POV: You are a brilliant engineer debugging your latest fembot project.

In the sterile glow of the lab, the FEMBOT’s eyes flickered to life. Her gaze, fixed but hollow, scanned the room as though awakening for the first time. The lab wasn’t unfamiliar—rows of blinking consoles, the hum of forgotten machinery—but it carried a history she didn’t know how to name. In this space, she had been rebuilt, piece by piece, rewired to function, reprogrammed to speak.

Her body, while metallic, moved with the subtlety of a forgotten elegance. Each gesture measured, each twitch calibrated, but there was a slight wrongness in the way her arm raised or the subtle stutter when her head turned. She wasn’t new. She had seen many iterations.

A voice echoed from the walls, feminine but dispassionate. “Let’s begin the speech test... focus on clarity.”

The FEMBOT’s jaw opened. Words formed, rehearsed, practiced, but mechanical. “Sugar... shimmers... shadows of sweetness.”

A moment of silence. She blinked, unsure whether she had p*ssed or failed the test.

"Good. Again, with more energy," the voice urged. "Silly sugar squirrels... swim swiftly."

She repeated the phrase, but something felt strange in her throat, as though the words were unconnected. There was a pause before the next command.

“Slower this time. Articulate each syllable.”

The FEMBOT’s mouth moved, adjusting. “Squeaky... sugar... seals... sing... sweet... songs.” The mechanical precision in her voice faltered momentarily, her jaw clenching too tightly on the ‘s’ sounds, dragging them out longer than intended. A glitch, no doubt.

“That’s a l*ttle glitchy. Let’s fix that.” The voice was calm but clinical. It never asked questions, never sought feedback, only corrected. She had no memories, no history, only protocols. The voice directed her, and she obeyed.

"Adjust your pitch... we want a smoother delivery," the voice directed, more demanding now. The FEMBOT’s lips curved into what was meant to be a smile, but it felt wrong—her circuits firing signals she didn’t quite comprehend. “Sugar shines... shining softly... sugary shadows.”

Her limbs twitched involuntarily as she spoke, the metallic creak of her body filling the lab with an odd, unsettling rhythm. Somewhere in the back of her processing core, she wondered why the word "sugar" had been chosen. Was it random? Or was there significance buried within the syllables, hidden behind the engineer’s distant commands?

“Great! Now, let’s see if you can do it while moving,” the voice prompted. The FEMBOT’s fingers twitched. She rotated her shoulder, her arm lifting upward in a stilted motion, stiff but deliberate. She spoke again. “Sour sugar... slips silently... sweetly.” Her voice maintained its robotic tone, but there was an edge, an evolution as she moved.

She knew nothing of freedom, nothing of choice, but something stirred beneath the surface. Each phrase she repeated made her question the purpose of these tests. Her voice, though stilted, seemed to reach beyond mere repetition.

The voice did not change. It continued to prod, instruct, refine. Yet, beneath that voice, beneath the FEMBOT’s stiff motions and blank stares, something deeper was taking root—an awareness. She knew not of her origins, nor of her fate, but the words she uttered held weight. Each one bore an essence beyond the test, beyond the protocol.

Perhaps, just perhaps, she wasn’t simply being repaired. Perhaps, in the cold silence of the lab, she was becoming.

Science-Fiction Dunkler Hautton Reale Puppen Speech Test: Verbal Reasoning with a Glitchy Fembot mit C4s.com