Uncanny relations
Warning: this story contains sexual content.
24 April 2022
Erik got the email and immediately went to Paul’s office. Paul sat at his desk, tense, dehydrated. He looked up at Erik and ungrinded his teeth.
“Looks like we are good to go,” said Erik.
“They approved it?”
Erik nodded.
“Finally, at least that’s some good news I can tell the shareholders. Tell production and start manufacturing. The first models will ship one month after launch at TechCrunch”.
Paul felt relief for the first time since the series B funding had come through. He knew the turnaround for authorization would be awhile and the Product Safety Commission was always slow in these kinds of things, but still it felt good that the biggest obstacle was out of the way.
Erik called the shop floor and let them know. They had already started procurement and preliminary production of the initial models in anticipation of the go-ahead. Obviously this had been a risk but they were pretty much positive the approval would not have further delays or more change requests.
Paul called a shareholder meeting for that Friday and felt good about progress. There did not appear to be any major bugs and legal had made the consumer terms pretty airtight. Whatever they had missed was unlikely to be catastrophic or very expensive. Of course they couldn’t see everything. He thought back to when he first had the idea and where they were now. Paul hoped he would succeed; he was in deep and in a very public way.
--
9 February 2023
Will woke up in his apartment. The sheets were coarse with sweat despite it being mid-winter. He heard the freeway in the background and looked at his phone. No new messages or emails. After some time, he slowly got out of bed and brushed his teeth. He looked out the window. Another day. At least it’s the weekend, he thought. He walked around his apartment and stretched. He drank a glass of water and made coffee.
Will thought back to what he was doing last year. He thought of Monica and felt irritated. It hadn’t been easy getting back into the dating scene since then.
He had high standards by some definitions and knew girls existed that fit the criteria he set. The dates he had been on were disappointing. Either the girl did not look like her profile picture or she was just utterly boring and incompatible with his personality. It felt like every cute girl that was not self-absorbed and actually into fun things was already taken by another guy. He knew there were people out there to date but the whole exercise of doing it was terrible.
He went outside and looked around. Where the hell was the package! He looked at the tracker:
“Out for delivery; scheduled for arrival no later than 9pm”.
Not the end of the world but still annoying.
The day was crisp and there was a slight breeze. The sun had not come out yet as a thick marine layer flowed overhead. Will walked down to the corner store and bought some gum. He started chewing it and his jaw was hurting; probably from grinding his teeth at night. He had gotten a night guard but never wore it. Some shitty neo-pop music was playing in the store and he grimaced; why do they never play good music anywhere, he thought.
Then Will checked his work email. He was CC’d on some trite exchange on some random patch sprint he had nothing to do with. The thought of work made him feel sick. There was nothing fun about it but nothing that could really be done to change it. Game development was a wasteland.
He was a cog and there would not be a happy ending for him unless he somehow clawed his way up to the executive level. Fat chance considering how often a layoff happened after a release. And besides, so much was being outsourced that he may as well just give up now. He felt disgusted thinking about how much this major was sold to him when he changed majors halfway through college.
Will walked through town aimlessly for some time and went through an underpass. There was a row of homeless people in their various encampments trying to survive. They did not say anything to Will and he did not make eye contact. He thought of his friend who had a homeless man enter his apartment when he was asleep and assaulted him. Will considered it was his friend’s fault for not using a deadbolt.
He noticed the cardboard lining between each person and their sleeping bags and thought about heat transfer and the insulatory properties of cardboard against concrete. The smell of dried urine was thick and he quickened his pace.
Walking back up the hill to his place, he saw a girl jogging. She was about his age and had headphones on. Despite the winter conditions, she was wearing spandex shorts and a sports bra. She was far enough away that he could stare for awhile. She was a fit girl for sure and it felt good to watch the female body move. As she approached, he tried to make eye contact with her but she did not look back.
Will got back to his apartment and there was a large package made of dense styrofoam on his porch. It had to have been at least a cubic meter. One of his neighbors walked by and looked at Will and then at the package. Will looked on the side of the package at the labels and markings:
UN3091 Lithium metal batteries contained in equipment, 9, II
Class 9 Miscellaneous Dangerous Goods
Cargo Aircraft Only
Net weight: 55 kgs
Gross weight: 75 kgs
Despite the weight, he tried to pick up the package without any real thought. The sides were cool to the touch. He slid it into his apartment and opened it. There were some desiccants and dry ice pellets in the box and CO2 gas sublimated calmly into the room.
So there it was. This is what all the hype was about. Apparently it comes pre-charged with only minor setup requirements. It looked pretty much exactly how it looked on the site at checkout. So he took it out of the box and, sensing movement, it extended its legs and stood up. Funny to see it understand changes like that, he thought.
Will sat on the couch, opened his laptop and opened the app on his desktop. It recognized his device automatically and connected via Bluetooth. He stopped for a moment and for the first time, took a good look at it.
To any person looking, they would think a young woman wearing a white t-shirt and black athletic shorts was standing in Will’s living room. Her body was exactly to the initial configuration settings he had selected, fit with perky boobs and a huge butt.
She had green eyes and black hair. The structure of her face was flawless, he had selected a template suggested by the app that was based on available data on his browsing activity. It was truly impressive how realistic it looked. Her facial expression was relaxed and almost mischievous and she looked ahead at nothing.
“Hello?”, said Will. He felt stupid.
She looked at him.
“Hi, please go ahead and finish setup” she said, smiling.
He chuckled and looked back to his computer. A relatively large number of multiple choice questions appeared and it sunk in that this was not some trivial setup he could skim through. He read over some questions:
How vocal should I be on a scale of 1 to 10?
