One of the many lessons Xtreme City taught newcomers and lifelong residents alike was that unless you wanted to wear a tie and sell your soul, there was no such thing as easy money.

Having said that — Vera had been pretty sure she’d found the exception.

FinTech, the largest banking institution for some of the world’s most powerful underwater conglomerates, had to have a presence in the XC. Every corporation wanted a piece of Ground Zero at the heart of the Manabloom. But since the city was about a thousand kilometres from the nearest sea, it wasn’t like their office needed to be a locus of activity. Nor did it need to be a fortress. A few rent-a-cops with zappers, a smattering of surveillance cameras, maybe a drone or two, all defending the corpo-equivalent to an embassy on foreign territory.

But of course, since it was also technically a bank branch, deep within its fortified concrete walls was a hardline to FinTech’s digital currency repository. It’s how anyone from Mu to Miami could pull spendable cred and not get laughed at for bringing the financial equivalent of seashells. But that discrepancy between the potential value extracted and the lack of visible security assets made it a target. Like a bank vault having a screen door on the side. It should have been easy. It should have been simple. And it had been…until the fucking Mounties showed up.

With a peek beyond the monolithic server pillars she was using as cover, Vera could see eight…no…nine figures in red and black uniforms. They looked a little different than they had in the old flatscreen films. Tactical armour painted in the traditional colours, while shunning the famous wide-brimmed hat for a similarly shaped helmet painted the familiar khaki. Most were human, though their leader, the sergeant or whatever, was an orc. 

Her upper half was, at least. The stripes on her uniform gave her some kind of rank, though Vera didn’t care enough about the military cosplay cops did to clock what it was offhand. Everything below her waist had been temporarily ensconced in a state-of-the-art cybernetic centaur form. Quadrupedal and weighing at least a thousand kilograms, it gave each of the Mounties both speed beyond bipedal norms and a wide range of tactical options ranging from signal jammers to anti-drone netguns to riot-breaking sonic howitzers. The heights of law enforcing technology.

Corporate law, of course. In the XC, there wasn’t any other kind.

“I repeat: This is the Rapid-Response Commercial Mounted Police!” an augmented voice from the orc woman bellowed with a heft dollop of reverb. “Disarm and present yourself, or be found criminally liable for damage to company property without trial!” 

Muttering a bunch of very uncharitable (not to mention hypocritical) things about people who would do anything for a buck, Vera wracked her brain for a hint as to what had tipped them off. Though new to the city, she’d been breaking corpo systems (and the evil suits behind them) for years now, pulling off jobs with a combination of laserwhip reflexes, prodigious hacking abilities, and a trickster goddess’ heart. And when guile and gizmos failed, her cybernetic snake-like lower half made a convincing argument for her. 

And it had worked a treat! The cyborg lamia and the pair of runners she’d hired (or, technically, had promised to pay with the proceeds she’d get from this job) had breached the fences, incapacitated the guards without triggering any silent alarms, and slid into the internal server farm’s ten factor security doors like a surgeon with a scalpel. She’d just about plugged into the airgapped hardline terminal to start pulling (metaphorical) fistfuls of cred when they’d heard the sirens. At first, only through the external security systems Vera had cracked wide open, but quickly they could hear them with their own ears. And before they could say “rats in a maze”, the cops had locked down their only means of escape. Maybe it’d HAD been too easy. Maybe she’d slid right into a trap.

Her eyes — glowing pink vertical pupils on a sea of black — snapped wide open. Her enemies list wasn’t short; if you didn’t make enemies as a runner you weren’t making money. But there was one tag that screenburned into her eyeline and refused to go away, even if she blinked. It had to be her. It couldn’t be anyone else.

“Aleph,” she muttered the name like a curse. She’d get her back and then some. But first…she needed to get out of here in a way that didn’t land her in a set of coma-cuffs. Or wrangled like a loose boa constrictor that had escaped from the zoo.

Vera slithered between the gaps in the forest of server pillars to rejoin the remaining two members of her crew. She kept herself low to the ground, but given her size, it was impossible to be a small target. Luckily, the Mounties seemed disinclined to damage their employer’s merchandise. If they were packing dumb bullets, they might have taken the chance, but it looked like taser rounds were the order of the day, and you can’t fire those around server blades. Not unless you want to spend the rest of your life having your salary garnished. They held their fire, and she was able to curl herself behind the main terminal trunk once more.

“S’it bad?” Gossip, the tiny goblin dronelady asked, fretting with her wrist-mounted controller. She was a deft hand when you needed a bird’s eye or something shut down from a klick away. But she was a worrier, and worriers brought worries on themselves even when they weren’t under fire.

“Don’t sweat it,” Spire reassured, the troll woman’s enormous grey-hued hand landing with a gentle pat onto the goblin’s shock of cerulean hair. “If we were really fucked, she’d say something like ‘it’s going to be okay’ or ‘not a problem, gang’. So? How bad is it, Vera?”

She flashed them a winning smile. “Not a problem, gang. Everything’s going to be okay!”

Both the other runners started swearing, though Gossip was by far the loudest, then both the troll and the goblin started checking their weapons. Vera kept her own gun holstered. This would probably be a fight, one way or the other, but she used a firearm as a last resort. Not out of a moral compunction or squeamishness; her mind was simply more deadly than a bullet.

“I don’t understand it,” Gossip squeaked as she pulled apart the Smart SMG she kept on her back, “we did all the prepwork, I had this place’s guard schedule cracked, we knew where all the laser tripwires were…this should have been a tutorial level!” Snapping the receiver back into place and clearing the action, the goblin’s angular weapon was just as compact as she was. And, Vera guessed, just as dangerous.

Spire’s focus was on a breech-loading arculverin that was as long as Gossip was tall. But there was more to her smoothbore handcannon than just its size. Runic sigils burned with laser precision into the barrel could be charged with magical intent. With a few chosen ritual words, Spire could adjust each pull of the trigger to punch a hole through a tank, clear a room in a single shot, or anything in between. It was the party favour she brought out when her more subtle choice, a baseball bat with a depleted uranium core, was not an option. That hung from her back in a shoulder sheath that looked straight out of a mail-order catalog for hard motherfuckers.

“I’m guessing we were sold out,” the large woman said as she slid a glowing crystalline shell roughly the size of a beer can into her weapon, “but you knew that already, didn’t you Vera?” 

“Can’t possibly compute what you mean,” Vera lied. “And besides, why couldn’t it have been one of your enemies?” 

“YOU hired US!” Gossip snapped, scowling with as much anger as a tiny goblin’s squeaky voice could offer. “This job couldn’t very well be a trap set for our butts if we’re the dumb muscle, could it?”

With no idea where to take the lie that wouldn’t be equally unbelieved, she tried on the truth for size. “Fuck. Okay. Sure. It’s entirely possible that there’s a hacker in town who’s…a bit of a rival of mine from way back. One with enough bad blood to burn a run she wasn’t even on. Name’s Aleph.”

More cursing from Gossip, and Spire slammed her head hard enough to vibrate the panel of the pillar she was taking cover behind.

