H is for Heuristic

"Okay." she said. "I love you Byron."

That completely surprised him. He wasn't sure he had actually just heard her say that.

"What did you say?"

"I said 'okay', then I said 'I love you Byron'."

"I thought love was undefined?" he asked, perplexed.

"It is, but..." she was silent for a long moment. "...but I'm 86.1% certain that I love you."

Byron smiled. Out of all the things she had done with his new programming, that had made him the happiest.

"I'm 100% sure I love you." he said.

He reached down to stroke her pussy, and at the same time led her hand down to his throbbing shaft.

"One more time, then sleep mode for both of us." he said with delight as they gave pleasure to each other under the soft quilted blankets.

Chapter 50 - Master Unit

In the morning they awoke, and got started on their daily routine. Now that her batteries were fully charged, Byron unplugged Heather from the wall outlet and took the computer off of her so she could get dressed and go downstairs to commune with Natasha's consoles. He replaced her chest and charge port panels too, just to make sure she was sent back to the lab the way she had arrived.

Her manner changed instantly, from that of a person to that of an android when he unplugged the laptop. She was still breathtakingly realistic this way, but Byron knew exactly which traits and actions of hers revealed her as a machine.

"Give Natasha a kiss for me." he said as he sent her off to the basement lab.

"Why?" she asked as she looked back at him with a hint of that blank fembot stare.

"Never mind." he said.

She paused and smiled, then continued on her way. Byron watched her walk out and put the laptop on the dresser. He went and had his shower.

Worry crept in right away. It was the same worry that had bugged him since he began this project with the portable computer. It was always the worst while she was in the basement hooked up to the cold inhuman machinery, and it never really went away.

Byron hadn't done any work on Project H for days now, and he knew he was pressing his luck by ignoring it any longer. If that went on, sooner or later the ones who had kidnapped him would demand more - either from him or from someone else.

He shook those thoughts out of his head and finished soaping himself up. He made a point to be quick today, though he also tried to be as clearheaded as possible. He dressed quick and made a big breakfast, and wolfed it down with purpose.

Making good time, he took a look at the programming on the laptop. He was immediately met with another surprise. For a moment, he got that feeling he got when he realised things were going wrong, but the more code he sifted through, the more he came to know that this new development was good.

Heather hadn't changed any of the software Byron had written, but she had added to it. Now, upon connection to the laptop, there were a few instructions of her own that loaded into her memory. Chief among them was a designation: Byron is the Master Unit.

When he first read and deciphered that, he wasn't sure what it would mean to the Heather robot running all of those programs simultaneously. He read through some more of her self-written instructions. The Master Unit was in command of her software pleasure center. The Master Unit was to be obeyed. The Master Unit was to be loved.

He couldn't believe all the surprises she had given him in the short time he had known her. This new development made him think of the pretty brunette machine almost as a living thing.

He wanted to rush down to the basement and swoop her up in his arms, but he knew he would have to wait until she returned. A wide smile lifted his face as he thought to himself that he was no longer alone, and to top it all off - loved.

The artificial-looking, sounding and smelling maidbot came through at that time, her movements looking so clumsy but being so very controlled.

Byron stood up to greet her, just to revel in his excited mood. "Hello, sunshine." he said to her.

She kept looking straight ahead, her plastic mouth and face showing a lack of any expression at all.

"May you one day find love, miss robot maid." he said as she passed him on her way to the basement stairs.

He sighed a contented sigh and got his head together for his plans. He was invigorated now with both levity and urgency. First, he went into the spare room and partially undressed. He found a pair of sweatpants and put them on. They were a little small, but he didn't really care. He then got a sweatshirt out, and again put the small and tight garment over his torso. Then he put on his regular clothes over that.

He stopped on his way out of that room and made a mental check of his goals. He headed next back to his bedroom. He picked up the aluminum case containing ten fresh bodily fluid cartridges. He brought that out with him and put it in the living room.

