I came home late last Friday and found my house a shambles. That was the night of the big thunderstorm, and, as I slid the key into the door and turned it, my hair stood on end.
I don't mean that I got spooked, I mean that all the hairs on my head, which I had recently dyed pale-moon blue to match my eyes, stood at attention, as if they were trying to get as far away from each other as possible.
Once I opened the door, I could smell the ionized air -- like walking into a laundromat with 20 dryers going at once. I put down my umbrella and took off my heels -- I had been out on a date, so I was wearing a black cocktail dress and not a lot more.
The living room looked normal, as did the kitchen, but when I opened the door to my office, it felt as if I had walked into a different world.
The bay window that looked onto my backyard was broken, and rain and wind were whipping around inside. One corner of my desk had collapsed, and the books on the shelf above it had crashed down on top of it. Papers were strewn everywhere, some flapping in the breeze.
The floor lamp had been knocked over. I must have left it on, because its pale light was casting enormous shadows on the opposite wall. It was hard to tell in the dimness, but I thought I could see a black, charred mark in the alcove above the bay window. Could all this have been caused by a lightning strike?
I walked over to the desk. My laptop had slid under the side table. Its screen was blinking a sickly shade of green. I could see more scorch marks on the surge protector and on the wall under the desk. I had been very lucky that there hadn't been a fire.
My left flank caught a bit of spray from the blown-out window. Just as the possibility entered my mind that somebody might have gotten in through the opening, I spotted movement in my peripheral vision. On the wall in front of me, the shadow of a large and very masculine figure rose: I recognized it at once as Burly.
Before I could react, he was on me, pushing my head onto the floor and pulling my hips up. With a nimbleness that surprised me, he hitched up the skirt of my dress, pulled my panties down to mid-thigh, and rammed his way inside me.
A moment later, Burly's weighted balls slapped into my clitoris, sending a shiver of pleasure up my spine -- exactly as they had been designed to do.
* * *
I have always been a tinkerer. As early as I can remember, I loved little wind-up gadgets and spring-powered items, working my way up to electronic devices with capacitors that could store energy.
I guess most people would have called them toys or robots, but I always preferred "automatons." Which may be my heavy-handed way of trying to give them a life of their own.
I went to college and studied engineering, and all my teachers and advisers made a big deal about it. There weren't a lot of women in the engineering program, I guess, but I wasn't at all interested in being a trailblazer.
I dabbled in computer programming, which filled some of the same needs for logical puzzles and finding simple solutions to difficult problems, but it just wasn't the same. Tinkering has always been a tactile thing for me -- about flesh and blood manipulating metal and plastic.
But it was during my senior year that I had a sort of come-to-Jesus moment, except that it was Jane Fonda I came to. Literally.
Specifically, the movie "Barbarella," which was being screened by one of the cinema societies on campus. I went with my roommate and best friend, Philippa, a flame-haired lesbian dancer that all the boys want to convert to heterosexuality.
I was enjoying the movie in all its sexy, campy glory, when, bout half an hour in, Barbarella got captured by a band of orphaned children. Who knows how they got there or how long the little imps had been alone, but they had developed a society of a sort.
They chain her to a post and set a squad of animated dolls with cruel-looking metal teeth in motion. "Sweet!" Barbarella declares them until the dolls begin to ambulate toward her awkwardly, saying "Mama!" and occasionally chomping their ferocious teeth.
At last understanding her predicament, she yells out, "No!" But the children just smile their creepy, innocent-seeming smiles. Soon the little robots are all over Barbarella, snapping their teeth, ripping her clothes and drawing blood. A transported look, a kind of rapture brought on by pain, comes across Jane Fonda's face -- and across mine sitting in the dark auditorium.
I was extremely aroused, and it was a matter of only the slightest rubbing that caused me to explode into orgasm.
Later, when Duran Duran's Orgasmatron was doing heaven-knows-what to Barbarella, I started touching myself again. Something about the way she was lying there, having things done to her by this machine, stoked my libido in a way that no man I had ever been with did.
Of course, Philippa noticed, and, that night, we slept together for the first time. I've never been attracted to women much, but, with thoughts of Jane Fonda dancing in my head, I gratefully lost myself in the smell and texture of her redheaded pussy.
That's when I realized what I wanted to do with my life: Create automatons designed to pleasure women.
As I talked to Philippa about it, I began to get wet again, and she made me promise to let her test them out. One of the things that I love about her is that, even though she is without question a lesbian, she still wants to feel a dick inside her pussy every now and then.
She wouldn't have been much use to me if she hadn't been, to be honest. I have zero interest in creating fake pussies for men to masturbate into. It was always the notion of machines doing things to women, like in Barbarella, that drove me.
