Dr. Rossum entered his classroom from the door near the electronic blackboard, which was really more of a huge pressure-sensitive multipurpose monitor and tablet. Those who grew up long ago might remember the dissonance from calling green slates affixed to walls "blackboards" rather than chalkboards. With chalk out of the equation, and any color available at the touch of an electronic pen, that term had fallen completely out of use.
The classroom seated two hundred students. Most seats were filled, as much as theoretical for a class that started at 9AM. Then again, the subject was still a fascination among young people, even as they proliferated through modern life.
With a tap of his pen, the blackboard changed to display the title of the course. ROB201 - Robot and Android Repair. Dr. Rossum's TA appeared through the same door, a slim woman named Carol who walked with her hands folded before her like the servant in a Chinese palace.
"Salvete omnes!" Dr. Rossum cried out to the students. The gentle hum of conflicting conversations lessened as they put away their phones and other distraction equipment. "Today, we shall finally disassemble an android. It'll be a lot like dissecting a frog, except nobody dies."
The professor chuckled, but nobody in his class laughed. They had all been born after interactive holograms allowed for realistic simulations of dissections without a real frog. Needless to say, the frog soon went extinct in the wild, now kept and bred exclusively for their delicate legs, eaten by fussy people who don't know better.
"You all might be thinking... where are we going to find an android?" Dr. Rossum gestured out to the class with his pen. "Well... I think now's about the time to reveal something to the class."
Dr. Rossum held his pen at the end of his arm, pointed at Carol like a magic wand. With a dramatic motion of his thumb, he depressed the button.
Lines began to form on Carol's joints like dried riverbeds, dark blue crevasses wherever she would move; her elbows, knees, shoulders, and fingers. The sudden exposure seemed to startle Carol, as she looked down to her more artificial appearance with some small amount of concern. Her skin appeared to be semiflexible plates covering the large planes of her body, the upperside of her arms, her decolletage.
"Yes, as a few students guess every year..." Dr. Rossum gestured. "My teaching assistant Carol is, in fact, an android. She's been helping me for so long that... her model has been discontinued. This is why I'm no longer afraid that someone will find her face on a website selling androids. It's also useful when someone tries to get out of class by saying they told Carol when they saw her at the dining hall."
Laughter slowly grew in the class as each student came to understand the joke. Dr. Rossum continued, "I lose one student a year to that excuse. For those who missed the first class, I'm very permissive with missing classes... so long as you don't lie about why. Try to say your grandma died, I'd better be able to find that obituary. If you lied about it... you are flunked."
The students laughter grew more nervous.
Dr. Rossum continued his lecture. He gestured to the visible lines on Carol's body. "Can anyone tell me what I've done to her?"
A male voice called out from the back row. "You turned off her joint compound."
Dr. Rossum pointed to the voice with the obvious affirmation of a correct answer. "I don't like the term 'joint compound,' but you are correct. To hide the more mechanical parts, humanoid androids have this special skin liquid. Pass a very gentle current through it, and it can solidify and flex in certain predictable ways and act like skin. It makes for excellent fake skin. But it's too expensive to cover her whole body with, unless she was a million-dollar model. Sadly... I couldn't afford one of those.
"As it is... every android has a wireless command that can turn this off. Its generally only in the hands of repairmen like us. This is not what we'd call a 'user-serviceable feature.' We could even turn off the
"Someone found the website!" A different voice called.
"Excuse me?" Dr. Rossum looked up.
"The site with Carol for sale on it. It was archived."
Dr. Rossum pointed his pen at the blackboard, temporarily opening it to student images. "Send it up here, please?"
With a swipe from his phone like he was pitching the top card from the deck, the student sent the picture to the screen. A picture of Carol with longer and clearly artificial blonde hair filled the blackboard. Based on the reaction from the crowd of students, Carol knew the picture that appeared on the screen was of her naked body. She turned to look at it. It wasn't actually her, as hundreds of models of her were surely manufactured. This one was fresh and brand new.
Next to her picture were useful statistics for the shopper. Height and weight, measurements, both of her bust... and the depth of her orifices. Evidently, they had researched the kind of man that bought these and allocated space accordingly.
"I normally wouldn't have shown a picture like this in class..." Dr. Rossum looked up to the picture, and to the slightly more worn model he possessed. "But those of you who are uncomfortable with nudity... either get over it or change your major. You will have to deal with naked robots all the time."
A particularly obnoxious student laughed and elbowed his neighbor, an attractive student he evidently had a crush on. "Don't get too confident." The professor said. "Women are bombarded with image of female nudity through their lives, but we men... you'll have to see some male robots naked at some point. They've engineered them to be quite a thing. Almost impossible for the real thing to hold up in comparison."
The women of the class chuckled. The men, for the most part, were silent.
"How come her boobs are smaller in real life?" Called out another student.
"Well-observed, Sam." Dr. Rossum noted. "The skin liquid, which has a name, but it's eight syllables long, so even experts just call it Skin for short... the Skin is stored in the same areas where a woman would hold fatty deposits: in the breasts, buttocks, etc. For a male robot, it's generally made into muscles. It was a perfect solution, as it could be programmed to be the perfect density for those body parts.
"But as the years go on, bit by bit, the Skin eventually dries out and flakes away like the dead skin of a human. It's very gradual, but eventually... well, there's less excess to store there, so they gradually get smaller with age. Male robots tens to simply get less buff and get that Dad-bod that is so popular. Very few male 'bots are brought in to have new Skin installed. As the customer get older their tastes alter. But what is attractive in a woman never seems to change. Carol?"
Carol snapped to attention. Dr. Rossum took a wooden lab stool from the edge of his stage and brought it over. Rather than sit on it, Carol bent over it, rolling her shirt up from the small of her back. The removed Skin revealed a circular portal at the very base of her spine.
