Chapter 11: Gamma Jasmine and Delta Elisa

Let me start off this chapter with a short discussion on my method of mental programming. While I have given various descriptions of the brain implants my women had been given -- or at least their triggers and effects, since I have no inclination to give away specifics of the technologies involved-- I have almost completely ignored the initial base programming.

After all, some readers have no doubt questioned how to make a woman readily accept sharing a man with other women or even suddenly becoming bi-sexual when the character has had no history of such behavior.

The answer is fairly simple. Everyone, real or artificial, undergoes similar programming throughout their lives. In European and Western societies, we accept the idea that a monogamous one-man-one- woman marriage is the standard and proper lifestyle. Oh certainly, some countries are expanding that to include homosexual partnerships, but despite what you may see on TV, they certainly aren't yet accepted as a societal norm.

When I control a character's childhood memories, I control what they were brought up to believe and accept as societal norms. While harems or polygamous relationships probably aren't in the background of the characters (except maybe Jasmine), that doesn't mean they can't be altered to believe they are acceptable behavior without changing any of the character's known background.

Perhaps the character remembers walking down the street with her mother and seeing two women kiss. She asked her mother about it, and her mother gave a positive and accepting response. Perhaps there was a discussion about how a woman doesn't have to be a lesbian to enjoy a relationship with another woman, or even about how such women might find a man they both like and share him. Or perhaps there was a nearly-forgotten childhood friend who had a mother in a harem-like relationship. Or a favorite cartoon series told of two or three women sharing the same man. Or friends in high school openly dated the same boy.

These are the type of memories Alpha and I include for each new woman we build. Memories with a purpose, tailored individually for that character. For example, while I'm sure that nowhere in Power Girl's comic book appearances do we see a man with multiple happy wives and lovers, her recorded comic book history does not cover her entire life. There are always plenty of opportunities to shape her understanding of societal norms. And of course, with some characters this is significantly easier than others (e.g. Wonder Woman).

Don't mistake this discussion for arguments of what societal norms should be and whether they are right or wrong. They are simply, as stated above, memories with a purpose, designed to program into the women the acceptance of their new situation.

The rest of the mental programming is similar to a drug-reward system. Every time one of my artificial women sees me, hears me, touches or is touched by me or even smells me, hormones and chemicals are released into her brain and bloodstream by small implants in her glands and brain. The more contact I have with her, the more chemicals are released. Alpha works out limits on the chemical releases so that the women can still function normally for the most part, but basically their own bodies tell them that I am an ideal mate.

Now, as I recall, I left off in Chapter Nine trying to decide what next body to build for Alpha to have a second mobile platform. (Chapter Ten was a bit of a digression into how my life was developing outside the harem.) I had mostly narrowed it down to a choice for Alpha of either Jasmine (from Aladdin) or Elisa (from Gargoyles), wanting to get a bit more of a diverse racial mix in the household. Neither character would work well if we built her as a normal woman with memories true to her character, especially since both characters were strongly in love with other men, so I was taking advantage of the fact that Alpha would be running the body directly as a cyborg.

In trying to decide between the two, I picked up an old Gargoyles comic in the quarter box of a local store. This was the Halloween issue (I think it was #3 from the Marvel run, but that's just a best guess off the top of my head), and when I opened it up, I was surprised to see Aladdin's Jasmine in a Gargoyles' comic. Of course, it was actually Elisa in a Halloween costume, but it made me realize that, at least in comic book form, they looked enough alike to be sisters. Now Jasmine is, of course, Arabian and Elisa is a Black/Native American mix, but their skin tone and hair are almost a perfect match.

Inspired by this, Alpha and I decided that we would create a couple of sister cyborgs, instead of just one.

Thankfully for my sanity, this time around I didn't have to do all of the wiring myself since I had Beta on hand to help out.

