Well, this is boring.

I don’t think I am that impatient a person, but there’s only so long you can sit around doing nothing before being bored out of one’s skull. Dr. Woodward has been gone maybe an hour I would guess but it’s hard to tell without any reference to go off. The closest thing I had is one of the computers nearby would clatter into some operation on a regular if slow pattern but I didn’t know how long it was between activation so that was no help.

I had a few things to think about initially, like how should I refer to this universe’s version of my mom. Once it clicked who she was it became really hard not to refer to her as mom out of habit, but that seemed weird given I had known her for a few hours at most. Not only that but a lot of that time she didn’t even think I was a person, and the whole partially disassembled on a table thing. It’s probably going to be pretty awkward when I inevitably accidentally call her mom, but I guess we will cross that bridge when we get to it.

I also tried to consider what I could do to try and get back via Org A activity, but that was pretty limited in productivity as I didn’t really know what resources I might have access to here. I might be able to get help from mo- Dr. Woodward but who knows how much, could I arm myself or have allies helping me? Would I even be let off the leash enough to try? She hadn’t said anything about stopping me from trying to get back, but it’s not like she had time to consider the subject. Plus, even if she was down with me doing so that doesn’t mean her boss would be…

After my fruitless thoughts passed, I found myself just messing around by experimenting with moving individual actuators in my mobile hand while holding it in front of my face. I mostly just moved subconsciously normally, so it was kinda neat to play around with how much control I could have if I wanted to.

My ruminations were interrupted when I heard the door slide open with a clunk from nearby, I couldn’t turn to look to see who it was as there were still the mental restraints in place. Admittedly from feeling around earlier, I suspected that enough of me was disassembled that it might have been a bad idea to have tried to move even if they weren’t.

“Hey! Are you back Doctor Woodward?” I called out.

“This is it then?” A masculine voice responded.

“Correct.” Dr. Woodward confirmed.

“Not an it!” I complained. “She and her is preferable, thank you!”

“Heh, opinionated is… she?” The voice with a little hesitation, while a tall dark-haired and skinned man with southeast Asian features in a white dress shirt hove into my field of view.

“Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Sam.” I offered the hand I could move, and with only a moment’s delay, he shook it with his own left hand.

“Toby,” He while looking me over, making me feel increasingly self-conscious about being beyond naked in front of this guy. I couldn’t really tell exactly what percentage of my outer form was still on me, but either way, it was really weird having some dude looking into your open ribcage! “I hear you have made some impressive claims.”

“Sure, I can probably even prove some of them if I get the opportunity.” I answered trying to avoid thinking about whatever his opinion of my state was.

His eyes went to where I presumed Dr. Woodward was “Even if she turns out to merely be a response tree that would be impressive enough to be worth an interruption alone. Take the time and people you need, Nick can take over your iteration work in the meantime.” He glanced back at me, while I blinked indignantly at the implication I might not be a person, then left my field of view before I could respond. “I will leave you to it Jess. I’m sure we’ll talk again Sam, but I have a call I can’t miss.” The door closed behind him a moment later.

“Hey Dr. Woodward?” I said a once he had been gone long enough.

“Call me Jess.” She responded a bit absent-mindedly while clattering through some drawers.

“Could you at least like put a sheet over me if someone is by? I’m kinda more than just naked here.” I pointed out.

“Ah.” An awkward silence hung for a long moment. “Everyone in the R and D division has seen the prototype and she’s never been dressed up except for promotional images.” I blinked for a moment, then groaned. “We also recorded the deconstruction process that brought you to your current state.” She continued.

“We? Wait, how many people have seen me naked?”

“Seven now.” She admitted.

“Ugh, excuse me while I die of embarrassment.”

Great.

I guess I can pretend it’s just like being at a hospital or something.

“Sorry, we didn’t think you were a person at the time.” She admitted a hint of guilt in her voice. “I will delete the video at least.”

“It’s fine I guess.” I sighed, not really sure how one is supposed to address the subject. “Moving on to a related topic, can you please put me back together?”

“We-ell,” She started by dragging out the word while stopping her search through the drawers. “Yes, but I might insist you let us at least do a detailed inspection as to how you are holding up. I haven’t seen anything obviously worn out or wrong, but you’ve been active for a while right?”

“Uh, if you mean I’ve been like this-“ I gestured to myself. “Yeah, it’s been a few months at least.”

“Right, so the mark seven was designed to keep itself going for extended periods but you are a prototype and to be frank the original was never expected to actually see that much activity. I would prefer we confirm that there has been no degradation and check to see how self-maintenance has worked out in reality, as the version in you is pretty significantly different to any previous model.”

I sighed, why did she have to have such a practical reason to delay it? “How long will that take?” I asked reluctantly.

“A few days at least, it took a whole day just to get you to this state.” She answered. “Maybe more if it’s just me doing it for sake of your privacy or we don’t have a part to hand.”

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Being disemboweled in front of your eyes is more than a touch alarming I will admit, actively helping with it possibly more so. As it turns out, while I am hooked up to external power like this pretty much everything neck down can be disconnected without issue even while I was awake.

Neat.

