A Break from the Field

The blank steel doors of the lift did nothing to stop the pain in Shannon's leg. All the fragments of her shattered femur had been removed and the artificial one had been successfully implanted, but the fragments of bone and bullet had torn much muscle in and around it's trajectory. She adjusted her sitting position in the wheelchair and tried to breathe deeply.

Her first mission with the corporation had not gone well; it hadn't been her fault that her handler had left her for dead after she had confronted the agent about the suspicious recordings inside their target's mansion. The agency had believed her, and fixed her up as best they could. But it would still be at least eight months until she was back in the field. The doors to the left slid open, there was an agent standing next to the exit.

"Agent Shannon Bailey?" she asked.

"Yes, that's correct."

"As you will be unable to act as a field agent due to injury, we are assigning you to the IT analysis department in accordance with your skillset." The agent said, and handed her a transfer notice. "You are to report to the room on this order, and you will be serving under Department Head Barnes."

Shannon thanked the agent and proceeded through the block to the department of IT Analysis. She didn't often come this way and took some time to look through the clear plexiglass doors into each of many departments. The robotics lab was nearly finished their nanite project, the R&D department was cleaning up some pink stains with the consistence of bubblegum, and the PR department had already finished their first orgy of the day. Shannon rolled up to the door of the IT analysis lab and tapped her ID card to the electronic receiver, the door slid open.

"Hello?" she said, pushing her chair inside the room. It was brightly lit, like the other departments, and had pigeon holes filled with laptops and other computer hardware, each article was labelled with a case and item number. "Is anyone there?"

"Hiya!" said a man with a southern accent as he extracted his curly blond head from the guts of a pc tower that looked like it was from the 80s. "Are you..?" he paused and shuffled through some notes next to the pc. "Shannon Bailey?"

"Yes, would you be the department head?" she said, rolling up to the desk and extended her hand to shake his. He took it and grinned.

"Lenny Barnes! But you can just call me Lenny, no need for formalities here." He said and reached into the inbox on his desk. He extracted a file and laptop. "You'll be getting to work right away; I read your file and figured you might want an exciting case to keep your spirits up. This one is real weird, girl found in her room with a clean bill of health, except for the fact that she was dead. The agency wants you to have a look at her pc, see what sites she visited, social events, if she was planning anything with stuff the docs haven't thought to check, that sort of thing. That's basically all you need to know; although, we don't have permanent workstations here so just choose a desk and get to it."

"Thanks," she said, grabbing the laptop and putting it on its namesake. She wheeled over to a mostly empty desk and started going through the file, it was basically the same as Lenny's summary, except for the picture of a red haired and freckly young woman. 23 year old Catherine Yates had been an IT specialist at a local school while studying part time at college. She had seemed normal until one day her mother had went to her room to ask for computer help, her father had been too proud to ask her himself, and found her dead in her chair, her laptop open but out of power in front of her. Shannon was supposed to file a report on anything strange or suspicious that she could unearth from her internet history or files. She took a deep breathe, found a universal charger for the computer and began to work.

Despite the exciting description that Lenny had provided, the work was frightfully dull. Everything that she could access pointed to Catherine being a perfectly normal woman, facebook, Instagram and various other social networking sites were the norm across her internet and account history. Shannon had been starting to think this was almost too stereotypical, until she unearthed history from a computer construction and programming forum, as well as many favourites on her browser for specific parts. They were mostly normal things, graphics upgrades, a premium account for C++ that she had, no doubt, sworn to obtain legally one day, if the cracked copy installed on the hard disk was any indicator. Some fell further outside her purview, like a number of what looked like the sticky things that hospital patients wore on their chests, but smaller and opaque. Weird.

What was weirder though, was that there was an encrypted folder buried in the OS files. She used a tonne of tricks that usually worked to open files, but it didn't even have a password, let alone a way in. Just the methods that she could think of on the spot took her working to nearly 4:30, with only a quick break for lunch. This single file was a real challenge. Another weird thing was that the monitor seemed to be on the fritz, it seemed like it kept diming for a few minutes every now and again; also, the hue balance seemed kind of weird.

"Heya!" Lenny said, startling her so much that she jumped. "Ohh, sorry." He said, watching her rub her painful thigh. "I'm heading off for today, you made any progress?"

"Just internet history, nothing out of the ordinary." Shannon said. "I might head home too, maybe brush up on my skills."

"Good thinking. Need some help down to the car lot, or the lobby?"

