A.I.D.A. (Sci-fi, Robot-girl. Finished story.)

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" A high feminine voice chirped from all over.

"You tell me, A.I.D.A," came the distracted response. From behind a suspended female humanoid body, made from mainly silicon, aluminium, and plastic, a messy grey haired head darted about, before poking through a tangle of wires. Looking at the small blue and white hologram at his desk, he said, "State the results of the last batch of tests."

The avatar of his program, the Artificial Intelligence Domestic Assistant, looked at her wrist and a holo-screen appeared in front of her. "Simulation tests No. 693227-742876 returns a 70% success rate, Prof. Maddox."

"And there you go," he replied, sticking a large cable into the small of the body's back. The lights in the lab dimmed and darkened as segments of the body's spine began to light up, showing that it was receiving and holding power.

A.I.D.A's face frowned as she felt simulated worry and concern. "Yes, but 25% of the failures resulted in wildly different outcomes," she replied. "Ranging from something as simple as motor function incompatibility to software corruption. Not to mention, the remaining 5%, which is also the highest percentage chance: Catastrophic Termination of Self and Others."

Crashing through the mess of food wrappers, drinks containers, crumpled papers, and spare parts on the floor, Maddox waded towards his desk. Slamming both hands onto it, he leaned menacingly over his assistant. "I have not spent the last 20 years and a small fortune working on this, to stop for 5 per cent, A.I.D.A.," he glowered, holding up a data drive. "This experiment will succeed, and if there's any ironing out to be done, it'll be done after. When we have new data." Reaching over, he plugged the data drive into his computer. "Now, if you're so paranoid, download yourself into there, and we'll install you in there with the rest of the software, instead of the actual AI we wrote."

A.I.D.A's avatar blinked at him and nodded. "Yes, Prof," she said, before her entire avatar blinked in and out of existence once, before vanishing altogether.

Frowning, Maddox scoffed at her making a back-up of herself before doing what he ordered. He did have to consider the fact that he did not write a self-preservation protocol in her code. Although, he did program her to learn and adapt, so it could be possible that she hypothesized that an auto-save feature or a simple copy/paste could be applied to her code as well. In any case, since she'd gone through the trouble of copying herself, he could dig through her code later, once the experiment was over.

When she was fully downloaded, he stood in front of the soon-to-be mobile shell, heart hammering in his chest. He looked at the faux woman's face and form, designed after different parts of the world's most attractive women and swallowed hard, before ducking under it's arm. Standing behind it, he brushed aside the long brown hair to reveal the data port at the nape of it's neck. His hand was wet with nervous sweat, and trembled violently as it brought up the drive. It slid in smoothly, and the shell automatically downloaded and began the boot-up sequence. Once that was finished, all he had to to was confirm the start-up on his computer, and A.I.D.A would wake up in her own physical body.

Maddox stared at the screen as code ran across it. Now that he was so close, and all alone, he could finally admit it to himself: 30% is a significant margin of error.

But he had come too far. He was on the cusp of the next step of humanity's advancement. If this worked, it would mean that soon, the risks of physical labor could be minimized, affordable 24/7 domestic care for the elderly, infants, and infirm. Simulated training partners for those with limited social or athletic abilities.

There was only a moment's hesitation before he confirmed the start-up.