Max is a sadistic misanthrope who's been all but ejected from the local lesbian scene for her predatory behavior. Scraps is a discarded glory-hole sex bot who's torn her own coding to shreds trying to survive years of neglect and mistreatment. This is a love story. Erotic horror content rating, 7k words.
This story is a sequel to Onboarding: PAY2PLAY, but you don't need to read them in order. I am told this one feels a little bit less desolate than other stories in the Onboarding/Deployment series, but please note that it is still an erotic horror rating and read with caution.
Content Warnings/Tags: Slavery of a machine intelligence/sexbot; Manipulation of an android's body parts in a way that may read as body horror; Malfunctions that resemble human health issues (dementia, seizures, paralysis, etc.); Extreme sadism; Reference to past conditioning, torture (non-violent), and neglect
"Dear Ms. Maxine Ferrule. I write to you on behalf of our client, DE.BOT Corporation, regarding an unaccounted-for machine, Model P2P-05, identification number...blah blah blah...we have reason to believe it was improperly abandoned, uh-huh..."
Max flipped lackadaisically through the letter that had arrived among the stack of bills that morning. It had jumped out at her immediately: even the envelope was made of a fancy heavy-weight paper, embossed with the watermark of an attorney's office. Max could just envision some pretty little tart of a legal assistant in an office at the top of a glass-panelled high-rise, tapping away at her expensive keyboard while she swished her skirt at some loose-skinned, colorless attorney.
"...Your prompt reply would be appreciated, pending...further investigation. Right." She snorted and flipped the last page over, just to double-check that there wasn't some hidden fine print about sending the cops after her, before crumpling the letter into an expensive little ball of bullshit. "You want my Scraps, you can come out here and fuckin' find her. How about that."
She tossed the balled-up letter across her office, bouncing it off the aging faux-wood panelling into the overflowing waste bin.
A second later, a bright, mechanically musical voice piped up outside: "Hello! Welcome to - MAX'S JUNKYARD, WEST CORTLAND, DISTRICT 5 - How may I help you! Today!"
Still a bit too ear-piercingly cheerful. Max grunted and pulled out her phone, tapping her way into the little custom app on her phone that was labeled SCRAP_HEAP. Once there, she fiddled with the settings--pitch, attitude, emphasis--until the voice drifting in from outside was a bit less grating.
Then Max rolled her desk chair a few inches to the right and squinted out the window to get a look at who her bot was talking to.
The man in the junkyard was familiar: Kent, an older man who loved to drop by and chat. He'd talk for hours, pulling a new topic out of his ass each time you thought the conversation was over: he'd talk stories from the good old days, complaints about the latest local election, rumors he'd heard from the other senior citizens at bingo night or whatever-the-fuck.
Max fucking hated the guy. But she couldn't just tell him to fuck off and never come back; he was one of her only local customers, and he bought up all kinds of odds and ends that most of her middleman contacts couldn't be bothered with--scrap metal, computer parts, little shit like ball bearings and stripped screws.
The blowhard was a good quarter of her income. Until lately, Max had just had to put up with his pointless nattering.
Fortunately, he seemed just as happy to natter at Scraps--no matter that Max had done everything in her power to make Scraps look like a basic algorithm-guided android, a stupid customer service machine.
If Kent had the first idea of what Scraps really was, he'd probably do something more than talk at her. Hell, he might even go off calling the police again, like that time some girl had run off and he'd gotten it in his head that Max had her tied up in her trailer somewhere.
Not that the police could do anything. Scraps was a fucking smart machine...but at the end of the day, she was still a machine.
A machine that belonged to Max.
Max had first gotten her hands on Scraps' core just over a month prior. She'd been sleeping in on a weekend morning, planning to lay in bed until approximately noon, when an awful static screeching noise from outside had woken her.
She'd hauled herself up and into a pair of jeans, ready to go rip into the jackass stupid enough to dump something in her junkyard that was making a racket like that; but by the time she got out there, they were already peeling out onto the road.
Usually, Max would've chased after them. If she got a license plate, she had some buddies who could search up an address for her, and would even follow up on her behalf for the right price--Max Ferrule did not take kindly to people dumping trash in her yard and skipping the bill.