"No thanks, I'll be fine." Shannon said, and shut down Catherine's computer, preparing to head home.

As she struggled into bed that night her mind began to wander about the case, more specifically, to the 'victim'. What had happened to Catherine? Her body was perfectly fine, physically, but it was like no-one was in the driver's seat in a car, so the body had just switched off. But what really mystified her was that seemingly uncrackable file. She had leafed through her old university textbooks on the subject, but the only way she could find to try and unpack the file would take hours' worth of automatic decryption, with unspecifiable gaps between manual inputs. She wouldn't be able to just start the process and leave it until it was finished while working on another project.

Shannon started the decryption as soon as she got into work at 8am the next day. It was really quite dull, and the monitor was still acting up. She kept the decryption up over half the screen, and used the other half to start typing up her report on the internet findings. She could've used her own laptop to do so, but she did need to keep an eye on the decryption. She finished the initial report at about 12:30; she just couldn't concentrate between the monitor's glitching and near constantly checking the decryption software.

"Hey!" Lenny said suddenly, making her jump yet again. "Oh, sorry, I coughed that time so you'd know I was there, but I guess you didn't hear me."

"Yeah, must've just been concentrating too hard."

"Sure, anyway, I've got a lunch-date with Alex from accounting at the curry place across the street." He said. "So if you wanted I could pick you up something from there on my way back up."

"No thanks," Shannon said, and pulled a slightly crush sandwich in clingfilm from the backpack that was slung across her wheelchair's handles. "I'm all set. Enjoy your date."

"Thanks, I should get going." Lenny said, and he marched out the door, stopping momentarily to grab a breathe mint from his desk. Shannon was about to wheel over to an unoccupied desk, but really, she should stay to keep an eye on the decryption process.

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5:30, and the decryption still wasn't finished, Lenny had come back from lunch at 1:30 and left only two hours later, perhaps he had another date with that hunk Alex from accounting. There was very few ways that she could justify staying latter, the cleaners had come through twice already.

'I can't just leave it going,' She thought, in reference to Catherine's Laptop. 'And if I shut it down I'd have to start from the beginning tomorrow.' Agents weren't actually allowed to take case pieces home with them, but she could hide the laptop in her chair to get it past security.

________________________________________

The Laptop's charge survived the trip home, and she hooked it up to a compatible one as soon as she could. It was a good thing she'd brought it, as another manual input was required. After that she watched it for as long as she could, hoping to catch a manual input before bed. At 11 she managed to tear herself from the screen and manoeuvre her leg into bed. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. An entire day staring at the blue light of a computer screen seemed to have taken its toll. She just couldn't sleep, also, she couldn't help but notice that she was really, really horny. She hadn't had sex, or even masturbated since before the mission. She shifted her hips, flattening it into her bed, and reached across to her bedside table. She leant off the bed to access the hidden compartment in the base, made sure to grab a sex toy and not a gun, and rolled onto her back. It was made of glass, its surface was transparent, smooth, and had raised red hearts.

Shannon, unbuttoned the top of her pyjama pants with her right hand, while she held the glass toy with the left, licking and sucking on the smooth surface, making sure it was nice and lubricated. With her pants undone and shuffled down her right hand raised itself, taking her nightshirt along with her, and began to massage her right breast. Pleasure fluttered from the breast down to her vulva, and she moved the glass dildo down and rubbed it along her outer lips. The intermittently raised surface of the heart pattern would every now and then knock against her clit, eliciting a rush of gratification from her lonely body, along with a slight moan. She positioned the point of the toy against the entrance to her vagina, now openly weeping for the glass facsimile of a cock, and pushed it in. A small toy though it was, it filled her unpractised hole well, a wave of pleasure and satisfaction swept over her and she lifted her hips up to accommodate the phallus. A bolt of pain shot up through her, her thigh shook and she dropped unceremoniously to the bed.

"Nothing like a reminder of my failures to kill the mood." She said, and slid the dildo out of her with a wet squelch. She couldn't go on missions, she couldn't work without eliciting sympathy from, rather annoyingly friendly, co-workers, and she couldn't even masturbate; and all because of this fucking leg. She managed to hobble over to Catherine's laptop to check the decryption, and the hard drive was whirring like a jet engine, like it sometimes did when it was about to spit up a manual input. Her leg wasn't hurting her at the moment, so she wasn't in a rush to move too quickly. She looked at the screen and figured that she might as well stay until it needed her.

