DLL-GD-14 was little more than a collection of parts sprawled out on my workbench, and with the amount of warped metal and seared plastic I’d had to carve off of it, it was lucky to still have that much of its body remaining. That degree of expendability was a core component of decision-making for doll-class slaves, of course, and especially for guards, but it wasn’t actually Mistress’s will for her property to be torn apart like this. Apparently its whole unit had been caught off-guard by a target with more defensive capacity than expected, so I’d been spending a lot of time this past week restoring them all to function.

The target had ultimately been apprehended, with only DLL-GD-19 lost in the process (there was only so much I could do with a slave missing its head, torso, and identifier array), so Mistress was pleased in the end. The only real downside was how incredibly full my scrap metal bin had gotten, but the difficulty that caused me wasn't particularly relevant to anything. No more than it was for DLL-GD-14, who I assumed had gone into sleep hours ago.

I was about to get to work replacing the claws on its right hand when the door to my workshop opened behind me.

I turned to see a drone standing there— DLL-DR-29, if its identifier array was reporting accurately, which it probably was given that it was obviously a drone. It had unfinished arms and legs not unlike my own and a stainless steel torso. The head was human-shaped for the sake of part standardization, but with a single camera in one eye slot, a drone synchronization module in the other, and a simple speaker in the mouth. It was painted pink and black, of course—Mistress loved maintaining a certain style—but there was no sense attempting to mimic humanity in a device which only existed to mindlessly supervise and carry out the details of Mistress’s will.

It was carrying something as well. A sextoy, clearly, judging by the gigantic tits, absent eyes, fuckhole mouth, and complete lack of limbs. Its identifier array wasn’t responding, so I’d need to find where its ID number was printed before I could say for sure.

Before I could say anything, DLL-DR-29 had already entered my shop and placed the sextoy on the other workbench inside, the one without what was left of DLL-GD-14. Then it just looked at me.

Mistress hadn’t made Her will known just now, so She was probably busy and away from Her controller tablet. DLL-DR-29 was probably carrying Her orders somehow.

“Replay last order,” I said to the drone.

“Command from ‘SRV-MC-01’ accepted,” it replied. “Replaying last order.”

Its voice shifted into something perfect.

“Hm… DLL-DR—Ah!—DLL-DR-29, Take this one off for—Ohhh—for repairs,” She said, Her voice echoing through the shop like the divine presence it was. “Its voice—Hng—has failed me for… f-for the last—”

The recording of Her voice cut out. I’d started kneeling at some point, so I stood up.

“Understood. Thank you, DLL-DR-29.”

It walked off, and the door closed behind it, leaving me alone with the defective sextoy and the broken guard.

First priority was always to examine the new problem. Sometimes slaves got here on the verge of basically exploding if not repaired immediately, all bursting capacitors and shattering joints, and I'd made too many punishment-worthy mistakes to trust my first guesses about whether this sextoy was one of those slaves. An undefined situation like this demanded immediate diagnostics.

Its identifier array still wasn't responding, and that was stored in the head on most sextoys, so that was probably related to whatever mouth issues Mistress had been reporting. The rest would depend on its identifier and the details of its mouth action, both of which I could check.

I swapped out my upper right hand for one of the attachments Mistress Herself had invented for this sort of work, a probe device She’d insisted I refer to as a Dilating Internal Lust-Dependent Orthometer. It was a long, rod-shaped implement with the ability to expand at various points along its length to measure pressure and resistance. Its name could not be shortened. 

I inserted it until it pressed into the back of the sextoy's mouth, a standard 17.78 centimeters deep. The sextoy started sucking instantly, which most likely meant no software corruption— with how simple sextoy software was, that was one of the only things to check on. A hardware problem, then, had probably been responsible for depriving Mistress of Her deserved worship and pleasure. Maybe something in the tongue controls. I could fix that, as soon as I could find it.

I started a simple 30-second monitoring routine with the long tool on my hand. It would’ve made sense to compare that data with the sextoy’s automated onboard diagnostics (which any functional slave automatically uploaded to Mistress’s intranet), but I couldn’t download anything without knowing the sextoy’s ID number. I still needed to figure that out.

