First test subject

For most people, the R&D district is much like any other neighborhood of Aerix, except that any females residing there are also implicitly consenting test subjects for laboratories based in the district. It accelerates the experimental process a lot, and like I said above, we're all women - it's exactly what we're here for.

The first test subject, then, is a regular woman stood outside her apartment door, chatting with her next-door neighbor. "And that's when..."

"Sorry to interrupt! Could you step into this, please?" I call out to her, stooping down with the prototype braced against my legs.

"...Sure. Sorry, one sec," she apologizes to her neighbor, who's watching on with some bemusement, before she turns to me, "do I need to take my clothes off?"

"Not strictly? It's a prototype portable reconstructor, so it should be fine as long as none of your clothing is unprocessed in origin."

"Oh, it's all his girl in that case," she replies with relief. "Mira was her name, right, Kol? She wanted to celebrate her one-month anniversary at her new job, so he surprised her by plucking her whole torso off her hips, head and all, and turning it into clothes for himself. Turned out there was enough of Mira spare that he gave me some too."

The man chuckles. "Least I could do for my daughter. The bliss whenever someone uses her to construct something - at least, I assume since she can't talk or signal to me! Don't worry, her hips are still sitting in her exoframe doing her job, even without the rest of her upper body. I learned my lesson trying to mod her mom - I only deleted half her memories this time!"

"Only half?"

"The half with her emotions and memories, see, so currently my girl's just down to an empty pair of hips carrying out the same routine every day on autopilot. Knows to go to work and come back, no other demands, no other personality. That's my girl!"

"That's wonderful! If you ever get around to restoring her backup from Central, she'll be so happy to hear about it. Just imagine the sparkle in your daughter's eyes when you tell her her walking crotch was the most useful she's ever been!"

"Right? Nothing but a bare pussy and an asshole, my daughter's never been luckier to be anything else! So proud of her!"

I cough. "Could we...?"

"Oh, yes, of course! Sorry! Well, see you." The apartment-owning woman waves her neighbor bye before stepping straight into the square 'hoop'. Rather than passing through, it's like she falls into a hole that leads somewhere else entirely, her entire personage disappearing completely into the black hole-like void.

After a second of processing, a little grey cube is ejected from a port on the side of the frame, measuring about half a palm on each face and completely featureless save for its angled edges. It weighs about as much as it looks when picking it up, but there's a certain inertial heft to it that indicates just how much has been compressed into it.

"Is that her?" the man who was just talking to the cube asks.

"Yep." Seems like the first pass is successful - a full female human body has been reconstructed into an intermediary form which can now be used for anything.

"That's very convenient - a whole woman's worth of material in the palm of your hand. You could stack up a whole bunch of women and store them that way indefinitely!" the man says.

"...Thank you, that's very insightful. I didn't even think of that," I mutter, tapping a quick note down on my belt holo.

"You didn't?"

"No, this is only supposed to be half of the process." It's true, though - no matter the size or shape of the input, the 'hoop' reconstructs any woman's matter down to standardized dimensions and superpositional density, so storing hundreds of female resources - even thousands - in an intermediately processed state in a stack in the corner of an office or the back of a janitor's closet seems like a very practical reality.

Just as I finish noting that revelation down, an alert tone emanates from the device. [Impurity processed. Please raise device], an automated voice says.

"Ah, good. The discharge system's working too," I say, setting aside the chatty neighbor cube.

"Discharge?" the man asks.

"Baby steps first, after all. It's a prototype, so for testing purposes, it's set up with the assumption that it'll process one whole female body at a time, and any 'impurity' - that is, anything that's not one whole female body - gets discharged."

To demonstrate, I lift up the 'hoop' off the ground, and once it detects enough clearance beneath it, it spits out a translucent, neon-purple snake of slime that splats onto the floor and piles up on itself in an inelegant, semi-solid puddle.

"Oh, so that's Mira!" the man exclaims, grinning with understanding as he identifies the discharged waste material as what used to be his daughter. "However much of her your test subject was wearing, anyway."

"Right. Reclamation and reforming functions still aren't ready to test yet, so the reconstructor's not programmed to reverse out parts of the original female." I stoop down and give the man's daughter a prod, observing the warm temperature of the purple mess of goo, though it obviously doesn't do anything in response. "So the portion that was your daughter hit the fallback of being reconstructed as zero-effort junk. Think of it like it's digested her, essentially."

"I see, I see! And that'd happen with any non-whole woman? Like if I took this off--" Squatting down next to me, he plucks a finger off my non-dominant hand with a soft pop. "--and then I put you in, it'd fail, for example?"

"Right. Removing my finger makes me technically incomplete, so if you input me now, I'd essentially be detected as one giant impurity, and rather than condensing me down to a superpositional cube, my physical form would be sloppily 'digested' and dumped out on the floor as a mound of inanimate goop, just like your daughter. In fact, we'd be visually indistinguishable. Do you need that finger?"

"Hm? Oh, not really, but you don't mind if I keep it?"

I shake my head to indicate I'm just fine with that - it's one finger, after all - then continue. "Though I have to stress, this is all still just the prototype stage. We plan on handling those cases more elegantly later down the line, we just wanted to prove the basic functionality works for now."

"No, of course! Don't let me bother you, I'm no scientist, haha." The man stoops down next to the pile of soft, purple waste that used to be his daughter's inanimate form as a set of free clothes. He experimentally picks up the soft goop up by one tail, then pinches off a piece and pops it in his mouth out of curiosity. "Hm, pretty bland. I guess that's waste material for you."

"There'll be lab cleaning staff here shortly, so they'll vacuum up your daughter for you." I gather the 'hoop' and pocket the neighbor's intermediary cube, and nod before I leave. "If you'd like to do anything with the byproduct before they dispose of it into sewage infra, just tell them it was your daughter and I'm sure they'll be willing to accommodate. Have a good day, sir."

"Oh, no, if she's waste, I'm sure she'd would be cranky at me if I kept her from being flushed down a toilet like she's meant to be. You too, ma'am!"