The room where I'm going to be examined is bright, bright enough to give the impression of being cold, but it's not. The temperature inside has been optimized so as to not interfere with my performance.
The inventor offers me his arm as I step up onto the stout, carpeted platform at the center. I smile at his colleagues, feeling like a fine doll on a stand. He's dressed me in a plain chemise with snaps down the back. When he gathered my hair away from my neck this morning to secure the collar, his breath on my shoulder and the sureness of his touch made me woozy. I turned and caught his mouth with mine, already going numb in the thighs with need, but I could barely hook my arms around his shoulders before he scolded me.
"This is a very important day," he said, rearranging my reaching limbs into that doll-posture he's always having me practice. "Remember?"
"Yes," I said.
"I need to stay focused. It's crucial that we make a good impression. That you make a good impression."
"Yes," I said.
The inventor smoothed my hair down with both hands. He kissed my forehead, his cologne only barely masking the smell of sanitizer and nickel.
I wonder what kind of impression I'm making now. My mastery of microexpressions and vocal cues is wasted on these academics, stoic as they are, but he warned me that would be the case. They circle me with their hands clasped behind their backs. They murmur things to one another, turning just far enough to the side that I can't read their lips. The inventor stands erect at my side like a guard at a door.
Another man comes forward from the crowd with a clipboard in his arms. He approaches my pedestal.
"Hello," he says.
"Hello."
More murmuring. He jots something down on his clipboard.
"I know we're starting very early," he says. "Did you get a chance to have breakfast this morning? I didn't."
"Yes. I enjoyed some hotcakes and a glass of milk. I recently began to tolerate dairy."
Others are writing now as well. Some have drawn closer to see me in more detail, and while I speak, a woman lifts my arm at the wrist and presses her fingers to my pulse point.
"When you say you enjoyed it, is that just a turn of phrase, or do you mean you took pleasure in it?"
"I took pleasure in it."
"Are there any foods you don't like?"
I glance sidelong at the inventor, who gives me a permissive smile.
"Cooked apples," I say, to a ripple of light laughter. The inventor encouraged me to laugh if I feel like laughing, so I do. "Too soft. Though the fresh ones are nice."
"You would have hated the turnover I just had for breakfast, then," the man says. "Don't you think?"
There's a shift in the room, a sudden stillness. Several pens are poised at the ready.
"Yes," I reply, "but I'm confused."
"About what?"
"You said you didn't have time for breakfast."
The man looks satisfied. Without taking his eyes off of me, he reaches for the inventor's hand and shakes it.
"You're very right," he says. "Impressive recall. Superb work."
I feel the inventor's palm on my lower back, approving, reassuring. My lungs fill. Sometimes when he mounts me from behind he'll leave a hand there, the pressure reminding me to keep my hips angled properly: he needs to be sure that his semen reaches my womb. Facedown on his bed while he labors over me, I purr and drool into his pillows. Every so often I forget to maintain the arch and he has to correct me after we're finished. But there's always next time.
The inventor joins the crowd and everyone talks amongst themselves for a bit. I watch his eyes move around the room, the twitches and tics in his handsome face while he tries to maintain his composure. He has a nervous habit of wetting his lips, and every time I glimpse the tip of his tongue I think about all the time it's spent probing into my orifices. I understand all the words they're using, but I can't concentrate long enough to pull any meaning from them -- I want the inventor to take me home to his workshop and use me the way he sometimes does after he's been drinking. I think about it for so long my knees almost knock together and I have to fix my posture.
"It's a convincing automaton," one man says, "but sentient? Human? Let's call it what it is: electrified meat equipped with artificial intelligence."
Before the inventor can retaliate, someone else chimes in. It's the gentleman who questioned me at the start.
"And if the model is able to conceive in vivo and carry the fetus to term? What'll you make of that benchmark?"
"Christ, are we so primitive that reproduction is the metric by which we define ourselves? So he's made a talking incubator. And we inch ever closer to spiritual annihilation."
Some laugh, others groan. The division is growing. The inventor's hand flexes at his side; my mouth waters for his fingers.
"Fertile or not," says a woman over the lid of her tall coffee cup, "what you should really be concerned with is the breadth of her agency. We know she doesn't care for apples. But is she capable of dissent? Deception? Contradiction? Judging by what we've seen today, I'm optimistic. I'm also unconvinced."
Absentmindedly I've begun kneading the flesh of my upper arm, the other crossed over my chest.
"Look," someone says, "we're making her nervous."
That gets some chuckles, even a few scribbled notes.
"Then we'd better make this next part quick," says the woman with the coffee. "Would you take a seat for me?"
I obey, and she undoes the buttons down the back of my chemise. It gathers around my waist. She uses a stethoscope between my shoulder blades and above one breast, which perks and prickles at the brush of her wrist. The other researchers trickle out of the room as she snaps on a pair of latex gloves. Only the inventor remains by the time the woman guides me back into a supine position, nudging my knees apart. He watches her press down beneath my navel, watches as she thumbs the hood of my clitoris, watches as she slips her middle finger inside me and brings it back out, shining like syrup. I wiggle my toes, and from between my spread legs I watch him back.
***
Back at home, I stretch myself across the inventor's bed while I wait for him to finish pacing. I would call his disposition "nervous," but I've learned that most men prefer "tense." He cares a great deal what his colleagues think of him and his work, not just because of his reputation, but because it's their assessment that will determine whether he brings me before the board. The board is composed of his superiors and their donors, but the word always makes me think of the strategy games we play together on slabs of varnished wood: moving pieces, spinning dials, the exaltation of victory. But if his superiors are impressed by me, there will be no more games -- I'll be relocated to a special care facility where I'll continue to learn and undergo testing, but the inventor will stay here and make additional models as his grant allows. He promises he'll visit.
He's pressing the pads of his thumbs to his temples now. I can recall a time when the silver in his hair was confined only to those spots, before it spread to the lock that's always falling into his face. I asked him once if it was contagious, but he laughed.
"No," he said, "your hair will never gray. It'll never grow, for that matter."
"It won't grow?"
The inventor ran his hand along my dangling hair like the strings of a harp.
"Not an inch. It's a cosmetic feature; I needled it in myself."
"So I'll never change?" I asked.
"Some things will," he said. "Mostly internally. Your cells can reproduce, your neural pathways will continue to deepen and diversify. There'll be wear and tear, naturally. But I made you a young woman, and superficially, you will always be a young woman."
"But not profundally?"
