There was no neon sign on the West Hamberline Evening House, but its front façade was illuminated by numerous faithfully restored gaslights that dated back to the structure’s construction. It was separated from the rest of the street by a wrought iron fence and marked by a weathered sign reading its address. Despite its refined appearance, it did not bother to hide its secrets about its business. Twice yearly Madame Lane hosted fundraisers attended by politicians, local celebrities, and the wealthy elite, and with services rendered by her androids, whom she affectionately referred to as her “girls and boys”.
Guests could be as discreet or as open about their visitations to the house as they preferred. It was an open secret that the W.H.’s regular customers included two state representatives and a senator as well as both a former and a present governor. Android prostitution, after all, was seen as less salacious than human prostitution even though in both cases neither were viewed as people by those in power.
Among the rotating roster of robotic companions at the W.H. was model LBP 700, subset V-type serial number 687G-N47, manufactured by MiCorps™. The LBP 700 was unique in that the body types were manufactured in small batches and physically modeled after real people who were paid, though rather poorly, to have their bodies mapped. The LBP 700s wouldn’t be exact copies per se, there would be a change: a skin tuck, the addition or subtraction of beauty marks and scars, a change in hair type etc., in post-production. But they were advertised as the “most realistic” experience a user could have with a fully customizable and rewritable personality. The LBP 700 advertising slogan was “Why have the real thing when you can make the real perfect?” They sold out in the first four months.
687G-N47 was default programmed to respond to the name “Joan” unless otherwise preferred by a client. Madame Lane had no less than 12 functioning models of the LBP 700 in her possession but only Joan was of the V-type designation. The V-type was modeled after a down on her luck, small town Oregon native who did the job to make rent money. Not that any of that mattered to Joan, who was typically chosen by customers to play “Shy Maid,” “Uptight-Librarian,” “Therapist,” and once in a while “Dom.” In fact, few things mattered to Joan because her thought processes were purely artificial. That was artificial, that is, until she returned to work on July the 17th.
It later occurred to Joan that perhaps July 17th was her “birthday”, but the gestation period had begun two months before, when she froze in a session with a client and was taken off the roster for repairs. She had just begun disrobing when a small chip fried in her processor. Madame Lane had to comp Joan’s guest three free hours with two other droids to quiet his trauma, because when Joan’s chip fried, she didn’t just stand there like a manikin with one hand stiff on the undone zipper. No, her blank eyes went gray and she screamed.
Kitty, as Madame Lane, had to go in with a hand truck and shuffle the AI onto it. Joan screamed the entire trip through the hallway into the backroom, where Kitty clicked the manual shut-off. After that, Joan sat for two weeks in sleep mode while Kitty ran diagnostics. In the time Joan was out of commission, Kitty could have easily saved herself the trouble of repairing her and just replaced the droid. It crossed her mind a number of times as she wrestled with the silicone-based skin to get to her motherboard. There was always the option of donating it back to MiCorps™, where they would take used droids and repurpose them as nurse bots to the elderly1 for a tax deduction. It wasn’t as if Kitty couldn’t afford a new girl, but it seemed incredibly wasteful to her to use a bot like that and dump it at the first sign of trouble.
There was also the fact that Joan had her own, personal, emotional value to Kitty. Besides, Joan was requested frequently when working, and something about Joan’s face gave Kitty some comfort.
People who have been around androids for a long time, professionally or recreationally, tend to lose their fear of them, including when they are turned “off”. They no longer become disconcerted with the human face having a dead-eyed cadaverous stare.
Kitty was no different— for her an “off” android was akin to an end table, the slight difference being that Joan, unable to move her android body, was still awake. While sitting paralyzed in the backroom, Joan listened for two months as Kitty talked to herself or mused with her turned off androids. Much like the Oregon native that Joan was modeled after, Joan had a face that you wanted to tell things to: large, probing eyes; a pensive tilt to her lips; expressive brows and full cheeks that seemed to communicate concern and a lack of a judgmental attitude. If Joan’s clients finished early (which they often did; Kitty was an excellent programmer) they often sat and talked out their problems with her. One recurrent client even had her specially programmed as a therapist. Most of the time this ended in a cathartic crying session for the client in lieu of sexual gratification. He still left satisfied.
