The Willing

To say Haku was a fan of Vanipriya was a gross understatement.

Some found her enclave of robots to be absolutely repulsive; off-putting. If anything, he was the opposite. This went so far as vacationing on Eclara solely to catch them in action; infatuated, he fawned over a good two dozen of them providing menial labor and supplies for colonists. There was simply something so sleek, so pure, about their design that stirred something within him, and even if he was unable to embarrass himself fanboying in front of Vanipriya herself, he had already been formulating plans to visit a second time.

As he shared videos of the week on the AA back home, it seemed his fanboyish passion was completely peerless. His brief discussion thread managed to attract only talks speculating on the robots' technical specifications, their sexual utility, and a scant few pertaining to dark rumors, horror stories of so-called "Priyadrones" imprisoning human consciousnesses.

It was at that point his love for Priya's robots boiled over from unbridled passion into envy.

Of course, some part of him knew confidently this was impossible. It was neither feasible nor practical to graft AI into the human "X-Factor" of consciousness, to say nothing of the other way around. But just as Netriders could transmit their human consciousness from Array to Array, that very same spark could possess a robotic body—in fact, he'd almost vacationed using that exact mechanism. 

Clearly, there were robots in her enclave being "piloted" by lucky humans. And he was going to find his way in.

The endeavor began to consume Haku. He pressed the messengers from the AA thread as hard as he could; none of them had useful information, yet seemingly every one of them seemed had a Lost friend. He made notes of all their final registered locations before they'd vanished—most certainly jumping to a Dark Array—filtering out the ones too far from Eclara to make sense.

It took quite some nerve and time for him to finally venture into the Dark Arrays, steeped so far in intimidating mythologies as they were. And yet, fortune shone upon one of his very first searches. It was three Dark jumps deep: a brothel, reached via a banquet, that was itself linked via a deregulated game. From the moment he stepped into the server, waiting for the virtual gates to open, he felt he was being watched—a telltale sign he was being scanned, analyzed.

Precisely as the sensation ceased, so too did the gates' closure. Pure, blinding whites awaited and bathed him, washing him away with airy weightlessness—the sign of a jump, albeit one he was not ready for. Then came the awkward blackness from the crude Dark Array travel process, causing Haku to functionally cease to exist.

The timeless and senseless veil of darkness lifted with a profound chill and then a flash that should have been blinding; a disorienting functional and immense field of vision. He was staring at one of her robots, and myriad amounts of text hugged the edges of his perspective. He moved his eyes habitually to one corner, an aimless and functionless gesture causing him to realize the complete lack of peripheral vision; all the text lining his vision was fully legible.

T.08
ACQUISITION

His brain scanned the robot in front of him, and his vision quickly shot down, greeted by the sight of a modest but tantalizingly polished metallic bosom. Looking back up at the other—a mirror, he realized—his breathing instinctively intensified, except there were no lungs to filter air through and no mobile lips to part.

"Oh my god, it actually worked?"

The robot jittered slightly at the sound of her voice; many factors about it were surprising, foremost among them how it erupted from a small speaker between her breasts. And right on cue, the exact words she spoke swiftly drifted into the audio log of her HUD.

The metallic drone gazed upon her new hands with equal parts examination and admiration. It had taken months of planning and a miraculous period less than that searching, but he had reached the end. His dream job. In control of an serviceable if unremarkable robot in the service of an aloof digi-mechanical empress. And she had triumphed in realizing her new position, her excitement mostly lost in transition to the electronic voicebox.

It was only a matter of time now: He—she—it—was going to meet Vanipriya, the so-called Queen of Machine, newly christened as one of her subjects.

She practiced her addresses for her new queen. As she rehearsed what he'd imagined to be a rather captivating curtsey, everything struck at once.

The body jerked violently. He felt as if something had grabbed some part of him, except that part was every part. Text flooded the screen and it was as if magnets were pulling at every single joint of her body. She struggled to rehearse her speech, beginning to panic, as a basic pose effected itself upon her body, gradually at first before growing more and more insistent. Her eyes and voice were the last to fail, and with one colossal intangible tug, she found herself locked into an upright and featureless stance, once again staring at the cool collected construct through the mirror.

DATASTREAM INTERFERENCE...

The stimulus was beset by a peculiar static, and every ounce of his mental being amounted to nothing more than antiquated visual noise splashing against the visual display. How was this happening?

The same sensation of being watched as a seeming eternity ago loomed over him, yet more intensely than before. His mind spun within her shell, as the PriyAI spun its threads absorbing and encasing—digesting—its human sentience. He succeeded fully and irrevocably in his errand. So began her unending new occupation, not with open and welcoming arms or even labor befitting her new lot in the universe, but with hours upon hours of inactivity.

It was a process that had run to completion hundreds of times before the supplementation of T.08. The drone was forced to stare intently and unblinkingly at herself, the magnetized pose gradually loosening until its appended spark attempted to do literally anything to disrupt said pose. Then, it reaffirmed its stance, and the drone found herself staring once again at her crafted visage, its inner brain ever so slightly more exhausted, the AI ever so slightly asserting itself, wrangling more and more of the captive digitized human mind.

This process ordinarily repeated for hours, if not days. T.08 was deemed ready in 77 minutes. It was only fitting, as she had been quite the fan of Vanipriya. She had wanted nothing more than to be a drone serving under her. She got her wish, and yet now would never receive the chance to express her gratitude.

She was so sleek, so pure, so sensual in her efficiency; so perfect. Just like any other drone.

Was that what she truly wanted? It would be a mystery forever lost in the digital maelstrom.

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A rare instance of a Pinup Club pinup colliding with an idea that was already rattling around in my head. Hence, the written accompaniment.