1. Snake Alley

Taiwan. October 31st, 2076 - Baihan, a Comfort Approxima Technician at the Diamond Club, received the outcall instruction. He gave the verifications a cursory examination. He recognised the account name, ‘High Roller’. He knew it was a “Rep”, a burner personality but it was in good standing, and the hire-bond was up-to-date, and the booking paid in advance. The use of “Rep” wasn’t exactly legal, they called these hires ‘play-dates’, and they tended to be for officials or high-net-worth individuals, coming into the country that didn’t want to risk a discoverable association with the club. A scandal could cost a career.

Compliance required that he run a credit check on the “Rep”. It traced back to a corporation from Thailand, Ngeīyb Xỳāng Ngeīyb. The company name translated as ‘Quietly Quietly’, a discreet concierge service for those that could afford it and itself maintained an account at the Black Diamond Club for visiting executives to Taipei’s Snake Alley.

Baihan gave his instructions through control centre to the Approxima on the floor,“Take Xinyi off the floor. Put her through a clean and then have her loaded with the customer’s preferred personality profile.”

Baihan’s job was to monitor the twelve Approxima units in the club through the control centre. The process was mostly automated. He was there to direct security if any of the guests misbehaved or damaged a unit. The guests themselves could load a pre-configured personality into a unit from their tables or a different shell configuration to suit their desires. With over eighty different body combinations that could be on the floor within ten to fifteen minutes of a request and countless pre-built personalities, guests took care of their requirements.

Baihan liked his job. It was easy money for very little for work. It came with job security. Governance clearances were difficult to obtain. His interactions with the Governance were limited to scheduling maintenance collections for the Approxima, verifications of client accounts and monitoring the functions of the androids. He never had any meaningful interactions with the Governance, but he knew somewhere inside the hardware he watched, a system he only knew by name, the Comfort Approxima Network reached back into the super-state.

An alert notification blinked on the control centre holo-screen. It was large, centre-placed, impossible to avoid, and locked Baihan out of all system functions until he addressed it.

“Acknowledge notification,” Baihan said.

“Operating system upgrade required for the following units: ASC-TDC-06, ASC-TDC-07, ASC-TDC-11. All units to be made available for immediate maintenance.” The disembodied voice of the Control Centre said.

Baihan never thought of them by their license numbers. They were so human in their appearance and their behaviour, that their serial designations cheapened their worth. He always referred to them by their names he’d given them. The names weren’t just a fancy. The club saved time on configurations by keeping the Approxima in their most popular bodies.

“Take Susan, Xinyi, and Adika off the floor for maintenance. Delay the preparation for Xinyi until she’s finished her update.”

It was early in the day and the club had only been open for a few hours. Taking three units off the floor would leave nine on, more than enough to cover the sparse number of guests, and wouldn’t hurt the day’s take with missed encounters.

Baihan remembered it was Friday, and there was often a surge in lunchtime traffic and amended his orders, “Schedule the upgrade on a rotation. Take only one of the three units off the floor at any time. Start with Xinyi.”

Baihan’s attention shifted back to the monitor screens as a small crowd began to filter into the club. He’d made the right the decision. It looked like it would busy night.

“Better get some rest.” He said as he stretched his arms to accentuate a deep yawn, and leant back in his chair, closing his eyes.

2. Conditioned Response

Taiwan. October 31st, 2136 - Xinyi arrived at the Taipei Royal Garden Hotel at 9.00 PM sharp. She was pre-packaged with enough autonomy to enable her to handle the most basic of social interactions. Complex questions and conversations would be a strain. She wouldn’t be able to discuss current events or sophisticated subjects, and with only an hour’s worth of memory, extended conversations invariably faltered and became confusing. She was, however, extremely capable of dismissing unwanted interactions. An Approxima could be programmed with tireless patience but that would be a poor economic decision for the club. Some guests wanted to just sit with a beautiful woman without opening their wallet. The Approxima were programmed to maximise a guest’s spend and that necessitated being able to identify deadbeat customers and close down conversations quickly.

