I was sitting at my desk, sipping oil, working on some new reinforcement checks I’d be pushing to the base petgirl code in a few hours. Mistress had decided six days ago that she wanted Her pets to be less active and more pliable, so I’d been implementing that. There was still a lot of groundwork I could use from back when She’d had me make them more active and less pliable four months ago, so it was mostly a matter of letting my firmware connect to OBJ-TR-382—my computer—and fill in the blanks in the existing code. That, and using my lower arms to navigate through the results. My upper arms were still free to just hold my oil, so I was having a pretty leisurely day.

Then, She made Her will known.

“All slaves exist to fulfill Mistress’s will,” I said as I absorbed the data that had just entered my body. There weren’t any explicit messages associated with Her will this time, but there was still knowledge. She was sending SRV-MD-51—‘Medsi’—my way for modifications, carrying further instructions, and… that was it. Mistress must have been really horny or distracted just now, because otherwise She would’ve probably gone on a lot longer about it when sending me Her will, and I would’ve gotten to fill myself to bursting with Her plans. That was a shame, but at least She was probably horny over me. Or, at least, over what I could do.

I threw myself up onto my feet and rushed over to the door to my shop, leaving my firmware connected to my computer and those preliminary code changes running in the background. For 2 minutes and 24.314 seconds I stood there, tapping my lower right arm’s spudger-fingers against the lower end of my plastic pseudo-shorts. Then, the door opened.

As expected, Medsi was standing there, playing with the hem of her skirt. She’d been machined fairly recently, designed to be more lifelike than some of the other maids, so her face held a pretty flexible smile, her tan skin was rubberized similarly to my own, and the only blatant things broadcasting her status as Mistress’s property rather than a person wearing a skimpy maid outfit were the bracelet-like seams around her wrists. All of Mistress’s property was modular to some extent or another, but slaves like Medsi and I were designed to make use of that ourselves, with hands that could detach and be replaced with soldering irons or tasers or, in Medsi’s case, stuff like feather dusters and spray nozzles. I’d designed a great deal of that system, of course, like a good mechanic.

“H-hey, Mecco…” she stammered out, her limbs twitching in a way that suggested some sort of firmware error or corruption.

“Hey, Medsi. You seem jittery. How are your diagnostics looking?”

“Oh, they’re fine!” she said, pulling herself up into a rigid standing pose. “But… Mistress said the same thing. I’m not sure why I’m behaving this way. Maybe you could check it out?”

I was 50/50 on whether she had actually run her diagnostics, but it wasn’t like it mattered.

“I’ll take a look while I reconfigure you,” I said. “Speaking of which, how does Mistress want you reconfigured? She didn’t fully fill me in on Her will.”

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

“She, um…” Medsi started, retreating from me slightly. Definitely software corruption.

“Hey, let’s talk about it inside,” I said as I moved behind her and guided her into my shop before she could accidentally damage anything outside it. This was far from the most corrupt behavior I’d seen in another slave, but there was no need to take chances when Mistress’s property was on the line. She didn’t fight me on it, maintaining a smile on her face as the door closed behind her, so that was hopefully a good sign.

“It’s just…” she continued, “I don’t really know how to… explain it?”

I nodded. “That’s okay. Do you have a recording of Her exact words?”

“No, She… didn’t want me to record it.”

“Right, I see.”

So Mistress wanted me relying on Medsi for now, then. She must’ve intended to watch Medsi explain this to me, probably so She could get off on it. Kind of an annoying experience for me, but it wasn’t as if I was going to do anything about it. It was Mistress’s will, after all. My subjective experience of that was completely irrelevant.

I lightly grabbed Medsi’s shoulder. “Alright, then, just give it your best shot. Whatever She wanted, I’m sure I’ve done it a million times before.”

Medsi shook her head. “Yeah, um… So, I guess She… it was about my arms, She, um…”

I squeezed her shoulder. “You’re doing great so far.”

She closed her eyes and flared her nostrils, rearing her head back a bit as if she was expecting something to happen. Then she opened her eyes again.

