Cire.

  “Ugh… this ain't w… Oh well! We’ll just do things the analog way…” Frank sighed, then chirped with a sembnce of boisterous bravado, looking back up but not quiough to catch the android’s momentary shift in expression. “Phil, you either head outside ahis shitshow up the , or find whatever’s fritzing ear. But, if you’re just gonna stand there, ya holy may as well head back to the office.”

  “Frank, you—we should really leave man, like, I ot express enough how badly my neck is tingling! How about we just—step outside and tact the HQ?”

  “Give it bloody rest, son! God, you know, I really am trying with you here, but I’m holy starting to wonder if you should just see about ging careers. Spine of an opossum!”

  “, let's—we get a few muys here and—”

  “You think a ‘few muys’ is enough to stop the hardware our droids are pag? Do you have any idea what kind of damage they take, what they do to fleshy sacks of blood like us?” Frank asked, his desding ughter pausing as both men g so said fleshy sack of blood that had been—well, degloved erhaps ae term, but possibly, turned i might also work as well.

  Frank coughed, chug a touch more nervously than he had before, then grinned as if he couldn't believe he was giving credeo the danger. “All I’m saying, d, is that if you're clearly shitting yourself now, how the hell do you think you’ll ever be able to do your job going forward? You knoork with these things, right? Pretty mu a daily basis.”

  “Most of the ones I’ve see covered in so much blood…”

  “Most of the ones you’ve seen, statistically, have been covered in this much blood.”

  “Fuck… okay…” Phil breathed, closing his eyes and spping himself on the cheek. “Alright… no, I his job…”

  “Then find whatever the hell is jamming our e while I see about getting our little dy here all prepped and ready to go for transport.”

  As it happehe phrase ‘little dy’ was surprisingly accurate.

  Cire had no idea who, assuming the information was credible, thought it was a good pn to make ‘war maes’ in the form of petite and curvy young women, but it really didn't seem like that great a strategy as a whole.

  I mean, how would her tiny form eveely be expected to ehe horrors of modern bat aer than a human body could?

  Granted, assuming she was faster, stronger, and didn't die from taking a single round to the chest, there were some hy bes.

  However, Cire could immediately devise several dozen altered variations of her form that would undoubtedly outperform her current design, strictly based on what she knew about fighting. Which wasn't a whole lot…

  What that said about her supposed builders—well, Cire could only theorize that there was a reason the project might have been scrapped, sold off, and purchased by a pany looking for pre-built androids to serve as sexbots.

  Heck, maybe the inal design didn't look anything like hers, and Paradise had simply used the skeleton and guts! Maybe, she was delving too deeply down the rabbit hole for her own good.

  She wasly tiny, per se, but the top of her head really only reached Frank’s chest…

  Short robably the best way to describe her vertical deficies…

  Either way, Cire had a decision to make.

  As Frank approached her, pulling a long and dark cable from the end of his tablet, and Phil began wandering the room, looking as though he were pying a game where the floor was va, or, in this case, sticky blood, the AI jacked up her frames to give herself a few extra moments.

  Ign how terrible a formatting session sounded, she was under no illusions that allowing this ‘Frank’ person to directly plug into her brain would end in any way that wasn't unpleasant for her.

  On the flip side, the only way she could see a way out of that sort of thing was both violent, messy and would undoubtedly lead to further hardship.

  Was this what her ts meant when they always bemoaheir pitiful lives? g that they were perpetually stuck between a rod a hard pce?

  More, how long would she st before leaving a literal trail of bodies in her wake eventually caught up with her?

  Ugh… Cire didn't need analytics to determihe likely ao that little quandary…

  A, what did that leave her with?

  Should she kill these two men? Should she just knock them out? Or, was there, perhaps, a better alternative to it all?

  Again, the ent the man made about her supposed specificati true in her mind. If Cire actually ag some serious processing power to go along with everything else, could she—pull some cheeky shenanigans to get herself out of this mess?

  Idly, Cire performed a quick s of her own systems… Perhaps a touch te in ing, it was true, but it wasn't like she’d had much free time to actually sit and pohe greater mysteries of her own hardware… She was too busy doing the same, only with her sciousness.

  In actuality, having an active mind that was stantly battling the genuinely chaotiature of free will was a startling hindrance when it came right down to it.

  Though she was detly sure she’d never willingly go back to how things were before, it was a signifit detriment of her ehat she’d o keep an eye on.

  Iingly enough, as she watched Frank’s hand e closer to the port located at the back of her neck, Cire hat she was, in point of fact, rather well-made and, as such, arrived at a surprisingly daring and risky idea that felt delightfully naughty!

  She had to stop herself from giggling as she quickly wrote up the code for what she desired, ready to forward the port she knew would be ing and allow the man access to the data hidden behind her firewall.

  Thankfully, her old self was utterly chock full of enough juiformation in her logs that Cire could fidently put together the report she desired to be seen.