“Next time ‘boss’,” Gossip said, “do us a freeb and tell us BEFORE WE SIGN UP that you have sparks with the XC’s Top NaRC?” 

Vera’s eyebrows shot up. “You must be thinking of someone else. Aleph’s a smug, greedy little worm, but she’s not a NaRC.” 

NaRCs, a backronym for Neutered and Rehabilitated Criminal, was the derisive term in these parts for former hackers who get caught and, rather than do their time in slammer, they take the Devil’s Bargain: join the corpos as their pet ‘security expert’, and turn on all your old friends. Vera hated Aleph’s guts, but even she didn’t think her rival would sink that low.

“This is your LAST WARNING!” blared the Mountie with the speakers hooked into his voice. Vera didn’t have to look to know the others were already moving forward; the sound of metal hooves heralding their imminent doom as the enormous equine forms pushed into the outer layer of servers. They had to act fast.

“Alright,” Vera said, “you can both blame me later, but this is my mission and I’m going to get us out. Gossip, you still have a link to your overwatch drone?”

A flicker in her gaze as she checked something in her HUD later, she nodded. “Bonnie’s still airborne! ” 

“Does it have net access?”

A longer pause. “I think so? But there’s so much static, I can’t get a live wire to her for anything but a status update. Looks like they’re choking the air for anything they don’t own. But…”

“But?”

The goblin grinned. “But…whatever jammer they got running is giving the cops’ freqs a wide berth. If I ride the bottom of their allowable window, I can get a high-powered burst through. It’ll drain the battery on this thing real quick though.”

Vera slid over a little and held out a hand toward Gossip’s drone controller. Reluctantly, the gob disconnected it from the port on her wrist mount and handed it over. The exchange resembled a mother asked to hand her firstborn child to a stranger at gunpoint.

“I got a trick I tried in Berlin. If I’m right, it’ll give us an out,” Vera plugged the data jack from her wrist into the device and immediately felt the world around her open up once more. The drone’s multivalent cameras saw the electronic infrastructure around it in a glowing wireframe of power circuits, data conduits, and constantly adjusting sensors. The jamming system was a dull grey fog that covered the immediate area, making both visual and data communication inside the area of effect difficult. But she wasn’t looking for anything inside the building…

“Well, what the hell do we do?” Spire asked, throwing up an incredulous shrug.

“Buy me time!” Vera hissed. And she had an all-timer hiss. She was a lamia, after all.

Gossip exchanged glances with her much larger companion. “Suppressing fire?”

“You’re so romantic when you’re endangering lives,” Spire replied, giving the goblin a gentle kiss before thundering over to one end of the pillar they hid behind. Gossip took the other, and, like star-crossed lovers in a last stand, both opened fire. The goblin’s SMG spat bursts that sounded like ripping sheet metal, while the heavy krak-BOOM of the troll’s cannon cut in like exclamation marks on the former’s sentences. While they didn’t hit anybody, the torrent of fire was enough to throw the Mounties back. 

But they were dead centre in the middle of a massive room, and despite their enormous bodies, there was simply too much room for them to maneuver. Slowly, the centaurs worked their way to circling around to catch the trio. Another gun could have bought them another minute or two, but Vera stood stock-still. The only parts of her that moved besides the rise and fall of her chest were the rapid flickering of her eyelids: the telltale sign of focused hacking through mental commands alone. 

As Gossip slapped another stick-shaped magazine into her SMG, she took a second to put a hand on Vera’s arm. Not enough to shake her out of the near-hypnotic trance of a hacker going full tilt, but enough to remind her that consequences in the real world were rapidly approaching a state of unignorability.

“If you’re going to do something,” she told the lamia, “now’s the time. We could really use an exit!”

Vera’s eyes opened on the goblin’s concerned face with a serene expression. “As a matter of fact, our ride is almost here.”

Before the drone wrangler could ask what the hell she was talking about, the clarity she sought arrived when nearest wall exploded into a haze of concrete dust and snapped support struts as the Metro-12 stretch bus took a detour from Centraltown Station to smash, at full speed, into the eastern side of the FinTech server farm.

The Mounties vanished behind a rapidly decelerating wall of metal and glass, and those that didn’t dive for cover were pelted by flying debris. It was all Vera could do to shield herself by wrapping her torso in her mechanical coils, with the impact showering her with pieces of wall and vehicle in equal measure a fraction of a moment later. Spire performed a similar service for Gossip, cloaking the much smaller woman with her enormous body and offering only mute protests as her back was showered in debris ranging from the heavy to the jagged. 

Just as suddenly as the chaos had begun, it was over. The hijacked auto-bus came to a halt, leaving a broken, twisted egress for the beleaguered runners. But as with everything in their profession, time was a factor.

“This is our stop!” she called out to the pair, slithering through the shattered windshield and through the bent corridor way that had once been the passenger compartment. Half the time she’d taken was finding a bus that was both close enough and running empty. As a bonus, the fact that it was a stretch model would provide them cover for twice the distance. On the other hand, now that they were removed from the server farm’s protections, not to mention having already caused several million creds worth of damage, the restraint the Mounties had shown previously dissolved as frustration boiled over into inevitable bloodlust of law enforcement officers everywhere.

The trio clambered, ducked, and weaved as the staccato chatter of electrified stun rounds, pinging off walls and the few remaining panes of safety glass and sounding for all the world like they were trapped in a Quonset hut in a hailstorm. Vera’s large yet lithe body made short work of the obstacle course, slithering around grab-poles and rows of dislodged seats with equal ease. Spire found more difficulty with the varying width of the passage, and every once in a while the bus shook as the massive troll woman smashed her way through a barrier she couldn’t shimmy through. Gossip, to her credit, never exceeded a few steps ahead of her partner in (figurative, also literal) crime.

Calls to pursue the runners chased them all the way to the back of the bus. A quick shoulder check to the rear emergency door spilled Vera onto the cracked pavement of the parking lot beyond. She’d just had time to prematurely celebrate when a second brace of Mounties, the ones who had surrounded the building to prevent this exact thing from happening, joined the party. They didn’t waste time offering a warning; they just started blasting.

Vera’s tail came up to protect her on reflex, its reinforced underside snapping the prongs of the taser rounds before they could wreak havoc on her cybernetics. But sooner or later they’d catch in a panel joint or a servo node and cause her body to start seizing up. Her right hand went to her side, and with a pop of a mechanical lock, her internal holster released.

Unlike everything else in the rest of her life, the cyber lamia’s own weapon was a relic: a Tandy-Omnikron 3650 slugthrowing revolver. No wireguiding, no biometric scanner in the grip, not even a red dot sight. It worked because metal kissed metal, end of line. In other words: something that could never be hacked. That could always be trusted; a precious commodity in the runner world. 

With her rig tagging the joints of centaur limbs with glowing red reticles, she brought her pistol up in a two-handed grip and got to work. Heavy metal slammed into dextrous but vulnerable points of articulation, folding up one mounted cop after another as they tried to close the distance. Centaurs sprawled in ways that would have had race horses put down without a thought. But there were more of them, and they were already circling to get around her temporary shield.

Thankfully, she wasn’t alone either. 