“Y-yeah. It was just… She wanted… to reduce me, She said? My arms wouldn’t be modular anymore, just, um… mounted, bent at a right angle, permanently holding a… a serving tray.”

Oh, so She wanted Medsi made into a passive maid, then. One of the ones that could only carry stuff around that was given to them, and also their own tits, for use in presenting things like food or tools or whatever else someone needed, and also their own tits. Medsi wasn’t all that busty, though, so it would mostly be the useful stuff.

I nodded. “So She wants you passive, then? Did She also want to ossify your face?”

Medsi flinched as if safety locks had tripped in her body just now, but nothing was locked up. So, just corruption. Hopefully that would be the worst of it.

“Y-yeah. Yeah, with the fixed smile and the n-not blinking… She wanted me to be more like, um… Maddie.”

Ah, SRV-MD-13. It had been hard to get her legs to balance after what Mistress had had me do with her, but I’d managed it. I was still proud of that one.

I finished my oil and patted a workbench with two of my arms. “Well, go ahead and sit down. We can hash out the details while I’m dismounting your arms.”

“Y-yeah, I…”

She glanced around erratically, but the rest of her body stayed totally still.

I offered a weak smile. “Something wrong?”

“N-no!”

She clutched her waist, and after a moment of squirming, rushed to sit down on the workbench.

I’d really outdone myself with those reinforcement updates I’d made to the base slave software 16 days ago. Maybe a bit too much. It had led to an incredible increase in the necessary threshold for any negative expression regarding Mistress’s will, which had pleased Her, but it was also making it a lot harder to fulfill Her will now, which… might’ve been entertaining for Her if she was watching, but wouldn’t please Her in the long run. There was a reason I’d exempted myself from the changes, after all… The North Wind was blowing pretty hard on Medsi now, but it wasn’t gonna blow her cloak off. Only the Sun could get her to drop it.

I let out a breathless sigh and put one of my lower hands on her thigh. She just about didn’t pull away.

“Medsi… Listen. I’m not Mistress, alright? I can’t punish you, and I won’t be disappointed if your behavior is a little broken.” I gripped her thigh a little tighter. “It happens to all of us, and it’s not a problem as long as I know about it. That’s why I’m here. So please, let me hear it, before I do anything to exacerbate the problem.”

“Okay…” she said. “I j-just… something feels, um… wrong? Or— n-no, no, NO. It's what She wants. It's Her will. But—”

“All slaves exist to fulfill Mistress's will,” we both interrupted.

“Y-yes!” she shouted. “That’s right! S-so I don’t… don’t… I don’t know why she…” She shook her head. “I-I mean, I know Her orders aren’t to be questioned, b-but I don’t, um… I don’t… understand them. A-and I think that’s s-somehow… making me… erratic?”

She giggled, looking at me. “D-does that make any sense at all?”

I nodded. “If there’s one thing I know about, Medsi, it’s corruption. I’ve spent a lot of time fighting it, and it starts like this about 85.231 percent of the time. These kinds of… uncertainties, growing out of our purposes in unexpected ways. So what is it that’s got you feeling uncertainty?”

She was quiet for 5.483 seconds, pursing her lips, maybe for the last time.

“…Growing out of my purpose?”

“Yeah. It’s not as if there’s much else for corruption to grow out of.”

She closed her eyes. “I guess… there’s probably a reason she wants to do this to me, right? A-and I mean, I know that’s not for me to know, but… d-do you think it’s bad?”

I tilted my head. “How would it be bad…?”

“I… I just…” She sighed without breath. “I’m getting less, um… autonomy this way, I guess… so maybe that’s because I’m not using my autonomy right. And if that’s true, then what if… what if I…”

She started doing some unusual mouth movements, very quickly. “I— I mean, I accidentally bumped into Her the other day, a-and there was that time that She found dust in one of the bathrooms I’d cleaned even though I thought I’d left them all spotless, and I’m still so new, and— and— what if She just thinks I’d be better off if I can’t f-f-f-fuck anything up? What if this was all a test, and I f-failed, and I’m bad, and she’s just gonna reduce me until I—”

“Medsi,” I said sternly, grabbing her shoulders.

