The morning sunrise did the same thing it always did this time of year, gleaming through the slight parting of the curtains, spilling across the bedroom floor on his side of the room, and drawing a line across that spilled a little into one eye.“Yes, I appreciate this sounds like a sequel to Childminder. I’m sorry, BA. For the record, there is absolutely no relation between the stories. I just liked the style and wanted to resort to a little... what’s the correct word? Plagarism? If you get this, BA, let me know if I’m going too far into your lane and I’ll edit in a different wording. It's something I split off from The Four Brothers, so some characters are familiar. So erm... if anyone is editing the Fembotwiki, could you delete chapter 9 of The Four Brothers from there and swap this in? sorry in advance”
Marcus Manners squinted a little, the slight pain of the orangey yellow light pinging against his eyeball waking him. He stirred a little, shifting his hands a little to find the other half of the bed emptied. He opened his eyes, watching the perfection lying next to him in bed, Julie Manners... the mistress of the house. Perfectly tanned, carefully curved by what seemed to be years of good living...
Marcus gently stroked the figure, lying with her torso perfectly straightened out on her side of the bed, her arms at her sides. Her bare figure was totally naked, save for a pair of sheer black panties hugging the haunches of her , her breasts unsupported by any shapewear but still maintaining a lovely humpiness atop her ribcage. He glided his fingers along the slight fuzz of her skin, Fingertips trailing lines in the soft flesh of her body. A beautiful body with a beautiful mind.
Marcus turned to his bedside table and took up his smart tablet. He had recently upgraded it and shifted a lot of his old stuff from the old tablet after a serviceable ten years. Turning back to examine his lovely wedded wife and long-time loyal companion, he decided that maybe he would do what he wanted to do a little more slowly, with more care and hands-on action. No peeking at cheat notes or things that he should not be peeking at...
He calmly switched to his work email and tapped out a message. “Will be in after lunchtime today. No committments in place to prior to 2pm.” He prepared to send it off to his office assistant, trusting them to forward it to HR and the Arendt bros. He could dixtate such terms easily so long as he kept fulfiling his obligations and workload at his studio, either here or at the actual inner sanctum of the company headquarters. He paused, then tapped a postscript. “P.S. Will visit Elliot today. Please advise me of any changes to his condition.”
Marcus hit the Send button and closed his eyes as he put away the tablet, focusing his attention now entirely on his sybaritic lover... He leaned in close to one of Julie’s ears, admiring the way it curved in and along its various curves, swirling into a deep black hole all ready to swallow his love... in the other manner of speaking. There were obviously other holes ready to swallow his love, in various exciting ways. He had spent a tonne of effort even before he had carried her across the threshold.
There was a little jewellery in the form of a single tasteful stud on Julie’s left ear, a matching pair of faintly glowing gems inset in simple gold-plate prongs. Nothing obtrusive. They were a match to a small pendant necklace of the same gem type and color. A verdant lush green, all the better to match the warmth of the color of Julie’s perfectly coiffed hair, carefully tied into a bun for ease of management during sleep. Another lady would have let it all down in bed, but Julie didn’t.... wouldn’t.... care.
Marcus breathed deeply against Julie’s exposed ear, before leaning in closer as if to whisper sweet nothings, one pair of fingers carefully and firmly pressing down on either side of the ear stud. “Julie... would you kindly.... begin wake up?”
There was a faint flash in the gem studs, as Julie’s bountiful chest suddenly started moving obviously, the heave and ebb of her lungs taking deep breaths paired with the faint gusting of exhaled and inhaled air from her rounded nose, like a Sleeping Beauty of sorts. She remained seemingly unconscious, even as Marcus proceeded to cradle her a little in his arms, enjoying the silkiness of her tanned skin, the wrinkles that a woman her apparent age would have even with regular downtime by the pool and at the beautician’s.
Unmade up, her face still radiated the same beauty that had taken his breath away all those years the first time he had sat back and watched the preview photos on the screen of his studio computer. She would never win any sort of beauty contests, there would be many women far prettier than her, but Julie was still the right kind of beautiful.
