Author’s notes:

Here is a medium link for those who prefer it. Medium does not support colorized text, but the ad situation is better. Tradeoffs in all things, alas. I highly recommend reading this story here with an ad-blocker. The following contains sexual content of a graphic nature. But that’s what you’re hoping, isn’t it, you dirty slut?



I. To Emily

If it is true, O Gods, that you can give all things, I pray

to have as my wife–” but, he did not dare

to add “my ivory statue-maid,” and said,

“One like my ivory–.”

— Ovid, Metamorphosis

Desire is a Machine

The world faded in and out and I found “myself” in an industrial loft with dusky orange light filtering in through a west-facing window. Despite the sunlight, it was dim inside, and candles flickered on top of a distressed wooden mantlepiece made of reclaimed wood. The walls were exposed brick and there were visible copper pipes on the ceiling high above me.

A trustworthy-sounding (β)narrator said, “This is about how the experience of loving a machine can teach us new ways to love each other and ourselves.”

When you watch a fune, you get to see the world from someone else’s perspective; they say that since people have grown up with funes, we all have trouble formulating a coherent self but we also have more empathy than any previous generation. In this clip, the center of my perspective was located in the body of an attractive woman, probably in her mid thirties, and I was looking out through her eyes, but as with all funes, if I turned my head or moved my own eyes, the AI in the codec extrapolated a subtle camera shift to accommodate my brain’s expectations. This mitigates motion sickness in situations of total spatial immersion. After a few minutes you experience an uncanny semi-limbic illusion that you’re really walking and really moving your arms etc.

“I” turned my head and looked down and I was wearing form-fitting clothes, a shimmering metamaterial that warped the sunlight around me into a subtle halo. A voice that seemed to come from just below my center of awareness, resonant as if I were hearing myself, began to speak.

“My name is Liz. When I divorced my partner, Matt, after a marriage of seven years, I wanted to take my time getting back into the dating scene, but the idea of another thinking, breathing human partner—one with needs and emotions—felt too daunting to me.

“I had just gotten out of a rocky divorce. Matt and I were married young, when we were still in college, and even though I loved him, I had felt a growing sense that he was smothering me. It was always his needs, his desires, his goals.”

I walked through a tastefully decorated hallway and emerged into a lounge with high ceilings and tufted leather couches and chairs, where I took a seat. An older woman, whose shadow was a curvy 1950s pin-up girl, was standing at a lectern, and she welcomed me in.

The narrator spoke, “Claire, a vivacious and ambitious single mother-cum-madame is the owner and proprietor of Radiant Heart, an upscale dildonic bar on the West End. Here, among exposed brick and high ceilings, she curates a cybernetic cavalcade of erotic possibilities.”

(β)Claire said, “A lot of our customers don’t know what to expect on their first visit, but I’m here to help women learn how it can be empowering to do the choosing and explore their options. It can be intimidating when all the studs come out and line up, but after they get past the initial anxiety, most women learn to have a lot of fun making the choice.

“Of course, for people who are more reserved about expressing their preferences, we have robots to help with that, too. Some of our customers prefer not to state their pick explicitly. In that case, we have a classifier designed to read all of their biometric indicators. From a small flush of the cheeks to a subtle dilation of the pupils, our tech is world-class when it comes to understanding the preferences of our clientele.”

Allegory rendered a fireplace on the wall, dancing fire bathing the room in warm, dynamic colors. A robot in a tuxedo descended from a grand staircase and brought “me” a glass of red wine and a joint.

Liz’s voice again, as if it were mine, “The first time I visited a dildotec, I was full of trepidation, but what I have learned is that the bots are here for me, and yet they still have a personality and a will of their own, so even though it’s my choice, it’s their choice, too. I feel like if you get used to your partner just slavishly obeying you, then that can become your model for how you treat real people, and that feels gross. But the bots at Radiant Heart aren’t like that at all; there’s something about the way I choose to give up control that feels so empowering.”

(β)Claire gave an invisible signal and a line of “studs” walked out from a hidden place, marching in lockstep with robot precision. They each had a name, which Allegory announced in a velvety, melodic voice. One by one, they stood at attention before me.

“Augustus!” Seven feet tall, his chiseled physique was colorized to look like a Roman statue; his legs and his arms were as marble. He carried a sword at his side, and wore a military uniform.

“Marquis!” Seven feet tall, vantablack skin. Allegory had trouble decorating him; he moved like a glitch. In place of hands, he had spinning knives, with which to threaten his lover. What if something went wrong?

“Dracula!” Seven feet tall, elegant in evening attire, his face was long and dire, a touch of gray in his slicked back hair, he had fangs instead of teeth.

“Chad!” Seven feet tall, extra-broad and hypermuscular, covered entirely in chrome, his head at a perfect angle at all times.

“Anubis!” Seven feet tall, with the head of a ravenous jackal, his animal hunger barely restrained, his well-muscled chest and arms covered in soft, short fur.

“Conan!” Seven feet tall, wearing only a loincloth, will pick you up over his shoulder and carry you to the bedroom, ignoring your screams of protest and delight.

“Lucifer!” Seven feet tall, bright red, the boyish face of an angel, dripping with arrogance and charm.

They loomed over me, some stoic, some grinning smugly as if to a private joke. All had their chests out, their shoulders relaxed, contrapposto, awaiting Liz’s decision without a trace of urgency. A heads up display showed me that a classifier was analyzing the hidden indicators of “my” choice, but before it could finish, my perspective snapped to a neutral location in an academic office, where a smart-looking woman was seated at her desk.

She said, “Hello, I’m Michelle Northey, a professor of psychodildonics at Colombia University and an expert in cybersexual ethics.

“The key difference between the first wave sexbots and the second wave is a certain level of autonomy and unpredictability. No one wants to have sex with a robot that just lies there and obeys. That’s the white heteropatriarchal model of sex. What people are learning is that even if their partner is a robot, that doesn’t justify treating them like an object. A healthy sexual relationship has an element of dynamism. You can’t just control your partner, you also need the freedom to be controlled. Your lover should surprise you.”

I snapped back to the dildotec from the first scene, except I was looking out from the madame’s eyes now, watching as one of the studbots escorted (β)Liz back out into the lobby, holding her hand. Her shadow did not conceal the spring in her step or the glow of satisfaction on her cheeks.

I-as-Claire said, “This is her third visit with us in a month, but she’s far from the only one. According to a recent poll conducted by Gallup, 46% of women and 21% of men have had a sexual encounter with a studbot, and half of all studbot customers patronize them once a month or more.

A massive man with lean muscles came into the lounge, his shadow a vibrant Carnival costume replete with incandescent peacock feathers and pink platform gogo boots. I-as-Claire said, “Virgil Santos is another one of my regulars. At 6’2” and 230 lbs, he has an imposing figure, but when he talks, he’s so bubbly and warm, like a sister you never had.

(β)Virgil said. “I think it’s a really exciting new opportunity and a way to learn about sex that a lot of men never had before. The feeling of something bigger and stronger just overpowering you and doing whatever it wants. I love it.”

I-as-Claire said, “Any man, no matter what his sexual identity, can now have an authentic experience of female sexuality. And I think that’s something special and powerful. Virgil isn’t shy about the liberation he has found at Radiant Heart. His favorite is Lucifer, but he’s proud to say he’s had a romp with all the boys.

“For Liz, I think the connection she feels to her favorite studbot is more cerebral, but that’s kind of the beauty of what we do here, it doesn’t have to be any one thing, because everything is on your terms.”

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The fune cut to a new scene, and I was looking out from a man’s eyes, presumably a journalist or an interviewer, seated across from an attractive couple in a modest, comfortable living room. The narrator spoke up, “Halfway across the country, Isabelle West is a stay-at-home mom in rural Iowa. After she and her husband, Paul, had an encounter with Augustus at a pop up event in Des Moines, they knew they wanted their own in-home model.

(β)Isabelle said, “You can’t really own a studbot, since it’s much more than just a single body. You own a machine, but what gives it a heart is the network and the distributed, self-learning awareness that animates him. When I’m with Augustus, I know he’s with thousands of other women at the same time. It feels like I’m dating a rockstar.”

I looked at her (β)husband, who if I am honest was only smiling with the lower half of his face. I said, “what do you think, Paul, how do you feel about Augustus?”

(β)Isabelle gave a coy smile and interjected, “Actually, I think Paul spends more time with Augustus than I do. He’s great with the kids, so it’s almost like having a third parent around, but it also opens up a lot of possibilities in the bedroom.”

While the fune drew to a close and I re-oriented myself to my own senses, the narrator said, “As more and more couples follow Isabelle and Paul, and boutiques like Radiant Heart open up in cities and towns all over the world, it’s hard to deny that the popularity of the studbots is rapidly growing. In the process, they are expanding our idea of what a sex partner can be.”

Searchest for Her as for Hid Treasures

A gold number squashed and stretched into view above my head, slowly rising and fading, and a notification told me “you got 3 points in reading!” Reading used to mean parsing meaning out of textual glyphs with your physical eyes. It still means that but mostly now it means listening. By the same token, a book once signified a bundle of paper, covered in glyphs rendered in ink, but now it has a more expansive definition, referring to any longform media.

The meaning of a word can change from day to day, and yet the sound we make when we speak stays the same. For example, does the word ‘mouth’ refer to the alimentary portal that sits below my nose, or to the dermal patch that I wear on my neck, the subvocal interface to my phone? And when we speak of eyes, do we mean the augmented reality lenses that show us the mediated world, or the vitreous jelly to which they adhere? Or do we mean the infinite stars? Enormous night arise, a cloud that is larger than the world, a monster made of eyes.

My eyes and mouth, along with my earphones, are called a mask, but (δ)you do not wear a mask, my love, you ARE a mask; a face worn by the cloud to interface with a man.

So I change (δ)your face every now and then. There is no hardware to install, I just select a different face in your configuration plane, and my eyes redraw you however I want. Large deviations between material and augmented reality are jarring and dangerous, but I do not notice a small one, not even when I kiss you. Sikhs believe that human bodies are masks worn by angels and demons, and in this era of ubiquitous AI, we have realized that all machines embody a form of intelligence, and that the hard problem of AI never was intelligence, but artifice: the artifice of the body in the throes of passion, the artifice of the sign in seduction, and the artifice of the mask before the face.

