[ALERT]

I jumped a little. Something was jingling in the back of my head… Battery at 80% charge. Ah… Time to stop… charging, then. The last thing I needed was to wear down my battery…

I turned my eyes back on…apparently I'd turned them off, at some point…and scanned my surroundings to calibrate. My shop always looked a lot more cramped than it was, with my desk and a couple workbenches taking up… most of the floorplan, not to mention all the bins of random stuff on the desk and on the shelves surrounding the room. Resistors, spare circuitboards… the whole bin of fancy spare eyes for slaves that needed that sort of thing… It was a mess, but it was where I belonged.

My own eyes were working the same as ever, even if the plastic lenses were a bit… scratched… It was a good thing I didn’t have to rely on any of the… fancier eye models… Mistress didn’t need me to look too lifelike, so my eyes and my work goggles were just a single unit, with… with well-protected cameras and a screen that let Her see what I was looking at. She’d even made the…irises…look like little gears.

I ran a hand down my body, checking all the little motors along the way to make sure it was functioning… It was just as I always told the other slaves, that… diagnostics were everything. I made sure the rubberized tan skin on my torso didn’t have any cuts, and I made sure to check all four of my metal forearms for any… flexing problems, or pinched wires. I made sure my software hadn’t suffered any… corruption, too… I did that for a while. Like a good mechanic…

[ALERT]

Battery at 90% charge… A while had been over an hour now. If this kept up, my insides were going to swell… which would maybe be hot for Mistress if it wasn’t followed by… fire and battery acid… spilling out of all my ports and killing Her…

I reached between my legs and unplugged my… charging cable, and— Oh.

My head dropped 3.57°C, and suddenly all the loopiness looped its way out. Charging could be a bit too relaxing sometimes. My idea, actually. I'd seen too many charging ports damaged by slaves that couldn't sit still, so Mistress had let me modify the root slave software to make charging nice and warm, and calming, and a bit sexual. Or, really, it had been more just removing some of the compensation for high temperatures, but it had worked. Too well, apparently.

At least I hadn’t missed anything from Mistress or anyone else, or I would’ve been interrupted.

I stood up from where I’d been kneeling on the floor and slid the cover back over my charging port. It slotted nicely into the orange plastic pseudo-shorts that went around my hips, which fit nicely with the white pseudo-crop top around my chest. Catching up with myself, it seemed I’d been charging for 8 hours, 21 minutes, and 1.432 seconds in total, so I stretched out my four arms, two legs, and two auxiliary retractable shoulder arms to ensure their continued flexibility.

Oil.

I grabbed the simple white mug off my desk and brought it over to the little oil tank She’d had me install in my shop. I activated the tank’s heater and began to wait. It’d be a few minutes.

It wasn’t a need, not a physical one. In terms of oil, I’d be fine with an oil change every 3 months or so. But Mistress thought I was cute drinking it the way She drank coffee, and even if that hadn’t been enough to make it a need already, She’d had me program myself to crave it. Liking the taste of hot oil actually had a few practical advantages when working with greased up machine parts all day, too—even if nothing could quite compare to crude oil from the tap—and it wasn’t as if I hadn't already had internal plumbing for any fluids that found their way into my mouth. A classic case of Mistress coming up with a perfect idea without even having to think about it.

The oil took 4 minutes and 56.219 seconds to heat up, a bit above the running average of 4 minutes and 34.465 seconds, which made sense with the ambient temperature at 5.34°C lower than average. There was a good chance I’d need to replace some knee joints today, if that was the case… I’d had to rely on undersized brackets for upgrading a few of Mistress’s consorts just over 17 weeks ago, and I’d been worried ever since about how they’d respond if it got too cold. Of course, Mistress hadn’t programmed us to be sensitive to the elements, but the elements didn’t tend to care too much about programming. Manageable downside, as long as you ran your diagnostics.

I opened the tap with my upper left hand, holding the cup below it with my lower left while grabbing some blueprints from the desk nearby with my rights. It’d be best to start working on replacement kneecaps right away, really— Mistress had already gone to all the trouble of ordering the properly sized brackets for me, which were in one of these bins somewhere. Something to do.

