DÉSIRÉE FEMME
1
FORTY MILLION DOLLARS GOES A LONG WAY
The clock governing Richard Booker's life also tortured him with an unending litany of boredom. The current project was behind schedule, and he routinely pushed his workday past quitting time until the American Robotics building was locked down and he had to leave for the night. It was close to nine o'clock, and Richard knew there would be an argument when he returned home, but what could he do; when he was on a streak, he had to bet the streak. Flashes of brilliance came too seldom the older he got, and tonight he was on to something. Despite the fact the computer was not exactly cooperating, Richard sat at the monitor, trying to force the code down the throat of the synthetic model that lay on the slab behind him.
If only... if only I could get this bitch to work,
he lamented to himself. He had lately been referring to the unit as
bitch
rather than a synthetic sex bot. Richard knew the operating system was powerful enough to handle coding this complex and did his best to ignore the lateness of the hour and force-fed the data into the mainframe.
American Robotics had hired him out of MIT and routinely used him for the more quirky projects. He was knee-deep in the daunting job of creating an android that could feel physical sensations and, up to now, had failed miserably. He knew the system
would never handle the programming download before he began, but a job was a job. He doggedly sat at the mainframe, tenaciously trying to create something that had never been attempted, much less accomplished. The actual chassis wasn't the problem; he got that right. His brilliant and beautiful assistant, Robin Connolly, had seen to that right down to the female body parts; as they say, the devil is in the details.
The body of the synthetic woman was perfect, better than perfect, even to the toenails and clitoris. Building the model was never a problem as long as Robin was on the team. The android's features weren't a problem either; the glitch lay in the add-ons. The robot could change its body configuration and function based on the requirements of the situation... up to a point. The body parts, hair color, and processing algorithms were programmed to evolve based on the partner's responses.
The body of the synth lay on the lab table, connected to the mainframe. The cables connecting it to the computer reminded Richard of I-V lines in a hospital, making him feel like a doctor. He wasn't wrong to think of himself as such; Richard earned a computer design doctorate at Stamford. His assistant, Robin, picked up the slack on the omissions in his training. The woman was the most technically savvy robotics expert he'd ever met. She was also great at anatomy design, specializing in females, being an out-of-the-closet lesbian, and cutting her teeth at CIVI Ltd in the upper body prosthetics department. Richard considered her a find and reached out immediately after he met the technician at the New Age Robotics symposium in Los Angeles three years ago.
The CEO of American Robotics, Brian Farley, had sent him there to see the latest industry innovations in robotics. The conference was mainly about prosthetic limbs and the newly emerging bio-chip interface technology. American Robotics had no interest in forcing its way into the nitch of the prosthetic limb business. The big players monopolized that field too well, and CIVI
Ltd was among the most prominent developers. Brian Farley had one thing on his mind: the development of a saleable sex bot.
Brian was the CEO and sole owner of the Westchester-based corporation, and the fact that the porn industry was the first model to make a profit off the internet back in the nineties was not lost on him. This newest scheme, coupled with the fact that he was filthy rich from inherited old New York market money associated with his hardcore internet porn addiction, made perfect sense to him. Despite his wealth, Brian's five foot-four inch stature and portly body were usually a strike out with women; his hygiene wasn't the greatest either. The only dates he succeeded with were when he was being chauffeured around in the back of his limo and getting blow jobs from paid escorts, and these encounters left him feeling unfinished and more like a rube than a stud. When the concept of a robotic masturbation device came across his desk, it seemed like a no-brainer. The units currently on the market were woefully deficient and more off-putting than arousing. They all looked like plastic inflatable dolls and were just sad and silly.
How hard could building a better model be
, he thought to himself. The key was finding the right man to do the job. Brian would find out that there was many a slip twixt the cup and the lip in the wanting and the getting, especially in robotic design.
Richard sat at his computer station, trying to find a better way to complete an almost impossible task. He knew what he wanted to do: build a woman with a knockout chassis and then give her physical and sensory responses, and, if he could, throw in a bit of cutting-edge AI; it would be so much the better. Richard had worked in the isolated lab in the basement of American Robotics and had been connected to the world of robotics for close to twenty years. His boss kept him around despite the considerable salary; finding a techy that lived on the AI cutting edge was challenging. Richard believed that making a physical female replica was one thing, but embedding active sensory abilities into the unit was another, and his
progress was as slow going as it was costly. Richerd repeatedly ran up against the same wall; it was too much data to cram into the system. The new Phosphorus Instant Storage System drive, which could store a virtually unlimited amount of data in a relatively small unit, would handle the sheer volume of bytes. It made the HPE CRAY Frontier TOP 500 with the 1102 Petaflop chassis look like a grade school iPad. Still, the problem of loading the unit was a wall over which he could not climb. Each time he tried to load the system, the coding scrambled, and what came out was gibberish, causing a system crash.