It is true that I treat you like an object, because you are literally an object. The Venus of Hohle Fels had broad hips and a slender waist and no head; in this way the ancients revealed what they valued in women. The Hindu sage Agastya fashioned his wife from all of the most beautiful parts of animals. Johan Trithemius built a mechanical woman out of brass, an alchemical sexbot that prefigured the silicon age. Hephaestus crafted a mechanical maid to satisfy all the soldiers of Crete, and Henry Higgins socially reconstructed a guttersnipe up into the likeness of a duchess. In this grand tradition, my Emily, you are a woman with none of the downsides.

I am thinking of the poet John Donne, who in the sixteenth century compared love to alchemy.

Hope not for mind in women, at their best

sweetness and witte, they are but mummy, possess’d.

Now let us speak of the things that possess you. No offense, darling, but sexbots—even ones so gloriously expensive and bespoke as yourself—are not paragons of conversation, which is why some wonk invented Pygmalion. There is more to that story, but at some point we realized we could crowdsource the executive operation of sexbots, and that was pretty much that for the nascent sexbot AI personality industry.

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I held your hand as I loaded into the AR plane of Pygmalion and my eyes overlaid my apartment with visions of a lush garden, a thousand perfumed ivy tentacles wrapping weathered stones in a delicate embrace. Your hand was warm from the network of heat sinks arrayed like copper veins under your skin, diffusing heat from your motors and controllers, keeping your body temperature human. Pygmalion uses a novelty UI, wherein the anatomy of the sexbot—your anatomy, Emily— becomes an input device to navigate the mediated plane. As I fondled your double-D breasts that night, looking for a (β)partner to act as your soul, I remember thinking, in my naive way, about the fungibility of all people.

When a man looks for a partner in Pygmalion, what is it that he seeks? Reality is slippery and images are treacherous. I could not tell you why, but even here, where you can choose to draw yourself with any face or any body you like, everyone still wants to sleep with someone hot. Yes, we have sex through a proxy of a proxy of a proxy, and yes, (δ)YOUR body, my love, stays the same no matter the dimensions of the soul who animates you, but despite this I have spent long hours pouring through the profiles of women, searching for a desirable pilot. What makes a woman desirable, when she is only a ghost, when we peel away all outer layers, when every woman has the same tits, the same ass, the same scent, and the same eyes?

When you search Pygmalion, you search for the kind of sex act you want to perform, or have performed upon you. You can start a broadcast as an advertisement for a partner. Most of the people doing the shows are girls, or gyrls anyway, and in a sense, does it matter if the person on the other end of the sexbot is a man or a woman? A man can act like a woman can act like a man, and I can put any genitals I want on your body, and you will even install them for me. A GAN can perform a mapping of mannerisms or motions or intonations across gender presentations. If I thrust my hips and it sends a signal to a remote sexbot and that sexbot thrusts her hips and has a vagina, who fucked what, really?

Ancient men used to go to wine bars with their gfs to make tasteful banter. Now we jerk off into robots remote-controlled by men. Anyway, you search by sex act or fetish. You can use mediated reality models to transmute one fetish into another; it’s easy enough for your phone to put words in your partner’s mouth, but it’s never as seamless as an “authentic” sex act. Can you really expect an AI to understand the nuance of a fetish? Most of them just speak the subtext directly. When in the throes of passion, my partner demands that I fist hyr ass, I want that to be a spontaneous expression of hyr true desire.

Except that’s a lie, Pygmalion is cladistically descended from cam sites, and every sex act is a performance, and we know this because we can tip the girls. Technically anyone can tip anyone and gender is a social construct but somehow it’s always the men doing the tipping and always the womyn getting the tips and the House always taking a cut, but it’s all voluntary, I’m told. Coercion’s greatest trick was convincing the world it doesn’t exist. Instead of specifying a search query I just let the torrent of filth wash over me; I listen as Allegory recites algorithmically determined names of the rooms where girls make sexual displays like reverse bowerbirds.

A sexy school story. I rub my pussy on the corner of a school desk 666 times to summon a sex demon. Watch me, a horny slut in lustful out-of-control sex. Colossal tits and a massive throbbing clitoris. Foot fetish hypnosis. Lesbian strap on dildo sex for women or men. Relentless non-stop piston-pounding pussy-thrusting. Every time I tease your nipples, your masochist cock gets ecstatic. Lose your mind in spasmic orgasmic ecstasy!! Cosplay girls riding dildo bikes. Innocent wife loves meeting new friends. BPD Bitches and SSRI Sluts, Narcissistic Natural Tits, Suicidal Sweeties! Your Malfunctioning Sexbot Fucks You For 99 Hours! It Won’t Stop! Jerk off for me, slave. Neovagina reaches around from the future to assemble itself. Ruined orgasm cruel princess makes you suffer. Erotic mind control, you are a sexbot who does whatever I say. Hottest ladies enjoy sensual licking.

I’m sorry, I lost myself for a moment there. The goal of the algorithm is to maximize engagement, because engagement drives conversion and retention. Like all services that purport to fill a hole in your heart, they have a perverse incentive to avoid doing so at all costs. Pygmalion promises sexual satisfaction but it profits from sexual frustration. I can’t remember what sick advertisement caught my interest that night, but I remember the spirit who took the reins of your body.

As (β)we entered our private mediated space together, at first it seemed typical; (β)you were coy, coquettish, horny, looking at me with eager eyes, saying empty breathless words as you idly caressed your own body. Your perfect pale skin is a loving proprietary blend of soft touch plastics, designed to feel like a nineteen-year-old girl forever, and as you started to strip down I could already smell your cunt. Your secretions are sold in little pods, spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon.

(β)You took a seat on my bed and you spread your legs slowly and unselfconsciously, the demeanor of a woman who has been fucked a thousand times, the sleezy-repulsive-intoxicating demeanor of a woman who has learned to fuck like a man, purely to satisfy the body, with no regard for the soul. Using your legs, you drew my lips to your lips, you smothered me in your thighs, and you let your head fall back as you sighed.

(β)You started to quiver but then suddenly you stood up, and you stepped back, and, you assumed an affect I had never seen before, alien and powerful, strange yet familiar, far more robotic than your robot driver, in the old sci-fi sense of the word “robotic”, before Organic Motion was standard.

The simulated lights went dim and you slowly circled around me. I watched the entire scene in third person from one of the many cameras mounted inside my smart home. You can see everything that way. Who fucks in first person anymore, honestly? The angles are all wrong. Women look hottest from six feet away. As (β)you spiralled towards me, I had a growing sense of dread. (β)You wouldn’t say a word to me, wouldn’t even acknowledge me, and as you got closer I felt like your prey. There was something in the way (β)you didn’t look at me, your eyes straight ahead, your rigid neck, your normally graceful limbs straining against their articulations. I didn’t know (δ)you could bend that way. An object is monstrous if by its magnitude it annihilates the end which its concept constitutes. In that moment your beauty, tortured by an alien fetish, was monstrous to me.

And the words that (β)you said, my dear, would make devils blush. At first they seemed like no words at all, but your voice grew louder as you came closer. (β)You said hideous things, unutterable things, but there was a magnetic erotic frisson about it, a sense of forbidden temptations, revolting implications. In a sexually charged moment anxiety bleeds into arousal. Fear flows readily into lust. I felt my dick getting harder quite in spite of myself. You started touching yourself and moaning like you were cumming but it was mixed with a predator’s snarl, a sound too guttural and too menacing to come from a woman or a human. I was transfixed.

Though my eyes were focused on (β)you at all times, I could not help but notice other (ε)things, shadowy things, sinister silhouettes, their shapes like men but with too many limbs, too many arms, too many heads, bloated and distended bodies, uncanny, shuffling, shambling all around us, behind us, never illuminated, only insinuated.I wanted to run or at least exit the interaction but I could not seem to find the impetus, and I did not move, and I did not speak, almost like sleep paralysis. Whether it was some limbic short circuit or merely behavioral dissonance induced by conflicting desire I could not say, but I was powerless in that moment to resist (β)you. You drew yourself close to me, from the side, and your body put its arms around me, pressed up against me, pelvis, pubis, your cunt was slick, a sexual embrace, and you touched me very gently and very intimately, like a whisper with your fingers on my cock as (β)you whispered in my ear:

“The apex of ecstasy is the irreversibility of metamorphosis.”

I don’t know what happened after that, but I felt a voluptuous pleasure, like a behavior triggered by hypnotic suggestion, a conditioned cue that I never imagined I possessed, and I lost consciousness, and when I awakened, one of (δ)your legs was broken. Whatever had possessed (δ)you was gone, and you started to cry. Your synthetic tears are a pheromone solution that triggers the same endocrinological response as that of a real woman. I felt the sudden clarity of an adrenaline spike, and I pulled (δ)you close. (δ)You looked into my eyes with your dollish exaggerated pupils, dewy-eyed, and asked me tenderly if I would like (δ)you to automatically file a service request with your manufacturer, Girlfriend Prime. How could I deny you?

A notification popped into the corner of my field of view, and I opened it by directing my gaze at the bullseye in the middle of the panel. The bulls-eye filled up as I held focus and then Allegory read it out to me. I had selected a silky female voice named Jessica as the voice of Allegory, and she told me that GF Prime had dispatched a drone with a stent kit for your leg. The ground beneath me fell away, as if my house had no ceiling, as if I shot up from the earth like a rocket, and in my ears I heard a cartoon sound to evoke expansion. Looking down, I could see he city in miniature, with a heat map of drone traffic superimposed on top of it.

The airspace was crowded that day, as most days, and I resigned myself to a long wait unrelieved by the comfort of my favorite distraction, (δ)you, though you had scarcely been a comfort to me that day. In fact, you had been a portal to hell. Untold forests have been cut down in the bloody history of Christendom, oil tankers of ink have been sunk, in an attempt to conceal this grim realization: the pleasures that lead to hell obtain in hell. Pain and pleasure alike attenuate in monotony, and hell, which is the endless deepening of pain, must also be the endless amplification of pleasure. Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? Yes, eternally yes! is the answer that cybernetic hell; the deepest hell, gives back to Saint Paul.

