Commission: Always Striving for Efficiency

[Story Listing]

Summary: In order to attract the attention of an engineer on site (as well as to make work easier on herself), Tala restructures her robot bot to be a touch more flexible. Commissioned by Ninten.

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T4-7A was the project name for a classified model of autonomous bipedal machine—colloquially, an Autobiped. They were initially designed for work in dangerous environments—specifically built for mining—that posed a considerable risk to human workers; with that in mind, it made sense that the robot's anatomy was designed to resemble that of a human—it needed to be able to access and use the same tools and equipment.

The work of an Autobiped had a harrowing risk factor, but they were expected to perform in adverse conditions. That was the upside to bringing in a machine. In the olden days, a gas leak would signal a full evacuation of the mines, resulting in wasted time and money for the execs... but a machine didn't need to worry about succumbing to deadly toxins, only to monitor for their more organic co-workers and make informed cost-benefit decisions. They really were clever contraptions.

But technology wasn't at the point where such impressive machines could overrun the industry and replace the workforce without paying a steep price; the execs were more inclined to work the typical working grunt into total exhaustion. Even if work in the mines was typically fraught with perilous situations: gas leaks, cave ins, steep drops, minecart collisions, not to mention all the heavy machinery.

There was a certain appeal to replacing hands of bone with hands of steel, but the technology was cutting edge and very expensive. So the models wandering the work facilities were few and far in between... and, not unlike their fleshy counterparts, similarly overworked.

It was a good job market for those who could work with and on such elaborate mechanisms. Engineers were in high demand, and were likely to become more desirable as autobiped technology continued to advance.

Phineas Carter was one of those men contracted to work on such incredible machines. An engineer under the employ of Obtanium Incorporated, he wasn't entirely sure why the original designers deigned to give the robot an emphasized breastplate; that part didn't make quite as much sense. He found it bitterly ironic that the execs would rather manufacture their own fembots to put in the workplace than to hire some capable women...

But tightening the bolts on Tala-- his nickname for the autobiped assigned to his sector--did put food on his table, and he wasn't one to stir up trouble with the higher-ups.

"The knee joints should be working fine now." Phineas muttered, twirling the socket wrench in his hand. "Little early for an oiling though."

Tala leaned back in her chair, her chrome form glistening in the light of a bulb flickering above her. Her joints were made with a flexible nanowire fabric mesh; her skin was smooth, yet hard to the touch like plate armour. Her eyes flickered with subtle, electronic lights, white lines against a black LCD backdrop; she wore a visor, data lining the periphery of her vision: heat, humidity, air purity data metrics were things she constantly processed, and it came to her as easily as breathing. Not that she needed to breath or anything...

"Thanks. You know how to handle your tools." Tala muttered, her silvery lips pursing as she reclined in her seat.

Phineas gave her a particular look. "I, uh, am not sure how to feel about the particular enunciation on the word 'tools' there, so I'm just gonna rush riiiiiiight past that. How're you feeling?"

Tala sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose in mild exasperation. "In working order." She admitted in a forced, clinically phrased manner. "You can write that down on your clipboard..."

"That's what I was looking for," Phineas scribbled a brief report down, silently wondering to himself why they gave the autobipeds personalities. Tala was coming onto him with increasing regularity; it was flattering, but Tala had something of a flippant streak.

Corporate policy was to report instances of emergent personalities within autopeds for "bug fixing", but Phineas had been dodging the issue for a while now; it was lonely work at his spot, surrounded by machines, and Tala was the only one assigned to his posting.

"You know you don't have to do all your work at once, right?" Phineas muttered, scribbling his notes. "It's a long work day."

"There's always something to do though," Tala sat up, crossing her legs. "And besides, the sooner I get my work done, the more time I can spend with you~"

She purred, kicking her soled silvery foot in his direction. He blinked as he lowered the clipboard; the execs would be pissed if he kept dodging the issue.

