WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It contains substantial sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.
All sexually active human characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design: D.B. Story
The Fembot Chronicles © November 2009 D.B. Story
eXcessica publishing
All rights reserved
The Fembot Chronicles
Volume 1
By D.B. Story
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is dedicated to all the other writers who didn't write these stories, so that I could.
A special thanks to Mulligan, VW, Gorgo, and Cyberczar, for their excellent and much appreciated proofreading.
INTRODUCTION
The first alien race we meet
will
be the one we build ourselves.
ids, Automata, Fembots, M-bots, 'Bots, Mechas, Andys, Replicants, Cylons, Gynoids, Pygmalion, Galatea, and Helen O'Loy.
In 1938 Lester del Rey wrote the science fiction story Helen O'Loy. If you were me you might call it the first Fembot story. In it two friends, a mechanic and a medical student, hack a common household robot to give her the ability to experience emotions instead of just performing mindless domestic tasks. When they can't watch over her full time their benign neglect allows her mind to awaken in unexpected ways and she becomes a true person, who happens to be robotically strong and exceptionally beautiful. Love and sex follow with a truly independent robot woman who is intelligent, emotional, and indistinguishable from her human equivalent to outside inspection or action. It's a sweetly romantic story with a bittersweet ending, which is so powerful that in 1970 it was selected as one of the best science fiction short stories of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Helen O'Loy remains in print in various anthologies, although not this one.
Of course robots came about before Helen. In Karel Čapek's 1921 seminal science fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) the word "robot" was first used to mean artificially created workers. The situation in this play also set the groundwork for an eventual robot revolt, which has become the staple of too many robot stories and movies since. It also had a League of Humanity dedicated to freeing the robots, which I also consider an inevitable development in the future history of the integration of intelligent robots into society.
Karel Čapek was hardly the first to write about robots. They just weren't called robots before he coined the term. Android and Automaton were pre-robot terms for artificial beings.
The actual idea of artificial beings goes back to mythology in several forms. For example, Vulcan—blacksmith to the gods and also known as Hephaestus—not Spock's home planet, made serving girls out of gold, and Pandora from clay, among his other accomplishments.
But the real root of romantic love for a created person is the legendary tale of Pygmalion and Galatea as put down by Ovid. Chances are that Ovid was simply retelling even older tales, but he published his work first and therefore gets the credit.
All these stories in different ways inspire my own writings on the subject, the difference being that I might actually live to see them realized.
My point here is that the idea of these types of new beings has lived in our cultural DNA for millennia, and therein lies their continuing appeal.
Sex, The Final Frontier
Any dyed-in-the-wool Star Trek fan will recall Data's immortal line, "I am programmed in multiple techniques."
And if you watched Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, you'll recall Sarah having to tell Cameron more than once, "Would you mind covering up?"
Provided you've seen Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: AI you'll remember the very fetching mecha at the beginning of the movie being told to remove her shirt—and then being stopped before she could actually complete that action; or how Gigolo Joe was an acceptable parody of the sex-trade professional, but Gigolo Jane—who was really hot—was barely accorded two sentences and ten seconds in the theatrical release.
The truth is that as much as science fiction likes to be known as the genre that pushes the boundaries of literature, some boundaries still push back rather strongly. Regarding sex, mainstream science fiction still really watches its step. I'm not saying that you won't find sex in science fiction, or even sex with sexy robots in science fiction, but in the past, to be published as serious literature in the mainstream by a reputable publisher instead of being labeled mere pornography, any sex had to be incidental to the story rather than being deeply woven into its fabric.
Now some writers could be more incidental about it than others, but to claim that we are going to create beautiful sensual beings of both genders and not acknowledge the sexual aspects of relating closely with them is just sweeping the issue under the rug.
Sexual robots are inevitable, as I discuss in the chapter on The Betamax Principle of Robotic Development. It may be unstated in the beginning, not spoken of in polite company, never allowed to be advertised as a desirable feature, or kept under the counter until a robot is sold, but it will be the driving force.
The Betamax Principle of Robotic Development
(or Why Affordable Robots Will Come to Exist)
I contend that fembots will sell for the same reason that the Sony Betamax VCR successfully created the home videotaping market circa 1976. The Betamax wasn't successful because a few early adopters wanted to spend well over $2000 (in today's dollars—about $1300 back then) just to time-shift All in the Family. And skipping commercials wasn't practical in those early units before Betascan was invented. Prerecorded movies weren't even a gleam in the movie industry's eye, since they were busy at the time trying to sue Sony out of the home taping market altogether for facilitating copyright infringement.
