Chapter 0.1: Our Only Hope
"Dave! Jaime's fried! Her entire power subsystem is burnt to shit! She can't keep operating." Keith blurted out, his voice shaking with anxiety. "It's a miracle her auxiliary battery stayed intact long enough for her to make it out of that hot tub and back to her room!"
Dave nervously rubbed his hands over his eyes and responded, "Jesus. What a mess! Shouldn't her water-proofing protocols have activated long before she got in that hot tub?"
Keith replied, "I don't think that was the issue. They were fully activated. From what I can tell, the stimulation to her...ahem...erogenous regions combined with the activation of her water-proofing protocols stumbled on some latent truncation error. It...it...it incorrectly assigned a value thus triggering her charging subsystem's activation. The erogenous stimulation also leveraged computational priority from her main CPU Bus. It didn't even pick up on the activation of her charging subsystem. When her subsystem requested her charging port be opened, her CPU Bus interpreted the same truncation error for her data hungry erogenous subsystems and granted permission. Her charging subsystems went into operation...her port opened...she tried to pull some current...and well here we are."
He chuckled, almost panting, "A real comedy of errors if you ask me."
Dave looked at Keith dumbfounded, "So you're telling me she tried to charge while in the hot tub? Underwater? While being groped by our target!!?"
Keith nodded, avoiding eye contact, "Yes."
"Jesus Christ.I thought these new infiltration units were supposed to be top of the line?" Dave picked at his mustache, "Well her aux battery is still working; Can she hold enough of a charge with that to complete the mission?"
Keith shook his head, "No. Her aux only provides about 20 minutes of functionality; that won't be nearly enough time. Plus, her last transmission, before her self-diagnostic-software crashed, logged all kinds of errors with her voltage sinks. If we turn her back on, she'll be a walking electrostatic time bomb. There's no way she can function in this state Dave." Keith looked his manager in the eye, "I'm sorry. I don't know what to do."
Dave leaned back in his office chair and sighed. Looking at the ceiling in hopes that ideas would stream down from the heavens he replied, "How soon can we get a Field Tech out there? We can patch her up and have her back out there in a few hours yeah!?"
Keith roared back, his voice now filled with contempt, "I don't think you realize just how serious Jaime's damage is. She's gonna need a complete rebuild; it could take weeks! This isn't something a...Field Tech...can just patch and repair. How's a field tech gonna get into Yavuz's compound anyways?" The words 'Field Tech' came out of his mouth with a sense of mockery.
Dave looked down from the ceiling and fixed his gaze on Keith. He couldn't see Keith's eyes behind his glasses; the glow from his three monitor desk setup glinted and refracted off of his wire-rimmed frames.
"Well Keith...there must be a contingency plan. We've had our bots fail in the field before haven't we?"
Keith agreed, "Yes, but never this spectacularly. A quick self-repair routine or a..." Keith swallowed with disdain, "Minor visit from a Field Tech have usually been enough to remedy the issue," He raised a finger and his voice shifted to make a point, "and the only other times our bots experienced THIS LEVEL of damage we called off the operation altogether."
Dave sternly countered, "Well, that's obviously not an option. If we can't get a direct hardwired connection to Yavuz's nuclear authorization briefcase he'll continue to use the threat of nuclear strike to keep the entire region paralyzed with fear!"
Keith looked down, avoiding eye contact, and spoke quietly, "I know."
Dave's voice gained momentum, resonating off the walls of the stuffy interior office. He shouted loudly, but to no one in particular, "Yerevan is gone! A pile of ash! And almost the entirety of Armenia's remaining population have become refugees getting the hell out of the country as fast as they can. Where will Yavuz strike next?! Greece? Bulgaria? Slovenia? He's shown that retaliatory strikes have no affect on his agenda. Those nukes will all launch simultaneously if he flat-lines, so we can't kill the guy...yet. He's unpredictable and un-phasable. NATO is too afraid to bring about World War III that they refuse to act with any balls." He slammed his hand down on the table. "Millions of people WILL die if we're not successful! If Jaime's not successful! Now Keith, tell me. What is our contingency plan here?"
Keith stammered, "I...I...I...don't know. I don't know." He looked at his feet despondently.
The room was quiet. The low hum of the computer bank provided the only sound.
Suddenly, Keith looked up, a quizzical expression slowly spreading across his face. "Unless! Unless...we can find a bot in the area that matches Jaime's aesthetic profile. We could load in Jaime's logged experiences with Yavuz into the new unit's main CPU..." His eyes glanced beside his head," she would essentially operate just as Jaime would have!"
Dave looked at Keith skeptically, "So we just need to find a functional bot that looks enough like Jaime to fool Yavuz?"
Keith nodded. "Yeah."
"Well get searching! It's not like time is on our side!" Dave roared.
"Yeah, on it!" Replied Keith. "This might be a long night, we're gonna need some caffeine."
Dave reluctantly rose from his seat. "And what do you want?"
Keith grinned, "Biggest french roast they got. Black."
Dave returned about 20 minutes later sporting Keith's large coffee and a drink of his own.
Keith looked up at Dave, a gleam in his eye, "Dave, I found one bot in the area that suits are needs. Now do you want to hear the good news or bad news first?"
Dave palmed his face, "Good news...I guess."
Keith pivoted in his chair and began, "I found a bot with a facial template that matches Jaime's at 96%. Her body structure is a 92% match. And! And and and! She has access to an almost identical wig & wardrobe selection that Jaime used."
He pointed at lists of numbers and gestured at diagrams to accompany his explanation. "With a few small adjustments she'll be a dead ringer in appearance and operation to Jaime. Oh, and she even has a spotless performance history; she's never had a single malfunction in the field!"
Dave eyed Keith with excitement and hesitation, "Well that all sounds fantastic! What's the bad news then?"
Keith's voice softened, the confidence behind his previous statement absent, "Well...she's a heavily modified Avant S3X-4.6."
Dave looked vacantly at Keith and shrugged his shoulders, not understanding.
"She's a sexbot Dave! She wasn't designed as an infiltrator model and she hasn't been activated in over six years!"
Dave retorted concernedly, "What do you mean? How is she even on the local registry if she's not specked for infiltration missions?! And she's just been laying dormant that whole time? Where!?"
Keith replied, his voice still lacking authority, "Well, whoever made her modifications must of felt she was up to snuff to be used as a viable option. And she hasn't been dormant this whole time. She's been in standby mode. Basically, she's been waiting for a command this entire time. Her systems log a full software/hardware diagnostic every month and all of her results this whole time have been within her operational specs."
"Answer my whole question Keith, where the fuck is she and why is she there?"
Keith responded, "She's in the basement of the Polish Embassy..."
