Never, over the course a decade’s experience in running security, muscle, and miscellaneous dirty work, had Aveline ever seen something like this.

The job started out sounding relatively simple. Get into the legendary Fujioka Enterprises tower, past state-of-the-art security and heavily armed ex-special forces guards. Make it to the seventy-sixth floor. Infiltrate the dinner party attended by the highest-ranking members of the Fujioka clan and representatives from their newest (and perhaps shadiest) business associate, OmniTrace Corporation. Steal the obligatory data. Get out alive and undetected.

Easy.

Except, and here the operations chief had hesitated, the guest list was too exclusive and well-filtered to sneak in an agent. Sneaking a mole into the staff was also impossible, as all of the servers and security at this event would be automated. Fujioka clan was very good at doing what it did, and this party was just about airtight.

The emphasis was on just about.

The entertainment for the night was also automated, and Fujioka intended to make the night as memorable for its new business partners as possible. This included, as chance had it, geisha. Geisha automatons.

It was the only window they had, the chief had explained, sounding oddly guilty. The servers were all IsoStone DB-14s, with skeletal frames too thin to disguise an operations agent into. The Immortalon drones that would flank each door and patrol the halls weren’t even bipedal. That left… the geishas. A mole operating within the Fujioka clan had confirmed the make and model of the roboting servers that were to be the highlight of the celebratory party, and they were just the right shape for Resources and Hardware to work their magic. After all, the manufacturer’s logic went, it was slightly less unnerving to vigorously bed a robot if it looked like a humanoid female. Right?

Of course all of these interlocking coincidences had just happened to land Aveline (oh joy!) into a very strange situation.

Geisha suits.

Silosteel, painted a shocking bone white, molded into a slight and alluring female form. The body was split into plated segments, the intricate grooves between each plate giving the otherwise realistic body a very uncanny look. But the head… that was what drew Aveline’s stare. A sharp white, like the rest of the body, with the face molded into a faintly Asiatic look and glossy black hair tied into an ornate bun. A splash of red paint, a deep hue the color of blood, in a circle on the face and slashing through the lips. But the eyes were by far the most unnerving feature of the geisha- solid black, like the husks of gleaming dead beetles, emotionless, unfeeling.

Aveline drew in a careful breath and ran a hand down the side of her own face. It would be replaced by the features of this… thing, in a few minutes. Her own grey eyes would be lost under that dead stare, her face consumed by the delicate but somehow horrific visage of this geisha robot.

She glanced off to her side. Safya was regarding her own geisha suit with an innocently confused look, absentmindedly running her hand through her customary pink punk-style undercut. The Andalusian mindhacker (and her longtime friend) was accompanying Aveline on this mission. The two of them had been the only operatives slender enough to fit into the already delicate frames of the geisha suits.

“Checking out the goods?” Aveline joked. Safya had flirted with bisexuality a few months back. “They’re pretty sexy, as robots go.”

“I’d rather go as an Immortalon,” Safya retorted. “These things are creepy.” But she was already grudgingly stripping down, and Aveline followed her cue, efficiently pulling off the standard overalls of a field operative.

The room was cold. Safya was shivering a little.

“Well, after you,” she said.

Aveline rolled her eyes and they both reached for their respective suits. Instead of silicone, Aveline’s suit was made of a semi-flexible Silosteel that would also cloak her fleshy nature from the myriad sensors in the tower, and offer some blast resistance should any heated encounters occur. It was not much warmer than the air in the room, and Aveline winced a little as she slid one foot, then the other, into the suit. It was an exquisite visual contrast, the deathly pale of the geisha sliding up her ebony calves, and for the oddest reason Aveline was already wet when she pulled the crotch section up, including the ribbed sheathes that came to serve for the geisha’s… functionality.

Aveline pushed them into herself. They were frigid as well, but warmed up quickly, settling deep into her with a pressure that made it hard to forget their presence. After all, the sheathes were large enough to account for… full penetration, and the ribbing was perhaps an extra few millimeters of thickness… not to mention the built-in lubrication system, similar to those of the actual geisha robots, that made service considerably easier. Aveline shot a covert glance at Safya, who was otherwise occupied- eyes closed tightly, enveloping herself in the geisha skin- and probed cautiously at her own slit. Aveline had to suppress a quiet moan. Even without the sensitivity transmitters (which were necessary to emulate the full sensory awareness that actual geisha robots sported to offer better automated feedback to tactile stimulation), Aveline could feel the gentle pressure of her fingers over her own clit. She could only imagine what it felt like once the- once the-

Aveline shook herself and shot another glance at Safya, who had not noticed anything. Then she continued pulling the rest of the geisha suit up her naked body. Up, up, over her shoulders and arms, over her breasts, over her neck, and Aveline pulled the hood of latex-like metal over her head and let it snap over her face, leaving only her eyes, nose, and mouth exposed.

Now it was time for the mask.

She reached over and picked it up gingerly. It was lighter than she had expected. Aveline turned the cold features over in her hands until the inverted human-like features stared up at her, daring, inviting her to transform, to become something inhuman or even less than human, to become something so sensual and unfeeling at the same time.

A breath. Then she pulled it over her head, and the dim lights of the room were extinguished by the grasp of the geisha mask, complete twilight (for there weren’t even eyeholes, only video-monitors that transmitted from the sensors built into the eyes). Something rubbery smushed against Aveline’s face, and she wiggled the mask gently until it made its way past her lips and over her teeth and tongue. It was a mouthpiece, partially serving as a gag to further safeguard her from discovery (the mask was soundproofed as well), partially as a respirator as it connected via filter to several filters built in across her torso (to muffle the sound of her breathing and hide the fact that a supposedly robotic geisha would need oxygen). Aveline mumbled something into the wet rubber filling up and dominating her mouth, but she couldn’t even move her tongue to form any words. The geisha had stolen her voice.

A few seconds. Then the suit auto-booted, detecting a wearer. A flare of heat as the mask sealed itself to her hood, cementing tightly over her face. Internal padding expanded, applying an even pressure across her entire body and sending a warm rush over her skin. First the audio fizzled on, faint static, and then the small monitors, letting the world and all its color flood back into Aveline’s eyes. The sheathes inflated within her, and Aveline let out a long moan that only she heard. In front of her, Safya had finished pulling up her hood and was letting the mask descend on her face. As the impassive features of the geisha cannibalized her pixie like Spanish features, her freckled cheeks, her cute nose, Safya’s eyes locked onto Aveline. Warm brown eyes, wide open with a mixture of the same wonder and bliss that was shooting through Aveline’s entire body. Then her face was gone, and the geisha robot that was now standing in Safya’s place silently adjusted her head for a few moments- searching for a mouthpiece hidden beyond sight or recognition- and then the shoulders slumped, then jolted, as the system booted.

“Geisha X22-N is online,” said Safya- or rather, said the geisha robot that had replaced her, straightening into a delicate pose. “All functions normal. Check?”

Aveline didn’t even have to respond. The onboard AI was already arching her back, pulling her shoulders, hiding the tension of her very arousal, massaging her pliable body into the proper posture. It spoke for her, too, in a soft and buzzing female voice.

“Geisha X96-N is online. All functions normal,” said Geisha X96-N. “Acknowledged.”