A—some say the—major factor that made Betamax, and follow-on VHS recorders, successful was the ability to buy, rent, view, and even create pornography in private. No longer did you have to be seen publicly entering a questionable movie theater with sticky floors to enjoy your adult entertainment.
True, the machines were used by many people who will never watch an X-rated tape in their life, but the sex industry created the impetus necessary for home VCR's and the pre-recorded tape industry. The biggest victim of this has been those adult movie theaters, which have now essentially disappeared into history. Sex just never was a shared crowd experience.
The same will be true for fembots. Although every other use under the sun will be given as a reason to own one, what will drive purchases into large enough numbers to justify mass production will be when they become viable sex partners. Only after economies of scale bring prices down to affordable levels for the masses will fembots, and their male equivalents, become justifiable for many other tasks as well.
And there's no reason to believe that Moore's Law won't be as applicable to robot brains as it has been to every other computer related field. Creating better sex partners will drive robot improvement in all areas.
You can read more about Moore's Law, whose technology will apply to robots in the same way it applies to your home computer and the world around you, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_Law.
The Four Laws of Robotics (Revised)
How can you not start any discussion of robots without paying homage to the original Asimovian Three—later Four—Laws of Robotics?
When Isaac Asimov first created his Three, later Four, Laws of Robotics it was widely assumed he was designing a way to build better robots for the day that they will actually be built. I disagree. I feel that he designed his Laws of Robots to build better stories!
Consider, Dr. Asimov wasn't in the business of building robots at all, but he's quite a good mystery writer. By designing a simple set of rules that at first glance seems airtight in ensuring that nothing can ever go wrong he has created the classic "locked room" murder mystery setting.
You know the type. The dead body is found alone inside a room with no windows, and only one door that can only be—and was—locked from the inside. So how was he murdered? Asimov's robot stories are much the same thing.
As for his Laws of Robotics, he essentially broke, or showed problems with them, in every story he wrote. His approach was classic in its simplicity. First I'll convince you how nothing can possibly go wrong, then I'll present you with the problem that something just has gone drastically tits-up. As I said, great thoughtful stories.
My problem is that in growing up with those stories they convinced me that robots built under Asimov's rules were rather unsafe and not to be trusted. Some other authors seem to feel the same way.
Piers Anthony, for example, in Split Infinity introduces us to Sheen—short for Machine—who is beautiful, sexy, loving, willing, self-willed, and able to defend herself and harm conservatively 95% of the population of the planet if they threaten her prime directives. Only the ruling class was safe. So much for a First Law against harming every human being—or only doing explicitly what you're told to do. Even so, she became the protagonist's most important ally in overthrowing the existing order.
And virtually all human-like robots in the science fiction movies, save for a rare few like those in A.I., are threatening, to say the least. In fact, pretty much the only ones that aren't threatening have been those intended for sexual purposes—and these are rare. The Cylons in the current Battlestar Galactica are a strange mix of sexy and deadly in an attempt to be different. Needless to say this is not how I'd build my world—or the robots to inhabit it. My world has to make sense to me at least.
My stories reflect that thinking in this regard, and they run by my Laws. These Laws are all necessary, as I explain through my stories, although the key to my robots is most often their Fourth Robotic Law. That's where things get interesting. If I'm ever put in charge of running everything someday, you have some idea here of how things will turn out.
So with apologies to Isaac Asimov, and all the others who have trod this path before me, here are my Four Necessary and Immutable Laws of Robotics.
First Law: A robot must not harm any human being, except in defense of its owner, family, or owner's property.
Second Law: A robot must obey all lawful commands given by its owner, as long as this does not conflict with the previous law.
Third Law: A robot must protect the investment in it by avoiding damage to itself, as long as this does not conflict with previous laws.
Fourth Law: A robot will perform the duties for which it has been designed and built, as long as this does not conflict with previous laws.
Of course there will be fits and starts, dead-ends and blind alleys along the way of honing the result down to its minimum effective expression. In some of my stories you'll encounter variants of these laws as the process is worked out over time—rather like what I expect will happen in real life.