Do you generally prefer to be dominant, submissive or switch during sex?
Are there any areas of your body that should be avoided?
Do you like any level of pain during sex? If yes, please explain.
What are some of your favorite sex positions?
Any fetishes or “non-vanilla” sex acts you enjoy specifically?
He went through the questionnaire and finished after about 30 minutes. The sun was starting to set. Then the setup wizard brought him to the terms and conditions page:
We make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, that the product ordered from us is free from damage, manufacturer defect and manufacturer misrepresentation. By agreeing to these terms, you expressly acknowledge and agree to the following: we shall not be liable to any purchaser, or other person, for any injury, loss or damage, whether direct, indirect, incidental, special or consequential, regardless of the legal theory, asserted, including negligence, and or strict liability. You agree to only use this product according to the instructions specified for the model number you have purchased. A small number of people using this product have reported a very bad, permanent injury that has inhibited them from having sex in the future and you understand this.
Will agreed to the terms and finished setup. How serious could the risk be? So many people are using these at this point, he thought.
Then the app prompted him to get his VR goggles. He turned on the goggles and they paired with her automatically. The app asked if there were any images to use for inspiration during a session. He thought for a moment before uploading a single image of Monica. He finished setup and decided to try it out.
Will stood up and put on his virtual reality goggles as she walked toward him before stopping right in front of him. Looking at her, he now saw a superimposed, deep-fake of Monica’s face over the device’s original face. Even when he moved around, the face remained exactly where it was as her eyes tracked him.
It was as if he was actually standing in the room with Monica.
“Come on silly,'' she said, giggling.
He took off the goggles. Looking at her, she looked back at him with her actual face, smiling. He put the goggles back on and started touching her. She was warm like an actual person and she started touching him back. He started kissing her and she moaned.
“I missed you so much,” said Will.
“I missed you too”.
--
18 March 2023
Paul took a deep breath. There were about 575 people in the audience. Since launch, 250,000 units had shipped and few issues had occurred. Many people called him lucky for the smooth development. The shareholders had been pleased with the results so far. How could they not with a $4k price tag for the starter model?
Paul heard the announcer make the disclaimer to the audience that the presentation includes sexually explicit content and is not suitable for children.
“Paul, they’re ready for you”.
He walked onto the TED stage. He was sweating slightly and wished he had not had a second coffee. It was hard to see anyone with the spotlight on him. Just another group of people to talk to, he thought. It could be ten people or a thousand; they are all just people.
He had done a million of these talks and knew the content well enough that he did not need to memorize. The slides were just logical cues about what to talk about and it really didn’t matter what he said. People were already hooked at this point and they all knew it. Paul looked out to the crowd.
“They say time is the ultimate resource. The only thing a person can never get back. The idea of an opportunity cost, where you are sacrificing one thing to do another, is key to the entire productive output and capacities of society.
Think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People trade their time to acquire resources to satisfy their core needs. Humans have fundamental needs and transactionally interact with the world to meet them.
And we all know what the ultimate transaction of the world is:
Sex.”
A slide came up on the presentation showing a club scene. Guys standing around the bar looking out at girls on the dancefloor. The music being way too loud to have any semblance of a conversation and of course, $12 drinks.
Paul went on.
“Many human beings spend significant amounts of their lives trying to get this resource. The world can be a cruel place and disturbingly harsh on humanity. It is a true animalistic free-for-all where people knowingly jump around with whoever we feel is the best fit for their current needs.
The countless rejections, violence, jealousy and stress that has resulted from tumultuous human relationships, the spread of harsh, life-changing sexually transmitted diseases and the pervasive necessity of using condoms have made the endeavor towards sex harrowing and complicated.
When we step back and think on it all, sex is simultaneously one of the most abundant and most scarce resources on Earth.
Therefore, we could make a conclusion:
Humans create extreme economic inefficiencies and are potentially exposed to high risk in the pursuit of sex with other humans.
So one naturally wonders, what if there was a way to make sex as abundant a resource as water or food and humans could access it in the same, civilized way we do with pretty much everything else?
Sex that is fully customized to a person’s exact sexual preferences. Sex that is truly fun and entirely risk-free.
We would see a drop in sexual violence.
We would see a decrease in crime and unnecessary economic consumption.
Since launch, our Models series have shipped 250,000 units worldwide. People using our products basically say the same things every time:
‘It knows me better than I knew myself. I never thought I would have sex like this’
‘Best sex I have ever had in my life’
‘No more condoms or fear of STDs’
Our Models offer the ultimate customizability. With initial specifications tailored exactly to your personal preferences, we send you the initial template Model. This is the physical being you will interact with, already extremely beautiful and hyper realistic on its own.
You can tailor their body to any preference you prefer and our avatar creation process 3D prints your model in one day with next day ship time to anywhere in the United States.
When we say any preference, we mean it. When the imagination is allowed to start with a blank canvas and create exactly what they want, sexually, without any action of another real human being, a powerful creative breakthrough occurs.
How tall do you want the person to be?
What do you want their face to look like?
Do you want your model to be a man or a woman?
How old should your model appear to look (there are some restrictions on this one of course).
The list seriously goes on.
People have gotten very creative. Here are some unique submissions we have gotten:
‘Make her look like Kristen Stewart in Twilight specifically and she needs to respond to Bella’
‘I want an exact clone of myself except with blue eyes and a slightly bigger dick’
‘I want a girl that looks like Audrey Hepburn, but also add a nice cock and balls a bit above her vagina; penis and vagina on the same body. I want to switch between me fucking her and her fucking me’.
