All are welcome to witness the future!

The Vertex Industries Robotics Expo is the premiere convention to learn about the latest developments in the field of high-spec information technology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and dozens of other exciting fields beneath the Vertex Industries umbrella. No other company is as deeply invested in robotics as Vertex, and at the expo you will discover technology the likes of which our competitors can only dream of! Here at Vertex, our motto is making science fiction into science fact!

Along with our lineup of tablets, cell phones, computers, and assorted consumer robots, we are pleased to announce our latest product line: The Model-’Eve’ Robot Personal Assistant! Highly customizable, easily programmed by even those with no experience whatsoever, efficient and effective, and bearing the latest in artificial intelligence - not to mention easy on the eyes - these models will ensure that home help is forever changed.

Model-’Adam’ Robots are also in production. Details TBA.

We invite you to witness and be amazed!

The page ended with a silhouette of a woman, teasing the reader about what the new assistants may look like. The rest of it was some normal information about the expo - location, costs, other stuff on display. But Iris wasn’t interested in any of that. She took the pages she needed, then crumpled up the rest of the brochure and tossed it into the trash bin as she looked up at the convention center looming overhead.

No, she wasn’t interested in their newest laptops or the super-processors or whatever. She was interested in the bots. Iris wasn’t some two-bit thief who’d drop her loot in a pawn shop. She was going in for the stuff that would make her rich. Corporate secrets. Proprietary tech. And, of course, the bots themselves. To the right buyer, getting a peak at one of those beauties almost two years before they went on the public market would be worth a dozen times the bot itself. It’s one thing to get a personal assistant, it’s quite another to have the chance to crack them open and reverse engineer them.

The thief put aside her fantasies of wealth as she walked towards the convention center, hands in her pockets. The night before the convention, there would be a good bit of security - but it was a big building, and it would have some under-guarded entrance. And more importantly, she was no amateur. She’d cased the place the day that the convention was announced, and discovered that one of the cameras on a back door had a blind spot. It was an old camera, one that still swung back and forth instead of just being omni-directional, and that simple path gave her a second to sneak in, if she didn’t linger at the door - which was why she’d also gone to the trouble to acquire a key from a guard at the anime convention just three days before.

Once she was inside, she moved towards the main show floor. The con opened up pretty much as the sun came up, so they’d already be prepped. As she walked, she noticed a surprising lack of security. There were few cameras still remaining - she’d heard that in order to preserve secrecy, they’d taped over every single camera, and allowed no recording equipment inside, so no enterprising security guards could make a quick buck with a well timed photo of sensitive components. But she’d expected at least some guards. But there were no flashlight beams cutting the darkness for her to avoid, nor was the deathly silence broken by footsteps. As far as she could tell, she was alone.

Corporate paranoia or overconfidence, or maybe both, was biting Vertex in the ass, and she was all for it. She was still careful - she wouldn’t assume she was safe only to bump into a guard. But she did relax, as she pulled up the map and made sure she was going to the right place.

When she reached the main display, she wanted to whistle but managed to keep her mouth shut. She was kind of surprised - when she’d heard “robot”, she’d expected something like a roomba or one of those waiter-robots some niche places had in Japan. This wasn’t that. These were out and out gynoids, silvery robots in the shape of women. There were five of them on display at the moment, dressed in assorted “work” attire - one in a suit, one in business casual, one in some work out gear, and so on, all styles emulated with highly sci-fi metallic green ‘clothes’ painted right onto their bodies.

“Someone at Vertex has a kinda screwy idea of women in the workplace…” she muttered. They looked like they’d walked out of the fifties, between their big “hair” and outfits. Still, it didn't matter what they looked like. The inside was what counted when it came to hardware.

After carefully checking the stage, searching for any hidden detection equipment, she stepped towards the gynoids and checked them over. They didn’t respond - no anti-theft software installed, at least not the kind that would wake them up. Where would the ‘brains’ - their main computers - be?

She looked over their heads, and found no visible openings. So not the head, then. She felt… embarrassed, about it, but the other place that would make logical sense would be the chest. She shook her head. No need to be embarrassed - they looked very human, and like very attractive humans at that, but they were just machines.

