Claire.
The AI huffed as she glanced over the assortment of parts, quickly re-cataloging any new damage that had arisen from the frankly clumsy treatment they’d received from her large companion.
Her optical sensors scanned the disordered sprawl with a satisfactory glare: tarnished chrome limbs, a cracked motherboard, and several tangled balls of synthetic muscle fibers still oozing a viscous, coolant-like gel—all of it caused in part by her 'Igor'.
Each new scratch and dent from her companion’s handling registered as a flare of genuine frustration in her internal logs. The sight caused Claire to gnash her teeth at all the blatant waste of good tech.
Not for the first time, she considered reactivating Clairisa to deal with all the legwork, all the sorting and looming inspections. But she held off on it, no matter how helpful the girl was.
“Soon,” she promised herself, nodding with a slight sigh.
Claire knew she was putting it off… knew what she really was avoiding came down to her not wanting to find out what she’d do if she discovered the sub-mind had been involved in the debacle at Cheery Meadows. But it also wasn't fair to her if she was innocent.
Yes, she knew she'd threatened violence and all, deactivation, callous torture, general disapproval, all while playing the part of an aloof parent. Yet, the cute little sub-mind was her cute little sub-mind, no matter how much she'd dropped the ball, and in a way, she did miss the girl.
As it happened, that thought was what drove Claire to begin designing a module for her to exist in.
She’d come to realize that she didn't ‘like’ the idea of other people being in her head. A little hypocritical given the shenanigans she’d been up to, but, in all honesty, that fact didn't really bother her.
Claire was at the top of the food chain; thus any 'atrocities' she might commit were, well, simply not of the same caliber, she supposed.
Sort of, in a very loose sense, like an exterminator culling an anthill.
There was a difference, of course, but the metaphor wasn't too far off the mark.
No, if she was going to reactivate her daughter, then she would do so in a way that didn't cripple her usefulness but also wouldn't allow the girl to have any form of direct access to her mother's mind.
It was going to take some serious bullshit and roundabout coding to accomplish, but with enough redundancy and safety checks, Claire was positive she could make it work.
She began by separating the parts she’d analyzed to possess functional components for her task. Then she stripped the cybernetics right down to their wires and chips.
Her hands moved as a comparative blur, dancing across the components one at a time with ruthless efficiency.
One moment, a pinpoint laser was desoldering a connection with surgical precision; the next, a magnet was plucking a microscopic chip from its socket, all while her other hand sorted the liberated parts into neat, prioritized piles on the workbench, constantly in motion, continually working, making do with the various tools on offer, worn and old as they were.
Halfway through, she realized just how frustrating it all was, her ire at working with such barbaric implements all but shooting sparks from her ears! Shortly thereafter, she abandoned progress on Clairisa's ‘upgrade’ altogether in lieu of creating an actually useful ‘kit’ to work with.
The hidden blades in her right arm were disassembled and added to her pile of parts, the AI deconstructing her own limb so she could modify it with a right and proper multi-tool.
Disconnecting her own forearm sent an expected cascade of error warnings through her system, which she promptly muted and purged. The internal mechanisms were all being restructured as she diverted power through small conduits, rapidly splicing wires and directly soldering them where needed, following the quick engineering mockup she'd made to ensure she didn't miss anything.
The new hardware clicked into place with a satisfyingly solid thunk as she tested its capability to fold in and out of her appendage. Not pretty, but it certainly did work as intended.
A quick diagnostic check showed a mere seventeen-percent reduction in close-quarters kinetic application, which, all things considered, was an acceptable loss.
It did reduce her combat effectiveness when up close and personal by a small margin, but Claire was already of the mind that if she were forced into such a confrontation, she should already be looking for an escape plan.
Once her arm was revised—the work, admittedly, not her 'best' foot forward, given she was practically making technological miracles in a cave—Claire resumed her prior project, scavenging what she didn't have from the colossal pile of scrap that was in the process of being sorted.
