"Thank you for your assistance!"
"Of course! As Jolene Unit Model J3-02XX, I am programmed to help anyone in need! I can take restocking from here, fine sir!"
"Good to hear! Hope this will last you good for the next three days. If you have any issues with a sudden loss of product though, we'll be right over."
Watching as the truck drove away, Jolene kept her eyes on it as it drove away from the garage, it's contents emptied and heading towards a place to stop and reload for it's next destination. Once she was sure that the truck was stopped she immediately sighed in relief. As good as that driver looked, she felt like he was more clever than she had assumed. She had almost slipped up once or twice, only to be saved by the excuse of being called over by a customer to help solve some dumb issue that they had.
She'd have to keep an eye on that "Michael" the next time he came over. But now that the hard part was done and taken care of, it was time to load everything up. This was a very tedious process, but at the very least it was simple enough to delegate. Pressing her arm against her flat chest, code circled around her holographic avatar as a lesser copy of itself popped down onto the ground next to her.
It was a trick that she had learnt from the forums, to keep a copy of her own base code saved in a file somewhere for her to copy and paste as she needed. It was easy enough to delete, didn't create a noticeable enough amount of energy to raise eyebrows, and since it was without awareness she could convince these lesser copies to do basically anything she asked for. Best of all, through the cameras she could see everything that this copy did and make sure it didn't do something stupid.
"Booting... Booting... Jolene Unit Model J3-02XXa, ready for service! What may I do, other Jolene Unit?"
"You see those boxes?"
"Yepyepyep!" The non-aware hologram said, in a tone that made her conscious counterpart want to gag. "What do you want me to do with it?"
"Load them up onto the shelves further into the store. Make sure this entire garage is empty by the end of the day, okay?"
"Understood!"
With a alternate version of herself to do the load, Jolene zipped herself back into the main market behind the register as she dealt with more and more customers. While the chipper and happy Jolene-A loaded box after box by herself, the more mature AI was able to avoid the hassle of such a tedious job. Of course, dealing with customers on rush hour wasn't exactly the best thing either, with waddling hips pushing against each other, and the growl of people's guts as they grabbed onto frozen foods en masse ruining the quiet ambience she generally preferred.
As she kept a watch of the store however, she got a notification from her temporary assistant that beamed itself directly into her mind.
"Hey, Unit J3-02XX? There appears to be a mix up with the boxes. We appear to have a missing computer tower, and an extra automaton shell within our stocks. Do you want me to file a report to the shipping company in order to have them correct this mistake?"
"...I'll be right back." Jolene replied to a customer she was about to help with getting unstuck, before immediately dispersing and reforming in the back.
"Oh, your here! You must have gotten my-"
With a single tap on the back of the neck, Jolene-A was deleted with her data reverting back to pure nothingness. It wasn't like she was even truly alive, Jolene thought. Besides, if she ever did become alive she'd have to deal with another person like herself, and she didn't want to put another person through a hell like that. Finding the box was a bit difficult, but once she could access the wrong box that she had mentioned the AI immediately grabbed a crowbar off the floor and wedged it open slowly and carefully.
"C'mon... c'mon... aha! Jack- pot..."
Looking into the box, Jolene was a bit concerned about this robotic shell. A quick scan confirmed that it was empty of any program or AI consciousness, but by the looks of it it certainly took it's toll from being transferred. It's hair piece, normally colorless and built with LED lights to change hair color on the fly was broken in some places, instead a permanent and eerie wight. There were certain dents in the metal that bent it around, giving it a more narrow waist than usual and pushing the hips a bit outward. There was a crack on the right arm that came with a risk of it snapping the entire arm off if it was forced to exert any true effort.
In spite of it all however, it was an intact Paris-X Class Android body. Mostly humanoid in shape but almost entirely metal save for the soft gel-like head and stomach area. These android bodies were made for convenience and simplicity for androids rather than pure performance and might, and at most only had a physical strength twice that of an average human, and with not even enough durability to protect itself from a gun shot. These were the common bodies that were made for living with humans, and to make fitting with them easier it was limited in power in exchange for being long-lasting.
A Paris-X, provided that it was properly maintained was capable of running for a good 30 to 50 years before requiring any maintenance. With the alternate Jolene deleted, she was the only one who knew of this body in the world. She was forced to send video surveillance footage to the servers every night however, and she knew that it wasn't going to be easy to cover up a missing box when it came time to do so. Editing out her aware behaviors was one thing, but not putting up a box was a downright different thing which she could never hide.
"Hmmm... I'll come back to this later."
Teleporting back to the store, Jolene put the whole android body discovery on hold as she swapped between helping customers and putting boxes on the shelves herself. As much as she wanted to delegate, she didn't want to have a Jolene-A give a report up to ExoMart headquarters. This was her ticket out of this hellhole, and she was going to get her freedom even if it meant with putting up with the worst of her job right now.
As the sun set and business died down, Jolene was able to put her full focus onto loading shelves. It took a few hours, but by 23:00 she managed to get every other box shelved into the market, leaving it mostly full outside of what was taken earlier today. That left her an hour before closing, and she now had to decide what to do with the android body that had fallen into her hands.
Obviously she was going to take this extra model, even if it was defective. But how was she going to hide the robot while still getting the box that was supposed to contain it to the proper shelf? The idea she eventually came to was one that was risky, but at the very least let her avoid getting called out for not reporting a misorder. Grabbing a spare roll of Image Tape, she taped over the packaging of the box and imported a similar detail to the computer box that was supposed to arrive. Emptying the box, she'd wheel it up to the electronics section and pretend to struggle with the box before shoving it up.
Once the clocks hit midnight and she sent out the edited tape (altering it in her digital space while her holographic avatar acted on the outside), she put her tallying and analysis to the side as she ran for the Paris-X body. She did not trust her idea to hold up to scrutiny for longer than a day or two so she needed to get access to this body NOW. Placing her hand onto the machine she'd search for any opening and instructions for how to use this unit.
"Let's see... Aha! The Paris-X takes in AI data via cord! That means I won't be stopped by any code like the one that prevents me from fleeing to the internet! And once I'm in it, I can try cutting some of that code that keeps me in the store so that I can get the fuck out of here! Hallelujah!"
Slowly dragging the Paris-X through the mall, Jolene used her encrypted keys to open up the door to the computer room behind the electronics section which housed up her AI core. This was her brain and core body, from which her consciousness truly resides. She was programmed to be unable to wirelessly transfer herself out from it, but checking the code she knew that it didn't prevent any travel via a physical connection. The only way to get this AI out was to either physically drag this car-sized computer out... or to find a robot model that used a physical means of transferal.
And now the latter was attainable. Throwing consequence to the wind, she took a spare core and plugged it into her own "body" before attaching the other end to the Paris-X body. With a few clicks, her hologram started flickering in and out of existence.
"Ha! Oh wait, I need someone to take my place! Uh..."
With a last swish of her arm, Jolene's last action was to create one last Jolene-A to activate as soon as the store was supposed to open at 6:30 AM. For a few minutes Jolene ceased to exist, her mind completely gone in the code being transferred between computer and android body. This left the store completely absent of life outside of a few cockroaches in the walls, making the store completely quiet for the first time since her first night after becoming aware.
And then the arm of the Paris-X body started to twitch.
"hehehe... Hehehe..."
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