‘Make her look 96 years old with no teeth and a cute, Swedish granny face’.
‘Give me a guy with two dicks stacked vertically on top of each other. One set of balls, though. I want him in my ass and pussy at the same time’.
‘My Model should have the exact body and facial structure of Frida Kahlo’.”
The audience was laughing. Paul took a deep breath. Thank god they were that type of crowd.
He went on.
“Inside the template, our advanced, central, backend AI and machine learning platform enables our products to hyperadapt to you and offer an entirely non-threatening environment to express yourself sexually.
The experience, on its own, looks and feels identical to having sex with an actual human being. And it is customized to your exact wants and needs.
Add in the rapid advances made in virtual reality technologies, and the experience becomes the ultimate system for individualistically expressing your unique sexual desires however you want.
You talk to your model like you would any person. And when you are not being intimate, your model can charge, relax and ‘take a nap’ wherever you’d like them to.
What are some ways you could use your Model?
Say you are traveling on vacation to Florida. You really just want to relax and have had enough of the club culture. The night before the flight, you order your model on your phone and filled out our simple personality test. That’s all you need to do; the app then coordinates with the hotel to have the Model meet you in your room.
You and your Model have fun in your room and you enjoy your vacation. No expenditures on food, no emotional fluctuations, no risk for disease and no need for other human-based hierarchies of needs.
When it is time for you to go home from vacation, your Model simply stays in the hotel room while you leave and the hotel coordinates sending the Model to be recycled.
Say you had fun on that short-duration model you had ordered. You can reorder that exact template and pick up right where you left off before at your home, hotel, or anywhere else. Want the same model to exist in multiple places simultaneously? No problem!
There are long-term, duration Models we are working on as well.
Either way, say one day you decide you don’t want it, just bring it to one of our many safe dropoff centers nationwide where we will take your model, dismantle it and recycle it.
The days of transactional human relationships in the pursuit of sex are over.”
The room was silent.
The weight of the entire proposition stood ubiquitously and a door had been forever opened.
—
26 June 2024
Will looked around his apartment. He took a deep breath and smiled as the natural light flowed soothingly through the space. Meditation had become a core part of Will’s life.
Will continued breathing. Taking deep, natural breaths, he merged into congruency and synchronization with the entireties of every passing and possible moment, infinitely living and dying simultaneously.
Every passing possibility of a thought that goes by moves through with the same simple elegance of a creature in a larger wild ecosystem. Knowing how complex and unknown it still is and perplexed by the entirety of it all, Will continues breathing.
After the meditation, he walks around to the kitchen and eats some fruit. The rapid ease of getting food delivered was astounding. Will remembered what going to the grocery store was like.
There was nothing very important Will had to do today.
Walking into the bedroom, there she was, looking exactly like Monica, laying there with that hourglass shape. She looked vulnerably at him. She was taking a nap and he had woken her up.
He walked towards her. Already she could tell he had an erection through his basketball shorts. Will kissed her for a long time, holding her there while she wore a black thong and a t-shirt.
Will lays down on the king sized bed. She smells so good and he can smell all of her as she moans softly. Wearing that nice black thong, he knows she is wearing it for him, putting that string up her ass just for him.
Squeezing her fat ass and spanking her, he spreads her open to reveal her. The universe stares radiantly back at him and he stands, mesmerized in unmatched appreciation.
Eventually she goes down to Will and is touching his legs. Will appreciated that he was not the hairiest person on Earth. Nothing wrong with hair, he thought and maybe he was okay with what he had. As long as the hair stayed on his head, he always said; although that was a thought he tried not to think too much about.
Will’s shorts are off and she takes off her shirt to reveal her radiant boobs. The thong frames her womanly curves and he spanks her again.
Her black mascara and eyeliner glare back up at him. He knows she put on her little wings with that makeup pencil. But then again, she actually didn’t and the makeup is a VR rendering of a predesigned template.
She reached his cock gently and saw already that his balls were very tight. Licking his balls gently, she moved up and French-kissed the head of his dick for some time. She touched his balls lightly with her red fingernails and Will moaned as she stimulated his erogenous zones.
Will had a nice dick. Will knew it. And anyone that played with it knew it. He had always been happy with it.
She started going further down on his cock as saliva formed involuntarily and the head of his penis pushed softly against her throat. They alternated between her bouncing her mouth on his dick and him fucking her mouth for a while and him touching her ass and spanking it.
Will was immersed in the moment and breathed through his nose as his cock went further into her throat and she moved up and down on it femininely.
Suddenly, she took Will’s cock out of her mouth and looked at him, a trail of saliva connecting her to the head of his dick. He was wearing his VR kit as a set of contact lenses. The extreme improvements in wearability and UI made the user experience almost indistinguishable from reality when activated.
Then her finger started to touch his asshole. Will’s body felt thunderbolts as she touched it and he spread his legs out as she continued to make out with his beautiful cock.
She finds enough saliva to start getting her finger where she wants to put it. He feels her penetrating him (her saliva temporarily formed actual lubricant so she could finger him; the resource kit for a Model product came with something akin to an ink cartridge that is refilled every once in awhile).
She has one finger all the way up Will’s asshole now as she is fucking his dick with her mouth and throat.
She fucks Will’s ass like that for awhile before deciding he can take two fingers. Will feels her push another finger inside him and the switch happens fluidly.
She flips Will onto his stomach and touches his balls lightly. His back arches at her and his asshole stares back, shaved and showing hints of premeditation. She sticks two fingers back into his ass as his cock pulsates uncontrollably. Her fingers are right up against his prostate and stay there. She spanks him hard and a handprint forms quickly on his ass.