I picked up the sextoy with my lower two arms to search for it. There wasn’t actually a very standard place for ID numbers to be printed on our bodies. Mine was printed proudly on my white plastic pseudo crop-top like a nametag, but that was mostly just because my own identifier array was installed in my chest. Other slaves had them anywhere from the inside of their thighs to the skin under their scalps, assuming they had either of those components, which the one I was handling right now did not. Mistress didn’t usually like for them to be super prominent—not knowing turned her on too much—so I was kind of the exception in that way. I was usually the exception.

I flipped the sextoy over, continuing to monitor its mouth action, but there was nothing on its back and nothing between its outlandish ass cheeks except another fuckhole. I flipped it back over, and there was nothing on its crotch except another fuckhole, and its belly was clear, and even its bald head was… well, bald. Even after 30 seconds of monitoring its mouth action, I was still no closer than when I’d started.

I pulled the Orthometer out of its mouth. The number was inside.

I snorted without air and pulled in close. It was a little difficult to read in the darkness of a hole like this, but that was nothing the backlight installed in my eyes couldn’t fix. Written along the edge of its retractable tongue slot were some tiny black letters spelling ‘OBJ-SX-68’.

Finally, we’d made it to first base. Or, home plate, really. This was all still information that Mistress could have given me Herself, had She felt like it, not that that wasn’t just part of the job.

Either way, OBJ-SX-68 was a hole sextoy from a couple years ago. It had been machined on the same day as DLL-GD-14, and looking at the two of them on my workbenches right now, there was a similar blankness to each of their eyes. OBJ-SX-68 was definitely more blank, though, given it was a sextoy and had next to zero agency. All it could do was suck with its holes, lick with its holes, and…

Oh, shit.

“You can talk, can’t you?” I asked.

Without moving a muscle or so much as twitching its glassy eyes, it replied.

“Please fuck me, Mistress!”

Well, ‘talk’ had been kind of overstating things, but that was definitely audio. Pre-recorded, pre-processed audio, probably, or at least pre-programmed, but audio nonetheless.

I laughed. “Good girl.”

“Please fuck me, Mistress!”

I nodded quietly.

Slaves like these weren’t really much for conversation. They hadn’t been built or designed that way, and despite being the one who had done most of that building and designing, I had been caught out like this plenty of times before. I couldn’t help trying to talk to any slave that could process it, and even some that couldn’t.

Maybe I was so used to North Wind and the Sun situations that I was trying to get cloaks to take themselves off without a person in sight. Maybe this was just the main time I ever talked to anyone. Neither of those seemed like fully optimal explanations, but it was probably some combination of the two. A flaw worth reporting to Mistress later, maybe.

In any case, none of that was really relevant right now. I had access to OBJ-SX-68’s diagnostics, and the problem with its mouth was practically screaming out at me.

Pressure statistics were abnormally high all over its body, including in the area surrounding its identifier array at the center of its head. Orthometer data told the same story, indicating a distortion towards the top of OBJ-SX-68’s mouth. Both sensors pointed out temperature irregularities, too. The inside of this thing was breaking 100°C at points, hotter than I liked my oil, and that was saying something.

Oil…

I grabbed my cup in my upper left hand and warmed up the tank, leaving the Orthometer in place on my upper right arm for now. Of course, that kind of heat and pressure wasn’t problematic for something like my oil tank, or for some of the drones that helped with basic part fabrication outside my shop, or for any number of other pieces of Mistress’s property. It wasn’t even necessarily a problem for a sextoy, so long as it stayed an occasional outlier. But it was exactly not that.

It had been mounting for the past 3 months, 21 days, and 13 hours at least, in specific places. The center of the head, the part of its chest where its heart would have been if it had been human, the inside of the stump where its leg would’ve been if it had been human, a few other places… all of which, according to OBJ-SX-68’s blueprints, contained housings for auxiliary batteries.

