Young Robots In Love, Part 1 Author: Elsa Frohman Rating: VVV (Very, Very Victorian), actually PG-13 for language. Spoilers: Takes place right after Smashed in S6 BtVS. Summary: This idea came from Taramisu (Thanks, Tara) who
demanded a WilliamBot fic. That got me thinking about why a WilliamBot
would have come into existence.
"Warren! Come on, open up! You've been locked in
there for days!" Andrew shouted as he pounded on the
door of Warren's inner-sanctum.
"Oh, leave him alone," Jonathan said, looking up from
his X-Men comic book. "If he wants to play with
himself, let him."
Andrew frowned and pouted. "Well, what am I supposed
to do? You're no fun. You just want to read and watch
TV. Besides, what's he doing in there? I keep hearing
power tools."
Jonathan shrugged. "He'll show us when he's ready."
"And I'm ready now," Warren said, having opened his
door. He had that peculiar I've-just-built-something-
bitching-cool smirk on his face that generally meant
there was a new kind of freeze ray about to be
unveiled. Warren stepped back and ushered his two
fellow evil overlord wannabees into his private
workshop.
The room was a mess. Warren had never been much for
picking up after himself. Jonathan stepped over a
pile of robotic body parts that was lying on the
floor just inside the door and went over to the
workbench to see ...
"Wow!" Jonathan exclaimed.
Andrew had beat him to it. He was standing there,
staring with wide eyes, at...
"Oh, my gawd..." Jonathan said in awe as he
registered the full detail and lifelike quality of
the male android lying on its back, nude, on Warren's
workbench.
Andrew was still speechless, his eyes glued to a
certain part of the robot's anatomy.
"Great, isn't it?" Warren said proudly.
Andrew nodded and swallowed hard. "It's... It's... "
Jonathan nodded... "It's Spike!"
Warren grinned. "Yeah, I got the idea when he was
here for that chip scan last week."
Jonathan looked confused. "Why do we want a
SpikeBot?"
"Ah, you haven't seen the brilliance of my plan,
yet?" Warren smirked.
"Actually... no," Jonathan replied.
"We're going to make a bundle with this! Think of it.
We'll make our own porn videos and sell them on the
Internet."
Jonathan's eyes grew wide.
"Oh, no... I know how you think. You're going to put
that thing with one of us in front of the camera.
There is no way I'm going to..."
"Calm down, Victoria. I'm not thinking of gay porn."
"Oh... Oh... OK..." Andrew said, sounding more than a
little disappointed.
Warren looked thoughtful. "Maybe later on. After
we've positioned our product in the market. Maybe we
could do some specialty stuff."
Andrew brightened.
"If you're thinking het, who, may I ask, is going to
be the woman?" Jonathan asked suspiciously.
"Turn your brain on, Bunky. I built this. I've built
female bots before. I'm going to build her. Won't
take long at all. I can have his sex partner done in
24 hours. I've got it mostly ready, just needs a
little tweaking -- but as soon as that is done, we'll
have the porn couple of the century."
"Oh..." Jonathan said, warming to the idea for the
first time. "Actually, this is sort of cool. Two
robots -- they'll do anything we program them to, and
nobody gets hurt. I like it! Maybe the girl could be
really short and ..."
Warren laughed and gave Jonathan a noogy. "Well,
she's going to be short, but not *that* short. I want
to get this done quick, so I'm going to use a nearly
complete chassis I made last year. I think you'll
like her -- you're always talking about her."
"What do you mean?"
"Last year, I did a special order. For Spike, as it
happens. I did a second copy, but never completed it.
It's a perfect replica of Buffy Summers."
Andrew was still fascinated by the naked bot's
privates.
"When you did the chip scan on Spike, did you get a
look at his ..."
Warren rolled his eyes. "Right... 'Oh, Spike,' I
said, 'I know this chip I'm supposed to be scanning
is in your head, but I've got to attach this
electrode to your schlong...' Duh... No, I didn't see
his unit. This is based on John Holmes. No reason not
to go with the best."
Andrew looked sheepish for a moment, but bounced
back, as he always did.
"Turn it on!" Andrew begged. "I want to see it work!"
"Can't yet. I don't have any programming set up for
him. I tried to get a set of engrams on Spike when I
had him on the table, but he's a vampire, and you
can't actually record anything off their brains."
"Then we can program it with our brain patterns,"
Andrew said hopefully.
