The fox lay motionless on the table. Face down, un covered, with her back torn open and the insides for all to see. A CAM arm poked at her spine repeatedly as a snow leopard, an angel and a sentient house watched.
“You know its one thing to know how many individual connections need to be made” The house said, “It’s another to watch a one-by one micro solder job going on”
“Nothing like watching a little robot perform surgery on yourself huh?” The angel replied absentmindedly while poking at another lifeless body in the corner, “What will we do with this one incidentally?”
Atasi glanced up form her computer and shrugged, “I don’t know, robot maid? That one turned out to not be good enough to fully contain Vikki, at least not independently.”
“Hmm, or something else fun” Kate poked the lifeless feline with the somewhat unnatural fur color, “Wonder if I can….”
Kate trailed off as she projected her thoughts at the lifeless body. Her mind invading its form; the various gizmos pistons and gryos of the prototype chirping their individual responses to her. The disused machines seemed almost happy to be heard, to be listened to and to be given a task for which they were designed.
Atasi almost jumped out of her skin when the motionless cat suddenly sat up, locked eyes with her and gave a wave, “Jesus, shit fuck…!”
Kate burst out laughing, through two mouths, her voice sounding like a doubled over cacophony of her own voice and the metallic warbles coming from the speaker system in the cat’s throat. Possessing machines wasn’t a new feat of Kate’s, or as Atasi more technically called it: Pseudo psionic interfacing. She did however mostly use it as part of her job as information gathering or to get into places that tried to keep her out. She could feel the city, see where it hurt, and getting to those places was easier when you could simply ask for a lock to open for you, or ask a camera to avert its eyes.
“Kate you little….” Atasi took a breath to calm her suddenly racing heart, “How? I mean its not even on!”
“The power supply is hooked up fine. I can talk to the whatzits directly, no need to get the OS involved.” Kate explained, “A spinney thingy here, a pushy doodad there and….”
The cat stood up on wobbly legs. Not all parts were fully set up or calibrated, and there was still a mess of wires coming out of her back, but Kate was doing at least a decent job piloting the brainless automaton.
“Your grasp of technical jargon never ceases to amaze…” Atasi deadpanned.
“What? You don’t need to know how muscles work to move your arms about. Same here.” Kate said through mechanoid feline vocal cords, “But fine, if you prefer ‘steppers’, ‘actuators’ and linear inducers’ I can say those words too.”
“Fair enough” Atasi said standing up from her terminal and coming over to the mostly ambulatory android. Kate stepped aside to avoid an inadvertent collision between them while Atasi looked over the droid, “Still I’m impressed you can control her to this degree.”
“A bit more complicated than what I normally ask machines to do, but hey, her bits were happy to oblige me.” Kate said then twitched a bit as she felt something odd, “Hmm… I’m not the only one poking about.”
Kate projected her mind back into the android, and found the OS firing up. That was odd. She hadn’t asked the motherboard to do anything, no reason too. It was starting up anyway, that could only mean one thing. She pushed her mind into the circuits of the main core and sure enough.
“Vikki? What brings you to this stretch of town?”
The fox started and turned to face Kate. Well, ‘started’ and ‘turned’ were both strong words. The two weren’t conversing in an actual physical sense. It was more an abstract conceptual sort of meeting within the wires and switches of a silicon landscape. “Ah hello” Victoria said, “Thought I’d join you in here. Atasi wasn’t kidding when she said it wasn’t even on huh?”
Kate shrugged, “The core’s job is to ask the body to move, but I can do that, so why bother the core?”
“Whereas I can’t get in here at all except via the ethernet cabling that… talks directly to the core.”
“On that topic though. You clearly CAN get in here. And the body clearly moves. Why was this one a ‘failure’ if I may?” Kate asked.
Vikki sighed, “it’s a failure because I’m not really IN here, any more than you are. I’m projecting, the core is interpreting. Similar to you I suppose. It would be a remote controlled body, not really an actual body that is MINE.”
