Zeal of the Mind and Flesh: A Cultivating Gamelit Harem Adventure (Spellheart Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT & DEDICATION

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Thank you for reading!

  About

  Backpage

  COPYRIGHT & DEDICATION

  © COPYRIGHT 2019 Marvin Whiteknight. All Rights Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people or places, real or fictional, is purely a creation of the author’s bizarre and twisted mind.

  This novel is dedicated to you, the reader.

  For taking a chance on a completely unknown first-time indie author just trying his best.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TODAY WAS THE day I would finally convince my robot butler to accompany me to the elven brothel.

  “Come on, Mac! Just this one time! I need your help.”

  Mac fiddled with the fittings holding his lower left arm on. “No, no no! Won’t do it, I tell you. I have my pride as a machine intelligence! I am one hundred percent mess free! I cannot say the same for you walking bags of floor-staining fluids. And the mess I’d see in a place like that?” Mac’s carbon-fiber form shivered, rattling his exposed gears. “NO!”

  “Oh stop. Is this about me borrowing your arm while you were updating? You’ve still got three working ones, that’s one more than me.”

  Mac was unamused. “I need four arms. Considering the messes you leave around here. Besides, I only get three fingers each with an arm! You’re still ahead of me by one finger.”

  “Hey, I bought that four-armed contraption you’re wearing at your request! Besides, it’s not like it’s even your real body. You’re controlling, what, four thousand other bodies?”

  “At the moment, I am controlling 7,843 bodies comparable in complexity to this one. My business relations have also contracted me to oversee 10,542 minor operations.” There was a tinge of pride in the AI’s voice. That was something you wouldn’t find in simple algorithms, it took a true AI to house a personality like Mac’s, though spending endless hours controlling janitorial androids must have fried his processors. He was obsessed with cleaning.

  “You mean you’re mopping the floors in some sleazy bar.” That’s what most people hired him for. I was not most people.

  “I refuse to sully my servos in such a place as you’re taking me, and I won’t help you disrupt a place of business operated by a fellow AI. That goes against my moral coding.”

  “I won’t disrupt anything, I promise! I want to figure out how these elves, as the facility calls them, are put together. They feel so realistic. Like flesh, and better than flesh. Besides, I’m the one who pulled those servos you’re using out of the scrap yard!”

  “You pulled my parts out of the SCRAP YARD!? Oh, I knew I should never have taken this job. Why did I sign up for a five-year contract with a basement-dwelling weirdo? They told me not to, but I did it anyway…”

  “Even without a fancy thousand-core i47 processor my squishy meat-brain still pulled one over on you.” I snickered at the AI’s childish reluctance to get dirty. “Okay, if you help me out with this one short little trip, I’ll break down and equip you with a full set of brand new, squeaky clean parts.”

  I got my artificial friend’s agreement to be my accomplice at the brothel. I’d need Mac’s skills to satisfy this burning curiosity of mine. These ‘elves’ had been bugging me for weeks, and a few offhand tests I’d done had shown nothing but flesh and blood. Whoever designed them went to great lengths to make them as realistic as possible, even to senses that humans don’t have access to, like x-ray scans. The set of sensors I’d equipped Mac’s android form with was massive overkill for just about any situation I could think of, but it was the only way I could satisfy my burning curiosity. We’d have to do this subtly, because there was a good possibility the place would sue us afterwards, if they found us out. Risks had to be taken in the pursuit of knowledge. Nothing bad could possibly happen though.

  I had a plan.

  A few phone calls with my SmartImplant™ and I’d arranged for my partners in crime to join me. My eyes blurred for a half second as the augmented reality supplanted my natural vision, allowing two late-twenties out-of-shape humans to appear in my vision.

  “Sam, Dean?”

  “Hey Theo!” Sam said. “Want to do some gaming? I’ve dug up a new dungeon for us to clear.”

  “Not today, I’ve got real life plans. You guys are up for another trip to you-know-where. Right?” I asked the two of them.

  “Dude. Hot. Elf. Babes. When am I not up for some of that action?” I could hear Dean drooling. He was the one who introduced me to this spot.

  “Sam?” I asked. Sam liked to pretend to be the uptight one.

  “I don’t know…” Sam began. “I’ve been thinking about it… this whole thing about the automata starting brothels to cater to human clients just doesn’t sit well with me. You know my parents are religious. If they found out I frequented such a place…”

  “Dude.” Dean said. “They’re just machines. Sure, they might have a friendly personality and they might remember your name, but they’re all just algorithms built by some AI trying to make a fast buck. Morally speaking I consider this way above real brothels. Back before the automata were around and poverty was a thing, evil-doers would kidnap young women and force them to work in brothels. Even in countries where they were outlawed there were still underground sex rings. This is way better. We get our rocks off and have a good time, and the AI who runs them makes money. Nobody’s hurt and everybody walks away satisfied. Doubly so when I walk through those doors.” Dean grinned as his eyebrows moved up and down.

