Strange Flesh (21 page)

Her head tilts thoughtfully for a moment. “Now, are we the first ones to think of this? Of course not. People have always made love to objects. Sailors used dolls made of wood, burlap, and hair of horse. They called them ‘sea wives.’ Now we can do a little better.”

She goes on to detail the more recent history of teledildonics. The subtleties of Allen Stein’s “Thrillhammer,” an internet-enabled dildo chair that, while something to behold, provides only a visual experience for hetero males. Many device enthusiasts swear by their Venus 2000 / Sybian setups; these are a powerful pair of his-and-hers sex machines, but they’re operated only by simple remotes and cannot actually communicate. At the other end of the technological continuum, one finds the purely mechanical charms of a contraption called the Monkey Rocker.

If one artificial coupling strategy has been to sexually enable furniture, another is to simulate actual humans. In response to a crackdown on prostitutes, the Koreans created Robot Hotels, populated with anatomically equipped mannequins. The U.S. has seen the debut of the gorgeous but inert Real Dolls and their more cerebral cousin Roxxxy, who actually runs some pretty respectable AI.

But Olya scorns such literal substitutes. “All these robo-whores give new meaning to the term ‘uncanny valley.’” She means the hypothesis that
almost
-lifelike human facsimiles produce feelings of revulsion in their living counterparts.

“Maybe one day, perhaps they will be very sexy, but now I think our
way is better. We want the machine, the interface, to disappear, and leave you with two
real people
making love.”

Other companies have taken the iTeam’s approach as well. Currently on the market is the RealTouch, which is a belt-driven device for men that produces friction in concert with specially produced porn loops. For the ladies, there’s the Sinulator, a vibrator control module that they’ve hooked up to Second Life. Olya sniffs, “A broken metaphor. I do not need someone else to run my Rabbit. If you’re fucking, there must be thrust. We are trying to simulate, not just interact. The problem, it is much harder.”

I’d like to explore Olya’s ideas at length, but she abruptly stands up and moves over to the room’s giant whiteboard. She wipes out a small colony of Garriott’s intricate drawings and with precise strokes sketches a block diagram of the system. As she’s doing this, she describes the team members’ respective roles.

She handles what they call the “skinterface,” literally where the machines touch the users. This includes much of the sensing package, which is currently being upgraded. The anatomical rendering is a series of air muscles operated by tiny valves controlling pressure from a small, but powerful, air compressor. Miniature heating elements provide an approximation of body temperature, and then finally there’s the “lubrication management” system.

Garriott’s responsibilities cover the gross mechanical engineering, including head and neck positions, the hand-tracking wings, and almost all the programming for the bots’ internal computers. He also built the configurable seats they call “MetaChairs.” Olya notes that while all these components seem to be working well, when run in real time, sometimes erratic, “maybe painful” behavior can result. Thus the software running in the devices’ embedded brains is called the ErrOS, supposedly for “ERotic Operating System,” but really a dig at the reliability of Garriott’s code.

In fairness, his challenge is the most difficult. It’s hard enough for two live humans to coordinate all the urgent motions of love, and the issues are multiplied exponentially when you insert two dumb robots into the mix. Olya explains that the team has found that people are very forgiving of sensory infidelity as long as
some
kind of rhythm is maintained. The dreaded “pop-out” in real sex must be avoided at all costs.

The iTeam combats this problem by having the large heads try to always maintain contact with the reflectors on their user’s crotch. Internal to the heads one finds the appropriate sex organ, a mechanized vagina for Ginger and an adjustable dildo for Fred. As the male user enters into Ginger, she feels this and sends a message asking Fred to thrust out accordingly. Since the woman moves too, much of Garriott’s massive code base is dedicated to hashing through data about who is doing what and determining the proper response for the robots.

Physically, Fred and Ginger are almost exclusively focused on points of genital contact. The exception is the “wings.” These armatures provide a very rough sense of the rest of your partner’s anatomy. They track the motion of your hands along the surface of your bedmate’s virtual body, making no attempt to render subtleties like earlobes or nipples. They mainly just stand in for places you might be prone to hang on to: breast, torso, ass cheeks, and back of the head. The arms cover a large volume of space, but they also fold into a compact form that allows a single robot to be stored in a good-sized suitcase. The team planned for two more arms to allow v-lovers to feel the glide of each other’s fingertips, but they’ve decided that the intricacies of that feature will have to wait for a future release.

Xan joined to create characters and animation, and she ended up with all of the demo’s programming as well. But the iTeam’s objectives have recently become more ambitious. They want a system that lets users all over the world come together using any skin they choose and start building their own scenes from day one. This is where I come in.

“James, the little ones tell me you are very good with networks.”

“I’ve played around a little. I can’t say I’m a 3D wizard though.”

“I think this is okay. Maybe you have heard of NOD?”

