Author's Note

Hope you enjoy.

Venturing Into The Purview Of Perverts

As soon as Steve Roman returned from his job as the senior computer forensics specialist at the FBI CJIS Facility near Clarksburg to his home that was close to halfway between Fairmont and Morgantown, he went down into the basement and opened the vault he had down there to resume working on his private little project. It was something he hoped would one day make him multimillions with just a few thousand dollars’ investment.

Nominally, it would be perfectly legal for him to carry it out. It was just a morally dubious task, however. Except that some of the details for helping in his moral dilemma were not only illegal, but they were highly so. Even just thinking about some of his ideas was considered a crime, nowadays.

Sitting at his home office desk in the southeast corner of the basement, he tapped his chin in thought as he pondered how best to hide the AI subroutine that he intended to have hardcoded into the surplus RAPTOR he was rebuilding. He stared at the large module that sat partially disassembled, with gaping openings, that mocked him by looking back at him—a neat trick given there weren’t any eyes in the RAPTOR Pelvic Assembly.

He leaned back to recall the issues he had considered which finally led him to seek this venture.

He might have been just a computer geek, and while the world never changed its attitude toward geeks since geeks first evolved long before computers were ever invented, he was no fool like Hollywood frequently liked to portray them.

The Internet, aka the World Wide Web, had originally been created by geeks to allow the military echelons to easily communicate with one another. Then, under the advice and suggestions from those same geeks that built it, the Army soon allowed the DARPA project to be available to the public for communicating in a similar secure fashion, especially to allow communications between geeks in colleges and universities.

Ostensibly, it was intended to improve general society overall by allowing college students who were going to be the designers, programmers, and engineers of the coming Computer Age to exchange thoughts and ideas regarding puzzles, and to develop solutions to their problems.

However, it soon became the free roaming domain of perverts, fraudsters, and criminals—in other words: politicians. And as happens whenever politicians become involved, various Games are created to take and maintain control over those who were ruled. Games that criminals are very adept at creating. Games that allow them to become rich while denying any opportunity for any ordinary person to partake of such potential wealth.

But Steve knew there were still ways of getting rich—mostly by skirting the law without actually breaking the law—but it still involved their Games.

Funny how the most lucrative of the Games was also the most fruitless of the Games. The quickest way to the top was also the quickest way to the bottom. And it almost always involved sex.

Steven knew he’d never be able to earn a decent-looking wife as his own physical appearance was only marginally better than the fact that he was a geek—that factor alone was more than ten strikes against him. But if he were to somehow get enough money from an invention, then both his looks and the fact he was a geek would quickly be overlooked. He just hoped that if he ever did get married, that she wouldn’t be a conniving backstabber that so many wealthy men always seemed to attract. Such a problem such as that would be Future Steve’s concern. Current-Steve faced two problems, a few suppositions, and several questions.

The Primary Problem was: how to make an invention that would allow him to accumulate enough wealth without attracting the attentions of the wrong sorts of people?

First Supposition: to make quick wealth, it’s got to involve sex.

Second Supposition: to avoid the wrong sort of attention, it can’t involve sex.

The Secondary Problem was: what can be done to solve that Catch-22?

Third Supposition: solution for Secondary Problem has to involve sex without involving sex, which incidentally solves Primary Problem for generating wealth.

Question: so, what is sex without sex?

The logical answer was of course: masturbation.

Question: what sort of invention can one make for masturbation?

Logical answer to that question: sex toys!

Question: so, what sort of sex toy can be made that hasn’t already been invented?

Logical answer: that is the trick to find!

One just had to be clever enough to figure it out.

Steve had smiled when he asked himself that question months ago, because the Answer had been obvious even back then: the AIs that were being designed in colleges and universities already!

Like DARPA when it was laying the foundations for the Internet, the military had sought out the brightest minds in the schools to develop combat robots that could be deployed to fight the wars they wanted to engage in. And like how the Internet had been usurped by the politicians, the AIs being developed were repurposed to be new elements in their Games.

In the meantime, the military went through their own assorted toys almost as fast as politicians would tire of theirs. Which meant there were plenty of damaged and decommissioned military AI devices now littering the landscape. Getting such surplus devices would certainly be a huge cost saver than designing something from scratch.