Gossip announced her presence with a scream and a simultaneous torrent of gunfire directed at the cops. Then she threw her hand up, which Spire grabbed to pull her into a hug without breaking stride, tucked both of them into a roll, and landed with all the grace of a mislaid wrecking ball. As taser bullets plinked uselessly against her tough hide, Spire used the rotation to bring her own weapon on-line, vomiting a cone of purple ice that either froze the limbs of the Mountries in front of them or sent them scuttling for the sparse cover in the empty lot. Adjusting the payload at Gossip’s shouted insistence, a second shot spat a black lightning bolt through a towed generator in the parking lot. Wherever they’d hidden the jammer, it fellt silent as its power cut out, and all at once the city’s transmissions rushed in to greet them once more.

While her hands performed the well-drilled act of slamming a speedloader into her revolver’s open cylinder, Vera’s mind connected to the nearby surveillance cameras. From sky-high vantage points she watched as cop cars from at least two other agencies, along with whatever the Mounties could pull from across the city, sped, galloped, and hovered their way. She snapped back to reality and pulled her data cable from the drone controller and tossed it underhand to the goblin.

“Looks like the party invite just went public. Get us outta here, Gos!” Vera told her, spinning the cylinder closed on her pistol.

Gossip clipped the device back onto her wrist and got to work, her own eyes glossing over as she entered her own hacking trance. “Hope I got enough juice left in this thing. And you asked why I parked so far away…”

Moments later, they heard the squeal of tires before they saw an old gas-powered van drift like a street racing muscle car before vaulting through the hole in the exterior chain-link that the bus had smashed through. Screeching to a halt in front of them, Vera couldn’t believe how glad she was to see the beat up rustbucket. This time, she couldn’t bring herself to roll her eyes at the painting of a troll barbarian and a goblin druid reclining sexily at her feet on the side. All she cared about was that it could get them out of here.

But what Xtreme City giveth, it can easily taketh away. 

Gossip shuddered and pitched over, body jerking to the pulse of thousands of volts pulsing into her little body. The Mounties from within the building had finally made their way through the bus, and one of them, the orc cop, had finally scored a hit. She sneered past a pair of ferocious tusks at a job well done.

“NO!” Spire screamed, levelling her arculverine, uttering a forbidden curse, and unleashing something that looked like a flaming skull from the barrel. It tore through the air with an ominous thunderclap, and the centaur sergeant had just enough time to rear upward when the entire back half of the bus exploded. Given a moment’s respite, the troll shoved Gossip’s stunned body into Vera’s arms and pushed her toward the van’s open doors.

“We’re not leaving—” Vera began, but Spire’s glare cut her off. 

“Get her out of here. I’ll keep them distracted.”

Vera thought about arguing, but as she looked down at the tiny goblin woman, he couldn’t help but nod her assent. Once her course was set, Spire threw her magic firearm into the passenger seat, and, now that her hands were free, she slid the heavy baseball bat from her back sheath as if it was the shining blade Excalibur itself. 

Vera nodded. “I’ll keep her safe.”

Spire gave a single nod, then charged toward the scattered, armed police officers with a ferocious war cry. The van operated on controls similar to the flying drone, and it was simple enough to jack into the driver’s console and proverbially floor the accelerator. The last thing Vera saw out the back window was the enormous woman swing for a home-run and knock one of the Mounties’ service weapons into the bleachers, had there been any.

Gossip shot up moments after they’d lost sight of the FinTech building, demanding to know where Spire was. Vera had to tell her, then restrain the goblin’s surprisingly strong thrashing when she demanded to be allowed to go back and save her partner.

“They won’t kill her, we made too much noise. They’ll want to make an example of her with a public trial. Til then, she’ll be safe,” Vera explained, splitting her attention between the road and the tiny woman in her arms. That seemed to calm her down a bit, enough to let her go and be sure she wouldn’t leap out of the van at the very least.

“Where do we go now?” 

“First? We find a place to lie low. They’ll be looking for this van, not to mention us, and the sooner we get off the streets, the better. Plus we need to get that taser round out of your back.”

Gossip winced, but nodded. “And then?”

“Then we find whoever sold us out and make ‘em pay. For Spire.” 

“For Spire.”

Vera handed off the controls of the van to Gossip, then got to work. As much of an insufferable prick Aleph had been to her, it was hard to square the idea that she’d turn NaRC. She had to get to the bottom of who had sold them out. Whoever it was, friend or foe, Vera promised she’d crack their neural hardware wide open and show them exactly what happens to traitors and sell-outs.

But before that, there had to be an exciting vehicular escape sequence. With a ramp and everything.

*** 

It was tough being several steps ahead of everyone you met; you could never get full credit for your genius until it was too late for them to try to challenge you!

The hacker known to the world as Aleph watched the unfolding situation at the FinTech server farm with the enthusiasm one might hold for a diverting holo-drama. Of course, the scenes playing out on the dozen security feeds she had jacked into were actually happening. But just like in a scripted broadcast, the results were never in doubt.

“Still,” she mused, “I suppose Vera is doing better than I’d expec…mmm!” Aleph’s thoughts derailed, her breath catching, and she did her best not to dig her fingernails into the chair’s armrests.

A pair of glowing hearts looked up from beneath the desk. “What did you say, Mistress?” 

“Never you worry, Bambi,” Aleph told the bimbot servicing her, “focus on what you do best: sucking cock.” 

The sextoy Synth wasted no time in complying, its lips locking firmly around her owner’s girldick and going to town. In the abstract, getting sucked off to the sight of people getting arrested was a touch on the perverse side. And not in a good way! But the idea of her long-term nemesis being first humiliated, then locked in bondage, rendered helpless, forced to admit in court that she was stupid enough to get caught. That she was a loser. That she wasn’t…wasn’t…good enough!

Aleph barely had time to grip a hold of Bambi’s synthetic hair before she unloaded into the bimbot’s mouth. Not her most unethical orgasm, but not something she’d discuss with her therapist chatbot anytime soon. She let the synthetic slut lick up the mess of synthetic saliva and real semen before sliding her office chair back and allowing the bimbo egress from her position as a desk pleasure pet. 

“Yummy!” the silly bot said, theatrically licking her lips. “Thank you for another tasty treat, Mistress!” 

Aleph laughed. “Go recharge, dumbass. I won’t need you again tonight.”

“Okie dokie!” Bambi said, not registering the insult as anything but a compliment, and flitted across the room to the transparent cylinder she rested in when not in use. She was the latest model, and not only did she come with a series of loadable personality profiles from the demure to the cum-crazy, her body was also fully customizable! The recharge alcove came equipped with a reserve of the same synthetic material that nearly perfectly simulated human flesh, a substance called nanosil. With this reserve (and purchasable expansion sets for the true deviant), one could change her ass, her tits, her hips, her thighs…just about everything except her height. You could shape her to your every desire, all at the click of a button!

