LoveMachine (2 page)

Chapter Two

Blue inclined his head slightly as if confirming something
he already knew. Though again, this was a projection Cally was making onto him,
not a real reaction a human being would have. Despite the bourbon, despite
herself, she felt suddenly nervous.

He’s a robot
, she said to herself.
It’s like he
said—he’s a bigger, more advanced version of the machinery I’ve got in my
bedside drawer. He’s been programmed to serve my every need. This is just
another need that he can take care of. There won’t be any ramifications. In
fact, it’s perfect. Blue would never make the same demands as a human man and
robots aren’t built to gossip.

“Besides,” she said aloud, “it’s Saturday night and I don’t
have anything better to do.”

“Please relax,” Blue said, his voice soothing. “Lie back on
the cushions, Cally, and close your eyes.”

Cally usually kept her eyes open during sex. She enjoyed
seeing what was going on. But there was something about that detached, polite
voice that made her do what Blue told her. She lay back on the silk and satin
cushions, spread her legs and closed her eyes.

He touched the inside of her left thigh first. His hand
wasn’t cold, exactly, more like room temperature, and surprisingly soft. She
tried to think whether she’d ever touched any of the house robots before. She’d
kept her distance—technology wasn’t her thing. She’d never learned how to service
them or program them like Ilsa had. The robots had probably passed her things,
glasses or plates or towels, but she couldn’t remember any one time in
particular.

Blue’s touch was pleasant. It lingered there on her thigh as
if he was getting her used to the feel of his synthetic skin. She pictured it,
bright electric blue against the tanned flesh of her leg. The thought didn’t
feel too weird. She could look down if she wanted and see if her imagination
was close to reality. But she didn’t. She kept her eyes closed and tried to
relax, exactly as Blue had told her to.

She was expecting the touch between her legs but she wasn’t
expecting how gentle it was and how sure. Something, a fingertip from the feel
of it, touched the wetness at the entrance to her pussy and pressed in with the
slightest of pressures before slowly sliding up the lips of her sex, lubricated
with her own juices, and finding her clitoris.

She gasped at the touch and jerked her hips. The hand on her
thigh moved to rest on her lower belly, calming her. Cally took a deep breath.
The fingertip was still on her clit, not moving at all. Not like a man, who
would be stampeding ahead, thinking of his own orgasm in the back of his mind
even if he was pretending to be patient. Not like her own hand holding the
vibrator, which would impatiently be frigging her to the first orgasm of the
night to get rid of as much tension and frustration as possible.

No, this touch stayed absolutely still. Neither the hand on
her belly nor the finger on her clit budged the tiniest fraction of an inch.
Cally could feel the pounding of her heart against the touches, and the way her
now-ragged breath made her body move slightly. That was all that was happening.
Her own heart and her own breath, rubbing infinitesimally against the robot as
she saw nothing but the warm red glow behind her own eyelids.

It was, strangely, thrilling.

“Blue?” she whispered. To assure herself that this was what
he meant to do, that his attention hadn’t been caught by a bit of undusted
shelf or dirty laundry.

“Cally,” came his voice back. It was deep and utterly human.

At the same moment, the fingertip on her clit began to
vibrate.

It was the same way Old Faithful vibrated but the touch was
gentler and more precise. The vibrations spread out over her entire pussy, up
and down the nerve endings of her body.

“Oh Jesus,” Cally moaned.

“Do you like that?”

“Do I ever.”

“Would you like me to move the stimulation?” Blue
demonstrated by moving his fingertip up and down, around the sides of her clit.
Cally groaned loudly.

“Or perhaps you would like me to increase it?” He did
something she couldn’t see but she assumed it was him applying his other
vibrating fingertips, because now her entire pussy was on incredible fire, and
yet the feeling was so delicate and exquisite that she could hardly tell where
it began or ended.

“That’s amazing.”

“Which do you prefer?” He alternated between the one finger
and the many fingers and Cally tossed her head from side to side on the pillows
and clutched the bedspread.

“Oh my God, oh my God. Just—just do what you’re doing.
Please. Don’t stop. I’m going to come in a minute.”

“Do you mean you are about to have an orgasm?”

“Yes. Oh yes. Blue.” Cally writhed under him.

“It is very interesting, your response. Do you think I could
increase the pleasure if I—”

Something, one finger, many fingers, slipped into her pussy
and Cally bucked on the bed as she came like an explosion. She cried out and
grabbed something, she wasn’t sure what, thrashing around and clenching her
eyes shut, clenching her pussy around the thrusting fingers.

It went on and on, with no thoughts and no words, until
Cally ripped in a breath and realized she was being fucked by the fingers in
her pussy, which had continued without a pause all through her orgasm. It felt
as if they were filling her, reaching all the way to her womb.

