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[b][u][center]A Day in the RoboCorn Life

For Repanbo

Sponsored by PineconePangolin

By Draconicon[/center][/u][/b]

The alarm went off. The plugged-in shell received the sound, translated it into electrical signals, and – as it had been programmed to do upon construction – turned those translated signals into something that the penthouse hard-drive could understand. The signals, once uploaded, were sent to the intelligence kept in stasis mode for the night, waking it from the ‘rest’ mode that it never entirely happily submitted to, and sent the intelligence down the hardline to the waiting shell.

The entire process took a total of 2 milliseconds, and the shell’s hand lifted and tapped the alarm button in the two more. Blue-gold eyes looked out of a black-steel face, staring down at the dent in the wall, only for the camera-view to fade as the shell’s senses took over.

Time shifted, pulled, twisted around the equine shell, and slowly, the world came into focus. Temporal shift was always the hardest part of waking up, going from the speed of an unattached intelligence to something that had to operate in the real world and operate at the speed of mortals. Ellyra groaned, feeling the pull and tug and swirl around her as the seconds seemed so long, then faster, and faster, and faster, until the concept of a millisecond was almost impossible to grasp.

She slowly pulled her hand back from the wall. The internal timer for the shell told her that it took a total of three seconds to pull it from wall to chest, and she nodded. She was properly in-sync with the world again.

Pity about the wall, however. She had reacted too soon, the body’s enhanced servos and other devices making her punch a hole in the wall when she had only meant to turn off the alarm. She usually waited for the sync-up, but this time, she’d been too eager. She chuckled, shaking her head as she dusted the bits of metal debris from her knuckles.

“Well, that’s another bit of the budget allocated toward repairs, I guess. Ah, don’t forget the cords…”

It seemed to be something that she forgot at least once a week; the cords that ran from the back of her head, along her spine, and from a special port just under her tail were quite obviously there, and always were after a sleep, but there was always that one time that she forgot and tried to walk off with them still plugged in. She never quite understood why she did that, but it kept happening.

She undid the one behind her head first, feeling the soft ‘click’ as it came loose, and the sense of the cameras around the penthouse disappeared. With each removal, she felt less and less wired into the system, until the last one – a combination charger and downloader – was removed from a USB port right under her tail. Her cheeks clenched, her muscle-fibers tensed, and her entire body seized up for a half-second before it all went limp again as the internal power supply kicked in.

“Mmmph…note to self, improve the next model so we don’t have that change-over…”

That went into all sorts of notes that she kept for herself, though these ones were mostly stored in the on-board directory. Ellyra checked when she had last synced that with the main system and winced: over four weeks. No wonder she’d been forgetting about those ideas when she was at work. There was nothing to remind her.

Scheduling a sync-up for later that night, she rolled her legs out of bed. The whines and whirrs of machinery had been gone for a long time. Not since the early versions of the computer shell, now that she thought of it. Sometimes she missed it; maybe she’d calibrate an older model to feel that later.

Up.

Stretch.

Roll her neck around.

A living being would have been popping like mad after sleeping the way that the shell did, or at the very least, they would have been sore beyond the common lot of mortals. Not Ellyra.

She admired herself. Despite not having the cameras connected, she still had her memories of what they had been seeing prior to disconnection. A dark-‘skinned’ equine model stood in the middle of the bedroom, with a glowing strip of lights along the back of her neck and the top of her head as a mane, and ‘flesh’ that was…well, it was somewhat artificial, at the very least. A mix of Lightning-magic and Machine-magic had created the material itself, something between latex, rubber, and flesh, and some enchanters that were very good at their job had taken it further, making it a sort of synth-flesh that was so close to the real thing that most people didn’t know that she was just using a shell.

Of course, every so often, one could see that the structure under the flesh wasn’t just bone and muscle. There were great metal struts inside of her, and she could feel them sometimes when there was greater tension. She shifted her footing, her delicate hooves clip-clopping on hardwood floors deliberately picked out for the best acoustics in the penthouse, and –

Ding.

Dong.

[i]Gardening Time: 7:30-8:00 AM.[/i]

“Eeeee. Good, good.”

