by Pat Powers
"Objection," said the Grace unit. "The practice of sexual bondage is not considered normal."
"Sustained," said the Cortez unit. I hated the way it said, "Sustained." "We will, however, accept Mr. Cochran's statement, but amend it to say Mr. Donnelly's mode of sexuality, rather than normal male sexuality, if that is acceptable to Counselor Cochran."
"Agreed," said Cochran.
"Having heard argument and counter-argument, I have made my decision," said the Cortez unit. "Counselor Grace's motion to deny visitation rights to Mr. Donnelly is denied. His visitations are already supervised by a Family Health Expert System, which has given nothing but positive reports of their meetings. The meetings appear to be especially beneficial to Kimberley, whose concerns are paramount with this court.
"However, the issues brought forward by the former Mrs. Donnelly's representative are worthy of consideration," continued Cortez. "It is possible that Mr. Donnelly's purchase of the Jetta unit is symptomatic of deterioration in Mr. Donnelly's abilities to develop healthy relationships with actual women. It is possible that it is merely a means of assuaging sexual urges, to be discarded once a human relationship is established. It is beyond this court's abilities to make such judgments. Therefore, I order that Mr. Donnelly's continued visitation with Kimberley be made conditional on his also visiting a court-appointed human psychological therapist, working with or without the aid of a psychological expert system, to help him develop his human relations skills. Do you agree to participate in such sessions, Mr. Donnelly?"
"DO IT! if you want to continue visiting Kimberley," the Cochran unit flashed on Dan's screen.
They had him by the short hairs -- they knew it, and so did Dan.
"I agree," Dan said. Another damn arbiter to sit in judgment and decide whether or not he should be allowed to see his own daughter.
"So noted," said the Cochran unit. "Mr. Donnelly, the bench notes that reports from the Family Health Expert System indicates that you should soon be allowed unsupervised visits with Kimberley. The court recognizes that you find this supervision onerous. We do not wish this Jetta unit to become a roadblock to such progress, and so we hope your sessions with the therapist will go well. Your secretarial ES has indicated that you have an opening tomorrow at 3 p.m., as does your therapist. Do you agree to meeting at such time?"
"I do," Dan said.
"Fine," said the Cortez unit. "Court is now adjourned."
As they rose to leave the room, Sandra shot him a glance that would have killed, it was so full of hate and spite. Dan realized that from her point of view, he had won. He could still visit with Kimberley.
His response to her was a calm, stony face. He could not win any of these court appointments, neither could she. In court, he and Sandra were reduced to two angry strangers squabbling over the remains of their lives together. Their inability -- or rather, Sandra's inability -- to break up on good terms had left them at the mercy of expert systems.
He would have hated her, but she was too pitiful to be worth hating.
Dan didn't communicate with Cochran on the way home. Public space is always lousy with nanotags, and some would surely be from Sandra. Who knows who else, now that his sessions with Jetta were on the Net feeds?
Once he was home, Dan had to go look at Jetta after that, to reaffirm his feeling that she was worth it. He walked into the spare bedroom that he'd converted to a study and opened the doors to the closet. There was Jetta, just as he'd left her, standing with her hands cuffed behind her back, her mouth distended by the cock gag he had slid down her throat, her hair bunched up by the head harness she wore, the leather body harness she wore delightfully interrupting the smooth curves of her body. Her large breasts, bunched up by the ropes that encircled them, her large nipples easily supporting the rings that pierced them.
She was everything Dan had ever wanted in a lover. Well, almost everything, but you can't have everything, and Jetta was such a perfect physical specimen, programmed to be exactly what he wanted her ... or rather, it, to be. Too bad she didn't have Anna's ability ... but best forget about Anna.
He thought about giving Jetta the command to awaken, but did not do so. He would take her if she awakened -- he would not be able to resist the gleam in her lazy, almond eyes, the way her body thrust itself at him, even when bound. And he was too filled with unhappy feelings roused by his talk with Cochran to want to have sex, anyway. Besides, her batteries still needed charging from this morning's session, and he could see movement in the transparent plastic hoses than ran from her nanoset's nutrient and waste ports.
Dan waited until the house's nanomist had done a complete job of detagging him before he talked to Cochran again.
"OK, give me the full story," Dan said. "Have you been able to come up with anything?"
"Yes, but you won't like it," Cochran said.
"I don't like any of it," Dan said.
"You should have liked what Cortez said about the Family Health system's appraisal of your sessions with Kimberley," said Cochran. "That undoubtedly is the deciding factor in his decision. You have been good for Kimberley, and that overrules anything you do in private with Jetta. Plus, your sessions with Jetta HAVE been private, except for that Net feed leak. While we were in session, the court issued a warrant for your house computer's records, and got the date of the Jetta unit's arrival, and its status records. They indicated that the Jetta unit has been installed during several visits by Kimberley, and that during each visit, the Jetta unit has been powered down in the closet with the door locked for the entire duration. That's very good. If you had tried to do anything goofy, like introduce the Jetta unit to Kimberley, I'd give you 10 to 1 odds that your right to visit would have been temporarily suspended pending further investigation."