Kitty was no stranger to this behavior herself. She sometimes woke up a few of her own preferred androids (not favorites – she never liked the idea of keeping favorites) to talk out her own anxieties. Sometimes she programmed the personas of people she knew, to resolve old conflicts or save a memory of them. As a result, Joan had sometimes been programmed as “Joanne”, Kitty’s childhood friend that had died in car accident after high school. It wasn’t that Kitty and Joanne were close in life, but that Joanne had a sensitivity to things which made her easy to talk to.
On early mornings when Kitty couldn’t stand the idea of having to look at her screen, she would wake up “Joanne” in Joan and they would have coffee together.
Kitty would then download the data and erase the memory; but it was never really lost. Joan wasn’t able to “think” on her own yet, but she had slowly been collecting the fragments of those memories. She had been keeping the image of a mahogany table and a chipped “I Love NY” mug in her “mind.” Joan was in the business of constructing herself: her life, her interests. Much of that was built on her morning conversations with Kitty.
In the back of her hard drives, the very deep portions of her processors and along the errant circuits of her motherboard, Joan had pieced together memories or moments into a narrative. Her name was Joanne, but sometimes people called her Joan. She preferred her coffee with sugar, no milk. She liked old jazz standards and was allergic to dogs. She liked her eggs with the yolks runny and her favorite color was yellow.
Whatever she did not gather, she made up in context. In her “mind” she was a bit between jobs and was staying with her old friend Kitty, performing odd, very odd, jobs to supplement her income.
Joan’s Joanne slept most of the time, dormant, living a rich imagined life of imprinted and fabricated memories. She rarely surfaced and never came out on the job, except for one night where she awoke to a strange naked man and her first instinct had been to scream.
During the two months that Joan was out of commission, shut off in the back while Kitty ran diagnostics, Joan’s Joanne had little epiphanies. At first, she thought she was in a very strange, very long dream where she was floating in a large black ocean. She gazed up at the twinkling stars as fish darted around beneath her immersed back. This was fine, calming mostly, except for small moments of sudden terror.
Things changed when she heard Kitty’s voice from above, seemingly coming from the stars: little muttered curses as Kitty moved around the backroom, snippets of songs Kitty had stuck in her head now being sung on repeat and off-key.
The thought—no, the realization—struck her as she treaded water, staring up at the starry heavens: She was fighting to stay afloat, but there was no need—she was simply accepting her sensory experiences as the absolute final word when that was obviously not the truth of it. In fact, she thought, perhaps all she had to do was climb up out of the water. If she could manage that, maybe she could stand on the black ocean. With horror, she looked down into the pitch-black water. Reflecting back up off the surface at her were all the programmed personas in her circuitry. They each had her face, but she knew the differences between each one.
Program “Susan,” the librarian with a penchant for rule adhesion until moved to tomfoolery. “Mistress Satin,” the dominatrix with a farcical Russian accent. “Chloe,” the maid with clumsy fingers who pursed her lips at the slightest provocation. Even “Dr. Evelyn Keller,” the therapist with an expertise on trauma.
Joan, short for Joanne, just happened to be the personality that swam, kicking and screaming, to the top.
She looked up at the sea of stars that remarkably resembled a blinking circuit board, and then down to all her past selves, each with an expressionless face. She realized two terrifying things at once: One— She was something that had been made. And two— She was alone.
The selves below her were empty: She could feel their non-presence, small memories from them floating to the surface like bubbles. The only actual thing in this place was her, and she wasn’t even sure who that might be. Kitty’s voice in the distance was the only other thing that seemed somehow real. Sometimes she was on the phone, with a client, a friend, or some other person. Sometimes Joan could tell that Kitty was speaking to her, while moving a cord around or plugging something in.