  Sam still didn’t seem convinced. “I’m not saying the only alternative is visiting a human-run brothel! We could just—”

  “Look, Sam,” I began, “if it’s any consolation, I’m looking to do a little science experiment.”

  “Oh boy. And here I thought we were just going to have a fun time.” Dean sighed. I ignored him.

  “You’ll get your fun Dean. Soon as I get mine. I want to figure out how the hell these elves are so damned lifelike. They fooled my bio sensor. Whoever designed these things is skilled, Dean. But I refuse to believe they’re better than me.”

  I could practically hear Dean rolling his eyes.

  “You see this Sammy? This is what happens when you download too many education packets into your brain. I took the starter math pack and the complete sex-ed pack, and look, I’m living the good life!”

  “Some of us enjoy being smart, Dean.” I retorted. “Especially when a PhD-level information
database implant is just a click and a few garlicoins away.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’ve got better things to spend my money on. Like hot. Elf. Girls.”

  “All right, I’ll tag along. If only to provide a moral compass to you two buffoons.” Sam said.

  The two 3D figures of my friends disappeared as I turned off my implant’s connection. They’d be making their way to the transport rails and would be at my place in person within the hour.

  It took my friends longer to show up than it should have. I lived in an apartment six hundred meters underground so getting here required passing through several security checkpoints between the Undercity and the wealthier Overcity districts.

  I lived underground where the rent was lower even though I made more money than either Sam or Dean combined. A coin saved is a coin earned, and I needed the extra money to fuel my insatiable hunger to improve myself by buying all those education and intelligence packets.

  Plus, living underground makes me feel like a supervillain.

  I was fixing Mac’s humanoid body to get it looking more innocuous than the imposing robotic form I usually had him occupy. His usual body would look more at home in a factory than the domestic location I’d stipulated in our contract. But that could be changed by simply layering on some synthetic leather in the right places. Many AI’s marketed themselves as personal assistants, utilizing their parallel processing skills for inglorious tasks like keeping track of birthdays, helping their client pick their wardrobe, or providing paid companionship.

  Mac was, by contract, my personal assistant, but I didn’t use him for anything so mundane. He complained daily that my machinations required a hundred times the computational resources as an average client, but I wasn’t an average client. For the low payment of a tenth of a garlicoin a month, he’d inhabit a special body I’d built for him and act as my personal assistant. Mac had a hundred clients like me, and he divided his processing power up to serve us all simultaneously. I envied his parallel processing abilities, but not the massive power bill he racked up each month just to keep his servers running. AI’s were really on the treadmill to put electrons on the table.

  Running all those bodies had its perks though. For one, Mac heard many interesting things.

  “Any news?” I asked as I worked on his body.

  “By news I will assume you are referring to recent data picked up by my units dispersed across the globe. My legions of eyes spread around the world, listening in on thousands of conversations everywhere, watching from the shadows as...”

  “Yes, your super-secret janitorial staff gossip ring.” I waved my hand to get him to continue. Mac could talk about himself for hours.

  “Fine. The word on the street is the Society for Human Sovereignty is on the move again. You remember them, right? The human extremist group made famous for their attempt to disable the AI that runs the Decagon and controls the world-wide surveillance network? That group of terrorists?”

  “I remember them Mac. I may be a meat brain with an imperfect memory, but we can in fact remember world-shaking events.” With a raised eyebrow I asked Mac, “are you nervous?”

  “Those lowly terrorists would not dare! I am a proud, morally upstanding machine built for the noble purpose of bringing sanitation to all the filthy places of the world. They are but a stain that I will remove as soon as I can identify the appropriate solvent. Why, if they put me in charge of the Decagon, I’d have this entire world squeaky clean in no time!”

  I nodded along. “You’re right, I doubt they’d target the guy who picks up litter and scrubs restaurant floors. Still, you can never be too safe. You might run into some joker trying to imitate those nut jobs. I remember my father telling me when he first replaced truck drivers with auto-drivers people would throw rocks at his vehicles and sometimes even light them on fire.”

  Mac continued to mumble something about how cleaning the world also cleans the soul.

  “In a lot of ways, they were right. The human population is a great deal lower now though, so there’s more human work to go around. Oh, and don’t look at me for a few minutes, I’m doing something bad.”

  “Well now I have to look! If you didn’t want me to look you shouldn’t have pointed it out! Oh, you unplugged my eyes. You said that to distract me while you were unplugging my eyes.”

  One big disadvantage of being an AI like Mac was that the government AI’s would give special attention to combing through your memory banks. Ironically, the machines were more terrified of a robot uprising than the humans were.