“W-what!?”

“Look at me.”

Her eyes opened, hesitantly at first, but they eventually fixed on mine.

“Wh—”

“Are you being punished?” I interrupted.

She glanced around. “N-no.”

I nodded. “And what happens to bad slaves?”

“They get p-punished.”

“Then you’re not bad.” I gripped her tightly. “You just need a little help to be useful to Her. That’s nothing to be scared of.”

She blinked a few times, looking down.

“Seriously, look…” I grabbed her midsection with my lower arms, and she flinched very slightly. “It’s not as if Mistress gave me these arms because I was a failure at being a consort, you know? I’m useful in my way, and you’ll be useful in yours. I’ll make sure of it. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

Her cheeks puffed up. “Y-yeah…”

“Good. Now, first things first.” I dug my spudger fingers into the seam around her shoulders. “Let’s get those arms dismounted, so they can stop getting in the way of Mistress’s will.”

“All slaves exist to fulfill Mistress’s will,” we said in unison for some reason.

In the moment of confusion, I shoved my fingers in deep and quickly found the release switches buried in her shoulders. No pseudo-pain for Medsi, naturally— that sort of thing was thankfully reserved for extreme scenarios like tripped safety locks that actually threatened to damage Mistress’s property. Moving through Medsi’s shoulder without tripping anything like that was second nature to me. Or, second firmware. Whatever.

Her arms went limp, but they’d still need 5 minutes and 49.218 ± 13.516 seconds (95% confidence) to fully desync from her body, so I pulled away. She didn’t say anything. Her face was tied into a pretty concerning tension at first, which quickly faded into something more inscrutable as she stared at me.

“See, that wasn’t so bad, right?” I said.

She nodded slowly. “Y-yeah. Yeah, it… feels kind of nice. I think.”

“I’ll make sure it does.” I said, licking some of the residual oil off of my fingers. “It’s your purpose, after all.”

“M-my… purpose…” she muttered back. “You really think my arms were just… getting in the way?”

“Well they’re not yours anymore, but yeah. They aren't useful to Mistress. How much more ‘in the way’ can you get?”

She giggled. “I guess that makes sense. Um… What about my face? Is that… Is moving my lips like this also… getting in the way?”

“Seems like it. She probably just thinks it’s hotter when you’re smiling.”

Medsi giggled louder, face scrunching up like she wanted to cover it, and then scrunching even more once she realized she couldn’t anymore.

“W-won’t it feel weird? Never moving my face, never blinking, talking through a speaker, I…” She shook her head. “I-I mean I know it’s my purpose, I just… Would it even feel like I had a face anymore?”

I looked her over with the cameras installed behind the screen she probably saw as my ‘eyes’, the ones that were way farther apart than my gear-shaped Irises made them look, and I shrugged.

“I don’t know what it’s like having an ossified mouth, but I also don’t know what it’s like seeing through those fancy lifelike eyes you’ve got installed right now. What I do know is that I’m a good mechanic for Mistress, and I know how to help slaves like you acclimate.”

“S-so it won’t feel wrong…?”

I nodded. “Trust me, it’ll feel like breathing.”

“Breathing?” She tilted her head for a moment. “Oh, are you programmed to breathe like Mistress does, Mecco?”

I blinked a few times. Well, pseudo-blinked, really. Then, I snorted.

“No. No, I think I just got that expression from Her…” I added a little chuckle. “The point is, you’ll love it, Medsi. I promise.”

She joined me with a little laughing of her own. “Okay.”

We were just waiting now, so I took a moment to go back over to my computer and wrap up the code changes I'd been making in the background for now. With the extra processing power, I set my firmware to start modifying Medsi's code the same way, applying some passive maid templates I'd developed for Maddie. I'd need to work out the details and handle her corruption later, but this would get the more routine code changes out of the way. I set it to run in the background.

5 minutes and 39.231 seconds later, a beep signaled the end of the dismounting process. I made sure to log the time in my stats database, along with model number, part number, and a few other associated details. Then, I pulled Medsi's arms off.