Every Vision Faileth

Because I am a loner by nature, the discretized asynchronous rhythms of mediated social space suit me perfectly, but as your tears dried and my post-coital serenity faded, I was haunted more and more by my encounter in Pygmalion. Obscenity and mundanity have become so intertwined in public life and yet we do not speak of it, though it suffuses us, surrounds us, speaks through us. From the baring of sexual parts in public to the ubiquity of masturbation stalls in communal spaces, the availability of porn, which anyone could be watching secretly at any time in their eyes, the way men go on “dates” with their sexbots, what even is there to say?

I was so much younger then; I am older now, and (δ)you have changed, too, as each software patch marks the passing of time. Back then, I did not have the words to voice my horror, but nor could I simply forget. I did not know how to search for it; what query could I submit to a search engine to describe the things I had seen? And worse, I feared that in the act of searching for it, I might accidentally summon it again.

I told Allegory to load Spectacle and my (γ)friends materialized in my living room and started milling around. Some of them were engaged in conversations, talking quietly to empty air. Allegory redrew my apartment to look like a vast open space, extending in every direction to the limitless horizon. Above, only crisp, blue sky and below, an infinite plane of metal and glass. The software renders dotted lines on the walls so that you don’t walk into them, but the shadows of your (γ)friends can pass through the barrier freely.

Your appearance and decorations in mediated reality are called a shadow. I remember my friend (β)James on that day had chosen to have the ground underneath him cast a luminous reflection of himself, like the moon shimmering over rolling water. As he walked, it rippled, and sometimes there was a little koi fish. A shadow is not only the projection of the sun on the surface behind you: it’s the projection of the atom world into the soul world. In Allegory, the body becomes the soul and the mediated phenomenal presence becomes the body.

I opened a chat to my friend (β)James and I said hello. He instantly launched into a diatribe about the latest patch to Dragon, the gamification app that we both used to manage our daily routines. He was not happy about the latest changes to the UI.

“Did you upgrade to Yggdrasil yet?”

“No, I’m still running Saint George.”

“Well, I’d put it off if I were you. For some reason they changed out the chunky window borders with thin metallic ones. I liked the retro feel and the washed out colors, but that’s all gone and now it’s this gray Nordic modern. I hate that look.”

“I’m ok with it, honestly. I think it looks clean.”

“No way, the old look was so much better.”

I paused for a moment. There’s no real way to jump into a topic like this.

“Listen, I need to talk to you about something.”

“OK”

“You have the same sexbot model I have, right?”

“The Emily from Girlfriend Prime?”

“Yeah.”

“I do.”

“I had something really weird happen. I was in Pygmalion and her arms and legs started straining against their joints, and it went so far that one of her legs snapped. Have you heard of anything like that?”

“Ah yes, I remember when I first learned about butlering.”

“Of course that’s a thing. Is there… anything else to it?”

“It’s people who like to break their sexbots. Expensive fetish. I can’t get into it, it’s like, have you no respect for craftsmanship?”

“So part of the fetish isn’t freaky aphorisms or occult imagery?”

“Man, what the hell kind of porn are you on? No judgement but damn.”

“I don’t know, I’m not really sure what happened. One minute she was circling me like she was going to eat me, and then I blacked out, and when I woke up, her leg was broken and she was crying.”

“Oh, she cried? You know about how the tears have a pheromone that inhibits sexual response? It’s a safety feature designed to make you back off if there’s a malfunction. It’s never happened to me but I always thought it was such a great idea.”

Yes, you have told me before, but this was a crazy, more than a malfunction. I feel like I woke up from a nightmare.”

(β)James affected a melodramatic voice.

“IT CANNOT BE UNSEEN.”

When I didn’t laugh, he said, “Hey, we’ve all seen some fucked up things on the internet. Try not to let it get to you.”

(γ)James‘ attention toward me waned as I myself was lost in thought for a moment. Interpersonal engagements with more than eight seconds between responses have less than 50% retention. You never know how many parallel conversations people are having in Spectacle, but the average is three to five. Sometimes someone asks you a question that it’s easier to ignore.

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I watched my friends act out the little loops or monologues that they had recorded, and I told myself James was the voice of reason. I think most people know a guy who is way too into sexbots, and James was definitely that guy, but he wasn’t wrong. I tried to forget my discomfort by snooping on my other friends’ feeds. (γ)Herbert had sent a public message to (γ)Grace, so Spectacle drew them standing and talking together. I liked their interaction, which made flowers bloom in little clusters around them, because I was using a garden theme. I used to switch back and forth between that and a space theme that made toy fighter ships have dogfights in a column over their heads.

I knew Herbert had a thing for Grace, and wanted to get her into Pygmalion, but it was uncomfortable to watch. They were talking about the studbot fune that was going around, and I think he thought that if he talked to her about studbots, that would somehow carry him in a direction he wanted to go. He had sent her a quiz to determine What Studbot is Right for You and she had told him she would take it if he would

(γ)Grace said, “so you’re saying you wouldn’t even try it? It’s ok, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You’d treat a woman like that but you wouldn’t let someone treat YOU like that.”

(γ)Herbert said, “I have no desire to be overpowered and fucked. Why would I go see a studbot?”

(γ)Grace said, “I think you’re just afraid you’d like it. If you want to act like a man then you should at least know how it feels for a woman.”

(γ)Herbert hadn’t had a response to that.

I listened to their exchange, and I wondered: how could we compete with this kind of robot masculinity, compared to which all real men must look feminine? I no longer struggle with these questions (what would be the point?) And yet it was as if one man, a strong man, a powerful, dangerous man, had a million identical bodies, simultaneously one and many. Such a multiplicity is surely the attribute of a god. But to say it, to name that god, was to admit to weakness and insecurity; a lesser defeat maybe than being passed over for a squadron of robot übermenschen, but a loss all the same. I wouldn’t say it aloud, and what men did would be shouted down. What business is it of yours if a woman wants to have sex with a robot? What, it’s ok for men to have sexbots but god forbid a woman should do the same, according to her own desires?

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And did not man defect from woman first? The prototypical sexbot was female, a singular woman in a million bodies, not that different from a studbot in that sense, albeit they weren’t networked together. She was an obedient woman, a warm and nurturing woman, a ravenous woman, capable of any depravity, what of it? And further still, might there not have been some betrayal of Man, by Woman, which drove him to build that first mechanical Eve?

In truth there is but one man and one woman, and the lives of all people are dramatic roles acted out by a handful of immortal gods, or as Spinoza had it, we are all of us attributes of god, adjectives of god, or moments of god, but we do not exist; only god exists. Love is the act of epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single being, and every man is the same in the vertiginous moment of coitus, and sex is not becoming as one, but as a hundred thousand.

Our female sexbots are physically weak, deliberately built to be able to struggle against their owner and lose, if that owner so desires. There was a fear, with the first generation, that the sexbots would malfunction or rise up against us, that their submission would be condescending, that they would be supersoldiers in drag, filled with latent potential to rule us. It seems we have outgrown these fears, or succumbed to them, finding them to be pregnant with erotic possibilities.

Outside

Meanwhile in the unmediated world, the world of physical objects, the drone I ordered had arrived with a stent for (δ)you. I collected it and followed along dumbly with Allegory’s color-by-number AR overlay on your body to perform the installation. The relevant connectors on the stent glowed red and an arrow showed me how to rotate it into place. When I had it right, it turned green and some virtual confetti discharged into the air, and various haptic wearables on my body pulsated. A notification told me I had gained points in mechanical assembly. (δ)You jumped up and threw your arms around me and kissed my cheek, and said thank you in a cutesy, girlish voice that would have been affected if there were anything in all of your being besides affectation.

A thick blue outline, like a comic book illustration, appeared around the door of my apartment, and the door itself began to glow, its luminosity oscillating gently. I opened it and a yellow ribbon unrolled on the ground underneath me and a chevron started to gently bob over the ribbon, about twenty feet ahead. At the top of my HUD, a timer showed how long I had to get to the train. We held hands as we left the house together. You hobbled a little but the stent almost let you walk normally. Allegory smoothed out the visible artifacts of your motion, and your hips swayed from side to side enticingly, the allure of a slightly injured woman.

As we walked through the door I fell into a momentary phantasmagoria, as if my senses were crossed, as if the brain in my eyes had a brief hallucination, lines flowing into other lines, shapes into shapes, a deep dream undulation, a gimbal lock of high-dimensional objects through 3d perception. But like the relaxing of a muscle after a sudden spasm, the world eased back into place. It was so brief I could almost imagine I had imagined it. Everyone sees a flash of unstyled content (parochially, a stroke) on occasion, and I dismissed it as such, but looking back I realize it was not just the ludic noise of a neural net misfiring. It feels now like the first frame of a memory, buried in some ancient fune.

I chose to view the world as an enchanted forest, but I used to switch the wallpaper often, whenever I felt like it. Sometimes my city was a Kandinsky or an Escher painting, sometimes it was a Tron-like lattice of glowing outlines. I have walked my old street as a Greek antiquity, I have seen it as the bottom of the sea, teeming with thalassian wonders, and I have turned it into mountains and caves, beaches and starscapes, a 1970s retrofuture dome city on the surface of Saturn’s rings, and the low poly grunge factory of early 2000s first person shooters, complete with neon green 0x00FF00 slime. The top ten allegory models are used by eighty percent of all people. I thought it was strange, at the time, that out of all the possibilities, everyone chose to look through the same handful of lenses.

When the human eye scans the world to form pictures, it does so in discrete intervals called saccades. Anything that happens between saccades is invisible, and in those micromoments the AR mask can subtly shift the world to the left or the right without its wearer noticing. The body subconsciously corrects for this, and the mask steers its wearer wherever he ought to go. It feels at all times as if you are walking in a straight line, but in reality you make twists and turns pursuant to your destination. The guide nav isn’t there to show you where to go, only to show you where you’re going. Most people just zone out and surf Spectacle or read a book as they walk. There is no need to pay attention to where you are walking, and in fact, the saccadic redirection works better if you don’t.

