by KT McColl
She took two steps forward. "Oh no, your pretty face too. Is that why you didn't come last week?"
I nodded. No one had ever expressed much concern for my face or called it pretty. She moved to touch my scabby lip and apparently thought better of it.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked.
I closed my mouth and shook my head.
"I've been cleaning up," she said unnecessarily.
She was close to me. I could feel the warmth of her, though I was probably just imaging it. "I can see that."
She stepped back and leaned a hip against the kitchen island. "I thought that I might as well make myself useful."
"It's not my house," I said.
"I know, but I still wanted to make myself useful. You aren't pleased?"
"I am. It looks good."
"At any rate, I figured that it's our home as long as we're in it so it might as well be clean."
Our home. The word sounded strange and foreign. In my world, houses were shelters. Homes didn't exist. "How are you?" I asked because it seemed the polite thing to do.
"I'm operating within acceptable parameters. My batteries have degraded a bit, but I should be okay. Other than that, I haven't been able to connect to the company network, so I don't know if there are any upgrades."
I'd forgotten, looking at her, that she was a robot. Hearing her speak those words, I remembered. "I doubt there are any."
"Why?"
I shrugged.
"You said that things had changed before you left the last time. What did you mean?"
Oh Mother, I thought. Did I really want to get into this? How long had she been out? Forty years almost?
At that moment, I felt really tired. "I think you should sit down."
She gave me a look.
"Okay," I said. "I need to sit down. This might take a while."
She took my hand and led me to the living room. Letting go, she sat down on the sofa, crossed her legs, and placed her hands in her lap. I sat opposite her. She waited, looking placid. Not vapid, but serene. I supposed it was her default expression.
I didn't know how to begin. "You're the last," I said finally.
She opened her mouth.
"The Jessie model was the last one. You're the last fembot."
Her eyes widened and then she looked down at her lap. "I think you need to tell me what happened."
She was right. She needed to know.
After meeting Jessie for the first time, I was forced to remember the things I hadn't thought about in decades. I probably still only knew a fraction of it, but part of me didn't want to know more.
I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. Taking a deep breath, I launched into it. I told Jessie about when I got out of school as a young teenager, when the Sorority had deemed me old enough and big enough to work in the fields. Back then I had something of a mentor. I don't know whether he was officially assigned to me to make the transition easier or whether he took me under his wing of his own volition. Sol was probably the same age that my dad would have been, maybe a little older. I lived with him in his shack, the one I inherited when Sol gave up the ghost. On the warm evenings after a hard day in the field, he would tell me stories of how it was when he was a young man. Back in the day, he’d say. He had a lot of stories from back in the day.
We would sit on his rickety porch and he would drink his liquor. He would tell me stories, the kind I’d never heard from my own father because I'd been too young then and too young to remember for myself. They certainly weren't the stories told by the Sisters.
By his own admission, Sol had been a bit of a Luddite back in the day. Didn't go in for all of the technological wonders that intoxicated so many people and made them fat and lazy and stupid -- his words. He certainly hadn't owned a bot. I got my lovin' the old-fashioned way, he'd say. And no, I didn't pay for it. He was suspicious of technology and would mock the people -- sheep, he'd call them -- who would stand in line for days for the latest gadget, even though it would be available to anyone with a fistful of cash a few days later. People loved their gadgets back in the day, he’d say. Would filter the world through them. They would go to concerts and such and watch through the screens even though they were right there. They were addicted. Couldn't go a minute without jumping to some beep or another and got all discombobulated if they weren't getting beeped at, as though they'd somehow ceased to exist without some kind of electronic validation. I couldn't imagine it, having lived beep-free all my life. They connected their homes and appliances to the Internet and lived half their lives online. They willingly invited gadgets into their homes, trading convenience for privacy, all for the ability to ask a box what the weather was or to turn on lights when they weren't even home. Hell, people were already taking tech into their bodies to make mundane things like shopping easier. Why wouldn't they embrace tech for pleasure when they'd already done so for nonsense? If these gadgets were already in homes and bodies, why wouldn't they be invited into beds?
According to Sol, no one should have been surprised when the bots caught on. He hadn't been. I told Jessie all of this and recounted the history of fembots as I knew it, how the first one, the Abby, had been treated as little more than a pathetic curiosity at the time, a bit of a sad joke for sad jokes. Launched at a sex show, the Abby was touted as a revolution in sex toys. I couldn't imagine that many would have recognized at the time the revolution that the Abby would eventually spawn. Few believed the hype. She was an articulated but barely articulate mannequin. That said, she had the requisite number of holes. From what I could tell, that was about it, and for many, that was probably enough. The anonymous, furtive men who bought her, the early adopters, were probably seen as even more pathetic than the device itself, but I didn't get into that. These were Jessie's ancestors after all.
The next generations of bots, the Bettie and the Cassie, were more realistic and boasted more sophisticated artificial intelligence. They could move and talk, though walking was beyond them, but I didn't think anyone could confuse them with the real thing.