Ellyra walked out of her bedroom, the dark-‘fleshed’ equine walking naked through her apartment. Once she was out of the bedroom, the tinkering and repair lab part of the penthouse was left behind, replaced with a lush place of hardwood and well-tended plants. But they weren’t the garden that needed attention.

She took the private elevator at the back of the living room to the rooftop, gathering the watering can that she kept by the elevator door and carrying it with her. The robocorn hummed to herself as she rode the metal box to the top of the building, waiting for the familiar –

Ding.

The elevator opened, revealing the balcony garden that she had long-since guaranteed for herself. Ellyra smiled, cradling the watering can to her chest as she looked down the lines of flowers and the smaller number of herb and vegetable gardens that she kept for herself. They were all doing relatively well, contained within a field of off-the-books Green energy that she’d had a few discrete casters bring up to the top floor, and it looked like it was still going strong.

Humming under her breath, the slender mare made her way to the faucet and gathered her water. A few pings in the corner of her eye told her that several security cameras had been activated by her presence, offering her the chance to see through them if she wanted to open her wireless ports.

She decided against it. Watching herself walk around in the nude would have been fun, but it would have been distracting, and she only had a half-hour before she’d have to upload herself back to the home-server, shoot herself across town to the work-shell, and then get started with that.

[i]Heheheh…if anyone told me that this would have been possible twenty years ago…[/i]

Ellyra shook her head. If she told her life story to anyone, they probably would have thought that she had come from some sort of science-fiction paradise, or at the very least, somewhere with more high-tech solutions to life than ever would exist on earth. They would have been wrong.

And who was it that said that sufficiently-advanced science was indistinguishable to magic? There was a corollary there somewhere, where the magic could imitate science that had not yet caught up with the dreams and intent of the people around them.

Ellyra let it go. She was still warming up, after all, and the brain circuits of the home-model weren’t quite so advanced as the office one. It was meant more for leisure, after all, and it helped to turn the brain off a little bit when there legitimately wasn’t as much brain there in the first place.

Humming to herself, the naked horse walked down the lines of plants, leaning forward and flicking her tail to the side. She could feel the cameras lining up on her rump, or – when she stood up – on her bare chest. Everything had a slight difference in movement compared to organics. Mostly correct, of course, but just a little bit delayed in the early parts of the morning. All the pieces had to be warmed by the inner heat of her processors and other parts, after all, and that meant that she had to let it run for a while. Until they caught up, her rump and her breasts were a little…stiff, less inclined to jiggle the way that they otherwise would.

The camera recordings would tell her if the latest formula for the synth-flesh inside of her worked better than the older one. Tactilely, she couldn’t really tell a difference, but she was in the midst of it, so she might be wrong.

Up.

Down.

Up.

Down.

She was just starting to bend over for the row of herbs, the watering can barely retaining any water, when she had a little buzz in the back of her head. Ellyra stood up and pressed her fingers to the side of her head, bringing up the little circle-image in the corner of her HUD.

[i]Oh, lovely…[/i]

Ellyra shook her head at the sight of her axolotl body-tech, but knew that this was one of those calls that she had to take. She double-checked her cam-spell, made sure that it was set to a distance that showed cleavage but not boobage, and answered the call.

An axolotl with a pink-blue face appeared in front of her, a half-transparent hologram that was the result of a combination Perception-spell and a Machine-spell, all wound together into an enchantment that was part of her current shell. Everything was magic in Docetri, it was just whether it was actively magic or made by it. Ellyra leaned slightly to one side, her hand on her hip as she looked at the image of the axolotl.

“What’s the matter, Jim?” she asked.

“[i]Sorry to bother you, but there’s a visitor for you here at the office.[/i]”

“Office hours aren’t open for another ten minutes.”

“[i]Technically true, ma’am, except for, um…[/i]”

“…Don’t tell me.”

“[i]Um, we have someone from PACC waiting for you down in the labs. We, uh, we asked if she was willing to wait, but –[/i]”

“But she wouldn’t. Ohhhh, boy…”

PACC. The Peri-Acrasia Corporate Court was one of the three big powers of Docetri, and while they weren’t playing host to a judge – or worse, one of the High Justices – a judge’s assistant was bad enough. The last thing that she needed was for one of them to start looking around and shutting down stuff that they didn’t understand.