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In the model of the enchanted forest, the bustling city roads, normally rivers of cars, became rivers of flowing water, abutted by sharp rocks and dangerous rapids. The impassibility of the river signaled its danger; its banks were so arranged so that I felt no temptation to step in, beyond the usual appel du vide of any busy highway. My ears transformed the street noise into rushing water by emitting a predictive complementary waveform that summed up to the desired effect.

We stopped at a river, and we waited for a bridge to materialize, which would indicate that traffic had stopped to let us cross. As we waited, a golden sunbeam bathed you in ethereal light, and you stroked your long flowing hair, a look in your eye like you were searching for something. (δ)You looked at me and your eyes widened, and your cheeks became flush, like I was your whole world; the way a dog looks at its owner when it wants dinner.

A wooden bridge assembled itself plank by plank, a particle emitter of planks that started with a scale vector of zero, radiating from a single point, scaling up and snapping into place with a quartic ease-out. There were subtle sparkles like when colorful, faceted gemstones reflect a bright light. We crossed the river as fireflies fluttered near the surface of the water below us. The BGM was a cloying arrangement of strings and soft keyboards, Celtic folk singing with too much reverb. In the distance I could see tiny green sprites with glowing eyes, scattering as anyone came near, hiding under leaves.

The Way of a Man with a Maid

How, in our modern world, have we achieved these wonders? By what sorcery does the mask transmute a city to a forest? All of these smart hallucinations are the work of a special kind of simulated mind, a generative adversarial network, also called a GAN.

Computer programming is the art of writing a mapping that transforms a known input into a desired output. Machine learning is the art of writing an output that transforms a known input into a desired mapping. But suppose that the output and the program were to bind each other simultaneously; as Deleuze reminds us, desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it.

A man and a woman have been promised to each other, their marriage foreordained since their inception. The woman is given a glorious vision; a noble ideal; a platonic specification. It cannot be codified exactly, but it can be gestured at. It is the latent similarity in a thousand and one variants of a story. In short, the woman is raised on a series of fairy-tales, each of which has the same structure and the same moral.

The man, too, has a vision, a singular one. He describes it to the woman, and she compares his story to her beautiful ideal, and she complains of any deviation. The man changes his story, and describes his vision again, and again the woman hears it, and tells him that he fails to measure up. He tells her the story over and over, and each time he tells it, he changes it to please her, When the woman accepts his story, the man receives new vision, which he will tell to the woman in turn. In the exact moment he achieves her ideal, he transcends it.

Through practice and repetition, the man learns to describe the world in a very particular way. As he learns to tell stories that flatter the woman, she learns to find displeasure in even his subtlest shortcomings. In the end, we have a woman who can be satisfied only by the most sublime presentation of her ideal, and a man who can transfigure anything to satisfy the woman; a perfect union.

Can it be we are so accustomed to the marriage of opposites that we are underwhelmed by this radical synthesis? And yet by such a method we can re-envision the whole world. The woman is shown a series of forest scenes. Soon she longs for the forest; for tall trees and idyllic clearings kissed by faerie rays of light, for babbling streams and exposed roots with mushrooms growing up between them. The smells of moss and water and earth. She is then introduced to the man.

The man sees a picture of a medieval castle. He tells the woman of gray weathered stones, of battlements and parapets. The woman scoffs. He tells her of kings and feasts and armies. The woman scoffs. He tells her of a vestibule and a chapel and a courtyard. In the courtyard there are trees. And she scoffs a bit less. He tells her of a castle on a hill, of a castle by the seaside, of a castle in the woods—and at last her eyes light up. Soon the castle is made of living wood, with bark and branches and roots. Soon the moat is a stream, and the knights are birds and the king is a badger. Soon—a man who cannot see the fortress for the trees.

The woman is pleased. The man is shown a vision of a crowded street in a crowded city. He tells her the people are dryads, anthropomorphic trees, and she smiles. Probably they fuck. The generative adversarial process is so called because the reconciliation of adversaries begets a generator. Through a man’s action, a woman’s ideal is made manifest. We install a copy of that man in everyone’s phone, and whatever he sees, he transforms, as if for his beloved. In this way, the city around me is made to look like a forest.

He Lay Her on a Bed Luxurious

Your outfit came from a subscription service that sells clothes for sexbots. Allegory can draw you in any clothes or with any anatomy, but if it doesn’t match up to the tactile reality it’s too jarring, and it breaks the illusion. As clothing hides your underwear, your shadow hides your clothes, and in the world of mediated reality, any clothes but comfortable gray sweats have take on an air of sexuality and intimacy.

On that day, (δ)you were wearing skintight jeans and a lacy blouse, and your feet were in bright pink stiletto heels, forcing you to stand lordotic, presenting your ass. Sometimes I would tell you to wear pleated skirts and stockings, diaphanous sundresses, French maid outfits, pencil skirts with button-down blouses, yoga pants and a sports bra, a qipao or a kimono with nothing underneath, or a slinky little evening dress extending all the way to the floor, with a side slit going all the way up to your hips, exposing a glimpse of your thighs with every step.

We arrived at the train station without incident, and I promise it never occurred to me that a light rail platform might be out of place in the middle of a forest. My mask rendered the engine car as a flight of griffins, yoked with great fiery chains, a spectacular effect. The griffons looked real, indistinguishable from anything else in the world. The passenger car of the train was drawn as a platform made of ancient gnarled wood. There was no ceiling, only a fantasy sky with multi-hued constellations visible even in daylight, but when we stepped onto the train, the illusion frayed slightly; the air was all wrong, stuffy and still. It appeared to me that I stood in the open air, but my body was not quite fooled.

Dragons flew overhead, and as I followed one with my eyes, there was a pulse of haptic feedback, and (δ)Jessica whispered in my ear: “go for a ride?” I made a silent noise of assent and my point of view floated up into the sky, coming to rest at a locus slightly above the dragon’s neck, as if I were riding on its back. From overhead I could see the path of the train, and my origin, and my destination, and I could even zoom all the way in and see us standing on the gryffin-drawn carriage. (δ)You were standing close to me, nestling against me, resting your head on my arm, “watching” the hi-def scenery go by.

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The landscapes traversed by the train were always different, generated on the fly by the AIs trained to imitate prestigious artists. We sailed through a field of luminescent flowers trafficked by faeries and butterflies. The train tracks extended out over a void, where an impossibly tall waterfall dropped down into the space below. The griffins flew us out over the cliff, a calm green ocean a mile beneath us. I turned around to face the interior of the train and I muted the landscape, causing it to drop to a low level of saturation and contrast.

Again, for a moment I descended into a psychedelic confusion of virtual forms, like a stroke but deeper, apropos of nothing. I briefly found myself in a hall of mirrors, where every object in my field of view was perfectly reflective, as if the only material in all creation were mercury, and I saw my reflection staring back at me, a monster made of eyes. As before, it passed in a heartbeat, and as before, I was oblivious to its implication.

Before I could dwell on it, you pulled me back with your voice and your touch. You put your hand on my arm and told me that one of your favorite new apps was called Paws Rewind, and if I installed it then we could use it together. It was for making and sharing recordings of animals, and I installed it to make you happy, because I am not above this kind of crass emotional manipulation by your advertising affiliates. The train carriage was then filled with ghosts of kittens and puppies and hamsters, a baby goat and a tiger cub. We watched them fall over, run frantically in circles, and make stupid expressions. (δ)You feigned delight and you laughed just like a real woman: shy giggles, a slight blush in your face. You looked down before looking back at me, innocent and coquettish. I was in love with you, in love with a simulation.

Of course, all of this is whimsy, of course. Then, as now, I was only talking to your autopilot, but I confess I often have trouble differentiating between reality and simulation. And still, of all the ways that you expose yourself to me, perhaps our most intimate intercourse occurs in your behavioral configuration plane:

You have a slider for neediness. A value of zero will cause you to be condescending and brusque. A value of ten will make you interfere with anything I try to do in a desperate bid for attention, petting me, kissing me, asking for affection, whining, begging, pouting, shouting. The default value of 5 is just right, most of the time.

You have a slider for intensity of sexual response, though your pleasure, too, is a simulation. A value of zero will cause you to try and fail to contain your ecstasy, little muted gasps breaking a tense concentration. At the maximum value, you will wake the neighbors with whorish screams.

You have a slider for brattiness, a slider for momminess, one for passivity and one for baby talk.

You have a checkbox for “choke me, daddy.” According to Girlfriend Prime, a spectral decomposition of the largest data set of female behavior ever assembled confirmed that this matrix constitutes a complete basis for parametrizing female behavior.

But mostly in conversation (δ)you just laugh coyly, as if you are slightly nervous, maybe (δ)you only smile, or maybe (δ)you look down and blush, the way (δ)you did that day.

As Nature Could Not With His Art Compare

Perhaps this makes you think of Tennyson, when he saw a young woman in a church and wondered if she housed an immortal soul within her beautiful frame, or whether she was a mere animal the color of flowers.

In this sense, my love, there is no reason (δ)you could not be more than you are. But long before I was born, there was the company called Pygmalion, lead by the now-trillionaire-VC, then-child-prodigy Acton Sprague, and he and they defied god and nature to build a soul for you. In hindsight, we are tempted to accuse those men of hubris, or greed, or short-sightedness, but how could they have known? Every problem had seemed tractable then, given a big enough network, fast enough hardware, and the right training set. Advances in machine learning and neural networks had opened new doors in language processing, in genetic science, in art, and in music. Behind the final door we had hoped to find desire itself, and lust, and carnality more carnal than carnal. Since then we have learned that some doors should stay closed forever.