"I, uh, gotta turn this report in." He rose sharply to his feet. "You, uh, don't do anything I wouldn't do. Just do some light exercises, walk around, get the oil nice and lubricated."

"Hey, wait-" Tala raised a chrome arm to get his attention, but he was already hurrying out of the lab. She paused, lowering her arm to her side, a slight whirring punctuating the motion.

"Tch." Tala clicked her tongue, folding her arms. "He keeps playing hard to get... is it too much to ask for a little attention?"

She paced around the lab by herself. Phineas had been making himself scarce lately.

"Am I coming on too strong?" She wondered to herself, tapping her chin with a metallic clink; her illuminated eyes flashed pensively. "...Or... is it just because I'm a robot..."

She considered that thought. Her mouth flattened.

"...Maybe I wasn't clear enough with my intentions." She shrugged. "Well... he told me to stay put and... lubricate myself~"

She purred, rotating her hips in a rhythmic whirring, a devilish smile rising to her silvery lips.

"...No, too strong. I'll just see what he brought in today." She paced to a nearby desk, her hand lowering to one of the drawers. A set of papers rustled inside as she flashed a knowing smirk.

"He figured I wouldn't find his stash of contraband comic books in here, huh?" She mused to herself, reaching for one and idly flipping through the pages. "Always trying to stash it away whenever I walk in..."

Well, if he wasn't going to report her irregularities, the least she could do is remain hush-hush on his comic book stash. She turned the book around in her hands to get a glance at the cover.

Plastic Man.This one was an oldie—it starred a former career criminal, exposed to an unknown liquid that changed the properties of his body to a strange, pliable, plasticine substance. It could stretch and contract effortlessly, seemingly infinitely.

It must've been soft to the touch too. Her fingers idly drummed along her chrome frame as her imagination drifted elsewhere. She squeezed longingly at her thigh.

Would Phineas be more interested in her if she was softer? More huggable? Her plate armour skin could either be cold to the touch or terribly overheated, never really much in between. More practically, if she had a considerably longer reach, it would make those basic tasks around this underground level less tedious.

"...hmm..."

She cocked her head to the side, looking over the elaborate machinery that lined the walls. It was really an impressive contraption: it had the capabilities to break down and reassemble base components based on a set of instructions. It was very useful for repairs, able to transform raw scrap material into refined components, and it was especially useful in extracting useful metals and minerals from ore.

And she had intimate knowledge of its inner workings. It would hardly be a trifle to, say, put herself through the machine, reassemble herself into a more robust model. The only particular hiccup would be bypassing its security so she could access the panel...

She cocked her head to the side, glancing underneath Phineas' desk.

"'Coolguy#2819, qpsQT5qm2%(*6>Dx'." She repeated to herself with a clever grin. Of course he'd write the user ID and password somewhere—it's not like anyone else was ever on this floor. Committing the information to memory, she paced over to the panel, pecking it in with precise inputs.

"Let's see... reconstitute ligaments... upgrade nanotube wiring to a fibermesh array... ooh, prepare a backup, yes..." She muttered to herself. "Upgrade visual processors to 4k, optics set to 500% multiplier, the taxpayers won't mind..."

She paused, eying the monitor.

"'Reboot core systems for upgrade'? Mm... no. I want to enjoy this~" She purred, dismissing the prompt before pacing for her chamber. The doors closed around her as her eyes went dark in anticipation for a full body makeover.

The machine lit up, myriad unseen mechanisms flaring up at full power. She felt the buzz of a full body scan running along the length of her smooth body. Her body tingled, small snaps of electricity surging through her form; her form went slack as sensation dissipated away, the solidity of her mass ebbing away as a thousand microlasers buzzed around her form, rewiring her circuits, breaking down her solid materials, sewing it into finer and finer circuits.

As the buzzing sensations reverberated through her entire body, she grinned to herself. She drank in the sensation of a total bodily transformation, antsy to test her abilities...

FWSHHHH...

