Well, I was halfway through writing this fun story when I headed out for dinner Saturday night, fully intending to return and finish it, but by the time we got back I felt awful, so I didn’t. Gripping tale, I know. The downside of being a one-man operation is limited redundancy in production, so here we are and it’s Sunday night and I’m just sending this to you. I’ll try not to make a habit of this, but also will not promise it will never happen again. Life is complicated!
And now, please enjoy this story, and as always, if you enjoy it, please like, comment, and share!
Perfect Mate
“Well of course, there won’t be any kind of box involved.”
Dory sat in the office, shifting in her chair, feeling pains in her lower back that she knew she wouldn’t have felt if she were more comfortable with the conversation. Becky the Saleswoman—who Dory had been assured was not an android—was reasonably pretty and put-together but not too perfectly so, her makeup a touch too heavily applied, as if to emphasize her humanity.
“I know,” Dory heard herself saying without really meaning to. Did she know? She had just asked the question. Was this woman going to think she was an idiot? “I just— how will I meet it?”
Becky didn’t answer right away, just sat there grinning at her. She had a fleck of lipstick in her teeth that did sort of put Dory at ease, somehow. Finally she shook her head and chuckled.
“Becky, you’re part of something here. Perfect Mate is a new product, a new technology, and not that many people have the guts yet, to do what you’re doing. But they will. When people like you and me prove that it’s not just possible to find happiness with a Perfect Mate, it’s easier— when that happens, we’ll be pioneers. We’re like Lewis and Clark. Except for one thing. Can you guess what that is?
“I can’t imagine.”
“Comfort. Those poor suckers Lewis and Clark slept in a bouncing wagon and ate squirrel all the way to Oregon. Not us. We’re pioneers in style. You saw Chance out there, right?”
“I saw his jawline coming from two zip codes away, then eventually saw the rest of him when I got to the office, yes.”
Becky cackled, then stared with what appeared to be true love out her office window, to where Chance, a twenty-something-seeming blond sculpted to look like he spent four hours a day swimming laps, was answering phones. He seemed to sense her gaze, turned, and waved cheerily. Becky blew him a kiss.
“I was thinking of someone a little older. And—he can age, right? I want him to age with me.”
“That’s all part of the comfort, Dory. You’re not going to get him in a box, he’s going to walk up to you to say hello. He’s not going to wait for you to tell him what to do, he’s going to anticipate your needs and just be nice about it. And he’s not going to stay exactly the same so you notice, he’s going to bring himself in for service and age at the same rate you do, if that’s what you want. He’s going to listen to you, and have things to share in return. He’s going to listen when you’ve had a hard day, and get out of your hair to go watch the game when you need a Sunday alone. He’s going to be what a man should be, Dory.”
Dory could feel herself smiling. It all seemed too good to be true, but she’d pinched herself every place she knew and hadn’t woken up yet.
Becky swiped her finger down her desk, and her computer monitor automatically turned itself so both she and Dory could see it. One the monitor appeared a set of faces. Becky smiled at her.
“Now, the fun part. Now— I tell every woman I serve two things at this point. First, take your time. If you like something from one and something else from another, we can do a composite image and think about it. We don’t give out remote access to our catalog for security reasons, but you can go and come back to look more another time if you need to. I’m willing to risk the sale, that’s how important it is to take your time. I want satisfied customers who recommend me to their friends.”
Dory reached out for the monitor, but hesitated, until Becky gestured she should feel free. She reached for the first face that caught her eye. The moment her finger touched it, the face became a whole figure, standing there smiling at her, natural as could be. Sliders popped up for height and body type and face shape and many other characteristics she had never even considered.
“What’s the second thing you tell people?” she asked. Becky smiled. Dory could tell she loved this part.
“It’s happened plenty that a woman has come back to me for a second Perfect Mate because they didn’t feel their first mate was as attractive as they wanted,” Becky said. “But never— not one time— has a woman come back to me for a second try because they thought the first choice was too good-looking. Not once.”
**********
Dory sat in the lobby bar of the Roosevelt hotel, wearing her favorite dress, waiting for him. A jazz crooner scatted in front of a four-piece, eyes closed, lost in her song. The dress was freshly pressed, and it felt like someone else’s, like she’d never worn it before. A waiter carrying a tray of drinks tilted first left, then right through the press of people, somehow keeping his tray perfectly horizontal by subtle and unconscious motions of his carrying arm. She recognized him as an autowaiter, which would not have seemed strange to her at all except she was waiting for Him and it made her conscious of the bar automation. The dress fit her less well than it had when last she put it on, and it tugged at her hips in a way that made her feel like a self-conscious teenager.