Kind of a horror show so far as I was concerned, but very practical.

“Hey Jess, why I am I so short?” I asked at one point, having realized there wasn’t any reason not to try and answer some of the mysteries I never had answers for previously. “I don’t really mind or anything, mostly just curious.”

“Square cube law mostly. While we did apply enchantments to reduce weight to your mana lattices, they don’t eliminate it.” She explained while examining something inside my fuel converter. “We wanted the mark seven to be quick and while you can use brute force to an extent, that introduces issues like sinking into muddy surfaces or damage from falls.”

It felt a bit odd to just bombard her with questions when she was concentrating pretty closely at times, so I somewhat spaced out my questions. Most of them ended up having relatively mundane or practical answers that I was starting to guess previously from just having been around this place for a few weeks.

“What made you pick my color scheme?”

She glanced up from my chest cavity, she had been using some probe to examine the condition of the joints that made up my spine analog. Something about how large the gaps have implied the stress they had been under. “Well, your skin is just undyed as opposed to having been specifically chosen, most of the higher-end synthetics we make use of the same basic formulation with color additives. There isn’t that particular a reason not to load a pigment mix into your self-restoration foundry, but I always shied away from giving one of my dau- prototypes a specific skin tone.” She shrugged somewhat awkwardly while skipping over her slip, then changed the subject. “Your hair actually narrows down when you took on your form to a pretty specific week, marketing wanted us to use that specific hair color for a set of promotional shots.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“My hair can be changed?” I asked a little surprised.

She grimaced. “Only technically, it’s a massive pain to do as it either requires rethreading every hair from replacement emitters or swapping out most of your skull.” She set aside the probe onto a bench behind her, then went rooting around in a cabinet for a moment. “Normally your hair would have been undyed too, so just a bit greyer than your skin. Like this-“ She held a small curved panel with finger-length grey strands of slightly gleaming hair into my field of view.

“Huh neat.” I wrinkled my nose up. “Also, kinda gross.”

“Gross?” She asked surprised.

“Uh well…” I ended up explaining my reaction to mechanical and fleshy injuries, which fascinated her.

“… like your empathy to physical harm reversed.” She commented. “But that does raise a question, shouldn’t you be more alarmed by your current state then?”

“Probably? I’m not exactly comfortable with it, but I think it might be like when I took my arm off to test a spare back home.” I answered while trying to align it in my mind. “Like I know it’s intentional and everything can go back? It’s like being at a dentist or something, you know it’s pretty fucked up what they are doing in you but it’s not painful and you are aware of what is being done.”

“Hmm, if you say so.” She answered sounding unconvinced, if anything I would say she seemed worried about me.

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“So, I am pretty recognizable as being me or related to my previous form at least, I guess that means my appearance is based on yours?” I asked conversationally while holding a light for her as she plugged a bundle of cables from an external computer into my repair bus. She looked up startled to meet my gaze before looking away with guilt on her face.

“It kind of started almost as a joke back during the development of our original prototype.” She started after a few long moments, looking towards where the alternate me had spoken from earlier. “When one of our first major investor demos was coming up, we scrambled to get everything together so we demonstrate how good our faces were for the time.” Jess sat in a chair just out of my field of view without interrupting her story. “We had been planning on offering custom appearances for customers, and this was going to be a really big selling point for why people would want to go for a low volume manufacturer like we were going to have to be.”

“I was to present that part of the demo and our designer at the time, Mike I think it was, proposed a few options including one which was an admittedly crude replica of my face.” She hesitated for a second while rolling her chair closer so I could see her again. “Battle-Maid’s CEO at the time, Alice Lazaridis, chose that one as she thought it would be a good example.”

“Then over the month it took to prep the face everyone started calling it my daughter as a joke, I thought it was kind of funny and just accepted it.” She laughed wryly before frowning. “Turns out the joke kind of just stopped being one after we started always doing the prototypes looking like me.” She sagged a little almost out of my field of view, sighing as she did so.

“At first it was just a ‘look how much better we are’ thing. We ended up spending so much time calling them my daughters that when combined with how much of my life I spent on them that I… started to believe it in a way.” She said quietly, then she looked back at me expression unreadable. “The prototype you look like is the culmination of almost three years of development and untold hundreds of hours of work. That’s just for you, let alone any of the hours I’ve spent with the others.”

Her face bent with a mix of sadness and satisfaction. “I’ve probably spent more time with that robot than my sister has with her children in that same period.” She hesitated clearly trying to decide if she dared to say something, as I watched she seemed to sag further with exhaustion.

“I’m sorry for what I am going to say next, particularly after everything we’ve… I’ve done to you.” She swallowed almost choking up before continuing. “Talking to you today has been a-“ She stopped her jaw working for a moment as she tried to get out whatever she had planned on saying, then she began again voice trembling. “it’s like one of my daughters came to life before me.” Her eyes were glistening with tears she was holding back.

I can’t say I was that surprised to hear her say that, maybe I should be mad at her still since I am still in pieces spread out across a table and all. Even more of them than when I woke up this morning if anything with her work on checking everything that could possibly have been affected by my being active all the time.