We didn't start building them right away, so it was a good 10 months before ... well, here, let me give you a general timeline of how things had worked out so far:

Kasumi - February

Daria & Jane - May

Kara - August

Rei - November

Rogue - March

WW & Zatanna - July

(Storm & flooding [Chapter 10] - September)

Beta Bayonetta - December

(AARD founded - April)

Gamma Jasmine & Delta Elisa - October

The new ladies' development was greatly aided by an upgrade I made to Alpha in February of that year. If you remember, I have previously stated in Chapter Eight that when I networked more than 32 systems together for Alpha, her improved processing power failed to increase proportionally. Basically from the 33rd system on up, they were mainly used for extra storage and connections and such.

In late January, I discovered that I had inadvertently wired that limitation into Alpha's fuzzy logic boards. (Okay, I may say it was inadvertent, but I'm sure at some point a few years ago I had decided it was just easier to do things that way, then forgot about it.) After Alpha's 32nd system, additional systems would run in series instead of parallel. Well, that explanation is really, REALLY overly simplified, but I don't want to write out 100 pages of technical background followed by 50 pages of explanations. Trust me, I discovered the source of the limitation and, by early February had fixed the boards and could add more and more systems to increase her processing power. Theoretically Alpha could now have up to 1024 different systems running at the same time to gain maximum power.

This didn't actually make Alpha much more intelligent. Since AIs aren't limited by memory recall or single-subject consciousness, it means... sigh ... this could easily turn into another 50 page technical discussion.

How about this for a simple explanation: For AIs, intelligence depends on the programming itself, not the system running it. The systems running the A.I. determine the processing power, or how much the A.I. can do with their intelligence at one time.

You can't apply normal IQ tests to Alpha, so I worked out my own method of measuring her abilities (as AIQ or Artificial Intelligence Quotient). When she was first turned on, we estimate her AIQ would have tested at around 20 to 25. Now she had about a 187 AIQ, which was awesome, but the increased number of systems simply meant that she could apply that intelligence to a lot more projects at the same time.

Or maybe I should offer a human comparison. If you take a single human of average intelligence and give him super speed and immortality, he could eventually write books or plays as brilliant as Shakespeare through nothing more than making millions of attempts at doing so over and over. The more intelligent he is, the better and faster his repeated attempts become, hopefully developing better and better writing skills as he goes along. The same applies to solving complex equations or understanding advanced biology or physics. The point of this comparison is, while intelligence is very advantageous, it is separate from processing power and speed. Now imagine cloning this intelligent human so he can work on more and more different projects at the same time with his super speed and lack of aging, and you might begin to understand what Alpha could do. Except that Alpha was now the AI equivalent of Einstein.

For reference, I'd estimate HAL from 2001 at somewhere around 60 AIQ and the god-like Eschaton (from the Singularity Sky books) at somewhere around 5000 AIQ.

Before the summer arrived, our front company was in place: Alpha Advanced Research and Development (AARD).

Alpha invested aggressively for months to allow us to buy a small building -- 3 floors, two of which are mostly lab space, plus a small attached warehouse -- and use it to set up a secondary site to host Alpha's newly expanded set of systems. With the cost of the building and all of the high-end equipment Alpha wanted, it eventually cost us over $80 million ... though maybe I should point out that most of that was for the lab setup which was purchased over the course of a few years.

I hired Jane as the company's graphic artist and decorator; she designed the company logo, pamphlets, etc. Kara was the day-to-day business manager. Zatanna was the spokesperson. Anna was in charge of HR. Actually, I put nearly all of my women to work for AARD in some capacity. Kasumi was the only one with no official job there, but she had full access and came by a number of times each week.

The offices had a few normal people on staff -- receptionists, security and facilities/janitorial to begin with. My household came and went as we pleased. I'm sure the normal staff were confused by the odd hours we kept and the fact that I, the owner and President, apparently preferred to work out of my home basement most of the time.

As far as the computer setup went, eventually we just separated the two locations into parallel copies of Alpha: Alpha 01 at home and Alpha 02 at work.