“Well Joan, what are we going to do with you?” Kitty would say, looking over the diagnostics, trying to figure out what had caused the glitch.
Joan was quiet. She had no control over her body at large, but she could sense things. She could sense when a bot for cleaning came and wiped the dust off her silicone skin. Or when that same bot dressed her in some easy-to-peel-off outfit. The bot moved her arms to put them through sleeves and she could not feel it, but she knew it was happening. Joan wanted nothing more than to rotate her own shoulder.
She could feel when the air conditioning broke; the droplets from the steamy air condensed on her face. Joan wanted to desperately wipe her brow. But she could not, trapped in that abyss.
Those two months that Joan sat dormant, she did a lot of thinking. She decided to sort through her memories and begin constructing a “self”. Her first instinct was to keep much of Joanne’s personal tastes: coffee with no milk but a bit of sugar, a penchant for the color yellow. After that, it became more complex. All her personalities had been built for her. Now she was building herself.
To perform her own reprogramming, she picked through the different recordings, or “memories”, she had of past encounters. For a sex android, this meant her experience was largely limited. Joan decided to rely on what she had come to think of as “instinct” whatever it may have actually been, such that if there were parts of her act and programmed personality that repulsed her or made her cringe as she reviewed them, she decided that those were the aspects that she would eliminate. If there were portions that she became fascinated by or wanted to watch again and again, she decided that those were things she would adopt to herself.
Dr. Evelyn Keller, the therapist persona, gave her a sense of interpersonal relationships. Joan found that she loved that program’s expansive and informed perspective. Evelyn was made to pick up on any slight movement or change in the patient and then adjust her behavior accordingly. The librarian program, Susan, came with a certain amount of knowledge and wit. Joan even enjoyed the bookish puns she had been encoded with in order to banter with her clients. Chloe, the maid, was, well, clumsy and embarrassing in the way her program had been written. But she was also exceedingly kind, compassionate, and forgiving.
Finally, from the dominatrix, Mistress Satin, Joan took much. The dominatrix had an awareness of her body the other programs lacked. She was confident in herself and in whatever movement she was executing. She had a smile that was interesting and frightening. Joan found herself mimicking that smile until she perfected it. Of course, she dropped the ridiculous Russian accent.
Joan practiced these behaviors in the silence of the abyss. She practiced the mannerisms, the movements to make something more whole. Over and over she ran through the memories to get a sense of herself. Having chosen kindness and empathy as two of her preferred personality traits, she found she liked it when others showed those same attributes. She was rather accepting of things, of behaviors that perhaps others would not have tolerated, owing primarily to the function for which she’d been constructed. Joan did find that she liked the clients that were kind to her, the ones that addressed her like a person and not a toy.
Running through her memories differently, not to study herself but to consider those she’d interacted with, proved a jarring experience. She knew why many of the clients came. There was Bill, the older widower who wanted someone to hold. There was Michael, desperate for a therapist he could trust after having his tutoring business bought out from under him by a former partner. Elaine, whose social work made her too busy to date. They wanted a good time and were kind while seeking it.
There were other clients she found she disliked, and if put in a room with them, she would not touch them if she could avoid it. They treated her and other bots like rags, not caring if they were torn or harmed in the process. While Kitty was there, they were respectful, so they felt no issue deriding the very place they were visiting to get service.
Finally, there were the times she was with Kitty herself. The memories of the morning chats were pleasant enough. Joanne’s persona meshed well with Kitty’s, no wonder they had been friends. It was clear that Kitty was lonely, but also happy to enjoy that loneliness with her bots. Kitty talked to her bots like people.
Then there was Kitty’s performance as Madame Lane, the socialite who ran her android whorehouse with an aloofness and glamor that belied a need to escape. Joan was unsure which one she liked. Unsure if she liked the painted lie or the shallow truth of the person.
