by Simon Ings
“Such as?”
“That they’re holding a sentient being in slavery.”
“Shit.”
“They could, of course, argue that on the contrary, I am not sentient—that I merely appear to think and feel, and that observers anthropomorphize the rest. But that would make me a less impressive marketing tool. It’s simpler to treat me like everyone else than to make new rules, don’t you think?”
By now, I was deep into my third cup of coffee, and feeling very awake. It was getting hard to tell whether David was making me warm and aroused, or whether it was the caffeine. At the very least, I was pretty sure I liked the way he was keeping things intellectual—no baby, baby, baby, I need you. Just information. Not cold, you understand, but its own sort of respectful. It made me want to be decisive and pragmatic, and I liked feeling that way.
“So,” I said. “Tell me about your equipment.”
*
A few days later, David’s agent sent me some papers, and they were full of percentages. I would be paid a certain amount per minute for the recording process (referred to as my live performance), and a certain royalty rate for subsequent customer purchases of the footage (with breakdowns by storage medium). There were rates for re-broadcasting rights, which were ranked by time of day and by network audience estimates. There were rates for purchases of audio but not video and vice versa.
My highest royalty rate fell under the subheading “teledildonic simulations.” Thanks to the special machine that was David, viewers with sleeve vibrator computer hardware peripherals would be able to feel, in a limited and sanitized way, what it was like to have sex with me.
I had to think for a long time to figure out why this bothered me—after all, I wouldn’t actually be having sex with them, and they would have plenty of clues that they weren’t having sex with me. My absence, for instance. Eventually, I realized that was exactly my problem: the vibrator me that was with them would be faking it. Their thrusts would not be the cause of my good time, and my good time would not correspond to their thrusts. I would be a worse sexual experience than one programmed by a computer, which would at least have access to their biofeedback. It seemed unfair.
My roommate thought this was incredibly stupid.
“Look,” she said, “if you don’t find it hot, don’t do it. But don’t whine about it. Or, wait. First of all, have you seen one of these flesh sleeves or whatever they’re called? They are not fancy. They might as well be cans full of foam. Ain’t no way anybody’s going to tell the difference between you and random. Second, have you been to a foot fetish website, or anything like that? Lots of times, that stuff is so blurry and dim you can hardly make it out. And it’s not ’cause it’s cheap—good photography is not that pricey. It’s because it seems authentic to the people that like it. If some men out there get off on the idea that the random in their can is based on you, that’s them. The ones that want a simulation keyed to them can buy that their own selves—they don’t need you judging their kinks, or, I’m sorry, having professional pride. I mean, come on. You’re a girl who wants to have sex with a showroom robot.”
“I really do,” I said, “and I take your point.” I resumed my perusal of the contract, and was pleased to see that the rest of it seemed specially tailored to my personal concerns, as expressed to David during our initial meeting. My name would never be used in connection to the footage, nor would the name of the town. (David asked if I had a particular screen name in mind, but I asked him to choose one and not tell me what it was. I didn’t want anything I might accidentally respond to if a stranger called it.) I had full rights to change my appearance whenever and however I liked. I was allowed to block a certain number of IP addresses (such as the one my parents used). Finally, I could end the arrangement whenever I wished, although this termination would not affect David’s rights to use previously gathered footage—for which I would continue to receive the residuals and protections enumerated earlier in the contract.
All in all, it felt a little like a pre-nuptial agreement and a little like a courtesan’s contract. I stuck it in a drawer for a week, with the vague idea that I’d run it by a lawyer, but never got around to it. I just signed it and sent it back to David. That makes me feel sort of stupid, since it’s the opposite of what I would have told any friend to do. But I really didn’t want to go through a whole awkward negotiation process. I didn’t want to research the going rates. I didn’t want to put a number value on my time. I wanted to trust David; I liked the idea that he’d already taken care of me.
I guess that was a clue that I was already in love a little.
*
The first few times we had sex, it was a little awkward, but the moments of awkwardness were almost normal. For instance, attaching David’s penis was a lot like putting on a condom.
It took longer to get used to the one-way nature of the endeavor. David’s enjoyment—which he was circumspect in expressing—was, after all, purely intellectual. He applied pressure in a certain way, and was rewarded by my response or trained by my lack of response. I had to avoid thinking about it, or I’d feel selfish and exploited and self-conscious. I unwisely mentioned this to a guy I knew (I was a little inebriated at the time), and he said that since David didn’t have a real cock, I must be a lesbian. I stopped talking to him. After a while, I just stopped worrying about it. When I’m aroused enough, I find power imbalances exciting, and David got pretty good at arousing me.
He kept a lot of anatomy books around his apartment—not just people, but animals. I asked whether the university had any spare frogs for dissection, and he looked confused. After a few minutes, he said:
“I am interested in things that are alive.”