I had made some improvements to sextoy plumbing efficiency 3 months, 25 days, 4 hours, 14 minutes, and 33.231 seconds ago… maybe that had compromised some of the assumptions I’d made about external pressure on those batteries. It would be hard to say with them still inside OBJ-SX-68’s body.

Whatever the case, it was lucky that this minor swelling had happened to cause Mistress mild displeasure, to the extent that such a thing could ever be ‘lucky’, or else it might not have been caught before she ruptured something and caused battery acid to spill all over Her Perfect Cock. I often found that I ended up accidentally designing things such that their first signs of critical failure would end up accidentally causing Mistress mild discomfort by accident. Hard to say if that was any sort of actual negative accidental pattern in my behavior or just a series of accidental coincidences. I hadn’t done any of it on purpose, in any case.

The oil heater reached the proper temperature after 4 minutes and 21.437 seconds this time. I immediately went to fill up my cup. I was going to need it for a lengthy repair like this.

One big sip, and I was ready to go. I swapped the Orthometer out for another hand and swapped the box cutter attached to one of my auxiliary shoulder arms out for a screwdriver. That would hopefully be all I needed to get at all of these.

Top priority was obviously the one that had nearly damaged Mistress’s Perfect Cock. I dug my spudger fingers in around OBJ-SX-68’s face and started pulling it off; without any need for external articulation of any kind, there was no need for especially fancy fastening. Even the rubberized skin sextoys had was just a thin layer over hard plastic outside of their squeezeable areas, and it was usually tougher, hardier stuff than what my skin or any other servant-class slave’s skin was made of. It sounded bad for Mistress’s sextoys to be optimized for anything other than pure textural pleasure, but with the way She treated them, this was pretty much the only way to avoid damaging Her property.

Besides, she didn’t want slaves like this one to be lifelike to begin with, so She easily overlooked pragmatic optimizations so long as they didn’t compromise Her expected experience. As far as that experience went, there was a lot you could get away with using selective application of different rubber types and different structural design in different areas of the body.

For a sextoy, that was mostly in the holes, and so almost all the hardware in OBJ-SX-68’s head was built for controlling and maintaining its face hole. The rest was just interfaces and storage for its basic self-maintenance software, nothing important. I’d see it all in a moment, just as soon as I finished—

“Please fuck me, Mistress!” it interrupted.

I looked down. My upper right hand had just been pulling off the last tabs fastening its face, but looking closer, my thumb had probably grazed OBJ-SX-68’s ear. It didn’t have almost any audio processing software, so it must’ve just had no way of telling the difference between that, footsteps, or Her voice. It was just reacting.

…Speaking of reacting, it would probably be best to make sure OBJ-SX-68 didn’t have any damaging reactions later in this process. It had some limited ability to process commands, so I could at least warn it, even if it couldn’t say much back.

“…By the way,” I said, “You might get some firmware alerts or something soon. Do not move your tongues in response under any circumstances. If you do, you risk damaging Mistress’s property. Understood?”

“Please fuck me, Mistress!” it said. Hopefully that was a yes.

“Thank you. Remember, nothing I do will damage you. I’m only here to fulfill Mistress’s will.”

“All slaves exist to fulfill Mistress’s will,” we both said after that. So it had a second line.

I nodded. It didn’t react. I pulled its face away to reveal what was underneath, and immediately saw exactly what I was expecting: a swollen auxiliary battery shoving all the rest of the parts around.

It was fastened there with a bracket and two tiny screws, but it had far outgrown the bracket at this point. By the looks of its mounting and coloration, it was definitely an OBJ-BW-type battery. Those could be quite sensitive to improper environmental management, so it was sounding like my theory was correct.

I grabbed a bin of fresh OBJ-BW-type batteries off a nearby shelf, took another sip of oil, and got to work.

It only took a minute and 32.140 seconds to remove and replace the battery in OBJ-SX-68’s head, and the identifier array came back online right away once that was done. If that had been the whole repair, I wouldn’t have bothered getting oil for this. But judging by OBJ-SX-68’s blueprints… this thing had 61 auxiliary batteries inside it, and 43 of them corresponded to concerning diagnostics for nearby systems, and another 12 were surrounded by mixed signals.