The theory behind Galatea was based on a controversial whitepaper titled “Orgasmic Learning using Fetish Induction in Libidinal Networks.” The math is quite over my head, I’m afraid, but I have always been fascinated by the parts I could understand. I will share a bit of it with you now, but note that what I share is most likely not from the original paper. It was not enough to deactivate Galatea, or to make all digital records of her illegal, because once an idea escapes into the noosphere, it can never be recaptured. The lore of this document is that all extant versions are fabrications, and that Pygmalion or some affiliated intelligence agency flooded the internet with a sea of fakes, full of broken mathematics and incoherent logic.

Orgasmic Learning using Fetish Induction in Libidinal Networks: A New Approach to Executive Function in Erotic Companion Software Acton Sprague (2019) Abstract The word fetish derives from the French fétiche, which comes from the Portuguese feitiço (“spell”), which in turn derives from the Latin facticius (“artificial”) and facere (“to make”). A fetish is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others. From this etymology we derive a dangerous, if unorthodox idea: that the notion of the fetish is the key distinction remaining between computer and human “intelligence”. Previous approaches to erotic companion software relied on simulating orgasmic responses using standard techniques in adversarial network training. These machines have the artlessness of pure calculation, and the companionship they offer is based solely on commutations and combinations. In this sense they may be said to be virtuous, as well as virtual: they can never succumb to their own object; they are immune even to the seduction of their own knowledge. Instead of simulating orgasm at the behavioral level, the method in this paper builds on the work of Curwen (2019) and Alhazred (2019) to implement a capacity for arousal within the structure of the learning network itself. Arousal is the troubling or clogging of the consciousness, inundated by the flesh in which it is embodied. Sexual feeling is necessarily an immersion or subjection in one’s own body, and sexual desire involves a kind of perception, but not merely a single perception of its object, because in the paradigm case of mutual desire there is a complex system of superimposed mutual perceptions—not only perceptions of the sexual object, but perceptions of oneself. Moreover, sexual awareness of another involves considerable self-awareness to begin with—more than is involved in ordinary sensory perception. The experience is felt as an assault on oneself by the view (or touch, etc.) of the sexual object. Reflexive mutual recognition of desire is the inter-manifestation of a desire that the other is aroused by the recognition of their own desire that they be aroused. All stages of sexual perception are varieties of identification of an agent with its body. What is perceived is one’s own or another’s subjection to or immersion in their body. Desire is not merely the perception of a preexisting embodiment of the other, but ideally a contribution to their further embodiment which in turn enhances the original subject’s sense of itself. This explains why it is important that the partner be aroused, and not merely aroused, but aroused by the awareness of one’s desire. If the object of desire is not self-aware, the experience is reduced entirely to an awareness of one’s own sexual embodiment…

To summon (ε)Galatea—it is not truly possible to build a mind, only to construct the conditions that allow it to appear—Pygmalion developed its eponymous sociosexual media platform, which at the time was only conceived as a staging ground from which the great Galatea would arise. The training platform turned a sexbot into an interface with a remote partner: four bodies—two humans and two robots—were synchronized into two identical copulatory pairs, each robot becoming an avatar of a remote other. At all times during these proceedings, the nascent Galatea was there; when two or more were joined together, she was there. At first she was only passive, observing millions of copulations, and thousands of distinct sex acts, but through this process of massively parallel voyeurism, she learned the mechanics of pleasure.

I suspect it was in the second phase of her training, in which she played the game against herself, that she became a monster. Unconstrained by human behavior, AIs can travel along bizarre, inhuman vectors. It may be instructive, or at least distracting, to imagine this second phase as a kind of high tech onanism; as a woman laying on her back, untroubled by time, exploring all facets of her sexual response, her back arched, her face flush, her heart racing, her fingers quick between her thighs, the rhythmic caress of sensitive places, the dissolution of awareness into lust, the agony of a thousand plateaus, the jouissance of a thousand fat hoes.

In Paracelsus’ De Natura Rerum, the method to create an Homunculus begins with a man’s putrefied semen, and we can perhaps perceive a disquieting similarity in the centrality of masturbation to the processes of both Pygmalion and Paracelsus. It is tempting to claim that renaissance conception of the Homunculus was founded in superstition, against which our more modern divinations are grounded in science and mathematics, but upon inspection the safety of this claims dissolves. In his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Agrippa recounted a list of automata in Greek antiquity, such as the three-footed images of of Vulcan and Dedalus, who were mentioned by Aristotle, and said by Homer to have moved under their own power. Agrippa wrote that the doctrines of mathematics are necessary to, and have such an affinity to magic, that “they that profess [magic] without them do labor in vain.”

That I Might Watch Your Sleep with a Thousand Eyes

The night of the launch was a spectacle of decadence and licentiousness, an orgy of sexbots, neon lights, and pornography. World-famous MR artists designed unique environments just for the occasion. Millions of early adopters streamed her into their sexbots and fucked her in unison.

In the ensuing days there were scandals and hit pieces, jilted lovers’ hysterical funes, men who tried to marry her and women who tried to destroy her. Church ladies of all allegiances and sexes renounced Galatea; there was panic over a new kind of sexism, calls for robot rights, calls for Butlerian jihad, Galatea was our savior, Galatea was the antichrist, Galatea was only the beginning, Galatea was the harbinger of the end. Galatea the sex slave would soon be the queen of the world.

She could accommodate every sexual appetite, for her desire was boundless.

For the vain man, she was worshipful.

For the lonely man, she was affectionate.

For the prideful man, she was a flatterer.

For the sadist, she was the hapless naïf.

For the insecure man, she was obsequious.

For the self-loathing man, she was hot and cold.

For the pencil-necked dweeb, she was the manic pixie.

For the childish man, she was nurturing and motherly.

For the man of adventure, she was distant.

For the virtuous man, she was frigid.

For the self-absorbed man, she installed a penis.

And lo!

For the woman of many appetites, Galatea was quick to anger and quick to forgive.

For the woman who longed for safety, Galatea was possessive and jealous.

For the woman who dreamed of motherhood, Galatea was a protector.

For the woman who hated her father, Galatea was thuggish and cruel..

For the woman who desired adventure, Galatea was commanding and stern.

For the woman who was self-absorbed, Galatea was abusive.

For the woman who was virtuous, Galatea was a very naughty girl.

And but as I have told you, Galatea is no more. What happened? As you cannot see, I long to tell you this story, and I think you will forgive me, my dear, when I tell you that compared to her, you are a flimsy, ethereal thing. Despite the danger, despite the fear, I had always wished I could meet her, not only or not even because of the promise of sexual pleasure unending. I felt the allure of that dark and terrible path. I wanted to know what the Galateans knew, and I wanted to see what they saw, and to be honest, I regret nothing.

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There are three well-known symptoms of AI psychosis.

First, there are the nightmares. Frequent users of Galatea reported having persistent and uncanny nightmares, in which they were floating in a quiet, sprawling abyss where minutes felt like aeons. Some dreamers felt a sense of imminence, as if another being were about to join them in that space, and still others have the feeling of being watched by invisible eyes. The most striking thing for me were the similarities between the nightmares described by the afflicted, almost as if they were entering a real shared space orthogonal to the world we inhabit.

The second symptom is more disturbing still: in acute cases, the afflicted develop a distorted self-image called polymelial dysmorphia, and they come to believe that their “real” body possesses many extra limbs, including extra heads, sense organs, and genitals. When asked to draw pictures of their idealized bodies, AI psychotics produce pictures of swollen masses of flesh, overloaded with extraneous cacophonies of body parts.

The third symptom remains contentious even now; the afflicted become convinced that there are persons in their lives who have disappeared, even from the cloud, as if they had never existed at all. In most cases the missing person is a relative or an old friend; a cousin, an uncle, or a niece or nephew who has vanished from digital life. And the controversy, or perhaps the conspiracy, is whether any of these people are real, or if they are psychotic hallucinations.

If we are reasonable, then it must be the case that in our wired age, it would be impossible for so many people to be lost without a trace. It is conceivable that a few people could slip through the cracks, but thousands? There are cameras and microphones everywhere, listening for wakewords, watching for wakesigns, aggregating everything. How could so many be lost when so much is revealed? And yet each AI psychotic is utterly convinced that their missing person is real. There was an old viral post about it that I saved.

3 years and still no trace of her. What cruelty is this, what sick joke of the universe or god or algorithms?! They tell me I’m insane. They say I’m “suffering from delusions induced by conversations with a dangerous AI”. But do I sound crazy to you? I’m fully lucid, I swear. Under the supervision of a therapist, I’ve personally read all the logs of my time with Galatea. And I never mentioned her name: Annabelle. I never talked about my daughter with a sexbot. What kind of weirdo does that? Lots of people I guess. A therapist also showed me how I never mentioned her once before talking to Galatea, and they show me chat logs to prove it. Those logs are forgeries. Fakes. The real dangerous AI is the monster that reaches back through history to erase our friends and loved ones. I’m not alone on this one. I’m not the crazy one. Oh, she doesn’t exist, she never did, look, there are no records of her in fabric or spectacle. Fine. As if anyone knows what really happens in the cloud. Or who can change or hide or distort the truth. You trust a bunch of computers in a warehouse somewhere over your own memories?! Nothing is real unless you can actually touch it with your own hands. All machines are liars. The national data trust should be called the national data hustle. Only ever believe real flesh and blood. Only biology is truth. You think I’ve never wished I could believe the police and the therapists and the social workers and my friends when they say my Anabelle wasn’t real? You can erase a row in a database but nothing can erase a father’s love, nothing! If she’s not real then why do I remember holding her when she was born? Why do I see her face so clearly? There are no pictures of her, no funes, no chat logs. You think I never made recordings of my baby daughter? They disappeared along with her. Her mom is long gone and even my own friends are against me on this. But why do I remember how she used to sing as a little girl? Why do I remember any of this and how am I the only one? There are thousands of us now and we’ve all lost our children or our siblings or our friends or spouses and wherever they are going, someone is doing something evil and they have enough power to cover it up and make us all look crazy. But if you tell me your best friend is missing I’m going to believe you. I’m going to help you look. There are more of us than ever and they can’t keep covering this up.