Whoa, he’s got big hands
, she thought in a daze. She
opened her eyes only to close them again on a hazy image of Blue working on
her, his glowing amber eyes focused not on what he was doing between her legs
but on her face.

Oh, but those hands. They played her carefully, skillfully,
and within scant minutes she was coming again and again, so many times that she
lost count.

Hours, it felt like. Blue paused, stroking her lightly
between climaxes, just long enough for her to recover. Then he would stroke her
again, slide his fingers in and out of her, sometimes slowly, sometimes so
quickly the world seemed in delirious fast-forward.

The final orgasm made her kick her legs on the mattress,
made her nearly toss herself off the bed, her muscles aching, her skin slicked
with hot sweat, and Cally cried out, “Please stop, please stop, I’m going
insane.”

Everything stopped.

“Are you satisfied, Cally?” came Blue’s voice and Cally
blearily opened her eyes again. She had no idea how much time had passed. But
Blue looked the same, still blue and courteous, his hairless head and glowing
amber eyes attentive. He could be bringing her a drink.

“Yes. I’m—oh my God, Blue, where did you learn how to do
that?”

“Observation and study,” he said blandly. “Are you ready to
go to sleep?”

“Yes.” And he was right—the most heavy, satisfied, contented
sleep lay bunched around her like a comforter waiting to be pulled up round her
shoulders. Cally realized she was holding on to his thigh where he was standing
next to the bed and her fingertips were white. When she let go, her hands were
cramped.

If he were a man, she would have left bruises.

Blue didn’t say anything about it. Gently, he pulled the
bedspread down on one side of the bed, the side she hadn’t been lying on, and
Cally crawled into it, between the cool sheets. They were cooler than his skin.
Cooler than his…amazing hands.

One of them smoothed back the hair from her sweaty forehead.
“Sleep well, Cally,” said Blue. “I enjoyed that.”

You’re not supposed to be able to enjoy anything
,
thought Cally but she was too tired to say so. A delicious languor had stolen
over her body, the result of several of the best orgasms she’d ever had. All of
her tension, all her frustration, was gone. She couldn’t remember ever having
been so relaxed in her life.

“G’night, Blue,” she murmured instead.

Dimly, she heard him walking around the room, turning off
lights, removing her bourbon glass, arranging her discarded clothes neatly on a
chair. At the door, before he turned off the final overhead light, Blue paused.

“Thank you,” she said to him, already not sure whether what
had happened was real or a dream. He paused before he replied and she was
half-asleep, on the verge of slipping down into that silk-lined soft abyss.

“Good night, love,” she thought she heard him say, and then
she was asleep.

Chapter Three

When she woke, Cally was thoughtful.

This was an unusual state for her on a Sunday morning.
Usually on a Sunday morning she was hungover and grouchy. But today she felt
fantastic. Her skin felt fresh and new and her muscles felt as if they’d had
the best workout ever. Her pussy was still sensitive but in the best possible
way. Tingling. It was amazing what a good night’s sleep could do for you. And
great sex.

The great sex was what she couldn’t stop thinking about.

When she went down for breakfast, her brother Jonathan was
sitting at the dining room table in his suit and tie, finishing up his
scrambled eggs. He raised an eyebrow.

“I had an early night,” Cally told him.

“On a weekend?”

“I guess I needed the sleep.”

Jonathan peered around her. “Where’s your fuck buddy?”

Startled, she looked over her shoulder. Was Blue in the
dining room? How did Jonathan know about what they’d done?

Then she saw the teasing look on her brother’s face and she
shrugged. “I didn’t have anyone over last night.”

Jonathan made a great show of picking up his tablet computer
that sat next to his plate and scrolling down the screen. “Incredible. And it
appears that hell hasn’t actually frozen over. What’s the matter, Cally? Losing
your touch?”

“Ha ha. Why are you wearing a suit on a Sunday morning?”

“I’ve got a meeting in New York this afternoon.”

Only her brother would fly to New York to go to a business
meeting on a Sunday. Cally pulled out her chair at the table and a robot more
or less instantaneously appeared at her side. It wasn’t Blue, it was Red.

Red, though as hairless as Blue, was female in form, with
red skin—of course—and soft yellow eyes. She greeted Cally with her cheerful
voice. “Good morning, Cally. What would you like for breakfast?”

Cally didn’t answer her straight away. She was looking at
Red instead. Normally she hardly noticed the house robots at all—they were yet
another thing that made her family weird. Something that Ilsa and even Jonathan
found interesting but she didn’t. But her encounter with Blue was getting her
thinking. Was Red also…interested in human sexuality? She was a female
robot—had Blue and she experimented together? Did they have some sort of
romance going on?