I started working with an adult toy manufacturer that commissioned me to create the usual toys -- vibrating dildos, vibrating eggs, and vibrating nipple clamps.
Not particularly intriguing stuff, but with the money I made, I bought a house. It was small but perfect, with room for a workshop and a second floor that was easily converted into an apartment for Philippa.
One of my high-end items became pretty popular: a cunnilingus machine. It was a boxy strap-on, and the real trick of it had been getting the right shape and feel for the saddle. I applied for and received a patent for the pore pattern of the synthetic skin.
Then came a movie called "Adult Toy Story." It was a crude (in both senses of the word) mix of live action and animation, and I created the live versions of its protagonists, a dildo named Woody and a vibrator named Buzz, who teach Andie, a college co-ed who works part-time at a sex shop, about the true meaning of pleasure.
Getting their stupid little faces and bodies to move just right taught me a lot about animatronics, which I got a chance to apply on a one-woman version of "Oh, Calcutta!" that a has-been Hollywood starlet managed to get produced. I created dozens of robotic mannequins that she shared the stage with and rubbed up against.
Originally the producers requested fully male and female versions, but that proved too costly, so I made one androgynously-shaped body and kept their facial features vague. Ridges to suggest a nose and brow, mounds for the lips. And, of course, I had to slap a penis on some.
Those guys were as tricked out as I could make them -- which is to say, not very much by my current standards -- with receptors for eyes that allowed them to seek out heat or the bright light of a spotlight and supple, natural-feeling skin that covered a not very flesh-like endoskeleton built out of plastic and metal.
But their joints were a joke, so they walked funny, and they were hairless, but the biggest problem, by far, was battery life. They lasted barely 5 minutes before having to be plugged in to charge up again.
Despite those failings, I started getting orders for more automatons. I took anatomy and material science classes, and slowly I was able to improve them for the buyers, who were principally sex museums, which there are more of than you might think, department stores looking for novelty in their store windows, and, yes, rich and presumably lonely women.
All of which may lead you to ask: What about my romantic life?
Truth is, I didn't have much of one. You could say I didn't need a relationship because of my automatons or you could say that I created automatons because I didn't want a relationship. I wouldn't argue with either.
I know I'm attractive -- not beautiful, maybe, but distinctive-looking and with a lithe, powerful body -- because if I go out to a bar or a party, guys will always hit on me. That doesn't mean that much, I know, but it's clear that my form makes at least a number of men bothered and warm.
But it has always been simpler and cleaner to deal with my devices than with another human being and his wants and needs and expectations. Which, it must be admitted, has let a fair amount of instrumentality to creep into my dealings with actual human men.
A few months back, I met a guy named Bob who asked me out. He wasn't my type, but it had been a while since a real man's cock had been in my pussy, so I said yes.
The day before we got together, I had received a request from the Museum of Gay Sex in San Francisco for two dozen unambiguously male automatons.
I fucked Bob on the first date. Research, you see.
We were face-to-face in the missionary position, but I was thinking about the man-bots. They would definitely not have Bob's spare tire or his thick lower back hair, I told myself.
I hardly even noticed when Bob turned me over and started fucking me doggy style. Despite my distraction, I began to enjoy the sex, and when I thought about why, I realized it was because Bob's testicles, larger and heavier than most of my partners', were slapping into my clitoris and upper labia in a particularly irresistible way. I couldn't wait to get him out of my house so that I could start designing a new ball sack.
The following week, I brought home a guy named Harry that I met at a bar, because the amount and quality of his chest and arm hair was just about ideal for the new model. He was trying to do his thing, but I think I distracted him by studying his follicles a little too intently. He finally stopped when I blurted out, "Look at this little cowlick!" while fingering a whorl of hair on his forearm.
I never saw either of them again.
That was the genesis of the Burly automatons, who have human hair -- some blond, others brunette, but no gingers -- inserted into the surface of their heads, chests, arms, legs, and pubes. About one-quarter even had mustaches.
I found packets of an electro-active gel that could be tensed and heated, giving the automaton the feeling of having real, rippling muscles under its silicone and urethane skin. And the joints were much improved, but still a little stiff.
I upgraded the sensors in the eyes that allowed it to move toward light, and inserted speakers in the throat to produce pre-recorded grunts and moans. The programming got a lot more sophisticated, too. I put in hearing receptors so it could track people and smell receptors to (theoretically) help them distinguish men from women.
The newer versions were programmable through a remote about the size of a TV remote that allowed you to set sexual preference -- it didn't always work perfectly as a pizza delivery boy nearly found out the hard way -- and aggressiveness. I even adjusted the model to be able to perform eight different thrusting patterns, so you wouldn't have to be fucked the same way twice.
But in all the time I spent working on Burly, it never occurred to me that what I was actually building was a kind of rape machine.
* * *