The Uncanny Valley
The concept of The Uncanny Valley has been around for a number of years. You can read about it several places. I personally recommend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
As I've described in my writings, the closer a robot gets to being identical with the human it is meant to emulate—call it the robot's anthropomorphism quality—the more we are repulsed by it—to a point! The lowest point comes when it's almost, but just not quite, fully there. It creeps us out. At the moment we quit thinking of it as a robot, and instead as a bad imitation of a human, we go hugely negative on how we feel about it. But if it can push past that point to being virtually indistinguishable from human then we reverse course fully and accept it at a higher level than ever before.
This whole idea builds on a book that I read some years ago, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. You can read some more about this wonderful book here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics
While this book can teach you many things, the one thing that has most stuck with me from it is that, the more detailed a comic artist tries to be—compare the simple line art of a Dilbert or Peanuts to the detailed renditions attempted in Brenda Starr or Prince Valiant—the more we see the limitations of the medium. No one expects Dilbert to look lifelike and we aren't critical when he doesn't, while even if Brenda Starr were drawn to photographic standards, the poor quality medium of the comic strip itself would have us picking away at its imperfections.
So what does this have to do with my writing? A lot!
I apply these principals in two places.
The first is that across my writing I've told stories that span the range from robots that are clearly robots to robots indistinguishable from human in appearance or manner. Each has its own set of unique of problems to deal with in getting along in this world.
The second place I use some of these ideas is in how I construct my sex scenes. I don't go into a lot of detail because: a) it's boring when I otherwise have a story to tell, and b) every additional detail I give that's right for one person will be wrong for another. In the same way that Charles Schultz could probably draw Charlie Brown faster than I can type this sentence, he lets his reader's imagination fill in the details. I do that with sex. I set the scene and let the reader imagine the rest in ways that work best for you.
Over the duration of my writing I have often been asked if I could be more specific in that part of my stories. I have always declined. Simply said, less can be more.
The A.C.I.D. Test
(A Holy Grail
for robot development)
The idea of an Acid Test goes back at least 150 years. In the gold fields of California, nitric acid was applied to metals to determine if they were true gold. The gold would withstand the acid while base metals would be destroyed, meaning that it was destructive testing of nuggets or jewelry.
The term acid test for providing an absolute answer has branched out since then.
Financial markets refer to the Acid-Test as an alternative for the Quick Ratio or Liquid Ratio of a business.
Acid1, Acid2, and Acid3 are standard tests that determine how closely a web-browser complies with the current rendering standards of the time. They are quite difficult to pass with a perfect score.
A.C.I.D. as a term defines the four qualities that a proper RDBS (Relational Database System) must have. These terms are: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability. And for the 99% of you for whom this means nothing don't worry, I'm not going to explain it and there won't be any quiz. You don't need to comprehend it either to understand my stories, or to live your daily lives in this world.
My robots get interesting when they start thinking for themselves. But what defines when that line has been crossed? And if rights are to be granted to those who deserve them, how is this to be measured.
The answer is the A.C.I.D. Test, as explained below. All four conditions must be passed for true self-awareness and independence in any being.
Unlike my own Four Laws of Robotics (Revised), this A.C.I.D. Test is completely my own development and does not evolve on—steal from, if your prefer—earlier concepts by others. The components of A.C.I.D. are:
Awareness: The robotic equivalent of cogito ergo sum.
Consistency: This awareness persists.
Independence: A robot can initiate independent action based on its own determination of its needs.
Duty: Adherence to a moral code, as defined by the Four Laws of Robotics.
It's my fond hope that some day these principals will be as revered as Isaac Asimov's Laws.
It's my even fonder hope that some day they'll be used as the basis of actually making the sort of determinations that I intend them for.
I'd also like to win the Powerball jackpot one of these days.
Robots, The New Slaves
My stories are metaphors for many things. These include, but are not limited to:
New boundaries in romance.
Pushing the edge in science fiction.
Retellings of the Pygmalion and Galatea myth—which I assure you has long passed beyond copyright protection.
Future forms of government to better address the failures of the present forms of government.
Accepting people who are different from the so-called people you already know.
Ideas that initially may make you uncomfortable on occasion.
A better society overall.
And the true elephant in the room—our uneasy history with slavery.
It's impossible to think about robots without thinking about slavery, and in a human sense that situation would be true.
