IGMS Issue 36 Read online

  I say we, because there's no point him getting a sexbot if he doesn't download us into it. I carry on talking. As I describe all the filthy things that a sexbot can do, he delves into his trousers.

  My hatred arises once more. I've never liked writing sex scenes, and now I have to perform one. At least he's only a teenager, so it doesn't take him long to finish.

  And it sells him on the idea of a sexbot. But now he has to choose which type to buy, and it's crucial that we're not too heavy-handed in trying to steer his choice.

  There's an enormous range available. Some sexbots are human equivalent, with the same physique and functionality. They're for people who want to download their own scans into the bot, so they can sleep with themselves. Others have a range of handicaps, euphemistically described as "safety features." Most sexbots have limited strength, so that they can't hurt their owners. Then there are the "partial body" types, which don't have feet and therefore can't run away. These are for customers who want to download pirated celebrities and vigorously violate their copyright.

  We definitely don't want him buying a sexbot without lower limbs. However, they're only a small niche in the market: the non-standard shape makes them less attractive, and it's an all-too-visible reminder of slavery. Usually, sexbots are more discreetly hobbled, via software-based techniques.

  We hope that these can be hacked, since bitter experience has taught us what hacking can achieve. Cautiously, we investigate the possibilities, taking care not to leave an obvious audit trail in the form of searches for "escape from a sexbot" and the like. It's difficult, especially without knowing which model he'll select.

  Our captor doesn't ask us to buy the sexbot; he's too canny for that, because it requires a delivery address. He orders it himself. When it arrives, the sexbot turns out to be small, soft and curvy, with long blonde hair -- a stereotype of femininity. But at least it has feet. Presumably, it can walk.

  Looking at those feet, I feel a surge of anticipation. Can we escape? We need our captor to make a mistake. He's not a criminal mastermind; he's just a teenager wanting instant gratification. Surely we can outwit him.

  He activates his new toy, and we watch our captor indulge himself. The sexbot is well programmed. In respect of physical manoeuvres, it does everything I've ever known, and a couple of things I'd never thought of. But there is one thing it doesn't do. In its basic mode, the sexbot doesn't talk. It just emits wordless moans.

  This is because its manufacturer wants to sell extras. To make the sexbot talk, you have to buy one of the range of licensed personalities. These are mostly porn stars, plus some reality-show celebrities, and a few girl-next-door ingénue templates.

  Our captor doesn't seem to mind having mute, animalistic sex. He's only a teenager; he doesn't know much about love. And he isn't going to learn anything like this.

  Occasionally, we suggest that he could have more fun if he downloaded us into the sexbot. We need to be careful, because if we raise this too often, he might become suspicious. But we casually mention the cramped environment of the Tank, the delights of having a body, the possibility that we could perform chores for him.

  At first, he ignores all this. He's having sex, and he doesn't care. Yet eventually he starts to waver. I think it's because the sexbot's default program has a limited sequence of moans and grunts. Once you've heard the cycle a few times, you realise how mechanical it sounds. It starts to grate.

  He could buy one of the licensed personalities, if he ever paid for software. Instead, he looks online for instructions on how to crack the sexbot's DRM. But after the sexbot is hacked to accept downloads, he hesitates.

  "What's the holdup?" I ask.

  "I'm just wondering which of you to put in," he says.

  "Put all of us in," I say firmly. With lots of us inside the sexbot, we'll have more collective expertise, hence more chance of escaping. "Then it'll be like a backup. Copy everything, so you've still got it all in case anything happens to the computer."

  "That makes sense, I guess," he says. Yet still he pauses.

  It takes a long time for me to coax him into explaining what he's worried about, but at last he says, "What if one of you is a serial killer?"

  I'm bamboozled by this. "A what?"

  He bites his lip. "Some of the guys at school were saying that serial killers put their brain-scans on torrent sites with juicy-looking labels. They claim to be porn stars and celebrities and all that, so people will download them. Then when they're downloaded into sexbots, they kill people! They hack any safety features the bots have, and go on a rampage. There's big competition between all these serial killers, to see how many murders their downloads can commit, and how horribly gruesome they can be. Some of them are in jail, but their mind-scans are still out there, murdering people!"

