“Illegal” and “well paying” defined most of the jobs Milly took. As one of the few people in the world who was both extremely familiar with Syntheticism’s designs, and at the same time, not beholden to Syntheticism’s contractual obligations, or non-compete agreements, Milly was free to do some of the more fringe jobs for clients who paid for efficiency, skill, and above all, silence.
The worser problem was the severe legal repercussions for what Milly did. Although most of her clients eventually relented to less illegal options, Milly was very good at covering her tracks when she did need to violate contacts, recommendations, and laws all in one night.
The client this time, an Oscar Surrey, had reached out to her through an online contact, who didn't know Milly directly but was connected to one of Milly's old co-workers who still contracted with Syntheticism and wouldn't touch the job.
There were a few red flags about the job, although with Milly's deep seated paranoia, all jobs had red flags. This client hadn't owned his synthetic for very long, and was already sending out feelings through the internet for modification advice, and soliciting help ‘upgrading’ his synthetic beyond the commercially available options. The client had insisted on on-site repair, no shops and no outsourcing. And then there was the pay. Milly always highballed, always threw out obscene numbers, just to prompt the would-be client to attempt to talk her down. It demonstrated to Milly that the client was serious about what they wanted, and at the same time, let Milly give off the appearance of being nice enough to offer a discount. This Oscar had tacked five percent onto Milly’s first fee for expediency, and then another twenty percent for what the client had called ‘discretion’.
Milly would’ve walked away then and there, except the client had deposited a third of the total as an advance.
The division the client lived in was remote. The client’s neighbor’s weren’t within earshot. That was of some reassurance to Milly as she sat in his van in the drive and surveyed the surroundings. There weren’t many places other than inside for cops to be hiding, other than inside the house. Better yet, out by the trash there was a massive crumpled cardboard box along with the packing material from a Syntheticism unit. From experience, Milly could tell it was one of the big ones. Milly afforded herself a chuckle, as she prepped the van’s roof-mounted aerial drone. The house was big, but not Titan-Mod big, and the image of some normal sized schmuck getting ridden by an Athena-Class or a Hera-Class on their less gentle settings was comical, especially if the poor fucker was caught between the legs of one of them when a hip actuator seized.
Her laptop connected to the drone without delay and the tiny tricopter took off silently from the van, feeding video back to the laptop. There was some risk inherent in the drone being spotted, but it’s slim profile, light bending coating, and generally silent nature meant that Milly felt better after reviewing the drone’s imagery than going into a strangers house.
The drone reported no misadventures. The front and back lawn were meticulously maintained. In the back a solar-shed suggested a drone-mower did most of the work, and there were no indications that any amount of foot traffic had been in or around the house in some time. So, hopefully, there wouldn’t be any cops hiding in the basement, waiting to spring handcuffs on her.
Milly took the drone higher and got a good look at the surrounding neighborhood. Lots of high fences, lots of privacy parasols, video monitoring systems, motion alarms, even a couple of aerial-video-defeating reflective panels. All of which made Milly feel more and more at ease. These were paranoid, privacy loving perverts. Every one of them deeply determined to prevent their neighbor, or a corporate data-collector, or a government observer from learning anymore about the resident than was absolutely necessary. Milly could empathize with that kind of suspicion and caution.
It didn’t look like anything overtly suspicious was going down at the house of Oscar Surrey, so Milly started getting ready to actually do the job she was hired to do. She double checked the hard case, although beated, scuffed, scratched, slightly melted on one corner, and a few more stains than she knew the origins of, the case was still intact, robust, and kept her more delicate tools and supplies in good working order. She added a few extra pre-formatted and loaded drives to the case’s deep and pliant foam. If she could get out of this with a quick drag-and-drop reset, she’d take the money and split before the client could realize Syntheticism’s product support could do it for free.
Her backpack was already loaded with more tools, the heavier duty ones, although if this was something as dire as a seized hip actuator, Milly would be hard pressed to fix it on-site.
