Jessica Wildfire's Blog, page 471

Chapter 7: Patrick the Man Child

This guy named Patrick and I got engaged in our mid-20s, a little while after Kevin. We’d known each other since high school, back when he was dating my best friend Tonya. Here’s the highlights of our back story: Everyone knew Patrick was too good for Tonya. He was a jock, and she was a nerd. Not a sexy nerd, either. I’m judgmental, but I hope you appreciate my honesty. Anyway, they dated well into college for some reason. In fact, I roomed with her my freshmen year and caught them having sex at least twice. Over time, Tonya became a mess. Her grades fell, and she dropped out of college. It happens.

Sometime during sophomore year, Patrick finally got tired of Tonya’s bullshit and dumped her. I didn’t hear much from him for a few years after that. We ran into each other a couple of times. Honestly, I didn’t care much for him at first. He was hot, but he was too happy, and a little sheltered. I could never tolerate anyone that normal. Except I did. What a huge mistake. My advice to you? Don’t ever date a normal person. Date strange people. Normal people are always hiding something you won’t like.

One afternoon, Patrick just happened into a café where I was typing away on my laptop. He invited me to dinner. I said yes. We had decent conversation, and agreed to see each other again.

We wound up hanging out for a few weeks, both afraid to kiss. Why? It felt sleazy. I didn’t want to kiss my old roommate’s ex-boyfriend. That seemed like a buildup to an episode of Jerry Springer. But my hormones overtook my judgment. Guys aren’t the only people who think with their genitals. So, Patrick and I saw a jazz band and drank martinis. The kissing started at my place, on the couch, and moved to the bedroom faster than I could predict. I hesitated a little at the idea of delving into a light version of my fembot routine, since it might scare him away.

I pulled him on top of me and chewed his lips. As my hands roamed his torso, a memory flashed in my head, of Tonya bragging about Patrick’s body one night in college. She’d described his exercise schedule, his six-pack, his nice round shoulders. That old description of Patrick’s body made me curious as I peeled down my dress and then went after his shirt.

Patrick arched my back, and I pulled his head toward my breasts. His tongue was softer than I imagined, and he gave them a good cleaning.

As my passion emerged, I decided to see what he would do if I fell limp in the middle of our make out session. My arms dropped to the bed, and I lay beneath him with a dull stare, mouth agape.

He turned my head side to side, saying, “Jessica? Are you okay?”

All of my practice with ventriloquism paid off that night as I faked a Siri-like voice that said, “This unit’s battery level is at 1 percent. Please plug in to recharge.”

I studied Patrick’s face, twisted by confusion. His surprise was turning me on even more. I repeated myself, lips barely moving. “This unit’s battery level is at 1 percent. Please plug in to recharge.”

He sat up, massaging his neck. “Is this some kind of sex game?”

A quick study, Patrick was. To seal our understanding, I repeated one last time, “Please plug in to recharge…This is a Jessica NeXus-7 test model, property of FemTech Robotics. If you have found this unit in a powered down state, please follow these instructions: Search the Jessica unit’s purse or handbag for a USB cable.”

Patrick hesitated a moment. “I’m not sure where this is going, but all right.”

He pulled a tangled cable from my bag and dangled it on my stomach. “Now what?”

I maintained a flat, instructional tone, feeling myself grow just a little moist. “This unit’s power unit is located at the base of its spinal column. Please move it to any nearby power outlet and connect its charging port.”

Patrick’s hands scooped under me, and I rolled onto my side. I licked the back of my teeth as he intuited to slip the cable’s end under the elastic band of my panties.

The metal sent a slight chill through me, and I shivered. He plugged me in and said, “So, is that it?”

“Please fold the unit’s limbs into a suitable position and steady it against a stable surface, such as a wall or corner.”

Although he seemed slightly irritated, Patrick did as asked and I breathed heavy, pleasure-filled breaths as his hands groped and tugged at my legs and arms.

He sat Indian-style next to me and asked for some much-needed context, and I suspended our role-play to detail my fetish. “I just thought I’d give you a little test,” I said, “because I’m someone who loves games and role-play.”

