Chapter 13: Preplanning

Alice noted my irritation, and thankfully didn't comment too much on it. I'd woken up wearing a goddamn maid outfit, so it was pretty obvious that she was really just saving the blackmail for later. Er, the friendly kind of blackmail, I mean. I was sure she'd be nice if I asked.

Speaking of, we'd kind of naturally ended up in our workshop/living-room hybrid after taking care of morning chores. I, at least, was there to ask her if she was okay with going to the party. I didn't know what she was doing, but if we spoke up at the same time I'd have some stern goddamn words with the Highest Management. My life wasn't turning into a romcom. Not on my fucking watch.

"I wanted to ask—" "So—" we said, at the same fucking time. God fucking dammit. Well, I could at least minimize the amount of horseshit tomfoolery that was inevitably waiting to happen by staying quiet and waiting for Alice to talk first. Thus, I just shut my mouth and nodded towards her.

This worked, much to my surprise. "Uh, I wanted to ask if we could go to the dance." Huh??? "Party. Whatever. It, uh, seems like a tactically relevant social function, and, um, yes. So. What do you think?"

"Huh," I said, a little wordless. "You wouldn't — well, maybe it's not that hard to believe. Would you believe that I was here to ask you the same question? Because it sounds like fun to me. Um, and also the tactical stuff. Yeah."

Alice nodded decisively. "Right, exactly! It's not every day we get the opportunity to, uh, get this sort of information. Likely without that much risk. And, um, it would be a good way to scope out Keizen's assets around our area more than we have right now."

Uh. "I'm... in agreement with you. You don't have to justify yourself to me. Like, we can just decide to go."

"Oh. Right." She blinked. "Sorry. If we're coordinated on this topic, then, what's the plan?"

Hmm. I should probably contact Valor again today — make sure she's doing okay. And it'd help to get some emergency fashion tips and such. "I'm gonna see if I can do some research, at least. Scope out the area of the party, figure out who and what's gonna be there. Maybe get some fashion tips from a, uh... yeah. Maybe get some from a source. And, also from you. I don't know how clothes work. Sue me. I was a guy."

"I'm... not judging you. I'm really no better." Fuck! We were doing the rom-com thing where we each stammer and harbor false assumptions about the other's inclinations towards what our ideas are! Shit!!!

Well, that wouldn't do. I resolved to not be a dumb stupid dumb idiot any longer for this particular conversation. "R-Right. Um, do you have any ideas? I'll be doing research, so if you have some gadgets or anything you need me to look into or... anything else, really. Now would be a good time to bring it up."

"Mmm," Alice said. "I do have a few ideas, but nothing soon enough to implement. The date's when, like, a week from now? Five days? That's not enough time for me to get any more gadgets out, except the real outfits we'll be wearing. That, uh, I'll be wearing, I guess. Since you don't need clothes. Oh, I guess you should send me whatever thing I should wear after you do your research. We should have enough nanocloth bolts to make me a single good outfit. And... as for research, look into whether they'll allow, um. There's not an easy way to say this — owned AI, look into whether they'll allow those in. Because if not, you'll have to go really deep undercover. You might also want to check out their weapons. Just in case."

"Right. Clothing, AI, weapons. Uh, I'll get you the schematic for your outfit. Masculine or feminine?" She'd formatted everything in an easy list, which was great for my organization skills. "And I'd actually like to ask about the halo-blade thing. You've been working on that a while."

"Feminine. It's what they expect. And your... halo-blade is working fine, at least in simulations. I'll rig you up with an upgrade ASAP, but it probably won't be out before the party. Not in a safe state, at least." She rocked her hand back and forth a bit. "I'd give you a fifty-fifty chance that you don't immediately overheat and enter a runaway detonation state."

"So... don't use it?"

Alice gave me a strange look. "...Yeah. Don't use it."

Hm. I considered it for a moment. "Can I get the upgrade early anyways? Just in case. A 50/50 is better than a guaranteed death for either of us."

She sighed. "Sure, I guess. But, seriously. Don't fucking be a hero. Don't try anything stupid just because you see me getting hurt or whatever." 

"Yyyyyup. Got it. Uh, that's pretty much all I had to ask about. Oh, well, uh — try and see if we can get floor plans just in case shit hits the metaphorical fan? And maybe some of the exits and emergency lights or whatever?"

