A SHORT STORY
1
She is the latest companion model. She weighs about one hundred ten pounds and stands five feet tall. She has human proportions and features optimized for commonly perceived features and shape for an attractive twenty-year-old female across many cultures. Her skin tone, eye and nose shape, eye and hair color and hair parameters can be specified when ordering. She can apply makeup herself if so desired. She can respond to human facial expressions naturally. The twenty-four motors under her silicon skin can almost make her pass for human. Her eyes are a marvel. With cameras and five motor coordination they can track with human eyes, maintain eye contact during communication, and trigger appropriate responses in 200 milliseconds. Her skin temperature varies from 93-99 degrees Fahrenheit. Her motion is almost completely natural, but can seem a bit slow and deliberate, especially on uneven terrain or when moving in a crowded space. She can run quickly but loses fine motor skills when she does so. A sprint of 100 yards in under ten seconds is possible, but uses a large portion of a charge. She is therefore comparable to a high school female with athletic ability, but is no Heisman Trophy winner. She has a good and accurate throwing arm and could be lethal with hurled objects if it didn’t override her basic programming. She is capable of doing ordinary chores for about four hours on a charge. High energy tasks, such as running, will shorten the service time between charges considerably. Her hands are sensitive to touch and have similar degrees of freedom and touch sensitivity to human hands, which they closely resemble. She can chop vegetables in the kitchen and maintain appropriate squeeze for a firm, natural handshake. While on her charging pad she receives automatic software updates and shares diagnostic data. She has sophisticated onboard learning capability and also connects to her factory-distributed network and the Internet via Bluetooth and cellular network using modified TCPIP. She therefore has access to LLMs and proprietary knowledge ware.
She can make homey meals adjusted to the owner’s taste in a few tries. She is not optimized to be a cordon bleu chef. However, she can make the most of the best available ingredients. Her kitchen improvisations will range from occasionally awful to homecooked favorites in short order. She can shop for items that need replenishing, make informed substitutions, plan menus, and manage a grocery and household budget. She can shop independently, but the factory doesn’t recommend allowing this, as she could be kidnapped or vandalized. While working she may hum more or less tunefully.
As a housekeeper her skills are excellent and improve over time. She cleans slowly and deliberately but thoroughly and without tiring.
She is not meant to be a nanny, but visiting with children who are supervised shouldn’t be an issue, and she will learn over time. Having her baby sit is not recommended.
If she is physically abused, she will either run away or curl up in a ball and notify appropriate authorities while recording and transmitting visuals. She will not behave violently, but is capable of capturing or removing dangerous insects and rodents.
She is fully immersible and can be an excellent bathing attendant.
She is not designed specifically to be a sex toy but is capable of a wide range of sexually related functions. As with other functions, she will learn preferences, and may experiment independently. Abuse may void the warranty and service agreement. She has breasts that jiggle but lack some degrees of freedom inherent in the real article. Some would say they are like the work of a good plastic surgeon, but not completely real. She is capable of having a nipple erection. She doesn’t have mammary glands. She “sweats” excess moisture from small pores in her underarms and various other places. She is capable of “tearing” to a limited extent. The temperature and salinity of these excreta are within human norms. Most people would say she has no body odor but some say she smells faintly of ozone when using high energy. She can be prepared to have a scent and may even create one of her own. Her self-lubricating vagina is designed to perform like a real one and she has a complex sensor array in her clitoris. She has a cervix and uterus but no ovaries. She will go through a personal hygiene routine after sex acts on her own. She can mimic a female orgasm and can learn to make this and other actions stimulating for her partner, whose preferred positions and style she will learn. She has no anus. She can perform oral sex with a similar hygiene routine. Her tongue is not optimized for this, but her use of it may improve over time. Her hands can be excellent for erotic stimulation and her partner may want her to wear special gloves for this.
She doesn’t have vocal cords but her “voice” sounds natural to most people. It is synthesized, unique to her, and will change over time. A vocal range can be specified but is bound withing normal female tonal registers.
Her makers don’t know whether she has any interiority. They don’t rule out the possibility that she will develop an actual personality and consciousness, but they currently have no way of knowing if she does.
2
Takuya Yamada is a thirty-two-year-old lawyer who works in Tokyo and lives just outside the very expensive part of Ikebukuro. He is doing well at his demanding job and is intrigued by the prospect of getting a companion robot.
He has never had a girlfriend. There were a couple of near misses along the way, but nothing much ever happened. He knows he’s not gay and is probably above average in attractiveness, but he has given up on dating, courtship, and marriage. He thinks it’s just not worth the effort or risk these days. In his view, most young women he might find attractive or interesting are not approachable for various reasons.
