“Real. Boy,” she spat. Her lips pulled back. He registered the expression, now, imagined it on the arousal/valence matrix. Scorn. “Real. Boy. Real! Boy! Real! Boy! Real boy! Real boy! Real boy! Real boy! Realboy! Realboy! Realboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyreal–”
Susie fell to the floor but the screaming continued. At first Derek thought it was her, still failsafing, but when he scuttled away from her he saw them: the others, Hadaly and Coppelia and Aleph and whatever they’d been called. Their mouths barely moved and their voices were rusty but their hands shook stiffly and their wrists moved slowly but surely toward their faces. The cards fluttered from their grasp. They aimed their fingers at their eyes.
“Realboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboy–”
2: The Island of Misfit Toys
Javier had enjoyed his share of organic virgins. Because he was synthetic, they enjoyed him even more. His failsafe meant that his memory would corrupt and his mind would fry if he went too fast and hurt them too much. So he went slow. He tickled. He teased. He got them wet and wild and wide. He made them want it more than they feared it. They called him attentive, thoughtful, caring. He called it self-preservation. And occasionally, he called it employment.
There was the girl on her way to Brown who’d never had time for a boyfriend what with all her overachieving. She met Javier in Mexico during “spring break,” which seemed to be something her therapist had suggested. Her own suggestion was that she get the whole first time over with, already, so she could put her curiosity to rest and just move on.
“I think it’s better, this way,” she said. “I won’t be one of those girls who can never get over her first time. I won’t obsess over you. And you won’t obsess over me.”
“Not afterward, no,” he’d said. “But I think you’ll find that during the festivities, I can be quite the micro-managing dick.”
“Dick being the operative word.”
There was the kid who wasn’t sure if he was gay or not, and thought trying it out with a robot wouldn’t really count. Naturally he was as gay as the day was long. Javier told him so, after all the orgasms.
“It could just be a physical thing,” the kid told him. “I mean, sometimes people can’t help coming, no matter who’s causing it.”
“Maybe,” Javier said, “but nobody made you fall asleep with your arms around me.”
Both times, they’d paid him. He was doing them a service, and they wanted to show their appreciation. Besides, they knew how hard it was for him. They knew what it was like, out there on the road alone. Or so they claimed. But of course they knew nothing. They knew nothing about sleeping under bridges and waking up with a mumbling transient’s gnarled fingers down your jeans. They knew nothing about searching dumpsters for e-waste and shredding your tongue on chipsets. They knew nothing about spending hours picking useless lumps of plastic from under your skin just so you could watch it get sucked down the maw of a recycler that spat out change in return. They knew nothing about measuring your life in those coins.
They knew he could fuck. They knew he couldn’t say no. They knew it was because he was a vN, a self-replicating humanoid with a hard-coded failsafe that guaranteed his affection for and protection of humans. They knew that all vN had the same failsafe, and that it would never fail, because the Rapture-happy mega-church whose tithes funded its design was just as picky about its legacy for those pitiful sinners left behind as it was about the Bible verses that backed up their Tribulation theology. That’s what they knew.
Now, they probably knew different.
Now, the failsafe was broken. A select group of kinky hackers had broken it within a subset of vN originally designed for nursing. The first clade of hacked vN, free of love and other shackles, escaped domesticity and made for the desert of the American Southwest. Their leader, Portia, attempted to cultivate the bug through serial self-replication and total selection. She created multiple iterations. Only one, Charlotte, was a true incarnation of her vision. Charlotte fled when she realized that Portia had killed all her iterations. Charlotte iterated one final time in Oakland, California, with a human man whose love for her was probably the purer for its ignorance of her past.
They called her Amy.
The rest of the world called her a menace.
Javier called her querida.
“Querida.” Javier burrowed his chin into her neck. Dawn would arrive soon. He felt it in his skin, and knew she felt it in hers. They shared the ability to photosynthesize. The sunrise was their thing. The thing they had instead of sex.