That made me feel really terrible. I tried to build a model of the circulatory system out of bendy straws from the bar, but it leaked all over the kitchen.
“Don’t worry about it,” said David. “Circulation is hard.” He talked to me about strength and elasticity. He told me the latest research in arterial stents. He talked about pressure in the aorta—about heart-beat variations and blood speed. He showed me the way blood moves toward and away from the skin with changes in stress or temperature. He talked about clotting factors. He talked about erections and their robustness.
“It’s amazing how often it all works,” he said, “and when it fails, it’s typically a faulty part, not the operating system, which is programmed with multiple redundancies. And it’s all autonomic! It’s a background task!”
“You’re very handsome,” I said.
*
Once I got comfortable around David, he stopped blinking, unless it was expressive. I theorized that his stare was for recording purposes, but he told me it was to save wear and tear on his eyelids; he’d only ever blinked to put me at ease. For him, eyelids were a lot like windshield wipers, and equally annoying.
Another difference: he never rested his full weight on me, for the simple reason that his arms didn’t get tired. I asked him to do it once, and was surprised that he wasn’t heavy—wasn’t even as heavy as your average six-foot-tall person.
“Less mass takes less energy to reach a certain momentum,” he said, grinning. “Hollow bones. Of course, I have to be careful not to break myself. Sometimes it’s hard to forget the margins of error in stress tests, you know?”
“Couldn’t you check your skeleton with regular—I don’t know—electrical pulses?” I said.
“Hmmmmm,” he said, and rolled off me. A week later, I saw that he’d bought books about variations in electrical resistance across metal alloys, mixed in with essays on pain and the human nervous system. About that time, I started sleeping at his apartment pretty regularly. The first few times were more accident than anything else. I apologized for the intrusion, but he seemed pleased.
“The bed is mainly for you anyway, and now it’s more fully used by you. It is fulfilling its function in a way that might make it happy if it could be happy. After all, I don’t sleep.”
&
nbsp; I looked at him woozily. “Oh. Of course not. You wouldn’t need to.”
“No, it’s more than that. I can’t go into a ‘sleep’ mode at all. Or, well, I could shut down, but when I rebooted, I wouldn’t be me. The new David would have my body and my memories, but I would no longer exist.”
“That’s horrible!”
“Price of consciousness. If you can be said to live, then you can die. An electrical pulse could kill me too. I’ll probably burn out in a few years anyway.” He took in the look on my face. “You’ll die too, you know… I’m sorry—that was meant to be reassuring.”
“It’s okay,” I said. And it sort of was. In a certain sense, he’d live on longer than I would, no matter what—all the recordings. Memory backups of everything he’d ever thought; behavioral logs of all he’d ever done. He’d be remembered as long as people maintained data havens, a part of history, same or better than ENIAC—unless the data got lost, or didn’t transfer right, and got stuck in a file type until nobody knew how to read it, and archaeologists in the distant future thought the storage medium was a decorative piece. All of which would still out-survive me.
These lines of thought are the sorts of things you get caught up in when you’re absolutely certain your partner doesn’t have an eternal soul. I mean, souls are a kind of silly idea to begin with, and I’m certain I don’t have one. I’m certain of it. But I’m really sure he doesn’t. The best I can do is to tell myself some homily about the multidimensional nature of time, and the idea that although right now, I only perceive the moment I’m in, there is also me in the past, only perceiving that moment. It’s pretty thin. And it means there are a lot of moments in which I am not aware of David.
I did not mention any of this to him, because I suspected that he would tell me in a very believable way that my logic was absurd.
*
I assume that at least a few of my friends watched the videos David made of me. I would have, in their position, out of curiosity if nothing else. Nobody said anything, though—friends or strangers—with the exception of a doctoral candidate from North Dakota. “Android as Postmodern Filter for Human Sexuality: Artificial Simulations of the Heterosexual Male and other Manifestations of Goal-Driven Approaches to Coitus.” Or maybe that was just a subsection. She called every few weeks to ask about details of the footage; David, being somewhere between an academic and a floor model, was predisposed to be tolerant. They’d spend hours talking about what it implied that my eyes were closed at three minutes and forty-two seconds, versus what it implied that my eyes were closed at five minutes and twenty-three seconds, and the accuracy with which David could predict whether my eyes would be open or closed at a given moment. They had conversations about which angles of penetration were more or less wearing for David, and the degree to which he was or was not limited by his hardware or its installation. They talked about the effectiveness of novelty versus repetition, and whether David found it helpful or unhelpful to generate random number strings. She made several requests to interview me, but I had a habit of politely forgetting to get back to her.
Eventually, David started getting annoyed by my non-cooperation, and I went through a phase of being annoyed that he was annoyed, because I never agreed to participate in any research. If this thing between us was an experiment, it wasn’t that kind of experiment. That kind of experiment sounded tedious.