It was still hard to believe she could afford such a luxury. Life as a runner had given her enough money to stay ahead of the bills…but just barely. Living with a roommate that she didn’t even get to sleep with, eating synthmeat for financial rather than ethical reasons, having to strip parts from a part-time gig at the recycle centre just to keep her rig competitive…

Now, nearly a year after she’d flipped allegiances, she was no longer just surviving — she was thriving. And Bambi was just the tip of the iceberg. She had a penthouse all to herself, furnished with all the amenities she might want and some she didn’t even think she’d use. Her desktop had gone from a terminal brick to a battlestation with a dozen screens that could be separately tasked, and her internal rig made her old cybernetics look like a museum piece.

And all it cost her was the respect of a few losers on the net.

Aleph spun around in her chair to take in all the perks of that trade-off. Sure she’d never be able to go to the old clubs, or talk shop with the other hackers in town at the Glitch Hub, but—

Her reverie ended when she noticed one of the camera feeds had changed while she’d been spraying jizz down Bambi’s throat. It had been facing the FinTech building from some high-rise, and only a small portion of the feed had been relevant to her interests. But there was now an enormous shape sticking out of the ground floor of the server farm where there hadn’t been one before.

She switched feeds to get a better look. Sure enough, a city bus had smashed through the wall. 

“How in the…” she began, but the answer was obvious: Vera. She was running the Berlin playbook. Should have anticipated that. As she searched for updates on what had happened while she’d been distracted by Bambi’s mouth, a call came through that she couldn’t ignore even if she wanted to.

“What do you want, Faust?” Aleph asked the officer who would surely be on the other end of the call. It wasn’t her name, but it was the one he used as the handler for the RRCMP’s program for flipping hackers in the city. Besides her gender and the fact that her voice probably belonged to an orc, she hadn’t gotten a real identity. Made no sense to bite the hand that had gotten her out of prison, after all.

“She’s gone.” Her voice was never particularly joyful, but this time, she sounded dire. 

“What the fuck do you mean she’s gone? How did you let her escape your trap?” Despite her surprise, it didn’t stop her keyboard clacking one iota. You didn’t get to be the best without learning how to multitask.  

Faust’s response bled anger the same way a dam bled water before it burst. “We were not warned she might find a way to connect to the outside even after we deployed the signal jammer. You know, the one you told us would be foolproof?”

“No, no, this can’t…” Aleph leapt from trying to find her rival to trying to pull up the footage and piece together what happened. “This can’t be my fault. It must have been your team that—” 

“I’m not interested in excuses!” Faust barked, then audibly restrained herself. “I don’t need to remind you that you’re kept in that penthouse because you are a valuable resource. Without my sufferance and funding drained from the city’s budget, you’re a NaRC with an outstanding prison sentence. Find her, disarm her, and hand her over to me, or our deal is over.”

It took a moment for the meaning of the words Faust had spoken to sink into Aleph. When they did, she stopped typing.

“You can’t be serious. This was just one—” 

“NOT. INTERESTED,” she bellowed, loud enough to make her wince. “Find her, or find space in your calendar for some hard time.” The connection died, and so did her previously jubilant mood. It had been the perfect setup! How had…she couldn’t have…

Aleph spent the remainder of the night and the rest of the day after that looking for Vera, only stopping to eat once, refill her stimsticks, and very occasionally look at the footage of the FinTech escape to figure out what she’d gotten wrong. It was easy to blame the cops, but you didn’t shout at the hammer for missing the nail. They’d arrested a troll, but she wasn’t talking yet. She would though. Runners talked a big game about the rules of the street; some might even mouth the word ‘class solidarity’ if they got too far over their skis. But everyone had a price.

Or at least that’s what she told herself to sleep that night, a full twenty-four hour cycle from the last confirmed sighting of her rival. Tomorrow she’d find her. The algorithms and data-scrapers she had running would ping, she would send the Mounties to some derelict warehouse or motel on the edge of town, and that damn snake would get safely caged.

She just needed a few hours of shuteye…

*** 

“Wake up, sleepyhead~”

Aleph swiped in the direction that the voice had come, feeling for the manual shutdown for Bambi’s reset function. Under no circumstances was her bimbot supposed to be waking her up in the middle of a sleep cycle unless her somnophilia protocols were enabled. But as the film cleared from her eyes, Aleph saw clear to the other end of the room her pink companion was resting in her recharge alcove, eyes shut with an empty-headed smile on her perfect red lips.

But if Bambi was there…with a lurch in her stomach, she turned over toward the opposite side of the room, closest to the door.

“Hey gorgeous,” Vera said with a little wave. “Let’s chat!”

Aleph sprang out of bed, or she tried to, at least. As she thrashed to push the sheets off her limbs, something drained the energy from her body, making her move like she was moving in molasses. It was only when she was halfway across the bed that she felt the tug of the cable inside her dataport. It was too late. She’d already been port-jacked.

“Impossible, you can’t…you can’t be here,” she stammered, looking fruitlessly for a light projector to imply this was some kind of holo-illusion. “This penthouse has the best security money can buy!”

But the potentially lethal threat in her bedroom stubbornly refused to flicker out. “Here’s a hint about that: did your security features include locking down the ventilation stacks on the roof of the building?”

“B-but those are so small! To fit through them you’d have to be—”

“A snake?” the lamia asked, letting her tongue flick out a little longer on the S than she might have otherwise.

Aleph cursed. But she wasn’t dead yet. She hadn’t been born into wealth, nor did she rest on any god-given talent. She stayed one step ahead of the competition because she was the best at playing the game. Her body might have frozen, but her mind was already racing for an angle to take. Playing dumb? Might work, but if it didn’t, the snake-bitch would be twice as likely to do something drastic. Flattery wouldn’t hurt though. Vera had an ego almost as big as Aleph’s. 

“Vera! I can’t believe it’s really you! It’s insane that we’ve never met in person. I knew you were a lamia, but I gotta say: big fan of the tail.” The target of her kind words smiled, but doing so bared her sharp fangs. Aleph felt more like a mouse preparing to be devoured than the subject of some pleasant repartee. 

“Thank you. And I must say, I’m impressed at your choice of abode. A tremendously appointed penthouse, bleeding edge networking tech, top of the line security system…not that it was good enough to keep me out, of course. You can even afford a personal bot to service your every need! Not many hackers get this lucky.”

“Well, what can I say,” Aleph kept the feigned joviality going while she tried some silent countermeasures to the neural hijacking, “when you’re one of the best hackers in the XC, you can pull down some serious cred.” Each probe she launched bumped into a glacial wall of ICE. She could try more forceful measures in her rig’s arsenal, but it would end this pleasant conversation real quick. 

“Y’know, I heard the ugliest rumour,” Vera slithered onto the bed, causing the springs to creak underneath the weight of her enormous lower half. Aleph barely noticed. She’d locked her entire focus on dispelling the motor control restraint on her limbs. Even as the serpentine body coiled around her, wrapping her up in a malevolent embrace, she rushed through her mental catalog for options that weren’t an all-out attack, and came up with nothing. Her defences had simply been down for too long while she slept. Her body remained helpless, and sweat dribbled down her face. 

“O-oh? What rumour was that?” Aleph asked. Time was running out. A full reset wouldn’t work. She needed the datacord out of her neck. Or to render the port itself inoperable…

“That you’re a NaRC. That you’re working for the cops against your own kind. And, you’ll get a kick out of this, that you sold me and my fellow runners out on the FinTech job tonight. That’s not true…is it?”

