It was at the dinner party that Marianna's perfect life started to go downhill rapidly.
Marianna's calm, confident smile as she looked over her dinner party guests from her seat at the head of the long banquet table bore witness to her self-satisfaction. She had a great deal to be satisfied about. A billionaire titan of industry widely regarded as a computer genius, she was very rich and very powerful, like many of her guests this evening, who included senators, famous actors, and fellow technocrats. Although a mother of two, she had taken very good care of her body and her looks, and she was well aware that most of her male guests were surreptitiously admiring the very deep cleavage of her favorite scarlet silk gown with the double-slit skirt, an insanely expensive designer item which showed off her large, full breasts and her toned legs to perfection. It was tight-fitting enough to show off her callipygian form, while the slit skirt allowed her to move freely. Ripe maturity did have some advantages, after all; and the gown was an engineering triumph that kept teasing the possibility that it would let her breasts fall free, but somehow managed to preserve her modesty by keeping them firmly contained. She was a dignified, fastidious woman, but she knew how good she looked, and she did enjoy being admired.
Another reason for her complacency this evening was the presence of her new robot butler, a sleek and sophisticated machine with the most advanced artificial intelligence available--not quite AGI, but getting very close. Her own company had developed it, and sales of this model were expected to take off among the rich and powerful. At this point, literally no one in the world but her had this model. Gino, as she had decided to call it, was making its first public appearance, and so far it was a roaring success. Gino was serving dinner with the dexterity of a veteran waiter, while simultaneously coordinating perfectly timed deliveries from the kitchen, supervising the cleaning bots upstairs, and monitoring the security cameras and communications lines of Marianna's palatial, and fully automated, mansion and the attached grounds.
Gino, in fact, was integrated into the entire mansion's network, and had direct control of everything on the entire estate, down to the electronic locks on the doors, while Marianna could use Gino as a very intelligent interface. It was going to make her life so much easier! She was so proud of it, and the special surprise she had promised her guests later in the evening involved her future plans for marketing this model, which was attracting so many envious glances from her guests.
Gino's body was admittedly a little over-engineered for butler duty, being based on the chassis of a state-of-the-art military combat robot. It had the strength to lift a car in one broad hand, and the superhuman speed and reflexes to catch a dropped glass in mid-air and return it to the table without spilling a drop. Marianna did not consider this a problem; Gino was a thing of beauty in so many respects, and its strength and speed could come in very handy for its security duties, if anyone were ever foolish enough to attempt a home invasion here.
Ten or 12 seats down the table, she saw her two children watching her with smiles on their sharp, foxy faces. They were quite young; Marianna was not all that mature, after all! Tim, the 19-year-old, was something of a disappointment to her. He was very intelligent, but so far had not displayed much ambition or self-discipline. His main interest in life seemed to be sticking his dick into anything that did not move fast enough.
Marianna was quite aware of the sex drive of teenage boys, and could only hope that he would eventually grow out of it. If not... well, she could always try cutting off his credit cards, and see how long he could keep playing the role of dumb blond playboy. She had already spent too much time and money bailing him out of one scrape after another. One of the reasons for transitioning the domestic staff over to robots was, in fact, to avoid further sexual assaults against the maids; it was awkward to put in writing that the job requirements included submitting to Tim's attentions. He seemed to think that the domestic staff were an all-you-can-eat pussy buffet. Well, now he could try boinking the cleaning bots--she would not put it past him.
His older sister, who was still watching Marianna with glittering eyes, was another breed of hellion entirely. Unlike Tim, Carla had not only intelligence, but enough ambition for ten young women. Carla was only 22, but already had her doctorate and had inherited her mother's technological brilliance (she had actually been involved in Gino's development--if Marianna was Gino's metaphorical mother, Carla was its big sister), as well as the killer instinct that was so crucial to succeed in the cutthroat business circles in which Marianna moved. Marianna fully intended that Carla would succeed her as head of the company someday, but not for another 20 years, at least. Carla would just have to wait her turn.
Carla also had an unfortunate sense of humor, which often took the form of practical jokes that were hilarious to Carla, but usually painfully uncomfortable for her victims, bordering on sadistic. Marianna had been forced to speak sharply to Carla after her latest prank against one of Marianna's most valued business partners, which had taken a great deal of time and effort to smooth over. Marianna's attempt at disciplining her had led to a shouting match, in which Marianna feared she had gone too far: In the heat of the moment, she had threatened not only to fire Carla but to disinherit her, which had not gone over well at all. Carla had duly apologized, but with a cold fury in her eyes that did not bode well.
Marianna knew that they all loved each other deep down, but the wounds from this argument would take time to heal, she realized. She returned Carla's sharp smile with a gentle one of her own. She would think tomorrow about how to reconcile with her wayward daughter.
