Page 77 of Smart Ass

“Clunky. Confusing. I can see all this elegant code, but I can’t figure out how to lift my finger without making it a part of something else.”

“So you can’t make it move?”

In response, the bot walked across the room, its posture somehow portraying both confidence and desire. Ben pulled back when it reached the couch, but settled when it just sat beside him.

No, not “sat.” Lounged. Flowed. Draped himself over the edge of the couch, leaving his dick provocatively on display.

“Good god, Max. Can’t you turn that off?”

The bot jerked and spasmed.

“Apparently not.” Max was frustrated now. “I can’t just… ugh. There’s the fucking finger.”

Ben looked down. The pinky finger on the left hand did, indeed, curl and straighten itself independently of the rest of the hand.

Watching it was about equally on par with the creepiness of the sexbot’s inappropriate seduction.

Robots were weeeeeird.

“Alright, explain it to me,” Ben said. “You were controlling two bots yesterday and a dozen the time before.” Two memories that he’d relived many, many times in the intervening days. “How come you can’t do the same thing with this one?”

“I wasn’t controlling their individual actions. I was just setting off pre-programmed responses. Things like go toward that object or hold tightly but without crushing. All of them have variations on things like that, and I just gave them the objective and let them each figure out how to meet it independently.”

Ben chuckled. “So all this time, I thought you were in control, and you just told that bot go ahead and whale on his ass and waited to see what happened?”

“Yes, Ben.” He could hear the exasperation in Maxamillion’s voice, but at least he wasn’t frustrated by the bot anymore. “That was exactly what happened. I just left it all to chance and hoped you wouldn’t break.”

“You didn’t though, did you? What did you actually tell the bot that was ever so artfully spanking my ass?”

Max sighed. “I told it to move its arm at a velocity of ten meters per second, starting twenty centimeters away and stopping upon impact. Then I increased the velocity. You know, you’re really ruining the mystique.”

“Oh, no, baby. Next time you get me in a compromising position, I’m gonna be all, Please, Master, increase the velocity to…”

Max apparently found the right protocol to slap the bot’s hand over Ben’s mouth, because suddenly he couldn’t speak.

He licked the hand impulsively. It… didn’t taste bad? Kind of impressively like skin, but without a real flavor, somehow.

He shook his head and moved back. The bot/Max didn’t seem to notice he’d done it.

“That seemed pretty effective,” Ben commented.

Max chuckled. “The bot and I agreed on that one.”

Ben winked at one of the cameras on the wall.

He was proud of Max, and yet… he found that he couldn’t even look at the bot when he was talking. It was too oddly human, and yet all wrong. He knew that Max was using the bot’s cameras and mics, but he just couldn’t see it as Max.

Which was strange, because the gang of maintenance bots had definitely felt like Max—at least in the way that a favorite whip felt like the Dom wielding it, his will and his expression of it through a tool intertwined.

In their scenes, Ben had been surrounded by Max. At Max’s mercy.

He felt the same way when Max insisted on watching him sleep. The watch wrapped around his wrist promised the same thing.

The sexbot felt foreign and, to be honest, a little bit invasive.

“I’ll get better,” Maxamillion promised.

“I’m sure you will,” Ben assured him. He’d known this would happen. It was exactly the type of change that new sparks were known for during their early months.

And Ben was going to support him in any way possible.