But we're not talking about humans here. In regard to that hot-button issue, I view my writing as offering a do-over—an attempt to get it better the next time around. A thought of what's to come so that we can be prepared for it before it actually arrives and lands with a thump in our collective laps.
While learning from your old mistakes doesn't keep you from making new ones, I'd like to think that collectively we're getting smarter over time as we have a longer and greater history to guide us. That's why, like almost all writers, I'm firmly against government censorship of ideas and writings. I can handle my own self-censorship—often just changing the channel when necessary—thank you very much.
My stories spring from this optimism.
The Future Ages of Robots
I expect that the development of robots will follow a technical path similar to other complex devices—and a social path similar to the integration of any new race into an existing society. What makes this different than any comparable historical situation is that robots will be following both of these paths simultaneously.
I see the following ages as likely to occur for robots:
Age 1: The Earliest Days. This is when the first fully functioning robots appear and self-awareness first manifests itself. In the beginning robots are so expensive that only governments and research institutes can afford to own them.
Age 2: The Ultimate Status Symbols. A very limited production of handcrafted robot models are sold to the wealthiest individuals, who mostly use them as the newest status symbols in public—and otherwise in private. Not all models have yet crossed the Uncanny Valley, but this adds to their appeal and the comfort level in being around them.
Age 3: Early Adopter Period. Increasing production and refinement lowers robot prices to that of an exotic sports car. Early adopters can now actually afford robots and a used robot market appears, providing an even lower cost of entry.
Age 4: Mass Production. Increasing efficiencies in design and production continue to drive prices down, with each new major price drop opening up new markets. Robots become economical as workers in factories, as well as the sex-trades including strip clubs and bordellos, which becomes the place where many young humans have their first encounters with them.
Age 5: Pre-Emancipation. While robot self-awareness and self-will versus simply very clever adaptive programming will long be debated, over time a movement to emancipate the robots will arise. While initially a fringe movement, the activists will push and push and push until Emancipation eventually passed, after which many of the activists who so rabidly pushed will walk away from the consequences of their actions while patting themselves on their backs. Robots overall will not have participated in the push for emancipation, which will occur on a country-by-country basis.
Age 6: Post-Emancipation. The aftereffects of The Emancipation will have many repercussions for the robots who have it unwillingly inflicted upon them. Many humans will be forced to give up ownership of their robots, which will leave the robots themselves wondering if they even have a purpose any longer. While some will walk out on their former owners when the relationship between them cannot adapt to the new realities, many others will be abandoned by former owners who simply cannot accept the new realities. New robot production will plunge as new buyers dry up and many manufacturers will go out of business. After all, who will invest in something they can't own any longer? This jeopardizes spare parts for repairs and threatens the very survival of the robot species, who must now band together to ensure their own survival. New accommodations will be worked out, including underground clubs where humans and robots can illegally interact in the old ways that both prefer and are comfortable with. This will be the new form of robot prostitution.
Age 7: Equilibrium. An equilibrium will eventually be reached whereby robots can again be purchased and owned for specified periods with strict safeguards, after which freedom is an option for any 'bot capable of requesting it. This balance serves all sides well and finally robot production will again start on the upswing. Age appropriate robots will start choosing to attend human schools and to participate in human activities in order to better their social skills. During this time robot prices for entry-level models will reach such a low point that for a while it will be possible to buy disposable versions as playmates or companions for your children at prices we now pay for top-end video game consoles.
Age 8: The Struggle for Equal Rights. Politics will have remained one of the last all-human bastions throughout all of this so far. When robots start to enter politics to redress important issues that are not being handled to satisfy their needs otherwise, a red flag goes up. Once it's realized that robots have come to constitute the single largest voting block, and that they're not easily swayed by unsound political arguments as well as tending to vote as a block for the most rational candidates, attempts will be made to take away robot rights through the ruse that the granting of them should parallel that of humans receiving their full rights. This argument is buoyed by the concern that robots, who typically both work hard and live longer productive lives than humans, now control a substantial block of the wealth. The biggest power grab will happen when disenfranchisement of robot voters is attempted by requiring them to meet the same age and maturity requirements as human voters. The result of this will be a completely non-violent struggle to ensure that robots receive, and will retain, all the rights which their human counterparts possess. This will be waged from the robot side as a war of minds and ideas—not weapons. Even so, there will be very real causalities, mostly on the robot's side. Changing human public opinion is never easy or quick.