Now rich politicians make for rich perverts. And rich perverts always loved to expand their fetishes and tastes into the weird and bizarre. As a result, there were plenty of AI sex toys already floating out there in the market. All Steve had to do was design one that was strange enough to whet the appetite of people with exceptionally peculiar tastes.

Ironically, one such bizarre design frequently used by the military was the Recon Attack Predator Tactical Operations Robot, or RAPTOR, as it was popularly known as. Given that it greatly resembled the creatures featured in those old Jurassic Park movies, they had quickly grabbed the public’s fascination when they were introduced and held onto it for years beyond the normal useful lifespan of such devices.

After all, to many, velociraptors and other Dromaeosaurids were popularly considered to be very sexy creatures.

Even more ironically, Steve had never once saw anything like them being made into “private home security” as so many of the AI sex bots were being marketed as.

And so, he found it rather disturbingly odd that he was potentially the first person to seriously consider turning that idea into a reality. If it were truly the case that no one else had thought of it first, it would be a fluke of universal proportions. Instead, he considered he was very likely just one of many people currently looking into the idea, but that simply no one had tried to capitalize on it—yet. But there was no doubt in his mind, there was someone out there who was preparing to do so at some level—in which case, the first one out the gate would be the winner in this race.

Of course, Steve was no fool. Naturally, the stranger the fetishes of his potential customers had, the more abusive the perverts tended to be. He didn’t really want to sell off his devices to just any stupid wealthy twit who wouldn’t take proper care of it. Or worse, simply damage it to the point of destruction just because they were rich enough and could get away with it.

So, Steve sat there at his home on the outskirts of town as he poked and prodded the Pelvic Assembly circuit modules of the dismantled surplus RAPTOR, Serial #37871-22471, one of five that he had purchased the month before, pondering how best to design, write, and test, then create a hardwired program version onto a chip, and then hide the anti-abuse self-preservation subroutines into the unit in such a way that no one would ever find it, but one that could allow the RAPTOR to act in self-defense, if it needed to do so, and allow it to escape and return to him for help.

He recalled hearing about how so many other designers had been caught and hauled off to prison for merely contemplating what he was planning to do. But he also was aware of the flaws and mistakes all those programmers made that allowed computer forensic specialists, like himself, to find their illegal subroutines.

He also thought it fortuitous that he was able to utilize a couple of built-in voids that happened to be in appropriate locations—assuming such voids truly were just happenstance and not actually something the original RAPTOR designers had ideas of their own in mind for future potential modifications—so he was able to easily repurpose those voids to contain the artificial sex organs he had planned to use.

He, naturally, preferred to think about equipping each of them just with an artificial vagina. But he certainly recognized the need for selling the units for members of the opposite sex, and even to those of his own sex who would appreciate something made specifically for a woman. The hard part had been to cut an opening into the armored casing beneath the tail for receiving the vaginal assembly, then constructing the hinged doors, their metal labia, as he jokingly called them, that would serve to protect the soft-tissue orifice. Behind the armor plate he had cut into, there was a perfectly sized void to accept that module.

Further below that location, there was an existing access plate sealing off a circular opening already built into the RAPTOR that led to another unused void which was large enough to accommodate almost anything that he could imagine—and he could imagine quite a lot—principally, a highly articulate metal tentacle that could be retracted, rolled up, and sealed inside when stored, but would still extend out and perform as desired when in use, with an appropriately tough vintex coating, the nonallergenic replacement for latex, for plenty of protection and pleasure of the customer.

Yeah, he sarcastically thought grinning, it’s highly doubtful that the original designers didn’t have something like this in mind when they created these guys way back then! Also, he still needed to find a convenient route to install the necessary plumbing that was needed to allow the units to perform self-cleaning functions after use.

Now, however, all those installations would have to wait. His immediate concern was finding the proper connections into the AI systems for tactile sensations and motor controls. With all the old weapons systems removed, there were plenty of open comm ports available for repurposing. As well as the thousands of still utilized functioning ports, such as external tactile sensory input. It was with them that Steve finally figured out a puzzle that had eluded him for years: the stupid reason the military retired this popular model.

To maximize profits, the builders had used substantially substandard components that resulted in the sensors frequently having excessive variances in the tolerances for inductive, capacitive, and resistive impedances to their signals. Mapping out those errors eventually forced him to take the same shortcut that the military had evidently settled on: simply establish a baseline map for each individual RAPTOR, store the file in a long-term storage register, and just let the onboard AI deal with it all—a horrible waist of computing resources that slowed down the overall system. Still, the final resulting combat performance of the machines was way better than any human could ever have achieved.