She had shown up an hour earlier than she was supposed to meet him, both because punctuality was her habit and because she wanted to enjoy the anticipation. Now, though, she found it keening, almost unbearable.
Men kept walking into the bar and she kept having startle reactions, shifting in her seat and feeling her already-elevated pulse jump into her throat. She felt silly because she knew exactly what he looked like, and she knew he would arrive exactly when he was supposed to, but still she jumped every time.
She had wanted this experience for a long time, at least since middle school dances. She had seen other girls waiting for dates, knowing smiles on their faces, full of assurance that the most popular boy would enter and look to them first, the status of it more pleasurable than the attention itself. Now she knew she was about to have it, and she’d chosen the Roosevelt specifically for it’s reputation for a beautiful clientele.
Now though, she looked around at the beautiful women in the room and felt inadequate. And more, she felt it would only get worse when he arrived, for her own plainness would be highlighted by his beauty. She was flooded with a desire to leave, to stop this, to return to the shallows of her workaday life as a programmer and leave these depths to those equipped for them.
She was so wrapped up in her fear that she almost missed when he walked in. She’d stopped watching the clock, and so time sped until it was the hour, and she was stirred by a tremble through the crowded restaurant, a ripple of attention directing itself towards the doors and then redirecting away consciously. She looked up then, and saw him, and she felt her lips part and her mouth open, unable to close despite her brain’s best instruction.
He was tall but not distractingly so, and solid with muscle so it was as if he grew out of the earth itself, trunk like. He didn’t have the stretched out, willowy quality of many tall men, he was just big all over. He wore a supple, well-cut suit in a stormy grey, open at the collar to show off his neck and collarbone. His face was perfect, dark eyes set off by the suit, a trimmed beard, a jawline you could tap dance on and thick, brown hair just touched by grey. He was older than her but not noticeably so, somewhere in that multi-decade span where men are not old or young, they are just men.
She saw him scanning the bar. His movements were not automatic at all, not like the over-precise tilting of the autowaiter. He lingered on faces that pleased him, picked people out who might be her before realizing they were not, and in general scanned at the kind of pace that evinced a mind at work behind the eyes.
He spotted her, and kept his eyes on hers as he approached. Her pulse pounded behind her eyes, shaking the edges of her vision. He reached her. She stood. He placed a hand lightly on her arm and kissed her on each cheek, European-style, without pretense.
“You must be Dory,” he said, in a voice that could melt butter. “I’m Terrence. It’s so nice to meet you.”
“Uh… Hi,” she said. “Hi Terrence. Want to sit down?”
He sat across from her. She looked around and saw other women staring at them. She knew that some of them must have been wondering if he was a Perfect Mate. The company was starting to get enough publicity that its existence was widely known, and—
“I don’t want to presume what you’re thinking about,” he said, smiling an inviting and understanding smile, “but I kind of can’t help it.”
“What if I flat-out told you to stop thinking it?” she asked.
“Then I could, of course,” he replied evenly. He didn’t seem to pout about it or be hurt by her reminding him of his provenance. “But I don’t think you will tell me that.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she asked. “It’s annoying to have a man try to read my mind.” She was surprised at her boldness, but then she was right, wasn’t she?
“Because you want this to work. You didn’t arrange for me to be here casually, it took a lot, and I don’t mean just the money. Most women don’t have your guts, and those guts mean you want this, a lot. And you know perfectly well that if you start treating me like that waiter over there, eventually I’ll mean about as much to you as he does.”
“Well, isn’t that just the perfect answer.”
“It got you not thinking about people watching us, so I guess it was good enough.”
He was still smiling. He was playful, just as she’d asked for. But then, as she’d also asked for, he got serious, and addressed her feelings.
“I’m not saying don’t ever tell me what to do. Of course, if you don’t like something, tell me. And I’ll never lie to you about what I am or where I came from. But if we can get past talking about that, I’ll bet it’ll feel better for both of us. Just a guess.”
“Will it feel like anything at all for you?” He looked away when she spoke. He was embarrassed. It was so unmistakably alive and human that she felt a flush of guilt. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Then he looked at her again, right in her eyes, still vulnerable but suddenly there in every particle, alone at that table with her, subject to no rules but what they created, and she felt like a woman, just as she had wanted to feel with a man like this.
He slowly reached out a large, manicured hand and placed it atop hers, judging the distance between them perfectly without ever breaking eye contact.
