shape that fit into her shorts and collared shirt. She wore a gold vest and a nametag, emblazoned with the "Small-Mart" logo and her name, Patty.
"Hello, you must be the new girl, Lia isn't it?", asked Patty.
Lia nodded affirmingly and smiled, "Yes Ma'am. I'm here for my first day on the job."
Patty nodded and motioned for Lia to follow her. Taking her to the back of the store where the employee breakroom was located, she stopped at a locker where a stunning red-haired woman was putting on a gold vest and nametag.
Patty tapped the girl on the shoulder and said, "Shannon, this is Lia. She just started today so can you teach her what to do?"
Shannon looked at Lia and seemed a little hesitant as she blinked and replied, "Yes Ma'am. Hello. My name is Shannon. How are you?"
Lia thought that Shannon must either be a little slow or hard of hearing as her movements and speech seemed very deliberate and somewhat lacking in fluidity. Patty had stepped away out of Lia's sight so left with Shannon she responded, "I'm fine thank you Shannon. I hope we'll get along and work well together."
Shannon nodded, somewhat stiffly and blinked. Patty returned with a gold vest and a nametag with Lia's name on it. "Lia, here is your uniform, please don't lose your nametag as it has a barcode on it that will let you into the doors here and also clocks your time in and out."
Lia nodded and took the gear, putting it on and running the tag's barcode through the clock/computer. It binged at her and displayed the time she had logged in to work. Patty smiled and said, "Lia, why don't you head out onto the floor. Get a feel for the department while I talk to Shannon about what needs to be done today." Lia nodded as Patty motioned for Shannon to follower her into the office marked "Supervisor". She sighed a little and walked out onto the floor. "
Small-Mart was a warehouse store and most of the items were sold in bulk. Large sections of steel shelves stood around in aisles, holding several tons of goods that were sold from the counters and displays on the floor. Lia had been hired for her expertise in computers and she worked in the electronic goods area where displays of computers, software, and hardware, as well as DVDs and such were stocked. Next to that area were the furniture items and household electrical appliances, the entire series of aisles being referred to collectively as "Hardlines".
Lia wandered up and down the hardlines aisles and got familiar with where things were and what products she would be selling. A young woman in casual clothes walked up to her and began asking her questions about the computers there. Lia smiled and began carefully showing the woman the features of the machine and answering questions.
After several minutes of discussion and questions, the girl nodded and sighed, "Well, a thousand dollars sure is a lot to consider when buying a computer that's going to be obsolete in a year."
Lia nodded and replied, "Very true, but you have to realize that at the rate the technology is advancing, these machines are obsolete when they hit the floor. All you're doing is trying to close the gap between how soon you'll need to buy another machine or upgrade."
The girl bit her lip in a cute fashion and looked at the machine with doe-like, brown eyes. "Fine then...I guess I'll take it. Could you load it up for me please?"
Lia nodded and brought over a large cart with a flat surface and no walls. The computers were kept in very large boxes and strapped together to keep them from seperating from the monitors, and together they could add up to a lot of weight and bulk. Lia carefully squatted and gripped the sides of the boxes, placing them as close to herself as possible then lifted the heavy boxes up and out of the recess beneath the computer shelf and onto the flatcart.
"Wow!", exclaimed the woman, "That looked heavy! You're pretty strong!" Lia grinned and dusted herself off, "Aw it was no problem Ma'am. I used to be an athlete in college." Lia pushed the cart to the register and left the woman there, just as Shannon walked up.
Lia immediately noticed that Shannon seemed to be moving a little more fluidly and even smiled at her, "Your first hour on the job and you made a 1000 dollar sale. I wonder what Patty thought I needed to teach you!"
The pretty blonde nodded at Shannon and replied, "Well I still need you to show me how to run the forklifts and such, so we'll still have a busy day ahead of us." Shannon blinked and nodded, "Yes I will be happy to show you how to operate the machines."
Several weeks later
Shannon and Lia were stocking supplies on the shelves early in the morning and Lia was beginning to feel a little worn down. "If I get another papercut off these ink cartridge packages I'm going to scream!"
Shannon blinked and in her usual pleasant and cheerful way nodded, "I understand the feeling. I am feeling a little weak myself."
Lia looked at Shannon and smiled. Shannon was always so good-natured and seemed to know just what to say or how to listen when Lia was feeling the stress of the job. Come to think of it, Shannon seemed to be very work oriented. She never talked much about her personal life and never seemed to have a problem with the job or the customers. Lia had also noticed how precisely Shannon could drive the forklifts and Lia wondered if she'd ever be that talented.
With a bounce of her breasts, Lia stood up from her packing and looked at the large clock on the wall. It read 6:45 AM, fifteen minutes before the store opened. "Shannon, we need to get some more Howitzer330 printers to put on the display rack. I'll go get the forklift and get them down from the steel."