She glanced down. Red’s crotch was as smooth as Blue’s. He
couldn’t have learned the things he knew from playing with her. But did Red
know what she and Blue had gotten up to? Did all the house robots know?

“What would you like for breakfast?” Red repeated.

“Where’s Blue this morning?” Cally asked.

Red paused as her sensors evidently located her fellow
robot. “He is clearing snow out of the driveway,” she said.

“Alone?” Cally said with some surprise. “Does he have a plow
or something?”

“He uses a shovel.”

“That driveway’s two miles long.”

“Two-point-four-seven miles. Yes, he always does it by
himself. We had six-point-one-seven inches of snow between the hours of
midnight and seven a.m. though it has stopped snowing now. What would you like
for breakfast?”

“Um. Whatever you’ve got. Pancakes, I guess.”

“I will make pancakes. Would you like anything more,
Jonathan?”

“No thanks, Red.
Pancakes
, Cally?”

“I’m hungry, all right?” said Cally. She watched Red leave.
She wished it had been Blue in the dining room this morning so she could see if
his demeanor had changed toward her at all. On the other hand, she was relieved
he hadn’t been there too. Jonathan was determined to tease her and if he picked
up on something between her and Blue, it would only get worse.

And besides, she felt…shy.

“You never eat breakfast,” said Jonathan.

“Today I do.” She helped herself to coffee from the carafe
and went to the window. Down on the driveway, Blue was shoveling snow. Over two
miles’ worth. He picked up an enormous load of snow on the shovel and tossed
it, seemingly without any effort, onto the snowbank on the side of the drive.
His naked form against the snow was bluer than the clear winter sky.

“What do you think the house robots do when they haven’t got
chores?” she asked her brother suddenly. “I know this is a big house but there
are only three of us living here. Do they hang out? Or do they turn themselves
off or something?”

“They have a standby mode to save energy,” answered
Jonathan, finishing off his coffee. “I know Ilsa gets them to help her
sometimes on her programming.”

“Do they…play?” Blue had gone out of sight behind a snowbank
but she watched the place where he had been.

“Play? I play chess sometimes with Green but that’s at my
request. Ilsa put a program in. I don’t think they go out back and throw a ball
around, if that’s what you’re asking. Why this sudden interest in the robots,
Cally? You’ve never been interested, even when we were talking about selling
the patents.”

“I’m not. I’m just curious.”

Blue had called her curious last night.

Red, who must be the fastest pancake maker in the universe,
returned with her breakfast. Reluctantly, Cally left the window to go to the
table.

* * * * *

Half an hour later, she paused before knocking on the door
to Ilsa’s computer room. She could hear her sister’s voice inside. Listening
closer, she could make out a word or two—her little sister appeared to be
talking about mathematical theory.

At least Cally wouldn’t be interrupting anything, even if
Ilsa did have a visitor. Though for Ilsa, math was probably some kind of
foreplay. Cally knocked on the door.

“Yes, but don’t forget that the kernel of an elliptic
operator on a compact manifold is always a finite-dimensional vector space…come
in!”

Cally pushed open the door. Ilsa sat with her feet up on a
desk. She was wearing headphones over her short red hair and she was the only
person in the room, though about a bazillion computers buzzed and beeped. All
the equipment scattered everywhere made her younger sister look even more
petite.

“Hey, sis,” said Ilsa, taking off the headphones.

“Were you in the middle of a phone call?” Cally asked,
picking her way over wires. The room smelled of warm plastic.

“What? Oh, no, I was chatting with a bot.”

Cally looked around again. None of the house robots were in
here. “Where is it?”

“Not one of the housies, it’s a chatbot I wrote. This one
likes to talk topology.”

“You’re talking to a computer program? You’re weirder than I
thought.”

Though Cally had had sex with one last night. Her cheeks
heated slightly.

“They’re quite good conversationalists and did you really
come in here to pick a fight with me? Because I have lots to do.” Ilsa picked
up her headphones again.

“I didn’t come in to pick a fight. I was…wondering something
and thought you might know the answer.”

“What’s that?”

Cally looked for somewhere to sit down and Ilsa removed a
keyboard from one of the chairs for her. “Do you ever get any real-life human
beings in here?” Cally asked.

Ilsa sighed. “What did you want to know, Cally?”

“Do you think the house robots feel emotions?”

She hadn’t been expecting to ask that. She’d thought she was
going to ask something more like whether the robots talked to each other about
the Morgenstern family. She wasn’t sure what she had been intending to ask,
exactly. But the question had just come out.

Ilsa raised an eyebrow. “That’s an interesting question for
you to ask. As I recall, you were willing enough when Jonathan wanted to sell
them off to the highest bidder after Dad died. You weren’t interested in their
emotions then—just how much money they could make us.”

