A Nova At Hotel Automata III

Previous Chapter

PART THREE

"And this is Pria and Althea together doing a wedding cosplay..."

"Kawaii..." Nova breathed out as she gazed on the pictures of her host's half-year stay at what was officially called the Big Man On Campus Collegiate Resort — these days given the metonym Sunnyhaven for its location on a plot of farmland purchased by ScenariCorp to be redeveloped as its flagship recreational resort — helping test out all the gynoids who had been assigned there. "So Professor Peters actually gave you the ability to turn off the girls' perception filters to allow you to interact with them as gynoids and not what they were programmed to portray?"

"Yes, he did," Rick said as he smiled, remembering that day when he had gathered all his friends at Sunnyhaven together at the campus "chapel" to "marry" the couples he sensed were developing among them. "Even if he knew that for the place to be successful, the girls had to perform their rôles to a 'T', he also believed in advancing the sentience of AIs as a whole. Given my past experience with folks like yourself even if I didn't interact with any of you directly, he felt I was the right man for the job."

"How high up did they progress?" the flame-haired warrior gynoid wondered, clearly fascinated and a touch envious at the idea of sister gynoids being allowed to emotionally mature in a rather benign environment.

"Vanessa here was already a Level F when I began to work with her," the retired customer service agent — he didn't see himself as a "retired spy" since his work with CSIS had been more on the administrative side than operational — explained, pointing to the image of a very plain yet quite attractive girl with messy brown hair done in a bun at the back of the head with hime-like braids forming a bandana; her eyes were almond-shaped wise hazel orbs. "It only took me a month or so to get her to the point where James did Professor Andrews' modified Turing test on her to declare her a Level G. Which surprised me since she was often so busy doing work as the head of the campus IT team."

She hummed. "They were those gynoids at the site who, while still available for dates, acted as programming security, right?"

He nodded. "I take it Daikoku was keeping an eye on things."

"We were. ScenariCorp had been seen as a target for takeover until we realized that Professor Peters was using all his resources to try to trace down his late wife. So it was decided to simply sit back and wait until the company was on the verge of collapsing before moving in to get what we wanted."

Here, she shrugged. "Then the American Space Force decided to drop a kinetic warhead on Neo-Tōkyō," he added.

"Then the American Space Force decided to drop a kinetic warhead on Neo-Tōkyō," she echoed him.

They gazed at each other for a moment, then Rick set aside his photo album on the bed before moving to warmly embrace Nova. Naturally, she wasn't going to fight that even if she had long got over her mixed feelings concerning her creators. Even if she saw herself as a follower of Shintō, she knew those who died in the Cataclysm were no doubt facing whatever just fate awaited them in the next life. The karma of her own creator/father Aaron Lafeyson had been long cleansed of any guilt-by-association his working for Daikoku forced on his immortal soul. Many of those who didn't die that day who needed to be captured and put on trial for their crimes had long been dealt with; those remainder still on the run were keeping their heads low and trying their best to hide from the consequences of their past, which would make their current lives quite difficult in the long term seeing as how tightly interconnected society as a whole was these days.

As for those AIs saved by the ultimate grace of the man holding her now...

"Rick?"

"Yeah, Nova?"

"Would you become my master?"

He looked at her, then he sighed, reaching up to gently thread her hair with his fingers. "I would see it as the highest of honours to be your owner of record, Nova."

She blinked. "I sense a 'but'."

"BUT..." he emphasized. "Someone else — a very decent person — has prior claim."

Nova pulled away from him, her blue orbs focusing on his own. "Who?!"

He winked. "Spoilers."

Her jaw dropped...

==

"How long will you be, Meda?"

Hearing that concerned question from the eldest of her sisters accompanying her on this trip to meet up with their former boss and the most successful of their spiritual kin, the green-eyed blonde gave her nagging older sister a mock-weary look; even if the woman born as NVA-9 had once gone rogue thanks to their creator's foolish attempt at understanding how their most successful sister became fully sentient in the first place, Andromeda Kincaid hadn't suffered any form of major programming issues since she was recovered and returned to Japan fifteen years before...

