Building Robot Lovers Chapter 4
By Gary LM Martin
It all started out as another one of Doctor Malthus's little experiments. The primary purpose of the Erobots was to provide loving companions to men and women.
But that didn't mean that Doctor Malthus wasn't interested in other purposes as well. He had been impressed how well the Erobots had been able to disguise their true nature during real world Testing. He wanted to take that Testing to a new level, to see how an Erobot would function in a high pressure, stressful environment.
And so Doctor Malthus infiltrated an Erobot into the United Survey Service.
How it was done was a complete mystery, at least to Susan. All she knew is that she had to prepare Schriber, Unit 008, for a very special mission.
He was now called Ensign Norman Thomas, a newly minted junior officer on the USS
Excaliber
. His immediate supervisor was a gorgeous redhead in a miniskirt named Lieutenant Miranda Hartman. Schriber and Miranda hit it off well almost immediately. Miranda found the squeaky clean young Ensign charming and flirted with him constantly. Schriber found Miranda appealing because, well... he was an Erobots, and Erobots were programmed to have sex.
But Miranda's flirtations confused him. Doctor Dickins had downloaded the entire database of Survey Service rules and regulations, and the rules were quite specific on fraternization aboard ship. Senior officers were not permitted to fraternize with junior ones under their command. Schriber was under Miranda's command, but that didn't stop her from rubbing against him, teasing him, making sexual innuendo, and doing all manner of things that Schriber realized were signals of desire for sex.
But what confused Schriber the most was how Miranda responded to his response to her advances. When she rubbed against him in a narrow Johnson tube while she was familiarizing him with ships' systems, Schriber responded by putting his hands on her ass and squeezing. Instead of registering her approval, Miranda had gotten wide-eyed and said, "Norman! Whatever are you doing?"
When they had been studying holographic star charts in astrometrics, and Miranda once again rubbed against his body, he had reached down to kiss her, but she pushed him away, pretending to look surprised, and saying, "Norman, not here! Someone could walk in at any moment."
And so Schriber figured out that there was a time and place for breaking Survey Service regulations. The time and place seemed to be Miranda's quarters one evening, when they were watching "Ultra, Amazon Warrior" together on Miranda's small couch. This time when Miranda rubbed against him Schriber figured the time was right and tried to kiss her. She let him kiss her for the briefest moment before pulling back. "Really, Norman. You're quite forward for a junior officer!"
Schriber talked to Doctor Dickins about this. As with all officers, he had access to the ship's interstellar communicator from his private quarters. Susan looked amused when he described the situation.
"You weren't put on the ship to seduce women, Schriber," said Susan.
"But seduction is one of the purposes I was programmed for," Schriber insisted.
It was true. While Susan had reoriented Schriber's goals somewhat, she hadn't had the time to design a totally new schemata for him from scratch; as a result, what he had was a mixture of the new and the old. Inside this Survey Service Erobot was an Erobot who also craved sex.
"What does it mean, Doctor Dickins? Does Miranda want me, or doesn't she?"
"She may want you, Schriber. Or she may be playing a game."
"A game. Ah. Where the goal is to be pursued, but not caught."
"Precisely," said Susan.
"But which is it? Does she really want me, or is it a game?"
"Does it matter?" said Susan. "Your mission is to see whether you can credibly impersonate a Survey Service officer. All other conditions are secondary."
But all other conditions
weren't
secondary.
Schriber, through his throbbing Emotion Plate, had the undeniable urge to have sex with Survey Service Lieutenant Miranda Hartman.
********
The
Excaliber
received a distress signal, from a freighter called the
Andropov
. When they arrived on the scene, they sent Lieutenant Tom Brand and several security guards over to investigate.
The crew and most of the passengers were dead. The ship had had a run-in with Ramadan pirates, and in the process the hull had been pierced. The only survivor was a passenger named Markessa Jinton. Markessa was a gorgeous woman with large breasts and long flowing black hair, kind of like Shoshanna, but with a more serious, practiced look, and Markessa was a little older, in her early 30's.
Captain Jeffries assigned Lieutenant Brand to take care of Markessa while they continued to inspect the ship. The odd thing about the
Andropov
is that all the bodies were gone. Markessa said she had been so upset to be trapped with dead bodies that she had flushed them out into space.
One day Schriber passed by Lieutenant Brand's quarters. An ordinary person could not see or hear through a door, but Schriber could do both. He paused and watched in infra-red as the heat signatures of two people were having sex could be seen. It was Schriber's impression that Lieutenant Brand was on top, thrusting into a woman who was presumably the rescued passenger, Markessa Jinton.
Lieutenant Brand was married to a large breasted blonde woman named Marissa and he had two children back on Earth. Schriber knew that men were sometimes unfaithful to their spouses, but Brand had just met Markessa the day before.
And the really unusual thing were the words that he could hear coming from Brand's quarters.
"You love to be controlled," said Markessa.
"I love to be controlled," Tom gasped.
"You want your rider to control your mind," said Markessa. "Say it, Tom, say it!"
"I... I want my rider to control my mind," said Tom. "Aaaaah!"
"That's right, that's a good boy. Every time you obey, the pleasure will only increase."
Schriber couldn't make any sense of this. Was this some kind of sex game? He knew that some humans enjoyed dominating their partner, or being dominated by their partners, but this didn't sound quite like that. And they mentioned something called a
rider
. What was that?
Schriber's curiosity only grew stronger the next day. What he expected was that Lieutenant Brand would continue his liaison with their unexpected passenger. Instead, he saw Brand entering the quarters of his immediate superior, Lieutenant Commander Sarah Woolsey. Very soon he could hear the sound of lovemaking coming from her quarters.
In the short time Schriber had been on the
Excaliber
, he had never seen Brand show any sign of affection for Woolsey, or her for him. And yet now, a day after Brand had copulated with Markessa Jinton, he was suddenly doing the same with his superior officer. It didn't make sense, and Schriber's orderly mind wanted things to make sense.
He brought his concerns to Miranda, thinking that she could make sense of them. She listened carefully, but her reaction was not as expected. "So... you've been spying on the crew, and watching them get familiar with each other, right? My first question would be, why are you doing that?" She rubbed her body against him like a cat.
By now Schriber knew this was a classic trap; if he responded sexually to Miranda's advances, she would act surprised and offended. So he stayed on topic. "Is it normal for a Survey Service officer to have sex with a new passenger, and then with his superior officer a day later?"
"Normal?" Miranda asked, rubbing her back against his chest. "It's hard to say. Things are kind of relaxed on the