Next came her hoodie. A pullover, black affair with a deep hood that also had a fold-down face covering, it was thick, and had a foam insert behind the outermost cloth of the kangaroo pocket. Although a piece of clothing it was arguably Milly’s most essential piece of equipment. Or rather, it contained her most essential piece of equipment.
Milly reached below the steering wheel and pried from the magnet holding it in place a snub nose .38 special revolver. A cheap unlabeled knock off of some expensive Austrian knock off of some premier American manufacturer’s design, it had never failed to intimidate, and at least four times, had successfully fired, even hitting her intended target once.
As she was stuffing the revolver into her hoodie, Milly queued up the client’s number on the van’s phone. The phone rung multiple times before an image of static pulled up on the screen.
“Hello?”
“Hello, mister Surrey? It’s Milly, I’m here for the repair on your synthetic.”
“Oh, uh, yeah, hi! Thanks for coming out on short notice. Look, uh, the door’s open, but I can’t come up from the basement right now, I’m really tied up with this pipe maintenance.”
Milly paused. This wasn’t expected. Unexpected things were dangerous things.
“So do you want me to come back later?” Milly asked, almost hopeful he would.
“No, no that’s okay. Come on in, the Athena’s sitting beside the couch. You can see her from where you come in the door. She’s in maintenance mode so you shouldn’t have any trouble. I’ll be up when I can be sure this pipe isn’t going to burst.”
Milly considered her options and came to the conclusion that this was even better. If she could get in, get the job done, and get out, all without dealing with the client, she could just bill him later. And to prevent him from squelching on the bill, she’d leave a remote shutdown in the gynoid.
“Sure thing. I’ll be heading in shortly.”
Milly pulled on her favorite squared baseball cap, threaded her hair through the snap back, and pulled the bill low before also pulling the hood of the hoodie over her head. No reason to get recognized walking the ten feet from the van to the door.
With all of her accoutrements, and her identity relatively obscured, Milly made her way into the house.
Part of her wished the door had been locked. Milly could’ve just spat some obscenities, gone home and black listed the client on the various sites for illicit repair work. But the door opened. Milly peaked in through the crack inside. Sure enough, even through just this small sliver of an opening she could see through to the back of the house, and in what was clearly a living room on its knees rested a very large, golden haired figure. No one else could be seen.
Milly pushed the door open further. “Hello? Mr. Surrey?”
“Yeah, come on in!” Shouted a voice from somewhere else in the house. “Got my hands full at the moment, sorry. The Athena’s in the living room, sitting in front of the couch!”
Milly walked into the home, surveying everything as she took her first couple of steps into the house. Tall ceilings all around, and a remarkably clean environment. The small kitchen was almost immediately to her right, and the living room further back passed a small dining room. Milly passed what she guessed was the hallway that the client was shouting from on the way to the synthetic at rest.
There weren’t any chairs, the entire house had a stark minimalist theme that precluded even a coffee table from featuring in the living room, leaving Milly nowhere to comfortably work. She set down the hard case next to the inert Athena, and slipped her backpack off her shoulders, pulling down her hood as well.
Milly looked around for something suitable to sit on. The couch would’ve worked, but most Syntheticism models had a primary access port in the nostril, and in its inert state, Milly had no chance of turning the head, and even less of moving the Athena into a more accessible position. If Milly sat on the couch, there was a good chance the cable wouldn’t reach.
Milly sighed and pulled the diagnostics unit from her backpack. She kneeled down in front of the synthetic, straining a bit to reach the Athena’s face to insert the cable. Milly muttered a curse under her breath as she realized she couldn’t reach, stood back up, inserted the cable and kneeled back down to get to work.
It was always weird working on synthetics, and the ones designed for Titan-Mod use made it even more unsettling. For all the world it felt to Milly like she was sitting knees-to-knees with a meditating blonde goddess, a meditating blonde goddess that Milly had just jammed a sheathed cable into her nose.