Shannon nodded agreeably as always, and smiled at Lia as she continued carefully slotting and spacing rows of printer cartridges.
Jogging a few aisles down to the big, electric forklifts that the company provided, Lia hopped on and turned the key. The 3000 pound machine sprang to life and whirred quickly down the aisles to where the printers were held up in the high steel. Lia carefully guided the forks into the pallet and pulled it off the shelf. She looked at it curiously as it came down.
Apparently some maladroit had stacked it all on one side so that all of the weight only rested on one fork, and to make matters worse, the pallet looked to be in danger of splintering at any moment. Lia decided she'd need to get the pallet down to Shannon as quick as possible in case it broke, so she drove to the printer area while the forks were coming down. Generally considered a dangerous thing to do, Lia dismissed it as there were almost no customers in the store this early, and they didn't use spotters to keep them away from the big machines.
Approaching the area, Lia noticed the young woman she'd sold the computer to on the first day talking to Shannon. She drove up quickly as they were running out of time before the store opened to let all the customers in. Suddenly the load shifted and the pallet cracked loose off of the fork!
Lia yelled at Shannon and the woman to move but it was too late as a load of printers and the shattered pallet crashed down on top of them. She jumped from the cockpit and began to pull the boxes off. Shannon stood up a couple of feet away and looked genuinely concerned, "What happened?"
The platinum-haired girl looked surprised at Shannon, then nodded at the boxes, "Help me get her out from under these!"
Together the two women pulled the boxes off and stood aghast as they viewed the ruined form beneath them.
The "young woman's" dress had been shredded open to reveal her honey colored skin which was also shredded open in a few places. Inside the girl's insides Shannon and Lia saw intricate tangles of fiber-optic cable, wiring and integrated circuitry linked to sophisticated motors and computers. A plastic tank inside the girl's torso had broken open and splattered her insides and skin with a strange, clear fluid which sparked and sizzled as it touched the components inside her.
Most horrifying of all was the girl's face. It appeared to have been popped off her head like a shell and lay to one side, still connected by cabling and tubes to the inside of her head. Lights inside her head flashed and blinked wildly as she turned her faceless head toward the girls. Sparks and servomechanized noises erupted from within the open face of the creature and the pretty face that lay beside it moved it's lips and mouth awkwardly. Eyes rolling over and up into it's face and sputtering.
Patty rushed up to the girls and looked aghast, "Girls what happened? Oh..." She straightened up and a group of women wearing lab smocks and surgical gear rushed up from somewhere in the back. Lia and Shannon were pushed aside as they carefully moved the broken girlbot to a stretcher, and began to push it quickly to the back.
One of the doctors stopped and spoke with Patty, indicating Lia and then headed after the rest of her team. Patty sighed and turned to look at her, "Lia, please come with me to my office. Shannon, you get someone to help you clear this mess up off the floor and then come see me."
Shannon nodded, looking worriedly at Lia who seemed on the verge of tears over the accident. Patty turned to Shannon as they began to walk away, "Shannon, please don't tell any of our customers about this, we don't want to alarm them."
Shannon sighed and affirmed, "Yes Ma'am", before turning to begin clearing away the debris left by the accident.
A few hours later Shannon wiped the sweat from her brow and sighed. Feeling a bit down she took the long walk to the supervisor's office and knocked at the door. "Come in please", came Patty's voice from within the office. Shannon stepped in and took a seat in one of Patty's decidely uncomfortable looking steel, office chairs as the Supervisor spoke to her, "Shannon, I'm sorry but you'll have to be pulling some extra time out on the floor for a few days til we can get a replacement for Lia."
Shannon looked a bit saddened by the news and spoke softly, "It was an accident Ma'am. It was not Lia's fault that the pallet broke." Patty nodded in agreement as the red-head added, "and...that thing...it wasn't a person. What was it?"
Patty stood up and clicked a hidden button on her desk, and a pair of metal restraints bound Shannon to the chair. The girl struggled as Patty slid open a concealed door behind her desk and wheeled Shannon through it. Shannon continued to struggle against the restraints and then stopped as she became aware of what was happening around her.
Rooms on either side of the hallway had girls of various sizes and builds laying on slanted metal tables. Some had no limbs and where the stumps were, masses of cabling and servomotor equipment spilled out. Others were missing heads, faces, or were opened up like some sort of futuristic version of an autopsy.
Shannon recognized the girlbot laying on one of the slabs. She was in 6 pieces with her limbs and head separated, and her torso severed in the midst, all linked together with tubes, cables, and wires. The same team of "doctors" were inserting tools into her limbs and cavities apparently removing damaged components and installing new ones. Occasionally the limbs would twitch or shudder spasmodically as the girls wired components into place and ran current through her.