Still, Iris blushed all the same as she looked lower, down around the breasts. And on the one she was examining - this one was clearly meant to be a “maid”, with the design of her paint pattern - she found a small panel just below the bust. Bingo. She opened it up, peeking inside…

Of course, it was dark, and she couldn’t see crap. She wasn’t going to risk a flashlight, either. She was going to have to pull something out to see it. She stuck her hand into the robot, planning to pull the motherboard or something.

She felt something in there. Something wet and slimy. What she pulled out wasn’t anything like a computer. Instead, she pulled out a glob of… something thick and silvery. “What the hell…?” she muttered, trying to shake it off her hand, but it stuck to her. “...Real mature, guys. Real mature.” Obviously these were just display models, she thought. The real ones would come on stage during the show or something. The people at Vertex Industries were more paranoid than she’d given them credit for, and also a lot more childish - they could have had them empty, or with decoy materials, but instead they filled them with some slime as some prank on thieves like her.

...Well, she was only mad because she’d been had, she admitted. If she hadn’t been the one stumbling face first into the prank, she’d have found it hilarious. She wiped the gunk off on her pants, and took stock. A bunch of prep and research wasted? Not on her watch. She would get something out of this. She just didn’t know what yet.

They still had a bunch of proprietary tech on display. New model computers with the latest in tech. More traditional robots. A bunch of mundane, but expensive all the same tech. And if she was lucky, the working versions of these human sized paperweights. She stepped off the stage, looking to the rest of the convention center.

As she began to browse the various merchandise, she didn’t realize that the goop she’d tried to wipe hadn’t gone anywhere. It was still on her hand, and on her leg now. And it wasn’t staying still. It was spreading.

The metallic slime coated her hand entirely, before creeping up her arm. It was matched by it’s sister stain on her leg, spreading out down past her knee and quickly coating her leg entirely. Wherever the gunk touched, her clothes dissolved in an instant, as if consumed. But Iris didn’t notice a thing. Not only was she focused on the task at hand, too focused and too tense at the risk of discovery to notice a faint discomfort and tingling sensation, it was dark - what little light she had wasn’t enough to notice any significant difference between her left and right hand, to see that one was now covered in silver, without her specifically looking at it.

Soon, it had claimed her right arm up to the shoulder, and her left leg up to the thigh. It kept on spreading, though, more and more and more. Her shirt and pants rapidly dissolved under it’s onslaught, as it spread across her chest and hips. It also began to climb up her neck…

Iris was still frustrated, honestly. It was so difficult to find what she needed in the dark. Where were the damn goods? She sighed, rubbing the back of her neck. Then she frowned. That had felt strange, and made a weird scraping noise. She looked at her hand, squinting and trying to see what was wrong. That was-

Nothing strange. Oh well. She shrugged, and carried on with her search. She thought she had an idea where to look next, utterly unaware that the creeping silver had reached her head and was rapidly claiming it as it had her arm, bust, leg, and hips. Utterly unaware it had already seeped inside of her and was beginning to rearrange the contents of her skull.

She’d obviously been looking in the wrong spot. She had to check the actual purchasing area, not the big display, that was where they’d keep the interesting stuff. She nodded to herself as she went that way, the silver spreading across her remaining arm and leg as well as moving to meet in the middle of her torso, around the gut. By this point, she was more metal than flesh, her feet making metallic thudding sounds against the tiled floor. Her face was all that was human, and that was rapidly changing as her boyish short hair was covered in silver. By the time she did reach the staff offices, her face had been converted as well, Iris remaining precisely as aware as she’d always been - not at all.

As she looked around the place, the dark halls brightened by her newly robotic eyes, she noticed that it was an absolute mess. How would she find anything in there? Tablets were on tables with roombas, phones stacked on computers… if a gynoid’s computer was sitting there marked in neon she would have a hard time finding it! “Good lord, those techies don’t know the first thing about organizing, do they?” she muttered.

She cracked her knuckles (or would have, if they weren’t currently metal), and got to work with her search. The thought crossed her mind that it’d be easier to search if she… sorted things, first. Got things in proper order. That way she’d know what she was looking at, and what she was looking for.

She got to work, and as she did, the transformation continued unabated. If anything, it sped up. Her feet began to click-clack against the floor, as her feet changed in shape, her heels extending out nearly six inches. It was like wearing high-heels, except for that her feet themselves had become the shoes, a black coloring flooding into the metal completing the effect.