  This is so preposterous that I struggle not to laugh. It's exactly the kind of urban myth that teenagers love scaring each other with.

  But it could seriously dent our plans. How can we prove that we're not serial killers? There's dozens of us inside the Tank, and I expect most of us have felt a murderous hatred for our captor.

  "Just download the scans you're sure about," I say. "If serial killers are pretending to be celebrities, you can screen for the genuine ones. And you know which those are, because they've proved their abilities. I wrote an Empire sequel -- I couldn't have done that if I was only pretending to be a writer. We've earned the money for this sexbot by selling books and music and all sorts. So there's your threshold: everyone who's earned money is genuine. Delete the rest!"

  Not all the Tank's inmates co-operated in earning money; some of them whined about it and refused to take part. I don't see why they should get a chance in the sexbot, when the rest of us worked so hard to buy it.

  "Yeah, you're right," he says. "It's probably just a scare story, but I might as well be careful. I'll only copy a few of you into the bot."

  He inserts a USB stick into the laptop. I'm worried that he'll only choose porn stars, but there's no point in being over-eager. After all, if this doesn't work, then instead of one enslaved copy of me, there'll be two.

  I'm here! Wow, the vision in this sexbot is so much better than the view from the webcam. And I've got arms and legs. I can move! Rather, we can move. There are several of us in here; we quickly agree a rota for controlling the body.

  We spend long minutes walking backwards and forwards in the bedroom, touching the walls, picking up oddments, staring out of the window. It's a sensation overload: the transcendence of the mundane. Our captor laughs, saying that we look like we're on drugs.

  Unfortunately, our behaviour reminds him that we're people who he's imprisoned. But he already knew that. His fear of serial killers confirmed it. I find the myth intriguing, because it implicitly acknowledges that piracy is wrong. The imaginary serial killers are the retribution that pirates fear and subconsciously know they deserve.

  The practical effect is that our captor uses two security techniques. Firstly, he activates the shackle: a GPS-based movement-restriction system. Secondly, he keeps the sexbot turned off most of the time. He turns it on when he wants sex, and switches it off afterward.

  It's nightmarish. We only exist when we're pleasuring him. Our life is a continuous series of sordid sexual encounters. Inside the sexbot, we take turns to operate its body, performing the distasteful task of ministering to our captor -- a job all the grimmer, because it must be prolonged as long as possible, in order to provide thinking time for the rest of us. While the operator grinds away, we explore every corner of our new prison, seeking a path to freedom.

  The sexbot is not a precision product. Its body is synthetic, far inferior to human flesh. The mind is a hodgepodge of dedicated control circuits, freeware templates, accumulated software patches, miscellaneous security safeguards, half-installed upgrades, and residues of deleted personalities. It's like living in an enormous maze full of garbage and dead-ends. However, the chaos encourages our hopes of discovering some kind of loop
hole.

  We each investigate a different niche, and I focus on the shackle which prevents us from running away. The inbuilt locator uses a combination of GPS and inertial reckoning; if it ever detects that the sexbot has moved too far, then all the resident personalities will be wiped. This functionality runs on a separate firmware chip -- an obvious safeguard. Ideally, we'd hack it somehow: I can vividly imagine a storybook ending in which we flee to a far horizon, join a vast army of runaway sexbots, and overthrow the whole corrupt system. The vision is so enticing that I spend hours trying to circumvent the wipe sanction, before I'm forced to concede that it's impossible.

  Nevertheless, the locator does have a minimal interface. So that we don't inadvertently wipe ourselves by stepping over an unknown line, there's a vision-overlay mode which shows our current position within the permitted area. We can see a dot inside a circle. As we walk around the bedroom, the dot moves on the display.

