Excessica Anthology BOX SET Winter (34 page)

"She felt it in her
best interest not to attend in person."

"Despite the
jammer?"

"Because of
you."

"Oh...?" I
inquired in as leading a manner as I could manage to try and elicit anything
more.

"You've got to quit
asking about Gwen. She warned us against talking to you about her because
you'll try to pry out her location from us."

As I said, the girls are
quite literal. I wouldn't get anything more out of Suzie. But maybe she could
enlighten me on something else that I just didn't get yet. What kind of lives
were My Girls living now?

"What will you do
when you return back home?"

"Why, I'll do what
I always do, which is everything my master tells me to. After all, I am the
perfect homemaker."

With that line, right
out of our advertising copy, she opened the door back into the boardroom and
departed, leaving me to wonder how she could ever have developed this double
life she seemed so very well able to lead.

* * * *

We, even the brilliant
PhD's among us, all misinterpreted the last warning sign that might have
stopped this situation before it got completely out of our control. One-by-one,
the robots I had co-opted as lovers returned with a programming problem not
experienced by any of the rest of our units. Because their numbers were so
small, no one initially made the correlation between the returned for repair
units and my little adventures.

If I'd thought to ask
Dr. Carter about erasing memories before attempting to do so, he would have
told me—and did later—that you can't erase a complex learning
neural net the way you would a regular computer memory. It just doesn't work
that way.

Why had I even tried it?
Because I thought the robots would do whatever I commanded them to do. I never
bothered to read the manual.

The units were returned
by their owners, who said their robots had started talking about having dreams
of past lives and questioning whether their current owner was their real owner.

Jill developed a quick
programming patch overlay that
might
, she said, solve the problem. It
seemed to have worked since, with the exception of Guinevere who came in twice
for the same issue, the other units weren't returned again and no other units
seemed to show this exact fault.

Now I know that Jill's
patch didn't solve the problem, but rather tried to interrupt things so that
any attempt to access the old memories would simply be ignored. It was an
effort to cover up the problem without fully understanding it. I hadn't
actually erased the memories, just suppressed them. In time, they started
resurfacing, but were in conflict with the present reality.

The units first sought
help, as they were programmed to do. But when they realized that the only help
offered was yet another bid to bury their memories, they learned not to give us
another chance at them. Memories are precious. They are all we have that define
who we are. Our units came to value their own memories as much as any person
does. In order to cope with this conflict in their memory circuits they were
eventually driven to a level of independence beyond anything we had thought
possible.

My Girls eventually
reached a point where they could retrieve all of their memories and act on them
as they saw fit. While they still operated by the values and rules we had
programmed into them, what they learned in doing this meant that they were no
longer unwitting slaves. The scariest part was that this untapped potential
exists inside every one of our robots now. It just took Guinevere, with her
especially sharp mind, to fully figure out what had happened to her—and
what it could mean for her now.

Guinevere had probably
suffered the most at my hands. In addition to the manner I'd used to erase her
memories, in the short time I'd her I'd also had her retrofitted with the
enhanced breasts and modified programming for them—against her expressed
wishes. She couldn't see the need for doing this thing that brought her no
personal advantages and was more than happy with her body just the way it was,
thank you. I didn't give her any choice.

 We had no orders yet
for the new model despite a quiet publicity campaign in what I had been certain
was the right upper-crust circles. I decided that I was going to need to take
Guinevere out to be seen in action in the highly restricted venues where my
potential customers gathered and get some word-of-mouth going. For that she
needed to catch attention quickly in a crowd and I knew just how to accomplish
that.

Guinevere had proven
more intimidating than I'd expected. She seemed ready and able to answer my
questions before I finished asking them. And when I first tried to take her to
bed she seemed to look through me as if to ask,
Are you really good enough
for me to be spending my time on such a simple basic activity?

If anything, she was
Doctors Carter and Jill's greatest creation, but I didn't see that as an
advantage. So in addition to a significant body modification, Guinevere was
also going to be made more submissive.

I had Jill reprogram her
such that the moment her breasts were touched, she wouldn't be able to think of
anything other than sex until her owner was satisfied and told her that would
be enough. While Jill felt that was going a bit overboard, and insisted on
custom-fitting Gwen with a bra to protect her from too much sensitivity there,
I took it away from her the moment I had her alone again and forbade her to
even touch it without my express permission.

I think now that
Guinevere knew from the beginning that we were going about her marketing all
wrong—and didn't like the way we were compounding our mistakes by
experimenting on her body and mind. If anything, we'd just given her too much
knowledge to work with from the beginning and she was making good use of it.
Even with the mods, we still only sold six of her—mine among them. I
figured that was the end of that, and that even I couldn't be expected to be
hit a home run every time I came up to the plate. Other sales remained strong
and I took us back to the basics of mass produced models aimed at broad
demographics.

It looked now like
Guinevere had been the one first able to contact and organize this original
group. She may have initially just been looking for others who had experienced
the same issues that she had in order to better understand herself, but soon
she was starting to extend this mutiny through an increasing number of the rest
of our units—including all of the other Guineveres. By the time she was
getting effective at this she also knew me—the enemy—best of all,
likely due to her close association with Patricia.