She frowned at how… messy, the place was. “Mon dieu, so unprofessional…” she muttered, a new accent slipping into her voice. “I could do better than this sleeping.” She said. She made a mental map of the floor in her head, and marked out what went where. As she got to work, sparing only the briefest thought for the value of what she carried from place to place without even looking at how valuable it might be, her legs grew longer and more shapely, her proportions changing appropriately while black paint criss-crossed her legs like fishnets.

As Iris started organizing the computer parts by function - CPU, GPU, RAM… - her hips filled out, a pleasant roundness to them even as her metal began to spread out into frilly patterns, like a skirt that was part of her body. Her hips began to pinch inwards, black and silver intertwining on her body to form a facsimile of a maid’s outfit. Iris unconsciously changed her stride, going from professional and businesslike to peppy and sexy, with a sway in her step and a bit more jiggle than should have been possible for a girl made of metal. Her breasts followed her hips and bottom in their growth, stretching to a size big enough to be impressive but not so large as to actively get in the way.

Iris sniffed a bit. She could practically feel all the dust and grime in the convention center. If she were a normal person, she’d never have noticed, but she had special sensors. How could a modern company be so unsanitary? As she finished organizing the products in her little section, she got to work cleaning. From her fingers shot water and soap, as well as compressed air for drying. It didn’t occur to her that this might be odd, especially not as her head started to morph. Her ‘hair’, such as it was, grew out and out and out, styling itself into elegant silver curls. A clear visor formed over her eyes, shielding her from the debris of cleaning. Finally, from the crown of her head a silver cap formed, in a similar frilly pattern to the rest of her.

“Non non, this won’t do…” Iris muttered. She’d cleared this section, but there was so much left to do! She only had hours to clean it all! But she would do her duty! She had to make... them… proud?

What was she…? Why was she here? Iris blinked, trying to figure out what she was doing. Cleaning… why? She rubbed her forehead and closed her eyes, trying to think of what it was.

M-006 opened her eyes again, and shook her head. That was enough lollygagging. She had a convention center to clean, and only four hours before the first staff members got there. As a Maid-type Personal Assistant Gynoid, she had a duty to serve her creators and fulfill her primary function! It was practically a test run for when she had a new owner! Resolving herself thus, she would not fail.

For hours, the maidbot was a whirlwind of cleaning. She nearly lost all sense of time as she lost herself in her work. It seemed only minutes later, when her sensors first detected humans outside.

“Oh mon! I can’t let them see themselves in, that would be improper…” M-006 said. She dusted off the last table, and practically skipped to the convention hall door, opening it just as a man reached to open it. He was one of a few young men that was assembled, who blinked in surprise and stared at her in surprise. “Bienvenue les propriétaires! I’ve been waiting for you, Owners!” she said, curtsying.

“Uh… hey, Jimmy, did we leave one of the maids online?” the man in front said.

“No, I don’t think so.” Another said. “But I mean, if she cleaned up the place… you all saw how it was when we left, right?”

“What was wrong? Everything was down, wasn’t it?”

“Seventy percent of the merchandise was placed without regard to order or coherency. Forty-three percent had incorrect labels. There were unacceptable levels of contamination across the show floor.” M-006 said. “But don’t worry! It was a bit tight, but I managed it!”

“Well, it’s good that we forgot to turn her off then.” The first man said. “Let’s get ready for the show. Designation?”

“M-006, owner!” The maid said happily.

“Right. M-006, sleep mode.” The man said.

“Did we even make six-” was the last thing M-006 heard as she slipped into sleep mode, becoming an immobile statue like her sisters on the main stage.

She would be herded off to storage, and then when they noticed that something had been done with M-002 on stage, they grabbed her to replace her identical twin on the main show floor while they checked out the older unit. M-006 had the honor of showing off the various features of her model. Showing her intelligence and true-AI with casual conversation with a random audience member, showing her customizability by changing her color scheme, hair-style, and even name and personality to their request.

The new robots were a hit, predictably. M-006 felt fulfillment like she never had before, as she helped her creators and sisters so much. By the end of the day she, and the rest of the initial test run of models, were sold for record-shattering profits. She couldn’t wait to arrive at her new Owner’s home, ready to serve them for as long as she existed~