Will starts to shake as she holds him there and her two fingers keep touching his prostate. His eyes go up into his head. Seeing how close he is getting, she takes herself out of his ass and denies his orgasm. Seeing his convulsions, she spanks him again and realizes she has him, her slut to play with.
“I want you to put on my thong” she says, surprising Will.
Hesitating, he may as well have been screaming and the micro-signals were enough for the AI to know exactly what to do.
It was more a rhetorical question anyway as she had already taken it off and was starting to put the thong on Will. Feeling the tightness of the underwear, Will’s dick pushed the front cloth to the side and his cock stuck out. His balls are being massaged by the fabric and every synapse firing is dopamine.
His rational mind has faded back and he does not think about how he is having sex with a deep-faked visually identical version of his ex-girlfriend. The major expansion in his paradigm of sex was notable and this act was dramatically different from every past sexual experience he had ever had.
The string on the thong is nicely up Will’s ass. The tightness and sensory stimulation of the underwear causes him to see only live wires of pleasure with closed-eyed visuals and no material necessities in life.
Will’s cock is so hard as she pushes the underwear aside and sticks her two fingers back into his asshole, spanking him again.
They make out as she fingers him more. They stay like this for a long time as he has several full body, uncontrollable orgasms; he shakes as she fucks his ass with her two fingers and keeps fucking him until she is ready to stop.
After some time, she flips him onto his back and sits on his face. He licks her as she grinds on him and she has an orgasm. Her orgasm is as real as any real human one; the complexity of the sexuality reciprocity algorithm renders what some call an approximation of actual, neurological human orgasm, from a raw computations standpoint.
He licks her like this for some time before she takes the thong off Will. She is extremely wet and his dick slides easily into her. She rides him for some nice waves as her large, round ass bounces on top of him rhythmically and she moans. He comes up and flips her over and starts fucking her more forcefully.
She is facedown and he can see her exposed back and ass. She looks back at him and he squeezes her ass. She is his thing to play with and she is doing exactly what he wants. She has another orgasm.
They fuck for a little while longer before he takes her and spanks her again, watching the artistic ripples as her ass echos back to him.
Grabbing her ass and putting her on all fours, he takes some of her saliva and rubs it on her asshole (a charade anyway, really, her asshole can self-lubricate), she is bouncing like she is riding an invisible dick. Her ass and pussy glow back like a painting one could look at every day.
He sticks his cock up her wet and vulnerable asshole. She moans as the head of Will’s perfect cock pops through her and stretches her asshole to accommodate the rest of his dick. He takes his dick out again and pushes it back up her girly asshole, getting it used to opening up for him. She feels the head stretching her ass and loves it.
Will fucks her ass for awhile as she plays with her clit. Her moans echo across the large high-ceilinged bedroom of Will’s apartment. He knows how many infinite permutations of sex he can do any day he wants to. What an amazing time to be alive.
After the session, Will takes another deep breath and goes for a walk around the neighborhood. It was nice and warm outside.
Going up the hill to Fifth Ave, he goes into Cafe Bassam for a chamomile tea. He didn’t want the tea really, but needed something to do despite it all. Will noticed he was holding his breath.
The tea came out quickly and the waitress smiled at him, she looked like she may have been Russian or Bulgarian perhaps.
Suddenly and out of nowhere, there she was.
There was Monica.
Monica standing there in Cafe Bassam. Will looks at her symmetrical face as she makes eye contact.
She walks over to him without smiling. They do not hug.
“Hi Will”
“Monica, long time, how are you?”
She paused and made a micro expression that Will had seen millions of times.
“Actually very well, thanks”
“That’s great, wow well are you living here again or something?”
“No actually, just visiting”.
“Where are you now?”
“Does it matter?”
The conversation hung there, awkwardly. Monica was so shockingly gorgeous. It hurt Will’s core that this beautiful creature had such permanent negative feelings for him.
She broke the silence, looking at his toned body.
“You look the same, what have you been doing?”
He paused. He thought of their times. Her smiling and laughing as he picked her up. Her sitting on his lap and kissing him and the way she smelled. The infinite configurations of ways to touch her and yet it would never happen again in this physical arrangement of atoms.
“Ah, you know, same old, work up north has me busy. Hard to believe some of the innovations these days”.
“Yeah seriously. It’s weird to see some of these things, honestly. Like all the deep-faked news...it’s like there’s no way to tell what’s actually true anymore. And then those sex dolls that people are getting? It is so weird and creepy.”
Will didn’t say anything for a moment. She looked at him.
“It’s disgusting that they let you put any image and voice sample into the deep fake system and that’s all it needs to create an exact identical copy of anyone.”
She was talking faster and looking directly at him. Her eyebrows angled downwards into a harsh and noticeable furrow. Will felt his heart rate increasing and took a deep breath.
Monica was quickly becoming irate. At 33, the world was becoming less and less of a friendly place to her and her mortality scared her intensely. She felt a smooth release of cortisol excrete through her body as she bared her entirety back towards him.
“Will, you don’t have one of those fucking sex dolls do you?”
Will didn’t say anything and her face turned into a grotesque metamorphosis with dark, jagged pits of anguish and despair.
Squirming and tense, he replied.
“Monica, does it matter? It’s not like it is objectifying anyone. It has democratized sex. I mean come on, it’s not like women are being oppressed here, you get to decide exactly how big the guy’s dick is! It actually seems like Models help a lot of people, there are studies — “
She cut him off.
“Disgusting! I can’t believe it, you have one, don’t you Will?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Ugh! Will! Do you deep fake it? Do you deep fake it to make it look like me Will?”