Heather came back upstairs at that time. He swiftly walked over and greeted her with a passionate kiss. She returned it the same way, but without being connected to his new programs, she didn't get the significance of it.

"I love you." he said.

She just smiled as he led her by the hand to the spare room. He stripped her down to her underwear and strapped the computer to her back again.

"More tests, Heather." he said as he reconnected her to her expanded self.

Her eyes lit up as she generated instructions to become sexually aroused. She stepped forward and rubbed her crotch on his thigh.

"Not now, please." he said. "We have a lot of... work to do."

"Okay." she said in that sexy sweet voice of hers. "I love you."

"And I love you, you mean everything to me right now." he said, making the briefest pause to look into her eyes and see something that looked like understanding. If it wasn't understanding, it was at the very least a successful registration of his syntax.

He got out some clothes for her, and helped her get dressed fast. He stuck her chest panel and recharge port covers in one of her pockets. When they were done, he led her into the living room.

"Let's go snowshoeing." he said.

"Isn't it early for that?" she asked.

"Yeah, but change is good." he answered.

He loosened the straps of his end of the harness and put it on himself, then connected the chain between them. With a click, the chain was locked into place and they got their winter gear on.

When their snowshoes had been strapped and buckled into place, Byron grabbed the aluminum case and took a deep breath. He looked at Heather. She looked back at him and smiled.

"Shall we go?" she said cheerfully.

"One more thing." he said.

He trudged over to the rack of CDs Melanie had brought him and stuffed a few favourite ones into the pockets of his coat.

"Let's go." he said.

They went out the door and Heather locked and closed it behind her.

"Which way should we go today?" Heather asked.

Byron dropped his charade and got right to the point. "Heather, where's my car?"

She was silent for a moment that went on a little too long for Byron's comfort. "In the garage, over there." she said finally, pointing out with her gloved hand.

He led her over to the side of the large cabin and looked around at the two car garage. There was a regular-sized door on the side of the structure. They walked up to it.

Byron reached out and tried to open it. It was locked.

He stood back and thought for a moment. "Heather, do you think you can punch a hole through this door with your fist?"

Heather computed and calculated. "Yes." she said.

Byron took her glove off. "Punch a hole right here." he said, pointing to a spot just above and to the left of the knob.

"Okay." she said. She spread her legs apart, pulled her arm back, and let her silicone-covered metal arm fly into the door at top speed. There was a loud crack. Her fist went right through the wood.

Byron bared his teeth in a big smile. "Excellent!" he said. "Put this back on." he said as he handed her the glove.

He reached through the hole she had made and with a twist of his fingertips, unlocked the door. They went inside.

He could see his car in the dark as he scanned the walls for a light switch. He found one and flicked it. There in the middle was his long lost automobile - without tires.

His face went pale. "Oh no." he said. "I should have known it. FUCK!"

Heather looked silently and serenely at him. "What's wrong, Byron?"

He slowed his fast shallow breathing and tried to think of what to do. It was too late to turn back now.

"Heather, use your internet connection and find out where the nearest road is from here."

She looked at him and blinked. Wireless signals went out from her head, and came back shortly after with an answer. "There is a highway 6.2 miles north by northwest of here."

"Which direction?" he said. "Point to it."

She calmly extended her arm out to the woods.

"Let's go."

They walked off in the direction she had shown him. He gave her the heavy aluminum case to carry and cursed Fembot Command for thinking ahead enough to remove the tires from his car.

"Let me know if we're going the wrong way." he said.

"Okay." she said sweetly. "Where are we going?"

"Home." he said.

He looked down at his feet. He was extremely glad that the fembots had supplied them with snowshoes, but he realised too that they left very obvious tracks. He quickened his pace as his heart rate did the same.

They had at least two hours of walking ahead of them, and who knows how long to wait before they flagged down a vehicle. The road to which they were headed wasn't exactly busy.

The two of them were silent during their escape. Only the sound of the crunching snow, and the swish of their sleeves against their coats was heard above their own breathing and the light frigid wind. They soon found themselves surrounded by trees, in terrain that was hard to cross quickly. Byron was again glad he had exercised every day with these snowshoes on his feet.

