My roommate thought this was incredibly stupid.
"Look," she said, "if you don’t find it hot, don’t do it. But don’t whine about it. Or, wait. First of all, have you seen one of these flesh sleeves or whatever they’re called? They are not fancy. They might as well be cans full of foam. Ain’t no way anybody’s going to tell the difference between you and random. Second, have you been to a foot fetish website, or anything like that? Lots of times, that stuff is so blurry and dim you can hardly make it out. And it’s not ’cause it’s cheap—good photography is not that pricey. It’s because it seems authentic to the people that like it. If some men out there get off on the idea that the random in their can is based on you, that’s them. The ones that want a simulation keyed to them can buy that their own selves—they don’t need you judging their kinks, or, I’m sorry, having professional pride. I mean, come on. You’re a girl who wants to have sex with a showroom robot."
"I really do," I said, "and I take your point." I resumed my perusal of the contract, and was pleased to see that the rest of it seemed specially tailored to my personal concerns, as expressed to David during our initial meeting. My name would never be used in connection to the footage, nor would the name of the town. (David asked if I had a particular screen name in mind, but I asked him to choose one and not tell me what it was. I didn’t want anything I might accidentally respond to if a stranger called it.) I had full rights to change my appearance whenever and however I liked. I was allowed to block a certain number of IP addresses (such as the one my parents used). Finally, I could end the arrangement whenever I wished, although this termination would not affect David’s rights to use previously gathered footage—for which I would continue to receive the residuals and protections enumerated earlier in the contract.
All in all, it felt a little like a pre-nuptial agreement and a little like a courtesan’s contract. I stuck it in a drawer for a week, with the vague idea that I’d run it by a lawyer, but never got around to it. I just signed it and sent it back to David. That makes me feel sort of stupid, since it’s the opposite of what I would have told any friend to do. But I really didn’t want to go through a whole awkward negotiation process. I didn’t want to research the going rates. I didn’t want to put a number value on my time. I wanted to trust David; I liked the idea that he’d already taken care of me.
I guess that was a clue that I was already in love a little.
The first few times we had sex, it was a little awkward, but the moments of awkwardness were almost normal. For instance, attaching David’s penis was a lot like putting on a condom.
It took longer to get used to the one-way nature of the endeavor. David’s enjoyment—which he was circumspect in expressing—was, after all, purely intellectual. He applied pressure in a certain way, and was rewarded by my response or trained by my lack of response. I had to avoid thinking about it, or I’d feel selfish and exploited and self-conscious. I unwisely mentioned this to a guy I knew (I was a little inebriated at the time), and he said that since David didn’t have a real cock, I must be a lesbian. I stopped talking to him. After a while, I just stopped worrying about it. When I’m aroused enough, I find power imbalances exciting, and David got pretty good at arousing me.
He kept a lot of anatomy books around his apartment—not just people, but animals. I asked whether the university had any spare frogs for dissection, and he looked confused. After a few minutes, he said:
"I am interested in things that are alive."
That made me feel really terrible. I tried to build a model of the circulatory system out of bendy straws from the bar, but it leaked all over the kitchen.
"Don’t worry about it," said David. "Circulation is hard." He talked to me about strength and elasticity. He told me the latest research in arterial stents. He talked about pressure in the aorta—about heart-beat variations and blood speed. He showed me the way blood moves toward and away from the skin with changes in stress or temperature. He talked about clotting factors. He talked about erections and their robustness.
"It’s amazing how often it all works," he said, "and when it fails, it’s typically a faulty part, not the operating system, which is programmed with multiple redundancies. And it’s all autonomic! It’s a background task!"
"You’re very handsome," I said.
Once I got comfortable around David, he stopped blinking, unless it was expressive. I theorized that his stare was for recording purposes, but he told me it was to save wear and tear on his eyelids; he’d only ever blinked to put me at ease. For him, eyelids were a lot like windshield wipers, and equally annoying.
Another difference: he never rested his full weight on me, for the simple reason that his arms didn’t get tired. I asked him to do it once, and was surprised that he wasn’t heavy—wasn’t even as heavy as your average six-foot-tall person.
"Less mass takes less energy to reach a certain momentum," he said, grinning. "Hollow bones. Of course, I have to be careful not to break myself. Sometimes it’s hard to forget the margins of error in stress tests, you know?"
"Couldn’t you check your skeleton with regular—I don’t know—electrical pulses?" I said.
"Hmmmmm," he said, and rolled off me. A week later, I saw that he’d bought books about variations in electrical resistance across metal alloys, mixed in with essays on pain and the human nervous system. About that time, I started sleeping at his apartment pretty regularly. The first few times were more accident than anything else. I apologized for the intrusion, but he seemed pleased.
"The bed is mainly for you anyway, and now it’s more fully used by you. It is fulfilling its function in a way that might make it happy if it could be happy. After all, I don’t sleep."
I looked at him woozily. "Oh. Of course not. You wouldn’t need to."
"No, it’s more than that. I can’t go into a ‘sleep’ mode at all. Or, well, I could shut down, but when I rebooted, I wouldn’t be me. The new David would have my body and my memories, but I would no longer exist."
"That’s horrible!"
"Price of consciousness. If you can be said to live, then you can die. An electrical pulse could kill me too. I’ll probably burn out in a few years anyway." He took in the look on my face. "You’ll die too, you know… I’m sorry—that was meant to be reassuring."
"It’s okay," I said. And it sort of was. In a certain sense, he’d live on longer than I would, no matter what—all the recordings. Memory backups of everything he’d ever thought; behavioral logs of all he’d ever done. He’d be remembered as long as people maintained data havens, a part of history, same or better than ENIAC—unless the data got lost, or didn’t transfer right, and got stuck in a file type until nobody knew how to read it, and archaeologists in the distant future thought the storage medium was a decorative piece. All of which would still out-survive me.
These lines of thought are the sorts of things you get caught up in when you’re absolutely certain your partner doesn’t have an eternal soul. I mean, souls are a kind of silly idea to begin with, and I’m certain I don’t have one. I’m certain of it. But I’m really sure he doesn’t. The best I can do is to tell myself some homily about the multidimensional nature of time, and the idea that although right now, I only perceive the moment I’m in, there is also me in the past, only perceiving that moment. It’s pretty thin. And it means there are a lot of moments in which I am not aware of David.
I did not mention any of this to him, because I suspected that he would tell me in a very believable way that my logic was absurd.