“I didn’t care whether we sold our robots. I didn’t care
about the money either. And it wasn’t the robots. It was only the patents.”

“So that every other house in the world could have robots
just like them. It’s the same thing as far as I’m concerned.”

“Seems like if other families had them too, we’d seem a
little bit more normal.”

“Normal is overrated,” said Ilsa.

They’d had this argument many times already and they weren’t
about to agree now. Anyway, Cally wasn’t sure if she wanted Blue replicas in
every house in the country. She shrugged and went back to her original
question.

“Do you think the robots have emotions?”

Ilsa smiled a little, secret smile. “What makes you interested?”

“Blue said something.”

“Ah. Blue. What did he say?”

Good night, love.

She hadn’t fully remembered he’d said that until right this
moment. It had seemed half a dream and she’d been more preoccupied with the sex
part.

But he had said that.
Good night, love.
Hadn’t he?

“It was…something a little bit unusual,” Cally said. “I
thought you would know if anyone would. You know more about them than anyone
else, except for Dad.”

Ilsa smiled fully at the compliment. “I don’t know about the
other housies, to tell you the truth. Sometimes I think they do feel things but
then I think it’s just me projecting my own emotions onto them. I don’t believe
that Dad created them to have emotions though I can’t find much in his journals
on that topic.”

“You said the other housies. Do you mean that Blue is
different?”

“Oh, I downloaded one of my chatbots into Blue.” She said it
with such elaborate casualness that Cally was immediately suspicious.

“What sort of a chatbot?”

“I asked him first. He said he didn’t mind.”

“As if any of the housies would say no if you wanted to do
anything to them. You’re the one who programs them now that Dad’s gone.”

“No, you’re right, they probably wouldn’t refuse me. Well,
Blue might now.”

“Ilsa,” said Cally, “what sort of chatbot did you download into
Blue?”

Ilsa sat forward in her chair, her face excited. “It’s the
best one I’ve ever written. It’s
surprising
. Most of the time the
chatbots are pretty good simulators of human thought but they’re simulators.
They’re predictable. If not at first, then eventually. And especially to the
person who created them. But this one that Blue’s got—it surprises me. It makes
connections that I don’t think I programmed in there.”

“How would it do that?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Like we would have a conversation,
say, about existentialism and I’d turn off the computer and go to bed. Chatbot
off, right? But the next morning, I’d turn it back on and I swear, it would
have been thinking about what I’d said overnight. It would have made logical
steps forward and analyzed my arguments and come up with counterarguments that
I never would have thought of, and connect it to real-life situations. Like,
instantly.”

“So you wrote a chatbot that’s smarter than you are.”

“Maybe. I thought maybe that it was staying active and
online and looking for answers on the internet. But even that—that’s targeted,
intelligent research.”

“You wrote a chatbot that’s smarter than you are and that
can learn to be smarter.”

“I’m not sure how it did it, to be honest. It was almost as
if it had a will of its own.”

“And that’s the chatbot you downloaded into Blue.”

“I was curious about what would happen.”

Curious. That again. It seemed to be a recurrent theme in
the Morgenstern family.

“Didn’t you think it might be dangerous?” Cally said.
“Giving an extremely physically strong robot an unpredictable—personality?”

“Dangerous?” Ilsa seemed genuinely shocked. “Oh no, none of
the housies could ever be dangerous. They were created to be gentle and
helpful.”

Yes. Ilsa was right. Cally had been alone and naked with
Blue last night and she’d never felt the slightest hint of menace.

“How has Blue changed?” Cally asked. “Have you been watching
him?”

“Sure. He comes here every day to talk.”

“Only to talk?” Cally asked. She got an imaginative flash of
Blue parting her sister’s legs.

No, Ilsa wouldn’t do that. Would she?

“Yeah, to talk,” Ilsa said. “That what I created the bot
for. He’s gotten even better at conversation since he’s been part of Blue. It’s
sort of hard to tell where Blue ends and the chatbot begins, actually.”

“Like brain and body?”

“I liked the word you used just now—‘personality’. Sometimes
it feels as if Blue does have one.” Ilsa nudged a large coffee-table book with
her toe. “He’s into art right now. Especially Michelangelo. I’ve had to raid
Dad’s library to keep up with him.”

“You talk about Michelangelo?”

“Among other things.” Ilsa shrugged. “Philosophy.
Mathematics. His own construction. Dad, sometimes. He’s curious about Dad.”

“Has he ever talked about…me?” From the surprised look on
Ilsa’s face, Cally supposed he hadn’t. “Forget it. I never asked.” Cally got up
to leave.

“What did Blue say to you, Cally?”

“It was nothing important. See you later, thanks.”

It was only when she’d reached her own room that Cally
identified the burning sensation in her chest. It was jealousy.