“Signal lag and such?”
“Part of it, having even a couple mils of lag would make moving around awkward, but more that I’d still feel like a… well a house, that was piloting a girl somewhere remotely. I want to actually FEEL like a girl again. I want the arms to be MY arms, not some RC robo arm.”
“So, the fox?”
“More accurate to my self image for one.” The vulpine ghost said, “But also with more powerful hardware that can actually hold me, all of me. It wasn’t easy getting the house’s worth of server power in that body but it worked.”
“You will keep a link open though right? You know in case of emergencies?”
“Oh ya. I have no interest in being trapped in the fox body if it fails or is damaged. I’ll keep an exit open, but as a backup.”
After chatting for awhile more, the pair were interrupted by a dinging noise of a digital notification and Atasi’s voice filtering in through the microphones in the ears they were sharing, “Assembly is complete, you two. Can you get out here Dr. Edwards?”
The lab cameras whirred back up as Victoria reasserted her attention to the house itself and looked down at the motionless nude body of the robotic fox, her body. It was finally finished. She could practically vibrate with excitement.
“You should be able to start the transfer” Atasi said, rather pointlessly as Victoria was diving headfirst into her new flesh, or new metal as it were, save the rubberized coating and synthetic hair, and the plastic, and the oil. Come to think of it not all that much other than the skeleton was actually metal, but that was neither here nor there. The numerous data cables wired to the body carried the upload quickly enough, the core clicked to life and the body started to initialize.
One by one the cables decoupled themselves and the panels on the fox’s back, on Victoria’s back, started to close up, sealing and protecting her insides. Eventually the last cable decoupled, leaving her only connection to the house the wireless data signals through the wi-fi, li-fi, and other protocols she had as backups. It felt strange, very strange to feel like she wasn’t the house anymore. The house was the remote object now, and she was something else.
The last thing to turn on was the thaumaturgical wards and with that the safety locks were disengaged and Victoria started to move. She was wobbly at first, it had been so long since she moved with actual arms and legs, but she remembered quickly enough. They say you never forget how to ride a bike, and well it seemed you never forgot how to walk either. She stood, stretched, and then started laughing.
“This is amazing!” Victoria said through relieved chuckles, a wide grin of pure happiness on her face as she turned to face her former assistant, “Ohh Atasi you did it, I feel like a person again!”
“I’m glad eh….” Atasi started but was cut off, finding herself ensconced in a bear hug. Victoria’s body was tall for a fox. The scale up was to accommodate the necessary hardware, and it resulted in her being closer to Kate’s height than Atasi’s. As such Atasi found her face smashed against a pair of vulpine robo breasts right at this moment.
“Thank you thank you thank you thank you!!!!” Victoria repeated, still beaming. Kate go the impression she’d be crying if her new body was capable of that. “The 15% scale up isn’t just your height huh?” Kate asked with a smirk, and a point.
Vikki blinked back to reality, “Well no we wanted to keep proportions appropriate. I may be a bit of a goliath, no need to be a lanky weirdo too you know an… OHHH…” Victoria took a moment to clue in but following Kate’s finger she realized what she meant and released Atasi. “Sorry Atasi, I didn’t mean too, uh….” “Mash your boobs in my face?” Atasi said with a smile, she was blushing but clearly not all that perturbed.
“Uh ya.” Victoria looked down and swished her tail around to cover her crotch and brought her hands up to cover her bosom. Kate was actually surprised to see her blush too. Red LED’s under the face? That was a detail she wouldn’t have expected. Victoria continued, “You know. This may seem weird, but I somehow never really thought about the fact that I’d be naked when I woke up in this body. Guess I haven’t worn clothes for the... what? The two years I’ve been your house?”
“Luckily I DID think of that” Atasi said opening a drawer and pulling out a tracksuit, “I think I’ll try to limit the amount of nudists in my house to the one invisible girl thank you very much.”