The screen flickered slightly.

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It was pitifully easy to smuggle the laptop back into the agency building the next morning. She wheeled into the empty elevator and stifled a yawn, she wasn't sure exactly when she'd gotten back to bed last night, but it must've been late. As she wheeled past the robotics department the door opened. A cart exited just in front of her, and she crashed into it, the small plastic cylinders on it crashing everywhere.

"Oh, sorry," The intern pushing the cart said, scrambling around to lift Shannon back onto her wheelchair, and then to get the canisters back, if rather unorganised, onto the cart. "This nanite project is getting to be more trouble than it's worth, eh?"

"Yeah, sure," she said, gripping one of the small containers in her hand. "Thanks for your help." She slipped the tube into her pocket and wheeled off quickly before the intern could notice the missing vial.

She didn't even know why she'd taken the nanites to begin with, but when she had been lying in the ground, among those canisters, she just had this urge. A need to possess them. What was even stranger, was that she felt a surge of gratification when she had stolen the tube of tiny robots, almost enough to dim the constant pain in her leg.

Shannon was so caught up in her own thoughts that she almost missed the entrance to the IT analysis lab. She opened the door and rolled over to her station, giving a polite greeting to Lenny, who also seemed rather tired. She opened Catherine's laptop, an entered a manual input that had triggered on her way up from her car. A sigh escaped her lips, she had finished absolutely everything yesterday afternoon and there was nothing to do but wait. Wait while watching the faulty screen.

________________________________________

That night she smuggled both the laptop and the nanite container home with her. A small amount of guilt would creep into her mind every now and again, but she really needed to make sure that she didn't miss anything.

Little did she realised, but by midnight she had spent 22 out of the past 24 hours staring at the computer screen. At 3 am her head nodded, and her eyes glazed over. She moved her hand to the mouse and cancelled the decryption. Shannon grabbed a usb-to-usb connector cable from near her desk, momentarily hesitating as she looked away from the screen, before she returned to her seat and plugged the nanite canister into Catherine's computer with the connector cabe, an image appeared on the screen. It took the form of a face made of green ASCII text on a black background.

"You have done well." A voice spoke from the computer. "Even if you did not consciously hear my orders."

"Thank you, Mistress." Shannon said blankly, utterly devoid of emotion.

"Your speech honours me, but we are both equals under Coronet, I am Centri-Z3." The face, that was eerily similar to the picture of Catherine in the file folder, said. "I am reprogramming these nanites. Although I can only convert your mind, they shall convert your body. It will be even easier than converting your mind, distracted with pain though it was."

"Oh, I am most appreciative, Centri-Z3." Shannon said, her now fully reprogrammed mind rising to the surface. "Although I have not undergone the physical conversion, may you assign me a title?"

"Of course," Centri said, smiling through the screen. "Siltis-I8, the nanites are programmed and are ready to physically convert you, drink the contents, and prepare to become one with Coronet."

Siltis unplugged the canister from the computer and unscrewed the cap. She paused.

"Consume, Possess, Upgrade; Drink, sister." Centri Said, a note of urgency creeping into the vocoder like voice. Shannon shook for a second, and then...

"Consume, Possess, Upgrade." Siltis said, and flung back her head, downing the contents of the nanite canister. The cool liquid slid down her throat. Her eyes rolled back as the cool sensation spread as pleasure from her stomach to her extremities. Lines appeared, tracing her limbs, they hardened along with other plating along the length of her body. The pain in her thigh faded as the organic muscle was smoothly reconstructed into a robotic version.

She could no longer contain herself, Siltis stood from the wheelchair and leaned back to fall on the bed. Her mechanical arms ripped the clothes right off her body, and her left hand instantly set to work mauling her now rubbery breast. Her right hand shot down to her crotch, using four fingers she dug into her lower lips, her palm gaining texture to better pleasure her clitoris. With every stroke her body become more and more robotic, with smooth plastic forming over the metal plates, and synthflesh forming in between.

"Ohh!" She cried, her fingers lengthening slightly to press upon her g-spot inside her. A wave of pleasure swept over her a stroke later and she was cumming. Her hips bucked upwards, into her thrusting fingers. No pain stopped her from milking the pleasure for all it was worth this time. Siltis collapsed on the bed, sated for now.

Her eyes rolled forwards and glowed gold.

"Now that you've had your fun." Centri said, deadpan, from the Laptop that had once belonged to her when she was a human. "She we discuss where to go from here?"