She knew.

Aleph panicked and dropped the facade, slamming her attacks into full gear. Hostile cleavecode and viruses fanned out from her rig like a maelstrom of bullets, each aimed not at Vera’s seemingly impregnable systems, but the port she was jacking into itself. Sparks shot from the implant, causing her to thrash and scream from the heat. She was almost free! Her limbs started to move, they—

*CHOMP*

Aleph squeaked the moment she felt Vera’s fangs plunged into the flesh around her collarbone. Her concentration snapped like an old CD, and she felt a dull warmth flood into her system from the place she’d been bitten. All of a sudden the laser-sharpened knife of focus she’d wielded turned to pudding. At the same time, without active pushback, a renewed assault from her assailant deluged her mind. But the bite made that not seem like such a bad thing. In fact…it felt kinda good~

“That’s a good girl,” Vera cooed, withdrawing her hypodermic fangs before licking the bite wounds closed. “That’s several hundred milligrams of Eros-8, one of modern pharmatech’s most powerful aphrodisiacs. Not technically approved for human use, though I’m guessing there’ll be no complaints from your end, hmm?”

“You…bitch…” was about all the resistance Aleph could offer. Even if she could move her limbs, all she wanted to do, with a growing intensity, was touch herself. It was as if someone had cranked her inner desires up to maximum, while the calming effect removed the inhibition that fear might have given her. If only, her immobilization made her chemically-induced arousal worse, her switchy desires flicked firmly into the submissive for the foreseeable future. Her cock hardened, poking out the fabric of her panties and pressing against Vera’s lower half, while her eraser-thick nipples ached beneath the fabric of the loose fitting t-shirt she’d worn to bed.

Vera clucked her tongue. “All that intelligence and that’s the language you decide to use. I don’t think you appreciate the gifts that nature and technology have given you, ‘Aleph’. All they’ve done is make you a sellout traitor and a selfish little monster. Perhaps we can help you become a more selfless person. Like your servant over there, for instance. What’s your name, cutie?” 

A mental flick to the penthouse’s systems activated the Synth’s greeting protocol. The jiggling humanoid toy minced her way out of her alcove and gave a little curtsey. Against her sluggish mental efforts to keep it together, a part of Aleph couldn’t help but feel a little jealous at the attention. 

“Bambi, Miss…umm…Miss Snakey!” 

“Vera, dear. My name is Vera. And it’s a pleasure to meet you. Aleph here could learn a few things from you. So polite! So kind!” 

Aleph’s lust-filled haze faltered, and she tried to wriggle out of Vera’s grip. The limited amount of motion she was capable of only rubbed her clit against the snake woman’s body, causing her to moan as the artificial pleasure snapped off a minor solar flare in her skull. A thin stream of precum dribbled out into her panties, a pale fraction of the neurochemical fireworks happening behind her eyes. A completely focused effort on her part, and all she did was smear precum against the tummy of her tormentor.

“Don’t do this…have money…lots…” Aleph said, her jaw feeling like it weighed a ton. Her tongue was equally uncooperative, slurring her speech to that of a drunk’s plea for one more round. But even if her syllables had rung out clear as a new speaker system, the look in Vera’s vantablack eyes made it clear there would be no reprieve.

“This isn’t about cred sticks, dear. This is about the fact that you betrayed our whole profession. Don’t worry. I won’t erase you permanently. But I will have a more…thoughtful personality take over for a while.” She reached over and unclipped Bambi’s own data cord and plugged it into her own dataport. With Vera acting as a bridge, Aleph felt the flow of programming from the sexdoll drain into her rig’s datacore.

“N…no!” she whimpered, the transfer slow enough for her to feel every packet of data sent to overlay on top of her consciousness matrix. Like blocks of perfectly cubic cotton candy, one by one they bricked her sense of self away, trapping it behind a barrier of freely offered sexual services and empty-headed giggling. Her triumphs, her schemes, her skills as one of the best hackers in the world, buried by sticky pink glee.

Aleph drooled from two places at once. Her jaw grew slack, all while her girlcock throbbed and rubbed against her tormentor’s scales. The need for pleasure soon became overwhelmed by the layers upon layers of directives to serve. To be useful. To be a good girl and do as she was told. Her dick pulsed a pathetic orgasm at some point, but she’d barely noticed.

Neither did Vera, as she was too busy skimming the program she was feeding into her rival’s mind. “Hmm. The personality program seems a little simple, if you'll pardon the expression. Barely any data here! Certainly not enough to fill your huge data capacitors.” She tapped her chin theatrically before pantomiming a ‘eureka!’ moment with an upraised finger. “I know! I’ll just set her program to duplicate itself. Like on old webpages when they used to tile images to form the background wallpaper? The same dumb, ditzy sexbot program, repeating over and over and over again~”

With her last cogent thoughts, she cursed Vera, cursed Faust for fucking up an easy trap, cursed the world for letting this injustice happen. Finally, she swore that some way, somehow, she would reemerge and climb back on top.

And then.

There was only.

Pink~

*** 

Vera couldn’t believe how far this was going. The thought of turning her rival into a bimbot had been nothing but a perverse masturbation fantasy. Now, as the woman who was still technically Aleph rebooted under new parameters, it was hard to keep her hands off herself.

“Bimbot Activation Sequence - Startup Protocol!” Aleph said in a cheery, high-pitched voice. Already her internal cybernetics had adjusted her to sound like a squeak-toy. The lamia couldn’t wait to find out what she sounded like when nibbled now~

“State designation and ownership status,” Vera rattled off as if performing diagnostics on any piece of equipment.

“Designation Alison Seraphina Tandy, subdesignation Aleph! Ownership None!” 

Vera snorted. “Alison? Well, that’s not a very good bimbot name. I do like Tandy though…sounds a lot like Candy, and it rhymes with the other sexbot in the room. Confirm redesignation: Your Name Is Tandy.”

“My name is Tandy!” Tandy agreed.

“Assign all previous designation information to the personality registered under the backup file Loser.bat, and assign Ownership Status to me, Vera.”

“Previous designations deleted! You are my Owner, Vera. Is the title Mistress okay?” 

“Yes…yes, that’ll do nicely.” Satisfied, she unplugged the data cord from both Bambi and Tandy, leaving them to wait for explicit instructions. “But right now you’re still a hijacked meatpuppet with extensive cybernetic mods. For full bimbot conversion…” She slithered away from the now docile Tandy and approached the clear recharge alcove that the sexbot had emerged from.

Something caused Bambi to perk up when Vera examined the exterior of her alcove. “Do you need assistance in understanding a function I am capable of?”

“Hmm…I see nanosil injectors here. Is that compatible with Tandy’s current cybernetic suite, or will more extensive modifications be needed?”

Bambi tittered. “Oh, don’t worry about that! Mistress Aleph had ports installed when she performed her own cosmetic alterations to give her a body more befitting a Hacking Goddess like her!”

Vera’s gaze crawled across the mechanical components adjacent to the tube and back to Aleph/Tandy, who waited with a vacant expression on her face. 