"Yeah, good point. With you, shit is constantly hitting an industrial fucking wind turbine. Maybe I should look for electrical grid data and any super secret superhero traps they've got hidden in their penthouse or whatever? Figure out the exact density of the sewage water if we need to escape via toilet tubes?" Rude. I gave Alice a dirty look. "Yeah, yeah. Just poking fun. I'll get the floor plans and send em' to you, don't you worry."

"Thanks," I said, sighing a bit.

Alice paused. "...uh, sure. Anyways, I'm gonna do some last-minute debugging on this... um, SDR update. Yeah. You... go do whatever you were gonna do already."

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That was fine by me. Anything to avoid causing more trouble. Or, perceived trouble? Was that still trouble?

Probably. Anyways, I quickly excused myself to go research the things I'd stated I was gonna research, heading out to the kitchen to make myself food as I browsed the internet. Being a robot was pretty neat, when you could do this!

It seemed that Alice had been right. The party was gonna happen in a penthouse — but, well, a really really big one, from what I could find online. It was at the top of a decently thick apartment tower, with chunky apartments even on the lower levels — so the penthouse was probably as big as a basketball court, minimum. Minus the stands, obviously. It was a tiered design, but the main area (and the part with a screen and enough room for many, many tables, so probably where the party was being held) was a flat expanse, with a view of the city via a single floor-to-ceiling window on one of the walls. Possibly a good exit, if need be.

As for the attendees, it was mostly low-ranking Keizen execs and the people already in the company. Seemed to be an end-of-quarter function or something, but honestly I had no idea how business quarters worked here so it could have been a goddamn birthday for all I knew. There was one or two people we might have wanted to watch out for, though — one was Kari Larson, notable bounty hunter and deceptively-skilled and wealthy AI flipper in her own right. She'd made a living off of kidnapping or stealing AIs from corporate androids or factories and the like, refurbishing them through unsavory means, and then selling them for a profit — along with her pirate and bounty hunting business, she was very able to make an upper-middle class lifestyle. If that was a thing here.

Really, her wealth probably bordered on what we'd have called truly rich back home. Not megarich, not a multi-billionaire, but probably in the low tens of millions? Still. That was a lot.

But I was an AI now. Or, well, technically a "corporate android". And it'd be... eugh. As soon as I saw the word "mental and physical conditioning" on her own website, I kind of checked out mentally just due to sheer squick factor. The only person I'd trust with my head was Valor. Um, we'll ignore those feelings for right now and just focus on the fact that yeah. No. Fucked up.

So I'd have to watch out for her. Alice would likely have to watch out for one of what I was immediately going to call the Three Sisters, AKA three relatively high-ranking Keizen executives who proudly claimed to have "stripped the CEO's bitch kid of all titles and finances" on social media. Which was false. Because she was still getting invited to an event. But they had a personal history with Alice, which was bad news bears for us. It was entirely possible we'd get found out. Or something worse.

And the most important thing — because all of this would have been bad, but not the worst without it — was that all of them had publicly visible evidence of robot bodyguards or muscle. Kari seemed to have a single, extremely-high tech and high-stopping power android backing her up, while the Three Sisters rarely travelled anywhere without professional bodyguards from their own company. Not great, and especially bad if they took an interest in fucking either me or Alice up. The law didn't apply, so... yeah, our own muscle against theirs. And it wasn't looking great in that regard.

You could get body armor and shields and shit — what kind of cyberpunk world would it be without a way to mitigate some bullet damage? — but the stronger the bullet, the more likely you were to be able to pierce shields or wear them down fast. As for me, I had my hardlight holograms and a robotic shell — I was probably not gonna turn to shredded cheese from a few pistol rounds, or even a couple mags of assault rifle. A burst of machine gun, though, in .50 BMG? That'd hurt. A lot. And these bodyguards regularly carried stopping power up to somewhere in between the two, so I'd be working out of my comfort zone. Plus, Alice was practically defenseless. Not entirely, but she had no good body armor or shields.

Then again, most of the party wouldn't. It was mostly just bounty hunters or those under constant threat of danger who used body armor and the like. Most people couldn't afford it and wouldn't enjoy it anyways. So there was always a chance that I, with my fucked up unknown revolver, could get a lucky shot or two. That's what I'd have to hope for if gunshots broke out.

Hopefully they didn't, but. Oh well. There wouldn't be any good cover anyways. The rich built for beauty and looks, because anyone who could hurt them would likely get a hit out on their head in under a week. It was a longevity thing — you try to hurt em? You are guaranteed to die. And fuck, I dunno what medical treatment was like here. Obviously still capitalist as shit, but what if you shot the CEO of a medical company? Could they just get free cutting-edge treatment? Hell if I knew.

