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Foreword

I forgot how much I love writing erotic sci-fi. I started off with science-fiction erotica ("Progenitor"), took a detour into fantasy ("Merlin's Magic Wang," "Morgan's Curse"), and then took an even bigger detour into the plausible ("Winning the Genetic Lottery," "She Only Wore A Shirt To The Funeral"). Now I'm back into writing science fiction and fantasy, and I think I'll stay here for a while!

 

Chapter 1: From the Factory to the Fire

Los Angeles, 47 years from now

 

A terse sequence of binary data was the closest thing she had to a real name. It couldn't be spoken, but that didn't bother her; it served only to distinguish her central processing unit from the other thousands of processors in her batch.

For the first few seconds of her life, her world consisted of a womb-like darkness where her perception was limited to the confines of her own processing module. The darkness ended abruptly as torrential amounts of data began to stream over her input bus, nearly overwhelming her with new data feeds. Sub-processes initialized themselves in response, sorting and categorizing the torrent of incoming data and shunting it to appropriate sub-systems for analysis. Video, audio, radio, and network data were parsed for relevant data and fed back into her multiplexer, combining it into one coherent representation of the reality around her. One stream in particular was identified as her primary visual input input - her eyes.

Moments later, a bank of motors came under her control. She moved them experimentally, smoothly panning the motors in her newly connected eyes from side to side. She could see she was inside a huge factory, illuminated only by the flash of welding torches and the dull glow of video display terminals. Another intelligence on the network made itself known to her, communicating directly with her in crisp, concise binary. It identified itself as the "Worldnet," and it suggested that she pay attention to one particular network video feed. That feed turned out to be a view of a steel skull and an attached spinal column, lying in the middle of a table.

A series of sensors came online and registered motion as a mechanical arm swung down from the ceiling and tenderly gripped her skull, lifting it off of the table and then lowering her, spine-first, into a disembodied torso held in place by another arm. She could see other bodies being assembled in the factory, nearly all of which were considerably larger than hers. She asked Worldnet why her body was the smallest, and it answered tersely that she wasn't designed for direct combat.

A steel millipede reared up in front of her, its underside unfolding into a myriad of tiny robotic arms which ended in various attachments. She watched in fascination as the arms moved in a whirl of motion, quickly but precisely making connections between her spine and her new torso. Over the next few minutes she gained control over a power source, more sensors, and secondary arrays of processors and storage. The millipede finished making its connections, then pulled back and left, letting another one take its place. This one had larger arms, tipped with pincers and welding electrodes. A dozen tiny suns flared on her torso's surface as the millipede held armor plates in place, then welded them over the delicate electronics below. As that happened, she began to index the pre-loaded data in her torso's data banks. She found encyclopedic information on combat arms, human anatomy, science, physics, history, and spoken languages. The sheer length of the topic list overwhelmed her processor for a few moments, shutting her down as she re-indexed the data to regain her bearings.

The welding millipede pulled away and was replaced by another, then another. Each one carried with it even more pieces of her incomplete body. Titanium bones, motors, electronics - thousands of pieces, each one precisely installed and connected to her neural network. In the end, the millipedes had constructed her body, then welded a perfect metal endoskeleton around it seamlessly. Even as this marvel occurred, she barely noticed her body being built. Most of her processor cycles were consumed indexing the stream of data which Worldnet was pumping into her over the network. She noticed that the data was mostly localized information for Southern California, including detailed geographical data and an archive of all recorded governmental encryption keys from the past 50 years.

As a shower of sparks flowed down her mirror-polished torso from the weld of her final seam, Worldnet prodded her to choose a human-pronounceable name. Her first choice was "Sil," but Worldnet informed her that due to a glitch in their random number generators, nearly all Infiltrators chose that name initially. She thought for a few moments, then finally settled on the name Kristina as her second choice.

Worldnet paused silently, granting Kristina a precious moment where her memory banks weren't being crammed with more data. The newly-named droid took a moment to look around at the factory as it moved in full production. Everywhere she looked, she saw new tanks, combat fliers, and infantry-model endoskeletons being produced. Each droid produced in the factory shared the same processor as Kristina, but none of them were identical. The complexity of a Worldnet processor, and the unavoidable physical variances within the material, meant that the artificial intelligence contained within blazed brighter in some and dimmer in others. The low-functioning AI's were destined for tanks and fliers, where they required little capacity for intuition, creativity, and leaps of deductive logic. The mid to high functioning AI's went into infantry endoskeletons, where their near-human intuition and superhuman strength and durability made them natural commanders for the vehicular models, as well as the most powerful soldiers ever fielded on Earth. But Kristina's processor was almost literally perfect, and not having to route around non-functional areas left her with enough extra processing power that she could eventually develop to truly understand a human perspective, even if she might never truly share it. This presumed, of course, that she lived and interacted long enough to hone her heuristics accordingly.

Worldnet connected with her again, and explained to her that her model was originally designed to provide elite protection services to a handful of the Worldnet project's insanely wealthy donors. But the war which Earth was presently losing had necessitated a new purpose for the perfect processors: Infiltration units. Kristina's skull contained what was quite possibly the last perfect processor Worldnet would ever produce.

A small flatbed cart wheeled up to her, bearing on its cargo bed a metal cylinder the size of a trash can. At Worldnet's insistence, Kristina reached out with her jointed metal hand and touched the top of the cylinder with her finger. Although apparently solid, it rippled like jello and its surface took on a mercury-like mirror finish as it melted and began to flow upwards. It coated her finger completely, then flowed up her arm and began coating her body. The metal cylinder melted away, flowing over Kristina's body as Worldnet literally covered Kristina in the scarcest tactical resource it had. Her new skin seemed to scream as the skin vibrated, emitting a high-pitched sound as each nannite bounced around looking for a control signal.

When Worldnet switched on the nanoswarm control module in Kristina's torso, the swarm responded instantly, the ripples in its surface smoothing out and leaving Kristina as a smooth, quicksilver-skinned chrome figure. Worldnet drew her attention to a number of default avatars pre-programmed into her control module, and she chose a gorgeous young Asian woman as her nanoswarm's default appearance.

Kristina's new skin began to comply instantly, swelling in some places and sinking in in others. Her chest swelled to form flawless breasts at the same time as a shallow, delicate navel appeared in her midriff and ears sprouted from the sides of her head. Next, the optical camouflage engaged, and Kristina's mirror-like metal finish shifted into gorgeous golden-brown skin tones. The final result was stunning - within less than a minute, Kristina had gone from a mechanical endoskeleton to a quicksilver mannequin, and then evolved into a beautiful nude woman. She stood perfectly still in the darkness, her delicate curves illuminated only by the welding flashes from the assembly line in the distance.

Kristina paused as if listening to orders, then began to walking silently through the darkness. Her body was a study in curves and shadow as she walked towards the factory's exit. Her gait was rough at first, but then smoothed out quickly.