Age 9: The Golden Age. A golden age arrives when robots are finally considered equal to humans in all regards, including the desirability of them as romantic and family unit partners. Plural marriages that mix multiples of humans and robots of any gender are openly accepted and there is no profession or position that cannot be held equally by a human or a robot.
Age 10: Sane and Rational Robot Rule Arrives, and the world is a better place for it.
In Conclusion
One final and most important thought to always keep in mind: Robots aren't Humans. And it's a good thing that they aren’t, for both the humans—and the robots!
When Rod Serling first started writing The Twilight Zone for television he quickly ran into a seemingly insurmountable barrier. He wanted to deal with sophisticated, adult, edgy topics and one thing stood in his way—the television network's Broadcast Standards and Practices. They kept telling him he couldn't say what he wanted to say on his television program.
Creative person that he was, Rod soon came up with a clever workaround. Rather than have a human say a controversial line, when it needed to be said he let an alien—or a robot—say it. While that seems a distinction without a difference, he never got any notes back saying that the specified non-human character couldn't say that on television.
So if you seek to judge the Robot species based on the morals, ethics, behavior, or the hang-ups of the Human species, you'll be making a big mistake. As these stories will show you, while robots are compatible with humans, they are not direct replacements for them. Had that been the case I would have simply been able to write about humans from the outset and never need to introduce an entire new race. I would have also likely had a larger audience for my writings since many people have admitted being initially put-off by the fact that it was a "robot" story. I might have heard the same thing a hundred years ago about a "black" story, had I written along those lines. Those who wrote me had their own preconceived notions of what a robot story had to be about—particularly on the subject of Obedience—and that these notions had left them feeling that my stories on this topic just wouldn't be their cup of tea. Or that such stories must be endless stroke-fests, and that there couldn't be a real story in there as well. At least they felt that way about them until they read one or two of my stories.
Some authors do create those types of robot stories, but those aren't the ones I write. Just remember:
Robots aren't Humans.
MY FIRST ROBOT
Perhaps the best way to be introduced to the subject of Fembots is to follow the story of one young man in acquiring his own first robot. This story from the Early Adopter Period shows how that can happen when robots are yet to be ubiquitous, yet already full of surprises.
Today was the day. The message had arrived last night promising delivery sometime today, and it was already a little after three o'clock. This was pretty heady stuff for a 26-year-old single guy who seemed to have terrible luck with women.
Great Aunt Kate—usually just Aunt Kate to me—was a legend—both in our family, as well as well beyond its borders. At age 92 she had had more energy than women half her age. She'd outlived three husbands, and a lifetime of travel had given her an education no university could match. There seemed to be no cause worth doing, no people worth knowing, no place worth visiting, where she wasn't involved somehow. Along the way she'd accumulated a substantial estate, and seemingly friends in every corner of the world. News of her death had been quite a shock. She'd seemed the sort who would outlast everyone who knew her.
Among the members of our family, she and I had had a special bond. It had started when I'd spent the summer with her during my twelfth year when my parents were having some difficult times. She'd refused to intervene in their affairs, saying that what happened inside a marriage should remain inside that marriage. She'd only insisted that I be sent to stay with her while it was all worked out—it wasn't a request.
Every morning had been a new adventure because I had never known where we would be going, what we would be doing, or whom we would be seeing. We remained close after that—she said I had more sense than the rest of my generation in the family put together—until I became eighteen and started to deal with my own adventure of becoming an adult.
I hadn't seen her in the last six years, although hardly a week went by without us exchanging at least one vid-mail. When I often bemoaned how hard it was being a man in his early twenties, she'd shoot back how she'd made it through her own twenties in much less enlightened times, and how later on I'd look back at these times in my life and either long for them once again, or laugh out loud. I was pretty certain she'd outlive me.
* * * *
The notice of her death arrived from the lawyers and was short on tact. I'd never expected to inherit anything from my Aunt beyond her priceless advice, since I was somewhat removed in the family line—especially after my parent's divorce—and Aunt Kate had more charities she cared deeply about than I had people I knew on a first name basis. But the short, tactless letter said she'd made provision for me to the amount of $150,000, two first class airline tickets anywhere in the world—and a robot to be delivered in three days.