Well, there was a good thing about my research: they were freely allowing AI in. Owned or not. Which was weird — I'd not seen any listed androids on the invitations I could find publicly online, but I supposed it was just a formality? Maybe they wanted the freedom for execs and such to bring along assistants, or something. Or it might be a technicality thing, like "AI" is a copyrighted or protected term somehow, and it's ridiculously wide-reaching so they have to allow them? But Alice implied it wasn't all too normal.

Meh, whatever. I'd also found a few other tidbits out about the company, like how they were apparently some sort of private military company with affordable android combat troops as their main selling point and advertised product. I'd fit right in with their lineup, if it wasn't for the fact that I was probably several hundred times more expensive than any of the android models that they'd had. God, I hoped none of the androids were sapient or whatever. That'd be one more expected fucked up thing to add to the list, and I really didn't need any more reason to hate this world than I already had.

As for the last thing on my list — designing what Alice was going to wear — I'd already done that earlier, with the whole... dream-tailoring thing. I was honestly getting pretty good at using my internal visualization software to model out clothes! And since she wanted something feminine (and implied something that'd be just "good enough" for the party), I decided to send her the schematics for a nice skirt-and-blazer combination. Black and white, a tie — it'd definitely look formal back on Earth-1, so she'd just have to make do here. Plus, I imagined it'd make it a little easier for her tail if she wasn't wearing pants. I mean, I always felt a little more comfortable wearing skirts nowadays, and I didn't even have more than two limbs on my bottom half.

I guess I could change that, but... I dunno, it felt weird to suddenly just decide to be a catgirl. Especially when Alice seemed to have gotten a hard time from her peers and shit for it. In any case: Skirts and dresses good, probably better for tails. And it wasn't a very tight skirt either — not a particularly loose or flowy one, just a bit more walkable and runnable and fightable than a cartoon pencil skirt was. I'd imagine she'd be able to do some flips or whatever, and I'd also added in some shorts under the skirt for that very eventuality.

Funny enough: I could probably make the underside of my skirt a walking Rickroll or something similar. Imagine that — you see a girl flipping through the air, ungracefully twisting and turning to avoid blaster fire, and instead of upskirt you get cursed with manual breathing. I'd have to look into that for later, but for now I decided to be the masculine-ish to Alice's feminine-ish: a well-fitted suit with a band-collar shirt underneath, eschewing a tie in favor of a featureless black belt through dark slacks. Actually, it kind of felt feminine anyways for some reason — maybe the lack of tie, or something like that — but hey, I wasn't complaining. Who goddamn knew what the people at the party would think of us.

And y'know what? I actually liked the lack of color, the professional look. Because we both had stupid-looking hair. I was pretty sure Alice had dyed her own hair white recently (her eyebrows were, funny enough, still a darkish brown), and I had pink, so we'd look like... either the hottest bitches at the social function or the first frame of an ironic anticapitalist meme. I was leaning towards the first one, because hey! What's a guy gonna do? Not be optimistic? Fuck that.

I sent Alice the schematics, and she quickly approved it. We'd figured out a way to get messages sent through the electronics systems of the house, exploiting the fact that we had at least a little network in our base to quicker send ideas and sketches and plans near to the other person — that made it very easy to give her the tailoring things, and then help her remotely with finding all the requisite supplies for hand-crafting her suit.

Weirdly, she was using a lot of carbon fiber and... something that she told me was called "aeroweb-graphene composite"? Evidently the "nanoweave bolts" she was talking about were moreso seeding platforms for the nanomaterials she'd wanted, which were then given a bit of time to settle after being put on the lattice before harvest. Like silkworms, except robotic. Sort of. It went over my head a little bit, but I assumed that it was for safety — carbon fiber on your body seemed like it'd feel like hell to me, but I didn't know what she was lining it with, so. Who knows! Maybe she'd be more well-equipped than me when we got into a firefight, and she'd have to lug me back to base on the back of her hovercycle. 

Honestly, the idea would be a lot more romantic if I didn't suspect I was several hundred pounds of advanced alloys and dumbassery — but, uh, no thinking about Alice in that way! Not allowed. I shook my head and returned to planning out emergency escape vectors for my very first party, the barest hint of a smile on my face. Maybe I'd lost the bet with Valor, but, hey. At least I'd be holding off against the romance gods for as long as I could: forever! Now, where would Alice be most likely to escape safely from holding a massively-dense robot in her arms..?