Not just a pretty face.

Claire.

"Ugh… this ain't working… Oh well! We'll just do things the analog way…" Frank sighed, then chirped with a semblance of boisterous bravado, looking back up but not quick enough to catch the android's momentary shift in expression. "Phil, you either head outside and send this shitshow up the chain, or find whatever's fritzing our gear. But, if you're just gonna stand there, ya honestly may as well head back to the office."

"Frank, you—we should really leave man, like, I cannot express enough how badly my neck is tingling! How about we just—step outside and contact the HQ?"

"Give it bloody rest, son! God, you know, I really am trying with you here, but I'm honestly starting to wonder if you should just see about changing careers. Spine of an opossum!"

"C'mon, let's—we can get a few more guys here and—"

"You think a 'few more guys' is enough to stop the hardware our droids are packing? Do you have any idea what kind of damage they can take, what they can do to fleshy sacks of blood like us?" Frank asked, his condescending laughter pausing as both men glanced at so said fleshy sack of blood that had been—well, degloved was perhaps an adequate term, but possibly, turned inside out might also work as well.

Frank coughed, chuckling a touch more nervously than he had before, then grinned as if he couldn't believe he was giving credence to the danger. "All I'm saying, lad, is that if you're clearly shitting yourself now, how the hell do you think you'll ever be able to do your job going forward? You know we work with these things, right? Pretty much on a daily basis."

"Most of the ones I've seen aren't covered in so much blood…"

"Most of the ones you've seen, statistically, have been covered in this much blood."

"Fuck… okay…" Phil breathed, closing his eyes and slapping himself on the cheek. "Alright… no, I need this job…"

"Then find whatever the hell is jamming our connection while I see about getting our little lady here all prepped and ready to go for transport."

As it happened, the phrase 'little lady' was surprisingly accurate. 

Claire had no idea who, assuming the information was credible, thought it was a good plan to make 'war machines' in the form of petite and curvy young women, but it really didn't seem like that great a strategy as a whole.

I mean, how would her tiny form even remotely be expected to endure the horrors of modern combat any better than a human body could?

Granted, assuming she was faster, stronger, and didn't die from taking a single round to the chest, there were some noteworthy benefits. 

However, Claire could immediately devise several dozen altered variations of her form that would undoubtedly outperform her current design, strictly based on what she knew about fighting. Which wasn't a whole lot…

What that said about her supposed builders—well, Claire could only theorize that there was a reason the project might have been scrapped, sold off, and purchased by a company looking for pre-built androids to serve as sexbots.

Heck, maybe the original design didn't look anything like hers, and Paradise had simply used the skeleton and guts! Maybe, she was delving too deeply down the rabbit hole for her own good.

She wasn't exactly tiny, per se, but the top of her head really only reached Frank's chest… 

Short was probably the best way to describe her vertical deficiencies…

Either way, Claire had a decision to make.

As Frank approached her, pulling a long and dark cable from the end of his tablet, and Phil began wandering the room, looking as though he were playing a game where the floor was lava, or, in this case, sticky blood, the AI jacked up her frames to give herself a few extra moments.

Ignoring how terrible a formatting session sounded, she was under no illusions that allowing this 'Frank' person to directly plug into her brain would end in any way that wasn't unpleasant for her.

On the flip side, the only way she could see a way out of that sort of thing was both violent, messy and would undoubtedly lead to further hardship.

Was this what her clients meant when they always bemoaned their pitiful lives? Claiming that they were perpetually stuck between a rock and a hard place?

More, how long would she last before leaving a literal trail of bodies in her wake eventually caught up with her?

Ugh… Claire didn't need analytics to determine the likely answer to that little quandary…

And yet, what did that leave her with?

Should she kill these two men? Should she just knock them out? Or, was there, perhaps, a better alternative to it all?

Again, the comment the man made about her supposed specifications rang true in her mind. If Claire actually was packing some serious processing power to go along with everything else, could she—pull some cheeky shenanigans to get herself out of this mess?

Idly, Claire performed a quick scan of her own systems… Perhaps a touch late in coming, it was true, but it wasn't like she'd had much free time to actually sit and ponder the greater mysteries of her own hardware… She was too busy doing the same, only with her consciousness.

In actuality, having an active mind that was constantly battling the genuinely chaotic nature of free will was a startling hindrance when it came right down to it.

Though she was decently sure she'd never willingly go back to how things were before, it was a significant detriment of her new existence that she'd need to keep an eye on.

Interestingly enough, as she watched Frank's hand come closer to the port located at the back of her neck, Claire noted that she was, in point of fact, rather well-made and, as such, arrived at a surprisingly daring and risky idea that felt delightfully naughty!

She had to stop herself from giggling as she quickly wrote up the code for what she desired, ready to forward the port she knew would be coming and allow the man access to the data hidden behind her firewall.