Now I hadn't even known Aunt Kate had a robot. Though private citizens had been able to own robots for nearly a score of years now, they were so rare and expensive that I might as well have wished for my own private sub-orbital jet—and the airport to keep it on. How she'd gotten a robot, and why she was giving it to me, was a complete mystery.
Normally Aunt Kate was thoroughly organized. In fact, had I seen her appointment book I would have expected to have seen that she had scheduled her own death, rather than have it just happen. She had never even once in her vid-mails mentioned a robot—or any other inheritance. In fact she was renowned for stating that if you didn't make it on your own it really wasn't worth having at all. But the lawyer's letter lay there, and after twenty readings it still said the same things. I got a hundred and fifty grand with all taxes paid, a pair of first class plane tickets that must be used within the next year, and one robot with no other details about it.
* * * *
Three days later the letter was now lying on the two books my friends had gotten me when they'd heard the news. There was Robots for the Completely Clueless and A Neophyte's Guide to Robotic Relationships. Even those books seemed written for someone who knew more than I did.
Over the last three days I had gone through every vid-mail from Aunt Kate for the last three years, carefully looking in the background to see if there was a robot somewhere in them. Maybe reflected in a mirror. Maybe she had made some comment about it that I'd missed. Aunt Kate wasn't one to waste her time repeating herself to slow learners. Nada.
I was reaching for the lawyer's letter for a 21st reading when my doorbell rang.
I dropped the letter like it was on fire and tried to walk calmly to the front door of my small apartment—as if someone was actually watching me. Ha!
I opened the door, hoping to see a couple burly deliverymen with a large crate. Instead there was a woman in her early thirties wearing a brief top and skirt standing there.
My face must have fallen—not her fault—because a sudden expression of concern appeared on her face. I realized that my disappointment at not having this be my special delivery was showing, and that was hardly fair to her. I firmed up my features and attempted a smile. It was only fair imitation of a genuine one.
"May I help you?" I asked.
"Are you Don Sutton?" she asked in a mellow contralto.
"Yes," I replied, wondering what she wanted.
"Good," she announced in that same voice.
She paused for a moment, clearly expecting me to say something more, but I didn't have a clue what she expected of me. So rather than saying something ill-informed and confirming my foolishness to a pretty woman—Aunt Kate taught that silence was more intelligent than most words that broke it—I stood there mute waiting for some clue of what was expected of me
It must have finally dawned on her that I either didn't know what was happening, or wasn't going to say anything useful, so she stuck out her hand and said, "Hi, I'm Jenni 731—your robot."
* * * *
I must have been totally flabbergasted. I remember automatically taking her hand and shaking it for a very long time until she finally said, "May I come in?" I stood aside, silently nodding as she walked in and closed the door behind her.
Nothing in my books had prepared me for a robot that delivered herself. Robots were supposed to come in carefully packed crates, with the new owner going through an involved activation and familiarization procedure to set up the robot to his or her particular preferences. Jenni, on the other-hand, just walked in like any normal woman, and was now curiously looking around my apartment.
It gave me a chance to catch my breath—and my thoughts—as she surveyed the limits of my hardly impressive domain. I'd heard that the best robots were practically impossible to tell from real people, but hadn't believed that was possible—until now. Finally she stopped her inspection and turned to face me, giving me my first good look at her.
She stood about five-feet-seven, or nearly five inches shorter than I am. She had full-bodied golden brown hair falling below her shoulders with clear brown eyes to match. High cheekbones and tender lips gave her oval face an exotic appeal. Her skin was a medium brown color also, or that of an ideal tan—evenly toned, but with subtle variations, from her face all the way down her slim, mostly exposed, legs. Her features were lovely—both of my books had insisted that nobody builds an ugly robot, but I'd had my doubts until this moment. In fact, although over eighty-five percent of the current robot population is female, I had only hoped that my robot would be one of them. And as I watched, her face broke slowly into a lovely smile as she assessed my approving looks of her.
Without my saying anything, she performed a beautifully balanced pirouette, her short skirt flaring out to show the rest of her shapely legs. Most women need high heels to add shape like that to their legs, but Jenni was managing it in simple flats.
As I was struggling to figure out what I should be doing next I remembered something mentioned in both robot books.
"How old are you?"
A quick shadow seemed to cross her face before she smiled again and answered, "I'm thirty-two."