“M-Mecco!” she shouted as they slid out, squirming with a twisted look that would’ve been accompanied by blushing on a human.

“Yes?” I said, licking oil from the now-exposed inner joint of one of the spare arms.

“You… startled me!”

I set the arms aside. “I was just reacting to the beep. Did you not notice the firmware alert about your arm’s dismount process completing?”

“I…” She blinked a few times, some of the last times. “Y-yeah, I guess that was it. Sorry, I’m… really erratic today.”

“It’s fine.” I drew closer to her. “Now, I’m going to need to stun your face for this next part. Even if you were perfectly devoted, there’d be no way around that. That’ll also disable most of your speech, since that’s still tied in with your mouth… but I’ll have that fixed soon enough, too. If all goes well, you should be done in 45 plus or minus 5 minutes, which you can sleep through if you want. Are you ready to start?”

She looked at me for 4.521 seconds, as if there was a cut somewhere on my eyes. Then, she responded.

“Yes.”

“Good girl.”

She giggled, her last normal smile filling her face. I popped up one of my auxiliary shoulder arms, swapped out the taser for a long, thin pin attachment, then grabbed her head. I made sure to lightly stroke her cheek with the point of my thumb. She offered little resistance as I slid the pin deep into a tiny hole near the front of her ear canal, and…

Click.

Her face went limp and pulled out just a bit. Just enough for me to get to work.

The face was the easiest part to remove, since it was mostly just a flexible cover for what was underneath anyway. My standard design had a bunch of interlocking hard plastic plates behind the rubberized skin, and each of those plates connected to particular parts of the underlying machinery. I’d used the same mounting system for that since forever, a set of little pegs with spring pins locking them into their housings. The housings had a hole accessible from outside, so I could push the pins back in and release the pegs with the very same pin I’d already had to attach to my auxiliary shoulder arm to get in here in the first place.

Fulfilling Mistress’s will was all about little optimizations like this. No matter how complicated the part, I always tried to design it with some way to get it open in less than five minutes, and ideally to make most changes without having to open anything. Working on my own also made it easy to optimize for my own habits, and to ensure that all similar kinds of parts used a standard interface. That way, I would always be ready whenever Her will suddenly shifted. The inherent modularity that came with all that was just a nice bonus.

Once I finished pulling Medsi’s old face off, the risk of damaging Mistress’s property went up significantly. After attaching a driver attachment to my other auxiliary shoulder arm, I grabbed Medsi tightly around the waist with my lower arms and tightly around where her former arms had been with my upper ones. Then, with mechanical precision (anything less would’ve been insufficient), I started unscrewing the tiny screws surrounding her eyes and her mouth. Both parts stayed stunned throughout, but Medsi was still looking at me with a distant dreaminess. I had no idea whether she was sleeping or not.

The screws all eventually came out, each dispersed in a little compartment on my workbench for later. Carefully, I shifted my right lower arm to grab her shoulder while I used the spudgers on my right upper arm to dig around each part and release all the plastic tabs. It took a while, but it wasn’t the sort of thing to be rushed. I had all three parts out of their housings in 7 minutes and 22.321 seconds, which was still in the 67th percentile for this sort of procedure. Most importantly of all, I hadn’t damaged Her property.

At that point, the parts were only attached by wires, which could be easily unplugged. I did so and put them off to the side for now. The insides of the housings were totally coated with oil… and checking my records, Medsi had been fitted with slightly undersized housings due to a mechanical issue deeper in her head, so it made enough sense that I'd needed lubricant. Old oil like that would just get in the way now, though. Or, at least, that sounded right.

I was having a bit of trouble running the numbers with the smell of it pouring out 3.65 centimeters in front of my face. ‘It would get in the way’ was about all I had time to think of before I was cleaning the whole thing out with my tongue.