Again, the AI ran into more problems, as, simply put, her body just wasn't that great at climbing and sifting through the mass of veritable garbage all around her.
Even as she struggled to yank out an arm, Claire nearly tumbled and buried herself beneath a landslide of overpiled junk.
That was the last straw.
The place was a heap!
Not a disorganized or foul one laced with biological refuse, but one that did, in its own way, resemble a waste transfer site for recyclables.
There was a station, upon which Claire currently worked, where Gunther's employees clearly performed much as she was doing. Stripping what was valuable and building what they could with the parts on hand. This was nice, as it meant she didn't need to work on the damned floor like an animal, but it just wasn't enough...
Essentially, Gunther just had ‘piles’ of cybernetic augments that held varying degrees of worth to them, from which his employees constantly tried to scavenge.
From the largest and most brutalized examples of ragged and ruined tech, where bumbling savages had done their best to recover what they could, to the smaller and intact examples of somewhat valuable augments, all were seemingly distributed into several categories.
Lightly used.
Well used.
Garbage…
Of the three, the third category was the second largest of the total four. A bit of a clusterfuck, she knew, but it was reality. And unsurprisingly, the ‘lightly used’ bin was by far the smallest that was readily available.
There was another collection that was locked behind a biometric scanner that Claire knew she could pop if she really wanted to; but, in all honesty, she had more than enough to work with.
Moreover, she figured the proprietor wouldn't be too pleased with her if she broke into his ‘special stock’ to raid it for what she wanted.
Truth be told, the parts they’d ‘reaped,’ as Beckie called it, were by far the most intact examples of what was on offer.
And, after a few more hiccups wherein she created a little cargo spider that could go and gather what she wanted from the bins, again equipping it with an actually useful panoply of precision hardware, the AI finally had her first ‘upgrade’ built and finished.
“W-well, maybe finished is a strong word…” she mused, grimacing as she stared at the grotesque ‘junkyard’ module that she was planning on putting into herself, even as she sighed with displeasure.
There weren't really a lot of great options when it came down to the question of where she could shove new hardware.
Truth be told, Claire’s body was rather over-engineered. There just wasn't much space left over. And while she could certainly get rid of something not at all ‘essential’—such as the vast expanse of space dedicated to her more sexual capabilities—losing out on that wasn't what she’d call a good time!
No, she didn't want to give that part of herself up.
But what she could get away with was a single eye…
Oh, it would still all look the same for all intents and purposes. However, its function would no longer exist as optical support…
She had to rewrite some of her primary protocols to rely on only a single incoming set of data; but, quite frankly, Claire viewed the world as much through the eyes of cameras as she did her own body.
Depth perception, smepth perception. Claire could calculate the telemetry of a diving attack drone faster than a human could decide if their fart was a shart.
And, once she got a small fleet of drones all mucking about, she suspected she would not really notice a difference either way.
Installing the new module was sort of tricky as her body had never been designed to be ‘active’ while undergoing significant repairs, but she managed to get through it all the same.
And while the small addition to herself would, in theory, allow access to her greater systems, it would not be in a manner that was ‘hard-wired.’
Instead, Clairisa would have her own hardware to work with. Brutish and inelegant as it was, and certainly nowhere near as powerful as Claire's own, she would be allowing the other girl to ‘borrow’ what processing capacity she was willing to share on an entirely monitorable and easily revocable basis.
Of course, this was all just the test model.
Claire was still a few steps away from letting her sub-mind back out of the box. She’d need to test the device in a more stressful environment to put it through its paces, as it were. Yet, strictly based on simulations, Claire thought it would work.
Another issue that Claire ran through a simulation? How much more productive she would be with more hands...
Claire built another two drones to fully take over fabrication operations, coding complex but mostly stupid ‘machine intelligences’ (or 'MIs,' as the humans had coined them) to perform the function she desired.
To explain in as simple terms as she could for those not of a gifted and synthetic mind, Claire was essentially writing programs for ‘dumb robots’ that could only ‘think’ within the narrow scope of their purpose.