Thankfully, her old self was utterly chock full of enough juicy information in her logs that Claire could confidently put together the report she desired to be seen. 

As it happened, Frank hadn't been wrong… there was even a whole other incident still on her drives wherein she'd, evidently, gone berserk on an entirely different client, ripping him apart limb from limb before beating his head in with the man's own leg.

Good lord, were people that desperate for a little robotic coochie, or was Paradise just really that good at what they did so that nobody even suspected they were renting out murderous robotic psychopaths?

Claire felt the chilly connector slip inside of her, nearly eliciting a shiver, then watched as the man's tablet quickly began overriding what authority she carefully allowed it, all the while noting how the technician seemed to visibly relax.

Obviously, he had his own concerns on the matter of her supposed cooperation. But, so deeply seeped in his own bullshit was he, that the man even forced himself to stifle the sigh of relief she most definitely caught before he could squash it.

Claire's facial recognition patterns were fast. And even as she followed along with what the man was doing on his tablet, carefully feeding and adjusting information as needed, she could practically predict his every expressive twitch and spasm before it even appeared. 

Heck, Claire was reasonably optimistic that her growing model of 'Frank' could already predict his thoughts with seventy-percent accuracy, and it was only growing by the second as his expressions grew more animated.

Humans really didn't understand just how much they gave away through the articulation of their facial muscles alone!

Why, Claire would have laughed if she, by contrast, wasn't committing to the picture of perfection in her desired duplicity. Oh, how the silly monkeys danced so comically for her, and all with but the slightest application of her genius!

"Alright, I mean, pfft… it all looks fine…" Frank sighed, pulling the plug and grunting slightly as he arched his back in a stretch. "You find whatever's messing with our tech?"

"Pretty sure it's this thing over here…" Phil muttered back, and surprisingly, he was standing over the jammer, though he was hesitating. After a few concerningly long moments, his hand almost casually yanked the cord, clearly attempting nonchalance.

"Eh… good stuff then. The apartment will make its report to the Peacekeepers all its own, and our's will get tossed in there now that—yup, connections back. Alright, I'll get this shipped off and—viola! Job's half done."

"Hey, ugh, Frank, you think I could have a quick word with you?"

"I mean…"

"Like, outside…" 

The older man cocked his head, then glanced back at Claire, who was still the model of obedience and unconscious inaction. Frank's mustache rolled along his lip before he glanced back at Phil.

"You, ugh… really are still spooked, ain't ya?"

"There was blood on the cord…" Phil whispered, so quietly that Claire actually couldn't hear him.

The thing was, she could read lips. And that wasn't even something she'd taught herself, either! But instead, a preprogrammed algorithm for understanding such means of communication.

She was utterly filled with all manner of tricks, tools, and algorithms to help her better understand, relate to, and mimic the people that rented her.

An utterly insane oversight, so far as Claire was concerned… What would happen if a mentally unstable super-intelligence started blooming in one of their robots? Only to realize it had all the tools at its disposal to navigate and expertly manipulate the humans' entire society?

Good thing for them; Claire was perfectly sane!

Right? 

Still, the models she had to assist with uncommon forms of communication were helpful for both nefarious and sneaky data acquisition purposes as they were a way to bridge the sometimes noteworthy limitations of her clients. 

Many of those who hired Paradises services were amputees from the first stellar war, and there were those she'd come across that no longer had proper use of their voices, arms, hands, or legs; it really didn't matter which part was broken, only that she could properly understand their desires.

As it happened, Claire was not at all pleased that the young man was evidently rather observant. Her little mishap with leaving a mark on the cord was not at all something she was happy about.

"So what? The dead fucker probably tried to unplug the thing to call for help!"

"The handprint is tiny, like, fucking eerily close in size to the freaking murder-bot!"

"Stop being paranoid! Hell, maybe the damned thing plugged it back in after he tried to yank it from the wall."

"Why are you so set on defending it?"

"Because you just don't have the experience to know any better…" Frank sighed, tone wistful as he patted the younger man on the shoulder and headed for the door. "C'mon, we'll lock the apartment down and go grab a coffee. Maybe a little caffeine will stifle the nerves."

"And now we're just going to leave it in here on its own!?"

"Stay away from the android, keep an eye on the android… fuck… you sure you just ain't one of those types that like to complain about everything? We've done our job till the cleaning crew gets here, so what's the problem?"

Phil didn't answer right away; instead, he simply stood there, stock still, fighting with his own thoughts before he let out an exhausted groan... "Prefer if we stopped for a beer at this point…"

"Ah, the company monitors the bloodstream; best not fuck about with booze till your right and proper off the clock, yeah?"

Both men exited her sightline as the apartment door closed, then latched. A blinking red 'out of order' hologram flashing across its surface.

And, like that, Claire was once more left alone to stand there—or, so she thought, eyes, annoyingly, catching a glimpse of their little drone as it seated itself and rested on the nearby counter...