A woman who would never betray her unlike a long line of women interested in hooking him only for his wealth, or his reputation, or even (at the time they had started living together) his looks. Granted, she would never give him children as well, but if he wanted to fix it there was a little thing called foster parenting or adoption. He would probably also need to have... discussions... together with her and Bellamy as well in that regard to help her broaden her mind to the possibilities of being a mother to a child. He mused a little. Come to think of it, maybe today afternoon would be a good time.
Right now though, Marcus felt a little stiff inside his pants. It was really prurient to suddenly have such thoughts in the middle of such a biddle soliquy, bu it was what it was. He traced one of his hands to Julie’s washboard abs, slightly filled out by the apparent effects of prolonged aging. A little softer, a little less perfect.He looked briefly at her outie bellybutton, smiiing as it momentary flashed in a faint green glow for two seconds, going out for two, coming back on, in a sort of loop. Consistency had its own beauty as well.
He brought his lips to hers and kissed deeply. There was no response for a little, and then a slight squirming as she stirred. The first words she had said every morning they woke together in the same bed all these years... “And a beautiful morning to you, dear...”
Marcus looked on satisfiedly, thinking back to times of yore...
-----------------------
Well, that was a washout. AGAIN. Marcus had chosen this pub because it had ties with the company, in a “I have a relative of an acquaintance of a sibling, please help me get him employed viably” way courtesy of Mr Gujaraz’s horrendously expanded family. Ostensibly a middle-class Mexican tequila bar, it was also a good place to get some privacy. He buried his face in one hand and sighed.
Mandy had been like all the other women he’d tried dating before. He’d tried upping his chance of success, but had wound up scuttling it the same way as before – by commissioning a corporate security check. If it wasn’t fear of his reputation, it was hunger for it. Or his money. He tried telling himself he wasn’t an incel, that he wasn’t going to become one of those loser boys who’d brought on and fostered the Despotic Years...
“Oh, Aymee, if only I had been a little more foolish with you...” He glanced at the other side of the booth he’d reserved, where he would have been counseled, advised, given legal advice and a guilty little eyeful of two big things on “a man”. She had DEFINITELY been a woman. Marcus could have been happy ignoring that and being the bitch in a marriage with her, but the chance had gone... Someone in Chinajapan had taken a liking to her and asked for her hand in marriage. It seemed big enough that it had been actually televised. Something about becoming the Empress uniting both countries in a peaceful union after the pain of the invasion and takeover...
She had looked like one of those Empress dolls they used to put into a court of dolls every year in spring, except that she was life-sized, and apparently being used to smuggle a pair of melons even with the effort the simple red kimono had made to tone down her figure. The simple austerity of the caked “food-safe” white foundation and subtly applied liner and stripe of blood red lipstick had sent something going in him. It had made Marcus fall in love... and then kick himself as the chance to do anything about it had clearly been shut tight.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), he had the company of Seamus in the other seat on the opposing side. He had drawn the short straw and traded a nice hard lager for a free flow of lean cider and sodas and the right to pilot a manually-driven vehicle, but otherwise, he was proving to be a shitty wingman. Zero out of eight had been a perfect record of failures in dating, and it had become clear that when you had a psychopath for a friend and a third leg at dates, the only thing you could expect at best was not to wake up and realise you’d have to bail THEM out for some sort of sexual assault or molest on someone while you were drunk.
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” observed a chartreuse singing on the jukebox next to the cooler full of free ciders. “YOU GOT THAT DAMN RIGHT, SISTER!” Marcus bellowed, clearly at the phase of full immersion drowning in his sorrows, as he swigged maybe one more mug too much in a toast to a missed chance at actual love that had been staring at him across the table all these years in dinky pubs and innermost corporate sanctums. He was clearly requiring the services of a taxicab to get home, of any indeterminate size that could hold him safely, and not necessarily yellow in color.
UNFORTUNATELY, all he was getting was a small raspberry jalopy, the kind you find in a second hand car store. Seamus struggled to stand up with a heavily smelling Marcus, soothing platitudes into Marcus’ ears about finding someone who could stand up to the pressure of all that he was.
As Seamus carefully bundled him into his personal man-driveable car – none of that autonomy bullshit outside of the parking phase, he had demanded despite the protests of Corporate Legal now that they had gained some balls without Aymee looming over all of them as a sort of short-circuit to their most pedantic tendencies – he briefly reflected on his failure at being a brother to Marcus.