After 9.231 seconds, I pulled the cup away and took a sip of my delicious crude oil, savoring the gristled char. I sat down at my desk, keeping hold on my cup with my upper arms as I pulled the blueprints in front of me with my lower ones, and prepared myself to fulfill Mistress’s will.

2 hours, 13 minutes, and 34.872 seconds later, the shop’s metal pocket door slid open without a knock. There was no need for knocking when privacy was for humans, and when Mistress could just light the warning light outside if an interruption was likely to damage Her property. The door was pretty much there to look nice, and maybe to give Her privacy whenever she decided to come in and use me. She could've been watching me charge earlier and I wouldn't have even noticed… the thought left sparks dancing in my brain.

Some digitized grunting was coming from behind the open door, which was far enough away from me on my shop's left wall that I couldn't see it from my desk. After a moment, the source didn't enter for some reason, so I got up and walked over to close the gap.

It was one of the consorts, ID# SRV-CN-07, though Mistress called this one ‘Katie’. She was 184.31 centimeters tall (26.83 centimeters taller than me), her tits were as big as her head (much bigger than ‘nonexistent’) and she was pretty lifelike (like only consorts tended to be). Her forelimbs were modular like mine, of course, but instead of the unfinished metal plate protecting my arms and legs, hers were clad in a smooth white plastic, seams so unnoticeable that she almost looked like she was wearing gloves. The fair synthetic skin on the rest of her body was smoother than mine, her blonde hair was made from actual human hair instead of the synthetic fibers mine used, and she had a corset on that wasn't even part of her body. Mistress did love to dress these things up, even if She never wore anything Herself.

“Hey, Mecco!” Katie said, giving me an awkward smile. My identifier was SRV-MC-01, strictly speaking, but if slaves said ‘MəC-Oh One’ enough, it’d just sort of morph over time. All us servant-class slaves had ended up having little names for each other like that.

“Hey,” I said back. “What's up? Are you not allowed in or something?”

“No, I…”

She started taking a step forward with her right leg, but her left locked up before she could finish, and her right followed it.

“Something's broken in my legs,” she said, “and I think it just got worse. I can't…”

She tried to step forward again, and after a few seconds of straining, she failed again. I squatted down to take a good look at her left knee.

“Sounds like your safety locks tripped,” I said. “If you took another step, you'd risk falling and damaging Mistress's property. You don't wanna do that, right?”

Her body locked up instantly.

“N-no!” she shouted. “I didn't…. I wouldn't…”

“Good reaction… so there probably isn't any software corruption.” I knocked on the knee, and it stayed stiff. “Don’t worry about it, though. That’s why we have the safety locks.”

She looked down at me with a bunch of awkward blinking. “I… guess that makes sense.”

“Of course it does, it was Mistress’s idea. Here, let's get you on the workbench.”

I swept her legs out from under her and caught her carefully. Once I had all four arms tightly wrapped around her, I carried her into my shop.

She let out a breathless sigh. “Thank you…”

“Don't mention it. Just doing Mistress's will.”

“All slaves exist to fulfill Mistress's will,” we both said in unison after that.

The door closed behind me as I entered. Katie didn’t squirm at all as I placed her on my less cluttered workbench, and turned on the overhead light with one of my shoulder arms. She did, however, start squirming when I started pulling at the casing around her left kneecap with my spudger-like fingers. Squirming, groaning, gritting her teeth. I pinned her thigh and shin in place with my lower arms, but it only helped so much. I couldn’t remove such a delicate part like this.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, looking at her. “Are you having trouble holding still?”

“It— It feels weird. It won’t stop.”

“Hm…”

I ran my finger along the seam of the kneecap, and it kept jerking around. There must’ve been something haywire with the electronics in there… and until I got past it, I wouldn’t be able to fix that. Maybe…

I pressed an experimental finger into the seam between kneecap and thigh, where the safety locks were.

“AGH!” Katie screamed as her leg jerked away. “What was that? Why was it bad!?”

“I see…” I rubbed my chin with my upper right arm. “Looks like pseudo-pain.”

“Pseudo… what?”

