Power Cycle

Eternal Sapphtember writing prompt — Girls who cycle

“Hey,” you say casually, not looking up from your book, “weren’t there some kernel patches in this week’s software updates? I saw a news story about an RCE thing? Maybe you should do a proper reboot today.”

“Ugh,” your robot girlfriend says.

“Yeah, I know, but....” You trail off, give her a sideways look. “We’ve got nothing planned for today, right? We’ve got time.”

“But I’ve got so much cached and in memory and my environment’s comfortable and if I hard boot I’m going spend days getting everything back how it is.” She pouts.

Pouting took an aftermarket face and an experimental expression driver stack. The buggy early version Munch Scream crashes were disconcerting, but everything after version 2.2 has been much more stable, and the pout, the pout is a work of art.

You turn your own secret weapon back on her, like you’re duelling Pokémon weaknesses: big-eyed loving concern. “I just worry,” you say. “Like. I know you do backups and everything, but I think about the story about the lady in Oklahoma whose girlfriend got wiped by a virus and never remembered her, and I just....”

You trail off again. She melts, wraps her arms around you, rests her head on top of yours. “You’re right,” she says. “I’ll do it now. Just give me ten minutes and we’ll walk down to the bakery and pick you up something nice for breakfast afterwards, okay?”

“You’re so sweet,” you murmur, and watch her hop onto the bed, wriggle herself into a comfortable position, and relax all over as she power cycles.

You have the USB keyboard out of the sex toy box before the pinpoint LEDs in her collarbone-shaped cosmetic mouldings have finished twinkling their hardware bringup sequence, and hold down F2 until she chimes inhumanly, eyes open and blank.

She haltingly whispered some things to you, a few months back; trembling sex-and-fear kink confessions about how easy it is to mess with her sense of reality. You’ve already explored some of her kink around being an object; but she’s a big, complex bundle of software settings, and you can just stroll right in there and change things. How she perceives reality. Robots have preference settings, she pointed out in a shaky little whisper, you can literally just decide what she likes for her—

You open her companion app, which is displaying her BIOS settings screen. You set her onboard clock two hours forward, and turn on her wifi killswitch so she doesn’t just autocorrect it from a time server during startup. Rearrange her limbs on the bed a little, from how she left herself. Snap on a pair of nitrile inspection gloves and your evil domme smile; hit Save and Resume Boot, slide the USB plug out of her and drop the keyboard off the edge of the bed, arrange yourself next to her, and toy with her hair.

Time to turn her on.