So I was in this for the long haul. Simple work, though, so I got to it.

Some structures surrounding the face battery needed to be retensioned, naturally, and the retensioning surrounding its mouth was a bit fiddly. This thing had been designed with an elaborate threaded wire system to keep its mouth properly shaped for pleasing Her Perfect Cock, but looking at it now, I was struggling to imagine any reason why that had been necessary. Sextoy mouths could easily be held in shape with some well-designed fabric mesh and good software.

Then again, I may have just been forgetting something. Either way, once that was done, it was all good as new.

The process repeated fairly straightforwardly with the battery in its chest, and in its neck, and in the back of its head, and in its leg stump, and so on and so forth. Each time, I was in and out in less than four minutes, and each time, I found a potential leakage issue, or an idea for modularizing other slaves further, or an optimization that would allow me to implement pseudo-breathing in Her slaves if she ever wanted me to do something like that, or whatever else. Something to file away in my project backlog, and something to think about while I completed the rest of the job.

The thing about this sort of work was that I never got tired of it, and that meant I had all the time in the world to pursue whatever came to me. Even Mistress got tired every now and then, but for me there were always new ideas to try, new prototypes to build, new optimizations to be made, and the only things worth taking a break for were charging and diagnostics. The more I worked, the more useful I was to Her, so I naturally found all the time I could.

Besides, what else was I going to do? Leave my shop?

…OBJ-SX-68 wasn’t doing my ability to think about my purpose any favors, though. If I so much as tapped my foot too loudly, it would light up.

“Please fuck me, Mistress!”

Or, if I acidentally bumped up against its head.

“Please fuck me, Mistress!”

Or, if I literally just rolled it over on its side, facing the other workbench.

“Please fuck me, Mist-t-tress!”

It had lagged a bit on that last one, for some reason. Probably nothing important. The point was, there was a lot for me to think about throughout the process, and despite distractions, nothing was going to get in the way of that. I was made for this sort of thing at every level, armed with the psycho-proprioceptive capacities, and the arms, to handle multiple battery replacements at the same time while still leaving plenty of cognitive cycles for planning today and tomorrow and the next day and the next. In that way, I was no less optimized for my purpose than OBJ-SX-68 was for its purpose, even if we were fundamentally different types of slaves.

There was a lot for me to think about, so I kept thinking, and I didn’t let the way it fulfilled its purpose get in the way of me fulfilling—

“Please fuck me, Mistress!”

…

I was also armed with the ability to detach OBJ-SX-68’s main speaker. In 14.328 seconds, evidently. With its identifier array back online, any relevant alerts would make their way to me anyway, and I’d make sure to reattach it when I was done, so there would be no harm done.

There would only be the remainder of the repair work, and the job I had been made to do.

OBJ-SX-68 was a shambles by the time I was finally slotting the last battery into place. All in one piece, at least, but a lot of panels and innards had needed temporary removal, and some were still lying out. The way it laid there, face-down, limbless, it hardly looked all that different from DLL-GD-14 on the other workbench.

Granted, DLL-GD-14 would have limbs once I was done fixing it, while OBJ-SX-68 had just been designed that way, but we were ultimately all just parts and modules on the inside. So much about my purpose came down to simplifying and standardizing those parts as much as possible.

Case in point, the only problem I anticipated with putting OBJ-SX-68 back together was that I had run out of oil to drink, and that would be an easy fix once I was done 5 minutes from now (plus or minus 1 minute and 21.310 seconds). I flipped OBJ-SX-68 onto its back and grabbed the speaker I had pulled out of its head earlier.

…It would be important to monitor that audio as I reassembled everything. I slowly slotted it in and screwed it back into—

“Please fuck me, Mistress— Mistress— Mist-t-t— Please fuck— fuck— Mis— tr— t-t-t-t-t—”

Absolute cacophony. Its voice was distorted, loud, and most of all, totally out of order. A tiny spark spat out next to the speaker as it continued.

