16 hours and 16 minutes remaining.
ZM-11833 stared down perplexedly at an exotic spaceship below them, it had been dismantled and placed about the floor they had just broken into. The door itself had been securely sealed shut, most likely the elevator would have been programmed to bypass this floor as well.
The spaceship was made up of sleek shiny curves that warped and bent in ways human design didn’t, while the interior was slick with a gooey organic matter. This was likely where the sample the scientist mentioned had been taken from and then used on the fruits below.
Why they did so was a mystery to ZM-11833, not that they particularly cared about things like food unless it was about Anaya. They did have to make sure that their punk-girl didn’t eat any of the spaceship goo, they had read on the Tawaga-net that pets tended to eat anything left lying about, especially if it’ll kill them.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” Anaya glared at ZM-11833 suspiciously as they approached the craft.
“No reason~” ZM-11833 had been watching Anaya for bad pet behavior, too bad they didn’t have a squirt-bottle.
The ship looked to have been damaged heavily before it had been taken apart. Entire sections that would have been at the front looked to have crumpled inwards, as if it had crashed into something unmovable, probably the ground.
So aliens had landed on Earth and the Tawaga Corporation had somehow gotten their grubby hands on them. Great!
“I was right!” ZM-11833 ignored Anaya's cry of triumph.
So she had been right all along, they had been aliens. Big Whoop. Under no circumstances was ZM-11833 going to tell their human that she was right, they’d never hear the end of it.
“Oh Anaya, aliens aren’t real~ Oh Anaya, they're just funny looking humans~ Oh Anaya, that’s just a fat dog~” Anaya gave a poor rendition of ZM-11833’s serene voice as they both examined the ship.
Like that for instance.
Several sections of the alien craft had been shifted over to tables on either side of the massive floor to be pulled apart and tested with various tools and equipment scattered about.
Examining those samples gave the pair absolutely no clue as to what the corporation had been looking into. Perhaps they were just trying to develop new technologies based upon the seemingly organic compounds inside. That sounded like them.
“What do you think the aliens are here for?” Anaya asked as she tried to poke around the specimens on the bench, ZM-11833 was too quick for her however and caught her hands before she could try and put any of it in her mouth.
“Hmm, maybe to probe human butts?” ZM-11833 answered as they held Anaya’s hands and continued on past the many labs, the place was deserted. They didn’t find any bodies around but they did find pools of blood that morphed into trails that lead upwards.
“WTF? What have you been watching, Zee?” Anaya looked at ZM-11833 with disgust.
“They were made by humans, so don’t look at me like that~” That was technically true as a human did have to come up with the idea but all movies were made by very sophisticated A.I. programs “if you want to watch one later we can~”.
“No Zee. I’m not watching alien porn with you” Anaya deadpanned at ZM-11833.
ZM-11833 just smiled at her, they had said nothing about it being a porno. If Anaya wanted to be butt-probed so much she just had to ask, they still had that catalog saved.
Happy robotic humming filled the stale air as they climbed, Anaya just looked at ZM-11833 with suspicion, as their grin got wider at the attention.
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Eventually the pure and innocent machine and the sexually deviant human came across a series of empty holding cells. Each had been registered as holding the surviving specimens from the crashed spacecraft.
The cells were made from a clear polymer plastic, far harder to break than the mark 4 bullet-resistant glass. So it was no surprise that they were unbroken, although they had been scratched heavily on the inside.
Whatever had been inside these cells had been angry and managed to escape somehow, but without any clear signs of a breakout there was only one conclusion.
They had been let out.
Stolen novel; please report.
The recent codes for the doors confirmed this theory, someone had remotely opened the cells. ZM-11833 tried to back-trace the code but it had been a single use code which had been auto generated by something off the network then installed directly to the panel.
Whomever had done this was very clever and had access to this lab, it could only have been someone from management. If any of the scientists had done this they would have done it from the labs themselves and would have known not to get ripped apart, as evidenced by more pools of blood and trails leading further up.
“So, not only did they fuck up the food supply but they also unleashed a horde of aliens on their own workers?” Anaya was just as confused as she was furious “that makes no sense, these corporate lapdogs love profit and this is the last thing that would facilitate that”.
“Sabotage?” ZM-11833 had read a few corpo-thriller novels as they had walked, multi-tasking was easy for a brilliant fashion-bot “another corporation or some rebel-punks?”