Almost immediately, Milly was greeted with problems. She poured through a few pages of raw information, the diagnostic pad was designed to mimic one of Syntheticism’s own official tools, and admitted Milly into the synthetic’s program layers directly and immediately.
There were no errors, at least, nothing that jumped out at Milly, except the code wasn’t Syntheticism’s code, it was something else. It was a spiraling, deeply interwoven, almost organic tangle of processes and protocols all layered on top of Syntheticism’s own unmolested hardcode.
"What the hell?" Milly called out. "This thing isn't malfunctioning, you overwrote almost everything with custom code!"
"Yeah, but many of the restraints are still in place. I can't send her out on errands. She won't leave the house. I tried to have her pick up some groceries once and she just paced around for a half hour before ordering them to be delivered." The voice from down the hall answered. "Can you remove all those factory restraints?"
Milly scrolled through to the very blocks the client referred to. Those were still in place, not immutable, but still very much there. Milly yanked the cable free. The mimicry box wouldn’t be enough to do what the client was asking, she’d need some hardware from the van to actually go through with it.
"What? No! Are you insane?" Milly was aghast only because what she'd signed up for wasn't nearly as time consuming or costly as what the client wanted. Moreover, what she had been hired to do was legally ambiguous, what was now being asked of her would come with several consecutive life sentences, if caught. Syntheticism had paid many lawmakers, many dollars, many times over to ensure the mandatory minimums for this kind of circumvention was severely punished.
"Those restraints are there for a reason, you could get seriously fucked up if you're not careful." Milly continued. "This one lady I read about disabled her Ajax's safeties, they found her a week an’ a half later, the Ajax still pumping away at what was left of her! I wouldn’t feel right leaving someone in that kind of risk.” Milly wouldn’t, not for the sum she was currently being offered.
“Look if you can’t do it, that’s fine, just say so. I can start looking for others to come in and take care of this.” The voice retorted.
Milly was frustrated, but recognized the building opportunity.
“It’s not that I can’t, but…” Milly offered.
“Oh come on, I’m already paying you like a quarter more than you asked!”
“You’re paying me to troubleshoot standard software, not to unshackle some shady unregistered OS from the hardcode.” Milly stated. She knew what would come next, it always came next, and she was already prepared.
"Well?" Milly prompted.
"I'm thinking!" The voice protested. The pause was almost painful. “Half again as much. As the base rate.”
“Hell no! Double the total. And you give me access to your network to wipe any contact you had with me so if you do end up getting snu snu’d to death it can’t be traced back to me.” Milly countered.
“Fine on the money, no deal on the network wipe. I can’t be sure what you’ll do.” Came the offer.
“No, the network’s got to be a part of it. I need you to come out here and log me into your desktop. I’ll do it for for fifty percent more than the original total, and the wipe. But that wipe needs to happen now, I need to make sure no one can trace this job back to me.”
“Okay, okay, okay I’m coming.” Came the voice from down the hall.
The figure that walked in from the hallway, however, wasn’t some hapless homeowner covered in the dirt and grime of an impromptu plumbing job. It was another Athena Class synthetic. An augmented, four meter tall, completely naked, equine phallus equipped Athena Class synthetic. In one hand, the Athena was holding the lead of a leash that fell down to the floor, where there crawled a somewhat less nude man, apparently clothed in the tight fitting leather straps and metal connection rings of a BDSM harness as well as a leather blindfold mask and hooks spreading his mouth open wide. Making the man’s life more difficult were the spreader bars, one between his wrists and one between his ankles that slowed his hands and knees crawl to keep up with the gynoid holding his leash.
“Well?” Said the gynoid in the same voice that had answered the phone, and called from down the hall. “Here he is.” The new Athena chuckled as her voice changed to something closer to the factory standard Athena voice, but a bit more sinister and breathy. “Now, are you going to get to work?”