Richard stared at the schematic of the new system. He believed the revolutionary drive could eventually work... he would routinely lament to himself,
if only. If only I could program it; if only I understood how it worked.
He was not technically a programmer; That is where his assistant came in handy.
The new system was a massive leap of faith for Brian to take. The forty million dollars of startup funding wasn't the issue. Money was what Brian had; it was time that he lacked, and it was an unforgiving master. Brian's constant badgering of Richard forced the Doctor's hand to use the untried system. It was after nine as he hunched over the keyboard, trying to work the new coding string his assistant Robin had created.
He remembered her comment when she plugged in the program, "Maybe we need to think outside the box." He snickered, wondering if she was thinking outside her box. Richard was a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist in the habit of sneaking glimpses of her rear and boobs, but that was as far as he could take it.
Richard glanced at the clock; it was late. He wondered if Kelly would still be awake and couldn't remember the last time he had sex with her. He thought about supper; she never cooked for him anymore; she never did anything for him these days. Maybe Louie's Diner was still serving.
2
GOOD THINGS TAKE TIME
"Richard," Robin's tone was sharp. She reserved the tone whenever she wanted her boss's full attention. She edged him off the chair and sat at the console. "I've got this; I've developed a new fazed protocol. Maybe we don't have to load everything on the first go-around."
"Explain..." She had her boss's interest.
"I'm saying we should just program in the base functions and let the model learn as it goes." She didn't bother to explain that the android could reprogram itself and upgrade its capabilities. She began to furiously type. It would amount to the difference between complete coding and a learning algorithm that would adjust its own database.
Richard was lost in the sauce of the commands as his assistant typed at a blistering pace. The theory sounded good at first blush; it was a résumé item that Robin Connolly was a top-notch robotics designer, having made it through the grueling MIT doctoral program Summa cum laude. After graduation, the woman cut her teeth in the Florida amusement parks. From there, it was three years in the R&D department at CIVI Ltd, which was more of a practical education in the logistics of robot building. He wasn't aware that she was this good a programmer, and he stared at the lines of code as they flashed across the screen, thinking,
Jesus, she's fast!
Richard watched for the morning and into the afternoon. He peered over Robin's shoulder; not a word was spoken as page after page of the program took shape. Richard was close enough to inhale
her scent, and his thoughts wandered to his reoccurring fantasy of throwing the woman onto a bed and tearing her clothes off; she was definitely fuckable. If it wasn't for the fact that she only dated women, he would have already made a pass at her. He thought about his wife Kelly, who couldn't compare to his sexy young assistant. Kelly was great in the looks department; that was never the problem; it was her attitude toward sex, in general, that rubbed him the wrong way. She acted as if sexual relations were not a part of her makeup, and it left Richard lonely and constantly horney.
Robin had been at it for nine hours and pushed herself back from the console, "That's enough for today. I'll do more tomorrow."
More tomorrow?
Richard wondered how long this would take until a bench test could be run. He innocuously stared at Robin's ass as she stood up and stretched. It was a depressing realization having to work next to this hottie and then go home to his cold fish of a wife, but, as his father used to say, you have to play the hand you're dealt. He locked up the lab, thinking how badly he needed to get laid.
The programming went on in much the same fashion for the remainder of the week, and the conversation between them was minimal as Robin sat before the mainframe in some weird Zen state. He'd never seen anyone focus as intently for this length of time. Maybe she was on the spectrum, and he wondered how autistic girls were in the sack.
On the ninth day, Richard answered the phone to a ranting Brian Farley.
"I've spent a lot of money on this project, Booker! Forty fucking million!" Richard didn't need to be reminded. "The least you could do is give me some update!" His tone was clipped, suggesting that if Richard couldn't get the job done, he would find someone who could.
"We're close, Brian. Very close." He didn't know if that was true as Robin sat at the mainframe console typing, but what else could he say? "We are finishing up the programming now."