The Dorothy was the breakthrough, a true companion bot that combined near-realism and sophistication. It could do what Sol called deep learning, whatever that was. It was the Dorothy that jolted those who saw in sexbots a deviant, if largely harmless fetish. With the Dorothy, the clumsy sex toy had become a fembot. She could adapt after a fashion, hold an intelligent conversation, walk without the distraction of whirring motors, and could of course fulfill just about any sexual desire her owner might have. However, only the most rarified reaches of the hedonistic upper crust could afford her.
And then, in a marketing coup that was at once crass and perfectly calculated, some now-forgotten B-list actor walked the red carpet arm-in-arm with a Dorothy during awards season. It didn't matter that the actor in question was known to be drug-addled and desperate for cash. Few eyes were on him anyway. They were on the Dorothy. Perfectly symmetrical, perfectly proportioned, perfectly at ease on the arm of a somewhat famous man in public. Then, on the red-carpeted stairs, they kissed. Flashes strobed to the chitter of dozens of shutters, capturing publicly the indecent intimacy of a man and a robot. The kiss might have lasted only a couple of seconds, but it spawned thousands of images. A hint of tongue from between crimson lips. A shapely leg pressed suggestively between his. Breasts flattened against a chest. His hand resting on her curve of her voluptuous ass. A Marilyn Monroe wink and a smile as she led him away.
At that moment and with every image, every man wanted to be him. Every woman felt the ground shift.
With the Dorothy, sniggers of derision evolved into envy on the one side and apprehension on the other.
It was shortly after the release of the Evie that demographers and social scientists joined activists and commentators in sounding the alarm. Dorothy's sales had bumped with the exposure, but the Evie enjoyed the kind of widespread adoption that came from a lower price. Economies of scale, Sol said. While the Dorothy was a Maserati -- whate
ver that was -- the Evie was a Honda. Factories in Asia churned them out. Tens of thousands were sold, many to individuals, some to brothels, and others to groups of men who pooled their cash for the privilege of bedding a bot. With the Evie, there was some evidence that the technology was having some unintended consequences. Unexpectedly and perhaps coincidentally, the divorce rate increased within the year of her release. The birthrate decreased as well. These two factors, even if they were minor blips on a graph, possibly a statistical anomaly, caused the technology to be described as disruptive.
From where I sat now, opposite Jessie, I could see that disruptive was an understatement.
The next few generations saw the technology improve exponentially. An increasing number of men chose the company of beautiful and willing fembots over the more complicated relations with flesh-and-blood women. Large numbers of men -- and it was almost exclusively men -- withdrew from their relationships and obligations, bewitched by proximity and easy availability of pleasure. For those who couldn't afford a bot, there were companies who would rent them. Apps that would summon them to your home.
Of course, not all fembots were employed as agents of sex. The manufacturers donated countless units to serve as companions for the aged, while others were employed as nannies, servants, and assistants. This was the benign face of the revolution put forth by the marketers. And though these applications were touted by bot manufacturers, they nonetheless introduced temptation where before there was none.
As one commentator put it, a lingerie model in a seminary is unlikely to encourage piety.
Politicians were hamstrung. While some demanded action, others protested the unwarranted intrusion of the state into the lives of the citizenry.
Naturally, there were men who didn't succumb to the promise of easy pleasure, men who joined women in expressing their disgust and warning that the fabric of society was stretching out of shape. But these men were outliers and besides, for those most wronged by this new technology, men were guilty by chromosomal association.
It was, said Sol, a slow-moving technological clusterfuck.
By the time the Haley had rolled out, a popular movement had started, led by she who would later be known as Mother Superior. There were marches in North America and Europe. Women's strikes. Shamings and outings. A slow burning indignation at the steady parade of respectable men shown to be deviant and weak. It all came to a head when a manufacturer's customer list was hacked and distributed online. Politicians and business leaders fell like dominos. It must have been about then that men realized that they had abdicated what little authority they still had. For them, it was too late. Mother Superior and the Sorority skillfully eased into the vacuum left by those who were otherwise occupied, distracted, or shamed. They had to.
I explained how the Enlightenment, as it came to be called, was a tsunami, innocuous at first, but growing larger until everything in its path was overcome and swept away. The catalyst was what came to be called the Ultimate Sin, which was a bit of a misnomer. It wasn't a single event but more like a slow unraveling of the old order as more and more men succumbed to temptation and more and more men were outed.
It was during this time that Mother Superior firmed her grip on the movement. She'd long agitated against the sorry state of affairs, the corruption of half of society at the engineered hands of automata who cared little about the victims they left in their wake. To some at first, she came across as a strident harridan, reminiscent of those shrill agitators who promoted temperance and self-denial during more puritanical times. But over time, what she preached made sense.
As a tactician, she was brilliant, maintaining a presence but never overreaching, never appearing to have any ulterior designs until it was far too late. A regular commentator on both liberal and conservative podcasts at the beginning, she shone an unforgiving light on everything that was wrong with bots and those who would consort with them. It was successful, and over time, when the movement became political, she became its natural figurehead.
