Efficiency

You’re feeling lonely so it’s time to go on a date. You open up an app and slap your intake bag a couple of times until the IV gets going again. The algorithm has already selected five potential matches for you. It wasn’t perfect at first (too many fats, too many trannies) but now you’ve got it honed down to exactitude. Like everything else in your life it understands your wants before you do. Three of them have the wrong taste in music so you swipe them out immediately. Two of them are exactly what you’re looking for (their faces are almost identical, in fact) so you flip a coin (well, use a coin-simulation app) and swipe on the one assigned for heads.

You’re bad with openings so you pay the app a dollar and it writes your messages for you. You don’t really need to be around for this part so instead you put on your headset and open a dronestream and watch an insurgent camp in the Floridian Archipelago get turned to cinders. You pay an extra five dollars and on-stream a stylized Artemis UAV turns a cartoon terrorist into a gore-bloom of spinning arms and legs. Sensing your excitement, one of your housebots motors over with an extended proboscis to suck your dick but you wave it away.

You pull off the goggles and squeeze through the trash to reach your phone. The app and the girl have come to an agreement on where you should meet up: a Chinese restaurant on the other side of town. You consider going yourself but then remember that means walking past streets of the sweaties, the ones who live in person-sized tarps to preserve the last bits of bodily water. Even through their suits they always stink. Better to not. The girl isn’t even that fuckable, anyway.

You go down into your basement and type in the code to send the creche into activation mode. The doors swing open. Inside is you, except six inches taller and seven inches longer. He has a jacked physique which is bullshit because he’s just a machine and isn’t eating ManForce and AlphaBuild and MegaFlex every day like you are. His eyelids flutter and the tubes maintaining his body withdraw. 

“Hello,” he says.

“You need to go on a date,” you say.

“Okay,” he says. His eyes roll back as he processes the information transferred from the app. He shakes for a moment and then returns to himself.

“She seems nice,” he says.

“Sure,” you say.

“Any adjustments?” he says.

“Just the usual,” you say. You’ve coded him to be alpha. Somewhere in that silicon brain are thousands of hours of podcasts, distilled down into postulates expressible in machine-code: Be aggressive. Never show weakness. Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

“I’ll just get dressed, shall I,” he says, and walks upstairs. You watch him go. This guy Jackson you went to the same EduSpace with says it’s gay as fuck to have a naked version of yourself locked in your basement but Jackson’s a faggot anyway so you don’t care what he thinks. Once you paid a Killr contractor to go and fuck him up but it turns out the app told him what you were doing and he hired a Killr of his own and in the end they just ended up drilling each other at the same time. It was fucking lame.

After a while you hear the airlock doors hiss and he leaves. You’re kinda horny so you pull up the girl’s pictures again and tell your VirtNavi to extrapolate what she looks like nude. She has perfect tits and totally shaved pubes just like everyone else. You’re still hard though. You hit your pen (custom amphetamines, straight from the labs in Vientane) and spend a half-hour grinding for rare drops in Babylon ‘03. A guy playing Fedayeen wipes you out with a white phosphorous attack and you send him a message telling him he’s a pay-to-win pussy retard bitch.

You’re in a bad mood now so you shut off the game and switch over to the feed from the date. The eyecam is looking down at some tofu chow mein which fuzzes and becomes semitransparent whenever your guy dips his fork into it. They’re talking about some shit you don’t really care about. It’s boring. At least the girl is hot, though: she’s got big tits just like the ones in her profile. It’s fucking bullshit ‘cause your guy doesn’t look at them at all, like. Barely even once, and that’s just when he drops his fork by accident (you paid extra for the ‘affably clumsy’ patch) and their hands meet when she reaches across the table to pick it up. It’s gay as fuck, honestly. They’re supposed to be adding manual eye control in the next firmware update but until then you’re just stuck looking at whatever the personality-model in your guy’s head thinks is most relevant.

Looking at the girl’s eyes you notice something strange. Her corneas are glowing red. Someone is watching you from behind those machine-pupils. Someone is sitting in a dark room like yours, wearing a headset like yours, and you are staring at each other but neither of you can be seen. The dolls at the table don’t notice, too caught up in each other. You look into those eyes and can only imagine the presence behind it as a great darkness, a digital shadow. Suddenly you feel queasy so you take your headset off and stick a syringe of antinauseals into your IV drip. You hit your pen again and the world smooths out, becomes an endless series of moments wandering helplessly into your maw.

You get your TV to generate a movie for you and spend a few hours watching a badass who looks exactly like you (but scarred and rugged) kill a couple hundred Anarcho-Islamist insurgents who are trying to execute the president. In the end the president tells the guy that he’s his most trusted warrior and then names him as his son and hereditary successor. It’s pretty cool even though sometimes the guy has six or eight fingers and the dialogue doesn’t really make sense and sometimes peoples eyes slide across their faces like they’re trying to escape. You rate it 4.5 stars though because it was dope when that guy got shot in the head and his brains went everywhere.

After a while the you-doll sends you a time-sensitive alert.

Prospect of sexual encounter detected, it reads. Proceed?

Fucking finally. You click ‘yes’ and click through the agreement authorizing it to take place at your house. It’s been ages since you’ve gotten laid and your ego needs the boost. You have no idea how people did it before the dolls. When you think about actually pressing your sweaty, filthy flesh up against some parasite-ridden stranger’s- sucking on their mouth for fuck’s sake, not to mention that disease-ridden slit between their legs- you’re glad you were born when you were. Things are better now. If you want to cum, use a machine. If you want kids, send away a sperm sample and contract a surrogate. All things have been paved smooth. All things have been put in their proper place. 

It takes a second to let the dolls in because you have to punch the authorization code for the flechette turrets like three or four times before they’ll deactivate. You head into the living room and take your pants off and cover your lower body with a sheet.

The airlock cycles a couple times and in walks the dolls. They’re perfect: him tall and handsome, her petit and beautiful with skin so perfectly tanned its almost glowing. And in with them walks something else: something dirty and foul and verminous. Its eyes are wide, its face sharp and emaciated. It reminds you of those starved kids you sometimes see on newsfeeds or in memes. Upon looking closer it resembles the girl-doll’s shadow, a lesser copy hewn from the same base template.

“What the fuck,” you say. “Get this thing out of here.”

“I cannot,” your guy says. “The contract you authorized permitted the temporary entry of the user for the duration of the act of sexual congress. I am unable to exert physical force against her.”

You’re considering throwing her out yourself but you’d have to touch her for that, and get up out of your chair besides. You guess there isn’t too much harm in letting her stay for the remainder. You’ll have this room UV-doused once you’re done.

They go at it. They strip their clothes off with mathematical abandon, your guy leaning in to suck greedily at her neck, the girl-doll letting out moans algorithmically modeled to induce maximum possible arousal. They’re so beautiful, the products you own, like statues come to life. You have the sudden urge to see them rip each other apart, to tear their perfectly sculpted flesh, to turn their perfect faces into grinning metallic skulls. But you can’t take your eyes off the other thing in the room, the other user. You want to pluck her eyes out. You loathe her gaze, the feeling of it constraining you, the disgust that surges up in your mind at the prospect of being seen.

On the floor they’ve stripped off the last of their clothes. His cock articulates itself upwards in a single movement, unfurling like a finger. Her vagina opens itself to embrace him with the whirring of motors. You begin to touch yourself under your blanket. Across the room, you can see that the slender fingers of the other user have slipped under her waistband.

From darkened corners, you watch the machines fuck.