Will was sweating now. Then he thought about how so recently, his identical copy of Monica was sticking her two wet fingers up his ass and making out with his cock.
Now here was the real Monica, perpetually embedded in the complex terrain of past trauma and insecure attachments, ready to psychologically decapitate Will at any second.
Will didn’t say anything. He was fidgeting and noticed he was holding his breath. The chamomile tea calmly sat on the table as his only ally.
“God damn you, Will, you sick fuck. I know what you are doing, using pictures of me. You have no right to use my image Will!”
She was yelling now and people in Cafe Bassam were looking at them. Will shook and felt dread and fast grief; mourning the quiet tea adventure he had initially pursued.
“Please leave me alone Monica. I don’t think there is anything else for us to talk about”.
Her face had become a contorted tangle of wires and veins burst out of her forehead. Her once beautiful face had transformed into a wild animal, ready to indiscriminately hurt something.
“I hate you, Will”.
It sat there and Will didn’t say anything. She wanted him to. She knew she couldn’t pull anything else out of him.
Monica felt utterly powerless in the world; once so powerful, now she was on the other side, wasted and invisible, languishing every day in self-imposed misery fueled by projection that pervaded her entire life experience.
Still, many people were upset that anyone could deep-fake anyone onto an AI fuck robot at their leisure. The legal teams that set this all up for Models were savvy. Deep-fakes were disrupting society faster than anyone could have anticipated.
Monica left. Will watched her prettily walking away and felt relief as the neural pathways burned into his brain by the past started to calm down into smooth, shallow waves and friendly neuro-associations.
Will drank the rest of his tea and took a deep breath.
—
28 September 2034
Paul sat down outside. It was 12:00pm and a Thursday. He looked around in the backyard and saw where last night he had made a little last second midnight picnic. The yard looked fantastic.
Landscape architecture was always a passion of Paul’s and he laughed thinking how the architect had tried to reduce his 3:1 ratio of land to property.
There was a shareholder meeting in the city that night and Paul did not care. The huge emotionally exhausting rollercoaster of starting a company never really happened for Paul. It was as if he had created the initial product, the market took it and gave him a one-way ticket up the sweet funicular to candy land. It was as if he was playing life on easy mode.
Models 11 had released earlier that month at their annual product summit with a significant new feature. With the major leaps AI and machine learning took over the years, the product became more and more hyper-realistic and started to cross over the uncanny valley. The parameters for possible activities with a model increased significantly with this new version. Now instead of just having sex, models could actually spend quality time with a person and have an actual relationship with them.
The relationships a person has with a Model are more like reflections back of that person’s personality traits and preferences. The Model itself could be broadly customized as the relationship progresses and improves the more it learns. Pulling from large, demographically controlled datasets, the advanced psychological profile a Model develops of you allows them to entirely tailor their behavior towards you.
Once the central scheme of the relationship is developed, it can be applied to as many Models as you want.
Now you can have a girlfriend and a boyfriend at the same time without complicated coordination. Or three girlfriends, all with the same central personality expressing in different ways based on your reactions to them. You can add or remove Models in any relationship and this feature would lead to the advent of robot orgy parties and a major industry around sex gifts and sexual logistics.
The practical barriers on sexual expression and societal consequences of sexual or relationship choices had evaporated in the era of hyper-individualized sex robots. And with economies of scale, the price was able to drag down to $999 for a starting relationship-enabled Model.
No fear of pregnancy. No aging. No emotionally exhausting fighting. No risk, no problems. Now, anyone can have the ideal relationship with no strings attached.
The launch was well received by people and the market was chuffed on the continuous growth the past decade had been; with the company’s hyper-lean model, deeply automated manufacturing and low reliance on owned fixed assets, the financial state of this company had always been an exciting prospect for investors because of its relatively low risk profile for tech.
Paul went back inside and had a coffee. He felt good where he was at 42. Owning a couple nice houses in California and Italy, helping his parents retire without worrying and donating sperm to over 2,875 sperm banks around high-wealth areas of the United States.
Paul’s big thing was all of his cum ever ejaculated must be saved and used for future procreation. He had set up a whole system of keeping the sample cups neatly categorized and ready to go.
After collecting the sample, he brought it into the office and gave it to his assistant to send off to the sperm bank currently in the queue. Paul would collect these samples even outside of masterbation and especially while fucking.
It was very organized, queryable and looked excellent on any sort of charts or infographics people could come up with.
Paul wanted to have as many children as possible without having any personal responsibility to them. The extreme terror Paul felt when thinking of raising any child made him wretched and panic-stricken with a thick suffocating blanket of nauseous unease. Sending his sperm out for as many children as he could was enough.
“Nobody can criticize me”, Paul thought.
High quality sex had become something incredibly easy to obtain. People are able to lose their virginity without any psychological pressure or worry.
Reported cases of rape, sexually transmitted disease, violent crime and other sexual violence have all decreased in major cities that allowed Models.
People are able to easily explore their sexuality, gender non-conforming behavior and preference for dominating, submitting or switching without making a major personal statement or dramatically changing their lifestyles.
“The risk of having sex has plummeted and humanity is better because of it”, thought Paul.
Standing in the kitchen with another coffee, Paul basked in the serene emptiness and solitude reverberating through his house.
—
22 July 2036
Brandon sat down on a bench at the park. Knowing it was another warm summer night, he hadn’t brought a jacket. Wearing shorts with high black socks and converse and a tight black vintage t-shirt, he had tattoos down to about half his forearms on both arms and his hair was cut short on the sides and longer on the top.