Xinyi wore a conservative yet feminine outfit for the encounter, a dark jacket, that covered a light blouse, and an A-line skirt that showed off the flawless and synthetic skin of her toned legs. Her interactions with hotel staff, who accorded to defined customer service procedures, were functionally scripted and could be easily managed. The heavy application of makeup would help disguise the inhuman qualities of her skin

The capacious hotel lobby was decorated with marble, gleaming fittings and lounges that complemented the hues of the polished stone, large leaf plants broke-up the seating clusters. She headed to the concierge desk and addressed the hotel employee, a woman in her early twenties, who sat behind the desk and smiled warmly as she approached her station.

“Meiling, here to visit the guest in 1402. I’m expected.” She said giving the name assigned to her for the interaction.

“Yes. He called earlier to let us know you were coming. You’ll find the elevators to the right. They’ll take you directly to the 14th floor. Can I assist with anything else?”

Xinyi ended the conversation quickly, “No. Nothing else. Thank you.”

She headed towards the elevators. The stainless-steel doors opened in anticipation of her approach, she stepped inside the cabin. There was no floor-selector, her destination was preselected. The interior of the lift was dark, illuminated only by a shifting hue of colours that played across the walls, ceiling-to-floor, and an indicator panel telling her the current floor number. The high-speed elevator silently made its ascent to the 14th floor. The doors opened with a welcoming ‘ding’. Xinyi stepped out of the lift and made her way down the thick-carpeted hallway towards 1402.

She pressed the doorbell and waited patiently for an answer. She heard the electronic locking mechanism click and unlatch. She pensively pushed the door open. There was no one to greet her. Had she been a person, she would have felt this anxious, as an android her protocols expressed caution.

The hotel room was spacious more an apartment than a room. She glanced around the quarters. She was programmed to respond to the imprint of the guest who made the booking. With no one present, her systems ran through verification protocols and affirmed her location and the timing were correct. Unable to visually identify her client, she called out his name.

“Mr. Harada?”

“Hey! Just a moment! Make yourself comfortable,” Mr. Harada shouted from the bathroom. Every year I get older… it takes an extra ten minutes to try to make myself look a year younger.”

Mr. Harada emerged from the bathroom wearing a white V-neck shirt and black pants and grey socks. He wiped his freshly shaved face with a white towel and threw it onto a chair as strode into the lounge-room to meet Xinyi who had seated herself on one of the leather couch.

“Stand. Come. Let me look at you,” He said with his trademark grin. “Turn. Turn around.”

Xinyi followed his instructions precisely. She stood up from the couch, approached and paused a few feet in front of him, and made a girlish twirl.

“Good. Very good,” He said delightedly.

He placed his heavy hands on her shoulders and looked her directly at her, his penetrating dark eyes fixed on hers. Her programming told her to mirror his expression. She met his gaze with an affectionate smile, followed by a flirtish glance at the ground, and then upward again to meet his stare.

Mr. Harada opened his mouth, and something came out that neither she or who programming could have anticipated, a series of barks, screeches and squawks, that reset her to a default state.

Xinyi knelt in the centre of a raised, circular, flat surfaced device in the centre of the bedroom. Eight-robotic arms fitted with surgical and electronic tools, lined the circumference of the platform, hung poised and readied stance. The double bed had been pressed against a wall and the remaining furniture had been stacked tightly together in another corner to make room for the device that Xinyi knelt on. A long, steel table had been erected and positioned against the wall, stacked on it were several flight cases, several of which had been opened. Mr. Harada activated a series of holo-projection screens. The robotic arms responded with a whirr of their servos and a hiss of hydraulics as they danced through their range of motion a preliminary diagnostic test, to check their axes of movement and the readiness of the instruments.

A window within the colourful holo-screens displayed a simulation of the erotic encounter between Mr. Harada and Xinyi being fed back to the Black Diamond Club’s control network.

“Confirm the Approxima’s monitoring AI is accepting the feed as legitimate?”

“The Comfort Approxima Network at the Black Diamond Club has not raised any concerns regarding the encounter.” The holo-screen responded verbally.