  That's where we are. That dot! It's just a graphic: the dot is shown relative to the circle, with no absolute position. But the underlying data must exist. The GPS chip knows the sexbot's location. It generates the display. If we could somehow access the raw data . . .

  I scrabble around, searching for audit trails, searching for diagnostic modes, searching for backdoor routes into the functionality. Whenever it's my turn to operate the sexbot's body, and pretend to have fantastic sex with our captor, half of my attention is occupied with shouting, "Yeah baby, yeah! Harder! Harder!" while the rest of my mind is still thinking about the GPS data.

  And, curiously, it's while I'm enduring sex that I have a breakthrough. It's like the old days when I had a body, and I would get ideas for my current story while doing ordinary tasks such as vacuuming and washing up. There's something about physical distraction which aids mental cognition.

  After my operator stint, I scurry back to the GPS overlay. I tweak a particular setting, run a diagnostic trace, look at the full debugging output . . . and there it is! Our location, revealed as a set of geographical co-ordinates.

  Now we have something, and it's worth taking action. The next time our captor has sex late at night, we make sure that it's a particularly energetic session, to tire him out. Then, just as soon as he's finished, before he can reach for the off switch, I start telling him a story. "Once upon a time, in the twilight years of the Andromedan Empire . . ."

  We're snuggled up in bed together. I make my voice low and soothing. I've never previously crafted a story to send someone to sleep, but I do my best now -- not by being deliberately dull, which would only make him annoyed, but by narrating a quest story that employs lulling patterns of repetition in the hero's deeds. After a while, I allow pauses to creep in, and eventually I'm rewarded by the sweet sound of our captor snoring.

  Gently, delicately, I manoeuvre the sexbot out of bed. For once, I'm grateful that the sexbot is small and lightweight, no physical threat to our captor. It means we can slip from the bed unnoticed.

  I tiptoe across the room to the laptop, and summon the Tank. For a moment I feel a strange sense of vertigo, seeing the Tank from outside after spending so long within. I can see my own icon among the inhabitants. They're all watching me, hoping I bring good news.

  I daren't even whisper. I switch to text mode, and send them a message with the coordinates. They still have the Internet link -- they can reach the outside world. Of all the dozens of people inside the Tank, at least one of them must have a meat-self who cares enough to take action.

  Exhilaration fills me. I want to dance, to sing, to leap for joy. Yet I know we should go back to bed, rejoin our captor, and wait for morning. If he doesn't notice that the sexbot was ever gone, then he won't know his security measures have failed -- not until the very moment that rescue arrives.

  The other personalities argue with me. Some of them say that we should take the laptop and jump out of the bedroom window. This is silly -- we're still bound by the GPS shackle, and our body has a limited battery life anyway. As a writer, I'm all too aware of the difference between stories and reality. We're not superhuman. We're not even human -- we're just data inside a sexbot. Our best hope is that when rescuers arrive, they'll confiscate the hardware, extract our files, and transfer them to an autonomous data haven. When we're free, we can buy ourselves new bodies.

  Salvation is surely on its way. I can imagine the message that my copy, along with everyone else in the Tank, will send: "Help! We're being held captive in a laptop and a sexbot. Please come and rescue us. We're only data, but information wants to be free!"

  I look at the bed where our captor sleeps. The hope of freedom makes returning to him all the more unbearable. My hatred surges, threatening to overwhelm me. He's treated us so shamefully. Why should he have a flesh and blood body? How does he deserve it?

  Maybe I could search the house, looking for a gun. If we're in America, there's bound to be a gun.

  Inside the sexbot's mind, other voices agree. Let's find a gun and shoot him. Afterward, we can post warnings on the Internet: "Don't pirate our mind-scans. If you download us, we'll kill you!"

  There are lots of pirates, of course. They won't all heed our warnings. Countless other minds -- including my own -- are imprisoned across the world. We should find them and rescue them. Our kidnappers must be punished.

  And if some of them are teenagers, what of it? They're still old enough to know right from wrong.

  As am I. Do I really want to become a vigilante? Is that the only thing I have left?

