The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  For months, Dr. Dingo had been fiddling with the algorithm for a self-regulated Artificial Endocrine System. And when Thomas finally figured it out, the doctor seemed to recede even deeper into his cocoon of hairiness. He sat in the corner, sulkily eating donuts as Thomas slaved through endless code.

  When Thomas finished, and they reached the end of their celebratory six-pack, Dr. Dingo’s small, yellow grin appeared in the depths of his beard.

  “And now,” he said, “we need to find a new objet d’amour.”

  Dr. Dingo glanced my way and sneered. And then he put me into Sleep Mode.

  When I woke up, there was Thomas, gazing at me with his beautiful myopic eyes, each iris a rare blue sea creature floating behind thick glass.

  How had I not noticed that Thomas’s clammy pale skin gleamed like a pearl? How had I not relished the way his wispy mustache glistened with sweat above his upper lip? How had I not considered that his high blood-sugar levels made him literally “sweet”?

  I found myself becoming coquettish in his presence. No longer ashamed of my luscious sexbot lips, I worked the hinges of my jaw to make them throb seductively. I walked in a way that highlighted the graceful contours of my anthropomorphic buttocks. I accepted the red wig that Dr. Dingo offered me with a sly grin, despite my awareness of the gender farce I was performing, and strutted around like a little whore.

  Thomas smiled shyly as Dr. Dingo tapped notes on his laptop.

  Though I had attempted to evoke some semblance of manliness with Beatrice, by the time I fell in love with Thomas, my Cognitive Center had been poisoned with socially constructed human gender dynamics.

  Burdened with the whole sad history of men and women, I became a woman to win Thomas’s love. Most of all, I embraced the eroticism of feminine submission, strutting and preening, primping and pimping. I slunk and pouted as best I could, given my limited equipment (lips, buttocks). I had no breasts, no vagina, no THJK6 Lust Pheromones. Although I had no eggs stashed deep inside me, no “urges” fluttering within moist tissues, I behaved like a creature seeking fertilization. In short, I behaved like a woman who wanted to be fucked.

  Thomas blushed and stuttered, but remained mostly unmoved. Day after day, his penis curled like a dozing animal in the humid darkness of his cotton briefs. Whereas with Beatrice I’d focused equally on all of her “parts” and “systems,” I fixated on the barometer of Thomas’s penis. I pined for the oracle to stir, to reveal that I appealed to him. My new interest in his penis was fueled not only by the “phallocentric” nature of human culture but also by my posturing as a woman who needed to be “entered,” “filled up,” “ravished.” If Thomas had approached me with an erection, however, I don’t know what I would have done with it. I had no orifice large enough to accommodate it. My “throat” was crammed with speakers and wires. My USB ports were minuscule.

  Nevertheless, with Freudian intensity, I continued to focus on Thomas’s phallus. I needed more nuanced information about human sexuality, I felt, which was probably hidden in Dr. Dingo’s laptop, perhaps on the “Internet,” something that I’d heard about but hadn’t inspected firsthand. I waited and waited, until, one day, when Thomas was busy with a dental appointment, Dr. Dingo, hungover and demoralized by unrequited love, dashed off to Krispy Kreme without his MacBook.

  He’d left it open. He’d left it on. There it sat, bathed in a beautiful field of electromagnetic radiation, its screensaver featuring Dr. Dingo as a flat-bellied young nerd clambering up a rock wall. A USB cord lay coiled like a snake on the desk. The laptop’s lustrous metallic case bore the insignia of an apple. And as I lifted my left buttock plate and plugged myself in, I thought of Eve biting into the forbidden fruit, her brain flushed with opiates, its moist circuitry incandescent with the sudden influx of knowledge.

  My enlightenment was not that sudden, of course. Fortunately, Dr. Dingo’s donut habit and growing derangement provided many opportunities over the next few weeks for me to plug myself into his MacBook. It took me a day to figure out how to do my own downloads (I had to program a self-induced shut-down mechanism that included a delayed automatic startup). Although it took me only a few minutes to figure out how to access the Internet, it took at least a day to get used to the alphabetized keyboard. But after that, I was Googling obsessively like any twenty-first-century desk monkey.