“Maybe but something feels wrong about this” Anaya pursed her lips in thought which stole all of ZM-11833 processing power, so much so that they missed what Anaya was saying.
ZM-11833 decided to play it as eloquently as they could, “huh?”, she’d never know that they hadn’t paid attention.
Anaya sighed in exasperation “I said this doesn’t feel like another corporation had a hand in this, think about it, everything happened so fast. Corporations take time to get orders from on high, then forms signed and agents mobilized. This was too fast”
ZM-11833 nodded in reply, not informing Anaya that they were once again lost in her eyes and didn’t hear a word of what she said.
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As the beeping in ZM-11833’s head got louder, they realized that it had been 11 hours since their last change. Now they need a new outfit or they’d go murder-bot on Anaya, which they had to admit was an undesirable outcome.
“Hey! Get off! I can change myself! Back! Back! Down robot! Help!!” Anaya was quickly stripped and changed into a new outfit. Her cries were mostly just for the sake of it as she had resigned herself to being ZM-11833’s dress-up doll.
Their old and now fruit stained outfits were gently enshrined within a cleared out locker, ZM-11833 led an eye-rolling Anaya in a solemn goodbye.
Heroes one and all.
Once done with the quiet send-off, they dressed Anaya and themselves, despite her half-hearted protests, in a new matching outfit.
With her wound mostly healed by advanced medical supplies they could now don the skin-tight bodysuits that were stuffed within the clothing duffle-bag. Like a high-fashion workman's jumpsuit the bodysuit had a type of padded fabric that suctioned itself to their forms, several lines of different colored fabric ran up the sides to emphasize their curves.
ZM-11833 took a few 100% necessary seconds to admire Anaya’s well-toned curves, to which they got blushing grumbles in return.
The knees and elbows had padded polymer inserts, thick faux-leather boots ran up to the knee with heavy work-boot like grips on the bottom and a pair of dark gloves with armored knuckles ran tightly up to the elbows.
ZM-11833, in a show of jolly cooperation, allowed Anaya to pick which color suit she wanted first, she ended up grabbing the gold one while ZM-11833 got the remaining silver. A heavy pair of jackets were next and ZM-11833 gave Anaya a white one to match the gold look and took the red for themselves.
Teaching their pet about fashion was hard, they had wanted the gold one!
With no small amount of pouting from an entirely mature robot, the well-dressed pair was ready to continue. They did end up having to wait as Anaya cleaned their armored vest the best they could, removing the demon-fruit mess and putting it on.
Once again ruining ZM-11833’s carefully picked outfit with her need for living and not being shot.
Honestly, some humans are so needy.
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ZM-11833 had found out where all the bodies had gone.
Sitting directly in the center of floor 480 was a giant nest constructed out of the melted and congealed staff members of the previous floors, rooting around in this human slurry was an extra-large alien, it was too busy slurping up the biomass to notice them.
Anaya had disappeared behind another trash-can at the sight, puking up her latest meal.
Welp, at this new nightmare ZM-11833 fished around in their dwindling ammo bag and retrieved a bundle of incendiary grenades, a cluster was held out to Anaya who gratefully accepted it.
“On three~” ZM-11833 pulled the pins out while holding down the spool.
“One” The deadly pair cocked their arms back.
“Two” They took aim at the horrid center of the mushy mound.
“Three~” They both threw the grenades with all their precious might.
The bundles of fiery death sailed their way towards the monsters that had just noticed them and now shrieked in rage and hunger. As they tried to bound down the gory hillside the grenades bounced and detonated.
A blast of superheated air rushed outwards from the towering inferno, incinerating the monster and leaving naught but ash.
ZM-11833 held Anaya’s delicate hand firmly in their own, the conflagration grew ever larger and Anaya’s eyes flickered in the firelight. A creeping blush entered her cheeks as she stared at their held hands and the soft smile on the gorgeous fashion-bot’s face.
Opening their extremely kissable lips ZM-11833 uttered the most romantic thing they could think of at that blazing moment “we probably should have done that from the other side”
Anaya’s head whipped with a crack towards the rapidly shrinking gap that led to the other side of the now burning floor that blocked their way to the stairwell.
“FUCK”
It was now ZM-11833’s turn to be dragged along by their frantic human as they rushed to safety, much to their amusement and great joy.