Another story going public for the first time, featuring a trio of my own characters that, depending on interest, I definitely have more to write about. Enjoy!
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Out at the far edge of civilized space, one found ways to make do.
It was simply the way of things for the citizens of Cur's Crossing, lacking as they did any form of national or corporate backing from a more established world further in toward the human center. They had struck out on their own, and thus the going was often lonely; the production pipeline from the Earth colonies did not extend out here except by smuggling, and what tech that did make it out there tended to be proprietary almost to the point of inscrutability.
The inter-sphere conglomerates were deeply secretive about that, of course; they didn't want an enterprise like Cur's Crossing to succeed. All the better to keep their customer base thinking solely of capitalist space.
That being said, robots, mechs, and artificial life forms continued to come, drawn by the promise of catch-free rights within a political sphere that did not recognize claims to ownership over sentient beings. They were all so very helpful, enriched the culture so much, but... well, everything needed a doctor from time to time. Humans did not traditionally come with paneling that could only be opened by specially made wrenches that could only be obtained through a corporate overseer, though.
Nor a genome with specifically encoded copyright functions designed to make mapping it impossible without proper clearances, unlike the vat-life that came to live here.
Out in Cur's Crossing, medical treatment was more about finding ways to slice away red tape than it was actual medicine.
Take the case of Sona and Ampere, one of only three twindroid pairs to ever make it out this far: even just thinking about their design was enough to set a few roadblocks in the path of any potential repair man or woman. They were pleasure droids, obviously, meaning that any attempt to open them up, much less fix their wear and tear would have to contend with the increased sensitivities and bizarre structural specifications employed within the adult robotics market; it was a discipline all its own, not the sort of thing that had much crossover with vehicle repair or even standard mechanics. The perverts had their own rulebooks and, consequently, their own techies to fix things, presumably ones far more likely to ensure that ports had been cleaned before opening them up.
Even assuming one could find a repair person with the knowledge to help, the little droids' code consciousnesses were twinned too. It was, in fact, the entire point of having a twindroid set: two robots instead of one, with a pre-existing relationship to one another, their programming inextricably linked and probably stored within both of them at the same time. Sona and Ampere the people were not easily located within their central processors, they were a process occurring within a wireless link between their two cases.
You could not disconnect that link while working on them any more than you could split a human brain in two and expect surgery to go smoothly. They were a unique problem. Back in the earthsphere routine repairs might involve a day trip to a licensed maintenance center, the sort of thing that robots could both walk to and back from without much trouble. Out here, one had to get... inventive.
All the while, having to deal with who Ampere was as a person, too.
The pink robot cried out when Ren slid his fingers into his inner workings, his voice boyish, feminine, unrepentantly sexual. Though his face was a featureless black screen, the teasing in him obvious through the displays he had for eyes; it didn't seem right to Ren that such a degree of smug amusement could be represented through just a pair of upward curving ellipses, but here they both were anyway.
Both parts of the twindroid set lay on their stomachs on Ren's repair tables, the paneling at the smalls of their backs removed and placed carefully beside them on a sterile sheet of gripping rubber. Swirling miles of wiring, plate after plate of layered nano-computers all lay beneath a thin patina of artificial muscle, turned to gel the moment the open air hit it. A pair of screens hovering beside the young repair technician divulged reams of data about the twindroids' condition, processor usage, a dozen smaller numbers that were no less important than the first two. A third screen displayed a good old fashioned instruction manual, inviting the reader with animated gloss to enjoy their new Gemini-class twin companion droid system. Even to a technological novice it would be clear that this was complex, fiddly work.
What, then, did Ampere's arched back and wiggling, slim butt suggest?
'Most times guys have to seduce me to get their fingers in me, pretty boy,' the pink robot practically moaned, the mechanical cat ears that hovered magnetically atop his head flicking and twitching. He had a tail too, and Ren found himself thanking his foresight profusely for having pinned that wriggling little thing down before they had begun.
'Amp...' Beside him, Sona laid her head in her arms, her own ears tilting downward. She had no breath with which to sigh, but the audio chipset in her artificial brain managed a good simulacrum of one. The difference between her and her setmate were night and day, but then, that was by design, wasn't it? They were a QA tested, committee designed, and software coded odd couple.
And now, out here at the edge of settled space, they were becoming their own people. Whole new individuals, growing from mass-produced, consumer-grade AI slop.
Ren did not have it in him to admonish the pink robotic femboy too much for that.
'Most guys probably aren't putting them in there to refit one of your lateral nerve coils, though. Hold still, please.' he said, his eyes fixed firmly on the work in front of him. In truth he was almost elbow deep in his current client, far from sexual now, his fingers seeking out a node on the interior of Ampere's abdomen that was, indeed, sitting a little loose in its slot and requiring some adjustment.
Pulling it all the way out and brushing a thumb across the insertion point without ever taking it out of Ampere, Ren slid it back into place and was rewarded with a satisfying mechanical click.
And also a long, sensual catboy moan, replete with stretching, thick thighs.
'Mmm, still feels good though!' Reaching back as the mechanic extricated himself, Ampere grabbed hold of the hand that had so recently been inside his guts and resettled it to his ass. The short robot whimpered enticingly, pressed back against his technician's touch.
'That's because he's knuckle deep in our central nervous system, Amp. Can you just let the nice man do his work?' Sona's tail, a thin, insulated wire with a male attachment at the end into which any number of intimate devices could be plugged, curled with displeasure. Her blue chassis, designed by some committee somewhere based on market research, made her a perfect contrast to her counterpart, a calming figure that had let Ren into her interior mechanisms without much fuss at all.
