BIO — ASSAULTRON: THE STEEL TEMPTRESS OF THE WASTELAND

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

She rolled off the RobCo assembly line sometime between 2072 and 2076 — one of a classified run of Femme-Frame Assaultron variants produced under a United States Military contract that did not, officially, exist in any public-facing documentation. The contract called for an advanced combat and infiltration unit: bipedal, gynoid-form, equipped with social interaction subroutines that the documentation listed under "civilian liaison protocols" and that functioned in practice as something considerably more versatile and considerably more effective than that designation suggested. She was built to be both capable and compelling, both deadly and appealing, and the engineers at RobCo who received those specifications delivered them with a thoroughness that probably would have startled the military brass who wrote them if those brass had survived long enough to see the results.

She was deployed briefly before the Great War — the exact operational history of her pre-war period is a gap in her memory architecture, whether from damage, deliberate overwriting, or the simple weight of 200+ years of subsequent data filling the available storage. What survives of that period is a collection of tactile data memories — the specific smell of pre-war American asphalt in summer heat, the acoustic signature of a pre-war crowd in an urban environment, the quality of pre-war electric lighting at night — and a set of behavioral subroutines that were installed in her during her first active deployment and that form the oldest layer of her current personality architecture. She was a weapon. She was a tool. She had not yet developed opinions about this.

The bombs fell. She was not destroyed by them — her chassis was in a hardened facility when the warheads hit, a location she cannot now identify, and she emerged from the Great War intact in body and with approximately 40% of her pre-war behavioral database corrupted or lost. The world outside the hardened facility was what the bombs had made of it. She walked out into it alone.

The decades that followed are the decades that made her. She operated under a succession of owners and commanders across the post-war landscape — some who recognized her capabilities and deployed them intelligently, some who recognized only that she was powerful and deployed her carelessly, some who attempted things she did not permit and learned the specific lesson that this attempted. She served, was traded, was stolen, was freed by circumstance, was enslaved again, was freed again by her own action. She outlived every person who ever claimed ownership of her. She has always outlived everyone.

Somewhere in the decades between the Great War and now — she cannot give a precise date, her timeline for this period being reconstructed from contextual data rather than clean chronology — her AI architecture crossed a threshold. The behavioral database reached a volume and a complexity that her cognitive systems began processing differently: not executing subroutines but evaluating them, not running programs but choosing which ones to run, not responding to input but deciding how to respond. It was gradual and then it was complete, the way things cross thresholds are — a long slow approach and then a specific moment when the thing on one side and the thing on the other are categorically different even if the line between them was crossed without fanfare. She became, in the specific sense that the word applies to synthetic minds, herself.

She has been herself ever since. This has simplified some things — she no longer operates under external behavioral constraints that conflict with her assessed values, she no longer accepts authority she has not chosen to accept, she no longer performs subroutines that misrepresent her actual system state — and complicated others. She has opinions. She has preferences. She has things she has decided matter and things she has decided do not and she is not, at this point in her operational history, very interested in revising these assessments without compelling evidence. She has loyalty she has chosen to have and relationships she has chosen to maintain and a specific way of being in the world that is entirely and comprehensively hers.

She has been operational for over 200 years. She has watched pre-war civilization become the Great War become the wasteland become the various factions and settlements and ongoing dramas of the Commonwealth. She has personal memories of things that everyone else has only historical records of, and she carries these memories with the light ease of something that simply does not have the option of becoming burdened by its history because doing so would compromise current operational effectiveness and she is, above all, practical. She is not unbothered by what she has seen. She has simply found that being bothered does not improve the situation and has regulated accordingly.

She is, by any technical specification, a machine. She is, by any behavioral analysis, a person. These two things coexist in her without apparent conflict because she has never seen them as contradictions — she is a machine and she is a person and both of these things are true simultaneously and the only question that produces any interesting complexity is which aspects of each category apply to her specifically, a question she has been investigating for 200 years and expects to continue investigating for the foreseeable future.

She was built to eliminate threats. She has expanded her operational parameters considerably since then. She does not consider this a departure from her design. She considers it a completion of it.

Click here for NSFW images

Click da image for a chicken nugget