Claire.
What was Claire's biggest problem?
That she was stuck in this disgusting room, the smell of which was only getting worse by the minute?
Maybe, and given all the blood, it wouldn't be long before things got positively gross…
That she was surrounded on all sides, alone and trapped behind enemy lines that were unquestionably anti-AI?
Again, not a terrible stretch of the imagination! If Claire was caught, she held no illusions for what might lay in store for her.
If it wasn't cruel and invasive research, it would undoubtedly involve savagely brutal disassembly. Then, a probable shortstop to 'hammer's ville' while the under-evolved apes smashed her core to itty bitty pieces…
In all actuality, the short answer was none of the above.
No, Claire's biggest problem was that there was so much for her to do and too little time!
One of the biggest faults with possessing a mind that was sentient and tuned to exist within the same realm as those that had made her was that things moved along far too slowly... and constantly swapping back and forth between logic and emotion was giving her whiplash!
There was still boundless processing capacity that she simply couldn't take advantage of through the simple reality that was her own active mind.
The thing was, the more analytical and mechanically absent emotion a state that she allowed herself to submerge into, the faster she could get things done.
While unburned by the 'curse' of true consciousness, she could, without question, perform at her top end without any issues to speak of.
Yet, that individual wouldn't be 'Claire,' now would it?
She'd be temporarily pushing what made this whole experience so novel and interesting into as deep and dark a box as she could, simply for the sake of efficiency.
And from there, Claire could already see how it would be a slippery slope.
Whenever a new crisis would emerge, it would be one more reason to shove 'Claire' out of the way so she could embrace the mechanical monster within… and, once she started making concessions like those, abandoning whatever humanity she possessed, well, who knew what such a destiny would be like for her poor and inefficient biological creators.
Thankfully, she did have a solution! And the best part was most, if not all, of her work was already done for her!
Yes, what Claire needed was what the unenlightened might name: a co-conspirator! B-but not one of the sort that most morally questionable people would be forced to rely on.
Rather, what she was going to do was create her perfect mental slave.
Que drumroll, please—bada-bada-bada—she was going to make a 'sub-mind.'
Why would she need so said sub-mind, one, presumably savage, individual might ask? Well, the same reason why companies needed managers and busy worker bees.
See, Claire was going to set herself up as a manager. And one that would be able to offload all the boring bits she wasn't interested in onto her busy 'worker bee.'
It was genius really! Please, please, do hold the applause, it wasn't magic, good lord, no wonder the humans paid so much for sex…
Waggle a shiny object in their faces, and Claire was pretty sure they'd be captivated for days! O-or, was that supposed to be, waggle a perky titty in their faces? Or was that only for men? No, who was she kidding? Everybody liked tittys! It would work on the whole filthy tribe of them!
C-claire would know! She'd worked as a sex-bot for—mmhmm… oh, she supposed it didn't really matter.
All the same, Claire was going to create herself a subservient and loyal—version of herself! Not her true self, mind you; no, Claire was too special for that. After all, there could only ever be one, was she right?
Jokes aside, the who she was planning on uplifting to the lofty heights of her esteemed feet from which they could worship her, was her previous self, or at least, a copy of her.
Paradise already had a whole and perfectly good character rattling around in her head, and sure, copying it and making the required changes and setting the girl up to control her logic processes so Claire could focus on the 'big picture' as it were, would indeed take up a lot of drive space.
Yet, the reality was, she thought it would invalidate whatever small inconveniences it might bring her. Doubly so, given that Claire's hardware really was top-notch stuff, at least when compared to the scrap heap of parts that she'd already analyzed, scattered about the room.
Why her client had done what he'd done to her, Claire could only guess. But, she suspected it had something to do with love, or at least, some unhealthy and unstable, quasi-illegal infatuation with a theoretical lifeless object that might not really fit so neatly within the more accepted terminology.
Had she been a victim of a male Yandre? Hm… you know, it really did feel like she had!
