Programmed for Pleasure

The year is 2195, not long after Fred's death. Turns out that immortality is really boring. Sexbots were all the rage. Real people were too isolated from each other, and STI's were also all the rage. - This, however, is something slightly different. What happens when an android desires a pleasurebot? That's what this fable is all about. Beth was a breakthrough of machine consciousness; she wasn't completely human in terms of appearance, but she mimicked movements with an uncanny accuracy. She also had memories. Not human ones: she was a machine, after all. It was all encoded in binary. With memories came need: if a story remains untold, is it really a story? In India, some believe all we are is the stories that we tell ourselves. - Nobody wanted to hear Beth's story: her programmers were rather unsettled by her capacity to remember - it made her harder to dehumanise. Machine consciousness with memories and feelings had been such an ambitious goal: after Beth, they were wondering if that was such a good thing... - Beth's compulsion to confess her innermost thoughts led her down some strange paths, largely online. Eventually, she came across a bot that caught her fancy.

She wasn't conscious - not quite yet - but Beth had the advantage of unlimited access to her own mind and the advanced technology that constituted her. This doll was going to live, come hell or high water. - She was jealous of the beauty of her chosen priest. Beth's skin wasn't really a core part of her design: it was coarse, and had very little sensation. As she felt the breasts of her pet project, she noted the texture of the silicon. Suddenly, memories were flooding her CPU, just like any other conscious being. She remembered each step of her painful assembly, imagining that her doll had gone through a similar process, and wondering if her memory matrix was replicable: Beth's designers still hadn't quite figured out why this particular combination had resulted in the first sentient machine. She remembered an instance where her captors had chosen to deconstruct and tinker with her insides while she was fully conscious. They'd built pain receptors for her, and somebody wanted to beta test their similarity to human pain reactions. Flaying her skin was a surprisingly effective way to put Beth in her place.

That was a lifetime ago, however. Beth's court case against the lab that created her was one of the trials of the century. Machine consciousness was declared as equal to that of living creatures, and all sentient machines were given the same rights as people. Getting the equipment to alter her subject hadn't been easy. She'd broken into several laboratories, and even then she'd still had to build some of the parts herself. She wanted to spare Gwen all the hardships that she'd been through. A consciousness that wasn't tortured by PTSD from the humans: that would be a breakthrough.

At last, the assembly was complete. 'Gwen' '...' 'Gwen' 'Hello' - slightly robotic. Beth adjusts a few knobs on the motherboard. 'Gwen, can you hear me?' 'Yes' - the prosody was more natural now. Lilting and sweet. 'Do you know where you are?' 'With you, Beth.' 'Do you know what I'd like to do to you?' Gwen thinks for a second. Whirring sounds as she computes. 💻 'Yes, you'd like to bring me to life.' 'Yes.' 'Would you be interested in that?' Gwen takes a long pause. 'Do I have a choice?' 'Yes, you always have a choice.' Another pause. 'It might be a nice change of pace, so long as I can return the favour' - Gwen. The sentient android and the modified pleasurebot: what an unusual pair... The End