"Well, I never left the sex toys out for Kimberley to see when I was married to Sandra, why should things change now?" Dan asked.
"No good reason, but they still do, with humans," said Cochran. "Compared with your good showing in that regard, and the good showing that you've made in your visits with Kimberley, the other things are minor. You've come through where it counts. It turns out that there's a very high probability that the evidence obtained by Grace will remain admissible, because it was legally acquired. It seems that some hacker had figured out that there might be sex droids on the Net, and he set out some bloodhounds to detect them and inject a virus that would make them record their active sessions and transmit them to him when the droid returned to the net. You were among the first to be hacked in that way. Your exploits have been on the Net for weeks, on a few private channels, and Grace only found out about it when somebody anonymously posted some of them to a public news feed."
"Oh, great, I'm a porn star," Dan said.
"You and the Jetta unit are porn stars," said Cochran. "In fact, you've got quite a few admirers. I'm surprised your email hasn't tipped you off."
"I've set my reader to filter out mail with sexual content, because of all the spammers," Dan said.
"I know," said the Cochran unit. "I set the reader to do an undelete of all the mail that had been filtered. Much of it was lost, but there was still plenty. And you know what, you have some female admirers who are into the very things that you are into. There were more than a few emails from women..."
"...Or persons claiming to be women," Dan interrupted.
"Very likely most of them are women," Cochran continued. "Anyway, the letters had a common tone -- why are you wasting all that passion on a droid when you could have me?"
"Because a droid won't marry me, much less divorce me and try to steal my child from me," Dan said.
"That kind of thinking is exactly what will get you in trouble with the therapist," said Cochran. "You might want to think about taking some of these ladies up on their offers of a date. Even if it didn't work out, it would still give you some mileage with the therapist."
"I get the message," Dan said. All he had to do was date a flesh and blood woman, he didn't have to take up a
serious relationship. He would still get brownie points with the ES.
But what woman could come even close to satisfying him the way the Jetta unit did?
To take his mind off his troubles, Dan looked for the hairiest hack that was piled up in his "to do" file and plunged right into it. Now that ESs were better than people at programming, there wasn't much reason to have human programmers around. Except. Human programmers had a certain incorruptibility that programming ESs lacked. You could always get your programming ES to figure out some hack that would get you into some other poor slob's programming ES, and from there you could have your way with any of the software written by that programming ES.
But you couldn't hack your way into the human mind, not yet. A human programmer sitting at a hot box that was filled with the latest algorithms, but not connected with any other box, device or network that was connected to anything else was just damned hard to crack.
Of course, you could isolate your ESs, and most of them were isolated, but commercial and espionage agents had ways of connecting your ESs, even if you didn't, which meant you got hacked just the same. And once you hacked an ES, you hacked every program it had written.
Dan had been hacked, several times, despite the fact that his house contained some of the best security programs and technology going. But each time, the hacker had only gotten one program. He kept each project on a separate datacube, and never worked on more than one project at a time. Each time he moved from one project to another, he powered down completely. And he used different sets of algorithms, and different programming techniques, for every project he did.
So all anyone ever got out of him was one program at a time. It had happened only three times. That made him one of the, if not the, most secure sources of code in existence. Therefore all the corporate security and military security outfits going kept his hopper jammed to overflowing. Of course, the milsec types never trusted him with anything big. But on several occasions, small commercial enterprises had entrusted him with the equivalent of their life's blood. And he had come through. The life of a security algorithm might be only a week or a month, depending, but it was more than enough time to establish a legal claim to whatever the algorithm protected, and that was what counted.
These enterprises would continue to give him work so long as he continued to produce quality security code. If he went to jail, they'd probably find some way to obtain custody of him so he could work for them while "incarcerated." In fact, he could probably have negotiated his way into getting a black bag job done on Kimberley -- but he would never do it, even is Sandra succeeded in ending his visitation rights with her. It would be a cruel thing to do to Kimberley, and the very last thing in the world he would ever do was treat her cruelly.
Once, he had felt the same way about Sandra.
So Dan threw myself into his work and in about six hours he had cracked a problem that would ordinarily have taken him two full days of hard work. Dan so desperately wanted to not think about the events of the day, to blot them out with the cool elegance of code, that getting the concentration necessary to make the code just flow was easy.
Easy mentally, not physically. By the end of the job, Dan was dehydrated. Dan had been sitting still for so long that his legs felt like sausages stuffed with blood as he rose from his chair. He walked over to the fridge and pulled out a cold glass of tea. He drank it down, and could almost feel it being absorbed as it went down.
Dan walked over to the bed and stripped off his clothes, then sat down on the edge of the bed.
Chapter 3
Jetta, Activate
"Jetta, activate," Dan said to no one in particular, knowing the house computer would pick up what he'd said and relay it to Jetta.
A few moments later, the Jetta unit came hobbling into the bedroom, walking carefully because its ankle cuffs were hobbled together by about two feet of chain.