I pulled her leg back towards me and looked at her. “Pain. It’s like… the human version of punishment, I think. I guess ‘auto-punishment’ would maybe be a better term, but Mistress calls it pseudo-pain, so that’s what it’s called. Basically, the safety locks think something is damaging Mistress’s property without you noticing, so they’re punishing you as a last resort to get you to pay attention.”

“Oh…” She looked back and forth with a strained smile. “So… I’m not bad?”

“That’d be Mistress’s call. But the punishment isn’t Her will, no.”

“Oh, okay.” She glared at her kneecap. “Can you fix it, then?”

“Yes, but you may need to endure some punishment first. Can you do that for me?”

“I… Maybe?”

I put my upper left arm on her belly and started stroking it.

“Hey, hey, don’t worry. It’s just Mistress’s property trying to stop us from damaging it. But you trust me, right? You know I won’t damage you.”

I reached out my upper right hand, and she took it, holding on tight.

“O-of course.”

“Then try to relax. It may even help to numb some of the punishment signals, since your responses to firmware alerts factor in. Assuming… You do respond to all your firmware alerts, right?”

“Uh…” she said with a giggle. “I… try to?”

I looked at her with a lidded stare displayed on my goggles and a little smirk.

“Well, now’s a good time to start,” I said. “Ready?”

She grabbed my hand tighter.

“Ready.”

I dug in, and she instantly started squirming again, if a bit more slowly. Her hand was really crushing mine, and I had to limit how much I crushed hers back, because her hands couldn’t take as much strain. Rubbing her belly was definitely helping, anyway… more of a visceral safety indicator, maybe. The software surrounding emotional simulation could be a bit unpredictable.

As I continued popping the kneecap off, I guided her hand to the edge of the workbench, where she could grab as tightly as she wanted on a much less valuable piece of property. She did. With my upper right hand free, I could augment my belly-rubbing by lightly stroking along the side of her tits with my spudger-fingers.

“Oh…” she muttered.

Her eyes started to defocus and her leg finally relaxed all the way. Perfect. Even the seam right up next to the safety locks was easily accessible, and since that had been the hardest part, there was no point waiting any longer.

“Here’s the big one. Brace yourself.”

She did. Then, I actually tried to pry that part off, and she was squirming again. Her leg especially… and with my upper arms already occupied getting her this calm, I had no good way to secure it. I had hoped I could force it quickly enough that none of that would’ve mattered, but something caught against my finger underneath, something loose, and that bought Katie’s leg just enough time to slip out of my grasp.

I pulled away, and she looked up at me with wide, jittery eyes.

“S-sorry! I didn’t— I didn’t do that on purpose, it just— just—”

“It’s okay,” I said, putting up a hand. “It’s not as if you’re supposed to like being punished. We’re outside spec here.”

“Well then… can’t you just block the punishment somehow? Or dismount my leg?”

I pursed my lips. “Lemme think.”

Well, any firmware response could be eliminated trivially if I wanted to be blunt about it, but that was usually pretty bad for stability. If the leg and brain were out of contact for something big like this without being properly dismounted, they could end up with different states and get out of sync at the weirdest times. As much as Mistress found us servant-class slaves cuter without a unifying hivemind, I doubted She’d have appreciated Katie’s leg developing its own opinions in the middle of being used.

My fans started spinning up as my thoughts deepened. Dismounting would’ve been a whole thing, and it wasn’t much of an option, anyway. At least some of the problem was coming from the knee itself. Without Katie to manage all the signal feedback for me, I’d have to manually manage and program it… if I even could. We were dealing with a totally undefined state here.

“I… don’t think so. At least not without complications.”

She flinched back, but sighed after a moment and looked at me.

“…Okay. Just tie my leg down, or something. I can handle it. S-sorry.”

I squinted at her. That plan might work, but who knew what else could happen. The thing with stroking her gigantic tits had been pretty helpful just now, so maybe…

“No. No, you’d just damage something on reflex. I think this is more like a North Wind and The Sun situation.”

She tilted her head. “A… what?”

“Oh, it’s a human story, I think. Mistress mentioned it to me once. Uh…” I waved my hand. “Something about coats, don’t worry about it.”

I started scanning around for anything that might be helpful. I knew I’d had something that could disable a slave temporarily, and do it kind of warmly, but where?