Suddenly the ride came to a stop as Patty wheeled the chair around and pulled Shannon through a doorway. Shannon craned her neck around frantically to see what was behind her and a sudden twinge of anxiety and fear made her squeak as she came into view of Lia, or what was left of her.
Lia was strapped and mounted to an inclined table. Her pretty blue eyes opened wide and staring blankly at shannon as she lay stripped and exposed like a piece of meat. Her generous breasts hung firmly from her chest. Both sides of her chest! Lia's chest appeared to have been cleanly sliced down the center and along the sternum and below the ribs, opened outward on a pair of doors. Within the cavity of her chest Shannon, could see a cleverly designed endoskeletal structure, packed carefully and tightly with components and cabling. Thick pads of material provided the cushioning of Lia's body giving the skeleton and components a realistic depth and layer of skin. Cables ran from an opened section of skin above Lia's crotch, connected to computers where another girl was checking lines of code. As Shannon watched, one of the doctors inserted a long, thick probe deep inside Lia's exposed genitals. Lia's expression of slack-jawed, staring eyed numbness never changed as the doctor pushed the probe inside her til a loud click was heard, and then a further set of clicks and whirrs as she turned it within Lia's dripping honey pot.
The red-head's eyes widened further as the doctor removed the probe and using both hands, carefully tugged at Lia's petals and lips until a seam formed around the entire sex. A squelching sound and the buzzes of many tiny micro servoes followed as the mechanized pussy slid out of it's socket, trailing thick, clear tube, and many smaller wires from somewhere inside Lia's electronic body. Shannon could see hundreds of small, rolling servoes move and slide around in the empty cavity as the thick pocket of artificial sex was removed. The doctor detatched the wires and cable from the complex organ and set it on to a tray nearby and rolled it over to a bank of computers. Shannon noted that the clear tube dripped a clear, slick looking substance, the same as what she had seen in the other robot's broken case earlier.
Tears rolled from Shannon's eyes as she felt her heart sink. She was wheeled to a similar table and though she struggled fiercely, the "doctors" proved to be surprisingly strong and bound her to it. Splayed and helpless on the table, Shannon let the tears fall as Patty walked up to her.
"I'm sorry Shannon. I know you are confused but let me explain. Lia was a prototype of a new series of girls here at Syntech. We were field testing her to see how she could work in different environments and she was working out fine til this morning. She allowed a conflict in logic to occur and she disregarded the saftey parameters we established for her", Patty explained, while moving around the lab a bit.
"Why are you doing that to her? Why are you doing this to me?" asked Shannon, through blurred vision.
Patty mused for a moment and replied, "Well we cannot allow a malfunction like Lia's to go unchecked. As you saw earlier it caused the destruction of one of our test units. Fortunately this facility was designed just for the purposes of testing our products and so no one was really hurt."
"Testing your products? What? Then why did you hire me?", choked Shannon.
Patty sighed and nodded at one of the doctors who moved towards Shannon with a strange looking pen-like device. Shannon felt the heat on her face as the pen emitted a thin, green beam at her and the doctor moved it around her head in a precise pattern. Patty continued, "Well Shannon, you have been one of our more successful units. Not too intelligent, not very demanding and programmed for loyalty to your owner. In this case your owner was set to "Small-Mart" and so you became very obedient and compliant with your work routine and this "company".
Shannon gasped, and just as the sound escaped her mouth, it distorted into an electronic whine as her vision whited out for a moment then focused on the large pair of cables coming from her...head?! To the back of a mask that was covered in circuitry, servo-motors and some sort of sensory material. The doctor who held the mask turned it around and Shannon cried out in horror as she saw her own face looking back at her in terror, seeming to mock her as its mouth and eyes responded to her thoughts.
The doctor plugged a cable into Shannon's head, somewhere between her eyes, and it clicked into place. Strange lines of code and screens occluded Shannon's vision as CONNECTION ENABLED appeared. Patty smiled at the helpless android girl, "Don't worry Shannon, you've been doing very well and we won't have to disassemble you like we did Lia, although you do have some energy management issues we need to correct. I had to replace your batteries a few times. But of course you don't rememeber, just as you won't remember this now. You'll get some memory modifications and reprogramming to be able to work Lia's department until we can assemble another unit to take her place. "
Another girl walked up to Patty and spoke to her, "Supervisor Patty J. It is time for your modifications." Patty looked back at Shannon and began to undress. She shrugged and smiled, "Well as you can see I'm still as busy as ever. I'll leave you in the girl's capable hands".
As Patty spoke a pair of technicians wheeled up a gurney and as she finished stripping, strapped Patty to it and began to move away. "See you at work bright and early in the morning Shannon", said Patty as one of the technicians carefully pulled the supervisor's pretty blonde head off, trailing wires and cables. They began to wheel her to another room as Shannon's vision grew dim and the overwhelming power of the computers began to erase her memories, one by one...
End Of This Tale.