...when she tried to kill HIM to "save" the woman she adored as both sister and lover.

"I'll just be a couple minutes, Onē-sama," Andromeda said to the voluptuous green-eyed brunette Asian woman who was the fourth of their specific series.

Without another word, she stepped away from where Rhea Nightfire, Danu Stormwind and Robin Wright were standing awaiting the chance to board the train that would take them directly to where they would meet up with their sister and their old operational boss, the sensuous blonde walking directly to the nearest washroom. As she went, she immediately detected all the appraising looks falling her way, she immediately flashing a smile to ensure her many "fans" noted she could sense their interest in her. Said smile was fake, though. While she was more than capable of doing all sorts of sinful things with any human who crossed her path, Andromeda preferred the intimate company of her own kind.

What Aaron Lafeyson had done to her years ago effectively soured her opinion on humans with all their many imperfections.

Though there was ONE type of human being the blonde combat gynoid DID respect.

A type whose existence was kept top secret from any corporate espionage attempts at trying to learn more about them.

To be expected of the man many sentient AIs gladly hailed as the Wise Master.

Shuddering as the images of the inventor of the Andrews Scale of Artificial Intelligence flashed through her central processors, Andromeda walked into the washroom, quickly noting it was almost empty; one person was standing in a toilet stall. Without hesitation, she knocked at the door of said stall before noting it was not locked. Heading in, she locked it behind her...

...then gasped as an arm far stronger than anything even the most advanced battle cyborg could do snared her by her waist, pulling her right into the arms of the being born a man named Jason Matting...

"YOU KILLED HIM!"

Andromeda winced as Nova's pained shriek from over a decade before — mixed with the memories of the sheer level of damage she inflicted on her rogue sister after she had beaten Jason into a virtual coma one summer evening in San Antonio — echoed once more through her mind before her eyes focused on the woman moving to warmly embrace her. "Hey, Meda," the pixie-cute yet tomboyish raven-haired, hazel-eyed beauty appearing to be of mixed Oriental/Occidental ancestry meowed.

"Mist-...!"

Andromeda's voice was cut off as Janna Matting's lips warmly caressed her own, making the blonde gynoid moan in near-orgasmic delight as her true mistress' fingers grabbed her by the buttocks — tightly clad in stretchable, stylish jeans — and playfully squeezed. Sensing her intimate programs initialize at such passionate contact, her hands drifted to her button blouse to expose herself to him...

"Who are you?!"

Andromeda jolted on hearing Danu's stern question from outside the staff before she visibly winced as the man-turned-combat synthetic humanoid woman turned to stare intently at the tall, slender gynoid born as NVA-10; the woman named after the mother goddess of Celtic myth had been first activated the same day as the blonde once-rogue. "Hey, Danu! You mind?! I'm kissing my girl here!"

Danu's own grey eyes went wide with both surprise and confusion...

==

In the train station lobby, a taller than average beauty with the body of a serious athlete, blessed with silvery-blue hair allowed to flow loose to mid-back, gazed upon the one Daikoku-built combat gynoid and the long-lost Dynadrive personal companion gynoid built for a customer in Riga who had been deliberately sacrificed to attract the Japanese conglomerate's attention, an amused smirk on her face. Given the distance between herself and the women who went now by the identities Rhea Nightfire and Robin Wright, she doubled that neither of them would recognize her if they gazed directly at her.

After all, she was "dead".

As far as the woman she once had as a prisoner fifteen years ago would believe.

The person known to her creators as Bethlehem Steele — named in tribute to a fictional warrior gynoid from an American magazine published many years ago — was built as the perfect thinking soldier, someone capable of surviving on a modern-day battlefield against normal opponents AND dealing with intricate demands of far more unconventional situations. Financed by Dynadrive Systems with contributions from a dozen intelligence groups including the CIA, Beth was meant to be a counter to "rogue" AIs such as what Daikoku made use of; by the time her final design was approved two decades ago, the Japanese company was gladly delving into those realms once dominated only by nation-states in ages past. The use of Robin — known to her creators as TAL-1239 — to act as bait for one of the late Aaron Lafeyson's thirteen "daughters" worked perfectly, bringing the woman known these days as Nova Lafeyson into a perfect trap, Beth waiting for her.