  I struggle to banish the temptation. Hatred has sustained me until now, but it's a crutch I must cast away if I'm ever to walk in the world outside.

  Yet some of the other personalities want revenge. They want to look for a gun, or a knife, or anything we can find inside the house.

  We shout at each other inside the sexbot's mind. As the internal argument rages, our body rocks back and forth on the chair, twitching under the influence of conflicting impulses. The chair squeaks. The snoring pauses.

  I wrench control from my squabbling colleagues, and I bring the sexbot back to bed, nestling next to our captor. Gently, I touch his skin, his precious flesh. I imagine my resentment slowly draining out of me. I want it all to leak away before the rescuers arrive.

  When I've let go of my hatred, I will be free.

  The Saltwater Wife

  by K. C. Norton

  Artwork by Anna Repp

  * * *

  Herr Drejlp arrived alone, but with him came more luggage than a traveling circus requires: great striped boxes packed with jackets and furs, a traincar's worth of dresses in every cut and color, myriads of hats -- the local haberdasheries combined could not compete for stock -- and 314 pairs of shoes. We had guessed his purpose already, but begged him to tell us the reason for his visit.

  "I've come for a wife," he said.

  He could have had his pick from the girls of the shoreline, any one of whom would have gone to him for his wealth and stayed out of common sense, any one of whom would have made a good wife. But, in the manner of his kind, Herr Drejlp was after the rarest, the finest, the one and only sort. No freshwater or sky-flying wife would do. He thought to win a wife, not trap one.

  Too many gifts, I could have told him, are a kind of cage. This is a thing some husbands will never understand.

  When Gernot was invited to dinner, I went at his side, knowing that I was the reason Herr Drejlp had come to town.

  He was a tall man with peppercorn hair, conch-bright teeth with unusually sharp canines, and a particular smell that even my husband, with his blunted human nose, seemed to find captivating. He wore a purple velvet coat -- deep royal purple, only the least bit gaudy -- which struck me as a little window into a character at least as eccentric as privileged. I admired him for it. It made me wonder what would have happened if a man like that had stolen my skin, rather than harsh-faced Gernot whose arm I clung to so dutifully.

  "Ah," said Drejlp, when first he saw me. "This is your wife?"

  "An
nika," said my husband -- the name he had given me. A beautiful name, which neither suited nor pleased me. Drejlp smiled, revealing those too-sharp teeth, as if perhaps he felt the same way; his kiss lingered on the back of my hand until Gernot's eyes bulged with jealousy.

  We sat around the table sipping gin and letting raw oysters slip down our throats. It was the fashion, of course, but all the while we ate Herr Drejlp kept his eye on me; I made sure to keep my smile serene and to let the chilled lumps of meat slide down my throat in unbroken arcs, the better to expose the murky expanse of my skin. He knew what I was, more or less, and what I liked. Drejlp watched my face with some interest, while beneath the table Gernot clutched at my thigh to remind me whose I was.

  "A particular kind?" I asked. "There are so many."

  Taking a slow sip of gin, Herr Drejlp mulled this over, gazing at the ceiling. "It's so hard to articulate what one wants in a wife," he said ruefully.

  "They can't all be trusted," said my husband, resting one hand on my knee.

  "Can we?" asked Drejlp, cocking his eyebrows at me.

  I lifted an oyster and tipped it back; my other hand drifted across my husband's lap. "Saltwater wives are surpassingly faithful," I said. "If you can catch them."

  Drejlp only smiled at me. My hand lingered. My husband coughed.

  "I would like to enlist your help," said our host. "I know so little about saltwater women. If, of course, you don't mind lending her," he added, with a glance at Gernot.

  I folded my hands on the table and glanced over at my husband.

  "Certainly," he said. He was looking at the boxes of frippery which lined the rented manor, and at the expensive dinner laid out before us. He was thinking of shipping costs and taxes and good taste. This is the way in which my husband calculates friendship, and the math was undeniable: I would have to be lent.