“Ah! Found another one!” he exclaimed when his renewed probing located one of the many circuits that he was keeping a continuous look out for, and the text suddenly began scrolling on his computer monitor. “And it looks to be a major hit, too!” he happily cheered.

It scrolled too fast for him to get full details, but it was soon clear from his skim-reading skills that this code was the set of instructions related to the LethalLock™ subroutine that had been added to all decommissioned RAPTOR systems sold by the military surplus facilities. “Oh, fuck, yeah! I’ve been looking for YOU, like since forever, bitch!”

He made sure the code was fully copied over into one of his computer’s hard drives before he removed the probe. He then made a note specifying the location of the probe point so that he could follow that circuit path back to the computer chip that contained those instructions. Once finished, he then resumed probing about, looking for other AI subroutines—

“Steve! We’re detecting gunfire from outside,” a call came through on the intercom, interrupting his work, from one of the four functioning RAPTORs keeping watch upstairs. “Consensus supports it seems to be coming from the vicinity of Todd Collier’s property!”

Instantly, he set down the probe and reached for the desk drawer where he stored one of his personal guns, a 9mm auto, a full clip for it, and a Bluetooth headset. In a well-practiced smooth motion, the pistol was loaded, armed, and locked in under a second as he ran up the stairs from the basement. Just before he reached the top of the stairs, he donned the Bluetooth headset with its built-in HUD goggles, earpiece, and microphone in their proper places.

“Alpha! Charlie! Delta! Come with me and lead the way! Echo, hold the fort!” he called through the Bluetooth device out to the RAPTORs that he had left intact and powered up as he ran for the door. The three named units directed him outside through his home’s front door on the east side of the house into the moonlit night while the fourth stayed inside to protect the house from any potential intruders.

Outside, he had to slow down and be cautious. There were two possibilities: the shots either came from his neighbor’s house across the road that ran between their properties, or they came from either of the fields surrounding their houses. Steve crouched low as he slowly walked, having flicked off the safety for the 9mm when he left the confines of his home while the RAPTORs flanked him on either side and Charlie took point ahead of them. Despite the infrared heads-up-display, he couldn’t see any movement as he ventured out.

“Any suggestions as to where those shots came from?” he quietly asked.

“87% consensus is that shots fired came from 057 degrees,” Alpha responded through his Bluetooth, and Steven had to use a few seconds to mentally convert the direction.

Roughly northeast—just as they had reported earlier, directly toward his nearest neighbor’s house standing across the main road that ran between their homes.

“Let’s go,” he softly said, and they steadily advanced forward.

They had just reached the edge of the road when Steve saw two figures start running from his neighbor’s house.

“Sic’em!” Steve called out, and instantly, two of the RAPTORs on either side sprinted across the road and onto Todd’s property to intercept them.

In mere seconds, there were screams coming from two people as more than a quarter ton of flying metal suddenly landed on each of them.

He followed Charlie as the unit advanced on the house. A third figure suddenly appeared in the backlit doorway, but one Steve could clearly see wasn’t his neighbor as the individual was far too skinny, and had raised his hand—

“DROP THE GUN!” Steve shouted.

A shot rang out from the stranger and Steve heard a ping from just ahead of him, but he immediately fired three shots past Charlie back at the invader who instantly fell back.

Coming up on the individual, he saw it was someone about the age of a college kid, but the person was so filthy and greasy in his appearance that Steve doubted he was really a student. Three wounds center chest assured Steve the guy wouldn’t be giving anyone any more problems, but just as he had seen in plenty of cop shows, he kicked the kid’s .22 out of the guy’s reach across the kitchen floor.

“TODD!? IT’S STEVE! ARE YOU OKAY!?” Steve called out. A low moan came from the stairs leading to Todd’s basement.

“Charlie, are you damaged?” he asked the RAPTOR accompanying him.

“Damage is insignificant,” Charlie reported. “Nanoprobe repairs are already being undertaken. Surface photovoltaic functions in the affected area have been isolated to prevent compromising electrical supply. Performance capabilities unimpaired.”

“Then come with me and relay a call to 911,” Steve instructed as he led the way downstairs. “Alpha, Delta, what are the status of the other two?”

“They are not going anywhere,” Delta responded through his Bluetooth.

“Good!”