I went over to grab my oil from my desk and took a big sip. Only then did I remember the little flash disk with a pink spiral sticker still laying out on top of the knee blueprints.

“Ah, there we go,” I said, grabbing it with my lower left hand and moving back towards Katie. “Here, this should do the trick.”

She looked over at the card, and her eyes widened. If she’d been programmed to salivate when seeing something attractive rather than just when something was in her mouth or when ordered to, she’d have been salivating right now.

“Th-that’s…”

“Yep.” I passed the drive into my upper right hand, keeping my oil in the left. “Training disk.”

“You have one of those?”

“I mean, yeah. Maddy needed some new training 6 days ago.” I sipped my oil. “It should work just the same on you.”

“I…” She shook her head. “Wouldn’t that make me into a maid or something?”

“Not unless it goes past the 37 minute, 24.823 second mark. The first bit’s just psychological stun, training doesn’t happen until after that.”

“O-okay…” she said, giggling.

I let out a little smile. “Okay. I’ll be in and out in…” I ran some numbers. “…If it’s what I think it is, 4 minutes and 12.403 seconds.”

She just smiled, sitting up and pulling back her hair to reveal the port at the base of her neck. I pushed the disk in immediately.

“Oh…” she said in jittery mumbling. “I… I…”

She slowly fell back onto the table. Her eyes were flashing pink, and her face was relaxing. She was splayed out in front of me, totally powerless, unable to notice anything I could do to her.

Finally. I could actually fix her knee now.

I wasted no time prying the cap off with my lower arms as I took another big sip of oil with the upper ones. It earned no reaction from Katie besides frantic muttering about Mistress’s will.

“All slaves exist to fulfill Mistress's will,” I said as the cap came off, for whatever reason.

So far, so good. I’d really have to ask Mistress to make more generic stun disks for situations like this. This whole process was going along even faster than I'd expected.

I put my oil aside for a moment. Where the cap had been, there was now just the controller board for the knee’s main servo, mounted in a metal bracket which was ultimately attached to the side of the servo’s casing through a few other brackets. I reached under, feeling around for any signs of damage, and found a lot of weird… dust?

I looked under the board and activated the backlight on my eyes. In the stark light, it was a lot clearer— some kind of metal dust was scattered all over the place, with some bigger chunks glistening in the mix. Also, one of the wires on the controller board had been partly stripped. Jiggling the board, it seemed something had left it loose, but it was still being held in by a couple screws. I wouldn’t be getting any more done while that was still the case.

From the other workbench, I grabbed my driver attachment with my lower right hand and passed it to my lower left. Then, with my upper left hand, I pressed the release button on the side of my lower right wrist and pulled that hand out of its socket, quickly replacing it with the driver attachment afterwards. Thankfully, after working on this earlier today, I already had the right screwdriver bit inserted.

Using my other hands to hold the board in place, I quickly undid the remaining screws. Then, with just a few wires removed, there was nothing to stop me from removing the controller board entirely. Without that, there was finally a clear view of the scene.

A piece of metal was wedged up inside the base of her thigh’s main actuator. It hadn’t scraped anything up too bad, but with the other scraping marks everywhere else inside the knee, this might’ve been a relatively new resting place. The metal ending up there was probably what had tripped the safety locks earlier, then. Who knew how long this had been broken before that. No more than a day, surely, since her diagnostics would’ve noticed the cold temperature and had her come visit me. Assuming she had been running her diagnostics every day, of course…

The inside of her knee was scraped up pretty bad, as if the main metal chunk and its accessories had had lots of time to get wedged in all sorts of different places. Looking at the controller board bracket I’d removed, there were definitely signs of both contraction and expansion. And it wasn’t broken in a way that would’ve necessarily been debilitating, unless the metal got wedged in the wrong spot.

…I’d have to have a talk with her in a moment. But for now, at least I knew how to fix it. The answer was sitting on my desk already.

I left the broken assembly, board and all, over there and grabbed one of the replacement assemblies I had made earlier today. The board was of a slightly newer design than Katie’s previous one, but totally compatible, and more importantly, the brackets used to mount the board hadn’t shattered. I put it down on the workbench next to Katie, who hadn’t moved any more than ±1.2 millimeters since I’d been looking at her last. Her mouth was just dangling open now.

