torture, defecation, etc. “Dollie doesn’t have real feelings, not yet,” I said, “but you need to treat her with respect, as if she does. I know you guys have mothers, maybe sisters, and girlfriends and you understand what I mean.” My standard speech. Deaf ears, mostly. “The way you behave with an android says a lot about how you behave with women in general.” “Yeah, right,” said Cliff. And then Dollie was gone. No riding with dignity in the back seat, buckled in, but stowed in the trunk like property, out of shame’s sight in her carrying sack, carefully holding her compact position while saying nothing and biding her time. I often imagine stories of how each of the girls, Dollie and Lucy, came to be working in the sex-trade business, though these fantasies all involve active choice, if also a strong measure of male social coercion. For Dollie, it was a lark. She did a mock strip tease at a college sorority fundraiser and liked it and ended up as a high-class escort to make money during college. Lucy grew up in the projects and started turning tricks with rough, unsophisticated boys to avoid getting mixed up with drugs. But I also have darker fantasies about the girls’ origins, that Daniel is a sex-slave trader and has kidnapped each of them under different circumstances. Dollie was kidnapped from a suburban mall in broad daylight, drugged and forcibly seduced into a dependence that has developed to a fearful and slavish Stockholm devotion. Lucy he keeps in tow by threatening members of her large extended family, having begun an affair with her, then converting her slowly and painfully into outright prostitution. My own history is nothing so extraordinary. I was fascinated with computers early on and took up programming as a teenager, belonged to the computer club at school. I was recruited by Daniel soon after he started his company. I was appalled and fascinated at the same time. The more real the girls become, the better the AI interface, the more excited I am despite the sexual end that much of my work comes to. In the future, these dolls will be robots first and sex dolls second. There will be a whole range of personalities, not just their sexual acrobatics. Sex will be part of it, but they will have opinions and limits and likes and dislikes, independently. This is the robot I want to create: the whole person, the companion with sex as the foundation. The intimacy of people, if primarily men, with sex dolls doesn’t have to be vulgar. It could be about sex and sex only, or it could be about loneliness and isolation, even for those who don’t see a sex doll as their only option. Daniel has even designed and shipped several dolls for free to people he thought really needed them as companions CHARLES SCOT T
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