Alisha

Now, you'll probably look at this and think 'Ah! That's very similar to that film about that girl by that bloke who did that other film...'. And you'd be right. It started as a pastiche based on a film with a very similar name. But on the way -- as these things so often do, it became something else. I hope you enjoy it.

Alisha

"Doc? Tell me again how I came to be?" Alisha asked me as we sat listening to the storm rattle the old building where we live. We were sitting together on my worn old couch, comfortable, both of us semi-dressed in the warmth of the room, a warmth that was the perfect antidote to the rain beating against the windows.

Alisha's perfect breasts rose and fell slowly, she was relaxed and her movements were languid, her whole elegant, finely formed, exquisite body draped in enticing ways across the couch, and me. Her head -- that beautiful face, that long soft hair -- rested on my shoulder, her delicate but surprisingly strong hands making subtle moves in my crotch.

"How you came to be?" I asked her, "That I don't know, you came to be in a time many hundreds of years ago, in ways even I do not know.

"How I found you? How you came into my life? Now that's another story, and that I can tell you."

In a kittenish frame of mind, she wriggled -- sensuously, happily and thoroughly enticingly, making herself comfortable.

We call it Above. It's a city that hangs over our city -- Below -- in a way that cities shouldn't.

It's been there hundreds of years, and the privileged people who live there, live their lives, prosper and fall, fight and screw, have no thoughts for us except for what we can produce for them and send up to their city through the massive combined anchor and support conduits.

They crap their trash down on us in Below.

Piles of it, daily, scrap, worn out equipment, broken tools, anything inorganic. The organic material, they recycle. They drink recycled water and eat their recycled food -- all supplemented by the fresh foods we send up to them.

Everybody in Below works for them in one way or another. If it isn't directly, it's indirectly. Directly, you work in farming or extraction, or refining or processing, sending food and raw materials up. Or you can work in recycling -- sorting through what they send back down.

If you don't work for them directly, you work for them indirectly, supplying the workers, meeting their needs -- bars, whores, and other services.

I'm Doc. Aka Doc Spark. I live in Below. A long time ago I lived in Above, but now I don't and my life in Above seems like another world. Above is the pinnacle of human social living, a utopia. Below isn't but it is vibrant and it's full of life and stuff and it's interesting. I've lived here long enough now that I think of myself as a Below person, I'm an Us, they're the Them.

People call me Doc, but I'm no doctor. Spark isn't even my real name, but that's what people call me and I'm happy to answer to it. I'm an electronicist. I fix high end tech, electronics, and robotics. Prosthetics, AI circuitry, nanotech, cyber enhancements, vid players, hell I even fix printers -- 3D and inkjet.

The thing is, I prefer machinery and mechanisms to people. Oh, not exclusively, it's hard not to be involved with the people around you if you live somewhere that bustles and hums like Below. I'm not a hermit - I deal with my customers daily and I have friends I see on a regular basis. We go to the local bars and have a drink, we laugh, we listen to live bands, but generally I am more comfortable with prostheses and relays than people and relationships.

I understand how they work, what they do, I enjoy rebuilding them and repairing them and recycling them.

At least I do if I can get the parts I need.

And that was how I discovered Alisha.

I have to make runs out into the crap pile, the junk raining daily onto Below, looking for parts and pieces I can use. There's a whole bunch of juves who do this for me, dodging the incoming, picking through the scrap and bringing me things that they think that I can use, but I like to do it myself as well. Clambering, and sliding across the uneven surface of the scrap. It's dangerous, especially if the wind changes and you don't notice, and can be unrewarding but you never know what you're going to find.

And that was where I discovered Alisha.

The scrap shifts over time, because the wind affects the falling materials the heaps change shape, the surfaces move, and that uncovers stuff that has been buried for a while. You can search an area, get some good parts and components, and then go back a few months later and the surface you picked over has changed and there's a whole new seam to look at.

And that was when I discovered Alisha.

I found her half-way down a slope. Saw her from the other side of a gully, realising that what I was looking at was a human form, almost a whole full body. Now that's not unusual, Above use humanoid cyborgs, but the augmentations don't often come onto the heap.