He held my hand in his lap, caressing my fingers with his. “I’ll try my best,” he promised. “You’ll have to teach me.”

I kissed him on the cheek and assured him I was an excellent, patient teacher.

The sex would prove lovely, but warning signs appeared immediately. For starters, most guys in their 20s with a college degree don’t have a curfew. Patrick did. He actually left around 1 am. “I don’t want my parents to worry about me,” he said, donning his shirt.

I lay on the bed, enjoying the view of his toned legs. “Why can’t you just stay here?”

Patrick stepped into his shoes. “I can’t. My mom would find out we were dating, and I hate lying to her.”

I sat up on one elbow. “Why wouldn’t she want us to date?”

He rolled his eyes. “Let’s not worry about that for now, all right?”

And with that I brushed my hair back into place, stepped into my heels, and walked him to his car. We kissed for a little while against the driver’s side door. Of course, I wanted to call Patrick out for being timid with his parents. At the time, the feeling of his firm hands on my buttocks seemed far more important.

The next morning, Patrick left a message saying “We need to talk!” When I called him back, he let a tidal wave of apologies out about the previous night.

At first, I thought he was apologizing for not spending the night with me. Oh, but it was far more interesting than that. He didn’t want me to think he was a man slut.

Correct, a man slut. I supposed I should hear him out. All kinds of theoretical concepts existed: black holes, other universes…

“I’ve never just…done that with a girl so soon,” she said. “I don’t know why I did that.”

“It was nice,” I said. “You’re, like, 24. You don’t think I’m a slut because I’ve had sex with guys, do you?”

There was a pause. The shakiness fell out of his voice. “I have to confess something to you.”

“What?”

“Promise you won’t get weird.”

“It’s far too late for that, Patrick.” And when he didn’t laugh, I added, “That was me trying to be funny.” Seriously, there’s nothing worse than a hot guy with no sense of humor. I should’ve dumped him right then.

Patrick took a deep breath. “Well, when I first saw you back in high school….I kind of wanted to dump Tonya and start dating you. But you never gave me any hint that you were interested, so I just kept it to myself. I’ve felt guilty about that ever since.”

“Patrick, that’s completely irrelevant now. We’re both single. We happen to know each other from high school. So why don’t we just focus on the present. Okay?”

And that’s exactly how a robot reasons through moral dilemmas, ladies and gentlemen.

At least that problem came to a quick resolution. Alas, the issue with his parents only got worse. For two entire years, we managed to keep our relationship secret from Patrick’s mom. Because Patrick’s parents thought he was single, they actively encouraged him to date other girls — daughters of friends and coworkers. I had to endure knowledge of him going on a “date” with someone to appease his parents. Patrick took a perverse pleasure in narrating these dates — the wonderful meal at a Mediterranean place we should try, a movie he wouldn’t mind seeing again.

One night, Patrick and I were spooning in bed when he told me he was going on another one of these fake dates the next night. He cupped my breasts, as if this conversation was leading anywhere remotely erotic, and I said, “Do you just want me to call your mom and tell her we’re dating?”

He swept his foot along my calf. “No, she’s a high school friend.”

He let go of my breasts and lay on his back, hands crossed behind his head.

After a moment of careful deliberation, I said calmly, “What the fuck?” I closed my eyes and sat up Indian style, wrapping the bedsheet around me like a towel.

He started picking his nails. “I mean, it’s not a DATE-date. There’s a movie she wants to see. It’s not even very good.”

“So why go?” I stared at the gray ceiling.

He tried to tickle me. “Don’t worry. She promised it would be just as friends. I told her I’m not interested in her.”

I pushed him off. “Be honest with me, Patrick. Did she ask you out?”

“Well, yeah.” Patrick shrugged. “But I’ve known her since high school. It’s fine.” He paused, then added with a slight nod. “And you’re being a little unreasonable.”

I reached down to feel for something — anything — to throw. It happened to be a paperback copy of A Hundred Years of Solitude. “Why don’t you go home and sleep with your fucking mom? I think that’s what she really wants. Anyway, I’m done with all this.”

