A Robot Walks Into A Bar
“Are you telling me,” I said, “that you are a sex machine?”
Short fiction originally published in the New Scientist project Arc 1.4: Forever Alone Drone. Winner of the 2012 Intel “Future Pleasures” prize. Reprinted with permission of the author.
When I met David, I was working as a bouncer at a trance club downtown — a high-end place where before the muscle manhandles them to the curb, big spenders get a polite request from a smiling girl who wonders if they’d rather move to a private room. Unlike the bar staff, I don’t get tips, and like the rest of the bouncers, I spend most of the evening scanning the crowd for trouble. I just do it in a slinky dress while holding a shirley temple. It’s not a great job, but it lets me double dip — at the same time I watch for assholes, I keep a lookout for new trends, which I report to another boss. Remember the headbands that were popular last year, the ones with shapes cut out of them? I’m one of the people who spotted that back when a few college kids were hand-making theirs.
Meanwhile, I’m doing a third job as a shill making small talk about the product of the week, whether it’s berry-flavored vodka or an “underground” new single. On a good day, I feel like a double agent, like the membrane through which cool percolates. Other times, I think it’s pretty sick. But by stacking jobs, I only have to work fifteen hours a week, which leaves me time for my music. Not that I use my free time to work on my music. I mostly watch movies. And spend most of my paycheck on drinks and clothes. Keeps the bosses happy.
The first thing I noticed about David was his hands, the way he handled objects. It’s obvious, really — hands, sex — it’s like saying he had beautiful eyes (which he did, though I didn’t look at them until later). Most people, when they approach the bar, do one of two things. Either they push to the front, catcall the bartender, and wave a lot of cash around, or they hesitate, meek and uncomfortable, talk too softy for their order to be made out, and wait until the last minute to fumble through a stack of credit cards. David, in contrast, was still, but still in a way that had weight behind it. He waited like a man who was completely aware of the crowds and flashing lights, but completely separate from them. When he pulled out his wallet, his movements were economical. Deliberate. As though he knew precisely where every bill rested — its unique texture and particular history, its level of appropriateness to the task, and the exact amount of force required to tease it free of its brothers.
The way I describe it, it sounds fussy. It wasn’t. There is something thrilling and frightening about a man who knows exactly what he’s doing. It should make him seem safe. It does the opposite. I was seized with a strong compulsion to knit a stiff yarn dress and let him unravel it from around me — thread popping as knots pull loose line after line; a reverse dot matrix printer, a laser un-writing a green and black computer screen; a cartoon character gnawing a cob of corn. I watched him back to his table, or what became his table, in a small dark corner with a good vantage — the kind of spot appreciated by regulars, but rarely noticed by newcomers. He didn’t look like he was waiting for anyone, but who would know? Over the next half hour, he made brief small talk with a few sorority girls on the prowl, his expression indicating an interest that was polite but not eager. Between conversations, which he never instigated, he sipped his drink at a leisurely rate, posture comfortable and alert. When someone at the next table had trouble with a disposable lighter, he fixed it.
He was perfect. That’s when it clicked. I sat down across from him.
“You’re a robot, aren’t you,” I said. He smiled, with a flicker of something else behind it.
“Not exactly,” he said, soft and deprecating. “That is, I’m not just a set of preprogrammed responses and a system of adaptive logic. I am those things, but I have my own consciousness.”
“Like emotions?”
“I can’t say. They seem like emotions to me. But what I mean is that I’m aware of myself as an entity — I have a self.”
Close up, he looked great — pores (real), water in the eye membrane (fake — actually a polymerized oil), suggestions of shaved beard-hair follicles (fake), eyebrows imperfect enough to seem un-groomed. I’d wanted to see him with his clothes off before, but now I had new reasons.
“Are you famous?” I asked.
“Nah — just a vanity project for the university. I don’t really prove anything new, or have any marketable function. I talk to alumni with money and impress them with how lifelike I am. Sometimes I go to trade shows or technology contests, if that counts as famous, but there are better versions out there. Princeton has a model named Clio. She can do gymnastic routines and improvise recipes — I don’t taste things, and don’t have the flexibility for handsprings. I do better on Turing tests, though.”
“So you don’t know what’s in that,” I observed as he sipped his drink. He laughed, and it didn’t seem forced but probably, and likely definitively, was. (Whether his expressions of emotion are expressions or emotion is something I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out and have mostly given up on.)
“I misspoke,” he said. “I have a sense of smell much more accurate than a non-mechanical man’s. I can give you a complete ingredient list if you like. I can also tell you with confidence that no one has brought explosives into this club. What I don’t have are opinions about what tastes good and bad — just educated guesses. So what do you do in your spare time?”
I blinked. “Um… I write songs. I’m not very good. Some people like them.”
He laid his hand across mine. “I apologize,” he said, “for bringing up a delicate topic. It was meant as a simple expression of interest.” He withdrew his hand. I realized I was blushing, which made me angry, which made me blush more.