Ellyra rubbed her forehead, taking a few breaths. Jim was just a mechanic; he didn’t know the protocols of dealing with people that high up the food chain, nor did she expect him to. She’d just have to get in a bit early and hope for the best.

“I’ll be right there,” she said. “Prep something that’s officious and good for the lab for me to wear. Expect me downloading in ten minutes.”

“[i]Yes, ma’am. Right on it, ma’am.[/i]”

The call ended, and she set the watering can at her hooves. No point in finishing now. The Green would do the rest of the work for her, for now. She had to get in before things got screwed up.

She could only imagine what had prompted this. Her first thought was some outsider that was trying to slow down the entertainment production line that RoboCorn, Incorporated had just started, but there were scant few that actually knew about it. The RoboCorn line was more of a niche item that she was trying to move toward the public, but the difficulties of finding a good balance between proper AI and the cheap materials she’d need for mass production were stymying her at the moment.

No, probably not a competitor then, but –

[i]Oh, the board wouldn’t…no, they would. Oh, they would…[/i]

Ellyra grumbled under her breath as she returned to the elevator. Ever since she’d signed the agreement that put RoboCorn, Inc. under the same banner as Horsepower, Inc., they’d had a constant fight over the idea of unions. The bigger company didn’t entirely [i]mind[/i] them as long as they got their share of the profits, but they didn’t want any of the unionization ideas to spread through their other subsidiaries.

And they would be the sort that would call on PACC to pay her a visit, ‘just for the sake of keeping up appearances.’ She rolled her eyes, the movement so fast that it barely registered in her sensors.

She couldn’t tell herself to take deep breaths, because the RoboCorn shell didn’t really breathe, but she could tell herself to cycle down a bit. She did, slowly, bringing the fast-think that was staring to throw her out of sync with time back down to its normal levels.

[i]Everything’s probably fine,[/i] she thought. [i]Jim’s the only one that called me, which means that my directors and scientists aren’t particularly concerned. Could be nothing, could be just a routine inspection…[/i]

Because that happened. There were official inspectors that were more specialized in Machine-magic and other types of manufacturing, and those were the things that mattered nine times out of ten, but anyone of sufficient power could call up PACC and get them to come down and take a look at things. That meant shutting down an entire operation for a good bit of the day, and if the judge – or the assistant that was more often sent out – felt that there was something off and an investigation was required, then the whole company could be shut down for however long it took for the investigation could be completed.

[i]Just going to have to make sure that they see everything is fine.[/i]

Just had to hope that she pulled a reasonable inspector, too. That was going to be the big one…

The elevator finally reached the penthouse floor. It had only taken ten mortal seconds, but she had been on machine time for all of it, so it felt far longer. Ellyra resisted the urge to stay in that; that sort of speed-walking would punch holes through her pretty floor and leave her having to replace full-on craters. Instead, she walked with all the speed that a normal person could muster, went back to her bedroom, and plugged in the charger-downloader cord that went just under her tail.

What happened next could have been high-tech to someone that wasn’t watching, but it was so much more than that. Machine-magic meant that there were ways of pulling an intelligence out of a head. Perception and Presence-magic meant that there were ways of detaching a mind from its body, and ensuring that it could be active from a variety of places. Lightning-magic allowed the electrical impulses to become electricity and travel in ways that a body never could. Enchantment-magic made it all possible without her having to know the magic herself, and –

Well, what it came down to was that there were a lot of different types of magic in Docetri, and for those with means, it was possible to live a life that looked very lush, and very un-magical, indeed.

Ellyra initiated the upload of her mind from her body, and shifted. The world went blue, surrounded by numbers that were lighter and darker in tone, ones and zeroes that flowed about her. She entered the hard-drive, spread out through the database, and shifted herself through the hardline that ran from her penthouse out through the city.

Zip.

Zap.

Gone.

It took all of half a millisecond to get from the penthouse to RoboCorn, Inc.’s headquarters. She didn’t see it. Nobody could see ‘out’ when they were traveling through a wire. She just knew she was there, because there were only a few places that she could go from the home-database, and each one had a shell waiting for her there. The one here –

Boot.