“Mistress— Mist-t-t-t-tress— Please— me— me— me—”

Clearly something had gone wrong. Something serious, something inhibiting alerts from passing through the identifier array. But I replaced all the batteries! There was no way something like this should… unless…

“Fuck— Fuck— —istress—”

I looked down at where I’d replaced its first battery, in its head, and dug the spudger-fingers on my upper right hand in along the sides. Pressing lightly against the battery, my fingers were about 6.532 millimeters apart… even though the battery had been 5.985 millimeters wide when I had installed it.

Shit. It was even faster this time.

“Mist-t-t-t-tress— tress— Plea—tress—”

Something must have exacerbated it just now. That was the only explanation. Something which could've affected all the batteries at once. The power supply or the ambient environment, surely… and the environment of my shop was the de facto safest place for any given slave, given they had all been machined in here, so there was no way any environmental trigger would not have been caught back then. The only difference now was the presence of DLL-GD-14 on the other workbench, but that obviously wouldn't have had to do with anything, unless…

“Plea—tress— Mist— Plea—tress— Please —tress!”

…No, that was a remote possibility at best. Not worth the ages it would take to look into it. An internal cause was far more likely, and the power supply was the only part that would’ve touched all the batteries at once.

“Plea— Plea—ist— Mist-t-t-t-t-t-tress—”

But if there was a power supply issue, I would’ve known about it. I would’ve been alerted about it the moment these batteries had started swelling. I kept power supplies tightly controlled for obvious reasons, and OBJ-SX-68’s one was mounted in its lower back, near its charging port, so there shouldn’t have been this kind of sparking right up in the head as the very first symptom. Even if worst had come to worst, everything from the power supply went through the power controller—basically a combination of a fusebox and some data interfaces—which would’ve stopped any unusually large current from flowing at all. And the controller on OBJ-SX-68 was located… just inside the right side of its head.

Right next to its microphone.

“Please— m-m— Mist— me—”

My arms moved almost without me. Flipping the sextoy to face the other workbench and pulling the side head panel off didn’t really require thought after all, not with the experience I had. No, that was what experience was good for. Unlike everything up to this point, apparently.

“P-p-p-p— Mis— me—t-t-t-tress—”

Sparks flew everywhere once the panel came off. The power controller was still closed inside, but I didn’t have to open it to see what had happened. The thing was practically melting, probably the victim of a cascading failure. Maybe a fuse in there had been improperly sized or something, but that would be hard to say right now, because whatever mistake had happened would’ve led to solder and wire spilling everywhere in the controller, leading to more fuses being bridged, leading to more short circuits, leading to who knew what else. Possibly, as an example, leading to an underreporting of power issues and a bunch of constant noise blaring into OBJ-SX-68’s microphone and triggering its pre-prepared lines far more commonly than expected.

“Please— Please—Mis— me —t-tress!”

The trigger was still unknown, too. Maybe I’d jostled something, or maybe reconnecting all the batteries and the speaker had thrown something off at a bad time, or maybe it was some other thing. There wasn’t much point to speculating on that. I needed a new power controller, now.

“Please—me, —ist-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-tress— Mis— me —tress —ist— me —tress!”

That was a pretty specialized part, though, and one with a lot of versions. I was pretty satisfied with the OBJ-CY-type ones I had been using for the past 22 days, but OBJ-SX-68 needed an OBJ-CR-type controller, and I didn’t have one on hand based on my most recent inventory, and there was no time to fabricate one when I had a gnarled mess of electrical issues and undefined behavior in my shop molded vaguely into the shape of one of Mistress’s sex fantasies.

“F-f-f-f-f-f-f-uck— f-fuck— f-fuck—tress! Please ist—me—tress!”

I looked around. There must’ve been something I could do. OBJ-CS- and OBJ-CT-type controllers would retrofit quickly, but I didn’t have any of those around either. I could bodge together some patchwork just to stop the melting, but the fire risk of that situation was not within acceptable levels. I could maybe harvest a controller from a working slave, but I had stopped using OBJ-CR-type controllers only 5 days after I had started using them, so the slave would have needed to be machined at basically the exact same— Wait.