“Listen,” he said, “you’re obviously working,” (which pissed me off — I’m supposed to be subtle) “but I’d like to talk to you more — to find out how you spotted me and to make a proposal. I’d like to meet you outside after your shift. In the meantime, I’d like to buy whatever you’re supposed to be selling me.”
“Beef-infused tequila. It’s awful, but you have no taste. I get off at 2.”
At that point, I hadn’t decided whether I was going to stand him up. He was attractive enough, but I couldn’t see things going anywhere, given the circumstances, and the last thing I want after a night of fake flirtation is to go on a date. When I watched him pull out his wallet again, it hit me — no university would bankroll an incognito android’s night of drinking. He was making his own choices with his own money. Where did he get it?
When I came out the door at 2:30, he was waiting, seemingly
unperturbed by the extra half hour. His posture was perfect — which doesn’t count for much since he has a harder time slouching, but it seemed refreshing at the time. He stood under a light, but his pupils were no more or less dilated than they had been inside the bar.
“Where do you want to go?” I said.
“Anywhere in range of wifi. Otherwise, I get pretty stupid.”
“That makes sense.” We walked toward the diner on the corner. “For the record, there was no particular thing that gave you away, although I’m accumulating them now. I just spend a lot of time around people. You were doing a fine job. It probably helps that no one’s looking for you. I mean, I mostly follow social news, so maybe I’m not the best informed, but I didn’t think any of you guys had been released into the wild, so to speak.” He shrugged, and opened the door with a cocky half smile.
“Don’t worry — I have a tracking device and a kill switch and I clock in at the university daily. It would have been a big deal a few years ago, but robot stories are currently out of fashion.”
David didn’t eat. He explained that he could seem to eat, for politeness’ sake, but would have to regurgitate it later. We agreed that seemed wasteful. He watched me through half of a pancake before he said:
“So, how do you feel about having sex for money?”
“In the abstract?” I said.
“In context.”
I thought about it for a minute. David waited without expression or tension, and I couldn’t help thinking of a pulsing cursor.
“Are you telling me,” I said, “that you are a sex machine?”
“In a manner of speaking. More like a really expensive camera. With consent, of course. Please stop me if I am offending you. I’m working from a hypothesis that you’ll be more curious than offended, because you work at a bar where you are paid to look pretty, where you sell opinions that aren’t yours, and where you nevertheless are willing to talk freely about personal subjects. In addition, your initial approach gave me reason to suspect you are attracted to me.”
“So basically, you are asking me to sleep with you because you think I will say yes.”
“Yes. I think it would be easy to work with you. I also think the ratios of your face and body will appeal to a broad segment of the population. You are very beautiful.”
I should have been insulted. I was insulted. But David was right — you don’t last long in any of my lines of work if you can’t look past that kind of objectification to find the angle. So far, this seemed like a bad deal to me. I was doing fine for money, and I couldn’t cross promote without emphasizing my identity. Dangerous?
At the same time, I did, in fact, find the idea of being filmed by him somehow deeply sexy.
“Your university has a very progressive ethics board,” I said.
“Some years back, during a fracas over bathroom use by
transgendered students, the university made an official declaration guaranteeing free expression of sexual preference to all staff and students. That ruling was later successfully employed by a student to remove all prohibitions on pornography, whether viewed or created, from the code of conduct. Technically, I am neither staff nor student — more university property — but for all practical reasons, I’m considered staff. Public relations is of course not happy, but they can hardly deny my ability to give informed consent without opening themselves to other accusations.”
“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.”
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 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 think 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 hole. 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.”
“Maybe someday,” I said. We sat together on the couch for a while, and it was awkward, so we went and laid in the bed. Finally, David said:
“Will you talk about me?”
“When?” I said. “To whom?”
“Now. To me.” I looked over at him, and he didn’t seem to be wearing a particular expression. So I just described how he looked, and what his voice sounded like.
It’s become a regular thing, now. Maybe once a week, we lie down together, and I talk about the way his hands move when he performs a particular task, or the way the skin around his eyes stretches or folds when he looks around. It seems to give him a kind of peace, like he’s reassured to know I’m looking back at him as hard as he’s looking at me. I think maybe that’s the reason he first took a shine to me, back at the club. It’s weird to think of him as having insecurities, but I can only respond to the reality that presents itself — at least if I want to maintain this thing.
We’re thinking about getting a dog, or maybe a large rabbit. The man of no scent preference has valiantly agreed to clean any litter boxes, so long as I buy the food.
David has a thousand parts that could wear out, and for some of them, he’s the first real test. The fact is, one day I’ll have to get used to someone who breathes, and sweats, and pees. Maybe that’s a good thing. Until then, I’ll spend my days awake and my nights asleep, and in between, I’ll dream I can upload.
Romie Stott is poetry co-editor of Strange Horizons magazine and author of “A Futurist Vision of Retirement Planning.” If you enjoyed this story, you may like her short film “The Sleeping People” (part of Jonathan Lethem’s Promiscuous Materials Project) and nanofiction collection Postorbital.
