She stepped back and posed with a huge grin on her face. “Taa-daa! Check out the new me! No more timid little mouse girl.”
Her new body was a dragon morph. It wasn’t too obvious at first glance, since it was still pretty human looking. But her sharp features had lost their hint of softness, and the whiskers were gone. Her teeth had been reshaped into cutting weapons, with fangs that made her smile look distinctly predatory. Instead of furry animal ears on top of her head she had small, pointed ones about where a human would.
The wings and tail were the changes that drew the eye, though. Her tail was almost a meter long, slender and covered in fine scales of a dark red that complemented the rich brown of her hair. The wings were tiny at first, until she spread them and they suddenly grew to span the whole room. I could make out a complicated system of telescoping struts inside them instead of normal bones, and were those lift field emitters?
She confirmed that suspicion by powering them up, and floating a few cems off the deck.
“Check it out, Alice. I can fly now!”
“You’re a dragon, Emla.”
“No, silly, this is dragon girl mode. A real dragon looks like this!”
Her features blurred, and for a moment I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Then I got it, but that only made me more confused. Instead of normal machinery or tissue, her whole body was made of millions of micro-machines that could fit together in different ways. Even her bones were made of segments that could unlatch, and hook back together in a different shape. In the space of a few seconds she reformed into a dragon that looked a lot like Ash, only about ten times bigger.
“What do you think, Alice? Pretty sweet, huh? Now I can help you when you fight!”
“I suppose you can,” I said, still stunned. I’d heard of morphing androids before, but they were terrifyingly expensive. To make it work every one of those little components had to be a custom-designed piece of smart matter, with its own computer and power cell along with structural bracing and whatever machinery it needed to do its job. Just doing the transformation part without crippling her normal functions would be a nightmare to design, and I could already see that there was more to it than that. Her wings had reshaped themselves to fit her dragon form, and the lift field that held her up hadn’t faltered while they did it.
The captain just quirked an eyebrow. “Impressive. I take it we’ll be seeing more of you, miss?”
“Yes, sir! I’m Emla. I’m an unrestricted class four AI with combat augs and a pack loyalty imprint, and I belong to Alice. I guess I’m her assistant and bodyguard for now.”
“Bodyguard?”
“She’s says she’s not old enough to want a companion android, sir. So I’ll just have to keep her safe until she is.”
A warm feeling was growing in my chest. This was what Emla was meant to be. Bright, bold and disconcertingly caring.
“Oh, Emla. I’m not going to die on you. But I’ll be happy to have your help. Are you good with the software changes?”
She’d re-validated her bond with me at some point during that first hug. Her new code was a work of art. The same core personality, but a much cleaner implementation. There were no crude hacks to cripple her mind now, either. Just an enduring loyalty to friends, family and her leader. She was still determined to follow me, though, and I wasn’t going to turn her down.
“I’m great,” she assured me. “Strange Loop Sleuth walked through it all with me before it compiled me back into hardware. I’m exactly what I want to be now.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “Can you change back, though? I can’t hug you properly when you’re all scales and armor.”
“Sure thing, Alice.”
Yeah, there was a spike of radiation when she did that. Not enough to be dangerous, even to humans. But she had some kind of fancy distributed micro-reactor system that used the mass of her body to shield little capsules of radioactive material. Her spec sheet said she had a plasma flamer and power claws, and that was just scratching the surface of the hidden features packed into that transforming body. If I’d gone to a major vendor and asked for a design like this, they’d have quoted me an eight-figure price. Maybe nine.
Strange Loop Sleuth answered my call immediately.
“Why?” I asked.
“Are you dissatisfied?”
“No! I love the design, and I think she’s going to be much happier now. But it must have taken you a lot of work to develop the tech base for that body. You could have given her something a lot simpler.”
“Your companion will need suitable capabilities,” Sleuth said. “The effort involved in the customization was not excessive, and fabrication is simple.”
“I guess. But why go to so much trouble just for me?”
“I project that you will understand the answer to that question soon, Alice Long. Perhaps then you will visit me again, and we may discuss plans for a brighter future.”
Chapter 17
“This interface sucks,” I grumbled.
As usual, my bots were getting cut to pieces because I was fighting blind. The only data I had on enemy movements was a map view based on what my bots could see, and a little window that could pull up the camera view from one bot at a time. Then when I finally did see the latest surprise I had to give new orders with this stupid point-and-click interface that wouldn’t run any faster than a human could type.
Chief West just laughed at my frustration.
“You have to walk before you can run, kid. You’re not bad for a newbie, but you need to get a better feel for bot tactics before you start trying fancy direct interface tricks.”
“Yes, Chief,” I sighed. My last team of bots was just about gone, and I wasn’t allowed to fight anything myself. Not that it would help much if I did, since the physics simulation in this stupid VR wasn’t good enough to model my usual fighting style. The ‘bots’ were really just abstract blobs of defense values and hit points, and their shots didn’t necessarily go exactly where their guns were pointed. All of which was on purpose. Chief West thought I relied too much on my enhanced senses and physics modeling, so he’d dug up a training program where I couldn’t use those things at all.
My last bot went down, and the sim froze. Chief West’s avatar walked out of one of the enemy bots, and looked around.
“That’s that,” he said. “So, what did you do wrong?”
“I assumed our teams were built on the same point values,” I admitted. “When I spotted that minefield with the sniper drone overwatch down in Hold 8 I added up the points, and thought that was the last of your forces. So when I tried to push through to your beachhead in the port shuttle bay your reinforcements took me by surprise.”