Man or Machine: 2 (Body Electric) (2 page)

“I wasn’t expecting you to be so…autonomous.”

“I’m an automaton.”

“Yes, but I thought I would have to tell you what to do.”

“I have been researching. Am I performing correctly?”

“Yes! You’re very good at it.”

“I’m glad you like it, baby. You’ve created me well. May I ask, what are our objectives for this session?”

“I…er, wanted to see if you and I would be compatible at having sex.”

“And our numerical objectives?”

“Numerical?”

“You built me for your pleasure, baby. I’m here to give it to you. How many more times do you want to come?”

Ilsa blinked. “I hadn’t really thought about it that way. I was just going to see what happened.”

But it made sense. Deciding how many times you wanted to come before having sex would remove any uncertainty. You would know one hundred percent before starting that you were going to be satisfied exactly in the right way.

It was exactly the kind of messiness she was trying to circumvent by creating a robot lover for herself.

“Um…three?”

“Twice more, then. It’ll be my pleasure. What would you like me to do?”

Ilsa gazed at him lying beside her. He was physically perfect—muscular in stature, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. The robots her father had created, Red, Green and Blue, didn’t have nipples or a navel but Ilsa had fitted her creation with both. They weren’t anatomically necessary but she liked them. She touched his body, running her hands over his skin, feeling the contours of his chest and belly. When she touched his nipple, it hardened slightly, like that on a real man.

“Do you like what you see?” the robot asked her. His eyes gleamed orange. He had the face of an angel.

“Yes. You’re beautiful.” She’d touched him before, of course—she’d touched every centimeter of him, inside and out, and assembled him with her own hands. But she’d not touched him as a being, as a sexual partner. The experience was entirely different. The mere shift of perspective from creator to lover was a transformation greater than anything she could have achieved with a computer or tools.

His skin was soft and firm, supple and warm. Unlike with a human lover, she couldn’t hear his breath or feel his heart beating beneath her palm, because he didn’t need to breathe at the moment and he didn’t have a heart. She could feel a low thrum in his chest, a vibration undetectable to the human ear caused by the electricity running through his body. Depending on the functions required of him, he would have to recharge himself once every seven-to-eight days using the Morgensterns’ self-sufficient solar-panel grid, which powered everything in the mansion. If he went outside he could recharge himself continuously through his own solar collectors.

He had a permanent Wi-Fi connection to the internet and the mansion’s own network, although she had set up firewalls so the other house robots couldn’t perceive him yet. He was carbon neutral and fully recyclable and, even if she did say it herself, a phenomenon of engineering.

“Absolutely beautiful,” she said, thinking about the grace of electronics, the astonishing complexity of mathematics.

She stroked down to his penis. With the rest of the robot’s body, she’d been essentially following and improving the blueprints her father, inventor Victor Morgenstern, had left behind. But making sexual organs had been something else altogether. Her father hadn’t ever thought his inventions would be used for that purpose, though Ilsa tried not to think about that too much.

A penis, in particular, had to have exactly the right dimensions and texture, responsiveness and range of movement. It had to contain hydraulics to control its erectness because a robot couldn’t walk around with a hard-on all the time, and a system for distributing the necessary (yet discreet) lubrication.

And more than that, it had to seem authentic and attractive. It should feel masculine and substantial. You should definitely know when you were holding it and be impressed—you should be thinking,
Boy, this penis is a nice heavy one
.
And then when you were through with it, it should tuck neatly into clothing so it didn’t become too obtrusive in daily life.

Ilsa curled her hand around it. It was nice and heavy, hot and thick. It had a lovely curve to it, a realistic ridge running down its underside, and hairless, tight balls at its base. She gave it an experimental squeeze.

“Can you feel that?” she asked him.

“You know I can, baby. You designed me to.”

“Does it feel good?”

“It feels great.”

She’d tried her best to allow her robot to experience physical sensations beyond the necessary protective ones of perceiving heat and cold, sharp and dull. She’d run into some problems making those sensations correspond to positive pleasure. It was an ongoing development and would probably need quite a bit of tweaking.

“As long as you’re enjoying yourself,” she said.

“You know I love it, baby. I’m fulfilling my prime directive.”

And there was the rub. Was it ethical for Ilsa to create a being whose only purpose was to pleasure her?

He seemed to read her mind, as he slipped his hand between her legs. His long finger slid inside her and she couldn’t help but moan.

“You’re wet and ready for me,” he said. “Do you want me to fuck you?”

Forget ethics.

It had been a very, very long time.

“God, yes.”

First he took her bra off. He didn’t even have to check, just flicked his left hand behind her back and it was unfastened. He pushed it off as if he’d been removing bras from females for years and years.

Then, his finger still inside her, he caressed her breasts with his left hand and bent his head to kiss them. Ilsa’s breasts were small and he kissed them thoroughly, from the top slope to the curved undersides, kissing the tips of her nipples before drawing each of them into his mouth, which was hot and wet and incredibly dexterous. She’d done a good job designing him, so good that she braced her hands on his shoulders and arched up toward his mouth.

Then he rolled himself between her legs and, unerringly, thrust himself inside her.

Ilsa cried out. She was indeed wet and ready for him but he was big and even though she’d been working toward this moment for a long time, he was a surprise too. Because he felt…

Familiar.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “That’s great. I’m going to fuck you ’til you scream.”

