"So you don’t know what’s in that," I observed as he sipped his drink. He laughed, and it didn’t seem forced but probably, and likely definitively, was. (Whether his expressions of emotion are expressions or emotion is something I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out and have mostly given up on.)
"I misspoke," he said. "I have a sense of smell much more accurate than a non-mechanical man’s. I can give you a complete ingredient list if you like. I can also tell you with confidence that no one has brought explosives into this club. What I don’t have are opinions about what tastes good and bad—just educated guesses. So what do you do in your spare time?"
I blinked. "Um… I write songs. I’m not very good. Some people like them."
He laid his hand across mine. "I apologize," he said, "for bringing up a delicate topic. It was meant as a simple expression of interest." He withdrew his hand. I realized I was blushing, which made me angry, which made me blush more.
"Listen," he said, "you’re obviously working," (which pissed me off—I’m supposed to be subtle) "but I’d like to talk to you more—to find out how you spotted me and to make a proposal. I’d like to meet you outside after your shift. In the meantime, I’d like to buy whatever you’re supposed to be selling me."
"Beef-infused tequila. It’s awful, but you have no taste. I get off at 2."
At that point, I hadn’t decided whether I was going to stand him up. He was attractive enough, but I couldn’t see things going anywhere, given the circumstances, and the last thing I want after a night of fake flirtation is to go on a date. When I watched him pull out his wallet again, it hit me—no university would bankroll an incognito android’s night of drinking. He was making his own choices with his own money. Where did he get it?
When I came out the door at 2:30, he was waiting, seemingly unperturbed by the extra half hour. His posture was perfect—which doesn’t count for much since he has a harder time slouching, but it seemed refreshing at the time. He stood under a light, but his pupils were no more or less dilated than they had been inside the bar.
"Where do you want to go?" I said.
"Anywhere in range of wifi. Otherwise, I get pretty stupid."
"That makes sense." We walked toward the diner on the corner. "For the record, there was no particular thing that gave you away, although I’m accumulating them now. I just spend a lot of time around people. You were doing a fine job. It probably helps that no one’s looking for you. I mean, I mostly follow social news, so maybe I’m not the best informed, but I didn’t think any of you guys had been released into the wild, so to speak." He shrugged, and opened the door with a cocky half smile.
"Don’t worry—I have a tracking device and a kill switch and I clock in at the university daily. It would have been a big deal a few years ago, but robot stories are currently out of fashion."
David didn’t eat. He explained that he could seem to eat, for politeness’ sake, but would have to regurgitate it later. We agreed that seemed wasteful. He watched me through half of a pancake before he said:
"So, how do you feel about having sex for money?"
"In the abstract?" I said.
"In context."
I thought about it for a minute. David waited without expression or tension, and I couldn’t help thinking of a pulsing cursor.
"Are you telling me," I said, "that you are a sex machine?"
"In a manner of speaking. More like a really expensive camera. With consent, of course. Please stop me if I am offending you. I’m working from a hypothesis that you’ll be more curious than offended, because you work at a bar where you are paid to look pretty, where you sell opinions that aren’t yours, and where you nevertheless are willing to talk freely about personal subjects. In addition, your initial approach gave me reason to suspect you are attracted to me."
"So basically, you are asking me to sleep with you because you think I will say yes."
"Yes. I think it would be easy to work with you. I also think the ratios of your face and body will appeal to a broad segment of the population. You are very beautiful."
I should have been insulted. I was insulted. But David was right—you don’t last long in any of my lines of work if you can’t look past that kind of objectification to find the angle. So far, this seemed like a bad deal to me. I was doing fine for money, and I couldn’t cross-promote without emphasizing my identity. Dangerous?
At the same time, I did, in fact, find the idea of being filmed by him somehow deeply sexy.
"Your university has a very progressive ethics board," I said.
"Some years back, during a fracas over bathroom use by transgendered students, the university made an official declaration guaranteeing free expression of sexual preference to all staff and students. That ruling was later successfully employed by a student to remove all prohibitions on pornography, whether viewed or created, from the code of conduct. Technically, I am neither staff nor student—more university property—but for all practical reasons, I’m considered staff. Public relations is of course not happy, but they can hardly deny my ability to give informed consent without opening themselves to other accusations."
"Such as?"
"That they’re holding a sentient being in slavery."
"Shit."
"They could, of course, argue that on the contrary, I am not sentient—that I merely appear to think and feel, and that observers anthropomorphize the rest. But that would make me a less impressive marketing tool. It’s simpler to treat me like everyone else than to make new rules, don’t you think?"
By now, I was deep into my third cup of coffee, and feeling very awake. It was getting hard to tell whether David was making me warm and aroused, or whether it was the caffeine. At the very least, I was pretty sure I liked the way he was keeping things intellectual—no baby, baby, baby, I need you. Just information. Not cold, you understand, but its own sort of respectful. It made me want to be decisive and pragmatic, and I liked feeling that way.
"So," I said. "Tell me about your equipment."
A few days later, David’s agent sent me some papers, and they were full of percentages. I would be paid a certain amount per minute for the recording process (referred to as my live performance), and a certain royalty rate for subsequent customer purchases of the footage (with breakdowns by storage medium). There were rates for re-broadcasting rights, which were ranked by time of day and by network audience estimates. There were rates for purchases of audio but not video and vice versa.
My highest royalty rate fell under the subheading "teledildonic simulations." Thanks to the special machine that was David, viewers with sleeve vibrator computer hardware peripherals would be able to feel, in a limited and sanitized way, what it was like to have sex with me.
I had to think for a long time to figure out why this bothered me—after all, I wouldn’t actually be having sex with them, and they would have plenty of clues that they weren’t having sex with me. My absence, for instance. Eventually, I realized that was exactly my problem: the vibrator me that was with them would be faking it. Their thrusts would not be the cause of my good time, and my good time would not correspond to their thrusts. I would be a worse sexual experience than one programmed by a computer, which would at least have access to their biofeedback. It seemed unfair.