People, at least those that still mattered, trusted her. She saw and spoke the truth. She spoke of the grievous insult to half of the population by the hand of those who were driven by the basest of impulses. She spoke of how those who held the levers of power had abdicated their responsibility. And she was right.
If ever a society needed the cleansing fires of a revolution, she would say, this was the time.
It wasn't long before her rhetoric easily won half of the population to her side, women who were fed up with the status quo, disgusted with those to whom they'd uttered vows of fidelity, only to be usurped by machines. They had the numbers. They now had a voice and the power.
It was around this time that fembot distribution facilities were bombed. I suspected that the agents of these actions were the forebears of the Lozen who now guarded the Sorority. Importers were made to disappear. Warehouses were set ablaze. Some social unrest bubbled up, but it wasn't against the Sorority. For the most part, it was between men. When the availability of new and improved models ground to a halt, the have-nots fought those who had. Simple supply and demand. Greed and envy.
The Sorority stood aside and let this happen, giving proof to the need for order.
Ultimately, it was a virus, what Mother Superior likened to a righteous biblical plague, that finally brought an end to the era of the fembot. The virus spread through the network, infecting fembots until they became little more than sad, inert mannequins. The history of the technology had gone full circle.
"Boys like me were rounded up and placed in institutions for re-education. Men were effectively sidelined and left to fend for themselves. Some were employed by the new order. The more compromised were encouraged to leave, others were left to live out their lives in anonymity. They're old or dead now. Those who didn't move on or were banished are still around. Those who had been more sinned against than sinning created the world we have now. It was the Rebirth that followed the Ultimate Sin.
"Having accomplished what she set out to do, Mother Superior retired to the city, content to let others, the new breed of leader, govern what remained. But the city was hers and became a model for others in the country.
"And here we are." I glanced over to Jessie, who was looking blankly at the floor. "Are you okay?" I asked.
"No," she said. "But there's one thing I don't understand."
"What's that?"
"Male sexbots. They existed. I know they did."
I nodded, remembering what Sol had said. "Not nearly as many. At least not so many that they were as much of a threat."
"So?"
"The Sorority doesn't include them in the official history."
Jessie shook her head. "Go on."
I was getting to the era that I knew better, the threshold of the Ultimate Sin. I took a sip of water from my canteen. Not having talked so much in a long time, my throat was dry and scratchy. Not having thought of it in decades, my head hurt.
"My father had a Haley."
Jessie looked up sharply. "Your father?"
I nodded. "She wasn't the first one he had, but she was the one I remember. I thought she was the last. She was certainly his last."
"Oh." It was a strangely strangled sound that came out of Jessie, a sound that I had no idea she was capable of. Her fingers alit on my forearm and we both stared at them for a moment before she reluctantly withdrew. I didn't want to think about whether this was genuine sympathy or a programmed gesture.
"My mother had left by then. I can imagine how tired and angry she must have been. I could understand it. I guess she didn't see much upside to competing with perfection. A lot of women did that... leave. And my father... I guess he didn't see much point in competing for anything. He had all the pleasure he could hope for at his beck and call."
"She left you too?"
That was the thing I could never understand, could never forgive. "I guess she saw me as my father's son," I said.
And that was just it. I was the collateral dam
age in the lack of trust that tore so many families apart. Men couldn't be trusted. Even if individual men railed against the technology, participated in protests and shouted as loudly as the women they marched with, they were guilty too. All that separated them from those who loved their machines was opportunity or a desperate enough hunger.
Now, looking at Jessie, I could understand how well those suspicions were founded.
Jessie was silent. Finally, she asked, "What happened to your father?"
I looked at the wall opposite me, where I could see a nail and the shadow of a picture that had once hung there. A family picture, perhaps. I wondered about the thought processes of those who had lived here -- what to take and what to leave behind. They had taken the picture but had left a lot behind, like the cigars. There was no understanding people. Of course, it might have been something more valuable than a family picture. I had no idea. Maybe they couldn't tolerate the thought of a stranger looking on them someday, passing judgment on what these forgotten people had been like. Maybe that was it.
My father. The only picture of him I had was the one in my head. The picture, like the man, and like my memory of him, was probably flawed. I remembered how the Sorority came for me, under the guise of Family Services. It was a wonder that they'd found us as we'd moved often and always down the property ladder, more deeply into the shadows, shedding possessions as we went until we had precious little left under our roof. It was, in retrospect, squalor, not that my current situation was any less so.
My last memory of my father was of him sitting on a threadbare armchair, elbows on his thighs, hands hanging limply between his legs, head bowed after he'd signed the papers that turned me over to them. Unable to provide the necessities of life or some such. Haley sat lifeless on the sofa, wide-eyed and unblinking, her programming having been scrambled. By that time, my father had no shame left, at least not enough to even try to hide her. Shared inertia made them a good pair. He never looked up as I was led away.
I shrugged. "I don't know. Don't really care. Like I said, he didn't really look after me, so I was taken by those who could."