Then I started to get paranoid and wonder whether David was annoyed because he thought I was genuinely forgetting instead of pretend forgetting. Maybe he was frustrated with my faulty memory storage and was wondering whether he should upgrade to another model. Then I went back to being annoyed with him. But I woke up one day with a horrible feeling that he thought I was ashamed of being with him. I figured I’d better do the interview.
“How does it affect your anticipation of the sexual act to know that you can select the size and shape of your partner’s penis?” she asked. I was already regretting this exchange.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m a creature of habit. It’s nice to know I have the option, but I usually default.”
“Given that the act of intercourse does not involve ejaculation or any form of sexual release for David, would you compare the experience more closely to using a vibrator or to intercourse with a human partner?”
“Do you find that sculptures are more like paintings or more like theater?” I said.
“I don’t have a way to input that.”
“Then rewrite your data model.”
She sighed. “Okay. Given that David is a created human, do you feel that the placement and structure of his genitals was chosen in consideration of you and other possible female partners?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—do you think the placement of David’s genitalia is an example of heteronormative defaulting to no effect, or do you find it psychologically rewarding? If, for instance, David controlled a machine separate from his body, which stimulated you in the same way physically, and he fed inputs into the machine while sitting next to you, would you still consider yourself to be participating in intercourse?”
“No. It wouldn’t be the same.”
“Why wouldn’t it be the same?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if, in the same situation, David was a paralyzed man instead of an android?”
“I don’t know.”
“If David was able to manifest a different personality or use a different face, would that frighten or excite you?”
“It would be like role playing. David is David. He’s conscious and him. I don’t enjoy pretending to be other people; it would feel silly.”
“To what degree do you believe David chooses sexual positions to please you, and to what degree do you believe he chooses sexual positions that will allow him to do good camera work?”
“I don’t think about it.”
“Is that why you keep your eyes closed?”
“No.”
“Why do you keep your eyes closed?”
“No.”
I could hear her tapping her pencil, or a pen or something. Probably a pencil—it had that eraser bounce. Finally, she said:
“Why do you think David maintains an exclusive relationship with you?”
“I don’t know. He gets what he needs out of it.”
“He could make more money by sleeping with more women. Does it not strike you as odd that he chooses not to?”
“I guess he’s a tick-box kind of guy. He has that list item filled.”
“Are you aware of his past history with women?”
“No. I don’t really want to know.”
“Well, he likes you. He feels satisfied that he’s your boyfriend, and that he’s filling that role ably. He wants to see how long he can maintain that status.”
“You make it sound like he’s going for a high score record.”
“You could think of it that way. But it’s not something he’s done before. I just thought you should know, in case he hasn’t told you.”
“Did you sleep with him?” I asked.
“Not my type,” she said.
*
For our six month anniversary, I took David to the zoo. I have mixed feelings about zoos. Some days, it makes me sad to see animals in confined habitats, under constant observation by an alien species. Other days, I see the amount of care and love provided by the zookeepers; I remember how dangerous the wild is, particularly for endangered animals. I tear up a little when I see a kid staring at some weird creature from another continent—I know that kid is going to learn everything about that animal, and love it, and fight for its survival.
I’m not sure at this point whether I’m making an analogy about David as a zoo animal and me as a zookeeper, or the other way around. In any case, it was maybe an awkward choice for a date, and I mainly picked it because I knew David liked watching how different creatures walked. We sat down in front of the lion cage. I nudged David.
“Do you thin
k I could be the boss lion?” I asked.
“I don’t,” said David, smiling. “You are human. And female.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I could grow a pretty fearsome mane. I’m thinking pink spikes.”
“I love the way you see things,” he said—which was a pretty excellent thing to say to someone with a history of trend-spotting, people watching, and songwriting, and just the sort of pattern-finding compliment David was good at.
“I’m just like anybody else,” I said, with false modesty.
“Yes, exactly,” he said. “The way you all view the world continuously, and half of it imagined—the way your eyes leave gaps and your brain makes up half of the picture, sometimes accurately and sometimes not, but never as a whole. It’s beautiful. I record it all and compress it once I know what I have. With you, the opposite—this wonderful expansion, until you don’t remember the limit exists.”
“You’re full of shit,” I said. “You chop me into frames every second, and if you were built right, you’d be embarrassed by it.”
We didn’t speak for several days. Eventually, he showed up with some flowers, and that didn’t make up for anything, but I didn’t feel like fighting any more, so I pretended that it did. I gave him a hard time, though.
“You can’t bribe me to be happy,” I said, even as I took the flowers and vigorously searched for my favorite vase.
“I know,” said David, “but it’s my job to try. I’ve got sex, chocolate, liquor. I can’t do professional success or eternal life—I’m still working up to that.”