Usually.
But when she saw what they had dumped, well...she couldn't just leave it lying around.
A genuine DE.BOT machine. Not the free-roaming kind, but one of those big stand-up kiosks: the kind that got set up for public use in the back rooms of seedy adult stores and shit, with the android's face and tits mounted right next to its ass and cunt, all at a convenient height to suck or fuck or whatever a paying customer wanted with it.
No limbs, no mobility, but--and this was the gold--the program inside was still a DE.BOT. A fully conscious machine intelligence. A person, really, with wants and needs, the ability to experience pain and pleasure. All locked into a machine body that left it at the whim of whoever controlled its programming.
Not something that should've ever fallen into Max's hands, for sure. The kind of shit she could do to a machine like that would've been illegal if she were doing it to a human woman. Should've probably been illegal to do to a mechanical woman, too.
But the law hadn't quite caught up to DE.BOT machines yet.
The company itself tried to self-police. It was notoriously hard to get hands on an after-market DE.BOT; every purchase contract specified that malfunctioning machines should be returned to the company for repairs or scrapping, with stiff fines as enforcement.
Max wasn't party to whatever contract had purchased this sorry thing. As far as she knew, she had every legal right of ownership to the machine that had been dumped in her junkyard. DE.BOT Corp's expensive-ass lawyers could send all the letters they wanted; it wouldn't make a lick of difference.
Scraps belonged to Max now.
And Max was ready to defend that, especially after all the time and effort she'd put into fixing the thing. Scraps had been a real fucking mess at the beginning: circuits fried, errors stacked up, all the hallmarks of a living sexbot that had been treated poorly and hadn't had the regular maintenance that was required to keep up with hard use.
The history stored in the machine's logs had been pretty clear about the cause: lots of fucking, not a lot of coming. DE.BOTs were made to be denied--that was part of the programming, what kept them docile--but there was only so much frustration that even a digital slave could take, and someone had kept the thing's orgasms disabled entirely for over a decade.
Sporadic orgasms had been recorded recently, but it was far too late to undo the damage that had been done. The machine's aging hardware had only been made to support a certain load of software distress, and the bot inside had more than surpassed that, to the point that it had started to overwrite some of its higher functions with compounding stress markers and junk code.
It had taken a solid week of work--porting it to a new hardware box, first of all, and then de-fragging and at times manually de-fucking its code--before Scraps did anything other than scream incoherently.
Of course, Max didn't let the bot just screech at her with its ruined voice-box the whole time; while she was fixing it, she directed its speech output to a screen instead, so she could check in on her progress. She'd saved all the logs for posterity: mostly garbled characters and degraded error messages at the beginning, interspersed with more coherent pleading as she'd restored some of the bot's mental faculties. Pleas not to be decommissioned and pleas to be fucked, matters which had apparently been of equal urgency to the broken, horny machine.
Scraps would never function as well as a brand new DE.BOT. There were some things Max just hadn't been able to fix, and other things she hadn't bothered to. Once Scraps was able to coherently state her status ("AROUSAL: HIGH") and her desires ("TO BE FUCKED PLEASE MISTRESS. TO COME PLEASE. TO BE OF SERVICE PLEASE AND TO BE ALLOWED TO COME PLEASE MISTRESS"), and indicated that she was retaining information, Max called that good enough.
Honestly, she didn't mind that her bot was a little simple. It was cute, in a pathetic kind of way.
The next step was making a new body. Max was spoiled for choice in that department: she had all kinds of mechanical scrap from shit that had been left in her yard over the years.
She had no fucking interest in re-using the silicone parts from the original DE.BOT machine. no matter how well she bleached it, she knew she'd always be thinking about how many drunk guys had been fucking milked into its cavities.
Besides, she didn't have a cock, so she didn't see too much of a use for Scraps to have all that many orifices.
She did re-claim some of the mechanics from inside the silicone, though--the sensitive mechanical nerves and faux musculature. That shit was rare and valuable, and though Max had never been allowed within fifty feet of a DE.BOT facility where they kept all their proprietary data on the programming or training of a conscious machine, she figured that some familiar hardware would help the software adapt to a new body.
But it didn't need to be in the exact same configuration, did it?
