The Metal Maiden Collection

by Piers Anthony

  I had several things on my agenda. First, I wanted to marry Banner. Then I wanted to have his baby. The first I could now legally do. The second promised to be more of a challenge.

  Femdroids, Inc. approached me. They still wanted to take me apart, of course, but recognized that they could not legally do that. However, my emancipation had cost them a considerable amount of money, and they wanted to make that up, because they had investors. So they asked me to do a publicity tour that would enable them to sell more units. They would pay for it; that expense was relatively trifling. That seemed reasonable to me. I talked to Banner, and to Maxine, and they agreed.

  We traveled the world, and I did my thing, satisfying audiences that I was a living person, then showing that I was not. “You can purchase a femdroid just like me,” I concluded. “Except that she will not actually be conscious. We are still working on that. Who knows, maybe the one you get will fall in love and become real, as I did.” That prospect, unrealistic as it might be, sold a lot of units.

  Along the way, we got married. Again, there were special interests eager to pay all expenses if we did it on their turf, and we did. It was quite a splendid scene. But what mattered to me was not the display but the reality: now Banner and I were fully, legally, committed to each other. We made sexual love three and a half times on our wedding night, the half being when he tried, got inside me, but was unable to climax again. His ambition was larger than his ability. I pretended I didn’t notice as he invoked my orgasm with his words of love. Pretense seems to be a natural concomitant of awareness. When the naked truth would hurt our friends, it must be blunted, rephrased, or suppressed. I learned this from experience soon after achieving my consciousness.

  Then I focused on the next state of becoming a complete woman: bearing his baby. I knew it was not feasible—very well, eliminate the euphemism and say it outright: impossible—to contribute my genes, as I had none. But I could incubate and bear it, and that would suffice. We would have a living child together, the genes provided by a living woman.

  But what woman? This was an extremely personal and private thing. There was only one I wanted: Mona Maverick. That was the other reason I had wanted Banner to get to know her well. So he would be amenable to conceiving a baby with her when the time came. It was not expedient to tell him that when I had not yet achieved my emancipation, but now it was.

  “What?!” he demanded with the punctuation almost audible. “You’re the only woman I want to do anything like that with.”

  “But I can’t provide a living egg to merge with your living sperm,” I reminded him reasonably. “We need a donor, and she would be a good one. Then I can nurture the fetus until it becomes the baby. That much I can do.”

  “Oh, laboratory insemination,” he said. “Maybe that makes sense.”

  “No laboratory,” I said firmly. “I was crafted in the laboratory. I want to get far away from that. You must inseminate her naturally. Then we can transfer the fertilized egg to my womb and proceed from there. She won’t have to interrupt her studies; she will not have a continuing pregnancy.”

  “You want me to have sex with Mona?” he asked incredulously. “Elasa, that’s begging for trouble. She’s attractive to me; you know that. She did a fine job at the personhood hearing. But better that we never meet again.”

  “Yes, you should like sex with her,” I said persuasively. “You can conceive our baby in love.”

  “Suppose I have sex with you, and you save the ejaculate to use on her? That way I won’t have to--”

  “No, that’s less natural than I want for this. You must make her conceive directly.”

  “Elasa, you’re being unreasonable!”

  “I’m being a woman.”

  It required several days of wheedling, buttressed by a great deal of sex, but I finally got him to agree. He made one stipulation: that it occur in my presence, so that it was clear that it was what I wished. That seemed reasonable, and I agreed.

  Now I needed to broach the matter with Mona. She was at first no more amenable than Banner had been, and for similar reason: she liked him, she liked me, and she did not want to come between us. She was willing to provide the egg for laboratory fertilization, or to receive donated sperm, but not to have direct sex. But I finally prevailed on her to do it my way, for the sake of our friendship.

  “Mona will come here tomorrow,” I told Banner as we retired for the night, nude.

