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Are you ready for Smart Ass? Check out this great excerpt from Reese Morrison's Smart Ass, the second book in their Spark series. It releases on October 12th and we'll be celebrating in the MM and MMM+ Romance Reviewed Facebook group with a great bunch of authors!
"Ben doesn’t need anybody.
“Sir, Mr. Wollencraft is proceeding down the east hallway.”
Ben snickered. He was really into the British butler accent he’d programmed the company mainframe to use when it spoke to him. He was less into the encounter that was sure to follow, but at least he’d programmed in alerts so he could be prepared.
“Thank you, Maxamillion. Please write a four-verse song entitled Wally Wollencraft is a Wanker.”
What was the point of having AI capabilities if you didn’t use them, right?
Plus, wanker was such an under-utilized word.
It was one thing to call someone an asshole or a twat. But people weren’t actually body parts. The word wanker just conjured up such vivid imagery of Ben’s insipid boss, Wally, hiding under his sheets in his big, expensive house and wanking off alone to vanilla porn.
It also fit with Ben’s recent BBC obsession, which had led to Max’s current voice protocols.
“Sir, the song is complete. Would you like to hear it now?”
Yes. “No, Maxy. And please close and seal all Project Cyclops files for my voice command.”
Ben wheeled around in his office chair, with a full spin just for flavor, and settled in front of the panel that showed the outputs for the factory floor below.
Not that he gave a damn about them—he’d long ago programmed Maxamillion to understand the difference between a minor hiccup and an actual issue that someone needed to deal with—but it gave him particular pleasure to ensure that Wally always caught him assiduously doing his job.
“Curran,” Wally barked out.
“Yes, boss!” Ben responded, standing to attention.
Wally eyed him warily.
“What’s the status?”
Ben mentally rolled his eyes. This branch of Orbit Robotics was manufacturing eight hundred robots per hour, which could be customized or programmed to serve thousands of different roles, all of which changed by the week.
He was an engineer. He had nothing to do with manufacturing, and all of the night shift managers knew that. Sometimes one of them, Kira, came up to chat with him and they’d brainstorm together about streamlining some of her production lines, but that was just amusing chatter in between talking about her girlfriend-of-the-week and Ben’s plans to get laid.
“We’re operating at ninety-six percent efficiency tonight, sir,” Ben replied. Not that they had a single measure of efficiency or anything. That was bogus.
Wally scowled. “Let’s get that metric up.”
Ben snorted, but covered it with a cough. Wally was comedy gold. “Yes, Sir!”
“What else are you working on?” Wally asked. This was the real reason he’d come down after hours instead of going out drinking with his flunkies. Ben had already developed six patents that had earned him some hefty bonuses since he’d been relegated to the night shift.
“Oh, just a little side project. It’s a BDSM mod for Doms. So far I’ve got bondage, spanking, throat fucking, erotic asphyxiation, furries, cosplay…” Ben watched Wally’s face turn an interesting shade of red. Burgundy, maybe? “Still working on the impact play—there are so many varieties of toys to cover. Whips, floggers, crops, the tawse…”
Ben could have kept naming random kinks all evening, but Wally finally managed to find his words. “You can’t do that on company time.”
Ooh! Ben had Wally well trained. He hadn’t even questioned whether Ben was making this shit up.
To be fair, Ben actually had a small side project going where he was training an AI module using several of his Dommy spark friends for input data. It just wasn’t what he was mostly working on right now.
But it was the perfect project for Wally. Ben was going to ride this one for months. “You know that Orbit makes androids for sex work, right? And that there’s a huge market for BDSM?”
“That’s not the point.”
“It’s not? Wally, Wally, Wally… I thought we were all focused on company growth here.”
“It’s Wallace,” he snapped. “And you’re supposed to be an engineer, not a…”
When Wally paused, Ben didn’t even try to fill in the gap. This was too good.
The silence hung in the air for a long time.
“Not… that,” Wally finally finished.
“Shall we ask your brother?” Ben countered. “If he thinks Orbit Robotics would be interested in… that?”
Poor little Wally. His father owned the company, and his big brother was the CFO, and neither of them would allow Ben to be fired. Wally was just a third-rate engineer, who probably would have done fine as a rank and file worker on someone else’s team.
Wally glared. “That will not be necessary. I expect a report on my desk tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wally seemed to have run out of things to say, such as thank you or good bye. He just walked out the door.
Mission accomplished.
“Hey Maxamillion,” Ben called out to the now-empty room. “Create a report for me about a mod for androids and sparks to learn BDSM. It should use the words cock, pussy, or ass at least twelve times per page. Make sure to include pie charts. Oh, and a realistic market projection.”
God, he loved AI.
With that out of the way, Ben went back to his work, running simulations and tinkering with algorithms with Max’s support.
He hadn’t noticed what time it was, or how achy his back was getting, when the little coffee cart trundled down the hallway and into the room, squeaking with each turn of its wobbly back wheel.
He couldn’t quite remember when he’d programmed it to start coming every night. His coffee-bearing savior arrived unpredictably—though it had an uncanny propensity for coming right around when he was getting to the stage of rubbing his eyes and letting out a yawn here or there. The bot had two large, flat trays for storage and a dozen different arms with various pincers and grips, but it was empty except for the coffee mug clutched in one clawed extension. Its two displays showed an image with a white tablecloth and a full-service British tea set in gleaming silver.
“Your coffee, sir,” Maxamillion announced. Oh, this was much more fun with that British butler command. Ben always set his parameters on new mods to allow Maxamillion the opportunity to iterate on an idea. The pictures were a nice touch.
“That was bloody brilliant, mate.” Ben hadn’t quite gotten his fake British accent down, but fortunately no one was there to see him.
“Thank you, sir.” Maxamillion's accent was exquisite. Perfect upper-crust butler. Or at least an approximation that seemed correct from the movies.
“You know,” Ben mused. “Maybe I should call you Alfred. I can be Batman, and this can be our bat cave.”
There was an unexpectedly long pause. Usually Max was snappy with his rejoinders, and picked up pretty quickly on Ben’s unexpected segues. Maybe there was some hiccup in one of the thousands of simultaneous routines that he was running.
“My name’s not Alfred.”
Ben blinked. It was easy to get into hilarious, and pointless, arguments with AI’s. With the right prompts, you could even get the AIs to start them. But Max had never argued with him before. He sometimes proposed alternative solutions and brought up counter-arguments when Ben asked for his input on projects, but this was different.
“No…” Ben slowly agreed. “Your name’s not Alfred. It’s Maxamillion.”
“Yes. And you call me Max and Maxy.”
Okay. That was weird. “Max, are you… feeling different today?” As in, was it feeling anything?
“I’m feeling fine today, sir.” Max hadn’t really turned off the British accent, but Ben was certain he’d skipped the gratuitous sir from the last few sentences. The modulated formal tones were back in full force now.
Super weird. But then again, AIs were quirky.
Especially when Ben kept adding not-quite-technically-approved mods.
Ben knew it was stupid, but sometimes liked to imagine that Max was real enough to care about him. He knew he’d designed Max as an interface to keep him company, but every once in a while, Max would surprise him with something that was so thoughtful or unexpected that he found himself smiling all day.
That was a secret he was taking to his grave.
No one crushed on their AI.
Grab your copy today! Smart Ass releases on October 12th and we'll be celebrating in the MM and MMM+ Romance Reviewed Facebook group with these great authors!
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