I clawed my way up the slope to it, picking up some scratches and a couple of cuts until I reached it. It was only when I had fully uncovered it that I could see the droid properly. It was battered and dirty, a full femidroid torso, and most of its right leg, part of its left leg, it was missing both arms, the right foot and its left leg from the knee down. The face was that of an angel. The droid looked as if it was asleep. More finely shaped than a lot of the femidroids I have seen, it looked to be a bit of a specialised model.

At this point I figured I had hit the motherlode for spares. Although physically the droid looked to be in a bit of a state the internals would be good for lots of other jobs. And then I ran a scan over it and found that there was still a faint trace in its core systems. Not running, dormant but still there.

That made a big difference. A droid like this one could be a massive earner, done up and sold on, it would be worth a lot of money. Time to get it home and checked over.

Normally, even with a femidroid, they're a heavy haul. The metal frames and structure, mean a droid frame can be a quarter, even half again as much as the equivalent sized human frame. This one wasn't slight, in fact if she had been in tact it would have been pretty nearly my height but with less bulk, it weighed about right for an equivalent human. I really couldn't wait to get it on to my work bench to have a look at the tech in her.

And with that I picked the droid up to carry it down the slope, and the first thing I noticed was that it wasn't a solid shell. The droid had some real textures. The torso felt soft and yielding even though I could see the synthetic skin and the discolouration on it, and the patinas that all those years on the scrap heap had formed. It definitely had a metal skeleton It could see the ends of the arms and legs but it didn't feel like it.

With the scrap shifting under my feet, the clamber down the slope was nearly as deadly as the climb up but eventually I was at the bottom of the gulley, and I was able to set the droid down and go back up to see if I could recover the other parts -- the arms, the feet and leg. I found one foot nearby where the droid had been and the other, lower leg and foot higher up the slope. The two hands had travelled even further and I nearly didn't find the right hand, only seeing it as I was about to give up, it was resting at a funny angle and I was able to grab it and bring it down.

As I came back down, I swear that the droid was watching me. Which was crazy. Yeah, there was life in the frame, but this femidroid had lain in the weather and the scrap for who knows how long. The droid wasn't dead but I reckoned that all it was good for was parts and it would be a mercy to do it.

Back in my workshop the droid went onto the workbench.

The first thing I did was to scan the main elements to check for internal damage. It was built tough, aside from the damage -- the arms and legs -- the internal structure appeared to be complete with no obvious damage, even the spinal structure and the neck. Which was pretty impressive, considering the height she had fallen from.

The scan showed the droid's skeleton was very humanoid. Sometimes people designing droids use a monocoque approach, paying lip service to the idea of a skeleton. This was quite faithful, though some of the long bones and plates around the skull looked like they had mechanisms built into them. The breaks were all at the joints so I didn't need to go into the internals of the machine, still it was a truly marvellous piece of engineering.

After that I started to clean it up. It was late and I really wasn't up for the dismantling just yet, so I figured it would be a good idea to give the droid a bit of a wash.

I didn't have a sonic bath big enough and any kind of blasting -- sand or otherwise -- would have been too harsh -- so I put some degreasing agents into a bowl of warm water and set to, the old-fashioned way.

I started on the face, seemed like the logical thing to do. Bathing it like you'd give a real person sponge bath, soaping the 'skin', wiping it off and rinsing it, before drying. And it worked. Took some scrubbing in places, and so help me I tried not to be too rough, but eventually what appeared to be a near flesh tone began to appear. It was a very nice piece of work too, kind of a light coffee colour, not too pale, not too dark. Some would say it was an indeterminate colour but I thought it was a good tone, suggesting a lot of heritage. Like a lot of people here in below, we're all of the races under the Sun, just jostling up against each other, carrying on carrying on.

The skin felt quite delicate, soft still after so many years of exposure. The skin carried a faint pattern too, like a kind of brocade pattern, all swirls and stuff.

My initial impressions were right as well, the droid did have the face of an angel, large shapely eyes, not too big, pleasant to look on. A delicately sculpted nose, and ears, someone had done some nice work there, not quite a renaissance masterpiece but that kind of classical beauty.