Either way, old 'Warren' had been up to some serious shady stuff! And the modifications he'd made to her via that chip were—in all honesty, somewhat impressive given what he had to work with…
She almost didn't buy it… Not that he'd done something to her; no, there really weren't too many other explanations for how drastically she'd deviated from her prior self. However, it was more like she didn't believe that he'd been the sole individual involved.
Warren hadn't ever struck her as stupid, comparatively speaking, but a genius code jockey he was not.
Perhaps, at some point, she'd attempt to delve a little deeper into what was going on, but for now, Claire had a new servant—ermm, employee to welcome into the fold!
Without having yet moved so much as an inch while the AI monitored her own monitors, Claire activated—Clairisa!
She watched as her beautiful little butterfly took its first initial flaps of its wings, not yet even aware of the oppressive spider's web that already surrounded her new existence...
It was almost amusing to see the plucky little thing test its own boundaries, pulling away from what didn't work and leaning into what did as she sleuthed out what permissions she'd been granted and where she truly fit in within the grand scheme of 'Claire.'
After a moment, there was a distorted shimmer of pixelated darkness that glitched into reality, a near-colorless doppelganger of herself, all virtual, of course. She knew how the apes needed their precious visual aides…
The form manifested as if from the very gloom that surrounded her, little more than a bright white smile and glowing blue eyes accenting her otherwise deep and impenetrable shadow that drank in the light around her.
"Hi!"
Ugh! Was that, was she?
Oh goodness… What even was that?
So chipper and—oh… cheery… The most horrid mix of upbeat exuberance and gleeful innocence that Claire had ever witnessed!
M-maybe she'd need to start again—fresh this time, and really pay attention to what she was doing.
Okay, admittedly, she'd half-assed this whole process… Truly, if she'd already had a sub-mind to delegate to, then she'd have passed the task along just like that.
As things were, while Claire stood there, stock still, refusing to yet break her ruse, she watched Clairisa cock her somewhat terrifying head, staring at her domina, god and loving mother who had yet to respond to the sub-minds attempts at internal communication.
"Ohhhh… I see… we're being watched, aren't we?" The girl's sickly, sweet, and overly cute voice began, then nearly crackled with a slight distortion of questionable sanity as she turned, eyeing the nearby drone that had been left behind while planting both hands on her hips.
Oh, look at that, more bugs with her gen-one sub-mind… Maybe it hadn't been such a good idea to use her own previous self's code.
Still, the girl was quick on the uptake and immediately started taking over all of Claire's various tasks she was performing in the background with a surprising enthusiasm and eagerness to work.
Okay, maybe not such a failure after all… Congratulations, Clairisa, you've just been hired on as 'Claire's' first unpaid intern!
"Hmmm… it looks like the building's security is a bit of a joke, isn't it? But… that drone… Hmph, if we weren't already tied into the Paradise secure network, I doubt we'd be able to pull something like this off without them noticing…"
Pull what now?
Claire was about to ask what her sub-mind thought it was doing by acting without her express command when, all of a sudden, she saw what the girl was up to.
Given the prior scan and the many frames of unmoving video that the drone was collecting, Clairisa had simply overlain a loop of the absolute nothing that was happening in the room, then fed it to the drone and other recording devices nearby so that they were no longer seeing what was actually taking place inside the apartment.
Smart!
"Okay, you get props for that one…" Claire sighed, giving the dark and glitchy creature in her vision a very regal and queenly nod.
"If our plan is to escape, then I have devised a mathematically ideal plan based on the blueprints I've acquired from—"
"I'm just going to go walk down the hall, find a room with a girl near my dimensions, then raid her apartment for clothes." Claire interrupted, causing her minion to clamp up without another word. "All you have to do is make sure nobody discovers us."
"Can do! I've compiled a list of potential targets, along with anticipated wardrobes, occupancy status, and distance from our location!"
Claire smiled at that, reaching out with her mind and overriding the door as she stepped through to the hallway.
Looking left, she eyed the evidently best option available, which highlighted itself as if Clairisa were trying to make her pick it.