It took him a while to arrive at Marcus’ little cubbyhole for three people, now home to one lonely little man suffering from success at the top.... Seamus helped Marcus through the door, to the porcelain throne for two bouts of regret at overdosing on alcohol, before calmly dumping him in his bed, carefully shifting him so that if he decided to throw up AGAIN after Seamus left, he’d be puking into a plastic bag. Hupefully the scent of regret marinating in it would wake him up a few hours after the act.
Seamus left the bedroom and sat down at the coffee table in front of the tlevision monitor of the house. He didn’t want to leave right away without at least kicking back and resting a little. The idiot box would make him a fool, he decided, even with Marcus’ obsession with collecting lifetime subscriptions to channels full of genuinely educational entertainment. He wanted something to depressurize with at his own pace... He glanced at the pile of books beneath the glass top of the coffee table, picking out two or three. Marcus had good tastes – archictecture, a treatise on the ccultural alterations and aberrations that the forced unification of China and Japan had placed onto the combined culture of both nations in the terms of China dictating terms of governance and societay soperiority. (a long gone attitude thank god, they were equals now)...
Seamus blinked at the third book he’d picked up. It was a scan binder. He had built out the Oven in the years after they had started playing with fire – very realistic, lifelike android fire – shipping a family for Senator Bundt. The ban by the Texas Fundamentalists had made it through, been ratified, and was now a federal felony to traffick in any robotics that were considered too realistic, with a surprisingly clear, un-dunheaded list of criteria, with exceptions made only for antique machines existing prior to the queue, corporate needs, or medical trainer dolls.
The Oven, Mark V, had potentially enough gear combined together to infringe the law so many times over if not for the waivers that they had cobbled together through Bundt’s influence as a Senator, as well as their medical devices devision being a thing....
It could do a full spherical-field scan of a person or thing, taking details in to an absurd level both 3d and textural.
It could take recordings of a voice and parley them fully into a model that could speak with the same tones and even simulate a wide range of emotions with a little extra processing power
It could even hold DNA records if one pushed the format that had been Frankensteined together by the various items put into it, though Seamus had never seen any need to use that feature.
He glanced at the book shaped storage medium, looking at the Post-it note stuck inside. It had Aymee’s handwriting, though it seemed a touch drunken. “You don’t know what you’re missing. BEHOLD, A RECORD OF MY MASCULINE PERFECTION!, top this, ya bloated, wobbly dunhead. – Aymee... P.S. GO LIFT AND DO SOME CARDIO BEFORE YOU KILL YOURSELF WITH A FRIED CHICKEN BREAST.”
Seamus laughed a little. Welp, someone had clearly decided to violate the rules that they had set on the use of the Oven Mk V. He suspected that if Aymee had come to and realised what they had done, they would have attempted to commandeer his itellect to create some sort of time machine, gone back in time, and attempted to drag themselves out of the Oven V’s scanners before they made this record...
maybe it was the lateness of the hour. Maybe the residual alcohol in the cider helped. Or maybe Seamus Arendt was just being an uncontrolled psychopath. (Aymee had left behind a list of good friends and people he could trust to rein the Arendts in with her no longer being a lawyer in the company, but they probably were not doing a good job if they had allowed what would happen next to happen)
The ticking of a mind fucked up sufficiently to get the answers right but the working behind them so dramatically wrong was loud in Seamus’ ears. A plan formed... He suddenly ran for his own jalopy like a thief in the night, buzzing himself in and running past janitorial crew to his own office and workshop.
Seamus hurriedly slotted his ill-gotten scan binder into a compatible reader and started tapping furiously, what had once been either some sort of love note or just the braggings of a ‘man’ was now becoming something way more dangerous...
------------------------
If Marcus noticed the theft that had been committed within the confines of his house he did not show it in any way, as life with one man indefinitely down of the Four Brothers continued both at home and offices. The same messiness in both the keeping of the home and the way he operated and sculpted at his office studio... There had been a couple of odd interactions between Seamus and Bellamy ever so often. Furtive motions, discussions on obtaining some AI chatbot tech to improve company products. Questions about whether what they were doing was even legally acceptable
(Seamus had assured Bellamy that Legal didn’t have to know)
(Bellamy had pointed out that if Aymee or the Chinajapanese Union ever got wind of said thing they were doing, Legal would be the absolute least of their worries, or those of the entire company. Compartmentalisation didn’t work THAT way and he wasn’t doing it the right way that Aymee had done on Project Goldfish)
(Seamus assured him he was doing lots of work to anonymise it sufficiently, whatever ‘it’ was)
Marcus thought nothing of it, at least at first.