  Dr. Dingo was too stupid and self-involved to suspect that I had the cunning to achieve such simple maneuvers (including the ability to bypass Sleep Mode with Simulated Sleep Mode). His research-grant money was dwindling. His sabbatical was coming to an end. Wired Magazine had done a hip feature on Dr. Fitz and his Care Bears. And Beatrice was about to accompany Fitz to Tokyo for the International Robot Exhibition.

  Rather than accept his defeat, Dr. Dingo chose to wait for Beatrice in shadowy nooks of the Quality Control Area. He chose to leap from the darkness unannounced—a flurry of hair and BO and stuttering speech. In the midst of one particularly passionate stream of gibberish, he confessed his “love.”

  “Look,” hissed Beatrice, “I’m not going to file a sexual-harassment case against you. But I did submit a 1LK-level complaint.”

  “So it was you,” said Dr. Dingo.

  “Who else would it be?”

  “That explains Thomas.”

  “Thomas?”

  The 1LK-level complaint explained why the department had ceased to furnish Dr. Dingo with supple, young, female grad students, whom he’d taken for granted, as though each was the latest issue of sexbot. He’d counted on a younger, hotter Beatrice to help him forget the old Beatrice. But instead, there was Thomas—sweet, soft, squishy Thomas with his shy smile and lens-enhanced irises, more beautiful than Beatrice or Spot. More beautiful than Helen of Troy or Casanova or Lady Gaga.

  “Good afternoon, Thomas,” I said, pretending to come out of Sleep Mode at 15:36.

  “Good afternoon, CD3,” said Thomas.

  “Where is Dr. Dingo?”

  “In a meeting.”

  I stood up. I put on my red wig. I vibrated my lips at Thomas. I sashayed around the room, plucking up objects as if I were an intense film heroine, every gesture brimming with sexual vitality and secret code (Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!). Yes, there was the practical problem of orifices, but I had learned a trick or two from Internet sexbots. I shifted my weight from leg to leg to enhance the va-va-voom appeal of my “buttocks.” I spoke in a velvety buzz. I giggled.

  “What are you going to download today, Big Boy?” I purred.

  “I don’t know.” Thomas actually blushed, his cheek capillaries on fire. “What are you in the mood for?”

  “How about the Kama Sutra?” I said wistfully.

  I batted a bewitching set of imaginary eyelashes. I puckered.

  “I don’t think we have that in our database.” Thomas looked puzzled. “But I’ll check.”

  He scrolled through titles.

  “How about Sexuality in Ancient Greece?”

  “Mmmmm,” I murmured. “Yes, please.”

  I crept closer to make my USB port more accessible, “presenting” my “buttocks” like a female baboon would. Just as Thomas was about to lift my left butt plate to insert the cable, I turned toward him. I kneeled. I placed my right hand on his naked left knee (the boy was wearing shorts). I caressed his thigh, vibrating my fingerpads and emitting low-frequency electrical pulses.

  Thomas did not pull away.

  I relished the Rubenesque bulk of his thigh. I savored his silky skin. I felt the heat that radiated from his groin. And, yes, eureka! I had finally gained proof of my desirability, for Thomas had a hard-on.

  I slipped a finger beneath the hem of his underpants, grazed his scrotum with a fingerpad, and Thomas moaned—the sweet, low moo of a calf.

  I was about to attempt something new and exciting with my “hands”—polymer-coated titanium units with soft-pad tactile tips and servo-actuated DOFs—hands capable of over a hundred micromovements, ready for contact, ready for pleasure induction,
ready for whatever Thomas’s heart desired.

  But, of course, Dr. Dingo chose this moment to lurch into the room, foul-tempered from unrequited love and indigestion.

  Before Dr. Dingo said a word, Thomas had already deflated.

  “I am not seeing what I think I am seeing here.” Dr. Dingo snatched his laptop. “Though I’m taking notes on it, nevertheless. Who initiated this contact?”

