Debugging

Debugging

Part 1

Her neck servos whirred almost silently in the laboratory space as she looked around, craning her head around as she lay on the table.

She had no idea how it had happened; a malfunction in her motor systems, surely, but her creator had recovered her and brought her back to his lab. Surely it was to prevent her true nature from being discovered.

Amanda Reese was one of the most sophisticated android test subjects in the state, part of the Tri-State Area's science research collaboration. She and another five androids had been created by the Adamadyne Institute as a social experiment in the dawning age of android sophistication. The first models by Adamadyne had been featureless, entirely on purpose; this was the first sanctioned test of a humaniform, to see if people could surpass the feeling of the 'uncanny valley' on their own, with minimal prompting.

To that end, Adamadyne had gained the support of Congress to enact these androids as the first test of granting them the rights and privileges of a sentient, sapient human being. Amanda was just one of the lucky few to herald the coming age of robots as equal partners with humanity.

She craned her neck down to the bridge of her bustline, looking at herself. Her arms and legs were removed; the metallic sockets on full display, and she could see to her left the limbs resting on the desk by the wall. One of the limbs was connected to a terminal with technical readouts she couldn't understand, but only just; her cognitive functions were in human emulation mode, meaning she couldn't access the part of her personality designed as a cold, unfeeling machine.

She knew she was an android. It was part and parcel of her programming, not designed to stay secret with her and her sisters; Adam Reese, the head of the project, saw no need to hide the truth from what he basically saw were his 'cousins', as he so fruitfully put it.

Still, it was exciting to her, to see her mechanical nature on display like this. Her nipples stiffened; if not from the cold and stagnant air of the lab room, then from the sensory data processing in her emulation banks.

She looked back down at her body. There were no open ports on her body; she was naked, no clothing, only stubs for legs. Her perfectly trimmed brown pubic hair bristled in the dead air.

Amanda opened her mouth, trying to vocalize a command, but to no avail. Whoever had brought her back had disabled her speech systems. It was as if she was mute.

She wriggled on the table, trying to lift herself upright. She managed to, after some time, get into a sitting position on the table, giving her a better look at herself. Sure enough, a cable was plugged into her back at the base of her neck below her pixie cut hair, hooked into her primary power bank along the back of her spine and shoulder blades.

She was charging. How much of a charge did she have? She thought to herself. Obviously she couldn't access this information in her mind, so she had to rely on other sources. Slowly she looked around the room, at the cable hooked into her back, seeing if she could trace it to any machine, and finally found it hooked up to a battery tank on the wall; upon closer inspection, from the distance she could see, a bold readout on the tank said she was at forty-six percent charge.

Well, that narrowed it down. She must have been running low on battery charge, she thought to herself. Maybe Adam had her out in the field for too long. But, then, why couldn't she remember anything?

She slumped back down on the table and lay flat, giving her neck just enough space to not bend or break the charging cable, and closed her eyes. Whoever had recovered her, she had to thank when this was said and done. And she'd get some answers, at that point, too. Slowly she let her consciousness go into sleep mode and rested to get a full charge in her banks, and faded into darkness.

Part 2

Amanda's eyes lazily opened after what seemed like an eternity.

Her first instinct was to look over at the battery tank on the wall. Sure enough, it was still plugged to the cranial interface in the back of her neck, but now it read a steady green readout of 100%.

She barely noticed that her arms had been reattached to her, allowing her to come to a sitting position, the small of her back now on full display, and she looked around.

Still the room was empty. No sign of anyone had entered, save for a coffee mug sitting there by the computer. Her legs were over on a rack on the wall, post-it notes stuck to them with QR codes drawn on them in bold black pen.

Being in her primary operation mode, Amanda couldn't decrypt the QR code; her secondary status mode could, but she was currently cognizant as a regular person, not a mindless drone.

In a way, she lamented Adam's insistence that she know her true nature, but be unable to access these features on her own; in the past, she always got the response of "When you're ready for it, you'll get it" in some cryptic fashion from him. What secrets he held from her about her true nature, she could only theoretically dream of, and to do so enticed her further.