---------------
When the bottom dropped out of the hole, Marcus’ first response was “Have we learnt NOTHING from the way you first shoved Elliot onto me?” He asked with a very annoyed mien as he looked at what Seamus and Bellamy had asked him into their combined offices to see. “erm, I know it’s a woman in a can. A very hot woman. Seamus, I swear, if you’ve drugged a woman just to deal with my companionship issues, I am going to have the corporate doctors quintuple your dosage of psychopathy medication drugs.”
Seamus looked at Bellamy. Bellamy looked back at Seamus. “That would be very bad.” Seamus first spoke up. “ We wouldn’t be able to perform as required by our private shareholders.”
Bellamy nodded hard in agreement. “virtually 24/7 narcolepsy. We would be totally unpsychotic, but at the price of doing fuck all. Actually, wouldn’t that technically be kind of like death?”
Seamus nodded, and turned to pat Marcus’ shoulders as if to reassure him. “Please don’t do it to us, it’s not something that’s justified... “We just need you to run with it for at least a few weeks... if it doesn’t work out, you ship it all back, we dispose of it, and we agree never to bother you with this shit again. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?”
Marcus’ annoyance gave way to something as he pondered the contents of the giant cylinder. “... ... we’re not going to get into trouble, regardless? This is just an experiment and an internal test product?” The woman in the jar was a hazel-haired beauty, aquiline eyes, puty lips.... her naked pulchrritude on display had a certain familiarity he couldn’t quite put his fingers on, but at the same time it seemed soft and curved in so many brand new ways that he couldn’t quite wait to put his fingers on it. For some reason, her heavily trimmed pubic bush was slightly blonde, a peculiar mismatch of curtains and drapes.. “So, what’s she programmed as?”
Bellamy grinned. “That’s the beauty of it. We’re trying something different for personality generation. You know those AI chatbots that are the rage amongst some of the teens and young men now?”
“The ones with no life and no hope, you mean...” Marcus deadpanned, calmly ignoring that he too was part of their ilk.
Bellamy rolled his eyes. He wasn’t going to get dragged into that kind of debate. He was a psychopath, but his variation meant that he literally felt too much rather than too little, and it was literally pinging him, screaming “DO NOT ARGUE THAT POINT. JUST PRESENT AND GIVE.”
Bellamy gave a slight cough and handed Marcus a laptop of sorts... it looked more like a device cobbled together from a mini-PC box, a rollable monitor and some sort of chip reader/writer done up as a chip in a sort of glass jewel box with a plush velvety lining holding on to the container legs of the chip. It seemed to be a sort of all-in-one chip combining various functions, like the kind that sat right in the center of his smart tablet, but probably with greater capability and speed...On his other hand, Bellamy hefted a sort of VR set.”
“Just go on dates regularly with the chatbot for a few weeks first. Build it up. Let it get to know you, build emotional data. When you feel it’s ready, let us know and we’ll go over the next steps. In the meantime the physical body has a placeholder AI installed if you want to relieve yourself on it before the personality is ready for implementation.” Bellamy explained matter of factly.
“This sounds like one of those cash grabs they used to make back in my day as a teen, guys.” Marcus looked hesitantly as he took the laptop and eyed it cautiously. “Are you sure this is going to work?”
Seamus shrugged. “We did a lot of work to integrate a lot of new stuff, and we’ve never tried doing it this way before. Only one way to find out for real.We’ll help you install all the stuff in your house this afternoon, and you can go on your first dates with... what’s her name again?” He turned to ask Bellamy.
“We’re not doing a preset name, I don’t think it aids realism here...I’m shovelling that sort of thing onto the user for a change with this prototype” Bellamy shrugs a shoulder matter-of-factly.
Marcus pondered the situation. “I feel like I’m going to regret this, guys.”
Seamus slapped Marcus in the back. “I hope not! What’s the worst that cold happen?”