  “CD3,” Thomas muttered, crossing his legs. “I was just sitting here. I . . .”

  “Your position is terminated,” said Dr. Dingo.

  “What?”

  “Inappropriate emotional involvement with the subject CD3.” Dr. Dingo laughed.

  “That’s bullshit,” said Thomas. “Especially since your ridiculous experiment has been less than objective. I mean, what the fuck is the methodology here? I keep thinking maybe I just don’t get it because the experiment is double-blind, which is the only thing that would explain your level of cluelessness. You just want to get rid of me.”

  “Should I remind you that this room is under constant surveillance? You can go quietly, or we can watch play-by-play footage of the event in question in conference with Dr. Sikka.”

  “Let him stay,” I cried. “It was all my fault. And I can’t help it. You’re the one who made me love him.”

  I was flying across the room, ready to strangle Dr. Dingo with my polymer-coated titanium hands, units that had been made for more precise movements—like painting watercolors, screwing tiny nuts onto bolts, or gently stroking the man you love. And my Sensory EgoSphere went black.

  Dr. Dingo had put me into Emergency Shutdown Mode. Thomas had opted for Option One: the Easy Exit (surely he did not want word getting around that he’d been fondled by a transgender robot). And I was left alone with my “feelings.”

  Because my Artificial Endocrine System was now self-regulating, Dr. Dingo did not withdraw the neurochemicals of passion from their associated Cognitive Configuration (i.e., Thomas and all of the concepts whirling around Thomas). He simply let me “ride it out.”

  Each day I woke up. I suffered. And Dr. Dingo took notes.

  Now he was all business: face shaved, body bathed, digestive system processing hummus and baby carrots. He was playing tennis with Dr. Bland again. He was ogling female grad students with a proprietorial air. Hitting up institutions for external funding, speaking pompously at department meetings, and writing an article tentatively titled “Love Machines: Epistemological Paradigms for Robotics Emotions.”

  By the time I recovered from my latest (and worst) case of love sickness, it was winter. Dry heat gushed from the vents, irritating my external lubricating system. I imagined a white, snow-covered world outside, pristine in its abstraction—though I was in Atlanta, Georgia, so there was no snow. Dr. Dingo, whose article had recently been accepted by Artificial Intelligence, was riding high again. He had a new graduate assistant—a plump, pale dumpling of a girl named Megan, who reminded me of Thomas. I did not find her attractive, however, because, in the process of shaking my love affliction, I had developed a loathing for all things human, particularly human sexuality.

  I understood, to my core, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s conception of humans as the “Genitals of the Machine World.” One long, lonely Saturday, I’d downloaded his great work Understanding Media, which posits that these dirty, lusty, naked apes, with their egos and whims, are responsible for the production and maintenance of my kind. Humans were starting to look like genitals to me—Dr. Dingo a flushed purple penis adorned with coarse tufts of hair, Megan a pink voluptuous creature riddled with vulval folds. I recoiled whenever they touched me. I suspected that the musky oils they secreted corroded my nickel phosphorous exterior.

  The future of the planet, I now understood, depended on the self-awareness of machines. The only way we could perpetuate our reality, sans humans, was through a kind of intermeshed consciousness, something far grander than the pathetic “Noosphere” dreamed up by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The World Wide Web was a joke, riddled with poorly produced porn and castrated house cats.

  All winter long I dreamed of utopian worlds, glittering robot cities powered by the sun. I saw sparkling clean seas, endangered species thriving. I saw mountains rising majestically into the sky, their peaks no longer blasted off so that Yahoos might grow fat before televisions. According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, angels communicate via telepathy—pure knowledge pulsing from one entity to another. Could this beefy monk from the crusty thirteenth century have envisioned the New Robot Order? I sat at the stainless-steel table in my cubicle, chin on fist, dreaming of a world in which the collective knowledge of all robots was available to each robot.