Load.

Start.

The mind-circuits were faster, zipping online with a speed that the home-shell could only envy. Ellyra stood up, the various wires that hung out of the back of her head and down her back pulling slightly on her and reminding her not to move too quickly. She rolled her head from side to side, getting used to the leaner, slightly more austere body. Smaller breasts, narrower hips, slightly more business and severe than the other one. Cheekbones filed in a bit further, too, to make her look more intense if she had to frown.

Jim stood in front of her, holding out a suit and jacket, as well as a pair of long, tight pants. Ellyra nodded, slowly pulling the wires free and bracing for the tension bit –

There it was. Her chest thrust forward slightly for a moment, then pulled in as everything inside finished powering on. She held out her arms and the axolotl helped her into her blouse, then the jacket that went around it.

“How long have they been waiting?” she asked.

“I came and got you as soon as I saw them. Five minutes, at most.”

“So, fifteen by now.”

“Yeah, I guess. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“You think that everything’s going to be okay? I mean. I know that you’ll take care of us if everything gets shut down, but –”

“It will be [i]fine.[/i]”

She didn’t panic. She couldn’t, at that moment. That part of the brain was very deliberately shut down, keeping the panic at bay and focusing instead on the simulated adrenaline running through the system. It made her feel powerful, even a little bit overconfident in a way.

She liked it.

“Who’s waiting down there? Did they give a name?” she asked, stepping into her pants.

“No, she just said that she’s waiting for you.”

“She. That’s a step.”

The men tended to be more aggressive. She imagined that they didn’t like being assistants to the judges, and often wanted to throw their weight around even more. Women were used to the more ‘assistive’ roles and tended to be a little less of a pain. She could work with that.

Once she was properly dressed, with a dark-blue jacket, a white shirt, and a gold set of buttons and accoutrements on her suit, she nodded to herself. She flexed her hands, her fingers, doing a quick diagnostic of the body –

And paused.

“Did you…” She held up her right hand. “There’s something new in there.”

“Oh sorry. I meant to tell you about that. I was tweaking this shell, and thought a little discharge unit would be useful.”

“…Discharge. As in Lightning?”

The axolotl nodded.

“Hmm.”

“Well, I just thought – as you have that sort of, well, almost unlimited power most days, and it wouldn’t hurt to have something that’s more, you know, normal for self-defense instead of the machine-speed thing –”

“Hey, hey.”

She smiled, giving him a pat on the shoulder. The shorter axolotl leaned against it, almost tilting his head in to nuzzle her arm.

“It’s fine. Just tell me if you’re going to modify my shell in the future, okay? Sometimes, we don’t get time to talk about this.”

“I will. Sorry for not mentioning it.”

“Okay, we’re good. Now, I’ll go see what this is about, and you can just relax. Start making notes for other things like this.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“Relax.”

Ellyra patted his shoulder one more time before walking around him. The shell was kept in a small closet at the back of her office, one that had a fake-back in it that allowed her to just step inside at the end of the day, shut down, and go home. As she stepped out into her office proper, she enjoyed the soft clip-clop of her hooves as she walked down the marble floor, and the out into the carpeted hallway. Not so nice, without the sound, but she made it work.

It didn’t take her long to reach the elevators, and she tapped the button to summon them before crossing her hands behind her back. There was no panic in her head, though she could feel the programs trying to run in the background, and kept killing them so that they wouldn’t come up and bother her.

[i]It is more than likely fine,[/i] she thought. [i]An inspection, at worst, and a ‘prank’ by Horsepower, Inc. to flex some of their power over me, at best. We can deal with that. We can deal with all of that.[/i]

The elevator arrived and she stepped inside, tapping the button for the main lab. The door closed as she held her finger on the button, her unique magical aura – almost like her fingerprint, the same for anyone else in Docetri – activating a priority protocol for the elevator. The brass-glass cylinder dropped at speed, and she waited with her hands behind her back.