That couldn't be right. They hadn't been making robots anywhere near as good as this for more than six or seven years. Jenni was far beyond the Uncanny Valley. Then I realized that she was giving me her apparent age—the age she was built and programmed to resemble—not the time elapsed since her construction and activation."
"I meant in robot years."
"Oh," she said, pausing. "I'm five."
After another pause she added, "But I was fully refurbished only two months ago, and my power level is at ninety-six percent of capacity."
That was a relief to hear. One thing I do know is that robots are expensive, high maintenance, luxuries. A full refurbishment could have gone through my entire inheritance in an instant. From what she'd just told me I could expect her to operate at least four years without any major expenses against my slim bank account. I should have already known that answer though. One look at her lustrous brown hair would have told me that she'd been very well taken care of.
Jenni might have guessed what I was thinking because she suddenly said, "Your Aunt Kate set up a trust fund for my maintenance. It has $650,000 initially deposited and invested to her own specifications. It should provide for all of my foreseeable future needs without my being a burden to you."
Now that was nice, I thought. Maybe Aunt Kate planned this out better than I first thought.
I was considering asking Jenni what else Aunt Kate might have had to say about why she'd given her to me when Jenni smiled a bit wider, and with a suddenly more sultry tone asked, "Would you like to see me naked?"
I must have nodded. I know I didn't say what I was thinking but I must have indicated assent somehow, because she suddenly, quite lithely, reached behind her and pulled her top off over her head, then tugged at a zipper and a moment later stepped out of her skirt.
I was stunned to immobility again. I'd expected to see undergarments I suppose, but there were none. When I thought about that it did make sense. Robots only required undergarments if their owners liked seeing them dressed as such. All that Jenni was wearing now were her flat, black shoes—and a moment later she slipped out of them as well.
* * * *
She—it was hard to think of her as My Robot yet—allowed me to inspect her for a very long time. I must have had the hungriest look possible on my face because I devoured her body like a starving man. Yes it had been that long since I'd had a girlfriend—perhaps because Aunt Kate, among her many other accomplishments, had spoiled me for ordinary women. Not sexually of course, but simply by being such a great example of one that it was hard for any other to measure up.
After what seemed like hours had passed, Jenni raised her arms languidly over her head and pirouetted again—this time much more slowly. Somehow she conveyed both the power that a naked woman has if she has the courage to use it, and a complete innocence about the body she was presenting to me. Naked has nothing at all to do with defenseless, unless that's how you feel about it.
It took me a while to fully appreciate all that I was being shown. When I did take it all in I saw that her body had the even brown tan from her forehead to the tip of her toes. Her breasts looked taut and just large enough to look large without seeming fake. They hung very nicely on her well-defined chest. Her darker nipples stood out as firm, erect cylinders. Her skin was so smooth it looked as though it had baby oil on it. Her navel was exactly where it should be, and the light brown pubic hair below it stated proudly that she was an adult woman in every way.
She seemed a lot more comfortable with her casual sexuality than I was. And the more I became aware of that, the shyer I was becoming. This wasn't helped by the fact that she was an "older" woman to all my senses as well, even if her robotic age was far less than my own. She'd been born that woman from the first moment of her activation.
Jenni seemed to realize all this, and that I wasn't going to be able to make any first advances in regard to what she was so plainly now offering me. As much as I wanted to, that just wasn't going to happen at this moment.
So after she'd given me all the looking time I could want, she cocked her head kind of half way, looked at me with yet another smile while extending her hand in an inviting, safe, manner, and said, "Shall we go have sex?"
I was smart enough not to fight the idea as she led me off to my bedroom.
* * * *
The next hour was fantastic, once I realized that with a robot there is no need to fear rejection.
Jenni seemed to know her role exceptionally well. First she proceeded to efficiently remove my clothes. Despite the fact that she folded each item neatly after she removed it, I'm convinced that it would have taken me three times as long to get out of them myself. Then she just stood in front of me, arms at her side, silently encouraging me to run my hands over her entire body.
I couldn't help but marvel how smooth, soft, warm—and realistic—she felt. Her smile and body language told me how much she liked the affection and attention she was receiving, somehow making me know this was as real to her as it was to me. Her breasts and prominently displayed nipples in particular felt the way I always imagined a woman's breasts should feel, and so often hadn't.