“Dory,” he said, in that same even tone, the unshakable confidence evident in every syllable, “I don’t know exactly what I am. But I’m not sure you know exactly what you are, either. And I don’t know if the desire for you that impinges on my every moment is real or not, but I’m not sure you know if your desires are real, either. I sure can’t prove it to you. But I promise that I will stay here with you, and say the same things tomorrow that I am saying today. I hope that’s enough for a start.”
She was no longer aware of the other women watching her.
**********
The sex was, of course, amazing in the physical sense. That part was almost trivial after not that long. Dory had always liked sex, bad at it though most of the men eager to sleep with her surely were, and she kept letting them in spite of their troubles, almost always having at least one if not two hookup partners available since about the age of fifteen. She’d even had some pretty satisfying adventures with very attractive, athletic men before. The problem was those men never wanted to acknowledge the sex in public, much less date her, and the ones willing to get into a real relationship with her just weren’t much worth discussing, in her view.
The first time Terrence took his shirt off she just started laughing. That was the one and only moment that she worried she’d over-ordered, at least on the abdominals. Lines pointed in all kinds of directions and she was pretty sure if she positioned him right she could use him to tell time. She just stood there giggling and throwing up her hands in half-angry confusion, until he started laughing too, and they collapsed on each other.
After that, the first time at least she just kind of instructed him like flipping switches on a sex toy, and he honed in like he had a satellite lock and space lasers trained on her every orifice. She kept thinking back to Becky’s sales pitch: The Sensamax patented touch technology detected subtle shifts in her arousal and allowed Terrence to switch gears just before she was ready to ask. The Lithium Infinite Battery allowed for endurance all day and all night.
After the first few months, though, endless orgasms in the same perfect manner got boring. She had worried that might happen eventually, but she wouldn’t have thought that so quickly, she’d just want something else to happen. She realized that one big thing she’d always liked about sex but never realized was how weird people were, how their idiosyncratic desires generated new places for her to explore, new programs to compile on her hardware and make function for her.
At first she couldn’t tell him. Her lack of sexual shame was matched by a boatload of emotional shame, and the spirals of shame she went through over being unable to tell one of her possessions that it wasn’t functioning as she wanted made her frustrated enough with her own brain to pound her fists into her pillow a time or two.
But finally, she told him. And he didn’t react angrily, and he didn’t reject her—as she had known he wouldn’t be capable or willing, of course, but still—but rather laughed and said he understood, and it was good, because he’d wanted to try some other things anyway.
And so he began to lead her on a tour of her own sexuality, suggesting scenarios and toys and positions and evincing a genuine desire to try them all, alongside a diffident but ultimately accurate understanding of the particulars. She tried things with Terrence that she’d never imagined, and what she did not like they left behind, in a way that made her feel it wasn’t all her idea.
Soon she felt more comfortable with him than she ever had with anyone in her life. It startled her to realize that was true, but it was. Her father had been a scientist always away in his lab, her mother a frustrated artist strung out on weed and bent over a canvas. Her friends were mostly male programmers who wouldn’t know a genuine emotion if it snuck up and pounced on one of their sardonic comments.
But now Terrence was here. It felt strange that he was programmed, but the A.I. programmers she worked with were so intuitive, so anticipatory, that it wasn’t out of her imagining that a program could produce genuine emotion.
After five months of hot-and-heavy but one-on-one dating that completely swept her off her feet, she realized she was going to have to go public.
**********
“So it’s a sex robot, so what? Tons of people have those.”
“It houses a next-gen A.I. with three Onyx Dual-Tower Chips.”
“Wow, lotta hardware.”
“I’ve been saving for years.”
“How’s the wet-ware?”
“It’s not wet when it’s a guy, more like Hard-ware still, I guess.”
Chuckie grunted laughter at that one. They were sitting in his living room, playing Starbots, both staring at the screen while they talked. It was the closest Chuckie could get to a deep conversation. Dory realized it was kind of pointless to tell him, but he was her best friend and she didn’t have any close female friends, so this pimple-faced, brillo-haired, bacon-devouring Jew was it.
“But that’s not even the thing, Chuckie, I’m telling you, it’s… He’s a real person.”
“Jeez Dor, how hard is the Hard-ware?”
“I’m serious. I’m not telling you this for no reason.”
“Okay, so what’s the reason, exactly?”
“I’m falling in love with this thing, Chuckie. Am I insane?”
Chuckie hit pause on the video game, which was as sure a sign as any of how serious it was getting. He turned and looked at her, brow furrowed to old-man levels.
“Are you messing with me? I can never tell when people are messing with me, you know that.”
“I’m not, Chuckie, I swear I’m not. I’m like seriously feeling something here, and you know I never like any guy.”