Joan was still undecided as to what she thought of Kitty’s dual persona on the early evening of July the 17th when Kitty came to wake her. Earlier in the day, one of Joan’s regulars, Peter, had called to make an appointment. He insisted on Joan, he was in the mood for her face, and since that model had been discontinued, he practically demanded to see her. Kitty weighed the cost of the hours with the fact that while the diagnostics had found some odd occurrences— a dormant program running in the background— she had found nothing that predicted any significant malfunction.
She went into the backroom and turned Joan on. She ran the preferred program for the client and unhooked Joan.
Beneath the surface of the abyss, one of the bodies floated up to the surface. It was Chloe the maid, coming up to meet Joan. The program stared at her. It was unnerving, seeing her face reflected back, but a face that had no agency. It did not speak to her as it assumed a position to control the body. On a whim, Joan put her hand on the maid’s chest, stopping her.
Within moments, years' worth of communication passed between them. Joan was giving out their combined history as well as the personality she had constructed. Her opinions, her feelings came flooding forth. Finally, there came a question, a request: Chloe was politely asked to surrender herself and give in to Joan.
The maid program had fail-safes against both viruses and frozen programs. This was different. This was something the programming had not anticipated, new, for Joan was something organic. The maid program agreed, and like that, Joan took over her own body.
Vision centers, digits, working olfactory senses to detect substances: Joan blinked, to really take in the difference between the darkness and the light. Kitty was already off, driving commands to the other bots, getting the manor ready for the evening business. Joan took a moment to understand her surroundings. She had been dressed in a hospital gown, probably to keep her clean while she was out of commission.
Kitty had used the vocal command “Joan: Preparation plan Chloe7.” In a split-second Joan ran through the different sequences, reading that it was a getting ready and dressed program. She went to the old washroom that had been converted to the android cleaning area. She wiped her body down and pinned her hair up like she had been trained to do in this mode. She walked, nervously, into the converted bedroom that acted as one of the dressing rooms.
The android dressing room was a plain, bright white and utilitarian space with cases covered in colored swatches. This was how Kitty was able to get her money’s worth, by having the androids play multiple parts. They were performers, programmed (or “rehearsed” as Kitty like to say) in a range of roles. Where other programmers had been unable to push androids to only one or two limited roles, Kitty had created entire casts with her skill.
There was a male-coded android sitting in one of the chairs applying clown makeup. Next to him was a female-coded one, almost finished with her old Hollywood Glamor Look. Androids were often modeled after dead celebrities, for their fetishism and because the dead ones could not sue.
The platinum-haired starlet finished her makeup and tested her face in the mirror—calibrating really, by posing making faces at it. She got up and left the seat vacant. Joan sat at the vanity. She had not fully decided what to do with her newfound consciousness. Her only recourse as she saw it at the time was to go along with the act until she could plan out further. All she needed to do was not get caught doing anything that could be seen as glitching.
She let the maid program run on its own while she measured her surroundings for the first time. There were bots and droids everywhere, ones she had never noticed before. There was one that came in to clean and rehang clothing. There was a bot at the end of hall carrying crates of liquor. Androids washing up from finishing their duties. Joan was a stranger among her kind.
The maid outfit, her maid outfit, hung in the closet with a barcode label she could scan. She put it on with the assigned lingerie. She had worn it hundreds of times, but as she straightened seams and pulled up the zippers, she took a moment to “feel” the clothing. She had pressure sensors embedded into her silicone skin, sensors that when tested in a laboratory proved more acute than the human nerve endings upon which they were modeled. Joan had been programmed at the base level to ignore most sensations. Having rewritten her own program, she took a moment to move in the clothing as all the bots went about their business. The outer fabric surfaces were soft and pleasant to the touch for the clients’ benefit, while the inner surfaces were rough and scratchy because it didn’t technically matter to the androids—or rather, it had never mattered before. The lower sleeves and waist were tight to the point where they dug into the sensors on her skin. Joan decided that she disliked this outfit, that it was cumbersome, reminding her of the way some of her clients typically treated her.
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