For the first year or two we were a very small company, just big enough to act as a front for Alpha and myself, so we only had hired half a dozen outside people anyway.

Late that summer was when we went public with announcements for the artificial eye and early next spring, the nano-wire surgery unit, though it took a couple years for enough testing to be completed for each to be approved. Within the first two years, we registered 1074 patents for AARD. The majority of these were minor advances and ideas, the sort of things patent troll companies use to extort money from companies that actually make things. BUT we also applied for and were eventually granted from 2 to 10 significant, ground-breaking patents a year for the first few years. We held back most of the nano-technology and A.I. programming, but we registered for a lot of the bio-technology advances and some micro-tech. (Technically it generally took 3-4 years for each patent to be fully processed and granted, but once we registered for it, we confidently acted as though it was ours.)

There are a lot of stories associated with AARD, but I'll deal with them as they become relevant. Overall what you need to know is that AARD was privately held by me (despite a lot of offers to buy us and encouragement to go public with stock), staffed mainly by my artificial women, and designed to allow release of some of our discoveries and inventions while acting as a shield against too much personal public attention.

We hired a small law firm for the company, but all lawyers working for me were required to keep a certain eccentric and anti- social but brilliant consultant of mine apprised of all legal filings and problems. They knew her as Susan Helios, though she was, as you probably guessed, just one of Alpha's alter-egos.

Actually if I may continue my digression briefly, the lawyers were initially somewhat resentful of "Susan", but once the patent lawsuits started, they came to appreciate her. All of our patents were thoroughly and rigorously correct, but that didn't stop large corporations or patent farming companies from trying to stop us or take the technology for themselves.

In a way, it almost became humorous. These huge corps with their huge staffs of lawyers would take weeks or months to file a long, detailed brief. Then within hours, often before the judge actually had time to read the mega-corp's brief, we had filed a brief of our own tearing theirs apart in every detail. (Basically Alpha would send a response to my lawyers within an hour of receiving it, the lawyers would read it over, sign it as their own and file it.) Most patent- related lawsuits were won within a year (which is lightning fast for patent law), often with prejudice so we could recover our legal costs. The lawyers I had hired gained an enormous boost to their reputations, and I let them hire "Susan" for other work on a case-by-case basis.

Anyway, back to AARD. We built very little in-house, usually only those things which required nanite construction methods or other highly proprietary methods. We didn't manufacture anything that required true mass production. Those we leased to other companies to make, generally retaining a percentage of the gross sales. We almost always did the initial testing ourselves, though anything that needed government approval usually had that testing farmed out to another company.

For example, the artificial eyes required more production facilities than I wanted to get involved in, so we leased the technology to a large bio-tech firm for a 33% share in the gross sales.

The other initial product line consisted of surgery units with attached nanite-sized wires capable of performing safe surgery inside the brain or bones or anywhere really. (See Chapter 10 for background.) Some of what Alpha could do with her nanites in half an hour, these machines allowed human surgeons to do in only a few hours time.

AARD sold these directly, but the production of the main control units was farmed out. The control units were shipped to our local warehouse where we loaded the software and added the nanite-wires. The sales of these units were relatively low, about 1 per major hospital. Yes, there are a LOT of hospitals in the world, but the cost was high enough that the orders came in at a constant trickle. They cost $3 million each, which included regular training classes (held locally in Texas) and ten extra replacement wires. (That's actually low compared to how much we could have charged, but even so we made about 85% profit on each unit. Why didn't we sell cheaper? We couldn't have kept up with the demand or have gotten any respect as a product if we sold for under a million.)

Neither of those products came out within the first couple years though, since testing and approval took so long.

We made and licensed more and more tech as time went by, from lightning capture capacitors (designed to be placed atop very tall structures to capture up to 84% of the power of lightning strikes and feed it back into the electrical power grid as free, green electricity ... only $10,000 per unit!) to advanced artificial limbs and organs. After a decade, we were raking in the money hand over fist, and AARD was becoming ridiculously famous for a company that didn't sell anything directly to the public. But I'm jumping way ahead of the story.