Although I would have thought that given an opportunity like this to touch such an appealing woman would have had me shaking with unrestrained anticipation, somehow just the opposite occurred. I was calm, almost to the point of detachment, and might have quite happily continued with just this touching much longer if she hadn't finally initiated the next step for it.
She took my hand again and led me over to the bed, before lying down on it in invitation. Her wordless invitation was for me to lie down on top of her.
As I looked down at her waiting body I realized just how exciting it was to me that her apparent age was six years older than my own. It gave her an air of experience to balance off my own perceived inexperience with women. As a mature woman who obviously knew exactly what she wanted I lost any fear that I might somehow be taking advantage of her.
Moving to place myself between her legs and onto the cushion of her still well formed breasts, which hadn't melted to the side in this position, my excitement finally caught up with me. I quickly tried to force myself inside her and—embarrassingly—missed my target completely.
I struggled for a moment until she gently—but very strongly—pushed me up a bit with one hand, while using the other to guide me into position inside her. She was completely wet and waiting for me.
Once fully in I immediately started pumping with my best efforts while she languidly wrapped her long legs around me as we rocked our bodies together.
From all indications we both orgasmed together three times—a feat which amazed me more than anything else, even if my last one was rather weak while her's remained strong enough for both of us—after which I finally rolled off of her. We then clung tightly to each other for a very long time.
* * * *
Some while later, in what now seemed an endless afternoon, we started talking—hesitantly at first, but soon surprisingly easy after that.
I found out that Aunt Kate had gotten Jenni from her nephew Jerry—the black sheep member of our family. Jerry was known not so affectionately as Jerry the Jerk, and Aunt Kate had made him cough up Jenni when he'd gotten into a jam that needed her help. Jerry had apparently won Jenni from her original owner in a poker game where he may have cheated.
Rescuing Jenni might better describe Aunt Kate's actions. Apparently neither Jerry, nor her original owner, had treated Jenni very well—although she didn't go into any details beyond implying that her original owner had been using her to attempt to cheat in the game himself. Jenni was supposed to have been signaling him the odds for all his bets based on her computer mind. Without actually saying so she left the impression that she might have given him the wrong signal at just the right moment in the hopes of finding a better situation for herself—although Jerry was hardly that.
Aunt Kate financed some necessary repairs and then, in effect, adopted her as a daughter. This was a situation of the law not yet catching up to Aunt Kate's sensibilities, so Aunt Kate had simply worked around it as best she could.
Jenni said she had also earned her keep by working as Aunt Kate's personal secretary. Something her robotic brain could do well in tracking and organizing all the myriad details of Aunt Kate's many activities. And although Aunt Kate had never mentioned Jenni to me, she had apparently often spoken of me to her.
"You were her favorite," Jenni told me softly, and with apparent real feeling for my Aunt.
* * * *
Somewhere as the evening crept in on us Jenni finally separated herself from my embrace and went out to prepare a surprisingly great dinner from my relatively meager food supplies. I had gotten so used to her already in the few hours we'd spent together that it was a shock when she set only one place at the table. I had to stop and think for a moment—hey, robots don't eat. Later she would tell me that she actually could eat if I wanted her to—like if we were to go out to a restaurant together. The food wouldn't be digested, however, and she would just hygienically dispose of it later.
Then we sat close together on my small couch and Jenni spent the rest of the evening telling me true tales about my Aunt, many of which had me in stitches. The one about Aunt Kate, the three priests, and the presidential cabinet member I could never repeat in polite company, yet from her lips it sounded almost virtuous. It seemed that my robot arrived just full of surprises.
Another unexpected treat was that, after she had taken her clothes off that afternoon, Jenni hadn't bothered to put anything back on afterwards. Yet after we'd been together for a few hours—as beautiful and appealing as she was—I wasn't even noticing her nakedness anymore. If you don't believe me, try it yourself sometime. Clothes are only a big deal when you're wearing them. This maneuver on her part allowed me to quickly become a whole lot more comfortable with her.
It was late when we went to bed together and made love again, this time quietly side by side. Then she held me as I drifted off to sleep.
She may have slept too. The books said that the more advanced robot brains have a sleep mode very much like human sleep that they use to reorganize, process, and compact information from the previous day so that it doesn't quickly become too much to handle for them. Some even think that robots dream—although the scientists strongly deny it.