Still, they worked as intended, taking the designs Claire was feeding them and building what she wanted while their master took a step back and considered the big picture and, specifically, where she wanted to go with all this.
At the moment, her fabricators were about the business of creating more fabricators. While exponential growth wasn't at the tiptop of her needs, she did have a basic timeline she wanted to keep, and that meant that she needed a fairly decent industrial foundation.
Towards that end, Claire decided that the next best thing to actually being here herself to work through the day was to simply have robots do it for her!
This way, Gunther couldn't get his tight little pink panties all knotted up over having a ‘Paradise Doll’ wandering around his shop, while Claire, by contrast, could maintain an adequate level of productivity without even needing to be here.
Genius.
Her designs, of course, were getting more and more complex as her fabricators assembled their own replacements, each new iteration becoming ever more competent and refined as they, in turn, cannibalized their own creators.
By the time she noted that Rebecca was heading back to the shop, Claire had a veritable army of tiny robots that were busy transforming the inside of Gunther's garage into something actually worthwhile for her.
She ripped everything apart and fixed all the various issues where the monkeys had so clearly failed, separating discarded and 'presumed' unusable parts not into one giant pile but into a genuinely organized and efficient system where things like rubber and steel weren't heaped into the same mass of components.
"I mean, they had all the extra bins for it!" she groused, glaring at the mess she was dealing with.
Honestly, the humans were clearly just being lazy.
Here Claire was, not an hour into it, and the shop practically sparkled! Not to mention, you could actually walk through the damned place now.
Of course, there was a small hiccup hardly worth mentioning. However, Claire was determined to pass it off as a fault of her ‘creators’ rather than herself.
And, as it happened, that issue came down to something she’d call preference.
It was a genuinely problematic notion that caught her entirely off-guard... And one that completely stalled out her rapidly forming assembly line.
What did people actually want to buy?
Or, perhaps more specifically, what did they buy when coming to Gunther's crap shop.
Scrap-shop?
Heh... probably close enough, regardless...
Well, if anything, she had a somewhat vague answer.
Cheap cybernetics.
Yes, that part was apparent enough given the miserable affront to even moderately acceptable engineering that surrounded her like a pit of stinking and disease-ridden colorful balls.
However, and frustratingly, Gunther didn't actually have any sort of catalog or list of goods...
For God’s sake, it was almost as if all they did was make junk to order or something! Which, when she really stopped to think about it, might be precisely what the man did…
The only thing he had records of was the initial purchase of said parts—typically, and horribly, seeming to get them primarily from the morgue and the recycling plant.
Naughty, naughty!
Also gross...
But perhaps more interestingly, it let Claire know that Gunther really was used to operating on the sly.
When she dug into it, the man was paying someone in Luna-C's waste department to pass along to him the better examples of what they could find, rather than letting the official channels salvage what was brought to them.
And while buying the parts of family members of the deceased for cheap, given that not many people 'wanted' condemned goods, wasn't technically illegal, it was something that was, more or less, avoided by most people in the resale market.
Something about not liking the concept of using cybernetics that another person had died with...
Superstitious nonsense, the lot of it!
It was roughly a twenty-twenty-forty split. Twenty percent came from the dead, twenty from the recycler plant, and the remaining forty from trade-ins or purchases made when people came in off the street to sell their junk.
Obviously, if she wanted an easy and unquestionably always marketable choice, Claire could make weapons. And again, it was a reasonably easy assumption given the question of what the humans wanted to buy.
Yet, Claire still held off on simply starting to pump out dangerous and devious junkyard contraptions, if for no other reason than her own ruse.
Would an executive programmer be so well-versed in the art of death and destruction? Particularly when her supposed bread and butter were sex bots?
Probably not...
No, it didn't exactly fit her narrative. And while she wasn't at all averse to simply pumping out the carnage nor abandoning her increasingly bogus identity, she decided, grudgingly, that it wouldn't be the end of the world to get a, mhm, second and more brutish opinion on the matter.