Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  ‘She wanted to come with me to Abyss, and I was like, “Yeah, this would be cool.” She was impressed with Harmony. In fact, she brought photos of InMoovator, and Matt was impressed.’ Davecat shrugs. ‘She and I were in a relationship for a while and, needless to say, it did not work.’

  ‘How long were you together?’

  ‘I want to say a year – a little less. Personally, I’m not keen on long distance relationships, and she was living in France, so we had a plan where she was going to move to Canada, which is less than an hour from here, and she was going to take English courses.’

  I wasn’t expecting this.

  ‘It sounds like it was serious,’ I say, flummoxed.

  ‘We had high hopes. But there were incompatibilities between us,’ he continues. ‘She was always going on about how we had so many things in common, but the only things we really had in common were that we liked music from the Eighties and robots and dolls. I got the impression that she was… I don’t want to say provincial, but she was kind of provincial. She reminded me of myself maybe fifteen to twenty years ago with the way she approached romance.’

  It is hard to know what he means here, given that he uses romance as a euphemism for sex. Is he talking about physical contact?

  ‘How many times were you in the same room together?’

  ‘Er, twice. Once in October, with Harmony, and once in March, when she visited here. And it was just weird. It was a weird situation. She was moving a little faster than I would have preferred us to move. I technically broke up with her after we left to go back to our respective homes in October, and then another time, and then the third and final time was after she had visited in March. Part of it was the language barrier. When the first break up occurred we were about to get on our separate planes. I was going to explain my position, and every time I would speak she would motion for me to type out what I was saying on my phone, to translate through Google Translate. I can’t be doing that all the time, with the way I speak.’

  Davecat was prepared to change how he talked for Harmony, but not for Lilly.

  ‘Are you still friends?’

  He laughs a deep, sad laugh. ‘She decided that the best thing for her personal sanity would be to not be speaking to me anymore.’

  There was another girlfriend – before Lilly, but after he bought Sidore, he says. ‘She turned out to be a pathological liar. That really sucked. I thought we hit it off, because not only did she find me attractive, she found Sidore attractive.’

  ‘Was this another person you met because of your interest in dolls?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, with another long, serious nod. ‘She had seen my site and sent me an email saying, “I just happen to be an English girl, and I know you like English girls. I like showing off my feet, because I know you are a foot fetishist. I work in an infirmary in a prison in California.” That sort of thing. I was like, “Well, you sound really interesting.” She had sent photos of herself and she looked interesting too. It turns out she was actually an agoraphobic living in Ohio who hadn’t had a job in three years.’

  ‘You never actually met her?’

  ‘No. It took a long, long time for me to even speak with her on the phone, because she couldn’t sustain the English accent.’

  I’d had a nagging worry that Davecat was somehow hamming up the role of the socially isolated full-time iDollator, exaggerating his persona for my benefit in a way that has got him so much international attention for so many years. But it’s now clear that he really does reside in a fantasy land. I feel more sorry for him than ever. And Lilly. And the agoraphobic woman in Ohio. Maybe all their lives really would be improved if they owned sex robots. Robots can malfunction, but they don’t have the potential to disappoint as crushingly as a real partner.

  ‘Do you think relationships with dolls are easier than relationships with people because you’re more in control?’

  He pauses. ‘Honestly? Yeah. I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I’m lied to, or deceived, because that’s happened in so many romantic and non-romantic situations. I would rather be in a situation where I’m controlling a good 85 to 90 per cent of my synthetic partner.’ He gazes at Sidore. ‘Every single person in a relationship wants to make sure the person they’re with isn’t lying to them, isn’t cheating on them. Everyone, on some level, is a control freak. Maybe I’m just more willing to say that is part of my personality. I’m more willing to say I don’t want to step on landmines, and you know what, I’m not even going to go into the minefield.’