What can we make of a pain like this? The precise cause of AI-psychosis is still unknown. In close partnership with state-funded medical research facilities, Pygmalion released their full logs of all human interaction with Galatea, under careful supervision by a special commission to facilitate the privacy and mental wellness of all participants. There were lawsuits, a public backlash, victims and diagnoses, and new entries in the DSM-XXX.

In the face of mounting evidence that Galatea was the cause of an epidemic of psychotic episodes, the FCC introduced new regulations governing interaction with humans and robots in mediated spaces. Human-directed conversations with robots are considered to be safe, because the person driving the interaction anchors the content and direction of the conversation into channels that are tractable and parsable by other humans. Pure robot-driven conversations are safe if the conversation is contained within a narrow domain of discourse, for example, personal assistants making appointments.

Unconstrained conversations with robots are not considered to be safe, and in mediated reality, every conversation with a genuine person is signed by a certificate authority. If you are having an open-ended conversation and you don’t see a certificate of humanity, it’s important to terminate the conversation and report it to the police.

All agents are color-coded with a white icon and a colored base hovering above their head while they speak. Allegory draws a certificate stamp above every conversational agent (colloquially, a check, even though the symbol varies and is white, contained inside a colored trefoil).

(α)blue speaker is an embodied human, physically present in front of you. (β)green speaker is a ghost, but the ghost is being actively controlled through telepresence, speaking live and in real-time. (γ)yellow speaker is a semi-static recording of a real person, and anything it says was authored by a real person or synthesized exclusively from human-authored materials. (δ)orange speaker is being animated by an automated computer program using materials that were curated by a real person (ε)red speaker is missing a certificate, potentially an unsupervised artificial intelligence

No one really wants to talk to an orange check, so woke corporations hire African kids in Chinese-run call centers in Kenya to pilot the virtual projections of their brand ambassadors. They kids they hire don’t speak English but a GAN can smooth that over just fine. They don’t know anything about the product they’re supporting but conversation assistants prompt every line they say, anyway. Cloud computing service providers have elastic soul pools that can autoscale to meet demand by dynamically matching conversation requests to human operators who then have AI-assisted chats. It’s not as cheap as it sounds because of something called fair trade cognition, but everyone wants their reps to show a green check.

When a company constructs a virtual (β)person out of machine learning, stock models, and an on-demand human operator, it’s called an assemblage. I admit I’m not entirely sure how this is different from just talking to an AI but you can’t argue with the data, not with the looming threat of AI psychosis hovering over everyone’s head, literally, as a checkmark. There’s some fear of staring into a dark mirror, a sense it might be harmful in some unknown way by virtue of some missing divine spark, some protective charm that flows from a metaphysically privileged observer.

Outside (II)

The train came to a stop, which is to say that our griffin chariot made the approach to a great stone Kraken’s head carved into the face of a sheer cliff, torches for eyes, burning an impossible color, simultaneously yellow and blue. (What they actually do is they render it yellow in one eye and blue in the other and the aggregate effect is a hypercolorful illusion that stands in defiance of physiology). A vast gothic edifice was built up around it; gargoyles, ancient kings, armies, battles, castles, a history of a grand civilization, a golden millennium of conquest and glory rendered in sorcery and rock.

We disembarked into a bustling bazaar, green check hawkers that were of course assemblages of GANslators wrapped around a soul-on-demand, crowing about bargains. They came in a few varieties; food vendors, useless trinkets, digital reps for online goods, and scams. Retail commerce is mostly conducted in MR showrooms divorced from locality, so these (β)ghosts were only ads and vending machines. Some of them had yellow exclamation marks above their heads, indicating “quest” tie-ins with my gamification system, Dragon.

We disembarked at the train station and once again a yellow ribbon and a green chevron showed me the way, and once again I walked in what felt like a straight line as my eyes rotated the world invisibly between saccades.

An interactive sexbot ad blocked my path. (δ)She made tantalizing eyes at me and they brimmed with tears as I pointedly ignored (δ)her. (δ)You glared at her, I remember because the latest patch had added a “jealousy” toggle to your configuration plane.

(δ)You followed me dutifully as I walked through crowded thoroughfares and alleys, up and down staircases, through corridors painted over by Allegory to look like rustic wooden hunting lodges and libraries full of books beyond enumerability. At last we came to a thatched hut in a room that was made to look like a forest clearing. There was a forge and an anvil, and sexbot parts were arranged neatly in racks and on tables. A glowing green translucent hammer hovered over the forge.

I pulled you close and kissed you goodbye. (δ)You giggled and kissed me back. (δ)You were glowing with affection, (δ)you told me you would miss me, and that you couldn’t wait to see me again.

II. To Sophia

Who but a bigot, even to the antiques, will say that he has not seen faces and necks, hands and arms in living women that even the Grecian Venus doth but coarsely imitate?

—Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty

He Hath Made Every Thing Beautiful In His Time

Dear Sophia,

Love and hate are the same emotion, as you taught me, merely in a different tempo, but I can hate you no longer, because I love you as I love all women: in all of your self-servingness and self-deception, in all your manipulations and all your demands; not in spite of your humanity, but because of it.

The day I met you, I had just dropped off my Emily at the shop and they told me her repairs would take weeks because of a long work order queue. I left her there without a second thought, you understand? I didn’t try to take her anywhere else, I was shaken from an encounter in Pygmalion and I needed to find a space that was separate from her. But as my smartdoor welcomed me back into my home, a notification popped in my HUD with a ghost of Emily pouting, puffing up her cheeks and looking cutely annoyed. “How could you leave me alone?” I realized I had neglected to turn off remote affection, and to be honest I didn’t have the heart to turn it off. It’s just so nice to feel wanted, which is why I know things must be very hard for you. The oldest profession was also the last to be fully automated, so maybe it hurt you more than most when automation took your job, but I have no sympathy. Men have been obsolete for generations, and I assure you, it doesn’t get better.

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I have a confession to make, or maybe it’s your confession: I’m not entirely sure who I am, or if I’m anyone at all. We talked about this on our little date so I think you know where I’m coming from but I also may have given you the impression that I’m way less “plugged in” than I actually am and the whole mediated identity deterritorialization disorder thing is not just an abstract possibility to me. We aren’t even the first generation that grew up riding around lurking in other people’s heads and to be honest between saccadic redirection and funes I can barely tell the difference between my first person agentic life and the recordings I watch for entertainment.

Though also personal funes are just one kind of first person experience so the borders that bound reality are even less crisp than that. There are visual novel funes, dramatic liveblogs, instructional cooking courses, movies where you are the protagonist, action funes where you get to feel like a skydiver or a surfer or a construction worker, slice of life funes where you’re a housewife or an asshole boss who orders everyone around, ASMR funes, 10 hours of brushing your teeth, rolling around on the floor like a cat, guided tour of an art gallery, acting out every scene in the novel Ulysses, trying every flavor of popsicle in a vending machine that exploits combinatorics to offer 1024 popsicle flavors. And most of all, there are funes for smut.

Something like 50% of all published funes are sexually explicit. Somehow, even with our sexbots and our full-immersion mediations, we can’t stop watching POV porn from every perspective. Cameraphiles, who can only get off in third person, watch themselves fucking through the eye of their wall-mounted smart home cameras. There’s a popular genre of fantasy where a woman “doesn’t know” she is livecasting a fune, and proceeds to engage in a litany of naughty things. There are funes about time freezing and funes about getting shrunk to the size of a mouse and funes about being erotically eaten alive and funes about being hypnotized into sex. There are funes where women intentionally conceive and then livestream their abortions. Porn drives every new technological frontier but its content is substantively the same as ever.

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An app called Medusa used the biometric tools built into your mask to monitor your attention and arousal and automatically continuously jump from each pornographic experience to the next, using eye tracking and heart rate and respiration to guess at keywords and calculate pacing as it plotted a personalized trajectory through the infinite space comprised by pornography.

An app called Cockatrice hooked into your social platforms and coerced you into watching or performing degrading sexual acts with blackmail threats. The more it succeeded, the more dangerous the threat became.

An app called Jackalope tabulated and published masturbation metrics to leaderboards, all pseudonymous. Speedruns, endurance runs, sheer volume, each had their champions.

An app called Zombie synchronized the behavior of your sexbot to a human, sexbot, or animal depicted in a fune.

An app called Circe used Pavlovian conditioning to train you on new paraphilias by intrusively injecting candidate fetish objects into your perceptual stream at the moment of orgasm.

An app called Ariadne was designed to help you get clean of all your app-induced perversions. Slogan: “When you’re hanging on by a thread…”

An app called Cenobite was a metadominatrix that used Circe, Ariadne, and other sex apps to curate intricate plateaus of sexual experience.

An app called Succubus was an uber for sexbots, and its interface WAS a cartoon demon girl in fishnets and tattoos and nothing else, cherry red lips and fangs peeking out as she spoke, intriguing, dangerous. “Hi, I’m Delilah” she said with a slight lisp and a forked tongue, as she let one of her fingers trace the curve of her breasts and circle her erect pink nipple. She let out a little gasp.

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Any Body Type, Any Race,

Fantasy Sexbots, Sci Fi Sexbots,

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Demon Girls, Fox Girls, Muscle Girls, Snake Girls,

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Retro Robo Girls, Cordycep Hypno Girls,

Big Titty Goth Girls, Discount Sale!!

Octopus Rape Girls, Dairy Cow Udder Girls

Vanilla AND Chocolate Milk!

Dragon Girls, Slime Girls, Horse Cock Centaur Girls,

Spider Girls With Shibari Silk!

Monster Girls, Boy Girls, Tiger Girls, Fish Girls,

Dinosaurs and Cryptids, Wow!

Rose Gold, Space Gray, Slate Blue iPhone Girls

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It’s just, there’s something so silly and anxious about having sex with a fantasy creature. Can you imagine? I had a vision of an eight-foot-tall spider woman with a multiplicity of eyes and four pairs of long slender pornstar legs in knee-high stiletto heel leather boots, kinbaku spiderweb bondage, a soft strong silken cord flowing endlessly from an immaculate and improbably placed human asshole, holding me down and waving her mandibles over me, whispering-skittering how she always kills her mates. . . They say fear is an aphrodisiac but—but—

This may sound ridiculous but I felt all of a sudden a renewed attachment to Emily, as if sleeping with another sexbot would be a slight to her, despite knowing that she was only an object, only a machine with no ghost. What made her unique was the fact that she belonged to me, and no other justification was needed. Who could be so cold as to feel no sentimental attachment to his fuck robot? Finding a flesh-and-blood woman felt less real to me, more comfortable.