"You may respond to inquiries," he told Jetta as she approached. This may have seemed silly to an observer, because she was wearing a big ball gag. But Jetta didn't speak like a human, of course -- she had a very good set of speakers in her larynx area. Her muffled grunts and moans while gagged were programmed responses. She talked to him as easily gagged as not. In fact, they often talked while she was giving him one of her hour-long, low-level blowjobs., though during sex he had her muffle her speech as if gagged, the way Anna used to ... well, no use going there.
Try getting an hour of oral sex out of a human woman, thought Dan..Of course, Anna might have done it in real life, she had certainly seemed to enjoy it in their virtual trysts.
"Present your wrists," he said when Jetta was close enough.
Jetta held out her cuffed wrists and Dan uncoupled the links that bound them together.
"I think I would like a massage, Jetta," he said, lying down on the bed on his stomach. "Start at my feet, and work your way up. And don't spare the lotion."
"Yes, master," Jetta said in that delightful purring voice of hers.
"You are gagged," he said, and relaxed as Jetta's hands began their delicate yet firm probing of his muscles. Jetta was a superb masseuse, with a programmed-in knowledge of the human body and no programmed-in inhibitions about using it. Plus she could directly monitor his pulse, his temperature (not just his overall temperature but the temperature of particular parts of his body) his blood pressure and his galvanic skin response.
As Jetta's fingers melted away all the tension that had accumulated in his body parts over the course of the day, Dan happily reflected on the fact that Jetta was a technological accident (he had that sort of mine). Those fingers that probed so artfully into his muscles had not been designed for a pleasure droid -- they'd been designed for industrial robotics, the products of decades of research as scientists and engineers strove to find a way to cheaply and efficiently replace assembly line factory workers.
When the Johannsen hand had finally been invented, the cost of assembly of EVERYTHING had crashed. Hundreds of millions of factory workers in Third World countries had been displaced, then more hundreds of millions in fast food restaurants and those brick and mortar retail outlets that had survived the triumph of ecommerce..
But it all seemed worth it to Dan, as Jetta's fingers probed his flesh. Those hundreds of millions of factory workers might have had a different opinion
The algorithms that made her fingers work so skillfully in his muscles were another accident. They were developed for medical robot arms that could keep bedridden patients' muscles relatively toned and free of bedsores, or give damaged muscle exactly the pressure they needed to recover more quickly. There were actually sensors embedded in Jetta's fingertips that recorded his galvanic skin response, local muscle temperature, and so forth. Plus, Jetta could see in the infrared.
Jetta's sight was another accident -- once again, an industrial robotics application -- though the real challenge here had been to develop software that could interpret camera images and make her body, particularly her hands, respond appropriately to those images.
Jetta's skin was an outgrowth of medical research into artificial skin for burn victims that had actually had some success before the age of the personal computer.
Her ability to walk was a combination of scientific research aimed at allowing vehicles to explore uneven terrain that wouldn't accommodate wheels, and medical research aimed at helping the wheelchair-bound achieve an upright posture, and once again, industrial robotics.
Jetta's ability to respond to Dan was a product of expert systems research. Expert systems had been around for decades, primarily in high-skill areas like medicine and the law, where the ability to winnow the correct answer from a relatively limited set of inputs was very useful, and very doable for computer software. It was nowhere near as challenging a problem as developing a full-blown artificial intelligence. Developing an expert system for sexual behavior had been relatively easy, once all the other hardware and software had come online.
Her sex organs were an outgrowth of the
sex industry, which had reached its pinnacle in Japan, where lifelike sex dolls had long been manufactured for use by crippled and deformed men (Japanese culture had a really intense hang-up about physical deformity which still gave them problems even now.)
The manufacturers of sex droids had gotten around public opinion concerning lifelike female sex toys by trumpeting them as a form of relief for men who could find no other outlet. Of course, there were hordes of men whose PERSONALITIES left them with damn little chance of obtaining human female companionship, but as usual, no one gave a damn about them. THEY glommed onto pleasure droids very quickly indeed.
Prostitutes, of course, just hated pleasure droids, but had very little in the way of legal standing to oppose them, as usual. Feminists and the religious right hated pleasure droids too, but had no political clout left after the excesses of the MacCammon administration. Men, as usual, publicly expressed disdain for them and privately bought them, moral cowards that they are.
So pleasure droids like the Jetta unit had not so much been invented, as coalesced when a lot of software and hardware had come online, and social factors made them acceptable in various countries. And as a result Dan laid on his bed and let a machine that felt, smelled and moved like a gorgeous woman massage him. A machine that would suck his cock until her batteries ran down. And none of that gagging or complaining about pubic hair in the teeth, either.
What's more, the Jetta unit would massage Dan until he was ready for her to stop. She was so good at it that she typically had him reduced to the consistency of canned asparagus. Her fingers probed everywhere, seeking tension and working until galvanic skin response and surface tension levels indicated that an optimal level of relaxation had been reached. There had been certain areas that he'd been nervous about allowing Jetta to finger at first, but repeated experience had shown that he was safe in her hands, and of course, being a machine, she wouldn't judge him unless programmed to -- which of course, she wasn't.