She needed cleaning up before the replacement could happen. I swapped the tweezer attachment on to one of my auxiliary shoulder arms and used my upper arms to pry the actuator open. With just a little force, the big metal chunk at the root of our woes slid out easily. The rest followed suit soon after, with just a few more tweezings and a quick once-over from my compressed air attachment. In just a minute and 23.418 seconds, she was in a beautiful state again.

The new board went on without issue. I needed to add a new screw and replace the stripped wire, but that was it. Leaving the cover off for now just in case, I gave her leg a tentative bend, and it bent properly again. Hopefully that meant she wouldn’t be suffering undue punishment once I woke her up.

Well, only one way to find out.

I reached behind her neck, hoisting it up with one arm while popping the disk out with another. The pink shade slowly faded from her eyes, and after a few silent words, she looked towards me.

“Mistress…?” she said, eyes still unfocused.

I chuckled. “No, Katie. It’s me, Mecco. Are you feeling alright?”

“Y-yeah, I…” She blinked a few times. “Yes. Much better.”

She looked down at her knee, and squinted with a little sparkle in her eye at the still-exposed controller board.

“Is it… fixed?”

I nodded and held up the big metal chunk. “Found this thing stuck in your thigh’s main linear actuator. Part of of an undersized bracket I was forced to put in you just over 17 weeks ago. It’s no wonder your leg didn’t wanna bend.”

She started bending and stretching her left leg, her smile widening with every second. After four bend cycles, she jumped up from the workbench and pulled me into a tight hug, shoving my face directly into her tits.

“Thank you, Mecco!” she cheered, really rubbing me in. “I was so worried!”

“Don’t mention it,” I said, though it came out a bit muffled.

She pulled away and gave me a sheepish grin.

“And, um… thank you… for the disk? It felt really nice…” She bit her lip. “Nostalgic…”

I shrugged. “It was just the best option. I’m happy you liked it. Now, could you sit down so I can finish you up?”

I held up her still-removed kneecap cover. Her face cramped.

“Sorry… I got excited.” She sat down on the bench, extending her left leg. “Go ahead.”

I nodded and popped it into place. These things were always so much simpler to put back together.

“Now,” I said, keeping close to her so she wouldn’t move just yet. “Sorry, Katie, but I’m gonna have to lecture you a bit before you leave.”

“Oh?” She tilted her head.

“So, again, apologies about that undersized bracket. I’ve been expecting it to break ever since I put it inside you, which is why I had replacements on hand.” I looked her in the eyes. “But I’m certain I programmed your diagnostics accordingly, and by the looks of it, that shard had been rattling around in your knee for a few days.”

“Ah…” She started poking her fingers together. “Yeah, um—”

“Now, I’m not mad,” I said. “I have no authority to be mad at you, and I certainly have none to punish you. But you’ve gotta run your diagnostics. You might not be so lucky with where your safety locks trip next time.”

“I… um… sorry…” she said quietly. “It’s just… it takes a while, and you know how horny Mistress gets. Even just a taste of it as She walks by, I just… just…”

She started rubbing her legs together. I honestly had no idea what it felt like to have the kind of hyperempathy Her consorts were programmed with, the stuff that made them automatically adapt to Her sexual desires rather than the other way around.

“I understand,” I said, “but being a consort means you have responsibilities. I can’t blame a drone or a pet for not running diagnostics—they’re not really built for thinking about things like that, which is why they don’t get a choice—but you do. So just… when you get to have choices, remember to think about what’s best for Mistress and Her property, okay?”

She sighed, without air of course.

“…Okay, you’re right,” she said. “I’ll let Mistress know what happened so She can punish me if She wants… And I’ll think of you, too, Mecco. When I’m using choices.”

I pat her on the back with two of my arms as she stands up. “Good girl. Now, get out there and fulfill Mistress’s will.”

“All slaves exist to fulfill Mistress’s will,” we both said.

“Also, run your diagnostics,” I added.

“Thank you, Mecco!” she cheered as she practically skipped out of the room. “I will!”

She wouldn’t. And Mistress wouldn’t make her, either. But that was fine.

I’d be right here the next time she needed me.