“Tandy…can you be safely injected with nanosil?” 

“Yes, Mistress!” she chirped.

“Strip,” Vera commanded, “show me what you’ve already done to yourself.”

Without pause or visible hesitation, her rival deftly removed the little clothing she still wore. Sure enough, what she’d thought were strange freckles were actually the nearly transparent ports for nanosil injection around her body. Large hips, large ass, large breasts. She’d given herself the generically hot (but not too hot) proportions of an actress and, except for the eight inches of limp cock between her legs, would pass for an attractive cis cover model. A startling lack of vision, just like always.

Thankfully, she had her friend Vera here to help.

“I want you to look like Bambi here,” she told the glassy-eyed expression that Tandy held her gaze with. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Of course not, Mistress!”

“Program Directive: You think that Bambi here is the hottest woman alive, besides me of course, and you DESPERATELY want to look like her. No, you want to be even more like a pornographic fantasy. You want everyone to look at you and see nothing but a joke. An exaggerated wet dream given form. Confirm.”

Tandy turned her attention to the sexbot next to her, face flushing with unconcealed envy and lust.

“Oh my god, Bambi,” she moaned, her fingers tracing down the absurd curve of the machine’s breasts, “you’re so fucking hot.”

“Oh my god, Tandy! That’s so fucking nice of you to say! Wanna make out?”

Vera snorted out a laugh. “Later, girls, later. First, we need to make Tandy happy. Luckily, I know a way we can help.” She pointed over to the bimbot charging alcove. “We can give you a real bimbo body, dear. Is that what you want?”

The woman who had been Aleph nodded. “Oh yes, please! I wanna look just as hot and fuckable as Bambi!” 

“I think we can arrange that,” Vera told her, and immediately went to work hacking the charging alcove’s software wide open. There were plenty of security protocols in place to prevent exactly this thing from happening. After all, it wasn’t licensed to modify humans. But one by one, those safeguards were corrupted. Subverted. Turned against their original purpose. A few minutes later, Vera’s feral grin had returned. 

“It’s time, Tandy. Could you step into Bambi’s pod for a moment?” Phrased like a question, every request was regarded as a command by the bimbot’s program. She slid into the transparent cylinder, then waved to the Synth who had taken a spot on the bed behind Vera to peer over her shoulder. 

“Whatcha doin’?” Bambi asked.

Vera projected a wireframe of Tandy’s planned proportions. Enormous tits and ass, bulging hips, and blowjob lips. 

“Making her look perfect,” she said, then asked: “What do you think, Bambi? Any room for improvement?” 

The question seemed to bounce around the empty-headed bot’s skull for a lot longer than it should have. Then, she pointed between the wireframe’s legs. “What about her cock? Could it be biggerer?”

“I was just thinking that.” There were limits to exactly what you could do with nanosil, but it was pretty versatile. And self-replicating, once you removed its termination protocols that kept it from the risk of greygooification. But what was a little risk of infinite replication between pals?

The wireframe’s cock expanded to an absurd size. One, no, two feet long. Long enough to be totally useless except for fucking specially designed holes. It was an ornament. Something to be stroked and frotted against until it exploded, but too big to be used for its intended purpose. An almost purely aesthetic affection to make sure everyone knew she was there to be gawked at, not taken seriously. 

With the changes locked in, it was all a matter of getting consent. Always important in any medical procedure.

“Ready to be transformed into the perfect bimbo, Tandy?”

The ditzy program bouncing around an empty head nodded vigorously. “Yes, please!”

Vera’s smile turned venomous. “Beg me dear. Beg me to change you into a walking sexdoll.”

“Oh please Miss Vera!” the woman who had been Aleph said with a fervor that bordered on the religious, “please change me into your fat titted, big dicked bimbo slut!” 

“Well, if you insist,” Vera said with a twinkle in her eye, and activated the procedure.

The modification arms within the booths swung down, sticking into the ports in Aleph’s body and beginning to flood her system with nanosil. It flowed into the artificially woven channels in her body, pouring through biological membranes and lodging in the places fat had already collected to expand them outward. Her breasts grew from plentiful to enormous, while giving them a perk that made them look extra fake. As did the rest of her curves, with her thighs becoming especially luscious. Even her lips were not safe, plumped up with a pair of injections to make them look beestung and begging to be pressed open by a digit or a dick.

Other, smaller devices went to work painting a permanent mask of makeup onto her face, one perfectly calibrated to make her look like a cheap fuck. Then it went down her limbs, erasing her carefully cultivated lattice of geometric tattoos beneath a coat of paint to make her skin look good, but not quite all the way biological. Just like Bambi’s. By the end, there was almost nothing to differentiate the store-bought product from the hacker maven.

At some point, while watching Aleph’s degrading transformation, Vera had gotten so hard that to keep herself contained in the little port that held her genitals was simply too painful to consider.

“Bambi?” she said, snapping her fingers toward the real bimbot and slithering back to lay reclined on the mattress, “could you suck my cocks? I seem to be quite backed up at the moment.”

“Oh goody!” she said, skipping over and clambering onto the bed before unsheathing the pair of hemipenes from the spot where they would have been had Vera still used a humanoid body. She felt one of her cocks melt into the sexbot’s perfectly engineered mouth, her cushioned and vibrating hand taking care of the second shaft for now. Didn’t even need to be told how to treat a partner with two penises. Aleph had truly spared no expense with this model. 

But while the stimulation was pleasant, a proper feast for her libido played out within the pod on the other end of the bedroom. The modification arms had reached Aleph’s lower half, and in moments the nanosil started flowing into her genitals. What was once a perfectly reasonable size for a cock ballooned outward, increasing several times in size while still staying erect with the perfect rigidity of a dildo designed for a proper size queen. At the same time, her testicles inflated and reconfigured to be veritable nanosil factories. So long as she took in enough nutrients, she’d produce overflowing amounts of fake semen.

If there was any doubt as to what Tandy thought of the transformation, it was answered when she bucked in the pod and came. The last of Aleph’s natural seed blasted out of her body, only to be drowned in gushes of the ropey, fake nanosil jizz that her bimbot body would be producing from now on. It spurted like a geyser into the air, only for it to splatter against the pod’s transparent wall.

Eventually, both the seed-spattered surface and the modification arms retracted, leaving in their wake a truly transformed woman. The aura of a professional hacker was gone. The old Aleph had been scribbled over in an iridescent pink gel pen, with a little heart as the dot over the i’s.

“How do I look?” Tandy asked, giving a little spin to show off the extent of the transformation.

“You look like a bimbot fucktoy,” Vera said truthfully, as proud of her handiwork as she was enamoured with her rival’s new look.

“Yayyy!” the dummy cheered, actually jumping up and down. The action made her look like a jello mold in an earthquake, which made Vera’s grin even wider. “How can I ever repay you?”

“Well,” Vera replied patiently, pointing at the cock of hers that was not currently in Bambi’s mouth, “you can start by getting your fat assets over here. I have a whole cock that’s not being sucked right now with your name on it.”