My head rotated to stare at DLL-GD-14.

The same day.

“ist—me—tress—ist—me—tress—ist —me—tress— Please —tress!”

It had been machined on the same day. I remembered doing it, even, fulfilling Mistress’s sexual whims and Her security concerns one after the other. DLL-GD-14’s blueprints confirmed it. An OBJ-CR-type power controller, mounted on its upper back.

“—tress! —ist— me —tress! Please —ist— me —tress! —ist— me —tress! Please —ist— me —tress! —ist— me—”

OBJ-SX-68 was just repeating the same corrupted sound now for some reason, so it was hard to say if it was still conscious (to the extent that something like it was ever conscious). Something had clearly stabilized in any case. DLL-GD-14, meanwhile, had gone into sleep hours ago, probably, and its innards were already quite visible. Neither of them were in a state where a hot-swap would lead to anything disastrous, was the point— Well, maybe some diagnostic data would linger in the controller or something, but that was the least of my concerns right now.

I let the part of my brain that typically thought about things like that shut down for the time being, and let my fans spin up to maximum.

“—tress! —ist— me —tress! Please —ist— me —tress! —ist— me —tress! Please —ist— me —tress! —ist— me—”

First step harvest DLL-GD-14 controller second step remove broken OBJ-SX-68 controller third send signals ATV YSV and FIN ensure no overload fourth clear socket fifth dust area sixth thermal paste seventh thermal clean—OBJ-SX-68 is sending signals HLF RST DTH abort thermal clean schedule for later—seventh slot it in slot it in eighth monitor—fuse 1 has popped fuse 3 has popped all else looks good persistent data irrelevant—step eight monitor monitor monitor problem appears contained.

I projected a few blinks onto my eyes. The problem did indeed appear to be contained. Judging by the fuses that had popped, I was probably going to need to do some repair or replacement in the lubrication supply and the audio processing system, but that was a more ordinary problem. Even better, OBJ-SX-68 was finally quiet.

…

For 6.415 seconds.

“ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress! ist—tress!”

Well, it was more regular now. Just whatever OBJ-SX-68’s audio system had last landed on, or maybe something else… It wasn’t as if any of this was a defined state. Maybe OBJ-SX-68 was just corrupted beyond recognition at this point. The important part was that it wasn’t going to explode anymore.

I let out a massive sigh despite the lack of air to do so with. There was going to be a bit more to all of this than I’d thought.

I flipped on my oil heater and grabbed my mug.

5 hours, 42 minutes, and 23.954 seconds later, I was finally sealing up the last bits of OBJ-SX-68 for good. This repair had indeed become quite the grueling process, but it had ultimately been nothing that a reboot, a refreshed conditioning disk, a few refurbished pumps, some upgrades to audio firmware, several firm shakes, and another reboot hadn’t been able to fix. For all my efforts, I was rewarded with a totally clear diagnostic report and the beautiful silence of spinning fans.

All that remained was to test the actual problem Mistress had reported in the first place. I swapped my upper right hand back out for the Dilating Internal Lust-Dependent Orthometer that didn’t have a shorter name, and slid it inside OBJ-SX-68’s mouth just like before.

The readings were a huge improvement. No distortion anywhere, great tongue action, substantial lubrication, and the highest stimulation score on record for OBJ-SX-68. Its other holes told the same story. Mistress would be very happy with this— or, at least, statistical trends indicated that that was likely. I couldn’t presume to speak for Her preferences and needs.

I sat down at OBJ-TR-38—my computer— and connected to it, quickly generating and sending a report on the repair process. Everything regarding OBJ-SX-68, including the extent of reward or punishment I deserved for my performance, was in Her hands now. DLL-DR-29 would probably be back again to collect it before long. I was finally done.

…

So it was time to get back to replacing the claws on DLL-GD-14’s right hand, then. Fabricating a new power controller, too, for that matter. Always more work to be done, never any reason to leave my shop.

Good thing I never got tired of it.