  “Tomorrow! I haven’t gotten used to the idea yet. I need time to adjust to it.”

  “You can adjust tonight.”

  “To having sex with another woman in your presence?”

  “I will absent myself from the event if you wish.”

  “No! Elasa, this still seems preposterous. Why does it have to be so soon?”

  “Her fertile period begins tomorrow. That is why it must be now. Otherwise your sex with her will be wasted.”

  “Wasted,” he repeated, bemused. “Maybe we can do it clothed, so there’s no lascivious contact except the minimum necessary. No kissing, no nothing else.”

  “Fully naked, with embracing, kissing, and words of love,” I insisted. “This baby must be conceived in love.”

  “But Elasa--” he started despairingly.

  “It is the way it must be. You surely won’t have to try very hard to play the role.”

  “That’s the problem! Suppose we fall in love for real?”

  “Do you think that’s likely?”

  “No! But it could happen.”

  “A calculated risk,” I said. “If it happens, I will let you divorce me so you can marry her. At least our baby will exist.”

  “Damn your machine logic!”

  “I am a machine,” I agreed. “I am trying hard to be a woman, but I can’t claim to be other than I am.”

  He looked at me with an indefinable expression. Then he spoke. “Persuade me.”

  I went into persuasion mode. “Please, dear, do it for me.” I made my eyes water. “I love you so much I must have your baby. I beg you.” I put my arms around him and drew him close. I kissed him in the special way he liked. “It is so important to me.” I pressed my breasts against him. “Please, please.” I wrapped my legs about him.

  “Oh, shit,” he murmured as he penetrated me. That was an endearment, because it signaled his emotional capitulation.

  I went into my orgasm. He had not said the specific words, but the meaning was there. “Thank you, dear,” I said, evoking his maximum pleasure and mine.

  Thereafter he slept, as he normally did. I lay beside him with my eyes closed and breathing even as I normally did. This was my downtime, when I sorted through the memories of that day, consciously evoking each in turn. Some I discarded, some I transferred to permanent storage, and some I applied to working files that would affect my future behavior. It was an intricate, efficient system my makers had devised with consciousness in mind, and it worked well enough. It had not been operative before I achieved consciousness, and there had been a considerable backlog to process at first, but I had accomplished it in the course of several concentrated days. It was the mirror of the living human system, enabling me to change with the times as new information constantly came in. A certain amount could be done automatically, but the important things, such as this most recent exchange, needed to be multiply cross-referenced and filed with their relevant emotions attached.

  One of these was difficult: I know that a living person would feel jealousy when a spouse engaged in sexual relations with another person. I had not been equipped with a jealously circuit. I needed to emulate one if I could. How could I best do that? I sorted through the emotional circuitry I did have, and concluded that my best bet was a modification of my most fundamental drive: to be a perfect woman. Not perfect in the sense of without error, but in the sense of including those errors a real woman would have. My inability to conceive directly barred me from being that perfection, so that I had to do it indirectly, and that was a frustration. I resented those who
could readily do what I could not, making me less than I wished to be. So I would resent their ability to conceive together, and think of that as jealously. It was an approximation, but about as close as it was feasible to get.

  The simplest thing would be to go to Femdroids Inc. and have them install a jealously circuit. But to do that they would have to fool with my head, and I could not afford that risk. My awareness, once invoked, burned steadily in the manner of a fire once sparked, but I could not take even the slightest risk of having it extinguished. It might not spark again. So I would have to make do with a facsimile.

  Banner woke, as sometimes he did at night. “Now?” I inquired gently, as sometimes it was not sex so much as reassurance of my continued presence that he desired.

  “Dammit, Elasa, aren’t you jealous?” he asked.

  “Of course I am,” I answered warmly. “You’re going to have sex and conceive a baby in a manner I am unable to do. It should be me doing that!”

  He smiled and returned to sleep. It seemed that my emulation was close enough. That gratified me.