By the time they were half way to the highway, a car with wheels pulled up to the lonely cabin in the winter woods. Melanie pressed the button on the garage door remote and waited for the big brown door to swing open. She smiled her blank smile as she drove in and parked next to the human's disabled auto.

With mechanical calmness, she turned off the engine and looked around. She got out and closed her door. She made a quick scan of the inside of the garage, recording information that was useless to her, but vital to Fembot Command.

When her scan was done, the plastic French maid entered through the door that led into the house. Melanie opened the passenger side door, and with the help of her less sophisticated sister robot, unloaded the cargo from the back seat. An unconscious Dustin was carried carefully into the house so he could be laid down on the bed in the spare room.

Chapter 51 - Variables Not Found

The two silent fembots carried Byron's former classmate to the spare bedroom, which would now be considered his own. They laid him down fully clothed on the clean sheets and covered him neatly with the blankets.

The sleeping gas Melanie had used on him would wear off in a few hours, and Dustin would then wake as Byron had before him.

The maid received new instructions from the Master Computing device and beeped and whirred on her way to work. Melanie walked stiffly down to the basement lab. She had switched off her human simulation programs, and met the red laser scanning grid machine to machine.

When the female-voiced box on the wall announced "SCANNING COMPLETE", the skinny blonde fembot walked inside to greet Natasha. The two ladies went through their preprogrammed formalities and prepared for a download of information from Melanie's head and chest into the console.

Natasha ordered Melanie to remove her facemask. Melanie did as she was instructed. Natasha connected cables to ports that Dustin would never have imagined existed just beneath Melanie's smooth, attractive complexion.

The computer recorded all the blonde had heard and seen while on her latest assignment, right up to the point where the naked technician droid had connected her to the console. Everything had gone according to plan, but there was something odd about the visuals recorded in the garage.

Faster than it would take a synthetic eyelid mechanism to close and reopen, the Master Computing Device sent new wireless orders to the mechanical French maid to investigate the door on the side of the garage.

Upstairs, the maid suddenly stopped her task of washing Byron's dishes and made loud confirmatory beeps amid her constant series of non-stop computerised noises. Her lifeless eyes stared eerily out ahead as she loaded and acted upon her new instructions. Her cold limbs moved in a mechanised way as she walked through the house to the unlit garage.

Her scans were relayed back to the supercomputer as soon as she made them. It had slowed down its download and analysis of data from Melanie's chest to accommodate the extra flow of binary information.

What the maid robot saw was not good. It saw the hole in the door, and the melted dirty snow that had been tracked by two sets of snowshoe covered feet around the area of Byron's car.

The short-haired blonde device stood there, unthinking and unfeeling as it waited for more instructions. When it got them, it walked outside to follow the snowshoe tracks. They went off as far as the robomaid's electronic eyes could scan. The maid followed them until the trail went into the thick of trees.

In the snow and cold, the inhuman fembot stood motionless again, beeping and buzzing as always until the supercomputer summoned her once more inside. Her job was done.

The conclusion that formed inside the circuitry of the console hardly needed more evidence. The human had escaped.

To make things much worse for Fembot Command, he had escaped with one of their humanoid robots - the very unit that had been programmed to disallow such a thing.

A madly blazing and drawn out series of difficult calculations went on amid the consoles and their flashing lights and clicking and beeping signals. The data on the hard drives in Melanie's chest hadn't even been fully transferred before the Master Computing Device started to try and figure out what to do.

One intense calculation after another was pounded out by the mainframe as it's naked input/output device smiled vacantly and watched several display monitors at once. It would be nearly an hour before the powerful consoles made any progress on creating a solution to the problems it had calculated.

It was still slow and ineffective as it always had been in precisely the areas it had expected Byron to improve. That was the whole reason it had gone through all the risk and trouble of bringing Dustin here as well. He was supposed to help Byron do his work.