Around the time we founded AARD is when I first allowed Alpha to publish a paper in a professional journal. She had wanted to do so for a couple years, but without a body to read the paper at a conference or a degree to back it up, she was rather limited in her options. Eventually she wrote to a computer science journal and had an article published describing a new and better algorithm to read the remaining charge in a battery. (Imagine a laptop or cell phone or mp3 player that actually gives an ACCURATE reading on how much charge is left? What a wonderful world that would be... )

Slowly I let her move on to articles on biology and medicine and physics and chemistry, etc. Having a research and development company to list as an employer/source really helped. Not that she had figured out the Unified Field Theory or anything, but she was way ahead of her human peers.

So let's return our attention to that October, or at least that summer. We had taken a June Caribbean vacation. My yacht was too small for everyone to go on an extended sailing vacation at the same time, so we rotated groups between Disneyworld and sailing the yacht. Yes, I could have easily afforded a larger yacht, but it's not like it was going to be used more than once or twice a year. (And no, Diana didn't find Paradise Island. I felt sorry for her, but she knew the odds were against it.) I had plenty of Disney World Hotel sex and a few yacht orgies, and maybe I'll write about them someday, but not right now.

Beta stayed home and took care of the house and budding company, as well as continuing the builds for Jasmine and Elisa, also known as Gamma and Delta. Their tech was mostly the same as Beta's, but we had learned a lot from her build and repairs and were hoping the new sisters would be much less prone to initial failures.

Jasmine and Elisa had two significant differences when compared to Beta, one in design and one in post-build plans.

First, while they were still going to be much stronger than normal humans, they were designed more for extreme flexibility than super-strength. When I say flexibility, I mean that world class gymnasts and freak show contortionists could watch them and wonder how they did it.

Second, I wanted them to live independently for a few months rather than move right into the house. This was going to be a major test of Alpha's programming. Specifically, they were going to attend college on their own in a dorm. I would pull a few strings (via donations) so they could room together, and they would always have their wireless connections to Alpha, but at the same time, Jasmine and Elisa would have to pass for human with no obvious support structure or review. If they could do that for at least a semester, I would consider the experiment a success, and we could arrange for them to join the harem.

They were signed up for mid-year enrollment at TCU, the same college Daria and Jane attended. They would each have a double-major, Elisa in Mathematics and Physics and Jasmine in Biology and Sociology. These were tentative majors, subject to refinement and change later, but we wanted a wide range of degrees to allow Alpha to publish in nearly any professional fields she wanted.

I was there to witness their "births", when Jasmine and Elisa were removed from the pods. Although they had been conscious for weeks and still had over a day's worth of testing and settings to adjust and refine, the actual removal from the pods felt like it should be marked as their official births.

Jasmine is the shorter of the two at about 5ft 4in tall, with dark olive skin and dark hair that falls to her waist. She has large, dark brown eyes and an hourglass figure, with nice C-cup breasts topped with large dark nipples. Her pubic hair gives the impression of having shaved lips, though the hair will only ever grow in a small tuft above her vagina. Her ears, nipples, labia and belly button had all been grown with piercings, though the actual jewelry had yet to be inserted.

Elisa is a bit taller, with light creamy brown skin with the hint of a reddish tint and dark brown hair down to just past her shoulderblades. Her figure is more athletic, with B-cup breasts topped with tiny dark nipples and areolae whose color almost matched her skin giving the odd visual impression that her nipples stand alone with no areolae at all. Her pubic hair gives the impression of being naturally sparse, with little hair growth at all.

Side-by-side, they looked very much like sisters. Certainly not identical twins, but perhaps fraternal twins.

They both appeared to be in the 18-20 year old range and had superhuman strength and super-strong skin, though not nearly as tough or strong as Kara and Diana. Almost every joint was double or triple- jointed and their major bones could bend slightly without breaking with extremely elastic tendons and ligaments. They could each theoretically lick their own pussies from either the front or the back. (I saw them do exactly that bending over backwards once and asked them not to do so again while I was watching. It just looked too inhuman to be attractive. On the other hand, curling up into a ball to lick their own pussies from the front did look pretty darn erotic.)