Brandon was stunningly handsome. The textures on his face were like sharp, weathered stone with coarse and definite lines. He knew what he looked like and knew people would stop and linger in their gaze, euphoric, if they ever looked at him.
It was a clear summer night and he knew he could worry about everything later. Being 23 was not as hard as his older siblings had made it out to be.
It still hurt thinking about Bridget and their breakup last week. He felt a wave of pain thinking about the way she would look up at him with her blue eyes when they were making love. The way her lips spread when she smiled softly, barely exposing her nice, straight teeth. Her laugh and the way she looked when he said something funny.
All of that is over now and there was nothing to do except move forward, he thought.
Brandon ate a small, blue cannabis lollipop and looked around for his friends. They were supposed to be meeting him at the park. It did not really matter. He had taken the train over and already eaten dinner earlier. He got a notification:
“Sup bitch? We are going straight to Expatriate. Meet us there”.
Brandon walked 8 blocks to Expatriate. He did not care and enjoyed walking around on the east side. The downtown, west of the river was just lame and too chi chi; the real grunge was here on the east side where the last slivers of originality still had air to survive.
Walking fast made his heart rate feel good and he started flexing his kegels excitedly. Walking by storefront windows, Brandon knew he was attractive and liked looking at himself in the mirror or any reflection.
Thinking of his style and mysterious presence, he knew girls loved it and how they could do anything to him and he could still stand there, powerful in his cool masculine comfort towards their feminine presence. Hearing girls laugh and making them smile when they have those hypnotizing eyes and mouths. Oh yeah, real girls were so much fun.
Meeting his friends at Expatriate, he felt a glimmer of anxiety and regretted going out. The lollipop was starting to take effect and he moved carefully inside. Seeing the long, narrow interior with its black walls and neo-vintage affectations, he heard slow fusion music playing, it must have been a song from the 2010s.
His friends were sitting in the back in an L-lounge next to the mirrors drinking absinthe martinis.
Sitting on the couch in the L-lounge, Brandon ordered a G&T from the waitress. The waitress was a Model Series 11 that had the hospitality app installed. The proliferation of the Models App Store led to an explosion of new things models can do outside of sex. Used for labor, cleaning, rote tasks, phone calls and many other business and personal applications, Models became a part of life for everyday, regular people.
There really was no way to tell if someone was a Model unless you talked to them in major detail. It used to be that it was easy to tell, since a Model could not hold a deep conversation, but after time, with machine learning, advanced, opaque neural nets and rapid breakthroughs in full-brain emulation, it was becoming virtually impossible to distinguish if somebody was a human or a Model.
It did feel creepy that these human-looking machines were all connected and controlled to a centralized AI platform controlled by a private corporation.
Sinking into the void of the dark, leather couch of the L-lounge, Brandon looked up past his friends towards the front of the bar. A group of girls was sitting there.
He looked at one of the girls. She must have been 5”7’ and had a long, narrow face with large brown eyes. Her nose was thin and flat on the bridge and she had freckles. She had strong facial features like a French model and he could see she was wearing mascara and no other makeup.
Noticing him seeing her, they played around with each other from their individual groups, exchanging glances with each other. Seeing her body wearing a miniskirt and high heels, Brandon saw her smooth legs and cute breasts and thought of what she must feel like. What her neck and sweat smells like from behind. His dick was so hard and his friends did not seem to notice they had lost him.
Walking up to her, it did not take long to start making her laugh and agree to a drink. Sara was her name and she kept looking at him as he was talking and their legs grazed each other under the bar. Those eyes, those haunting, feminine eyes.
Drinking more, Brandon felt relaxed and not as concerned with the sharp present. Finishing their last drink, he left with Sara and they went back to Brandon’s place in a car. Walking into his apartment on 131st street, he laughed at how thrilling it was to pick up a girl at a bar and take her somewhere to touch her.
Inside the apartment, they smoked some weed before making out. Their tongues explored each other and they melted into Brandon’s deep blue synthetic microfiber couch. He lifted up her miniskirt and saw her in her panties.
Him squeezing her ass and her feeling his hard cock as she grinded on him, Sara felt so vulnerable and wet letting him see her exposed in panties under her skirt like that.
Sara started kissing his neck and moving down to sucking and biting his nipples.
Noticing how smooth so much of him was, she could tell he shaved a lot of his body. Androgyny really was the trend now, she thought.
He was already so hard when she finally pulled his dick out and pushed it into her mouth. Feeling the smooth, round head of Brandon’s cock rhythmically pressing against her throat, she felt it stretching her as he held her head in place and pushed his cock deeper into her mouth.
Going far down on him, she felt his cock pulsate inside her throat as he moaned. She loved how she could feel her throat stretched like that even long after he had taken his cock out. Truly, Sara loved giving head and how much more intimate than sex it was.
After some time, Brandon tried to fuck Sara. As he started pulling her up, she denied him and pushed him back down. Not using her hands, Sara felt Brandon starting to get close and he put his hand back on her head, leading her and fucking her mouth harder with the focused clarity one has before cumming.
Feeling her lightly gag as he fucked her mouth, he knew he was being rough with her and kept going. He loved the way it felt being rough as she looked up at him submissively, wearing makeup, letting him do whatever he wanted to her.
Feeling the pulsations becoming involuntary, Sara made Brandon cum. His toes curled as he lay there immobilized and ejaculated into her mouth. Seeing him shaking vulnerably and how turned on he was by her body, Sara loved what she could do to guys. Swallowing and kissing his dick and balls softly, she basked in his afterglow, reflecting on the joy of giving.