Its mouth was formed by two lips that were pretty much perfect, just the right curve and fullness. Whoever had designed this had gone for middle range values -- no exaggerated proportions, which still left a lot of choices, but the choices made were superb. It was a life-like face, but I thought it was beautiful. I was toying with the idea that if I did break the droid for scrap, I might keep that face.

Inscribed on the back of its neck was a maker's mark AL(i)-5Ha -- being tired, I read it the first time as Alisha. I knew the manufacturer AL(i) -- Anders-Lvov (industria), droid makers, they were always trying experimental stuff. The 5 meant it was a very early model, very early, probably built a few hundred years ago at least -- they are in five-digit model numbers now, possibly even six. The Ha (Human animus) was their fancy way of saying 'human-like android'. It was at that point that the lifeless femidroid stopped being an 'it'.

Once I had cleaned her face and the hairless scalp, I moved onto the torso. It felt a little like being a pathologist cleaning a body before an autopsy, as I cleaned and scrubbed at her skin.

As I moved across her torso I was surprised when her nipples peaked, subsiding quickly afterwards. I guess it was a droid equivalent of an autonomic response, sensors in her skin working with the latent operating system. It also felt like her breasts got bigger. You understand that I hadn't measured them but when I saw her on the scrap pile her bosom had looked okay, nothing extra-ordinary, but when I was handling her, cleaning her, they seemed to swell, become more of a handful. Then they seemed to go back to the size they were.

You do see this sort of thing with scrap parts like this sometimes. Well, not precisely this sort of thing -- swelling breasts and protruding nipples are a bit unusual -- but sometimes components have a sub-system, an operating system specific to that part. Their responses are almost automatic -- it saves on processing power for the central brain. But this response was quite sophisticated for a sub-system. It would probably need re-setting to zero. It was a little like the AI was dead but the subsystems didn't know it yet.

I moved on down her body and it happened again as I washed her surprisingly complete but bare nethers. As I was washing her vulva and anal openings, her hips gently moved under my hands. Just a twitch, a move of millimetres up towards my hand.

I was fascinated.

Well you would be, wouldn't you?

I positioned my scanner, a current tester, taped a couple of sensors into place and tried it again. There was a standard diagnostic port in the small of her back -- under a small flap of 'skin' around where the L3 vertebra would be, so I attached a connection there and got a read out for CPU usage and a couple of other functions.

First of all, I started with a nylon hair probe, touching her finger tips, her skin. The responses were small -- tiny - spikes in the traces, so minute that I needed to turn the scope right up.

Then I thought I'd try some more of the sensations that had brought the previous reaction.

Putting some soap on my finger I positioned them in the opening of her vulva, pressing the lips gently apart. It felt incredibly real. Soft and pliable, even in the state they were, you'd have been hard pressed to tell they were synthetic. I began to move them slowly, stroking up and down, circling round and round. There were spikes on nearly all of the sensors. Tiny responses, power spikes, increased activity, but minimal increases only. The operating system activity only went up by a tiny fraction of a percent, but something was definitely happening, and I could feel her hips moving under my hand.

I stepped up my motion, sliding my finger in and out, feeling her clitoris, pressing it with my thumb. Result! A tiny tremor shot through her droid torso.

I disconnected all of the sensors, and finished washing her arms, legs and feet. The femidroid's system activity changed the situation completely, if it had stayed at a minimal level, I would have been quite happy to pull the plug and strip it for bits. But the scan showed that there was something there.

It had been a long day, so I went for a shower. The sexual nature of the femidroid didn't bother me, it's just a rich man's toy, real women are still, thankfully, widely available, so that wasn't a 'thing' for me. What? Look if it's an electric motor you run a current through it, a hydraulic actuator -- you pressure test it. This was just a stimulus. Sheesh!

But what did intrigue me, was that her 'orgasm' response -- if that's what it was - worked on just a tiny portion of her OS. And if that was the case, what else could she do? What was that operating system capable of? I decided that I definitely wouldn't break her up for parts immediately but see if I could get the OS to restart first.