Warren looked sour.
"Right..." he sneered. "We'll program it so it
blushes and hides when it sees a girl. Or maybe it
could learn Jonathan's strategy -- throw up when a
girl talks to you..."
"Hey, that was just once!" Jonathan protested. "Maybe
it could learn your pickup line; how did that go?
'Hey, baby, want to come over to my place and play
with my AIBO?' That one got your face slapped."
"That was when I was in seventh grade! How was I to
know she wouldn't know an AIBO was a robotic dog?"
"As robotic dogs go, this one's top of the line,"
Andrew said with a nod, still staring at the bot's
crotch. He and Jonathan snickered.
"OK, if you're not going to use one of our minds,
it's going to take you forever to write a full
behavioral program," Jonathan said.
Warren shook his head. "I'm not going to write it
from scratch. I want this to be *Spike* -- not just a
dork who looks like him. It's not just the looks.
It's the swagger, way he looks at women and the tough
talk. This is going to be the best pornbot ever
built."
"So, if you can't record a vampire's mind, how are
you going to do it?" Jonathan asked.
Warren smiled. "That's where you come in, Bunky.
Remember that spell you found for tapping into the
minds of people in the past?"
Jonathan grinned. "Oh, yeah... got an A on my term
paper on Theodore Roosevelt's motives for invading
Cuba with that."
"Right! You're going to tap into Spike before he was
turned -- when he was alive and had brain activity to
record."
"But wait... won't that just be some poor schmuck who
got killed by a vampire?"
Warren shook his head again. "Nah, whoever he was
before he was a vampire, he had to have been a bad
ass. Otherwise, how could he have turned out like
Spike?"
"Guess you've got a point."
"You just go get what you need to do the spell,"
Warren said. "I managed to get some hairs off Spike's
head when I was messing with the electrodes for the
scan. You can use them to zero in on who he was in
the past."
Several hours later, it was done. The mindprint had
been captured. Jonathan had directed the spell's
output into Warren's file server with its four, RAID-
doubled 200 Gig hard drives. The volume of data had
caught them all off guard. The whole mindprint thing
was still very new, and Warren hadn't worked out all
the bugs -- particularly in the data compression
routines.
So getting it all recorded had been a messy job.
Particularly with Andrew whining about their dumping
all his Bram, Lois and Elephant mp3s to make more
room when they started to get disk-full warnings with
only about half of the data saved.
But they had the mindprint, and it was time to
program the bot.
"This is going to take hours," Warren said once he
had the loading routine running through a serial
cable attached behind the bot's ear. "We'll just let
it rip, and move on to something else."
"Fine -- time to tweak the BuffyBot?" Jonathan asked.
"You just want to see her with her clothes off,"
Warren said with a smirk.
"Well... yeah..." Jonathan replied. "I'd rather see
that than... this."
"I left my extra female chassis with a buddy up in
Carmel. Andrew and I are going to go up there and get
it. We'll be back tomorrow night. You can stay here
and baby-sit Spikey, and do the start-up procedure
when he's loaded."
"No fair!" Jonathan protested. "You always take
Andrew for the overnight trips! I always get left
behind!"
"Now, now..." Warren said with a patronizing air.
"Somebody has to be here to look after the bot. It's
going to wake up, and it's going to be confused.
You'll be much better to look after it than Andrew."
"Cool! Another road trip!" Andrew said. "Are we going
to get a motel? With a king-size bed? And Magic
Fingers?"
"Sure, sure..." Warren replied.
He turned back to Jonathan. "Now, when the bot is up
and running, give it some of Andrew's clothes, and
then take it out and buy it some stuff that fits
right. We want him to look cool. I don't think we've
got a leather duster in the budget, but you can get
him some black jeans and T-shirts."
"Wait a minute!" Jonathan said in alarm. "You're
leaving me alone with a robot Spike! It's gonna kill
me!"
Warren shook his head. "Give me some credit, Short
Round. I inserted some extra routines in the program.
Any attempt to harm one of us will shut him right
down."
"Oh... OK. That's sounds all right."
"You bet. See you tomorrow night."
Jonathan watched his friends leave, then went and got
a blanket to cover the bot. The nude figure bothered
him a bit. Besides, he looked chilly.
He settled down in a chair next to the workbench with
the new Star Trek Deep Space 9 book and started to
read. Two chapters later, he fell asleep.