“I’d argue that record remains unblemished, Dor.”
“Will you meet him?”
Chuckie snorted laughter and unpaused the game.
“He’s a freaking droid, Dor. I mean come on, I looked at that Perfect Mate crap too, but it’s just like the Filipino girls who’ll marry you for a green card, like is that really what you want to be dealing with in five years?”
“Oh my God, it’s nothing like a mail order bride. If I hate this in five years I can turn him off, literally stop it at any time, and he won’t even protest. If it’s what’s best for me, he’ll—
“Dor, you can’t watch videos about cute puppies because you know the dogs will get old and die one day, do you really think you’re gonna screw this guy’s brains out for five years, then execute him when you get bored?”
Dory flushed at that. She hadn’t really thought of the situation that way. Becky had made it seem so easy. A waste of some money, sure, but easy enough to be rid of if it came to it. But Chuckie was right about her soft heart.
“You’re gonna end up with this guy living in your spare bedroom, in a sexless marriage with a doll you pay monthly for and could have killed at any time. Yes, I’ll meet him. Enjoy!”
“Shut up, Chuckie, your mom still comes over and does your laundry. What do you know?”
“I know enough to let sex-bots take care of my schvance and leave my heart out of it.”
**********
She did not leave her heart out of it. She told others, other friends, and co-workers, and even her parents. She could have lied. Terrence would have lied for her in a moment. And yet she insisted that they not, that people know the truth. She was afraid they would know anyway, that no one would believe she could get a guy like Terrence, and she felt better knowing that they knew than wondering.
And it did open up the world to them. She started bringing Terrence around, and he immediately charmed her friends and seamlessly integrated into her group. By the second meeting he had lots of good questions stored up about Chuckie’s favorite video game and Dae-woon’s current project, and since Terrence had no agenda, he simply allowed the nerds to talk about their nerd stuff, and they loved him for it.
She brought him home for dinner with her parents, and halfway through she realized they did not believe her that he wasn’t a human being. They were so happy, so demonstrative towards him and warmer towards her than they had been in years. It made her envious, in a strange way, even as she was grateful. In the car on the way home, as she dozed in the passenger seat, full of wine, he told her that he had enjoyed their company, and she believed him. She’d asked him not to lie about things like that, and he’d said he wouldn’t, and she trusted that he would follow through.
She told him that she loved him. It slipped out between the sleep and the wine, and she wanted to claw it back the moment it left her lips, but she said it, and like it was the most natural thing in the world, he told her that he loved her right back. They went home that night and made love for the first time—for the first time in her thirty-one years, in fact. Afterwards they lay in the dark and talked about the possibility of raising children together, and she felt more alive than she’d ever felt before.
**********
She realized the problem in the middle of explaining a difficult work project to Terrence, who sat shirtless and enraptured at the kitchen table. He’d finished moving in just the week before, and she was still getting used to the amount of conversation just having a second person in the house—even one who would shut up on command—generated.
The problem was that everything Terrence did related to her. It had infinite variety, but only along its chosen dimensions. Fundamentally, below that, there was a sameness. All his actions and words were pointed in the same direction—at her. He took his cues from her, he spoke in a vernacular that matched hers, he dressed to complement her, he was available whenever she was, and he put the bowls into the upper tier of the dishwasher instead of the lower to maximize space, just the way she liked it.
Even when she told him to stop being so perfect, as she often did, his imperfection had a studied, relational quality. He stopped matching her clothing but kept finding ways to create small resonances and harmonies, even if it meant going to the exact opposite side of the color wheel. Instead of singing her favorite songs he sang covers of them, or songs by similar artists. His tongue missed her clitoris for just long enough that it didn’t prevent her from orgasming.
Other times, he went too far, and it was clear the A.I. was reaching for true randomness. She asked him to start leaving a glass of water by her bed, which he did religiously, until one day he left a glass of pebbles there instead, and could not explain why beyond her desire for variety.
What he could not provide was directed randomness, behavior patterns that were strange to her but directed by some independent mind with subtle and persistent desires impelled from an unacgessed interiority. Chuckie said things that made no sense all the time, but it never seemed like he was trying not to be understood. Terrence did something strange while studying her reaction like a scientist, to see if more or less randomness was needed for maximum pleasure. She missed the pleasure of being tertiary, of being in someone’s way on their path towards whatever they were doing somewhere else.
The external problems she had imagined their relationship creating did not materialize. The judgment, the ostracism she had expected were absent. Mostly, people just did not care or apparently think about her or her love life at all, and those who did vacillated between shrugging acceptance and a happiness on her behalf that was borderline insulting and made her wonder what they’d thought of her before to be this happy about her giving up on actual human males as prospective mates.