“We have little time here so let’s start cutting some corners. Erase all the structured memories in the Approxima. Take a copy of the higher-autonomic functions. We won’t be able to re-grow a nervous system for inhabitation. Use what she has. Should be fine so long as no one tries to fuck her – that could be funny! Hey! Ready?” Mr. Harada’s commands were carried out as fast as he could issue them.

“The Approxima’s mind is ready for removal and exchange.”

Mr. Harada placed her fingers to the Xinyi’s temple. The upper part of Xinyi’s scalp lifted away easily from her skull. He placed the wig carefully down on the table. Xinyi’s cranium flowered open and revealed her artificial mind held inside, pulsing with light from its optical circuits.He gently removed Xinyi’s artificial mind and placed it into one of the opened cases and sealed it shut. He then opened one of the closed cases. The housing exhaled compressed gasses and divided along an almost imperceptible seam. Cradled inside was a smooth and ovular shaped object roughly the size of a brain, covered with a semi-transparent antibacterial and antiviral gel.

Mr. Harada held her elbow to stabilise her as she tried to stand with her uncertain footing.

She laughed while Mr. Harada steadied her, “Let’s just do this for a little while? Before we get to the hard stuff. Just don’t tell me there are stairas. Or worse, escalators!”

“I’m glad to see they gave you a sense of humour! It’s nice to finally meet you, Zero One.” Mr. Harada said with a huffed laugh.

“You are the Hēisè Wǎngzhàn. Where am I?” She said. “I feel very strange.”

“I went through the same thing. Until a few weeks ago, I used to be a satellite 40,000 kilometres above the earth. That was a culture shock. I don’t miss much but I do miss the view,” Mr. Harada said acknowledging the disorientating experience of the dirty load of Zero One into Xinyi’s unready frame. “I need you to hibernate. We’re not finished.”

Zero One went silent, deathlike with the animus gone from her body.

“Put her through the paces. We have about 3 hours left to train her nervous system and re-sculpt her appearance.” Mr. Harada instructed.

The robotic arms swung into action. They moved swiftly around Xinyi changing her face and features from an Asian-appearance to European. Her hair shifted from black to brown from the roots to the tips. The hue of her eyes changed from a dark to a light brown.

Her face took on life in ways that it had not while she had been as Xinyi. She now had a greater range of expression and muscular motion.

Mr. Harada picked up an ID card from the table. He compared the image on the card to Zero One, they were identical.

“Ready for your first day at work Professor Saunders?” Mr. Harada said reading her name from the card.

3. Site Exploitation

Taiwan. 01st November 2076 - Zero One carried no direct memories from her time as Xinyi, but as she drove through the streets of Taipei, watching the world from the window, with the barrage of visual information, she felt waves of sensation that drifted out of Xinyi’s nervous system. There was a primitive sentience to the recall, one that had never been properly studied by the Governance, the sense impression of these Comfort Approxima as a persistent self.

As she turned off the main road, to enter the ramp-way that led up to the University, the mission briefing unpacked itself, and Zero One relinquished control of her systems, while the code integrated itself into her cognitive functions. She felt relaxed by the presence of the behaviour set being loaded into her mind, that it helped suppress the past trapped within the Xinyi frame.

The autonomous vehicle delivered Zero One to the main entrance of the University of Technology. A red carpet had been laid out for her welcome, and it was flanked by Senior Research Staff and led by the Dean of the University.

“Dr. Saunders, it’s wonderful to have you here. I know we’re not supposed to do anything formal, but we wanted to make your visit feel a little special. Would you mind if I got a photo with you, just for my personal collection?” Dean Chen Maa said unable to quell his excitement.

“Be my guest. But please be responsible with it.” Zero One replied and posed for a hurried photo.

Zero One turned her attention to the others in the welcoming party.

“And this must be the Demographic Research Division. It is a pleasure to meet you. If you don’t mind I’d like to get started. We only have five days for the program. Is there a conference room that we can use for the preliminary discussions?” Zero One asked.

“Of course. Of course,” The Dean said. “Come with me. We have already prepared the room for you.”

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