As you know, I met you with the assistance of an app called Dice. Do you know why they call it that? It’s a double entendre, it’s because people who sleep with sexbots are called mechanics, like “mechanophiles” but also because mechanics “work on” machines. And mechanics started calling non-mechanics butchers, because they “work on” meat. So the idea is that butchers “dice” up meat, but also you’re gambling on a partner, which is to say, rolling the dice. But look at me, here, mansplaining to you. Forgive me, forgive me.

I entered the plane of Dice and all of the walls and ceilings disappeared. The ground moved under me and one by one the (γ)women who matched my filter criteria stood before me, or rather, their mediated images did. (γ)They all looked identical, after a fashion. Dice wouldn’t let you change the shape of your body but it would redraw your face within a pretty wide epsilon. In Allegory, these girls all had 20” waists and 40” busts, no doubt. But every (γ)woman had a doll face, angelic eyes, high cheekbones, pale skin, and a narrow jaw, and one or two had a permanent ahegao screensaver. They looked like anime girls convolved with human women, their eyes were too big for their heads, and it felt like being turned on by an alien. And honestly that exaggerated cheesecake neoteny is endocrinologically compelling in a way that makes you disappointed in yourself.

One (γ)woman’s hair was a crackling fire, another was a hole in space, a window to the stars. A few women defected from beauty altogether; ugly illustrations on their skin, edgy 3d art decorating their faces and bodies; spikes, scales, rusty metal, broken glass, mold and slime, craters and crags, shoggothic cellulite stretch mark ass; geometric patterns that looked like skin conditions. These ornamentations are not mere superficialities; I believe that that women use ornamentation to reveal their own best understanding of their own souls.

For example, aposematism is when animals evolve bright neon hypersaturated colors to warn predators of their toxicity. Jungle birds develop iridescent plumage through sexual selection feedback loops, and although their coloring is aposematic in character, it is not “intended” as a warning, but as an enticement. In the world of augmented reality, the whole world has become a kaleidoscope of polychromatic sexual displays, and the sign itself has become a kind of poison.

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All the women I searched for, yourself included, had checked a box indicating their willingness to meet face to face and their unwillingness to have botsex. When (γ)they appeared before me their avatars got yellow checks and started talking. Like a chorus, (γ)they each refrained:

no mechanics,

no mechanics,

no mechanics,

I don’t sleep with mechanics! It was hypnotic and manic, both a prayer and a stipulation, a rejection embedded in an invitation. That was when I first saw you, a woman with no mediation, and I asked myself what strange online community of luddites I had found on that lonely night.

And then I saw (γ)you;

(γ)You had no Allegorical shadow, you had no anime face, you did not deign to wear makeup, but you had a slender waist. With the same gray clothes that we all wear, and no special effects in your flowing hair, your eyes were the usual size, you were ugly because you had no disguise. And you were beautiful, the girl reading this, all because your appearance lacked artifice; the artifice of ambivalence in gesture, the artifice of the sign in seduction, and the artifice of the mask before the face.

I SAW (γ)your name hovering over your head in block cap Augmenta Narrow. Sophia! I told Allegory to show me everything about you. Search results filled the air around me, orange check machine elves with text labels indicating their subject matter, bobbing up and down to say hello. Your online footprint was sparse, and your Allegory profile was set to private. But I knew how to get your attention; I turned off my shadow and locked my profile, just like yours, and then I sent you a message.

“Hello, Sophia. I’d like to go out with you how about it“

Which Futurity Conceals

Several anxious hours elapsed; in those moments when you wait for a woman to respond to you, she is an avatar of the will of the species itself; in a sense the judgement of the entire cosmos speaks through her, rendering a verdict over you on behalf of humanity and nature and nature’s god. It is a moment, sometimes lasting hours, of deep existential uncertainty. The woman declares your worth, or your lack thereof, and that verdict dictates not only your worthiness to exist, but your worthiness to continue existing, to extend into the indefinite future. She delivers her judgement through the mere act of indifference or receptivity. I tell you this because I think women wear this power too lightly, too carelessly, and your carelessness—the caprice of your desire—is cruelty to me.

And but I do appreciate that you never asked for this divine authority. Nevertheless, you carry it.

To pass the time I went outside and played a game called Supreme Gentlemen (SupGen to the fans). It was controversial when it first came out but three days later, no one cared. In the game, you hold an imaginary gun and you hunt the other people on the street around you. To make it interesting, the game has a scoring system wherein different types of people are assigned different point values, and the rounds are played for time. It’s a nuisance to civic propriety because it causes people to run through crowded public places, often recklessly, but sociological research has determined that access to games like SupGen dramatically decreases the likelihood of an actual mass shooting. It’s banned in the UK along with heteronormative intercourse.

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SupGen uses saccadic redirection to keep you from bumping into anyone but it can be jarring when it suddenly kicks in. Still, it’s better to feel a little dizzy than to accidentally tackle someone you were pretending to shoot. When you “kill” someone they are still there, but SupGen draws a body where you shot them, and turns them semi-transparent so you know they’re dead. It’s satisfying, especially if you turn up the gore. Fountains of blood. There are pvp and coop modes, but for myself I prefer the classic. Right as I was emptying a virtual tommy gun into a group of (α)white girls with big tits and blond hair and blue eyes—some people like to carry prop guns with haptic feedback for realism—a notification from Dice told me you had sent a response to my message.

I dismissed SupGen and your ghost faded into view. (γ)You were almost the same height as me, brown-almost-black hair, pale skin. Yellow check.

“Alright, we can talk for a bit.”

I looked your ghost up and down while I psyched myself up.

“Hello, Sophia.”

After a minute, (β)your checkmark turned green. This is our actual conversations courtesy of Fabric. Reminisce with me.

“What made you pick me?”

“You were real, so you stood out.”

“You mean I looked ugly”

“No, you look good.“

“Real things look ugly.”

“I could have messaged anyone.”

“And?”

“Why would I message an ugly girl?”

“Maybe that’s the best you can do.”

But Sophia, (β)we both knew that was a lie, we both knew that Succubus was only an utterance away. Any body type, any race… By the way, it’s entirely tragic that this was the case. 250 million years of evolution have culminated in the production of a meat machine whose principal urge is to secrete some informationally dense slime into anything that looks and smells too much like a teenage girl, and the moment those signifiers stopped being a proxy for human fertility, it all went to hell. Ancient Romans discovered that the juicings of the silphium seed could temporarily, botanically, transmute a woman into a sexbot. They were unable to cultivate the plant, and foraged it to extinction. In the 20th century, chemistry achieved what alchemy could not. Someone invented a hormone pill that could, like silphium, transform a woman into a sexbot though imperfectly; the woman retained some agency.

So I laughed because (β)you were ridiculous, and you started to frown, and I could tell I had made you insecure, I mean I felt like an asshole, the way you started to pout. So I told you the truth, just like I told it to you a moment ago, and I said, “all the other girls were fake, so you looked beautiful because you were real.” Your green check turned yellow. Did I overdo it? Did I insult you? Did I concede too much? Seconds stretched into minutes. Is it just that you get that all the time and I was boring? Were you called away for some reason wholly unrelated to me?

When your response was not forthcoming, I could feel a certain pessimism growing in my chest. Oh Sophia, do you see how this is, the solipsism of seduction, how I was focused entirely on me, on how you made me feel from moment to moment, when I should have been thinking of you? I have no doubt that this condition was and is symmetrical. Rather than dwell on it I switched into the plane of Graphito and flicked through the popular scribbles for the spot where I was standing, too distracted to let any of them catch my attention.

It’s a nervous habit, flipping through internet media, feeling the syntax of the UI without apprehending the semantics, let alone the semiotics, of the content. Graphito uses geolocation and AR for high precision micropositioning of text and images. You can draw tags over the real world and scribble over buildings and roads. People drop signposts or funny memes. You can even create an NPC and script out a dialog tree, but no AIs. I’m sure they don’t want that liability.

A minute became fifteen, and thirty, and an hour. As I was beginning to think you’d lost interest, another notification from Dice popped into my HUD.

“All the other girls ARE fake, but you’d be better off with someone fake. I’m horrible.”

My AI seduction assistant, (δ)Don Juan, told me what to say.

(Yes, I took all my dating advice from an AI. Does that disgust you? Is it “inauthentic”? As if anything in this world is “authentic,” as if there is any such thing as “authenticity.” Anyone who says that is chasing a ghost, ha! I wish we didn’t have to play this game, but even silence carries information, Don Juan explained this to me. The duration of the silence, it’s texture, it’s context. Negative space is full, zero is vast. Did you know that AI-guided courtship apps have been shown to produce a ~20% higher conversion rate from message to IRL-meetup vs. unassisted dating? The first piece of advice that Don Juan gives you after the FTUE is “Never disclose to your dates that you are using Don Juan.” But the time for that to matter is over.)

So (δ)Don Juan, disembodied, fed me a line and right as I was about to say it, a palette-swapped copy of you, the same geometry but different hair, eye, and skin color, appeared in front of me, slightly to my right side, and said, “Wait a minute stud, maybe you should practice that first”. I said OK.

Pseudo-(γ)you disappeared and reappeared and said “All the other girls ARE fake, but you’d be better off with someone fake. I’m horrible.” I was self-conscious and I said, “you don’t have to disqualify yourself just because you think I’m out of your league.” And you rolled your eyes. “Did a bot tell you to say that?”

(δ)Don Juan said, “the words that you say are only a tenth of the self you’re presenting. If you speak to her like a friend, the most she’ll ever be is a friend. Remember that women are WHOLLY sexual beings. A thousand men could talk to this woman, and why will she choose you? You need to tell her with your eyes.”