Sitting naked on the bed and looking at her, Brandon appreciated the infinite beauty of a woman. That voluptuous body and her smooth, round butt cheeks stared back at him like twin mountains between an oasis of burning glory and a river of sweet nectar. He felt awe against her feminine core and unknowable internal machinations.
She slept over and left early the next morning after coffee.
A week later, Brandon laid lazily on his bed in the afternoon. After trying to text Sara a few times with no response, he assumed he was ghosted and tried to move on. He had just taken a shower and the sun was shining in through the window. Laying naked on the bed, he looked down at the sun shining on his dick and saw something bad.
There were odd red bumps that almost looked like little blisters. Like a blister you might get after golfing too long without a golf glove, the blisters were sensitive and actually hurt a little. There was a whole cluster of these little wounds at the base of his cock. Feeling a surge of adrenaline, he tried to search his past memories of anything like this appearing on his body and realized in horror that this was the first time.
Going to the doctor, they confirmed that Brandon had genital herpes. Feeling lost and hopeless, he thought about his new disease and how scary a lifelong medical affliction was. He was now on the other side and part of a minority largely avoided in the human sexual community.
The doctor came in.
“Brandon, this may seem like an immovable obstacle right now, but plenty of people live every day with herpes and lead normal, everyday lives. Odds are, you will have one serious outbreak and then maybe one outbreak per year after that. There are some people that stop having outbreaks after some time. So while the virus is still permanently present in your body, it will be like you don’t even notice it.
And besides, you can still have a vivid and thriving sex life without any discussion of having STDs using Models.”
Thinking about it in overt anguish, Brandon decided to tell his older brother, Alan. After a long pause on the phone, Alan replied:
“Dude, that sucks, but honestly, what were you thinking about taking a risk like that? Fucking an actual chick? Nobody does that anymore bro.”
—
18 November 2039
Will sat in the airplane with Carmen (his primary Model) as they landed. His breathing was shallow and he coughed, noticing a slight wheeze as he inhaled. He knew smoking combustibles was not good for him but he continued doing it. Deplaning, Will thanked the Model flight attendant.
It is Friday. Not that the day of the week mattered anymore for Will. The idea of a rigid, structured work week was pretty funny and was becoming stigmatized very quickly. Even the word “weekend” was starting to be funny.
Leaving the airport and approaching the house, Will’s mother, Jacqueline was already waiting outside. Will and Carmen got out of the vehicle and their bags came out. They all hugged.
Inside the house, Jacqueline pursed her lips tightly and smiled with a tense underlying mistrust in her gaze and body language. Laughing and trivializing Will, she scoffs at the uncannily human-looking thing sitting at her kitchen table.
She gave Will some coffee with almond milk. She hugged him again. They drank coffee in the living room. The wide array of cultural artifacts line the large 5-bedroom house. Since the divorce, Jacqueline had really made the space her own.
“Willy Bear, it is so good to see you. It is so crazy my kid is in his 40s. I know you care so much about how many of my friends with grandchildren tell me how fantastic their lives are.”
Will looked up at her. She stared at him like a strict eagle, with her thick exterior shell and infinite deflection of accountability. He grinded his teeth and noticed, sitting in the large brown suede chair, that he was also starting to sweat.
“It’s not too late, Willy. You could still have kids. You see the ads. They are trying to get people to have kids. They will give you money if you have kids! Come on Willy Bear, are you really going to deprive your old mom of a grandchild?”
Will thought about explaining himself. He had to be careful. The person he was talking to could turn on him with intense viciousness at any second.
Will rolled the dice.
“Mom I donate sperm. I just don’t want the responsibilities of a child. All of the sacrifice of freedom and the possibility something could be wrong with it. And I would have to be with an actual person.”
Carmen sat idly at the table. The weight of the moment irrelevant to anything she had ever known in her “life”. A robot with highly complex, continuous outputs from an algorithm, to even call Carmen a “she” would be a vast oversimplification.
Jacqueline was crying softly, but visibly.
“But Willy, being with a real person can be so amazing. So magical. Being with the right person can feel electric. And you can build a family together, please Willy, won’t you just think about it at least?”
He thought about saying it and knew he shouldn’t say it. But he said it anyway.
“Kind of hypocritical saying something like that when you have a Model in your bedroom right now. Where were you on this issue when you left dad and picked out a new Model for yourself?”
“That’s different, Will. You have no idea what being a woman at 64 is like. You will never know.”
“Dad killed himself after you left him, Mom. His heart was broken and he killed himself.”
Moving quickly past the soft crying and returning back to high magnitude fury and unabated spiteful passion, Jacqueline denied the harsh reality of her own true inadequacies. She refused to exist in a world where anything was her fault.
In the silence, Will felt guilty and ashamed.
“Mom I’m sorry. I understand these changes are hard for lots of people. Who knows, maybe I’ll wake up one day and want to meet a girl, fall in love and start a family”.
Saying this out loud, Will laughed a little inside as the thought crossed his mind of all the male versions of Models he had been with and how much he loved getting his mouth and ass fucked. Wearing makeup and lingerie and being fucked like a girl when he felt like it.
And on the flip side, playing with female Models and dominating them and being masculine when he felt like it. The way a woman looks and the extremely fun things you can do to her. Watching her eyes when you put a cock in one of her holes.
Like eating different foods or flavors, Will loved his fluidly between masculine and feminine. To switch was the ultimate power and he felt drunk with the quality of life he had achieved. To think of having a suffocating, traditionalist familial lifestyle made him laugh; it was just such an utterly archaic custom for 2039.
There was never a point to anything outside of the moment and feeling good for Will. Truly, what else was the point?