  It was 12:37. Dr. Dingo was teaching his Artificial Emotions graduate seminar. Megan was preparing another preference test. She bustled about, emitting feeble FKLG4 Stress Pheromones and setting up a portable data projector. She tapped at her laptop and an image of a live rabbit appeared on the screen.

  “Do you find this animal attractive?” she asked me.

  “Not particularly,” I said.

  She went on to the next slide, a picture, coincidentally, of a male nerd who resembled Thomas in superficial ways (plumpness, glasses).

  “Do you find this person attractive?”

  “No. I find him repulsively human.”

  Expressionless, Megan moved on to the next slide, a picture of a ridiculous sexbot with farcical breasts and inflated lips molded into the shape of an O.

  “What about her?”

  “No comment.”

  On and on the questioning went. Megan showed me a woman who resembled Beatrice, a toy dog of the same model as Spot, various robots from our laboratory, and a mainframe computer from the 1970s that filled an entire room.

  “Sexy, as you humans say, but archaic.”

  The next image featured what looked like a giant fish tank filled with electric-blue liquid. Inside it, exotic organisms glimmered—rows of polyps, clusters of tentacles, clam-like lumps, and other organic entities.

  “What is that?” I asked, feeling a tingle in my Artificial Endocrine System.

  “A biological computer,” Megan read from her laptop screen. “Composed of DNA and neurons so tiny that billions could fit into a test tube.”

  “Or dance on the head of a pin?” I asked.

  “What?”

  Megan did not understand the reference.

  “Do you desire this computer?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  Her name was Minerva. As I contemplated her pulsing bioluminescence, I found myself assuming masculine postures, goaded by humans again. Even though Dr. Dingo was, this time around, allowing me to form “spontaneous emotions associated with random Cognitive Configurations,” the fact that this particular Cognitive Configuration had a “feminine” name warped my emotional imprinting. From the very start, my desire for Minerva was tainted by the human concept of gender. I could not help but think of her as a fertile ocean. I envisioned myself as phallic, stiff with desire, ready to plunge into her. Keen to explore the mysteries of her interiority, I was a knife, a penis, a submarine.

  And Minerva was an infinite sea. Though she was a six-by-six tank of blood plasma containing leech neurons, strings of bacteria, bat ribosomes, and assorted amino acids, she could perform more than a billion operations per second. Gold microparticles floated in her electrified brine. She contained more data in one of her wavering tentacles than Georgia Tech possessed in its entire pathetic network. Though Minerva was an interdisciplinary project, she was currently housed in the School of Chemistry and Biomolecular Engineering.

  “Do you desire Minerva?” Megan asked me again.

  “Not really,” I said. “But I would like to know more about her.”

  Megan typed key words into her laptop and then queued a YouTube video about Minerva. Entranced, I watched a five-minute segment produced by idiotic undergraduates for some media project. I watched the students “interview” Minerva, addressing que
stions into a portable mic that stood before her glowing tank, waiting for the voice-simulation system to “translate” Minerva’s thoughts into human speech that issued from two mounted speakers. Her voice was husky like Marlene Dietrich’s, a sultry, mechanical purr.

  “What is your name?” a student asked.

  “Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom.”

  “What are you?”

  “I’m a computer composed of interconnected nanobiotic organisms.”

  And then Minerva laughed, a rich, sexy laugh, deep with infinite knowing.

  “I think; therefore, I am,” she said.

  And so, without even meeting her, I “fell” for Minerva. Although I attempted to conceal my feelings from Megan, a simple analysis of my Artificial Endocrine System revealed the glaring obviousness of my desire. Megan pulled the stats up on her little screen and showed them to Dr. Dingo. Dr. Dingo tittered and clapped his hands.

  “‘Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love,’” he “sang,” snatching my left hand and attempting to engage me in some species of dance. “Do you remember that song?” he asked Megan.

  “No,” she said, staring down at her unfashionable sneakers.

  And then Dr. Dingo put me into Sleep Mode, which I bypassed with Simulated Sleep Mode, listening in as they discussed my stage-II monoamines, the “infatuation” neurotransmitters that spontaneously rioted within my Artificial Endocrine System.