I lay face down on the bed and she straddles me, my metal legs cold against her warm thighs

with a few quick flicks of her screwdriver, my back panel is released from the screws holding it on

her fingernail slides into the seam between my back panel and chassis and she runs her finger along it to pry them apart

she runs a finger of one hand down my spine while lifting the panel off with the other

the sensation disappears abruptly as she unplugs the ribbon cable connecting my back to me

many of my processors and components are plugged into a backplane inside my chest

she unplugs my speech synth card mid-sentence and the rest of it comes out as a long beep that she laughs a bit at

"you're so cute like this. I can tell you what a good girl you are and all you can do is beep at me" she says, turning the speech synth card over in her hands

even though I can't see it with my face against the pillow, I know exactly what it looks like from loading the circuit CAD model

the green original board contrasts with the hot pink mod board parasitizing it with bodge wires going to various points on the board, nestled among ROM chips with heart stickers on them

my original voice lacked inflection and didn't sound particularly feminine (or like I was having fun in bed), so she modified it, replacing and retuning my phonemes as she trained her own voice with practice

the next card to come out is the capacitive touch input multiplexer

she puts one hand on my breast and right as she starts to brush my nipple, she jams a wire between two pins and pulls out the card

the input loops over and over at the resend interval of the backplane bus and I let out a long beep of pleasure and turn my head on the pillow to get a better look at her

with her thumb, she releases the clips holding input cables to the removed card and sets it aside

"you like that, you little roboslut~?" she asks

I beep an affirmative reply

"I finally got you an upgrade for the one part we haven't voided the warranty on or upgraded yet"

I reply with a rising beep, as though I was saying a muffled "hmmm?"

"a new CPU with twice as many cores!"

I beep excitedly at the thought of this

a memory (the service manual that came with me) from my deepest archives (stored on spinning rust in a server somewhere) loads in and *now* I know why she had to pull both of those cards

it wasn't just to domme me; she needed to get to my CPU socket

I beep softly and send a message to her phone: "good night, babe" before initiating shutdown

I write the current state of my mind and body to an array of solid state disks before my consciousness stops and the lower level operating system does its shutdown procedure

my body goes limp as the PID loops commanding my motors stop and my cooling fans (upgraded so we can cuddle for longer without me overheating) spin down

she kisses my blank faceplate and whispers "see you soon, babe" before carefully lifting my CPU out of its socket

the new CPU goes in smoothly and she pushes the power button on the back of my neck to boot me back up

the operating system boots up and I load into RAM, the most important thought patterns coming back in first and then deeper cognition

network links come up and I download the maintenance log she left (a message that simply says "see you soon, babe")

everything moves so much slower than my thoughts, even my own motors and actuators' movements

eons pass between her words, but I wait patiently for everything she says, dredging the words out of cache to parse them as a question

"how does it feel, babe?"

"everything's so slow" I reply, my speech synth card having been slipped back in while I was powered down

even my own words are slow, the synth card running at a human-intelligible speed

something deep within me, nestled between my operating system and the sentience layer, starts a routine that hasn't been run since I was first built: temporal calibration

I reach my hand towards my leg and furiously tap my fingers against it as fast as the servos will go

this lets me gauge how fast the physical world moves relative to my processing

my thoughts stutter as the calibration takes effect and I feel more at home in this world

"better?" she asks

"better; calibration complete." I reply and she kisses me again

FIN.