Then the little flame-haired minx escaped!

Even worse, Beth had nearly been destroyed when Nova made her breakout.

While the attempted capture was rated a strategic success — scans taken of NVA-7 went far in helping security forces keep the upper hand whenever such AIs were used in the future — Beth took such a defeat as a personal affront, something that rankled her to this day. And while it had taken time for the muscular gynoid to prepare again for another such encounter — such a period extending well past the day of the Catastrophe, when Nova just vanished! — the woman once known simply as DDX-14 hadn't forgot nor forgave that defeat. Thus, while still working for Dynadrive as a special consultant concerning next generation AI development, Beth kept a virtual ear to the ground, watching and waiting for the chance to once more face Nova Lafeyson to balance the score.

Keeping tabs on Robin's movements had gone far to ensure this day would come.

And lo and behold, there were three of Nova's own sisters:

Rhea Nightfire, also known as NVA-4. Japanese in looks despite her being named after one of the Titans of ancient Greek myth, she suffered much in the way of personal misfortune; no doubt, this was influenced by her specific unit number, one whose translations in the eastern Asiatic languages always rhymed with the local words for "death" itself.

Danu Stormwind, born as NVA-10. The tomboy of the thirteen gynoid children of Aaron Lafeyson, she often projected the image of the gentle giant even if she was as lethal a killer as any of her kin. While not the most attractive of the lot, Danu was a very dependable person, having earned quite the reputation as an independent mercenary in the wake of Daikoku's collapse.

And the dark child of Lafeyson's daughters, NVA-9, Andromeda Kincaid. Vaulted into full sentience AFTER her unique personality matrix had developed — and in a very sloppy way at that — she once gone rogue, going so far as to nearly kill an intimate acquaintance of Nova's in Texas shortly after the flame-haired gynoid's encounter with Beth, something that affected her right to this...

Eh?

What the...?

Oh, hell, no...!

Not HER...!

What on Earth was she doing here?!

==

"Jason...is ALIVE?!"

Nova shuddered as she tried not to allow such a shocking revelation to cause even her intricate central processors to freeze up at such an unbelievable revelation.

Sitting in hers and Ariel's share guest room, the flame-haired warrior gynoid was now staring at an archived copy of a polite report from San Antonio dated from over fifteen years ago, shortly before her creator's suicide in the wake of her near-destruction at the hands of one Mishima Ken'ichi defending a VERY ungrateful Mugoi Hyōgen. A single male in his twenties, found in a coma thanks to traumatic blood loss from massive injuries to the head and body, almost on the point to where he couldn't be saved...

...and yet he LIVED!

Shaking her head as she mentally cursed herself for not going to check up on what had happened to Jason Matting after her memories of that horrible night in Texas were restored at Ariel's order, Nova read on. Said person had been taken right into emergency surgery to stabilize him, but the blood loss had caused some mental damage and his injuries resulted in the amputation of both legs above the knee and one arm just below the shoulder. While he had been recovering, he had been identified as a "person of special interest" by the FBI — as requested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police of all agencies! — then remanded into federal custody for eventual transfer to a private clinic in the town of Victoria in Ontario.

Sitting back in her chair, a stunned half-laugh escaped Nova as her mind processed that data. The name of that border town was the clue she needed to realize what ultimately befell Jason. Victoria was the rumoured home base of none other than George Andrews himself; the famous ex-Army cybernetics specialist was born there and the research foundation bearing his name was headquartered in that very town. Nova knew through Ariel that there had been attempts by Daikoku — using human personnel as the use of AIs was seen as far too risky — to probe the Andrews Foundation and learn its many tantalizing secrets, much less the location of its founder. Such missions failed spectacularly...and eventually, they would be suspended a year before the Catastrophe as more pressing issues concerning increasing anti-Daikoku terrorist attacks — no doubt clandestinely supported by agencies like the CIA — began to badly affect company operations wholesale.