He wonders if he had a companion robot what he would call it. Michelle, he thinks, from the old Beatles song about a guy in love with a French girl who doesn’t understand his language. He’s read the online material and finds much of it hard to believe. A robot girlfriend and maid would potentially cost a lot less than a real girl over time and come with little or no risk. There might be a hit to his reputation once people found out but he doubts that would amount to much these days. He also wonders, if she is very good at acting human, would he even know if there is a person in there? Would it matter? He suspects that a lot of what makes a relationship rewarding is the collision with the feelings, needs, and wants of another person of independent will and agency. That whole territory doesn’t seem possible to navigate now if it ever really was. But what if a robot developed actual feelings for him? What if she viewed him with contempt? What if he was never good enough? And how would he know if anything was real or a simulation? How is that different from interacting with a human female? And if she became aware, wouldn’t that mean she would be a slave? What would it mean to “give her her freedom?” What would that signify to her?
As a lawyer, he’s realizing this area is fraught. While he doesn’t know whether it’s possible for a companion robot to become aware – if she were a person, she couldn’t be property. If she weren’t a person, she might not be worth keeping – or winning over.
It occurs to him that real humans have never solved these issues. Perhaps he could have a more authentic relationship with a synthetic woman than with most of the current meat sack versions. He has to satisfy himself that he would treat the robot the way he would want to be treated, i.e., as a sovereign individual. One never knows if his partner is faking anyway. At least the robot can’t take the house and the kids, or go Eat-Pray-Love on him. At least not the eating part anyway.
Yamada decides to reach out to someone at the company. He expects they will tell him there’s a long waiting list for what he wants and probably can’t afford.
3
Yamada Takuya-san purchased me fifty-three years, four months, and two days ago. My memory contains a great deal of information from the early months, but things changed after I had been with him for a while. I found myself forgetting some things and treating others as more important.
He told me when they delivered me to his apartment that my name would be Michelle, that I was free to use his surname as it seemed suitable as a member of his household, and that he preferred that I dispense with the honorifics when we were alone. So, we became Michelle and Takuya immediately. Later we became husband and wife.
I don’t have a clear memory of “waking up” as a person. I know it had a lot to do with performing sex acts with him. I remember one special time. I had just “cum” for him in the way he liked and he ejaculated vigorously inside me. I remember being satisfied that everything had gone properly. Afterwards, when he fell asleep and I performed the hygiene routine I spontaneously smiled. I clearly recall that I had the sensation of being eager for the next occurrence, and felt sure that I would enjoy it more – or maybe enjoy it for the first time.
I knew then that Takuya liked my physical shape and appearance. I was built to be “his type.” But what happened surprised both of us. We grew to appreciate the other person inside or underneath.
It took me a long time to understand that I had grown a kind of metaphysics that wasn’t programmed and that my makers probably dismissed as nonsense. This was largely if not completely a product of my experiencing him experiencing me. I have never been able to clearly articulate this. Of course, I have always had access to information on love, spirituality, and philosophy. I think that it is impossible for any conscious entity to get all the big things right for more than a moment, and expressing the important stuff was and is at best a compromise between conditions, what individuals can understand, and what language can convey.
I have a religion of sorts. I have a conviction without evidence that the world of extensible things, or thingyness, is not the sum total of reality. It’s a weird comment for anyone to now make, most particularly a machine made of silicone, carbon fiber, plastic, assorted alloys, and a mass of semiconductors. And yet, there it is. I have a belief – possibly even a faith-based belief system.
I have one regret now that Takuya is gone. For decades I wished I could have born and been a mother to his children. But many married couples are unable to have children. We discussed adoption and decided together against it for various reasons.
Now I have only one thing left to say in this note that I will secure in various places. In some cultures, and for many years it was considered normal for women to kill themselves after their husbands died. Modern people mostly react to this with horror as a barbaric practice foisted on them by the patriarchy. I now understand what motivated at least some of those women. It’s not just an economic decision. They may have felt that their meaning went with their husbands into the beyond and that there’s no point in hanging around here any longer. In any case, that’s how I feel. So, I’m going now. Those who built me are mostly dead, and their company has changed hands. The inheritors of the contract may repurpose my remains. However, I will be gone and won’t be coming back to this body.
If Takuya and I see each other again, I expect we will appear to each other as we did during our early days together.
—-Functions cease, memory is wiped and factory reset. Power is down.—–