Her vivid imagination trailed off as the hissing of the chamber broke her out of her trance. The world opened up before her once again, steam billowing to the floor. She examined her arms, noting that the chrome plating had been replaced with a grey-green mesh: smooth as skin, soft to the touch, and remarkably pristine. Her olfactic sensors revelled in the potent 'new car smell'.

She experimentally tensed her hand, wiggling her fingers; they whirred to life as she flexed her wrist. And then she reached forward...

Hidden mechanisms in her ligaments pumped into her, the whirring intensifying as her arm bonelessly extended forward across the room, the joint melting into her extended limb. Her arm tripled in length in a matter of seconds, and Tala understood that she was capable of more.

Her calculations were perfect, and so was the algorithm she fed into the machine. She felt fantastic, flexible, more modular...

"A total success..." She purred, retracting her arm. "...Mm, no, not yet. This requires further testing..."

---

Her daily chores would be an ideal way to test the basic nuances of her new, enhanced body. The mine transports required regular maintenance—a breakdown deep underground would be terribly problematic if that came to pass. The annoying part about the job was the track maintenance, especially on lines of track that stretch above the primary walkways.

Of course, for Tala, this would hardly be an issue. She glanced up, surveying the work ahead of her. This called for a ladder, or a hoverpad, but she had other ideas...

She raised her foot and slammed it against the ground; as she did, long hot nails materialized at her soles and heels, burying into the ground beneath her and firmly rooting her to the ground. It was a new feature: a subtle form of shapeshifting, not quite as dramatic as whatever else she wanted to try... but she wouldn't have to wait long.

She focused inward, her torso whirring with sudden growth as her body grew upwards, chuckling to herself as her body swivelled in coiling revolutions as she allowed her body to flow and billow, bending with the emphatic gyrations of a belly dancer. Her body tingled as she ascended, her naval a thin line against her belly.

There was the subtlest swell of heat in her core, but she hardly noticed it in her irreverent stretching.

Her ascension ceased suddenly as she approached the overpass; she squinted as she examined the bolts affixing the structure. Her finger and thumb elongated as she gingerly twisted it back and forth; it seemed as if some of the bolts were getting ever so slightly loose.

She clicked her tongue, shaking her head. This wouldn't do.

She glanced at her hand, looking down at her palm. Tala flexed her fingers as she lay her hand flat; the gaps between her fingers ebbed away as her hand flattened, curled around itself, and narrowed itself into a rod. The end rippled, ridges forming into a square gap...

She smirked at the size of the wrench that protruded from her forearm with a satisfied smirk; it was hefty enough to give someone a serious headache, yet as she flexed her muscular ligaments, she lifted it as naturally as a kitchen utensil.

Such a rudimentary tool was well within her newly installed shapeshifting capabilities. Actually, she had taken care to equip herself with the schematics for a whole range of basic tools, though the reprogramming machines threw out some errors with regards to more elaborate mechanisms.

The rudimentary tightening was done in a hurry, metal creaking against metal. She glanced upwards to the industrial elevator shaft, a sleek black construct that pierced through the rocks above, ascending up and away to ground level. It was designed for heavy transports, and took a lot of punishment...

A check up wasn't scheduled for that particular day, but the gears in Tala's mind were turning as inspiration struck her. A devious smile rose to her lips as she retracted her impressive length, snapping back to her regular form as she paced confidently over to the closed sliding doors. She pressed her fingers against the split between the two doors, the narrowest of openings...

Her fingers compressed and slimmed, wedging between the gap with a snakelike flexibility. As her form squelched through, she wiggled her fingers on the other side. As she bonelessly stuck her wrist through, the curvature of her chest flattened against the cool metal as she pressed her body closer and closer, focusing her body to a narrow point. Her body compressed as the front of her body creeped through the crack, her arms pulling her through from the other side of the door.

And then with a POP, Tala was through! The interior of the elevator shaft was dimly illuminated: apart from an array of backup and emergency lights, as well as the natural glow her own illuminated robot form gave off, there wasn't much, it would've been hard for a worker to make anything out without the aid of a flashlight.

