Forn, scientist in the R&D district

[Observation logdate 882XX/78, 1358]

[Textualizing...]

"That's all the direction you're giving me? 'Walk around and try her out'?" I ask, holding the 'her' in question in my hands.

"Yup," my boss smiles at me from the holoterminal with her personality chip plugged into it. Her blue-monochrome scanlined face flickers with a wide grin. "She's a beaut, isn't she?"

I'm tempted to gripe, though I'm all for giving this thing a test run. The 'prototype portable half-phase reconstructor'.

To explain: the reconstructor is the ubiquitous tool that enables the use of any and all women on Aerix Station as resources, I'm sure you're familiar with it. Half-phase means it splits the process in half, so to fully use this thing as a reconstructor involves two passes. Portable means I've got to lug this thing around - thank goodness it's light, though I'm still going to look like a gallery attendant relocating a display the whole day. And prototype means my boss just finished blueprinting it, and capped off by diving into the lab's experimental reconstructor to build the first model.

And when I say diving in, I really mean it. She stripped all her clothes, jumped in naked headfirst, and only three seconds later she'd been reconstructed into this experimental portable gadget. It's a xanite-bracketed square, about 75cm on each edge, resembling a picture frame. However, where there would be a picture inside this, there's a silently humming film of black void being projected by its internal emitters instead. She calls it the 'hoop', in reference to some sport called basketball from some other part of the local cluster - apparently because it's a ring that things enter from the top, though the joke's completely lost on me.

'It took her whole body to make this prototype?' you might be asking, considering it's almost a hundredth of her mass. Of course it didn't - even accounting for the portion of her physical form that became the energy reserves powering this thing, plus her personality chip being ejected separately, there's still plenty of leftover material. Which, as is annoyingly her taste, has been transformed into an inanimate cardboard cutout of herself, standing there striking a smug pose in her lab coat.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I leave my boss to chuckle to herself in her terminal - she's happy being a tentative, virtual simulation of her real self while her body's been reclaimed for the furthering of science. We all would be here - we're women.

I'm just thankful she didn't put any personality simulation in the prototype itself. God knows I don't need her talking to me all day...