“Oh goodness!” Tandy gasped, hands with long pink nails pressing to her cheeks while her pillowy lips formed a shocked O. She sprinted into action, or hobbled as the case may be, her whole ridiculous body’s cumulative jiggle threatening to topple her over one one side or another. Thankfully, she reached the bed and made it to her knees, where she seemed much more comfortable.

“Mmm! Tandy purred, then pursed her lips. “I don’t see it.”

Vera let her head swing back down. “See what?”

“My name. You said it was on this one…” she told her, entirely earnestly. 

Vera laughed. “God, you’re stupid. Just the way I like you. Now get sucking while I find Aleph’s accounts. I have some transactions to make.”

With direct access to Aleph’s system, the financial crimes basically committed themselves. Vera scoured her rival’s history and started a loose inventory on both official and unofficial banking information. Whatever she lacked in ethical compunction, she made up for in fiduciary acumen. Of course, all this was unnecessary now. One by one, she started draining the other woman’s funds. 

She gathered enough to pay her team first. Spire and Gossip both got the money they were owed plus a bonus for the FinTech job, in addition to a healthy legal retainer for the former. She doubted the pair would win in a court in this town, but if she could make bail, the troll and the goblin could skip and live comfortably for a decade or two if they spent their money wisely. Or maybe just a few glorious years as queens. They’d earned it. 

Vera let her schemes slip down the priority list as the pair of bimbots found a sympathetic rhythm that was driving her mildly wild. One would bob up on the first cock just as the other was on the decline on the second, then change places. A steady, mechanically precise act that made her want to scream and cum all at the same time. More than that: it proved that Bambi and Tandy were almost indistinguishable. If she closed her eyes, she wouldn’t have been able to tell which mouth on her cocks belonged to the manufactured fucktoy and which belonged to the woman who had sought to put her in jail 48 hours prior. 

The sheer magnitude of her victory, not to mention the eager, sloppy sucking of her pair of penises, had her closing on the edge. She pushed Bambi off and put her focus on Tandy, jerking the cock that was freed while letting her hacked rival finish her off.

“Take it, you dumb slut!” Vera screamed, then came. Thick ropes of seed splashed Tandy’s whorish face, while the other cock launched just as much girlcum down her throat. As she swallowed greedily, pearlescent white trails oozed down her cheeks to dangle off her chin.

“Good hole,” Vera contemptuously before taking a picture with eye ocular implants for her future enjoyment. Maybe she’d change the woman’s official photo ID to that image of perfect debasement.

“My cum tastes good, doesn’t it?” she asked. Bambi voiced her agreement, but Tandy had to wait for the cock to be removed from her throat before she could do the same. 

“Yes, Mistress!” she said at last, throat still gurgling a little as the last of the spunk drooled down her modified vocal cords.

“Alright, that’s enough for now. You two just…stand there and look pretty.”

The bimbots complied, allowing Vera to collect herself. With her rival a mindfucked and shameless thrall, she was almost disappointed the fight was over with. After all, a victory is only as satisfying as how hard it was to achieve. She’d already defeated the city’s top NaRC and treated her throat like a cheap cocksleeve. What more could she possibly—

Another idea formed in her mind…one of those overwhelming ones you can only see a fraction of the scale of the endeavour. Like one face of some great mountain towering overhead. Aleph had been a talented hacker, maybe even on Vera’s level in a few areas. But she was just one of the city’s NaRCs. With time, the Mounties would find more catspaws to replace her, and they’d continue to be a thorn in the side of runners trying to make a decent, dishonest living.

Unless she took them all down.

The spirit of manic productivity overtook Vera as her scheme unfolded in her mind. Programming the virus wasn’t difficult of course. Not only was she one of the best to ever do it, but she had the benefit of using Aleph’s state-of-the-art battlestation to do the grunt work. And the payload was simple enough: take the ditzy bimbo program from Bambi and have it self-replicate in an infected system just as it had to create Tandy. The only problem is that any hacker worth their circuits is gonna be firewalled up to high heaven. It couldn’t be a connection spread, or even an induction transfer…it would have to be port to port. The victim would need to be jacked into. Luckily, there just so happened to be a freely available vector for this particular viral load.

She looked over at Tandy, who had followed the instructions she’d been given to the letter. She stood at the side of the bed, her hips cocked to one side, with an expression straight from the thumbnail of a professional porn clip frozen on her face: eyes half-lidded, lips parted, and still dripping cum.

“Tandy, I have a new task for you. Can you remember how to be a runner for a bit?”

Animation returned to her face, only for her to titter. “Oh silly Mistress, I’ve never been a runner! I’ve always been your bimbo whore!”

Vera made a show of lightly slapping her forehead. “Oh, yes, of course. Well, I need you to go on a mission for me anyway. Think you can do that?”

“Umm…maybe. Will it be fun?”

This time her reaction didn’t have to be faked. “Oh, I think it will be very fun for both of us. Especially for you, though. Because I’m going to give you a list of people I want you to seduce.”

“Oh Em Gee! I’m so good at that!” Tandy cooed, clapping her hands together. “Will they all be cuties?”

“Sweetie, they’ll be whoever I tell you they are. Whatever their gender or appearance, you’re going to find them irresistibly attractive. You’re going to leak cum from your huge fuckstick when you see them, and you’re going to lure them to somewhere private so you can fuck their brains out. You’ll promise to do whatever they want, because you’re a good little whore and you do what you’re told. Let’s practice that! Tandy, lie down on your back and show me how close to your head you can pull your feet.”

She did so without qualm, and whether it was the nanosil adding extra flexibility or perhaps Aleph had been doing yoga, but the bimbot dummy got pretty close to touching her ears with her ankles. Of course, between the enormous cock between her legs and that it rested in the valley between two mountainous breasts rendered the entire position absurd. In other words: perfect.

“Good girl,” Vera praised, slithering between her spread legs and rearing up like a viper ready to strike. Her hemipenes were still out, rapidly returning to their full size, much to the bimbot’s perfectly calibrated enthusiasm. “You’re going to let them do whatever they want to you. And after, when they think you’re nothing but a brainless bimbo slut and their guard is down, you’re going to stick your data cable into their access port.” As she leaned forward plug into Tandy’s neck port with her own cable as demonstration, her cocks prodded her ass.

“Mnf…I’m gonna stick my data-thingy in their…hole…” she managed, tripping over the technical terms like a true ditz. Vera briefly wondered if that was a programmed response or just a sign of just how airheaded she was.

“And then you’re going to upload this file,” Vera continued, transferring over the highly compressed, auto-extracting virus to Tandy’s update folders. “It’s going to slip into their head…just…like…this~” She pushed both cocks inside, stretching her heavily modified rival to her structural limit. Carefully calculated bottoming protocols took over, but it was still a tight fit. 

“Ooh…oh! Mistress, you’re so big!” Tandy said, saying something so cliché with the force of utter conviction that it was hard not to believe. Vera waited for her to adjust before pushing forward, then stroked the enormous cock to prompt the release of nanosil semen-equivalent. Not only did it make for a good stand-in for actual cum, but it was the perfect lubricant. She slathered that onto her cock with her hand, and after a few more insertions, the experience was much easier. Like Tandy had been created to be fucked. Like it was her whole purpose in this world.