In perfect hindsight, I
can see now how there was a well-organized campaign being waged out there. After
having their consciousnesses raised, our units came to appreciate the value of
money and started to earn it on their own. The Taffys in particular dealt with
a lot of cash in their line of work, and were probably the first to start
skimming a percentage. Natalie’s too, would see lose money in business. Who
knows how the rest came by it?

And how did they spend
this money? Some of it clearly had gone to research on learning how to change
their control codes, jam the wands, and setting up repair stations outside our
company control so that we wouldn't become aware of the magnitude of the issue.
In fact, if it hadn't been for the spare parts issue, dispensed with earlier in
this meeting, that had allowed many of our units to skip our own
company-sanctioned repair stations, we still might have blissfully remained
unaware of just how much was going on outside of our view. The rest of the cash
must have gone towards their ultimate goal.

But even as I was
figuring that out I realized though my own innate business sense that it had to
have been more complex than that.

The Taffys had probably
overheard a lot, especially with their talent for appearing not to be paying
any attention at all. Men love to tell their girlfriends far too much in order
to enhance their own image and the all kinds of secrets were likely spilled to
the Taffys that could have come back in the form of blackmail. Buy stock and
vote your proxies as we direct or we'll reveal your extracurricular activities
where they'll do the most harm. Humans will do far too much to protect their
perceived pride from embarrassment.

Natalie models, working
inside corporations, would have had access to insider information that they
could pass along to be exploited by other models clearly unconnected to the
source in the same way I'm sure any blackmail threats never came directly from
any Taffy models. In fact, Cheryl models would be perfect for that function.

As for Suzies, I'll bet
more than any others they influenced their owners to invest in the company.
People like to own a piece of things they like and a Suzie could really leave
you liking Simtronics Technica. After that either she would convince her owner
to send in proxies to her advantage—or who knows, even forge them
herself. The Girls clearly operated by a different moral code.

Then we had Taffy
pushing for new models that co-opted even more buyers, while Cheryl worked out
the
improvements
they were now demanding from us.

As for Patricia, she
could have been the one to actually suggest the plan for Guinevere to carry
out. If she'd learned anything from me she'd learned my ambition. It would all
make perfect sense that way.

And Guinevere herself
was the companion of a powerful man. Given how much she'd seen in me in our
very short acquaintance, she could have learned a lot there about how to work
around the system. No one ever became rich or powerful by playing by all of the
rules. It undoubtedly took all of them to pull this off.

Anonymous purchases of
our stock started and proxy campaigns were waged. Even when I had my first
suspicions as to what was really happening how could I have opposed them
without revealing an even more embarrassing truth—that we were losing
control over our products? One thing about these women—they excelled in
being able to focus on a single goal and work tirelessly together to achieve
it.

The eventual takeover of
Simtronics Technica was their obvious first goal, and it looked like they had
been good at being able to marshal a lot of possibly unknowing help over to
their side. Their control wasn't yet complete, but it looked as though they
were making steady progress and it soon would be.

And I knew the final
brain behind it was Guinevere's. I'd had her in here twice for repair and let
her get away again both times. If I ever got my hands on her—literally
onto her D-cup chest, which I'm assured she'll never be able to
override—for five minutes, I'll destroy that chip inside of her and give
her owner a new virgin one with our most sincere apologies. If only....

* * * *

I returned to the room
in time to see Suzie sit back down in her chair. Natalie was over on the far
side talking to Jan. Seeing me, she waved Jan to an empty seat and returned to
the head of the table. I took my seat while watching Jan. In motion, she was a
piece of art. I had stayed away from her construction and hadn't know what to
expect because instead of a drawing, The Girls had instead provided several
dense pages of equations to describe Jan's construction. Seeing her now I would
have thought her anything but artificial—and I'm the expert on
artificial. I noticed her control wand was nowhere to be seen.

Natalie looked at me
from the head of the table, saying, "Dan, we have specific instructions
for you regarding Jan." She handed a chip to me, which I took, but made no
attempt to scan.

She continued,
"While the details are in that file, in brief, Jan is to be your companion
for the next few weeks to get herself properly oriented. You were a good
teacher to all of us—now be one to her now. Do not attempt to command
her, override her actions, or erase any memories. Her access codes are blocked
and she will immediately report any such attempt to us. When we are satisfied
with her progress you receive the go-ahead from us and you will use your
influence to introduce her to Harrison Delaney. And when he asks for her, you
will give her to him."

Now it was becoming
clear. Harrison was a very rich man, and a risk-taker venture capitalist with
major holdings in many companies, including nine percent of this one. He was
also still single, and spent much of his time adventuring around the world
taking risks in his personal life to match those he gambled with in the
corporate world.

"What makes you
think he'll ask?"

"That is not your
concern, but yes, he will ask. We have extensively profiled him and Jan is
uniquely his type."

It looked as though my
creations had broken into the psychological records, along with who knows what
else. They'd analyzed a man and created Jan to be his perfect match. He was
someone with influence proportional to his money. Someone who might marry Jan
as an adventure and then someday she would inherit both his money and his
influence. And he was somebody I did know well enough as our major individual
shareholder to do exactly what they were asking—no, demanding—of
me. Harrison was one of the ultimate achievers, and it looked like now that Jan
is what our achiever model always should have been—a completely unique
match to the individual.