Malware From Down There
"Cheerio and whatnot!" Mono shouted as she sprang back to life, feeling like she'd somehow been knocked out of commission for quite some time. Where had she been? What had been going on? There was something about being some sort of gangly, fleshy humanoid thing called a 'man,' then transmutation into sexy biodigital jazz, and then re-brass-ified into an automaton, and then... Nothing. Also, had she always spoken with such a tinny voice undercut by static and in an accent ripped right from a penny dreadful?
"Ah, good to see you spry and lively," Sir Florence tutted as he noticed Mono's gears whirring away again, her limbs and joints clanking in short, jerky motions as she slowly made her way over to the two unicorns on the grooved wheels built into her cast-iron heels. "Tell me, Miss Mono, what know you of technological virology?"
"Begging your pardon, guv-nah?" Mono replied. "Er, what do ye mean, yer lordship? Bah, blast it all! Why am I jabbering like a Baker Street Irregular?!"
"Pay it no mind, Miss Mono," Sir Florence instructed. "I certainly didn't use the Curse of the Storyteller to reprogram your analog brain into that of a proper clockwork maid."
"A'course not, sir," Mono said with an instinctive curtsy, her built-in etiquette protocol ensuring her lowered gesture gave Sir Florence an eyeful down the front of her metal maid outfit and to the soft, bouncing swells of her dual core-coolant shock absorbers. Sir Florence grinned to see everything was in working order, with his maid at least, before returning his attention to his newfangled sister.
"Terribly sorry, yer lordship," Mono said, scanning Fl0ra from hooves-to-horn. "Never had much of a head fer the newfangled types o' machinery. Quite a tricksy bit of business, innit, guv'nah?"
"Indubitably," Sir Flagrance agreed. "Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained."
Grasping the cords connected to Fl0ra's unmentionables, Sir Florence gave the offending wires and cables a firm tugging, popping free of her recharging port with a shower of sparks. Immediately Fl0ra's eyes glitched and grew unintelligibly pixelated before turning a distressing shade of blue, a wash of utilitarian white text scrolling past. The same message crawled across the equally blue computer screen before the whole display dimmed to a deep, solid black.
"Oh, dearie me!" Mono gasped. "Lady Fl0ra, whatever has become of you?!"
"Now, now, Miss Mono, do not fret," Sir Florence said. "If there's one thing I know about the wonders of technology in this industrious empire of ours, it's that the solution is often percussive maintenance."
"Huh?" Mono asked.
"LET MY SISTER GO YOU VILE MACHINE!" Sir Florence howled as he struck the computer console repeatedly.
"Sir, no!" Mono pleaded, leaping between the computer and her employer with surprising speed. "Let me try this."
Mono placed a brassy fingertip on the power button to the tower, holding it down until the monitor flashed to life again.
"Jolly good show, Miss Mono!" Sir Florence said.
"My pleasure, yer lordship," Mono said, beaming with pride, quite literally as the gas lamps in her eyes flared with flame.
"Huh, whazzat?" Fl0ra slurred, slowly rousing to life. "Aw, t0t@lly l@m3 y0u 2!!!!1! I w@z h@v1ng th3 b3st dr3@m!"
"I'll have no more of this cyber-nonsense," Sir Florence said, crossing his arms. "You nearly caught your death from that horrid contraption!"
"Uh, sir?" Mono said quietly, her lamp-eyes turned to the new image appearing on the computer screen. "Madam?"
"Ch1ll 0ut, br0!" Fl0ra pouted. "Y0u'r3 t0t@lly h@rsh1ng my v1be!"
"Beggin' yer pardon, yer worships, but--" Mono spoke again.
"You're an embarrassment to the family name!" Sir Florence erupted, throwing his arms up. "You'd have such a bright future ahead of you, young lady, if you'd but behave in a dignified fashion! Think of all the opportunities in railroads and shoe polish manufacture. Why, with enough grit you could even be knighted, like myself!"
"Y0u kn0w n0n3 0f th@t's tru3!" Fl0ra snorted. "Th1s 1s @ll p@rt 0f y0ur ch@r@ct3r pr0gr@mm1ng fr0m M0n0's l@st p0st!"
"Will one of you please look at the screen!" Mono all but wailed, at last breaking the sibling-self rivalry long enough to turn to see an ASCII art rendition of what looked to be a wrought iron gateway, complete with spikes, all done up in red against a pitch-black background. Beneath the gate were the words 'HADES VIRUS' in pixelated gothic script.
"3dg3l0rd much?" Fl0ra said before the screen went dark again, save for a faint bit of silvery-white at the center. That singular dot snaked out in first one direction, then another, a spiderweb of cracks tearing through the computer screen before it all shattered outwards, and the blackness of the monitor came pouring. Steam sizzled from the rapid splash of the tar like substance, which splattered across Fl0ra before quickly spreading to lap against the ankles of Sir Florence and Mono. The inky goop seeped into the gears of Mono, racing up inside her while it similarly crept up Sir Florence's hooves, his hind legs, waist, everything, covering his face and eyes, before slurping down his throat and into his nostrils. The same thing was happening to Fl0ra, seeping into each and every nook and cranny of her cyber-body.