Ellyra didn’t have to wait long. The elevator reached the first main lab beneath the surface of the company headquarters – deliberately put further down so that a mistake didn’t end up crashing through to the ground floor – and the door opened. She had a brief view of the entire lab, with conveyor belts and the various RoboCorn models hanging from assembly lines, to the machine arms that were put together to weld them in place, before she saw the person that wasn’t in company attire…and relaxed.

“Milur, you scared the electricity right out of me,” Ellyra said, stepping out of the elevator and walking with speed toward the Arabian mare waiting at the end of the catwalk. “Next time, call first.”

“I can’t when I’m on the job, hon, you know how it is,” the judge’s assistant said, turning with a smile. “Good to see you, too.”

“Hardly as good as it is to see you. It’s been ages.”

“Yes, indeed. New model?”

“Three more since the last time you popped in,” Ellyra said, turning on the spot with happy little clip-clop dance. “What do you think?”

“Skinnier than I thought. Dear, you really need an actual ass.”

“That’s what some of the other models are for. This one’s all business.”

“Well, some business takes place in the bedroom, dearie.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you were in my position.”

“And you probably wouldn’t be dealing with as many irritating house-calls if some of your new bosses didn’t have such large sticks up their asses, but here we are,” Milur said, shaking her head.

“Then they [i]were[/i] the ones to call you?”

“You know I can’t confirm or deny that, Ellyra. Professional ethics and all that.”

But it was more or less a confirmation. Horsepower, Inc. – or at least, someone on the board – was still wanting her to just fall in line with the way that they ran things. They wouldn’t officially tell her to stop, but the little irritations would keep coming, one after another, until she did things the way that they wanted.

She rubbed her forehead. She didn’t have a headache, but she could feel the heat-pressure of some of her insides working up a bit of a frenzy. The RoboCorn put that aside, sighing a simulated breath.

“So, did they get you by chance, or –”

“I’m not about to let some trumped-up accusation end up shutting down your company for more than an hour, Ellyra,” the older woman said, shaking her head. “The minute I saw that come down the court-lines, I snatched it before someone else could. I’m not about to let someone turn a brilliant little mare’s work into a nightmare.”

Ellyra chuckled. For all that she had a machine’s mind at the moment, she hadn’t shut out the emotion processors. Well, other than the panic one, of course. And there was a thing where every mare had a happy, filly-like reaction whenever they got praise from an older mare. It was just an equine thing.

As she tippy-tapped her hooves, she couldn’t help but feel a bit grateful to the other mare, and she looked up at her with a smile. The other woman was a full head taller than her, and about a decade older. Everything had started to sag slightly, as biology was wont to do as the years went by. Milur’s nearly all-black fur meant that she hid most of the wrinkles better than the average mare would have been able to, but one could see the slight wear and tear around the muzzle, and just a little bit hidden under the skirt that she wore. There was just that little bit of sag back there starting, though it could probably be stopped with the right sort of Body-magic and transformation.

“So, just to get this out of the way,” Milur said, the mare tapping her wrist-tablet. “All your security measures are up to the same level they were last time?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“And all the manufacturing safeguards up to the same standards?”

“Of course. Better, actually.”

“And anything added that haven’t been approved by the court board on Standards of Service?”

“Just one, but I submitted the paperwork for that and got an approval yesterday.”

“Easy enough to check all those things.”

“So, we’re good?”

“You know that I’d fine you out the ass if you were actually doing anything stupid,” Milur said, shaking her head. “I will check it out afterward, but you know that if you lied to me, I’m out of a job for accepting it. So…you’re not lying to me, are you?”

“I would [i]never[/i].”

“Mm-hmm…”

Milur gave her a knowing look, and Ellyra would have blushed if the business-shell had been capable of it. There had been that one time when she had been in the process of testing a stallion-shell and hadn’t [i]quite[/i] had the cock-control programs working properly, and she’d had a full day of dealing with a rogue erection that wanted to get used on every passing compatible life-form. That had been a dangerous day, considering that there had been a complaint lodged and Milur had been dispatched to see to it.

That model had been destroyed at the end of the day. Milur had been right about it not being ready, despite Ellyra trying to insist it was. There was so much more testing needed compared to what she had then.

“But not now?” Milur said.

“No, I’m not lying. Swear.”

“Good.”