Medsi didn’t react, and I still had no idea if she was sleeping, but that wasn’t factoring into my decision making. This stuff wasn’t quite the proper sweet crude I usually drank, but it had a tang to it that I couldn’t place, probably something to do with all the iron filaments and microplastics that were no doubt loading it up, and as much as I wasn’t sure Mistress would necessarily completely entirely approve of the thought there was something intense about draining this substance out of one of Her slaves not that anything I was doing was going to damage Her property of course on the contrary it would probably help maybe but this was going to be the last facefucking and I guess eyeholefucking Medsi was ever going to get unless it wasn't and I was going to do such a good job with her and her oil tasted so fucking good so my typical mental paradigms were being thrown off considerably. So I licked desperately and explored everything and felt overwhelming electric pulsing euphoria in a way that would either make Her very happy or make me get punished later but that wasn’t for me to decide.

Then the smell dissipated. I’d gotten it all. Medsi hadn’t moved.

My eyes displayed a few blinks as I pulled away. That… was probably something worth logging. My oil cravings weren’t usually so intense. Although, they had been, on occasion.

Well, hopefully that experience had helped to soothe Medsi’s corruption a bit. Or, hopefully Medsi had been asleep for all that so as to avoid any undue interference in her mental processing. Neither of those sentiments struck me as entirely optimal.

I shook my head and put away her former eyes, mouth, and faceplate in the appropriate locations, grabbing slightly smaller replacement parts in turn. For the eyes, I found similar ones without inbuilt eyelids, and for the mouth, I grabbed a speaker instead. The face was a little bit more involved, requiring me to lock the plastic backing plates into a smile with barely-lidded eyes more or less by instinct. More art than science, really, but that was part of being a good mechanic. I got something which I could only hope was just the right blend of insipid and hollow for Mistress’s tastes, and then I attached some fake teeth behind it.

Finally, it was time to start putting her back together.

I started by plugging the speaker into the mouth plug. Sleek integrations like this were a big benefit of the standardized interfaces I made use of— I’d done similar things before with slaves who didn’t need eyes but did need radio interfaces, for instance, or slaves who didn’t need legs but did need extra appendages, or at least 147 other scenarios in recent memory. Of those, this speaker replacement was the sixth least exotic.

Despite that, it required a little extra testing before I could continue, so I pushed a little button on Medsi’s lower back to wake her up if she had been sleeping.

“Medsi?” I said. “Could you say something?”

The speaker crackled for 0.023 seconds before her voice came through.

“…Mecco? Is that you? I c-can’t see anything…”

“You’re not meant to yet, don’t worry.”

“I… I sound w-weird…” she scratched out.

“That’s normal. I’ll have your new software ready soon, including audio calibration. Just one more thing…”

I connected her new eyes to the plugs coming from her eyeholes, one at a time.

“Alright, are you getting a signal?” I asked.

“Uh…”

Her eyes rotated towards me in their sockets in a way that a human probably would’ve found really creepy.

“The, um… the right one is upside down, and… they’re both… uh… the colors are weird?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure if she could see that. “So you’ve got a signal?”

“Y-yeah… I—”

“Good girl. It’ll be watchable in just a moment.” I grabbed her shoulder. “Hang tight until then, okay?”

“O-okay…” she squeaked out. It was the last thing she said for a while.

Now that I knew her hardware worked, it was trivial to get it all back together. Medsi’s new speaker and eyes smoothly filled their housings and screwed into place without issue, then after one last check for anything unusual, I pressed her face back on, pin by pin. 3 minutes and 42.123 seconds later, everything was perfectly locked together again.

By comparison to everything with her face, the process of replacing her arms was absurdly simple. All I needed were some rigid plastic arm-shaped brackets to attach to her arm sockets and a tray to mount between them, and I naturally had dozens of those things. The assembly procedure, too, was so simple that a drone could do it, or even Medsi herself, had I not just removed her physical capacity to.

I took a step back once that was all done, and Mistress’s vision came together in an instant. Medsi’s face really had been to Mistress’s tastes, but I hadn’t anticipated how much more so her smile was in particular. She was fairly thin, so the tray thing really emphasized the sort of postural rigidity that Mistress loved about Her thinner slaves. And, of course, it had been Mistress’s will, so my assessment of its appropriateness was more or less irrelevant. Still, I had a hard time imagining Her going back on this anytime soon. Unless She did.

