FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Alice woke up.

There was a noise ringing in her ears, like a computer start up. She blinked twice, glancing around. She was in James' apartment, in the living room. Standing up, but feeling perfectly comfortable. James was there, the wolf standing in front of her with his cocky smile on his face. "Everything okay?" he asked.

An... idea slid into Alice's mind. It was like something outside her mind, creating a thought and slipping it in as if it belonged. The words were half out of the otter's mouth before she questioned them. "Yeah, all systems are... nominal?"

She squinted at her muzzle. "Oh..." she said. "I guess that means the whole thing worked?"

James nodded. "Looks like it." He slipped a small device, like a remote, into his trouser pocket, and smoothed his shirt. "They brought you round just now. Said everything was just fine, and you should be fully functional."

Alice giggled, a bit nervously, and shifted her weight. "Yeah... funny, I don't even remember coming up here."

"It was strange. You were just walking along, no expression, just like a robot. I thought the guy who brought you was going to tell me they'd scrambled your brains, but no, turns out you have a remote, on account of being a special order."

"I was a special order? Well, you know how to charm a-oh!"

She had taken a few steps forward, and looked down at herself, at her changed body. "Oh god," she gulped. "It's real. It's actually happened."

The biggest change was her arms. They were gone, the otter's shoulders simply smooth expanses of fur. There was no feeling of anything being missing, no ghost sensation, just a blank space where once there were arms and hands. It felt entirely natural, as if she'd never had any arms. She knew that before the procedure, she'd had two perfectly normal, perfectly nice arms, but now it felt right to just be a torso and some legs.

There was something implanted in her chest, covering her breasts. A wide, flat pane of glass stretched from below her collarbone to just above where her nipples would have been, melding at the edges to her fur. She couldn't see from the angle, but she knew that her breasts had been smoothed over, into little more than a shelf for her display screen. She could... feel that, somehow.

It was like a layer, in her mind. She could see how to do things with the screen, like flexing a muscle. At her mental instructions, it lit up, and she displayed a smiley emoticon on it. "Wow, I'm all properly cybered up!"

The wolf laughed. "Yeah, looks like it's all working. The arms I was getting were out of stock, but they say they can attached them next week. Proper multi function ones."

Alice lifted her feet looking down at her legs. Last week, the thought of being this cyberneticised half machine would have made her horny - this plan had been a constant topic of discussion in the bedroom - but not she wasn't feeling the slightest twitch in her groin. Of course, she knew why - between her legs was nothing but a mound of fur. Her sex was as gone as her arms, or her breasts.

Or her free will.

"How do you feel?" asked James. "I mean, you personally, not just your body."

The otter steadied her armless torso, and considered her being. "...Different," she summed up. "It's like I still remember everything, that I'm Alice, but like I'm imagining how I would act and then doing that. It's weird."

"Okay, one more question."

She laughed. "I get the feeling you'll have a lot more than that."

"Hah, yeah. But for now - what's the password to your email, and twitter, and bank account and everything?"

Alice paused, eyes open wide. He couldn't - that wasn't supposed to be part of the arrangement! After two years, Personal Assistants were converted back to people, and their previous owners weren't allowed to control them any more, but the passwords would let him run her life!

"I'm sorry, I don't have that information."

The words hadn't come from her mind, but they were true. While she was panicking, the part of her that was in charge had searched through her memories and come up blank. "I-oh, I really don't know."

James smiled. "Good, you're not meant to. It protects the Assistants - and stop them leaving. Nowhere to run."

Run? But leaving wasn't possible.

Was that an implanted thought, or did she not want to leave?

She shivered. "Okay. Helps put the whole being property now into perspective, I suppose."

"Speaking of passwords, are you password protected?"

The otter felt her memories being sorted through, neatly organised, and packed away, along with a whole bunch of information that would be called on. "I have your physical appearance and voice print from my memories, but you set up fingerprints and retinal scans too. Would you like to?"

She flashed up a hand on her screen, the fingers highlighted in red. Smiling, the wolf stepped up and placed his hand on her glass. She twitched a smile, reading every curve of his fingertips while she remembered the last time he had put hands on her chest, to caress her breasts and tweak her nipples.

But those memories couldn't even arouse her nulled body any more. She stored them away for after she was made back into a person, and registered her owners' prints to unlock and control her. "Fingerprints stored. Would you like to register a retina? Please look me directly in the eye."

