Chapter 281 Hub.

Chapter 281: 281 Hub.

Two days after that highly educational evening with Psyren, I woke up in my own bed with a heavy groan to the sound of sharp, rhythmic knocking on my bedroom door.

"Yes?" I growled, burying my face deeper into my pillow. "What? What is it?"

"Housekeeping."

I sighed, swinging my heavy legs out from under the duvet and shambling blindly toward the door. "Fine. Give me a second. I’m—wait, housekeeping?"

"Housekeeping," the pleasantly modulated voice repeated.

The hell? I was absolutely positive I hadn’t hired a localized cleaning staff.

The daily chalet chores were strictly handled by Rhea’s automated orbots. Very warily, I turned the brass doorknob and peeked out into the hallway.

...Well, it was definitely a maid. She wore the classic black and white apron, the frilly little chapeau, and a highly impractical, puffy black skirt. But her skin was forged entirely out of polished, high-grade chrome.

There were no visible rivets or ugly seam lines, but the silvery sheen of her perfectly sculpted face and aggressive silicone bust were undeniable.

Her hair was either spun gold (and if it was, I was going to have to launch a serious forensic audit of the syndicate’s expense accounts) or some other highly advanced, shiny synthetic material.

Her lips were plush and painted cherry red, and her heavily lidded eyes glowed with a soft, pulsing blue light.

She also had a pair of metallic dog ears poking alertly out of her hair.

In fact, her facial architecture bore a very distinct, unsettling similarity to a certain dog-eared, manic scientist on my payroll.

"...Housekeeping?" I said warily.

"Yes, Master," the android chirped with a blinding, perfectly symmetrical smile. "May I come in and tidy the room?"

"Uh... hold on just a second."

"Of course, Master," she said, folding her chrome hands politely over her apron.

I slipped back into my bedroom and firmly shut the door. I leaned my forehead heavily against the cool wood.

...Okay.

Right. I turned around, marched over to my bedside table, and jammed my secure communicator bead into my ear. "Rhea?"

"Hey, hey! The big man himself! What can I do for you, boss?" Rhea chirped brightly.

"Clear something up for me," I said conversationally, pacing across the carpet. "There appears to be a fully autonomous, chrome French maid with dog ears standing right outside my bedroom door. Is there anything you want to tell me about that?"

Rhea giggled, the sound bordering on maniacal. "Nice workmanship, right? I obviously based the foundational aesthetic design around myself.

"I gotta say, it was pretty tough capturing all this natural beauty in silicone and steel, but sometimes I even surprise myself!"

I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Alright. So... why?"

"Well, the ball-drones were doing an okay job with the dusting, but come on, Miles! We gotta show off the goods a little more! I mean, Roomba-bots are fine and all, but we can do way better than that. We are a prestigious, rising organization of A-list baddies.

"And what self-respecting supervillain doesn’t have a staff of properly sexy, submissive servants wandering the lair? It’s practically an industry requirement! So I got to thinking—hey, I can absolutely build that. So I did! Besides, the Rhea-Search AI protocol could really use some legs."

"Wait. You put Rhea-Search in that body?"

"In them."

"Them?!"

"Duh! I mean, come on, Miles," Rhea sighed with patient, motherly exasperation. "Did you honestly think I would only manufacture one? This is a massive estate! You gotta have enough specialized workers to really get the job done right!"

Fucking hell. I aggressively rubbed my face. But... well, Rhea actually had a solid point. Sort of.

Legitimate, top-tier villains generally had domestic servants of a certain aesthetic quality wandering their halls.

And the absolute best leagues always employed stunningly gorgeous women—usually dressed in something silvery or criminally sparse—specifically designed to distract the infiltrating hero, or maybe fall in love with him and betray her master to help him escape.

But since the Rhea-Search models were highly advanced, networked androids, that specific romantic betrayal trope probably wasn’t going to happen.

They’d function primarily as eye candy, and I had to admit, it would make the chalet feel a lot more like a proper supervillain lair to see a squad of them maintaining the property.

"Alright," I said slowly. "I’m not going to have to worry about her randomly trashing the antique furniture or pulling some slapstick, defective robot routine, am I?"

"Pfft! Of course not, Miles! What do you take me for? I design way better deathbots than that!"

I knew it!

"So she is a deathbot!" I barked.

"Miles, come on now! What kind of self-respecting mad scientist would I be if your brand-new legion of fembots weren’t armed to the absolute teeth? Literally! If she ever gets cornered, she can violently shoot out her molars like a specialized twelve-gauge shotgun!"

I groaned loudly. That specific feature might quite literally come back to bite me. But at the same time, I couldn’t exactly order Rhea to disarm the fleet.

After the absolute nightmare with Legion and The Jester, having a squad of heavily armed androids actively patrolling the chalet in the event of a sudden siege would actually be incredibly handy.

And sexy. No infiltrating hero ever expected the submissive French maid to have a pair of ballistic missiles hiding inside her push-up bra.

A lot of cocky international spies in the 1960s lost their lives to a pair of double-D munitions, but the tactic had mostly fallen out of favor in the modern era. Well, aside from Bosom Blast, anyway.

"Alright," I conceded. "But I want a highly thorough, itemized breakdown of exactly what kind of ordinance they’re packing."

"I knew you would! And I gotta say, Miles, I absolutely love it when a man takes a genuine, structural interest in my work! So many bosses are just totally satisfied that the death ray successfully disintegrates their enemies, but they completely lack a true appreciation for the art of the mad genius! The style! The subtle phallic imagery of a properly calibrated orbital laser!"

"That’s me. Just a delighted connoisseur of absolute insanity," I said with heavy, sarcastic cheer.

"You sure are! I’ve got the full CAD schematics completely ready for you anytime you want to take a look. And if you really feel like it, you can totally just check under the hood in person!"

I glanced back at the bedroom door and the chrome fembot patiently waiting behind it. "Wait, you mean..."

"I do highly thorough work, boss," Rhea purred smugly. "Very. Thorough. It is absolutely amazing what you can accomplish with medical-grade silicone and internal heating coils. Honestly, if I released these babes to the open commercial market, I’d do more catastrophic damage to the national birthrate than Pornhub!"