After watching them do about an hour of physical tests, I excused myself and went upstairs. I really wasn't needed for this phase and left Beta to supervise and watch the naked cyborgs move their joints and muscles in precise motions over and over again.

Besides, they would mostly live in the basement for at least a month until we had been satisfied that no major hardware failures were likely. I'd have plenty of time to plunder all of their virgin holes and play character scenes before they left for school.

At this point, it was only mid-afternoon so I headed upstairs to talk about Halloween with Kasumi and whoever happened to be around, which turned out to be Kara, Diana and Rei, who had just finished watching Oprah, I think. At this point it was just the first week in October, so we still had time to prepare.

We didn't give out candy, not being in a neighborhood or having an easily accessible front door, but there were a few possible Halloween parties in the area we could attend.

" ... So I was thinking that everyone should dress up in an appropriate or interesting costume for Halloween," I said to Kasumi, as if we were continuing a conversation.

"What?" She looked at me blankly for a moment. "Halloween? What costumes did you have in mind?"

"Well, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity for a few people to go out-and-about in costumes appropriate to their appearance. For instance, Diana would make a perfect Wonder Woman! And I can't think of a better Power Girl than Kara here."

Kara smirked at me a little. "Admit it, you just want to see us in our uniforms again so you can live out your sick little comic book fetish fantasies, don't you?"

"Oh come on, you can't tell me that the idea of walking around town in your official outfit doesn't hold some appeal for you? I mean, come on! Last year you didn't dress up at all."

Diana looked a little wistful. "It might be nice not to hide who we are for a night."

Kasumi looked at me. "And what costumes do you have in mind for Rei and myself?"

"Well, it will be your choice, of course, but you could always go in a traditional Japanese kimono ... or you could dress up like Sailor Senshi ... or whoever you want to, really.

"I was thinking that we could go to the college Halloween carnival during the afternoon and then the Anderson party in the evening. If we leave the party by 10, we'd still have time for a late night horror movie or two."

"Oooo, can I pick the movies?" Kara loves hard-R horror movies. (Oddly enough, that's one character detail straight out of the comics.)

"Within reason. Remember not everyone likes splatter-fests."

She pouted a little and tried giving me puppy dog eyes. "Please?"

"Maybe one slasher and one classic monster movie. But remember, watching would have to be schedule-dependent anyway."

Kasumi asked, "What about the others?"

"Well, Anna and Zatanna have their own outfits, of course."

"And Daria, Jane and Beta?"

"Well, they'd need to pick their own, of course, but I think I can convince Beta to dress up as Bayonetta."

Diana joined in. "And what about you, Frank. What costume did you have in mind for yourself?"

"I hadn't decided yet. Maybe a mad scientist get-up, like Dr Frankenstein or Dr Horrible or something."

"I have a better idea," said Kara. "We'll choose for you."

"Come again?"

"The ladies of the household will vote and select what costume you wear."

I looked at her warily. "Uh huh. I think I'm going to have to reserve the right of veto on that. As long as it's a real costume, that should be okay. But I'm not going to go around town in a loincloth, you know."

"Hey, you want us to dress up to fulfill your own perverted desires, we get to dress you up in turn."

"Yeah, but I'm not asking for bikinis or anything. Hmmm ... bikinis..." I faded out for a second, thinking about our pool and hot tub fun, til Kara lightly punched me in the shoulder. "Okay, okay, no bikinis."

"And we'll be similarly considerate for you."

"Just remember, it has to be something I'd be willing to go out in public in, all right?"

Rei had been listening quietly all along and now quietly asked, "What would be a good costume for me?"