The robot began to thrust into her, slowly at first, his body gloriously heavy against hers. The last thing Ilsa could do was analyze it; she felt too wonderful with his long, thick cock deep inside her, sliding in and out so slowly. She was turned-on enough so that her clit rubbed against his body at the bottom of every thrust and she twisted her hips for the extra pleasure.

And he was amazing. Rational thought slipped away. She was pure sensation, pure body, all wonderful friction and sliding and wetness and heat. He picked up his pace and she dug her nails into his skin, barely thinking about whether the polymer could take it, and he put his hand between them to stroke her and that was it, her second orgasm exploded in her and she let out a bone-deep cry.

She had barely taken a breath when he effortlessly flipped them over so she was on top. This way she could feel him even better, sink lower onto him so he penetrated even deeper.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Ride me. Ride that sweet pussy up and down my cock.”

Ilsa rested her palms on his shoulders and rode him, rode his cock, up and down on him while he kneaded and caressed her breasts. The sweat stood out on her skin. Her entire body was on fire. He would never tire, he would never need time to recover.

“Faster. Yeah, just like that.”

Faster. And faster. She didn’t know how long it was before she jerked her hips convulsively, bit her lip and came again, this time silently, holding her breath with explosions showing red behind her eyelids.

Her strength gone, she collapsed on top of him. He held her in his flawless arms as she panted.

She was breathing hard, though he wasn’t. After a long moment she propped herself up against him. His penis was still hard inside her.

“That was amazing,” she said.

“Thank you, baby.
You
were amazing.”

There was no point asking him if he was tired. He didn’t get tired. “Are you…was it good for you?”

“The best.”

“Though to be fair, it was the first time you’d ever done this.”

“I can’t imagine it being any better. Though we can try.”

He didn’t start thrusting again though and Ilsa realized she was a little bit sore. It had been a while. Carefully, she lifted herself off him. His penis popped out and returned to its natural position, erect and protruding at a forty-five degree angle to his supine body. Slowly, it began to subside.

“Do you want to cuddle?” the robot asked.

It appeared she had, in fact, created the perfect man.

So why wasn’t she happier?

“Yeah. I guess so.” She settled down beside him and he wrapped his arm around her. He felt nice—warm and somehow dependable. Though that was silly; of course he was dependable. He’d never been out of the workroom before today and his prime directive was to please her.

“Why are you sighing, baby?” he said.

“I was sighing? Oh. I didn’t mean to.” She did her best to relax against him. She’d had endless conversations with the chatbot she’d uploaded into him that served as his character, to train it conversationally. It shouldn’t be weird at all. She’d done the same conversational training with Blue, who’d gone on to develop his own completely independent personality, so much so that he could fall in love with her sister.

But she’d never had light postcoital conversation with Blue.

“You don’t have a name yet,” she said. “It seems weird that we’ve had sex and I don’t know what to call you.”

“What would you like to call me?”

“I don’t know.” She ran her fingers over his chest. “Dad named the housies after the colors he made them. I don’t think I really like the name Maple Pecan though.”

“You created me. It’s your prerogative.”

“Names are such a responsibility though. They affect your whole character. For example, Dad named me after…”
After Mom. Because she died giving birth to me.
She swallowed. “Anyway, what do you want to be called? Something with a good scientific pedigree, like Engelberger? Or Berners-Lee? Turing?” She sat up. “How about Hal?”

“If you refer to popular culture, Hal 9000 was a computer, not a robot.”

It struck her like a slap. She put her hand to her mouth. Why’d she say that name, of all others?

“Not Hal, no, of course not. We don’t want to name you after a fictional computer, and a homicidal one at that. Actually, I think you should name yourself.” She gave him a bright smile. “What would you most like to be called?”

He looked thoughtful, though it was hard to tell exactly. His eyes were flat and glowing, not as expressive as human eyes.

“I think,” he said after a pause, “I would like something virile and strong and yet intelligent. Something challenging and interesting.”

“Like…”
Newton
, she was thinking. Einstein. Even, maybe, Morgenstern.

“Like Dallas.”

She nodded slowly. That was not what she’d been expecting. “Dallas. Right. Dallas it is. Nice to meet you, Dallas.” She held out her hand to him. He regarded it.

“What do you want me to do with that, baby?”

“Shake it. It’s what humans do when they first meet each other.”

“Ah, yes. My education has been on the more intimate aspects of human relations.” He took her hand and shook it briskly up and down.

“Speaking of which, I’ve noticed something interesting about your speech patterns lately…Dallas. You seem to be calling me ‘baby’ an awful lot.”

“You don’t like it, baby?”

“Well, you sort of sound like something out of a porn film, to be honest.”

He merely continued gazing at her with an expression of mild interest. “My research indicated that this is how humans communicate with each other while having sex.”

“You’ve been watching porn online.”

“It’s not realistic?”

“Not exactly.”

“But do you like it when I talk to you like that?”

“Well…I think it can be sexy to have someone tell you exactly what they’re doing to you. Using dirty words. But it’s…I’ve never been called ‘baby’.”

“What have you been called?”

“Geek. Weirdo. Brainiac.” She laughed self-consciously.

“Those are not endearments, are they?”

“To be fair, it wasn’t a lover who was saying those things.”

“What have your lovers called you?”

Ils.

“Oh. I don’t know. My name, probably.” Ilsa found herself blushing again. She swung her legs out of bed and picked up her shirt from the floor. “I haven’t had that many lovers, to be honest.”