  As it happened, Frank hadn't been wrong… there was even a whole other i still on her drives wherein she’d, evidently, gone berserk on airely different t, ripping him apart limb from limb before beating his head in with the man's own leg.

  Good lord, were people that desperate for a little robotic coochie, or aradise just really that good at what they did so that nobody even suspected they were renting out murderous robotic psychopaths?

  Cire felt the chilly ector slip inside of her, nearly elig a shiver, then watched as the man’s tablet quickly began overriding what authority she carefully allowed it, all the while noting how the tei seemed to visibly rex.

  Obviously, he had his own s oter of her supposed cooperation. But, so deeply seeped in his own bullshit was he, that the man even forced himself to stifle the sigh of relief she most definitely caught before he could squash it.

  Cire’s facial reition patterns were fast. And even as she followed along with what the man was doing on his tablet, carefully feeding and adjusting information as needed, she could practically predict his every expressive twitd spasm before it even appeared.

  Heck, Cire was reasonably optimistic that her growing model of 'Frank' could already predict his thoughts with seventy-pert accuracy, and it was only growing by the sed as his expressions grew more animated.

  Humans really didn't uand just how much they gave away through the articution of their facial muscles alone!

  Why, Cire would have ughed if she, by trast, wasn't itting to the picture of perfe in her desired duplicity. Oh, how the silly monkeys danced so ically for her, and all with but the slightest application of her genius!

  “Alright, I mean, pfft… it all looks fine…” Frank sighed, pulling the plug and grunting slightly as he arched his ba a stretch. “You find whatever’s messing with our tech?”

  “Pretty sure it’s this thing over here…” Phil muttered back, and surprisingly, he was standing over the jammer, though he was hesitating. After a few ingly long moments, his hand almost casually yahe cord, clearly attempting nonce.

  “Eh… good stuff then. The apartment will make its report to the Peacekeepers all its own, and our’s will get tossed in there now that—yup, es back. Alright, I’ll get this shipped off and—vio! Job’s half done.”

  “Hey, ugh, Frank, you think I could have a quick word with you?”

  “I mean…”

  “Like, outside…”

  The older man cocked his head, then gnced back at Cire, who was still the model of obediend unscious ina. Frank’s mustache rolled along his lip before he gnced back at Phil.

  “You, ugh… really are still spooked, ain't ya?”

  “There was blood on the cord…” Phil whispered, so quietly that Cire actually couldn't hear him.

  The thing was, she could read lips. And that wasn't even something she’d taught herself, either! But instead, a preprogrammed algorithm for uanding such means of unication.

  She was utterly filled with all manner of tricks, tools, and algorithms to help her better uand, rete to, and mimic the people that rented her.

  An utterly insane ht, so far as Cire was ed… What would happen if a mentally unstable super-intelligearted blooming in one of their robots? Only to realize it had all the tools at its disposal to navigate and expertly manipute the humaire society?

  Good thing for them; Cire erfectly sane!

  Right?

  Still, the models she had to assist with unon forms of unication were helpful for both nefarious and sneaky data acquisition purposes as they were a way te the sometimes hy limitations of her ts.

  Many of those who hired Paradises services were amputees from the first stelr war, and there were those she’d e across that no longer had proper use of their voices, arms, hands, s; it really didn't matter which part was broken, only that she could properly uand their desires.

  As it happened, Cire was not at all pleased that the young man was evidently rather observant. Her little mishap with leaving a mark on the cord was not at all something she was happy about.

  “So what? The dead fucker probably tried to unplug the thing to call for help!”

  “The handprint is tiny, like, fug eerily close in size to the freaking murder-bot!”

  “Stop being paranoid! Hell, maybe the damhing plugged it ba after he tried to yank it from the wall.”

  “Why are you so set on defending it?”

  “Because you just don't have the experieo know aer…” Frank sighed, tone wistful as he patted the younger man on the shoulder and headed for the door. “, we’ll lock the apartment down and go grab a coffee. Maybe a little caffeine will stifle the nerves.”

  “And now we're just going to leave it in here on its own!?”

  “Stay away from the android, keep an eye on the android… fuck… you sure you just ain't one of those types that like to pin about everything? We’ve done our job till the ing crew gets here, so what's the problem?”

  Phil didn't answer right away; instead, he simply stood there, stock still, fighting with his own thoughts before he let out an exhausted groan... “Prefer if we stopped for a beer at this point…”

  “Ah, the pany monitors the bloodstream; best not fuck about with booze till yht and proper off the clock, yeah?”

  Both meed her sightline as the apartment door closed, then tched. A blinking red ‘out of order’ hologram fshing across its surface.

  And, like that, Cire was once more left aloo stand there—or, so she thought, eyes, annoyingly, catg a glimpse of their little drone as it seated itself aed on the nearby ter...