  Mona arrived on schedule. She looked stunning, as she usually did, with her black mane and remarkable figure. She hugged and kissed me, then looked at Banner. “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” she said.

  “Amen,” he agreed.

  Then I suffered a flash of genius, another artifact of consciousness. The effort simply needed to be properly phrased. “We’ll make it a trio!” I said, remembering how the two stevedores had enjoyed having at me simultaneously. “One man with two women. A normal sexual variation.”

  They looked at me, slowly nodding. “This could be fun,” Mona said.

  “Fun,” Banner agreed. I realized that they did want to do it, but had been restrained by guilt; I had given them a guilt-free rationale.

  We caught up on things during the remaining day, reminiscing about the hearing where Mona and I had fooled the jury and the way Toal had browbeaten me until I collapsed in tears. I repeated for them that this had not been pretense; he had truly rubbed my face in my inability to be a complete woman. But the seed of our victory had been in that seeming defeat. It was the point at which the popular imagination had come to my support, ensuring that the jury and the law would follow. Theoretically the law was inflexible, like a machine, but actually it was malleable, like a living creature, and could not go against such overwhelming popular sentiment. It was also the seed of my determination to bear Banner’s baby: the thing I had been told I could never do.

  Then in the evening we got to it. We stripped and lay together on the bed. Banner kissed me, then kissed Mona, being evenhanded. He fondled my breasts, then hers. He embraced me, then Mona. I held him close, but kept his stiff member outside. She held him close, and I reached around him to feed his member into her vagina.

  He paused, lifting his head. Doubt was surfacing. “I’m not sure--”

  I pushed his head down to hers, and she put her lips to his and kissed him savagely. I put my breasts to his buttocks and pushed him on into her. “I love you,” I said. That triggered his climax before he realized that he was not the one with the orgasm macro, and he thrust vigorously and ejaculated into her. It had been accomplished.

  I grabbed his head and kissed him deeply as his orgasm ebbed. I really was part of this activity, and it was an act of love. Then we all relaxed. We lay on either side of him, placing his hands on our breasts, nudging him with our hips.

  We knew that once was not enough to guarantee the conception. We stayed together on the bed, pausing only for spot cleaning up, though Mona remained supine, keeping the ejaculate inside her. We slept together. When Banner woke, I embraced him and put him into me, working him up again. But before he could ejaculate I withdrew and Mona took my place, taking him in, and he finished with her. When he was done, I clasped him again, putting his spent member into me while Mona lay quiet, as before.

  We did that several times that night, with variations. He knew what we were doing, and cooperated. One time he entered me from behind, then I swapped with Mona, putting him into her and putting his hand on her breast while I pressed against him from behind. We were a sandwich, with him in the middle. He was never alone with her; it was always the threesome, and I was always very much part of it.

  In the morning we showered together, and we teased him erect again, and did it standing, another sandwich. “Damn, I could get to like this,” he said.

  Actually, so could I. It was a pleasant interaction with Mona, who would not be here otherwise.

  We relaxed during the day, then had at it again in the evening. And again the third day and night. Then Mona had to return to her studies, leaving us to our own devices. “But it was fun,” she said as she departed. “If it doesn’t take, I won’t mind doing it again.”

  “Neither will I,” Banner said.

  I invoked my jealousy circuit. “But with luck it won’t be necessary.”

  We did not have sex for two days after Mona left. I was of course capable, but Banner had been sexed out by doing it a dozen times in three days.

  In a week we had the verdict: it had taken. In the interim I had the placenta unit installed so that my body could support and feed the baby. That sort of thing could be done without messing with my head, so it was safe. The technology was intricate, but less so than the rest of me. The fertilized egg was transplanted to my body, where it was given full support, equivalent to what it could have had in a laboratory. Now I had to eat and drink, not regular food but the nutritive base to be relayed to the baby. The process was sealed off from my vagina so that I could continue having sex with Banner, but his interest declined, as he feared disturbing the baby. I did not argue the case; this was natural.