I should have seen this coming. The whole reason I’m involved with these mecha-molesters is because a billionaire game maven seems unnaturally interested in them. Why should it surprise me that they’d use the same tech platform to pursue their deviant agendas?

Now that I think about it, NOD is perfect for the iTeam too. Being a feckless user-driven environment, it largely falls to the players to entertain themselves. The principal activity they’ve discovered is to copulate with all the frenetic energy and staggering variety one finds on earth.
More, probably. In NOD, you’ll find everything from white weddings to gilded
scheisse
palaces. Bondage, age play, garment fixation, deformity adoration, and forbidden Orc-Ewok liaisons. But while this might seem exciting and new, it really boils down to spicy chat and some ribald but low-fi animation. Behind it is old-fashioned jerking off. Which, while amusing and effective, is perhaps in need of an update. This is the iTeam’s mission.

“Absolutely. Nutting Over Data. I try to have all my sex there. It’s cheap, hygienic, and nobody knows I’m a dog.”

“A dog? Ah, you are kidding. But what you say is correct. Even more important, they are the only major world with the truly open-source software, so we can modify it to our, ah . . . specific needs. This is what you must now do: hook us up.”

“That will not be trivial.”

“Ya. So we give you four weeks.”

The traditional absurd deadline. “What’s the hurry?”

“We want to leak video then. So we can get TODD invite for formal launch.”

TODD is a rapidly growing tech conference held annually in New York. The name stands for Totally Obsessed with Digital Depravity, and its founders conceived it as an antidote to the earnest nerdiness of the establishment’s Technology Entertainment Design seminar, “TED.” The target participants are dissolute digerati from all over the world, and the occasion tends to punch above its weight in terms of media coverage. Given their daily ration of boring cell phones and laptops, the tech press is notoriously receptive to stories with a little flesh tone.

“Formal launch. That implies you have a business plan.”

“An artist is concerned about the filthy money?”

“They say it’s the root of all evil. So if your filthy robots are going to enslave humanity, I suppose we’ll need some pretty soon.”

“But our robots will be very clean. Dishwasher safe, and they won’t give you gonorrhea. The Dancers, we call them. The name is important. We want them to be elegant, classy. Like Fred and Ginger. Like iPhone. Expensive to make, but we get by so far.”

“But eventually . . .”

“Eventually we need servants to peel our grapes, so yes, I have been
talking to some people. You do not need to worry with this now. You worry about your work. We made the decision to start with a ready prototype, so we keep more equity.”

“Speaking of equity . . .”

“Ya, ya. What is your ‘end,’ yes?”

“A girl’s gotta eat.”

“Right. We must all sign the papers soon. When we get corporate structure set up. A business, it must be capitalized. So, with all that, we determine correct shares very soon. But I guarantee”—she leans over and caresses the back of my neck—“we make you happy.”

We both know that signing up for a venture without having the business elements on paper at the outset is totally moronic. Is Olya just reflexively trying to manipulate a number-dumb video geek, or does she really think that brandishing her cleavage at me like it’s a mind-control ray will make me do what she says? Excellent breasts have elicited from me a long list of ill-advised actions, but their allure tends to wear off after a few hours of coding.

“Well, I guess we’re working for love, not money.”

Of course, in the workplace, money is the only thing that actually
counts
. That’s true often enough in the bedroom as well. People say that sex drives technology, but they’re skipping a step. Money drives technology. Sex is just one of the few things people are reliably willing to pay for.

But I’m getting paid in any case. What she doesn’t know is that I might get fired from my real job if I queer this relationship by digging in my heels over a fantasy fortune.

Olya flashes a feral smile. “That is the correct attitude. Welcome to our team, Mr. Pryce.” She takes my hand in both of hers. “We’ll enjoy having you.”

A
fter the meeting, I’d planned to spend the next twelve hours in bed, but the lure of Olya’s challenge proves too strong to ignore. So instead, I go to my office to start downloading the NOD software developer’s kit, the files one uses to create customized NOD worlds.

A text from Blake asking me to breakfast disrupts this plan. He’s chosen Demeter, a painfully recherché cafe near his apartment that’s advanced the recent farm-to-table obsession to the possibly satirical point of allowing diners to inspect online the genealogy of the chickens supplying their eggs. Hoping a $34 thoroughbred omelet can at least do something for my hungover stomach, I head toward SoHo.

Blake’s idea of breakfast varies widely from mine. As I walk into the haute-country dining room, I see him already surrounded by food, conducting a meeting. A tall, svelte gentleman in an ostentatiously well-tailored black cashmere suit is delivering a heated lecture, jabbing his finger twice over the remains of his French toast. Blake gives me a “one sec” gesture and turns his blank business face back to his companion. I go in search of some coffee.

Who in the world gets to talk to Blake Randall that way?

When I return, the guy has vanished, and Blake waves me over. I sit, noticing the absence of a menu.

“So I’m not your first breakfast.” I tilt my eyes toward the door.