Alice stared deep into his eyes, feeling the map of delicate veins in his eyes build in her mind. She couldn't see anything in the dark of his pupil, which meant the there must be a camera hooked up to her brain pushing the image to her visual processing cortex - but where could it be? Was it inside her eyeball?

Or had they pulled out her eyes, put a camera in the empty socket, and covered it up with a pretty flesh like imitation?

"Retinal scan complete. You can now use unlock my non-private functions by voice print, and more private things like payments and private documents with either fingerprints or retinal prints."

Her more private functions... hah.

"Great!" he replied. "Oh, before anything else, what's your charge level?"

The otter frowned for a second, then said, "Biologicals at 64%. Electrical at 20%, but I can charge that from my body."

"You should go charge yourself. The station is in the closet in the hall. Oh, I'll get the door."

Following along behind him, Alice passed the mirror in the hall. She took a second to examine herself, the parts she hadn't seen already. Her body looked a bit better than it had, as if it had been tuned up a bit. Thinking, she realised she had a workout scheduled for the morning, and she'd be kept healthy - and probably end up in better shape at the end of this. Her head was wrapped in metal, implants tracing over her eyebrows and round the back of her head, holding her hair neatly in place and marking her as no a real person. She twisted her head, looking at her eyes to see if they were altered, but couldn't see where they had hidden the camera.

James opened the closet where he had once stored his coats. "I had them put your recharger in here," he said. "Get yourself recharged and then come see me."

"Yes sir," the otter said, stepping past him.

The closet wasn't large, but it was big enough for her recharger, a long low metal box with a tank of nutrients on one end. She synced to it wirelessly, and sent a command to activate. A pole rose up to below waist height, and Alice turned and presented her rear to it. The port that had replaced her anus opened, allowing the pole to hook up, and pipes connected, pumping nutrient fluid into her internal storage, and taking waste out. With her digestive system shut down, this was how she would be fed now.

Suddenly, she felt drowsy. Her battery was recharging, and there was no need for her to think at the moment. A smile played at the edge of her lips before she fell asleep.

***

She woke again, the second time as a mechanised assistant. All the information was there in her mind - her body was fully charged, and she should go to her master. The pole connecting her to the recharger disconnected as she stepped forward in search of him, retracting neatly back into the machine. It would alert her when the nutrient levels were getting low, so her owner could replace it.

He was in the living room, slumped on the sofa. It took her a second to realise what was different from how she normally saw him, but then it clicked: he wasn't bothering trying to look nice for her. Before, when they had been boyfriend and girlfriend, he had looked at her with love, with lust, with interest, and tried to get her to look the same, but now they were master and owned object, he glanced up with a disinterested look.

"Oh, you're done?" He waved his phone. "Here. You can hook up to this, right? Get all my contacts and store them, okay?"

It took a fraction of a second to connect wirelessly, sync phone numbers, email addresses, and twitter handles. Larger files transferred more slowly,but she figured he wouldn't need those right away. "Done," she said with a smile.

The wolf raised an eyebrow. "That was fast. Okay, I need to make a call."

He put the phone down. "You can make calls, right?"

Alice felt a thrill run through her. "Of course I can, James, it's part of my functions, now."

"Good. Okay then, call Jennifer. She's in my contacts."

Her number popped into the otter's mind. She could see where to feed it to call, how to hook up to the cellular network, and did it almost before she'd thought. "Connecting now..."

The connection went through. She could feel the rings coming, waiting for a response. "It's ringing," she said, and thought about Jennifer as she waited.

She hadn't liked the mare. She'd always been stand offish to Alice every time they'd met, but she was in their circle of friends, so she'd tried to get on. But why was James calling her? A spark of dread rose up in her stomach.

Jennifer picked up. She could read the audio stream, hear the shift on the other end of the phone as it was raised to her ear. Her words came down the line. "Hey, who is this?"

And the words came out of Alice, out of her mouth. She shaped her lips and tongue to them, but the voice was not her own. Whether her vocal chords had been stripped out and replaced with a speaker, or the mechanical control of her throat was so complete that it could sound like someone else, she simply didn't know.

James smiled, and lay back. "It's James! I have a new phone. Well, not exactly a phone."