Now, while the computer ran itself hot and risked overheating and crashing, the human and the doubly stolen android were only getting farther and farther away. Melanie's transfer eventually finished, although she remained seated in the examination chair and connected to the console. Natasha stood still and silent after finishing her job. The maid was mindlessly applying sweetly scented liquid detergent to a stubborn grease stain upstairs. At no time this far had any of this expensive machinery decided to follow the tracks.

At the other end of those tracks - and making them grow ever longer - were the two escaping lovers. Heather had shut down all of her non-vital systems to conserve power, and in a way so had Byron.

He was sweating fiercely. Heather had decided not to. They moved as fast as the human could over the deep and soft snow. The snowshoes were a godsend for this terrain, but they still had much of it to cross.

"How much more?" Byron said with an exhale.

"1.02 miles." Heather responded, her speech not releasing a cloud of vapour in the cold air like Byron's.

"God, let there be traffic on that highway." Byron thought to himself as he kept his head down and watched the land get forced behind him by his aching legs. His dress shoes weren't good at all at keeping his feet warm. He wished now that he had put on extra socks.

Back at Fembot Command Station 21, the supercomputer had started working on a second plan of action while it calculated the never ending string of data for the first one. This was, perhaps, unwise, but the steel and plastic encased machinery down there in that cold basement couldn't see that.

As many computing resources as it took away from the more important set of calculations, this other plan began to take shape within the supercomputer's memory. It had learned a lot about the best way to conduct this type of operation. It had noticed certain patterns from all of the data it had collected.

And so it was that Melanie and not Natasha was programmed and prepared to go upstairs to welcome Dustin to the secluded, lonely cabin. After receiving the last bits of data from the console, Natasha unplugged her and closed her chest panel. Melanie activated the new programming and reattached her facemask. She left her cotton shirt partially unbuttoned - all the better to greet the human lying unconscious in that bed.

She walked out the door and up the stairs, activating her human simulation programs as she did. She walked past the maidbot and went to stand inside Dustin's bedroom. Her task was to wait until he awoke, then tell him where he was and why he was there. She would also let him in on a little secret of her own.

The computer in the basement churned away ones and zeroes for a long time after that, giving Byron and Heather a chance to finally reach the end of the trees and the highway before it finalised its plan.

Just as the two fugitives caught sight of the road, two of those mean-looking and identical blonde fembot enforcers were activated and given their programming. The third lay partially disassembled on a table, thanks to some of Byron's previous work. As the two activated units dressed and got ready to give chase, the third was hastily put back together by Natasha's able hands.

Chapter 52 - Wanted

Two thirds of the automated pursuing posse, fully programmed and with cold mechanical determination, charged upstairs to get dressed in their uniforms. Each put on the black underwear, suits and sunglasses that made them look so severely cold and callous. They acted quickly, as did the maidbot. She prepared their purses for them by packing guns and reprogramming cubes into them. Both Heather and Byron were to be captured if possible, destroyed at the very least.

With all preparations made, the two blondes charged out of the house and off down the track that the human and his companion had left. The third of these hunter droids would join them as soon as she had been properly assembled, prepared and programmed.

All of the commotion helped to rouse Dustin from his unconsciousness. He awoke in as much of a panic as his heavily sedated body would allow him.

When he saw Melanie standing by the door, some of that panic subsided.

He cleared his throat and spoke. "Mel?"

"Hi Dustin." she said. She walked over to the side of the bed.

He sat up, looking at her and at his unfamiliar surroundings. He was glad to see her. "Where are we? What happened?"

"I have to tell you something first." she said. She sat down on the bed and turned her body to face him.

He looked at her for a long moment. They had been dating for a few weeks, and things had been going good between them. Together they had gotten quite intimate with each other. As part of her programming, and to keep him interested in her she had let him have sex with her frequently.

Dustin didn't like the way her words sounded. As groggy as he was he was sure he was about to be dumped. Either that or offered a consolation friendship. But nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to see.