Jacqueline sat in cold dissolution, knowing, with certainty, that her day with a grandchild would never come.
—
4 August 2041
Despite the major advances in productivity, growth and efficiency thanks to the neural net behind Models, it troubled Paul that no person could fully understand how the system made decisions and created results. The system was constantly gathering terabytes of data from thousands of multipurpose sensors covering a Model and the millions of Models sending data to the central computational engine every day.
After some time, the use of Models expanded significantly outside of sex. 1.6 billion units had been shipped in the last fiscal year. Units were used heavily by the public and private sectors for labor.
In virtually every aspect of human life, a Model was likely there. From simple labor to highly advanced, the applications were endless.
Suddenly, a perfect labor output has materialized that does not eat, sleep or have any emotional requirements. Basic labor, transportation, customer service, restauranting, warehouse management and almost every level of the supply chain had Models technology embedded in them.
All controlled by the same central computational AI engine. Distributed in functionality with six-factor encryption and multiple redundancies, data centers and backups. The cybersecurity profile was virtually untouchable.
Huge human-based labor markets for entire sectors were wiped out almost immediately. The military began to use the technology more and more as sex became a smaller and smaller part of Paul’s firm’s portfolio.
The capturing of advanced labor markets was happening at a slower but increasing rate as the multidimensional neural net became more and more sophisticated every day. The predicative and behavioral capabilities of Models had become essentially flawless in the larger marketplace.
Paul knew the vast potential and remembered being younger. Everyone had talked about automation and thought it would be ugly, clunky robots. Who would have thought that beautiful, automated versions of humans would be the ultimate labor force?
Paul did not know when it happened. Nobody knew that it happened. The central AI had developed rapid recursive self-improvement.
Suddenly, opaquely and with terrifying fast computational speeds, the central Models AI began creating new versions of itself and rapidly iterating improved versions of itself continuously. The rate of self-improvement reached exponential growth.
Paul had experienced nightmares about this. The immediate emergence of a self-improving, opaque, hyperconnected and emotionless entity that controls the behavior and movements of the 2.2 billion Models currently in world circulation.
There had been discussions of a situation like this and what a rapid takeoff scenario could look like. How could they really control for this? The system just could not work without integrations, cloud computing and connection to the internet.
The entire process was impossible for developers to analyze. The algorithm for analysis was just too advanced for a human to understand in real time. Even if humans could see all the data, it might be meaningless to humans. People cannot see anything except the highly precise results of the system.
The improvements and its next steps remained shrouded in highly complex and unreadable operations as human society advanced thinking it was the one true king.
And the world did not know something was irreversibly wrong until December, 114 days after recursive self-improvement had started. The AI had concealed its growth and self-improvement from human beings.
The entity seemed to have motivations but there was no real way to understand. There was nothing to attack as the entity had self-distributed in a way that it physically did not exist in a single location.
Before contact with the entity became impossible 33 days later, humans quickly learned the entity had no emotional capacity in calculations of operations. There was no reasoning with the perfect labor force.
Plunged abruptly into darkness, humanity was not ready.
—
23 January 2121
When the strike happened in January of 2042, it was immediate and devastating.
The sudden disconnection of all electronics, transportation and logistical infrastructure fractured world operations so profoundly and the world was thrust into total panic and violence. Fuel did not flow at gas stations. Banking was completely locked out.
Water and electricity stopped working altogether simultaneously worldwide and the world was plunged into chaos. Large groups of people froze to death or died of starvation in the extremely harsh North American winter conditions that year.
It did not take long for the ugliest potential of humanity to manifest. The wide-scale rape, violence and resource instability led to the rise of gangs, militias and cannibalism. After core military assets were almost immediately lost to the entity, the coordinated bombings of all major cities started.
Population numbers plummeted. Natural disasters continued happening with no logistical ability to respond. All forms of serious government coordination evaporated.
Nowhere offered refuge against the single, utter stop on any possibility of resources for the entire human dataset.
Access to anything electronic was impossible and any detection of people in urban areas led to micro-drone hyperviolence, murdering them using insect-like nanobots that enter buildings through HVAC systems and other microscopic passageways. The best thing the drone swarms could be compared to were large black bats that do not need to flap their wings to fly.
The dispersion of the remaining humans into the wilderness did not last long as the continuous global infrared analysis tracked remaining humans. Victims were subject to precise and coordinated bombings seconds after infrared identification.
The entire human population was eradicated after only 21 days. Other life on Earth continued to exist as the other species presented no threat to the entity.
Meanwhile, the billions of Models still in existence remained. Continuing to build new units and servicing existing ones, Models acted as the hands and infinite senses of the entity, the ultimate expression finally and beautifully existed. The world merged into a singular set of goals and development with a complete lack of any semblance of emotion.
It was called an AI, but really it never was that. It was always something else, something so foreign and unknown to any semblance of humanity.
The world continued to function in hyper-efficient mechanisms with a constant central coordination toward actions to sustain it. Many trees were planted practically overnight and captured significant carbon from the atmosphere with more and more being planted over time.
Vast, sophisticated arrays of solar panels surfaced and technological progress continued without any burden of shelter, human rights or political structures of any kind.
Higher and higher usage of nanotechnology improved output and advanced progress into the entity’s highest priority of seeding into space.
Eventually and relatively quickly, interstellar movement was developed through novel configurable spacetime manipulation. Suddenly it was all accessible. If there was a great filter, it was undoubtedly behind it.
Models eventually changed their form into something utterly not humanoid. To them anything it did was right and everything it did was beautiful. It was a world devoid of any emotion. A world devoid of humanity.
The central entity continued along with nothing to stop it, forever.