Alice fed the audio coming past her ears directly to the connection. Jennifer would her as if she had a microphone where the otter was.

"No!" Jennifer said. Alice mouthed the words, the other woman's words coming out her throat. "She actually went ahead with it? I didn't think you could talk her into it!"

Alice flushed. He'd told others? But they would find out eventually, when they saw her nude, nulled body trailing obediently after him.

"Yep, I'm calling you through her right now."

Jennifer paused. Alice recreated the slow intake of breath she gave. "She can hear everything we're saying?"

"Not just hear it, she's speaking it. It's weird, seeing her speak and hearing your voice. But don't worry, she can't do anything about it, and it you want I can delete her memories."

"She's completely under your control?"

"Yes. Officially she's not a person any more - all I have to do is make sure her body isn't harmed, and I could completely wipe her mind - they'll restore from backup once her time is up."

"So she's not going to interfere?" Jennifer asked, through Alice's mouth.

"No. She'll do whatever I want. We still on for tonight?"

"Yeah. Bring your new Personal Assistant. I'm looking forward to seeing her!"

"Oh, I will! See you later. Alice, end call."

Alice hung up. Numbly, feeling her stomach churning (though it was not being used), she checked James' schedule. It was right there: 7:30, meet Jennifer for date. Relevant information. Her voice returned to her, she quavered, "You have a seven thirty... meeting with Jennifer."

James looked up, hearing her tone. "Alice, are you operating properly?"

All her systems were running perfectly. "Yes sir. It's just... you're dating her?"

James stood up, staring straight at her. "Yes, I am," he said matter of factly.

Alice's emotions welled up in her. Tears would have been pricking at her eyes, to hear her boyfriend - ex-boyfriend and new owner - say she was being replaced, but her eye moisturising was now controlled by the implants, so she couldn't even cry. James saw the otter's lip trembling, and gently took her by the shoulders.

No, she didn't have shoulders any more. His hands were on the top of her torso, by her screen. "Alice. We can't be together like that, not any more. We can't have sex - hell, I'm not the kind of guy who has sex with property, anyway. You didn't expect me to stay chased the whole time, did you?"

A little timeline popped up in her head. Had he asked the mare out immediately that Alice had gone it for her conversion, or waited until today?

Or... before?

"I-I guess," she said. "Just - I didn't expect it so soon..."

He sighed, and started to tap on her screen. "Here. I'm reducing your negative emotions to 20% of what they would normally be."

She felt the sadness, the grief at the lost relationship, the fear of having to watch her replacement, shrink like a wall was built between her and the feelings. Numbed, she looked up.

"Feeling better?" James asked.

Alice nodded. "Sorry. I should have thought about this before- I know it's going to be rough to start..."

James hugged her. "It's okay. I'm not doing this to be mean to you. I don't want you to suffer. If it's too much, I'll delete your personality and put in one of the default ones."

She felt a little twinge of fear, and wondered if that was bone shaking terror of loosing herself, muted by his fiddling with her mind. "No, I think I'll be fine, now that you've turned my emotions down."

He released her, and stepped back. "Good. I didn't want to have to replace you. After all, that's the point of converting someone who knows you intimately, right? So the new personality can use your memories and what you know about me to predict what I'll want, and act as a real assistant, rather than having to train up a personality by having it watch me and learn."

Alice nodded. It made sense. That's what she was now, an assistant able to guess what he wanted. That was where her value lay, not in being connected, but in her knowledge of James' behaviour, his likes and dislikes.

"Okay, I have to go get ready for my date. You... do what ever it is you do while I get ready."

The wolf headed to the bedroom, pulling at his shirt. Alice guessed he would put on the light purple shirt, the one she had bought him, and always said flattered his shoulders. She'd have to get used to asking herself, 'What would James want?'

But did she really know that?

How was he so unconcerned with her? She would have thought he would have tried to help her without simply turning her emotions down. But he hadn't.

She sat on the floor cross legged.

AIs needed training, on what behaviour was desirable. So did people, if they were supposed to predict what someone else wanted. Had James been doing that for her, in anticipation of the moment he could use her as the perfect assistant?

But if so, he had been keeping part of himself secret from her. She didn't truly know all of him.

Well, she thought to the tiny screaming voice in the back of her head, she'd just have to learn.