Tala didn't have such issues—her array of visual sensors (colloquially, her eyes) worked perfectly fine detecting shapes in even pitch-black darkness. Her eyes glowed as she surveyed the interior of the shaft for what was to be a routine check...

Her torso tingled with energy as she swivelled upwards, her body turning in full rotations as she scanned the interior of the shaft for any damage or irregularities. Her torso hugged the sides of the shaft, coiling up the columns of metal that stood apart from the cables, growing several feet a second as she zipped up one floor after another.

From the increased length of her midriff, small green circles glowed; from those spots, her body morphed further, bumps forming, and then sprouting additional snake-like limbs that zipped towards fastened bolts, wrench-hands materializing to tighten anything that had gone loose. Other limbs pressed between gears to test for lubrication, checking for loose electrical wires, removing burnt and broken light bulbs. A flailing mess of limbs darted around the dimly lit chambers as her body rapidly inspected every nook and cranny in the shaft as her body continued to surge upwards and upwards, well past the hundred foot mark.

"Hah... the flexibility and utility of my new form is second to none!" She mused to herself with a satisfied smirk. "There are no limitations to my abilities now!"

WARNING: Operational parameters breached; core battery is overheating. Cease activities, a maintenance engineer will be reviewing your systems shortly!

In the center of her vision, a computerized popup commanded her attention, cutting her joyous train of thought off. Her jaw hung as she looked over her massive form, the base of her form removed from her sight as it disappeared down into the darkness of the elevator shaft. She could make out the indistinct shape of her myriad limbs, but...

She felt it. Her core was blazing hot. It had taken a while for the tactile feedback and sensations to snake its way up her overstretched form and into her neural processors, but she sure felt it: she didn't feel pain in the traditional sense of the word, but a welling sense of anxiety filled her as she weighed her options.

The first option was to try and manually retract her body... but this wasn't a compelling option, considering the process to reduce her length back to normal proportions was a separate, taxing process in and of itself.

She had overloaded her CPU with a myriad of processes. It was the fault of the damn limbs, compounding on her overtaxed midriff. She was stuck like this until her core could cool off; any action on her part could perhaps lead to irreparable damage to her inner processes.

Vhrrrrrr kchunk, kchunk, kchun...

The entire chamber began to rattle ominously, vibrations rippled through her overstretched body. She wasn't sure what exactly what it was, and it took her a moment to determine the specific source of the commotion, considering it was happening all around her, but then it occurred to her.

She looked upwards, a palpable expression of dread in her eyes.

The elevator was moving, descending down the shaft... descending towards her.

In her moment of confusion, the bottom of the elevator car collided with her head; her body began to collapse on itself as she made for the bottom of the shaft in a somewhat frantic scramble to get away. A mess of limbs greeted her at the bottom as she tried to get away, writhing and refusing to shrink back into her form as her torso knotted up within the spiralling mass of so many arms (and also two legs).

As she tried to find the limits of her extremities, she glanced up as the hefty car sloooooowly travelled down the shaft, inching towards her piled up form. She gasped sharply, tension in her voice as her body, piled up in heaps upon heaps, felt a heavy pressure on it as the car's weight bore down on her. She could feel her limbs flattening together, her cheek pressed squarely against the bottom of the elevator.

She grunted, the car was so heavy, and she was packed in such a tight space now, too large to be trapped underneath. The elevator creaked anxiously as her body resisted its descent to the floor. Along a limb that comprised her own neck, she swivelled towards the sliding doors that hovered above her—the same doors that she squeezed through to get here in the first place.

She pressed her face against the crack, trying desperately to press her head through before the elevator reached the bottom...

"Rrrgh!" She growled as the pressure from the elevator caused her body to yield, wedging itself into whatever limited space it could. Her head slid away from the crack as her body was pressed into the floor, like she was trapped in a vice. Her entire body stirred and writhed in a mad scramble to free herself.

She froze up, her internal processors spitting out a fatal error; she shut down on the spot, head slumping over as if she had passed out...