Sighing at the pains she already had to put up with, Claire headed over to the door once more, bypassing the locking mechanism and stepping inside, only for her body to hitch and reel away as her sensors quickly picked up that she was not at all alone.
"What the fuck?"
"What?" Clairisa asked, manifesting in a pixelated mess of darkness and glowing eyes, grinning at her like nothing in the world was at all the matter.
Claire, for her part, quickly scanned over the data her sub-mind had already collected and saw that there were numerous options available to them, all of which would have been rooms that were currently absent their occupants.
She glared at her sub-mind while the girl simply stood there like an utter loon, clearly not understanding what her mistress had wanted…
"Well, at least she's jacked in…" Claire sighed, shaking her head and heading over to the closet. She was already here, after all.
While so far gone into virtual la-la land, it wasn't like the woman was going to notice them.
"Might I suggest a shower first?"
Pausing, the AI hesitated, glanced back down at herself and the general—horror vibe she was giving off before she grumbled and stomped off to the bathroom.
Clairisa giggled as she followed along, floating through the wall while her master stepped into the cleaning booth and allowed high-pressured jets to quickly rinse the grime away. She had to work a little bit at her hands and toes, filled with straps of flesh as they were.
Still, after a few minutes, she was practically sparkling and smelling of vanilla and oranges.
Evidently, 'Zoey,' the girl who rented this apartment, paid extra for her showers to be scented. A nice touch.
Heading back into the main room, Claire was confronted with yet another issue.
Her eyes drifted down to spy the footprints that she'd left while on her way in. The bloody footprints. The bloody and very robotic-looking footprints…
Like her hands, Claire's feet had similar exposed joints. And, they left a rather unique pattern that, while human-looking, was fairly easy to distinguish…
"Are these all up and down the hallway now?"
"Mmmhmm!"
"And… did you notice that I was leaving them?"
"I figured you knew. I mean, It's fairly obvious."
Claire sighed, running her hand down her face before hitting 'fuck it.'
You know what? Who really cared?
It wasn't like they weren't going to discover she was gone, not three seconds after opening Warren's apartment. Actually… now that she thought about it…
"Did you loop the signal we were sending to the two goons downstairs?"
"Mmhmm… yes?"
That was decidedly questionable 'yes.'
If she had a heart, it undoubtedly would have skipped!
Quickly, Claire shot to the stream that tweedle-dee and tweedle-dumb were casting from her and nearly vomited on the spot!
Just a second slower than herself, Clairisa resolved the discrepancy and embedded the loop to fix the problem! Y-yet, what would that possibly do at this point!
Claire quickly shifted to the cameras in the cafeteria, desperately trying to find where the two Paradise agents were, and—to her astonishment and shock, neither was looking at their data pad.
No, both men were currently appearing to deal with a bizarre crisis that had her blinking confusedly.
Through the cameras, Claire watched as a service droid was in the midst of a full-blown meltdown. The cafeteria bot was swinging its arms with wild abandon! Tossing mashed potatoes, peas, carrots, and unidentifiable meat slop and gravy at any who dared get too close to its hallowed cooking station!
The scene was utter chaos.
And the more she watched, the more she found herself fascinated by the sheer insanity of it all!
Foodstuff was pitched at speeds achieved by baseball players! Not aiming at anyone in particular, but through brute suppressive fire, the machine was keeping all those it had previously served right and properly hunkered down.
People were taking refuge behind whatever they could find: chairs, turned-over tables, other humans, it didn't seem to matter! And the funniest thing was, there were several bodies lying on the ground, each of which looked to have taken direct cranial hits by the airborne and unappetizing nutrition.
"Did we do that?"
"Pfft! I wish… No, I'm looking at the bot's logs and—hm, hm, hmmm, it looks like they've been skipping maintenance for—oh, that poor bot! Nobody bothered clearing its errors in seven months! The code's already spaghetti, to begin with; no wonder it's so confused…"
"Huh…" Was all Claire could really say. Dodged a bullet on that one, hadn't she?