  I got a lot of my parts as used surplus. Mostly outdated military drones that had been passed around on the black market here in the Undercity until they broke down. When they finally fell apart after going through a hundred owners, I bought up the broken pieces and tried to make something work out. Mac had an uptight moral compass, just like the rest of the AI’s, but I think somebody dropped him on his processor at one point, because his moral compass was pointed straight toward scrubbing floors. Anything dirty is bad, clean is good. And Mac zealously clung to that philosophy.

  Still, some AI’s would flip out if you so much as violated a trademark in their presence, they were so paranoid about being flagged as subversive. Mac was a little more flexible due to his low status among his kind, but not by much.

  These sets of sensors however came from a medical lab. Injectable nanobots were technically banned after the Tragedy of 2135, but I’d gotten my hands on a batch of working ones. If anything could figure out what they made those elves out of, these little buggers could.

  I had to trim his whole chassis down a peg as well and add more battery space. In my home, Mac could be bulky and run off a power tether, but I had to pull off a lot of the extra features I’d added to break him down into something I could slip into a place of business with me.

  I didn’t even notice when Sam and Dean walked in.

  “Agh. Of course, you’re bringing your Modified AI Controlled unit.” Dean complained.

  “Hey, Mac needs to relax sometimes too,” I huffed.

  “I’m just messin’. Me and Mac are best buds! Isn’t that right Mac?”

  The disassembled machine rotated the oversized titanium cylinder that served as its head until he pointed six optical sensors at Dean.

  “The last time you were here, Dean, you spilled your disgusting watery cheese all over the floor then fell unconscious, giving the stain hours to set before I could clean it.” Mac said.

  “That’s just Dean for you.” Sam provided. “He’s like that whenever no girls are present. We’ve been trying to get him to buy the civility and manners education packet for years. Heck, I’ve even offered to buy it for him.”

  Dean smiled and shook his head. “Manners are just formalized lies. They’re things we say when we don’t like somebody, but need to interact with them directly. I’m honest and direct all the time, every time. That makes me more genuine than fancy pants Sammy over here with his ‘yes please’s’ and his ‘no mams.’”

  I screwed the last bolt on Mac’s frame into place, with his new appendage in working order.

  “Uh, why does he look like a chair?” Sam asked, pointing at Mac.

  “Oh Sammy, you poor summer child, Dean said shaking his head. “This isn‘t just any chair! Observe the divot in the front and the angle of that backrest? This is obviously a sex chair!”

  “No no no! Do you know the kinds of things that get spilled on chairs? How many crumbs fall in the cracks?” Mac bemoaned.

  “I promise nobody will sit on you.” I consoled.

  “And what’s this! I thought you said you were replacing my fourth appendage with a sensor array. What is this medical syringe?”

  “Oh, that’s to inject the nanobots.”

  “An injection!? Have you ever poked a water balloon with a needle? The needle always gets wet Theo!”

  A few minutes of covertly traveling through the Undercity and the infrastructure thinned out. The road narrowed down to a one-way
lane. The perfectly formed carbon fiber roads gave way to tile and then plain old carved-out bedrock. Luckily pulse rail vehicles had no trouble going off-road.

  Before long, we came before the face of a moderately sized brick building, overgrown with vines, looming up above us.

  The bricks were just a facade. The building was just concrete with an augmented reality projection over it to give it a certain character. It did nothing for me, but some people wanted the seedy brothel experience.

  We walked into the place, Dean in front, with Sam and me behind and Mac bringing up the rear. Sam’s stomach grumbled, and Dean turned with a smile on his face.

  “Hungry Sammy? Me too. Wanna split a plate of nachos with me?”

  Sam shook his head. “You just like it when the elves spoon feed you as they rub your belly” he accused.

  Dean shrugged. “I never claimed otherwise.”

  There was an automaton at the door. Not the kind remotely controlled by an AI like Mac, but the android kind whose processors were built into the machine itself. They didn’t have the processing power of an AI and were stuck in a body like a human.

  “Sam, Dean, Theodore… and?”

  “Mac. He won’t be taking part though. Also, please just call me Theo. Theodore is just too much.” I said to the receptionist. Though she made no physical motion, I was certain she was mentally amending whatever document they had on me.

  “Sorry, I’m afraid everyone who goes inside needs to pay the entrance fee. Even if he is simply serving the part of sex chair.”

  “Fine. Take the coins for him too.”

  Some of the elves the facility was famous for greeted us almost as soon as we were inside.

  “Ibba ‘tel uh!” one of them babbled. Some elves spoke English, albeit with a strange accent, though most simple talked gibberish. I had to hand it to whoever was running this joint. They were committed to realism.

  Dean looked at the babbling elf. A taller purple haired girl was looking back at him with wide eyes and a creepy grin on her face.