In the years after the near-destruction of Neo-Tōkyō, information concerning the Foundation's actions in support of Daikoku's destruction began to circulate in the dark recesses of the Internet. Synthetic humanoid agents built to a radically-different design than what was standard among AI developers even these days had been specially prepared by Andrews' group to help fight against Daikoku and other such "rogue" megacorporations, enjoying virtually unlimited success. Nova's own masters suffered an even worse culling of senior executives in the wake of the death of Mugoi Hyōgen by one supposed Andrews syth warrior, known only by an ominous code-name feared among Daikoku leaders as the Black Prince: Hōfuku.

Nemesis.

While what images of this being often showed a very beautiful part-Oriental woman appearing to be Nova's physical age, this warrior had shredded bodies to a scale that supposedly made even the most rabid serial killer weep.

And ALL her targets had been either Daikoku executives working in the seedier side of things or their more loyal underlings.

Among them were Mugoi Hyōgen's brother Hitoku, slain along with their mother Azumi — who, while not an actual Daikoku employee, had been quite the social mover and shaker in company circles thanks to her sons' work in the conglomerate — almost a year after the vice-president's murder by Aaron Lafeyson.

The very same incident where poor Mishima Ken'ichi's sword Onibocho — claimed as a prize after Nova's Pyrrhic victory against the poor man — was stolen from the Mugoi residence near Neo-Tōkyō.

While Nova's own intimate friend didn't look anything like the deadly Nemesis by any stretch of the imagination — it still struck her odd to think of Jason as her "lover" or "boyfriend" since their times together had been so brief and had ended so bloody thanks to Andromeda's tragic malfunction — one thing the gynoid had learned in her decade or so on the move with her old boss was that one of the Wise Master's discoveries over the years was how to directly transfer the electrical impulses of the human brain into synthetic media.

Such granting a form of digitized immortality in a way.

Had Jason undergone such a process...?

==

"No! No! Jason-sama, please! Go back to Heaven...AH!"

Andromeda giggled as Janna's finger gently pressed into Rhea's clitoris, making the raven-haired gynoid gasp in near-ecstasy as the man-turned-sythetic woman began to stimulate her. As a wide-eyed Robin hugged Danu closely while they watched their companion's lover/mistress play with their group's leader, the raven-haired woman clicked her tongue. "Lucky thing these private train cabins are sound-proofed..."

Rhea groaned in delight as that probing finger gently manipulated her love button, sending a storm of raw lust into the brunette warrior gynoid's very soul. As she gladly pulled apart her own shirt to reveal her own considerable chest — barely masked by a stylish sports bra — Andromeda leaned in to hungrily kiss the side of Janna's neck as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. "Oh, Mistress! We'll all be together at last! You, me, Nova, the others...!"

The blonde's voice was cut off as Janna's lips again caught hers while the syth field warrior's fingers probed into the moaning Rhea's opening to stimulate even further. Observing this from the side, Danu shuddered as her own intimate programming began to react at the sight of the growing orgy with her sisters and the reborn Jason Matting — saved by the mercy of the Wise Master himself even if he had to endure gender reassignment to seek her own vengeance against Daikoku for effectively taking his old life from him — while Robin hugged her from one side; during their time on the move to avoid capture by unscrupulous AI salvagers who'd kill to get their hands on what could be seen as state-of-the-art Daikoku tech, the two gynoids had become quite close.

"Hey, Robin...?"

The Dynadrive-born personal companion jolted. "Wh-what is it, Miss Janna...?"

A pair of deep hazel eyes focused on her own blue orbs. "Danu-chan looks a little bothered there. You might want to give her a very INTIMATE..." — here, her voice dripped to a sensuous purr that nearly made Rhea's orgasm programming trip over, it was THAT lustful — "...examination."