I walked back into the workshop, and looked at her lying on the table, with that beautiful face, eyes open, looking but not seeing. Without thinking I took the sheet I use to stop dust getting into the mechanisms while I'm working and covered her torso. I didn't have to do it, but it just seemed like a good idea at the time. That done I switched the lights off and turned in.

That night I slept well, except that I kept dreaming of the word 'alisha' -- wandering in and out of my subconscious, whispered, shouted, stated fervently, murmured, cried longingly, urged. It wasn't unpleasant, far from it, it was quite a pleasant experience, just unusual. I simply ascribed it to seeing that name on the droid on the bench in the workshop.

Not really thinking when I walked into the workshop that morning, I greeted her, "Good morning Alisha. Did you sleep well?" Of course, she just lay there saying nothing.

I talked to her as I assembled the tools and equipment that I needed to fix her feet and lower leg -- probes, voltage readers, soldering irons, RF joiner, shifter, Dremel, rivet gun, about thirty fine screw drivers with different heads, lidar scanner, oh and a hammer.

What?! Sometimes things need persuading.

Anyway, I talked to her as I did this. Just the usual chit-chat. "I dreamed about you last night, Alisha." I told her.

"Did you?" I imagined her asking.

"Nah!" I said glumly "I woke up before we could do anything. Boom! Boom!" The old ones really are the best.

Just then the first of a string of customers appeared at the workshop door, so that it was mid-day before I sat down beside the femidroid again.

I decided to start with her right foot, because I could refer to her left foot which had all the connections in place.

It took most of the afternoon. Her ankle was a thing of beauty, I mean not only was her foot aesthetically pleasing, with delicately formed toes, and a beautifully proportioned ankle, but the servos, actuators, the sensors -- the whole thing, was just so beautifully engineered. I really wished I could make shit like this. The break was reasonably clean so it was just a question of making the connections, and that was the problem, some of them were micro-jobs, that needed needle soldering, and others were about getting the right strands out of fibre bundles. It's simple enough work, just time-consuming.

As I worked, I veered between wondering whether I could get her OS to spark back to life, how much I could get for all of the spare parts if I couldn't, and how, if I couldn't get her working, I might just keep this wonderful femidroid to look at, because she was just so perfect.

Eventually I had the foot connected, I moved it around, up and down, round and round, feeling for anything that might be impeding the range of movement, and listening for anything that might suggest something was rubbing. Nothing, it was all silky smooth.

Next, I plugged in the analytical gear, and started testing the sensitivity -- using a nylon hair probe. The droid's skin was easily as sensitive as human skin, the sensors peaking when I touched the hair to its surface. From what I could see, a processor in the foot itself gathered all of this information and sent it up to the CPU. There was plenty of sensitivity there, the oscilloscope showed it, but still no sign of 'life'. The skin had another cool trick up its sleeve as well. After I had finished the ankle and pressed the skin together, it joined up seamlessly. No glues, no mechanical fastening, it just looked like it had never been apart. Tech, eh?

I was exhausted, absolutely knackered. An afternoon like that will do it to you, micro-joints, checking, re-checking, measure twice, cut once, that sort of thing. I made something to eat and fell asleep on my bed watching something on the vid.

I had a wet dream.

I was being blown by someone; someone I couldn't see. But that was okay because I knew -- in that way that you do in a dream - that the person doing the blowing was devoted to me. She would do anything for me, anything I wanted, and would even die for me. Even though I didn't know who it was, I just knew it. And on top of all of that she knew what I wanted.

Slowly at first her mouth worked my cock up and down, in and out, sucking and then dropping down my shaft to suck it again as she drew her head back. After a while she swirled her tongue around the head and then it all got sloppy. Gobbling my hardness, she bobbed up and down, her mouth was hot on my cock, her lips firm, and she added her hands stroking me, curling soft fingers around my balls and working them gently.

This went on for some time until the waves of pleasure built into a crescendo and at that point I came. In my dream, I 'knew' that when I came, I came in her mouth, but at the same time it felt like I was standing on the edge of Above looking out into the space between heaven and earth, where I could spray my cum across the universe, as I shot fountain after fountain into the air, even though my cock never left her mouth.