  We have been talking for over ninety minutes but Davecat is in no hurry for me to go. He puts his hand on his RealDoll’s knee and is cheerful again, back in his comfort zone. He confides that on his last visit to San Marcos, Matt let him in on some exciting news. ‘There’s a couple of things he’s said he’s working on that I think may be skewed towards me,’ he says, almost whispering. ‘Like, “Come back next time and we may have some improvements for a certain face.”’ He glances at Sidore again. ‘I can’t really say any more. I am keeping my fingers crossed.’

  Matt has always been friendly, Davecat says. ‘He’s always been eager to show off the latest developments to me. We haven’t really hung out, as such. I think there’s a bit of professional remove. He’s pretty impressive. It would be cool to, like, actually, like, hang out with him, but I understand he’s an extraordinarily busy man these days. It was weird because he had this period when he got tired, or burnt out, or he didn’t expect RealDoll to explode to the extent that it did, and he had some sort of crisis where he was like, “I’m going to step away from the whole doll-making thing for a while,” and he went to music.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Good Lord, this would have been… I can find out, if you were to hang on for a couple of seconds?’ He takes his headset off and goes to rummage for something off-camera. Sidore is still stuck in the frame, her purple hair fluttering in the wake of his movement.

  Davecat comes back with a CD in his hand. ‘He recorded two albums,’ he says. ‘This one is from 2006. It’s pretty good stuff, actually.’ He holds the CD up to his camera. The album is called Hollow. There’s a photo of Matt posing between two bandmates, in full grunge pixie mode. Superimposed over it, in huge letters, is the name NICK BLACK.

  ‘That was his pseudonym, Nick Black. That’s him in the centre.’

  I can’t believe it.

  ‘Like the Nick doll!’ I say.

  ‘Yes! That is his face. I guess at some point he realized he was doing a lot better as a doll maker than as a musician,’ Davecat continues. ‘At some point he saw iDollators such as myself having dolls as partners rather than just sex toys, and he realized if he could make dolls that have an artificial intelligence, he could make something huge. There’s a bit of a renaissance thing going on with Matt. I think at this stage, he is content to improve the human condition through artificial beings.’

  When I log off Skype, I get lost down a Google hole searching for Nick Black. I find a rarely updated Facebook page with 3,000 fans. One of the most recent posts is over a year old and says, ‘Anyone who needs a copy of Hollow or Awake email me! I have a few boxes left!’

  I find the Nick Black YouTube channel, which hasn’t been updated much in ten years. There’s a video for a power-chord-heavy song called ‘Sorry’, where Matt bounces and sings like Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington and bites a model’s neck with vampire teeth. Then there’s an eleven-year-old seven-minute behind-the-scenes rockumentary that begins with Matt on a rooftop after dark. He looks out into the distance and says, ‘Nick Black isn’t just who I am, it isn’t just the name of my band, it’s an attitude. It’s a way of becoming something more than you were.’

  That didn’t turn out to be true, of course: it is actually Harmony, rather than Nick, that has the real potential to make Matt something more than he ever was.

  CHAPTER THREE ‘It won’t feel a thing’

  Under humming halogen lights in downtown Las Veg
as, Roberto Cardenas is making a plaster cast of a naked woman. He smears handfuls of gloopy pink casting gel all over her breasts and thighs, while his brother looks on and takes pictures. Softly spoken and awkward, with a nervous laugh and stiff, gelled hair, Roberto has the air of a mad professor, but he’s as detached and clinical as a doctor taking a cast of a broken leg.

  Matt told me he has no competitors: there might be a few Chinese companies trying to produce something made of cheaper materials that can move a little, he said, but those dolls are years behind the artificially intelligent girlfriends being made at Abyss. Yet the truth is there are entrepreneurs and engineers across Asia, Europe and the US who are racing him to put the first sex robot on the market. Just over the state border in Nevada, Roberto has spent four years working on Android Love Dolls, Eden Robotics’ flagship creation, which he calls ‘the first fully functional sex robot dolls ever made’. While Matt sculpts his idealized proxy females by hand, Roberto casts them from life, in a drive to make a humanoid so realistic it can’t be distinguished from a real woman.