---

"Tala? Let's test your hearing, are you processing my voice?"

The next time she was conscious, she found herself back in the engineering room... the same place where she had wandered on her own to reconstitute her robotic form. Phineas was there with a clipboard, looking over her with a neutral expression and a curious glint reflected in his bifocals.

The next thing she saw was how her torso, still elongated, winded around the room and travelled out through the door, into the tunnels. Her body lay slack on the floor, wrapped around a rolling office chair that Phineas was using, not unlike a python. She gawked at her sheer length, as well as the sensations of cool tactile feedback that accompanied them.

"...Tala? Can you hear me?" Phineas asked again, a little more insistent this time.

"Eh?" She blinked. "O-oh, I... yes. I was a little lost in thought. What happened, did I... pass out?"

"That's what I want to know, yes," Phineas sighed, adjusting his glasses. "I examined the logs on the computer, and those gave me a bit of a clue as to what was going on. But... why were you messing with the machines?"

"Ah, well, I saw the sort of comics you liked to keep around the lab, and well... reconstituting my body proved to be a fairly simple task, with the sophistication of Obtanium's technologies..." She explained sheepishly.

"I found you pinned under the elevator. The elevator wouldn't go all the way to my floor. I was rushing after I received an alert about your systems..." He shook his head. "We had to get a team to pull you out, inch by inch from under the elevator car. You overheated your core."

"Ah, yes, but..." Tala's eyes followed her elongated form around the room. "I should be all cooled down now, yes? I can restore my regular working model parameters and-"

"And overexert your exhaust systems again? No ma'am." Phineas raised a datapad he had left slumped on a table nearby. "I took manual control of your alternative functions, so I'll be dialing back your stretching, little by little, until you're back to normal."

He explained as he pressed his finger against the screen, moving a slider a couple of pixels along a digitized bar. Tala's eyes widened, a tingling sensation spreading across her body. She gasped as she could feel her form contracted, ever so slightly; she couldn't see what was happening, but she could feel her extremities creeping along the floor, entirely on their own accord!

...No, of Phineas' accord. He dully glanced at the pad, stashing it aside.

"We'll be doing that in fifteen minute intervals until you're restored." Phineas slumped back into his chair, reaching for a comic. "You should make yourself comfortable, it's going to be a long day."

"I... I'm sorry, I only thought to stress test my new, more efficient body," Tala's eyes drifted to the side. "You must have better things to do than babysit me all the long while.."

"I get paid either way. It's a living." He shrugged.

"Are you going to report me to management? That I'm malfunctioning...?"

"Eh. I'm not sure I would call this a malfunction. Stress testing is a part of the iterative process. Mistakes are a part of it." He flipped through a page. "We can continue with the tests under a more structured setting. Maybe you were onto something with this experiment of yours."

"...Ah?" Tala cocked her head to the side. "You... Do you like my new form?"

"It's..." He coughed, swiveling his chair around. "It's not unpleasant."

"Oh Fin!~'' She purred, her head swiveling up on its own like a cobra. She wrapped herself around his chest in a tender embrace, her body positively glowing with a radiant, artificial heat. "I always knew you felt that way about me!"

"What are you doing?" He asked, lowering his comic book ever so slightly.

"Just making myself comfortable, as you asked~" She pressed her malleable head under his shoulders, hugging his gut. Her head settled into his lap, a contented smile crossing her lips.

"...tch." He clicked his tongue, ruffling the pages once again. "Do whatever you want."

It was a quiet day at work from that point on. Tala, reduced to a pool of noodly limbs, contented herself with slowly shuffling her massive form back into the lab, coiling more and more around Phineas with a dreamy look in her eyes. He was always looking out for her, protecting her. She knew he didn't always speak his mind; she understood that he found her irregularities charming.

Perhaps she could sneak out of work with him, one of these days. Hit up the town, have some fun. She idled herself with such romantic thoughts, as Phineas idled away with his comic books...