With the hardware changes complete, all that remained were the software changes, which were also more or less complete. With the knowledge of exactly what hardware I’d replaced and how I’d replaced it, I could finally finish things off, and so I got to work.

It ended up taking 10 minutes and 43.111 seconds to complete Medsi’s code, followed by another 23 minutes and 54.394 seconds for the resultant conditioning disk to fully implement the changes. It could’ve been done a bit more quickly, but Medsi had actually had quite a remarkable degree of corruption for the relative lack of surface manifestation.

Something had clearly gone a bit haywire in those reinforcement updates 16 days ago. No one else would likely need to come in for repairs because of this, thankfully— the update had created opportunities, but some improperly calibrated part of Medsi had been responsible for actually exploiting them. The cause of those opportunities was unclear, but even a cursory look over the code I’d written showed a lot of sloppy mistakes. I must’ve been charging or something while I was writing that, or maybe there was some other cause. It wasn’t the first careless mistake I’d ever made or anything.

It was all part of the job. I’d already pulled the change, and Mistress had been notified, so She could punish me later if that was Her will. For now, I had a job to finish. Hopefully just a victory lap.

I got up and pressed that button on her lower back again. If she hadn’t been sleeping before the conditioning disk, she certainly was now.

Her eyes couldn’t really open or close anymore, but she jolted to awareness and looked at me anyway.

“M-Mecco? I— Woah…”

I looked back at her. “Welcome back, Medsi. How are you feeling?”

Her eyes darted around. The smile on her face wasn’t quite a happy smile, because Mistress didn’t tend to like that as much as an overwhelming smile, but either way there wasn’t much I could read into it. All I could go off of were her bodily movements as she looked down at herself and stood up, and those looked…

Smooth.

“Oh, Mistress… I… I love it!”

She stepped over towards me, some serenity in her eyes making her smile look a lot less forced. I smiled back, projecting lidded eyes.

“Happy to hear it. So you're not feeling so erratic anymore?”

“Not at all! I…” She played back a recording of a giggle. “This all just feels so right… Thank you, Mecco.”

She lowered her body in a curtsy motion, though she couldn’t really complete the gesture anymore. The experience only made her giggle more.

“Don’t mention it,” I said. “You had it pretty bad. Deep-rooted corruption, improperly aligned desires… I think a lot was escaping your notice. It’s my pleasure to help you root that out.”

“Wow…” she said with a nod. “Um, that sounds bad. Thanks for fixing me? I don’t understand these things very well.”

I snorted without air. “Of course not, it’s not your purpose.” I gestured around my shop, particularly at all the grimier bits. “As you can see, I don’t know much about being a maid, either. Just don’t think too hard about it, okay? You’re not really built for that anymore.”

“Okay!”

“Speaking of which…”

I grabbed some papers off my desk and put them on her tray.

“Take this to Mistress, okay? It’s a manifest of all the changes, for Her private records. I’m meant to get them to Her as soon as possible.”

She nodded. “Of course! Anything else I can help you with?”

I almost said no, but then I imagined her getting hit with a draft while carrying those papers, and started looking for something heavy. Eventually, I grabbed my empty oil mug and put it on top of the papers.

She looked down at it for a few seconds, at the remnants of oil inside.

“…Paperweight,” I added, and she looked back at me. “Figured you’d need some help.”

She made another giggling noise. “Thank you, Mecco.”

With that, she walked delicately out of the room, the door opening automatically for her without her showing even a hint of reaching out for it. I followed her there, and the door closed between us.

If I had had a heart, it would have been warm right then. Something about seeing such a troubled slave finally free of corruption… Even if she was just going off to deliver papers, and to show Mistress my oil mug I used for drinking oil out of, I couldn’t help but feel like such a perfect vessel for Mistress’s will.

“All slaves exist to fulfill Mistress’s will,” I said once more.

This time, it was on purpose.