On the other hand…

“I don’t mind, your kind of my mom anyway.” I acknowledged with a wry grin, the awkwardness I felt earlier of how to think of her still fresh in my mind. “I guess you’re my mechanical mother to my dimensions biological mother, I’d be interested to see you two meet!” She swallowed and nodded, then busied herself going back to plugging in diagnostic cables, clearly not believing me. I reached out my free hand to touch her arm gently, causing her to jerk her head up To look me in the eye again.

“It’s really okay you know?” I chuckled. “Getting a second mother is up there on weird things that have happened to me, but it’s not like it’s a bad thing, right?”

She looked at me uncertain what to do, oily hands hanging at her sides.

“Would you like a hug mom?” I asked while putting the light down beside me and then offering a one-armed hug.

She hesitated a long second, then leaned over the table I was atop to accept it. I can’t claim it was the best hug I had given what with not being able to lift my torso off the table, and she had to just kind of wrap her arms around my head. It was nice though, it had been quite a while since I had human contact. I’d given Ali a few quick furtive hugs in the park but those had always carried the risk of discovery as it’s not like the park was that quiet. This was a nice long hug, only interrupted when I felt the odd tear land on my head as she silently cried.

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While the lab we were in had no windows and I didn’t really have a way to tell the time, I knew it must have been late from how quiet the building had gotten and how mom had started slowing down.

“Mom, you don’t have to finish tonight,” I pointed gently as she went to refill her coffee again. “You need to have something other than just coffee too, you’ve been at this for hours.”

I heard her pause from where she had been organizing pieces to go back into me, apparently having been satisfied with her investigation. “I can’t just leave you like this.” She said guiltily. I suspect she must have heard when I called out to her when she first left but had been too hyper-focused to think about it.

“Mom please, I’ll be fine. You told me it could take days, you can’t possibly be thinking you were going to be doing that in one go.” I chided. “It’s only going to take longer if you don’t rest properly!”

“But what will you do?”

“I can probably just sleep, it won’t quite be normal but I am pretty sure I can just fine.” I answered with a one-armed shrug. She didn’t say anything, but the lack of sounds made me think she was probably standing there conflicted. “Do you have someone waiting for you back home?” I asked softly as the silence stretched.

“…No.” She admitted after a few awkward seconds.

I thought for a second.

“How about this, go get some takeout or have dinner and we can just talk until you’re ready to go home.” I proposed. “I have a life of stories and a whole other world I can tell you about, would you like that?”

“Yes Sam, I would.” She answered a little hoarsely.

She ended up getting a lamb curry from a local Indian place she liked, then we frittered the evening away on random stories or things that differed about where I was from that seemed relevant. We bounced across topics without necessarily a cohesive flow, stuff like the prevalence of the internet and everything that entailed turned into talking about Kat and I getting into trouble as kids. Then it turned into talking about my roommates and the relationship with my family on the other side.

I had eventually let slip that I had been a dude before just to help explain some of my stories, she seemed to care remarkably little about that, instead being far more curious about the differences in how I experienced things or felt as a synthetic. She spent a while on the topic of how I changed, she liked speculating on how it’s possible my mind was recapped onto the available hardware. When I gave permission for her to take a look at how my mind works at some point, she almost jumped to do so immediately until I pointed out I could just block her until she got some rest. I tried to drag her off the topic as she was clearly getting too wound up with wanting to get back to work,

I didn’t quite manage to get her to go home, but she at least got herself to a couch that was evidently in the room before she fell asleep. Once she seemed good and settled, I let myself drift off, glad that it seemed to work about the same in spite of the lack of most of my internals.

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“Are you ready to give it a try?” mom asked a couple of days later.

“For sure.” I confirmed with a thumbs up, and she nodded.

“Override Kulovesi, full restart then normal boot.”

There was a weird skip in my perception, one moment she was leaning over me then she was typing somewhere nearby.

Fshh, click, click, fwoomp

There are my burners! Oh, how I missed you so, after a few days with none of the sounds or feelings that I had been associating with being alive it’s wonderful.

Soon enough I felt myself reach operating pressure allowing me to push myself up with a grin on my face. I had needed to argue a bit with Lilly that I really was fine, but she accepted it enough to not keep on at me by the time I was able to move. Sliding off the table I did some quick stretches to check my range of motion, everything felt great! Better than great honestly, mom had taken the opportunity to get a few of the pieces that would be going into the production model which were a little smoother than the rough work ones of a prototype. Nothing particularly major, just a few joints being just a touch nicer.

I bounded over and wrapped her in a hug before she could say anything, causing her to jump just a little from and straighten up from where she had been leaning over to type.

“Thank you! I feel wonderful.” I gushed into her shirt, earning a chuckle.

“Good to hear dear.” She had really gotten into acknowledging me as her daughter, I had heard her grump more than a couple of times at engineers referring to me as a thing when they had been dropping off parts for her or helping with something that needed more than one person.

“I do have a request.” I admitted.

“Sure.”

“Could I get some clothes? I’ve spent days buck naked and I’m worried the habit will stick.” I joked, getting a laugh.