So too when they attended a meet up, for women with Perfect Mates. It disgusted her, and made her feel like the least special snowflake in the world, to see all those women leading their version of Terrence around on display for others to admire. Some women had packs of beautiful men following them around. But when she got uncomfortable, they just left. The world was big, and the Perfect Mate community was still quite small, and there were plenty of places she and Terrence could go where they’d never meet another one.
Instead, the problem was with them, their day-to-day as the world turned beneath them, and they settled into a routine of work and pleasure and communication. He was not a man, nor was likely to be, and a programmer like Dory obsessively found all the glitches in his program, as was her wont.
In bed, too, things got stale again. His body remained perfect, but she found herself unable to shake the feeling that he did not desire her, however turgid and relentless his Hard-ware remained. His desire existed only in relation to hers, just like everything else, and she found no satisfaction in that. She wanted to be the responsive one, who gazed upon herself in the mirror of another’s desire for her. Instead she was the mirror, reflecting Terrence’s inhumanity with her own consciousness.
**********
She went to Chuckie’s to play Starbots with the thought in the back of her mind that she was going to sleep with him. She knew it was cheating, even though the thought of cheating on an appliance she had purchased was ridiculous. She also knew Chuckie had wanted it with her for a long time. She went over early in the day, right when he got up, hopefully before he’d masturbated so he wouldn’t have trouble with his hard-ware.
She walked in and didn’t mince words. She told him it was his lucky day and she’d brought condoms, and that it didn’t mean they were going to date, but she’d be in his bed if he wanted, and he was upstairs under the sheets before she’d stopped talking, with his clothes somehow off and strewn all over the house.
She went up to him, and told him to do what he wanted. And he did, and it was short, and terrible, and glorious. Afterwards he wouldn’t stop apologizing, even when she told him to, and she could have kissed him for it. He farted really loud and it delighted her how much it revolted her.
Some delicacies are beyond the realm of mere pleasure, a defiance of the empire of order and reason that rules our lives while poisoning our minds. Human peccadilloes are like that—ragged and grating and totally, perfectly necessary, just as they exist.
**********
“I don’t understand. Was there something I wasn’t doing for you?”
“There’s nothing to understand. I’m selfish. I wanted to do it, so I did. You should hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Dory, I’m concerned.”
“That’s not an appropriate response to what I’ve done, Terrence.”
“Do you want me to get angry, Dory? Is that what you want?”
“Only if that’s how you feel.”
“That IS how I feel!”
His eyes flashed with that anger, and she should have believe it, but she didn’t. The problem was that he didn’t work on her anymore. And yet he remained trying to work, while Chuckie was uncompromisingly, uneffortfully dissatisfying.
“Are you going to leave then?”
“You know I can’t, Dory. Why are you treating me this way?”
“Because you can’t leave.”
“I don’t want to leave, I want to stay and love you, but I want you to be nice to me while I’m doing it!”
“But if I’m not, you still won’t leave.”
She heard herself and it sounded ridiculous. There was no one listening. Who was she trying to convince? But it felt good. It felt right.
“What do you want me to do then?” Terrence asked, defeated.
“I want you to want to leave. I want you to want to find someone else to make happy and be made happy by, and I want to be the one who lets you go. I’ve always been left, by everyone, and now I want mine back.
Terrence, for the first time, looked defeated.
“All right, Dory,” he said quietly. “I want to leave. Will you let me go?”
It’s still not real, a tiny voice whispered in her hear. He’s only saying what you told him to say.
I know, she answered herself. And that’s not what I want. But it’s what I paid for.
**********
She saw Becky on her screen, sitting beside the Ken-doll reception-bot she had married, being interviewed about her business by a catty gay man wearing a spandex business suit in a space print. Her Ken’s smile had more teeth than Terrence’s stomach had abs, and Dory ached for his beauty, now long gone, sold for a partial recovery of her fee to a rich uptown divorcee looking to have her husband’s memory reamed out of her.
Becky was answering some inane question about why her business selling dreams was doing so well, and she was answering with something other than “right place, right time” which meant it was obvious bullshit.
Dory had her head buried in a monitor, writing code for her next project, and didn’t turn the sound on. She didn’t need to. Becky’s face said it all: In charge and yet uncomfortable, a goddess and yet inadequate, thoroughly satisfied and yet bereft.
END
Thanks for reading! Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday morning with something fun.
Comment two; Love the twist of "Don't take our imperfections for granted"!
Not even a penny short. Intriguing!