This erotic story features 'aeromorph' characters, humanoid robots/cyborgs resembling aircraft. But sexy.
SHORT STORY
Vast hangar bay doors creaked slowly open, a shaft of light slipping between the widening vertical crack. Amid the hum of equipment and the liquid throb of fuel lines, the prototype watched the sunlight creep in.
The "Autonomous Lift Inter-Continental Express" (A.L.I.C.E.) stood shrouded in the darkness that would soon be banished by the advancing rays. Alice was a lady of impressive proportions, and pedigree. An experimental new aircraft system -- intelligent, self-aware -- an offshoot of top secret military research currently trialling for civilian use. Few had seen her outside of the base; maybe a hiker wandering the wilds, or someone visiting her ground crew, would have caught a fleeting glimpse. To the world, though, she didn't exist. Her test flights had all been conducted with the utmost secrecy in the remote empty lands around her home base, where she'd been brought after assembly on a pitch-black night four months ago.
A product of concealment, a life undercover. It was beginning to irk her.
"DISENGAGE!"
A loud, booming announcement thundered through the intercom system, rattling the hangar with sound. Alice saw the sliver of light split the far end of the hangar, and her body heaved a great sigh as she could finally switch to visible light sensors.
The black strip that ran across her face where one's eyes usually were changed tint, unveiling two complex optical arrays modelled after the human vision system, with plenty of enhancements for a cybernetic being like herself. She squinted -- at least, that's what appeared to happen as her visor darkened in patches to block the excess light as it painted a stripe down her face. And what a face...
Broad. Rounded like a passenger jet. A big, spherical snout and smooth, flawlessly-white metal skin. Flat too, with minimal exposed features like ears, or horns -- the only protrusions a pair of swept-back control surfaces. Thin knife-like triangles jutting back from the sides of her head a 45-degree angles and spread out horizontally to about ten degrees, resembling ears. Her other distinguishing facial feature was the plump, black swell of rubber and synth-polymer composite that were her lips -- puffy pillows adorning her closed mouth; thick slabs designed to form an incredible seal even at high altitude. Everywhere else was blank, no openings...no need to breathe (yet), except for several lines of colour painted atop her white basecoat.
Alice was far more than a machine. That much was clear even from what could be seen in the sparse illumination. It was only the small figures flitting about on gantries that gave away the enormity of the creature slowly being revealed...
An aeromorph -- a flying machine built in the image of a person. Thirty feet tall (thirty-one if we include her 'ears'). Naked, or soon to be as a slow process of disengagement heralded by the booming voice began with a number of support structures and scaffolding moved away from her, taking with them pipes and tubes that had been previously fixed to her body.
"Ouch!"
The two largest connectors broke off, separating from her and swinging away as klaxons blared, warning her tiny crew-mates to stand clear. In their absence, a massive pair of breasts hung from her chest. Enormous fuel tanks filled to the brim, their nipples dripping with spillover as the access caps sealed shut. The trickle of orange-brown aviation fuel followed the curves of her cleavage as it rolled and plunged, staining the pure-white paint job and disappearing against the solid black patch of her belly.
As the small amount of residual pain from the disengagement ran through her system, the huge female raised her left hand and rubbed most of the spilt fuel from her bosom. Large, articulated fingers deftly graced her divine form, soft tips filled with tactile sensors driving vast quantities of data to her positronic brain -- home to a composite personality matrix, produced from a multitude of cerebral scans of human volunteers compiled into a living consciousness.
Her hand travelled from her breasts to her mouth, her jet-back lips parting and a gunmetal-grey tongue worming its way out from its den. The serpentine tip of her tongue licked her stained fingers, tasting the fuel. A 'purr' was heard by some as the aeromorph revelled in the sweet taste. Then, without much extra movement, she returned her arms to her sides, waiting for things to clear.
Careful,
she reminded herself,
you don't want to bump into anything.
Questions had arose in government briefings about the programme, and this didn't stop when corporate contractors got involved. Questions surrounding the efficacy of such a...unique solution to pilot fatigue, human error, and other sundry issues of long-range aerial transport. Making the pilot and plane 'one and the same' was certainly a novel way of looking at it. Some would say wasteful. Nevertheless, the green light had been given, and Alice was the result.
When designs for the A.L.I.C.E. prototype had been unveiled, they certainly raised a few eyebrows. "Rest assured," people in the know were told, "any resemblance to the form or function of a female adult human is purely coincidental, a mere byproduct of the design goals specified." Not sure if anyone believed this, but in the eyes of the decision-makers it had been agreed. There was no turning back, and now, after years of painstaking effort, she was ready.
Ready for her 'maiden' intercontinental flight.
Enough equipment had moved away to give one a good full look at this new goddess of the skies. Like her top half, her bottom half was the perfect facsimile of a beautiful, curvaceous woman. From the midsection of her fuselage to between her legs her belly had been painted black, sides and thighs white, knees capped with white and ringed with some nice blue stripes and lettering. Some seams at the joints were dark grey, others a lighter shade. Behind the knees and opposite the elbows had a more flexible, accordion-like substance that accommodated a wide angle of extension and compression as one moves their arm. The same construction was found in parts of her ankle and wrist, with her fingers hosting the most elaborate set of hydraulic and pneumatic mechanisms to approximate true (possibly superhuman) dexterity. Alice's every motion was a calculated procedure of maximum mobility with minimum energy cost.
That being said, somewhere in her personality matrix lay a flair for the expressive. A fragment of her creation, seeded by an unknown (to her) volunteer long ago, when her mind was a mere codebase gestating on a hyper-computer buried somewhere in the salt flats a thousand miles from here.
Another loud
CLANK
broke the rumbling peace of the hangar. The forty-foot assembly that had sported her fuel lines locked itself against the far wall a safe distance from the mammoth machine-girl. She turned her head and regarded the installation coldly, with a spark of warmth spared for the tiny figures scuttling about its scaffolds in single-colour jumpsuits and hard-hats. Her 'little helpers' as she'd nicknamed them. Delicate and cute. Her psyche reinforced the notion that it was her job to help them. That's why she was here, after all.
"FINAL INSPECTION!"
The loudspeaker voice boomed again, and Alice responded, her voice a close to a whisper as she could manage:
"Ahhh...a few more minutes, please..."
Acting like a grumpy sleep-deprived human wouldn't engender any respect from her superiors, so the metal giantess quickly stopped pouting and lifted her leg, taking her first step closer to her maiden flight.
A huge rubber-soled foot came crashing down on the concrete floor. It pressed down with incredible force, a loud