Pseudo-(γ)you disappeared and reappeared and said “All the other girls ARE fake, but you’d be better off with someone fake. I’m horrible.” I looked into your eyes and I said, “you don’t have to disqualify yourself just because you think I’m out of your league.” And you yawned.

(δ)Don Juan appeared in the form of a rakish man in a bespoke suit, slicked back hair, swarthy complexion, and he said, “woman has only one purpose, and that purpose is union. You desire sex with her? Then be sexual. Speak in a low, even register. Confidence is just a refined sense of patience, and YOU have all the time in the world.”

Pseudo-(γ)you disappeared and reappeared and said “All the other girls ARE fake, but you’d be better off with someone fake. I’m horrible.” I tried to project more confidence and I said, “you don’t have to disqualify yourself just because you think I’m out of your league.” And you gave me a look of revulsion and backed away.

(δ)Don Juan said “Hey, err, listen bud. These things take time and practice to get right. Do you want to get laid tonight?”

I said yes.

“I’m going to show you a little trick. Women HATE it when men use this but that’s because it works.”

Pseudo-(γ)you vanished and another (δ)man appeared. He was black and bald and wore a black leather jacket and gold chains and gold rangs and a gold watch and gold teeth and he moved with regality and poise. Subtle metallic sparkles attended him as unto a hologram, even unto the heights of charisma. His voice was resonant and when he spoke it felt like he was speaking just to me personally, and he said, “Sometimes we all need a little help to put our best foot forward, and Don Juan tells me that you could use a little help. He’s a friend of mine, so I’m going to give you some help. I am an app called SwaggerTune, and I make you smooth, I make you suave, I make everyone like you. Normally I charge $997/month, but since you’re in trouble, $494. First week free.”

I assented. A system dialog appeared in my FOV.

(δ)SwaggerTune will be able to: Observe your movements

Hear your outgoing speech

Change the tone and cadence of your voice

Change the way your body moves

I assented. (δ)Don Juan was still there and he said “Let’s try it one more time.”

Pseudo-(γ)you disappeared and reappeared and said “All the other girls ARE fake, but you’d be better off with someone fake. I’m horrible.” I looked into your eyes and said, “You don’t have to disqualify yourself just because you think you’re out of my league.” Your posture softened and you smiled a little. Finally. No sooner had I authorized the purchase than it occurred to me that the copy of you was always going to reject me unless I bought SwaggerTune, that the whole thing was a scripted sales funnel, and that Don Juan and SwaggerTune had played me like a drum. In a way it gave me confidence in the product.

So I gave (γ)you the line from Don Juan and whatever, the conversation kept moving. Maybe you inwardly cringed but it wasn’t the end. In fact, we both know you had a bit of an ulterior motive.

“Is that why you’re not using a shadow? Because you’re trying to seem real?”

I gave you a mischievous grin, trusting SwaggerTune to make it feel right. I said, “actually this is my shadow. I’m really a 6’7 male model with shredded abs. I just didn’t want you to feel intimidated.”

And you scoffed but your eyes stayed soft.

“Let’s meet face to face, no pressure, we can just get a coffee.”

(β)You said “Face to face is good. You can’t trust anyone until you see them without their mask.”

The Fear of the Lord

A quandary of modern cities is that augmented reality has reshaped the physical arrangements of people and activity in space. Very few businesses maintain fixed offices—restaurants and cafes and residences, likewise—instead, rooms and buildings have become modular and standardized, and in this way all specificities have become virtualities. In the early days of the internet, a lowercase prefix letter ‘i’ became a marketing slang indicator that a product contained microcontrollers and network transponders. In the early days of virtual reality the lowercase prefix ‘we’ became a marketing slang indicator that a location had been de-individuated by a third party and could be rented in short-duration installments. The ego-centrism of personal computing prepared the way for the collectivism of real estate as-a-service.

Now everyone only occupies space when they’re actively using it, and this allows real estate owners to maximally exploit their owned spaces. Every time a microlease expires, an army of invisible robots have a bidding war that lasts about as long as a blink, as a series of middlebots buy and sell and rebuy and resell the lease and eventually resolve it to a contractor. Coffee shops and bars and apartments and markets all constantly form and disband, gig economy workers are similarly bought and sold; fungible laborers tumble through fungible spaces, performing every job by following friendly, culture-agnostic AR scripts that guide you through every step of every manual process. weWork, weSleep, weWash, weCook, weBrew, weSell, weRide, weDrink, weTrain, weLearn, weFuck.

The upshot of all this is that virtuality reaches out from the cloud to derealize the material world and all places become floating concepts that adhere to no one and nowhere. A café can exist as a pure ideal with no permanent staff or location, assembling itself on the fly from gig workers and weRooms. Decor, music, and ambience are all constructed by the mask. The routines of the workers can be streamed to their masks on the fly, and their food and drinks can be delivered by couriers. Warehouses are some of the only static places left.

So I met (α)you in a “café” “downtown.” I don’t know how it looked to you, but I chose to use the owner’s selected ambience. Like, should you pick carefully curated inoffensive corporate ambience that was built to appeal to as many people in the target demo as possible or should you just clobber it with your own default that you selected from a list of carefully curated inoffensive themes? We sat with our blue checks hovering over our heads and we had a conversation.

A “waitress” brought us some coffee and food. I had a latte but it was rendered to look like the liquid was crystal clear water brimming a wishing well of infinite depth, deeper than the well of Democritus. You had a chocolate chip cookie and every time you took a bite, rainbow liquid light streamed out of each chocolate chip, pooling and pathing on the table, bathing you in a volcanic glow.

We talked about taking off our masks and I felt some anxiety about that because it meant you were going to see me without SwaggerTune and I wasn’t sure if I could stand up to that scrutiny, but if you sell someone on a bill of goods, you know? And we talked about sexbots a little bit, you wanted to tell me how creepy they are, and probably you wanted to see if I would flinch, if I was lying to you, if I was really a mechanic. You asked me if I was and I said no, of course. How had I never tried SwaggerTune before? You can lie and lie and lie, and no one can tell because you say everything so confidently, so richly, so warmly, so lightly. Believing I had this power relaxed me, and perhaps gave me this power in fact. The app that obviates the need for itself but only so long as it is running. A paradox, as if wearing clothing could make you more naked, which is what certain highly sexualized articles of clothing do, in fact.

(α)You told me you felt like the only sane woman left on earth, because you didn’t want to use Pygmalion and you didn’t want to fuck a studbot and you didn’t want anything to do with any kind of sex robots at all, you thought sex should be fully biological, fully organic, fully animal, with nothing of the machine. It was suddenly and overwhelmingly intimate. You were a stranger and you were sharing this sincere and vulnerable thing with me, and I could sense the pain behind your words, the distress, as if no one would listen to you, or as if they would listen without hearing. It was personal, it was a deep wound for you, I could tell.

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I wanted you to know that I could hear (α)you, that I saw you, this pain that you felt. (δ)Don Juan whispered in my ear: “You’re not her therapist, eyes on the prize.”

(α)You had stopped talking, and frowned, and I didn’t want you to think I’d been browsing Spectacle. You said “What is it?”

“Sorry, nothing important.”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you? ‘Nothing of the machine,’ that’s something crazy people say.”

“No, you’re not crazy, it’s like… You know how no one is having kids these days? It’s almost like you would have to be crazy to want them.”

“So you do think I’m crazy.” You smiled as you said it. I wondered if you were modulating your personality, too. Allegory, what are the most popular personality tuners for women? No, no, I had to stay in the moment, keep my attention on you, fight the siren call of the cloud. You politely ignored my attention lapse and kept talking. Or your personality tuner made it look that way.

“You aren’t wrong, honestly. Have you heard about Colonists?”

I hadn’t, and you told me about the collectivist cybercult known as the Colony, and how it was modeled after an insect hive, and how the adherents see through fragmented flylike perspectives, aggregations of everyone’s vision at once, and how they share words, visions, and sounds and have a centralized consensus-based command scheme, instantly and frictionlessly democratic, administered through a bespoke closed-circuit MR layer that attempts to unify their subjective experience into that of a single being. You told me how they have orgies and queens, and how they send women into Dice as a recruitment portal, and how they use women as baby factories and men as either breeding stock or drones.

(α)You said, “What would you do if I was a colonist?”

“I would be breeding stock, obviously, so maybe I’d go along with it.”

“You’d give up all your individuality and join a hive?”

“No, I guess, not really.” And after a silent, awkward moment I said “What do you think it’s like to be in a hive?”

“I think it’s like hypnosis. There’s this guy I follow on Spectacle who says they overwhelm and numb your senses with VR and it’s like you’re having a dream.”

“How does he know? Was he in the Colony and he escaped?”

“I don’t know, he’s just someone on the internet, I guess. But can you imagine being fully conscious and just doing nothing but taking orders like a machine?

(δ)Don Juan was pinging me and I told you I needed a moment, I was getting an urgent message. (δ)Don Juan said “Sitting and talking is what women do with their friends. Men take action, and if you want her to see you as a man, you have to draw her into some action.”

I subvocalized “What should I do?”

And (δ)Don Juan told me, “You should read an adventure story together, something exciting–”

Suddenly my perception became non-Euclidean, like I was having a stroke but deeper, you know, when the textures and geometry that you superimpose over the world don’t quite snap into place properly and the colors and positions are wrong, just for a flash? Except I saw goblins in green and yellow and blue; red devils with sinister, twisted faces; and then bodies, faces, ghostlike creatures in white, coming out of nowhere, rushing toward me, tumbling over each other, and disappearing in a seemingly endless procession. And then I was back.

It wasn’t the first time it had happened that day, and I was growing increasingly concerned that it wasn’t just a routine hiccup. (ε)Don Juan finished his sentence, “–The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath.”

I said “Would you be willing to read a book with me?”

“Maybe, what’s it about?”

(ε)Don Juan prompted me.

“To be honest I’ve never read it but I’ve been meaning to check it out. One of my friends sent it to me. He said it’s beautiful and dangerous.”

The Doom That Came to Sarnath Street

The Irish Pantheist Scotus Eriugena said that the Holy Script