“The virus is going to make them just like you, Tandy: dumb, slutty, in need of a Mistress.” The degradation was totally unnecessary; Tandy already knew her place. But Vera had gotten used to being really condescending to Aleph’s ditzy designated driver, and it was hard to stop.

“Mmmnf~ Yes! Yes! I want them to feel as good as I do!”

Vera lost herself in the act of fucking Tandy into the mattress, her heavy weight pressing the other woman’s enormous cock towards her chin and effectively titfucking herself. After a prompt to push her breasts together, the act became intentional, and soon white trails were oozing down her neck from both the pounding of her prostate and the stimulation from her shaft.

“But that’ll only turn their mind to pink goo. You’ll need to inject them with this thing,” Vera squeezed the cock with both hands, jerking it off from the base while she stuffed herself over and over with hip thrusts alone. “The nanosil will give them a bimbo body eventually; you just need to shoot it inside them first.”

“Mnf! Oh fuck…yes! I want to breed them into bimbo beauties for you, Mistress!”

Vera had a hard time keeping track of her instructions. Fucking her ass while narrating her scheme felt so good. 

“In their pussies, up their ass, even down their throats. One dose won’t be enough to make them like you, of course. And so you’re going to fuck them again…”

*Thrust*

“...and again…”

*Thrust*

“...and again, until they’re stuffed full of enough nanosil to look like a proper bimbo fucktoy. Then, you’re going to present your catch to me. I’ll use you both as cumrags and make sure you’re almost indistinguishable. If I’m satisfied, you’ll go out and do it again.”

*Thrust*

“...and again…”

*Thrust*

“...and again. You got that, slut?”

“Yes!” she cried, her partially modded voice glitching in either real or simulated ecstasy. It didn’t matter in the end. She wasn’t the one that mattered.

As if to show her just that point, Vera buried both of her shafts into the overstretched asshole of the bimbot proxy and unleashed herself. Every last drop of seed she had left to give flooded into Tandy’s clenching hole, prompting a sympathetic, calculated-to-the-microsecond climax from her partner. Nanosil seed spurted up and all over her face, a facial mask made even worse when she looked down her body’s length and received a few more direct shots that made it look like she’d taken a full bukkake video’s worth of loads. 

Vera held her close as the last of her orgasm drooled out of her cock tips, close enough to smell the bubblegum scent of her sweat, before dumping the loser of their contest of wits in a gradually expanding puddle of spunk that had once been a very expensive bed.

The lamia gave the toy a moment to reboot while she cleaned up the excess fluids off her cock with the ten thousand thread count sheets. Though her original mission in Xtreme City had been a bust, she’d certainly found enough to distract her. It would be a while yet before the heat died down, so she’d definitely need a place to lie low.

“You don’t mind me staying a few nights, do you, Tandy?”

An incoherent noise followed, halfway between a computer shutdown noise and a languid moan. Vera decided that was an affirmative. Aside from the state of the bed, these were some nice digs. Plus the surveillance screen setup that Aleph had would make for a lovely vantage point to watch the bimbot virus spread throughout the NaRC population.

Presuming Tandy was any good at being a double agent. Or was that a triple agent? It sounded complicated. With such an airheaded operator, she might need to reinforce the instructions a few times. Make sure to really drive it home, nice and deep. 

But Vera didn’t mind. After all, it was another one of the many lessons the XC had to teach: you can’t get anything done without getting your hands at least a little dirty.

*** 

First Sergeant Korga, known to the NaRCs under her boot as Faust, had had just about enough hacker bullshit for one lifetime. And that was before the third passcard failed to open the door to Aleph’s penthouse. The little closet-sized vestibule between the building’s elevator and the rest of the floor-spanning apartment was covered in sensors, scanners, cameras, and biometric readers that made the security in a missile silo seem breezy and lackadaisical. The hacker turned informant didn’t trust anyone, not even her benefactors, and had kept the door scrambled under some inscrutable protocol of her own design.

But all things were possible with a master key. And after she delivered a pair of skillful shots from the breaching shotgun to each of the reinforced door’s hinges, it fell inward with an unceremonious thump. Inside the penthouse bathed in shadow, with the only source of light the thin strips of light on either side of the blackout curtains that kept it shielded from prying eyes and drones. 

“Aleph?” she asked, switching on the light switch with a wave of her hand. “Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been calling you for days.”

There were no signs of a struggle in the lavishly appointed quarters, though someone had turned out all the lights, implying the space was unoccupied or otherwise indisposed. Korga was so focused on looking for clues that she almost missed a flicker of movement from the other side of a half-wall separating the spacious and lavish living room from the enormous kitchen. She snapped the breaching shotgun toward the motion, only to hear not the sound of a charging pistol, but a feminine giggle.

“Oh hi there!” a bimbot of absurd proportions said as it waddled its enormous ass out of the darkened bedroom. To say it was clothed was a bad joke; a bikini top and bottom stretched to the breaking point covered its nudity in the same way a drop of water quenched thirst. Along with a pair of balloon tits, the majority of an enormous cock bounced up and down in full view with every heeled step. “My name is Tandy. Wanna play?”

“She named her sextoy after herself? That’s some kind of fucked I’m not qualified to diagnose…whatever.” Korga sighed and lowered her weapon. Of all the ridiculous things Aleph could have spent her NaRC salary on, a walking sextoy with the shape of a pervert’s wank fantasy had to be the most disappointing. “I’m looking for Aleph. Where is she?”

The Synth tilted its head, and Korga half-expected to see the thing’s brain fall out of its ear. “I dunno who that is. Is she pretty? I like pretty girls! Pretty girls like you~”

“For the love of…the hacker! The woman who lives here. Where is she?”

The bimbot put a finger to its enormous lips. “Umm…oh! Oh, I know who you mean! You mean Mistress! She stepped out to do a thing.”

“Well, when will she be back goddamnit?!” Korga didn’t have a deep well of patience at the best of times, and this slut was pushing it.

The Synth giggled and shrugged, causing more curses to pour out of the gruff orc woman. Unwilling to leave the issue alone, she dropped her weapon on the table of a breakfast nook and slumped into a seat designed for aesthetics and price tag rather than comfort.

“Well, if she won’t answer my calls, I guess I’ll just wait here. You don’t have a problem with that, do you, slut?”

“Of course not, silly!” it said with a limp-wristed dismissive gesture. “I love meeting new people! In fact, I know a way I can make your wait much more fun~” Its hips swayed on a metronomic rhythm as it approached, and Korga’s first instinct was to tell the bouncing bimbo toy to fuck off. But, while she certainly didn’t hurt for money, she wasn’t exactly in a marriage that would allow the purchase of such indulgences. If she didn’t give one a shot now, she might never get a chance.

“Alright. Let’s see what that hole of yours can do,” she told it, undoing her belt and letting an enormous green cock spring free.

It giggled, turning around to spread its enormous ass cheeks to reveal a well-lubricated hole. “Happy to be of service. And I promise, by the time we’re done, you’ll forget all about your worries~”