Ralph Burch
Duplicate lovers
CHAPTER ONE
Clarence Williams sped to the supermarket parking lot in his Skimmer, which rode on air instead of wheels. Beside him sat a man that looked exactly like Clarence, that could've been his twin brother. A woman sat in the back seat.
The man who sat silently beside Clarence and was an exact duplicate of him was not his twin brother. It was Clarence Two, a robot. And it was 9 a.m. on an August day in 1995.
Clarence circled to join the other robot owners, each with a duplicate seated beside him or her, in Skimmers similar to Clarence's. The humans got out of their cars to mill around the closed doors of the supermarket, awaiting the manager who would open the doors. The robots, most of whom looked exactly like their owners, sat patiently, silently, waiting for the call to work. Clarence found a friend, Henry.
"Still thinking of trading in your G.M. and your DuPont for A-C robots?" asked Henry.
"You know it," said Clarence. "I've already got my order in."
"How stupid can you be?" asked Henry. "A-C robots are the worst. Twenty companies make a better robot."
The store manager arrived. The robots filed silently out of the Skimmers on order from their owners and into the store to do their jobs. Some were checkers, some were stock-handlers, some were baggers. Besides the store manager, there was only one other human worker in the store, a woman too poor to own her own robot. The robots with plastiskin surfaces and driven by miraculous miniature electronic 'chips', mingled with the human customers, blending so perfectly that it was impossible to distinguish between human and machine. The salaries the robots earned would go to the owners, who could go fishing, stay home and loaf or work at other jobs.
Robots delivered, and the store buzzing with early morning customers, Clarence and Henry returned to the parking lot. Henry looked at the robot woman in the back seat of Clarence's vehicle. He shook his head.
"You've got a robot checker and a female robot bank teller," he told Clarence. "You'd have to give up both to get one of the A-C robots. You can live like a king – why give it up?"
Clarence was tired of Henry's skepticism. "You want to know why? I'll tell you why. It's a secret, but I got a good reason. The new A-C robots are gonna be able to have sex."
"You're crazy! Nobody would dare make a robot that has sex."
"A-C will. They'll have the only robots in the country – in the world! – that can both work at jobs and have sex."
"Man," said Henry, "giving a robot sex equipment is against the law! Didn't you know that."
Clarence smiled a cunning smile.
"No, my friend. Altering a robot after it leaves the factory, that's against the law. The black market sex attachments stink anyway. Any manufacturer of robots can make 'em do anything they want, except kill a human."
"Clarence, twenty big companies make robots – G.M., DuPont, Kodak, Lockheed, even the telephone company. They're all in the act. Not one puts sex parts in robots. How come?"
"Because they're big companies with little old lady stockholders and a public relations image. It's a gentlemen's agreement – until some small aggressive outfit comes along and starts sexing-up the robots. When profits drop, they'll switch fast-enough. By then, little old A-C right here in Chicago will be way out in front."
"You know so much!" sneered Henry.
Clarence had had it up to here with Henry's sneers. He was sworn to secrecy but this morning, he couldn't take it any more.
"My cousin is a lady engineer at A-C downtown," said Clarence. "She's in Advanced Research. She's working on a robot with sex parts right now. I've seen pictures. I'll tell you something, friend. Those first A-C's will sell for $100,000, and your average non-sex robot will drop from $20,000 to $5,000 on used robot lots all over Chicago and everywhere else!"
He stalked off in triumph to deliver his lady robot to her job at the bank as a teller. Might as well goof off the rest of the day. When you own two working robots, who needs a job. And when those A-C sex jobs come out – zowie!
Henry waited until Clarence was out of sight. Then he pulled a small transceiver out of his pocket and called the Chicago headquarters of the private detective firm that employed him. By noon every large corporation in the country that made work robots had the word. A small Chicago outfit was about to release a robot with sex parts – and this newest of industries, that had excited the country for the past ten years, was due for a major upheaval.
Thirty miles away in downtown Chicago, Nancy Lyons, Project Engineer for the A-C Corporation, cleared her laboratory of all humans. She was all alone with Big Sam, the first robot in the history of the world who had everything.
She walked up to the six foot robot who smiled politely down at her.
"Well, Sam," she said, "today you become a man. You cost us two million dollars and the front office wants to find out what they've bought."
The robot stood a little over six feet, with broad shoulders, a nicely tapered torso and muscular legs. His body was patterned after a famous athlete, while his face resembled Nancy's boss, Nelson Harper. It was both an in joke and a compliment to the head of Advanced Research.
"You're beautiful," the robot told her, his seduction cycle activiated by her body heat and other sensory data.
"Thank you," laughed Nancy, eyes dancing. The fact was, she was beautiful. It was an accident of birth. She had an engineer's brain in the sexy body of a model. At thirty, she was at her physical as well as mental peak.
She accepted her beauty and femininity. Her usual dress was a black leatherite jumpsuit with a wet look. Breasts tight and jiggly in the suit, belly flat, rear-end ripe, thighs and legs perfectly curved, she was a fitting representative of the human race in this first sex encounter with a machine.
She pulled down Sam's head and kissed him on the mouth. At the probing of her pink tongue, his lips opened. Her tongue shot into his mouth. She savored his sweet breath, delicious saliva, his gasp. Of course a sex robot had to have all of that and more. He had to be more like a man than a man himself.
Breathing deeply from the kiss, and excited, Nancy reached down and played with Big Sam's cock in his pants. It thickened and rose just like it was supposed to.
"Uh," grunted the robot in distress. His pants constricted his hard-on. Delighted with this little touch she'd given him, she released his cock from his pants, stroking the warm plastiskin that felt so real. It was great. She felt her cunt swell and become wet as she moved the soft cock skin over his hard love-muscle.
She fondled the stiff cock, so hot and natural, and she felt the velvet run of preseminal fluid seep out. Maybe there was a little more of that than a real man gave off.
"That feels great," murmured the robot in a deep, masculine voice. The voice had been specially chosen. Its vibrations stirred the female skeleton. The right voice added a lot of sexuality.
"You're hung," she laughed. She felt the nipples of her big breasts tighten hard in her wet suit as they burned in rising desire.
She reached down and felt for the buttons hidden in the robots balls. His cock expanded at once from the standard six inches to seven, and the girth also widened.
"Ohhh," she said. She worked the button again. Sam's jabber expanded once more to eight inches and wider. Sam was made to please any female orifice.
"I've got to get it off," begged Sam.
"Sure you do!" she laughed.
She bent her head to stare at the enormous male member. The color was perfect, skin slightly darker than the rest of his body. It was reddened right now with sex desire, almost purple at the spade-shaped head. Realistic purple veins fed "blood" into the muscle to keep Sam rock-hard. The skin looked paper-thin with the cock extended. She'd worked very hard to get that male prodder just right. A-C was going to make it or lose it on the cock of Big Sam and the cunt of Happy Nan, her female counterpart for Big Sam.