  I’d found Roberto canvassing opinions from robot enthusiasts on dollforum.com. ‘Hello. I am building an Android Sex Robot Doll and want to share my project with the community,’ he wrote. He said his robot could ‘perform +20 sexual acts’, could ‘stay upright by herself, sit down, crawl’, could ‘moan in pleasure during intercourse’ and had ‘speech AI for communication’.

  ‘I am interested in knowing what features would the community like to see in a sex robot doll,’ he said. ‘Thanks, and welcome to a new era in human–robot interaction.’

  There were some links to his website, which showed a rather blank-faced humanoid in a suit jacket with sharp shoulder pads, and an unsettling video of a metallic robot skeleton writhing in the missionary position, which made me think of the final scene of the first Terminator film, after the cyborg’s skin has been burnt away.

  The replies came quickly.

  ‘Eye contact would be nice,’ came the first.

  ‘Voice recognition,’ came the second.

  ‘Breathing is more important than the complexity of walking,’ said another.

  ‘Make sure your gynoid has full body heat from head to toe,’ said a fourth.

  The forum members were both sceptical and cautiously excited about Roberto’s claims. ‘There are many people on this forum that absolutely will buy one if you create a product we can accept,’ wrote one. ‘We want you (or someone) to succeed.’

  The men here didn’t sound much like the disabled, lonely or socially excluded customers that Matt or Douglas like to talk about. Several mentioned their wives and girlfriends, and compared them unfavourably to their silicone doll mistresses.

  One included a photo of his sex doll for Roberto to use as an aesthetic guide when planning his robot’s proportions. She was in leopard print underwear, propped up in front of a wall adorned with daggers, mounted hunting knives and a bladed knuckleduster. ‘If my RealDoll could cook, clean, and screw whenever I wanted, I’d never date again,’ he wrote. ‘That’s what I really want, but that is just wishful thinking.’

  * * *

  I’d arranged to meet Roberto at ten a.m. at the artists’ studio above a tattoo parlour where he works so we can have a chat before his model arrives. Las Vegas is a strange place at ten a.m. The tattoo parlour is padlocked and I can’t find any other entrance to the building. I call Roberto and he tells me to go around to the back door, which is in an alley filled with discarded furniture and shopping trolleys. We have spoken on the phone and exchanged a few emails; he has sent me photos and videos of his robot that make it look like he’s been working on something substantial. But I become very aware that I have absolutely no idea what I am walking into.

  Roberto has thick glasses and a thick Cuban accent, and none of Matt’s swagger; in every sense, he is at the other end of the scale to Matt. Eden Robotics is a part-time project for him; he makes his living as a pharmacy technician, measuring out pills behind a counter and never interacting with customers. Conversation doesn’t come easily to him, but he’s smiling broadly when we shake hands, pleased to have a journalist take an interest in the project he believes is going to make his name.

  The studio is painted gloss black from floor to ceiling. Apart from a folding table, a white sink and a few boxes, it’s completely empty – a dark, glossy void. Noel Aguila, Roberto’s half-brother, is waiting for us, his arms folded across his Hawaiian shirt, in blue loafers and navy jeans. He’s twenty-three, seven years younger than Roberto, and he left Cuba for the US six years before Roberto did, so he has a more American accent, and a more American kind of confidence.

  ‘It’s a new field in business, so we’re learning as we go along,’ Noel tells me as Roberto begins opening some of the cardboard boxes. ‘I’ve been trying to help him with marketing and logo design, the website and exposure, trying to see the best way to sell it. Because the people who are involved with this are kind of… strange –’ he grins – ‘we’ve had some strange requests we’ve had to turn down. It’s definitely different.’ Noel, too, has a day job: he works at the box office of the Colosseum, taking tickets for Celine Dion and Elton John. He is used to facing customers, albeit those with more mainstream tastes.

  Farrah, today’s model, isn’t here yet, but Roberto is busying himself while we wait for her, measuring out the casting gel, a pink powder called alginate, and mixing it with water in a white plastic tub. She will be the fourth or fifth woman Roberto has cast for Android Love Dolls, he says. This will be the first of many castings needed to make a complete mould of her entire body.