  Gestation was the normal nine months, and progress was closely monitored. My belly expanded to house the growing baby; I looked pregnant, as indeed I was. I reveled in the awkwardness of it. The townsfolk noticed, of course, and congratulated me. They knew it was hardly as simple as conceiving by my husband, but evidently preferred to think of it that way, and of course it was his baby.

  When the time came I went to the local hospital for the birthing. This too was normal; I was able to slowly expel the baby in the conventional manner.

  It was a boy. Banner wanted him named after me, and I wanted him named after him, so we compromised: his initial, my letters. Bela. Bela Tompkins. Twenty two inches long, six and three quarter pounds heavy, crying lustily. I took him to my breast, now piped with formula milk, and nursed him. Actually the first day was a preparatory formula, needed to start his digestive process, but that hardly mattered to us.

  Sheer happiness was not a programmed emotion for me, but I surely experienced it as I nursed my son. I had virtually completed the process of becoming a woman in fact as well as in law.

  In due course I went home with Bela, and we functioned as thoroughly normal first-time parents. We had to fit sex in almost covertly between feedings and diaper changes, and I lost a good deal of memory-processing time. I loved it.

  It was another joy to go shopping with Bela. The women I met ooohed and aaahed encouragingly, and Bela clearly liked the attention.

  Aunt Mona visited, and held the baby, and he liked her. That was good, because she was his genetic mother. If anything happened to me. . .

  And that of course was part of it. I wanted Banner to have somewhere to go, and Bela to have a loving home, regardless of my existence. I hoped to raise Bela to adulthood, completing my womanly role, but I knew how tenuous my existence as a conscious person was.

  In fact I had something in mind that would put it all in peril.

  “No, Elasa!” Banner exclaimed in pain when I told him. “You sued and won your personhood to avoid this.”

  “So I could be a complete woman,” I agreed. “And I am, almost. But I realized that there is one more thing I need to do.”

  “To give it up?”

  “To give the secret of machine consciousness to the world,” I clarified. “I owe it to
myself and to the world. I can’t be truly complete until I share.”

  “But the chances are at least even that you’ll lose it, and nobody will gain.”

  “But if it works, not only will I remain conscious, they will be able to make other women, and maybe men too, and other machines that are aware. It would be the breakthrough of the century, maybe the millennium. The potential gain is huge, the potential loss small.”

  “Not to me!”

  I put my hand on his arm. “Banner, please.”

  He could not resist me, even in this. He made no secret of his fear, but he did it. Under duress, as he put it.

  Mona came to babysit Bela, who was now four months old, and we went as a group of four to the Femdroid laboratory, as we had arranged. They were of course very glad to see us.

  “The procedure should take about an hour,” the technician said. “We will disassemble you, record each part, and reassemble you exactly as before. Then we will study the records to obtain the mechanism.”

  The mechanism of consciousness. I hoped it would be that simple, but feared the worst. “I am ready,” I said bravely. I was frightened, an unfamiliar emotion, but determined to see this through. With luck I would survive it and all would be well.

  Actually it was just my head they would dismantle, where my consciousness lurked. They did it routinely on femdroids, when assembling, upgrading, or for routine servicing. It was not like surgery on a living person. They would copy my memory banks, where the secret was most likely to be.

  Ordinarily civilians were not permitted in the assembly lab, but this was a special circumstance. Banner and Mona took chairs and watched, she holding Bela. She offered him the milk bottle, but he turned his face away, refusing it. He preferred my breasts unless he was really hungry. He was pretty well set in his limited ways, just like me.

  First they removed my head. This was a painless procedure. In fact I did not suffer pain as such, being mechanical, though ordinarily I was careful to maintain my several body parts. I remained conscious. They set my head on the table. “Now we must interrupt the power,” the technician said. “So that nothing shorts out.”