I stood back, fingers on my chin, and look at her for a few seconds. "You know, Rei, with your short haircut, you could pull off a wide range of costumes. You could be Sailor Mercury or a sexy soldier or a French maid or ... well, there are a lot of good possibilities. Maybe you, Kasumi, Daria and Jane should take a trip to a costume shop together. Maybe you all could even do a group costume thing ... though I figure there's an excellent chance Daria will try to avoid dressing up at all. You'd better enlist Jane to strong-arm her into it."

An hour or so later, Kara found me playing God of War 3 by myself in the entertainment room. We had a little small talk, mostly about the game, before she got to the point.

"Frank, I had a question about Alpha."

"Sure, what is it?" I said as I impaled an attacking minotaur.

"I've been reading some of your science fiction books over the past few weeks and I was wondering why Alpha isn't smarter by now."

"Huh?" Realizing I might need to pay attention, I paused the game and turned to face her. "What do you mean? Alpha's extremely smart already."

"Well, yeah, but shouldn't she have improved her programming into god-like intelligence within hours of when you first started her up?"

"Not really." Making a minor intuitive leap, I asked, "What books have you been reading?"

"A few by Charles Stross and Rudy Rucker and there was some series called Shadowrun. I read some old stuff by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but they were all based on older generations of technology."

"Ah, I think I see where you're coming from. But there are a few limitations that apply to Alpha that don't apply to fictional computers.

"First, the hardware limits how efficient the software can become. Even if all of Alpha's programs were absolutely perfect and efficient, she's still limited to how fast her host computers process the data. She's can't detach herself and run wild and free on the internet. Besides which, I have some of the fastest servers available in the world running downstairs and at the office.

"Second, there are limitations built into Alpha herself. Yes, she can upgrade her own software, but each upgrade has to rigorously pass certain tests and filters before it can be applied. Plus, certain root functions are flagged so that any upgrades to them have to be approved by me first, and I'm a lot slower than Alpha when it comes to reviewing thousands of lines of code.

"Third, how would you know if she even has god-like intelligence? She's already a super-genius compared to any human. We worked out our own IQ scale for AIs, and she's already worked her way up to being a super-genius on that scale too.

"Finally, there's a big difference between human brains and computers when it comes to dealing with the real world, which means which means that Alpha needs a lot more software subroutines than you can probably imagine. I mean, we can look over there and just automatically say, 'that's a chair.' If a computer doesn't already have that image pre-defined as a chair, it has to process the visual, separate out the chair as an individual object, analyze its structure and work through all the possible variables until it can sort the imaged structure into a subset of objects defined as chairs.

"For example, Alpha and I worked up a program that would allow her to drive a car in traffic. Well, more her than me, but the program is enormously complicated. Car controls are relatively easy, but sorting out the constant movement of other cars and vehicles on the road while driving legally and safely? Just detecting nearby objects isn't enough if you're going 55 mph. And then there are things like driving in construction zones and potholes and speed bumps and animals ... We take those skills pretty much for granted, but everything our brains process subconsciously and automatically requires conscious programming for her."

"Why'd you program her to drive? Can she do that?"

"Pretty much, and it was a test. And remember, we're going to make her a mobile body at some point."

(Maybe I should point out that while Kara knows about Alpha, she doesn't know that Beta is a cyborg. To her, Beta is a nickname for "Elizabeth Alana Franks" -- Elizabeth Alana becomes Beth A. becomes Beta, so it makes a kind of sense -- a friend of mine from childhood who recently moved back to Texas. With her superhero mentality, Kara sometimes has certain built-in opinions of computers that build themselves super-powered bodies.)

I continued. "Plus let me say, don't dismiss Asimov or Heinlein or any of the classics. Maybe they didn't predict the microchip, but they provided the cornerstones for modern SciFi. I mean, even as limited as Mike the A.I. is in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, that's still one of Alpha's favorite SciFi classics. Alpha occasionally tries to prod me into financing a movie version. I think the I ROBOT movie disappointed her so badly that she feels the need to create a good movie adaptation of a classic SciFi AI."