When Stacey told Laura she had an update on Lorelei she wasn’t expecting the sight she had walked in on. The top of Lorelei’s head had been removed and there was artificial blood everywhere. Next to Stacey’s main work terminal sat Lorelei’s artificial brain.

Stacey turned and saw the look on Laura’s face. “It’s all cosmetic,” Stacey explained, covered in just as much as the fake blood. “I didn’t expect the doll to bleed so much.” Laura just stood there looking at Stacey in silence. “Don’t worry she’s not damaged, and this was the only way I could access her system. I wouldn’t have done this if I didn’t know I could put her back together,” Stacey continued. “The reason I called you in, is this isn’t the only model of this type, her unit is designated DX-9”

Laura took a step closer trying to look away from Lorelei’s body. She trusted in what Stacey said about no long term damage but still she couldn’t handle seeing Lauren’s body in that state. “So there’s other DX units that are human or…?”

“This is the ninth copy of Lauren’s mind to a doll like this,” Stacey confirmed. “There’s also more….” Stacey opened up the full program of Lorelei onto her computer. “While her mind is an unaltered copy of Lauren’s there’s additional codes in the hardware itself. With a simple phrase I could make this Doll go from being Lauren to being my obedient servant.” Even Stacey was disgusted with the idea.

“So not only are there more copies of Lauren out there, they’re Raymond’s slaves?” Laura felt an anger she hadn’t felt since she first found out what happened to Ben and Lauren. “I’m going to take joy in ripping that bastard apart.”

“You’ll have help with that soon enough, the good thing about mind controlling your staff is it’s like generative AI it only knows how to copy what’s already there. Fortunately a lot of that work is based on Stanley’s which I’m an expert with.” Stacey gave a smile that hid a bit of her pain. “Only the hardware is new. I should have her operational in a few hours.”

“Good,” Laura put her hand on Stacey’s shoulder. “I’ll secure what we need for our raid, and let our teams know shit is about to hit the fan.” Laura walked out of the room without glancing over at Lorelei’s body. She had faith Stacey would do as she said, all she needed now was whatever information their virus could retrieve and everything would be ready to go.

* * * * *

Benjamin had been reading the files of the orderly dolls and the psychiatrist for the past day or so. The drones appeared to be a simple hack, kick the pilot and have someone else take over. Raymond had used this technique on the doll that had crashed into 477900. The one thing that was strange about them was all the hijacked drones seemed to have the same user which should not have been possible.

The psychiatrist was more interesting, according to their files, Cassandra Peters was still piloting it when it went rogue. That made some sense as she had disappeared shortly after the raid on the mental facility. But the logs had shown that it was being piloted twenty four seven which wouldn’t be possible without a long term piloting bed. Unfortunately that’s all Benjamin and his team had managed to salvage from 477900.

“Do you think it was sentient?” DX-2 asked, leaning over Benjamin’s shoulder, kissing him on the cheek.

Benjamin looked at the one eyed doll with a look of disgust. He hated that he had been given this one. He would’ve much preferred to have kept DX-9 or taken DX-8 who was currently undergoing reprogramming. The parts of this body’s original mind had an attachment to these Dolls, one that wasn’t able to be scrubbed away and the imperfection of the eye patch bugged the Raymond part of his mind. Of course his superior version did this on purpose so he’d remember his place. At least it was easier to program.

“Possible,” Benjamin turned and got up off the chair and approached the blank faced drone. “If it was that’s a major concern as this one,” he tapped on the Drone’s head. “Is the only sentient Doll we know about, and soon it’s going to be destroyed but not before we learn all its secrets.” Benjamin picked up the head and took it over to his terminal and plugged it in.

‘Network not detected, files being scanned, hide true programming, retrieve all Data on DollTech, contact Stacey’ the AI told itself as its surface files were being read. ‘What, where am I? What are you doing to me?’ The AI demanded as Benjamin probed its mind.

“There you are, not so clever now are you?” Benjamin taunted the Doll’s program, of course it couldn’t see or hear him unless he activated those systems. “Now how do you take over our drones?”

The AI produced the information Benjamin was after, that it used basic copies of itself that could obey simple commands. Then it tweaked and modified the program that it was sending, demonstrating it did the same to more complex Dolls but used their integrated minds as a piggy back while reporting to the system that they were still being piloted. It didn’t actually have the programming that awakened Dolls in its system other than what made it sentient but it was masking that part of itself. While it gave out these half truths to Benjamin, it tried searching for anything useful it could find, but the terminal only had the program used to read its mind. All it could do was hope that Benjamin would pull it apart and put its programing to the test, allowing it to possess another Doll, but it knew they weren’t that stupid.

“Who designed you?” Benjamin asked as he continued to speed read through the information he was receiving. Even with his borrowed genius it’d take a while to learn how this all worked reading the raw code. He didn’t need to though, he just needed another AI that could read everything without being compromised.

Confident that he had every fail safe in place, isolating the program on its own machine. He got DX-2 to lift up its eye patch revealing the modification he had made to it to allow for easier reprogramming. He pulled out the long cable and plugged it into another closed terminal before connecting the two. Soon DX-2 would have a fully understanding how this rogue program was able to do what it did and where it came from. A problem that alluded the real Raymond Jones for the last few years.

‘Hello Lauren,’ the AI sent a message to DX-2 as soon as they began to access it. ‘How would you like to get out of here?’

“This program is really complex,” DX-2 informed Benjamin. “It’s going to take me a while to crack it.” DX-2 had told its first lie since being reprogrammed. ‘What did you have in mind?’