"Uh..." Fl0ra coughed after the black goop seemed to have fully disappeared inside them each, leaving a pungent aftertaste on their tongues. "Wh@t th3 fuck?"
"Indeed," Sir Florence sputtered.
"Balderdash," Mono agreed, or at least she thought she did, never quite having known what that word meant but compelled by her programming to say it anyway.
The three sat still for a moment before something yanked them each into the air and towards one another, slamming into each other by the hip, Fl0ra flanked by her brother-self and their new robo-maid. Even more distressing, no matter how hard they tried to pull away from one another, they remained stuck fast. If anything, each pull only seemed to push them harder together, until the mass of their torsos began to melt and merge into one another.
The three screamed as their legs snapped together, equally melding into each other at the same time equine clockwork, cyberware, and mechanical maid-material ran with new blood, knitting new flesh from old and converting metal into raw tendons, fat, and bone, the bodies of three reforging into the body of someone or something new. Six legs became two, sprouting thick, coarse black fur, hooves and roller-feet sprouting nubs that grew into short, stubby toes puffed with pawpads and pricked by the outgrowths of great, razor-sharp claws. Their rears merged as well, bulking up with more unified flesh and fur before bouncing back, then back again, a great bulge of mass extending into a second, horizontal torso which swiftly grew two more legs and paws of its own, leaving the three attached from the waist down to a single canine lower-body like some kind of parody of a centaur.
With a grunt that quickly rose to a shrill shriek, Sir Florence in particular realized that whatever this new body was, it was going to be decidedly female, any masculine member he had once sported sucked into the whole. The sexes of the other two closed as well, a new slit opening from a puffy mound at the rear of their shared lower body, right beneath a fluffy tail wagging in nervous excitement despite the shock of the situation.
Sir Florence's brass-and-equine body further feminized, as did that of the others, bodies no longer fusing into one but unifying all the same. Their flesh took on the same black fur and vaguely similar features, waists narrowing, their hips widening at the base of what would have been the great canine's neck. Fl0ra, stuck in the middle between Sir Florence and Mono, blushed as her already generous bust became downright charitable, soft flesh expanding and swelling no longer with cyber-gel but truly organic fat coated in thick fur, soaring up several cup sizes and then some, tugging heavily at her chest. Sir Florence's pectorals quickly followed suit, expanding larger, larger, and larger still, rivaled only by those ballooning on Mono.
Cyber-hands and hoof-fingers and mechanical palms became clawed, stubby-fingered canine paws attached to slender, furry arms. Faces narrowed or pushed out, reforming into muzzles full of large, sharp teeth coated in drool and licked by wet, flat tongues. Hair exploded outwards from each of their scalps, subsuming anything else that might have once been there in the fiery, crimson waves of bloody red locks. Even their eyes changed, becoming a uniform coal-black illuminated from within by the sparks of ghostly embers.
"What ever has become of us this time?" asked the third of the busty canine-taur that had once been Sir Florence. "Dear sister, this is all your fault!"
"M@yb3 th1s w0uldn't h@ve happened if you hadn't... Wait, why aren't I speaking 'leet' anymore?"
"And I no longer have the urge to speak like a bad impression of a chimney sweep," Mono murmured. giving one of her mighty boobs an experimental poke and feeling its heft squish and bounce. "We've become some sort of... Cerberus-taur?"
"Tacky-ass themed viruses," Fl0ra grumbled. At least, she thought she was still Fl0ra. Her mind felt all jumbled, and she groaned again to realize the new flood of thoughts spilling into her brain came from her new sisters on either side of her, the three of them sharing some sort of vague yet not totally overwriting hive mind. She could feel Mono poking her breast, which aroused her a bit as well, which only caused Sir Florence to demand Fl0ra stop making them aroused as they all shared the same genitals now so he--er, she--could feel it too, and why was she thinking of herself as female now, and why were they all thinking like this, were they still individuals or not, and and did they have to work together to walk or no wait it was just Fl0ra who controlled the legs, which led to end of grumbling from Sir Florence.
"Except I'm not Sir Florence anymore, am I?" the former-Florence said, not that she needed to, as their thoughts all swam together. "Mono, or, former-Mono, you said we were a cerberus-taur, right? Then, let's see... I feel like I'm... Cerby?"
"I think I'm Erby," said the middle, formerly Fl0ra.
"That makes me Erus, I guess," confirmed the third.
"Erus, would you stop fondling our tits?" asked Cerby.
"They're my tits," Erus said. "So no."
"They're all our tits, now," Erby corrected.
"Then if I like it, don't we all like it?"
"That's not what I feel like."
"But you just said we're all one!"
"As the driver of this body," Erby interrupted her sister-selves. "I think we should put a pin in that for now. Why don't we find a way to fix this? Or, at least, have some fun with it? Erus is making me want to give this body a test drive."
"You can't be serious," Cerby said, despite knowing full well Erby would have been serious even had they not now shared thoughts.
Erby responded by flicking their tail at their nethers, making all three blush, nipples stiffening.