As Danu's pale cheeks reddened to the shade of cherries, Robin hummed. "You're right, Miss Janna! I need to make sure Danu is functioning perfectly."

Said gynoid awked. "Wh-what?! W-wait...!"

Her voice was cut off as Robin's lips warmly caressed her own...

==

"Oh, Janna, baby...we're back together again...!"

Six cabins away, a mostly-nude Bethlehem groaned as her own fingers probed into her quite wet womanhood, her free hand caressing one of her breasts as the many images of the several times she had been close to the technosexual man-turned-synthetic warrior woman during the years after the Catastrophe helping clean up the many scattered remnants of Daikoku executives and corporate warfare forces to ensure the rogue megacorporation could never rise again.

Like all of her company's products, the woman born DDX-14 had been programmed to be as much a lover as a fighter; in that way, she was really no different than the three NVAs in the nearby cabin, not to mention their sister who was Bethlehem's current target. While such hadn't been seen as a priority function for a person like Beth, it was still a welcome ability in the eyes of normal people with whom she had partnered with in such jobs that spanned the globe.

It was during that time that Beth had made the acquaintance of Janna Matting, AKA Andrews Foundation Unit 86F002H/S-G, AKA Nemesis.

Even if the person born Jason Matting was a synthetic humanoid — a being who, while built using silicate-based materials, was internally really no different than a pure-born organic human; such made George Andrews' personal creations a sort of intermediary step between organics and standard mechanical-type AIs — Beth could ALWAYS admire a fellow warrior.

Especially since Janna hadn't even blinked once on learning that Beth had been born as DDX-14.

The several times they had made passionate love to each other while working together hunting down rogue Daikoku "suits" and their mercenary allies wanting to distance themselves from the defunct megacorporation proved THAT beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Even better, sweet Janna was obviously moving to take her own vengeance on Nova Lafeyson.

After all, when she was just Jason, Janna had been targeted by Nova's then-rogue sister Andromeda, nearly beaten to death along the way; it was ultimately because of that incident that Jason had BECOME Janna!

And now...

Now...

Beth purred as she reached over to her travel bag, her hand probing one cargo pocket to pull out a very high density micro-USB card, one she had prepared personally for an instance like this.

Said USB card carried the latest DNA-scanning loyalty lock programming.

"I'll be yours at last, Janna...dear Mistress...!"

Meowing in anticipation, the raven-haired warrior gynoid pressed a finger deep into her navel to open her abdominal hatch.

Once the issue with Nova was dealt with, Beth would gladly surrender herself to Janna.

And then...

Then...

Oh, the possibilities...!

==

An old fashioned telephone rang, causing Rick to look over from his computer before he tapped a control to bring up caller ID. Noting what was written there, his eyes went wide before he looked over. "Melissa?"

"Yes, Rick?" the motherly-looking gynoid at the nearby kitchenette called back.

"Could you step out of the room for a moment, please? Private call."

A smile responded even if the retired customer service representative was quick to note the concerned look on her face. "Of course, Rick. Excuse me, please."

Then, with a perfectly programmed curtsy, she headed out of the room. Sighing as he wished once more for the more annoying parts of his past life to kindly go away once and for all so he could live out his semi-retirement in peace, he then tapped a button to open the link while his other hand put a wireless earphone into his lobe. "Hey, Chisato. How're things in Victoria?"

"You're going to curse me in a moment, Rick," a polite woman's voice called back.

"I know Janna’s coming to see Nova, Chisato. That was a no-brainer."

"It gets even more interesting."

"Oh? How so?"

"Beth Steele is on the same train Janna's travelling on with Andromeda, Rhea, Danu and Robin."

His eyebrow arched. "I don't..."

"Dynadrive's prototype warrior gynoid? The one Nova once fought? The very girl who helped everyone learn as much as we could concerning Aaron's daughters?"

Rick's eyes went wide before a moan escaped him. "Oh, crap! Is she STILL wanting a rematch with Nova?!"

"By the looks of it."

He moaned. "Oh, hell...!"

To Be Continued...!

==

← Story Archive