For the moment, Amanda was more than a little happy to study herself at this moment. She looked down at the open cavities of her leg sockets, and with one hand bracing her upright, she traced the seam line of her thigh skin with the other's index finger. She could feel the silky smoothness of her skin, how sensitive the nerve endings were there, before giving way to brushed chrome and cold, hard plastic on the inner cavity.

She poked and prodded at the servo ports curiously, seeing if she could fit her whole index finger into them, wondering what interface they used to connect; was she 'Plug-and-play'? Did she require individual driver updates for the leg parts? Did she have to be rebooted before removing them? Was it even safe for her to be operating in this cognizant mode with them removed?

She found herself hugging her chest with her free arm, dreamy thoughts of her true nature filling her mind. What could she do, Amanda wondered? Was she the prototype for subterfuge? Was she a clerk designed for clerical duties? There was no way she could work in factories or warehouses, wasn't there?

After a few minutes of this, she brought her attention back to her true nature in practice, and looked at her left hand. Barely, she could make out the seams in her knuckles and wrist, and curiously, she could see a difference between one of the skin portions between her wrist and lower arm. It was cold, ridgid plastic, like a dust cover of sorts.

She pressed this plastic portion in, and with a click, her hand at the wrist slid off into her lap.

Amanda was surprised. Was it that easy to remove her hands or limbs? She thought to herself.

She picked up her hand and looked at it. The wrist was a ball-and-socket type servo with a plug like a large coaxial cable, ending in a CAT-5 plug, like the plug of an Ethernet cable. It certainly wasn't proprietary, she thought to herself.

She held her removed hand in front of her and tried to wiggle a finger on it, to no response. It almost disappointed her, in a way; she had hyped herself up to think she could remotely operate her limbs, but perhaps she was just a bit less futuristic than she imagined herself to be.

A lewd thought swam into her head. Maybe she could do things her hand couldn't do on its own. Curiously she looked down at her crotch, and then back at the hand, and carefully bent all but her index and middle fingers into a curl.

She spread her stubbed legs open and leaned back a bit, trusting her unnatural mechanical servos to gyroscope herself into a stable position and poked her removed hand's pointing fingers into her vagina, instantly feeling a wave of pleasure rise through herself.

Slowly she poked her fingers in, feeling the inside of her vaginal cavity; it was soft and wet, lubricated from tiny pores in the synthetic flesh and skin, she thought, and ribbed with nodules on the inside. She felt to herself like a high-class Tenga toy, like something that hadn't hit the market yet.

She pumped her fingers a few times then pulled them out, strands of sickly sweet smelling lubricant covering them. She held her removed hand up to her face and licked the fingers; the taste of sweet raspberry and pomegranate filled her mouth, and she lapped up every bit of it. The sense of it all was so enthralling to her now.

Curiously she wondered if she could reattach her hand as it was now, and tried to do so carefully. She lined up the CAT-5 port and plug in her empty wrist socket and plugged them in, and watched her hand.

For a few minutes, it did nothing. No twitches, nothing, still pointing in the air. Suddenly, Amanda felt like her vision was frozen for a minute or two, and could have sworn she felt a stuttering in her thoughts, before everything returned to normal. She looked down at the hand and tried moving a finger or two, and to her surprise, she could move every digit, a bit slowly at first, but then just as if she had never removed her hand at all.

She rubbed some of the sticky residue from her fingers between them, pulling them apart to see how the consistency of her lubricant was, and was surprised to see it was like a very liquid gel. She smelled the scent of raspberry and pomegranate in the room, and found herself feeling her pubic hair with her other hand, ruffling the scruffy brunette fibers with aplomb.

She looked to the battery tank and saw that her charge had dropped back down to eighty-four percent, and that she had resumed charging from it again. Amused by this, she lay back down, closing her eyes once more and letting the darkness overtake her for the second time.

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