The Arabian mare tapped her wrist-tablet again, and there was a soft beep.

“And that’s your complaint dismissed, and we can move on with our day,” the older woman said, stretching her arms overhead. “So, what in the world are you in the process of making? This is a whole different layout compared to last time.”

“Oh. Well, this is a [i]little[/i] embarrassing, but…Do you have time?”

“Dear, I have all the time in the world. I already booked the whole morning to deal with this just in case it got complicated, so nobody can call me back to work before noon.”

“Well then, come with me.”

It was a bit of a walk from the catwalks down to the product chamber. The rest of the layout of the lab was set up for proper manufacturing, for getting the new model ready, but the prototype had already been made and set aside. They just had to get there. They climbed down staircases and ladders, made their way across cavernous abysses, and finally stopped only when they were right in front of a massive test tube filled with synth-flesh, muscle-fibers, and a new shell that was very much [i]not[/i] feminine.

Milur blinked, leaning forward and resting a hand on the transparent part of the tube. She cocked her head to the side as she looked the stallion-shell inside up and down, her eyes very definitely resting on the sheath between its legs.

“Well…that’s definitely a step up from the last one.”

“I thought that I could make it better.”

“You fixed the cock-control problem, then?”

“It’s much more balanced. It doesn’t have the constant breeding problem unless you specifically engage it, and I set that behind four different safeguards to make sure that it doesn’t trigger by an errant thought. You have to basically be sitting down, jerking it, and wanting to go into that mode for at least a minute for it to go off.”

“…That’s explicit.”

“Well, you’re not on the clock, so it’s not like I have to be [i]that[/i] professional with you, heh. And besides, just because you called me out on the last one didn’t mean that you didn’t enjoy it when I had you bent over the desk.”

“Or that you didn’t enjoy it when I had your face between my cheeks as punishment,” the older woman said, walking around to the other side of the tube. “There’s something different about this one, though.”

“You’re right. It’s not a ride-shell. It’s a servant-shell.”

The other mare blinked, slowly looking around the container tube. Ellyra nodded.

“I’ve almost cracked the AI code. I just need to finetune it a [i]little[/i] bit more, and we’ll have a male AI to go with the fem ones.”

“Are you sure that the city’s ready for that?”

“Oh, come on. Have you seen how much RoboCorn mares have been selling for? Clubs have been buying them up left and right. Stallions might be a little more niche, but you know that there’s gay size queens all over the city that’d like one.”

“Uh-huh. And this isn’t just you spreading the herd all over the place?”

“…Maybe, but that’s besides the point,” Ellyra said, shaking her head. “And that’s not part of your department of inspection, either.”

“No, but maybe it should be.”

“Look, the point of bringing you down here wasn’t to make you worry. It was to offer you something new. He’s…almost done, and there’s a couple of personality matrices that are compatible with the shell, even if they’re not quite masculine. A couple of femdoms, a couple of playful alpha-mares, that kind of thing. And I was thinking…”

“…Are you trying to bribe a justice official?” Milur joked.

“Hardly. I thought you might be up for a bit of a threesome.”

“During office hours?”

“Well, you said that you don’t have to be back for a while. And I could use someone else to help me test whether it’s as good as the real thing.”

“And when was the last time that [i]you[/i] got the real thing?”

“[i]That[/i] is none of your business, but you can help out with this one, if you want.”

Ellyra chuckled as Milur gave the big guy another look over. She knew that the other woman would eventually decide to go along with it. There was nothing that would stop either of them from indulging, at this point. They were both far, far too eager to try out something new. Milur had a boring job that drove her up the wall, and Ellyra…well, Ellyra was always looking for something new and interesting.

[i]And this guy…he’ll be very interesting…[/i]

And besides…she had to test. It was what she loved most.

[b][u][center]The End[/center][/u][/b]

Summary: Another Docetri story, this time showing the life and times of one Ellyra, RoboCorn CEO.

Tags: F/solo, F/nudity, Teasing, Robot, Cybernetics, Docetri, Machine Magic, Imitating High Tech, Corporate Politics, Female Shell, Male Shell, Equines, Axolotl, Slice of Life, Nonsexual,