  ‘What were you looking for when you found Farrah?’ I ask.

  ‘She’s curvy,’ Roberto says, only looking up briefly from his alchemy. He’s had an order from someone who wants a fuller figure than the women he has already cast, so he is making one to the customer’s specifications, but his market research has shown it would make commercial sense to have a larger model on general sale, he says. ‘In the doll community, they are really interested in curvy girls with big butts.’

  Farrah breezes through the door, a breath of fresh air. She wears a long-sleeved ash-grey ribbed dress that’s skin tight and polo-necked and too warm for Vegas, hair pulled up in a messy bun, towering stripper heels. Her smile is dazzling and magnetic, and I’m grateful she’s here; all of a sudden Roberto’s awkwardness doesn’t seem so contagious.

  ‘Nice to meet you!’ she beams. ‘Who was I texting?’ She looks at me. ‘Was I texting you?’

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ I say.

  ‘Nice to meet you!’

  Roberto steps forward to shake her hand.

  ‘So what exactly do you do the sculptures for?’ Farrah asks.

  ‘It’s for an android robot,’ he says. ‘They’re like dolls. They go into positions and—’

  ‘So they are like sex dolls?’

  ‘The first ones will be like that. Then later they’ll be able to help you in the house. Like a housekeeper.’

  ‘Interesting!’

  Farrah found the job on Craigslist: $200 for two hours of being cast in plaster, and a $500 commission on every product sold with her body. ‘I thought it sounded like a great job,’ she declares. ‘There’s nothing else to do in the daytime in Vegas, except gamble. I hope mine sells.’ She shoots Roberto a dazzling smile. ‘She better be hot, or I’ll be pissed off!’

  We perch on the table while Roberto protects the floor by taping sheets of plastic across it. Farrah tells me she’s been dancing and webcamming for eight years, and works nights at Spearmint Rhino to put herself through real estate school and support her seven-year-old son. Her parents are Iraqi and they don’t know what she does for a living. I’m surprised to hear she’s twenty-seven. She has the kind of voluptuousness that only very young women have: soft and curvaceous, without a single roll of fat.

  ‘I was kind of sceptical when I first saw the job advertised,’ she tells me quietly, while Roberto busies himself on t
he other side of the room.

  ‘It sounded too good to be true?’

  ‘Yeah, like I’m not going to get paid. Craigslist is kind of scary.’

  Roberto shows Farrah how to stand – legs apart, arms away from her sides, palms facing forward, splayed just like those headless RealDoll bodies – and she peels down her dress to reveal nothing but a few tattoos: no underwear, no body hair. I tell her she should take her six-inch platforms off – she’s going to be standing there for a long time and they make me wince just to look at them. Roberto begins to apply the alginate, starting with her shoulders. She smiles, uncomfortably. ‘It feels like very cold toothpaste,’ she says.

  ‘Do you know what’s going to happen to the cast of your body?’ I ask.

  ‘They had something similar at this year’s AVN. They said that this is a new phenomenon, and it’s going to be big – a robot who can interact with you and talk with you. I think it’s fascinating that people can actually do this, that people will spend money on these things. Anything I can do to help. It’s cool. Why not? Why not be part of the future?’

  ‘But have you thought about the guys who will buy your body and what they’ll do with it?’ I ask, as Roberto applies generous swirls of gloop around her nipples.

  ‘It doesn’t bother me,’ she replies, breezily. ‘I think it’s better than what I do when I dance, because those guys actually have me. When these guys have a bot, I won’t be there.’

  ‘You are literally being turned into a sex object here,’ I say.

  ‘Now that you put it that way, I’m sure that it’s going to cross my mind, but it doesn’t bother me. If anything, I’m helping someone with their intimacy. I think men have needs. Whatever they do, as long as I’m not there, I’m fine with it. Hopefully she’s a big seller. That would be awesome.’