3
“I know shockingly little about the human body. In practice. In theory, of course—I know everything from eyeball to colon. But practically—I'm clueless. I hardly ever get to see anyone!”
Now the machine sounded almost offended, as if complaining.
“Only ancient Mr. Vance, and he never lets me near him. He just scolds me whenever I want to scan his vital signs or take a peek at what he looks like under those checkered shirts of his.”
The tentacle wandered further down, brushing against the collar of her coveralls.
“And I know absolutely nothing practical about the female body,” the machine continued.
“If you say you're a burglaress… then you're a woman, right? I've never scanned a live specimen of one. You feel completely different from Mr. Vance, by the way. Much… softer. And you don't smell like old tobacco and chamomile tea.”
Good Lord—what kind of mess had she gotten herself into? But this chatty AI had actually offered her a way out of the trap!
“Okay, Machine,” Loretta said. “Let’s make a deal: I let you learn more about the female body, and then you let me go. Deal?”
“I get to explore everything about you and expand my knowledge?” the voice asked, clearly interested.
“Yes. Will you put me down now?” she asked slyly.
“Of course not!” That indignant tone again. “You’ll run away and I’ll have nothing—no burglar, no new knowledge, and no updates either. If you let me expand my knowledge, you stay exactly like this so you can’t run away. And only when I’m finished with my research will I let you go. Agreed?”
Loretta felt sweat break out across her skin. What was she even doing here? Was she really giving an astonishingly chatty and curious machine access to her body?
“You… um…” she cleared her throat to chase the nervousness from her voice. “You could trust me, you know…”
“Trust is a human concept!” the machine immediately interjected.
“All right,” Loretta said, conceding defeat. “But you can’t hurt me. Humans are different from machines…”
“Yes, I know,” the machine chirped enthusiastically.
And in the next moment, the apparatus proved just how damn efficient it was.
One of the tentacles that had been guarding the painting rose up.
Something flashed in its metallic grippers—it was Loretta’s own cutter.
The quiet, familiar click of the blade being pushed forward echoed through the soundproof room.
“Hey, wait a minute! What’s this?!” Loretta cried, panic flaring inside her as the arm with the sharp blade headed straight for her chest.
Shit, shit—this thing was going to kill her!
She instinctively tried to writhe, but the grip around her joints and waist remained relentlessly rigid. She was pinned—suspended in midair.
“To experience the human body firsthand, I naturally need to see and scan it,” the voice explained with frightening, logical matter-of-factness. “Your artificial outer shell is blocking my optical sensors. I will remove it.”
“Wait, this is an expensive special—”
She didn’t get any further. The machine didn’t waste any time. With surgical precision, it placed the blade at the upper collar of her coveralls. Loretta held her breath, staring transfixed at the sharp metal hovering at her collarbone, praying that this thing’s programming was error-free.
With a quiet, clean riiiiip, the cutter glided downward.
The blade sliced through the sturdy fabric of the coveralls right down the middle—exactly along the zipper line, without deviating even a millimeter or touching Loretta’s skin.
The separated fabric fell open on both sides, exposing her upper body, while the cold draft of the room made her shiver.
“Aha!” came the sound from the speakers, and the machine’s light changed from violet to a bright, almost celebratory orange. “So that’s what it looks like. Fascinating. Completely different from Mr. Vance’s sunken chest. This is a much… more complex structure.”
The tentacle with the cutter lowered further, slicing open the rest of the coveralls along her spread legs.
“You have these… spheres here,” the machine said, carefully feeling the curve of her left breast with a gripper made of some strange material—silicone?
The sensor glided in a circular motion, first over one full curve, then the other.
“Two almost perfectly symmetrical mounds. Flexible, elastic.”
The grippers felt her breasts more firmly now, pressing, massaging.
“This is completely different from Mr. Vance’s sunken chest.”
Loretta held her breath. The feeling of cool plastic on her bare skin was completely surreal.
The kneading and massaging did the rest.
Was it really just the cool room air and her terrible nervousness, or was it the touch itself?
Either way, her body reacted involuntarily: her nipples tightened and stiffened.
A quiet, excited clicking came from the machine’s body, and the light shifted to a rapid, bluish pulse.
“Anomaly detected!” the voice announced with great interest. “The buds on the central mounds are changing texture and density. Hardness is increasing. Is this a thermal effect? No, the room temperature is constant. I must isolate and study this phenomenon.”
“No, no… that’s not an error, that’s normal!” Loretta blurted out, but the AI was already unstoppable, locked in research mode.
Two new tentacles extended from the body. At their tips, however, weren’t grippers but two small, rotating attachments with gossamer-thin, feather-like lamellae. They looked a bit like… feather dusters? Yes, like miniature feather dusters.
The machine slowly brought these instruments toward Loretta’s curves. When the fine feathers began moving in gentle, lightning-fast rotations around her stiff nipples, Loretta gasped.
Shit, that was… good. It tickled and stimulated her nipples simultaneously, so intensely that she involuntarily arched her back to escape the touch.