Patrick dressed while I lay with my hands over my eyes, trying to block out all the light. A few minutes later, I heard him shuffling toward the door. I went straight to sleep. Around 2 in the morning, I heard someone knocking. I padded to the door, half-awake, and stuck my eye against the peephole. Yes, the prodigal boyfriend. When I opened the door, he practically bear hugged me. “I’m so sorry,” he confessed. “You hate me. I can tell, but I canceled the date. Are you still mad?”

He held my chin, the one move I had no defense for. I melted into him. “No, I’m not angry with you anymore.”

Patrick turned me around and started massaging my neck, shoulders, scalp. His finger walked down my spine toward my hips, exciting me. We leaned into a corner and started kissing.

Could we have it all tonight, I wondered? I kissed him hard on his top lip and sighed, “I’m not angry with you anymore.”

He placed his hand on my cheek, rubbing the bone with his thumb. “I’m glad.”

I kissed him again and smiled as if we were dreams, folding my arms across his shoulders. “I’m not angry with you anymore.”

I loved these surprise role-playing moments for all their verisimilitude. Patrick squinted at me, wondering if I was having a stroke or something. He waved his hand back and forth and snapped his fingers, which was just perfect, and he didn’t even know what was happening.

I sighed, giving a love-filled gaze toward the back wall. “I’m not angry with you anymore. I’m your girlfriend. How could I be angry with you? I’m your girlfriend…your girlfriend…your girlfriend…”

If my innocent Patrick wasn’t the best fantasy partner quite yet, I was going to train him with trickery.

A few dazed moments passed before he caught on. I added a couple of head jerks and twitchy winks with my right eye for fun. He knelt down and slid his arm behind my back, his other at the slight bend in my knees. I sank into his hold and he carried me to the couch, all the while repeating, “I’m your girlfriend…I could never be angry with you…I’m your girlfriend…I could never be angry with you…angry with you…angry with you.”

Patrick impressed me with what he did next. Apparently he’d been visiting the websites I told him about. He pulled out his phone and pretended to dial a number. “Hi, Nexus Robotics? This is Patrick Black. I’m having a problem. I started dating this girl, and she just sort of went…I don’t know…haywire. I found this number tattooed on her neck.”

While Patrick got going, I sat in his lap with a serene smile on my face. “Angry with you,” I said. “Angry with you…angry with you…angry with you.”

Repeating phrases over and over like this had always calmed me down, the rhythmic calm, the predictability, the peace it brought my ordinarily frantic mind. I could have chanted at him well into morning.

He asked, “How do I get her to stop talking? Yeah, she’s saying the same thing over and over again. Inside the ear, you said? Okay.”

I grinned inwardly as my Patrick telegraphed his next move. He turned my head to one side, so one ear was facing the ceiling. Gripping my neck with one hand, he inserted his index finger into my ear canal.

No one had ever done this to me before, and I almost convulsed at the unexpected feeling of intimacy. My eyes flashed open, and I opened my mouth in feigned surprise, abruptly cutting myself off mid-sentence with a little yelp. “I could never be ang — -unnhh!”

I let out a little staticky hiss from the back of my throat, something that had taken so much practice not to sound like someone choking.

Patrick pretended like his phone was on speaker now. He spoke to it, “Yeah, she’s quiet now.”

Patrick enjoyed himself a little while listening to instructions from our customer support friend, running his palm along the inside of my thigh, making flirtations with my panties. His other hand rested on my lower stomach, that sensitive place below my belly button.

I kept all of my enjoyment on the inside, ignoring his advances and remaining in my defunct state, just like a good fembot does when caught in a speech cycle.

Meanwhile, the Jessica Wilder inside me was having the time of her life.

And it only got better. Next Patrick had to manually restart my speech controller. He gripped the base of my jaw and tilted my mouth back. “You said reach all the way back? Okay.”

I inhaled deeply, a little nervousness kicking up a heart palpitation.

Was he going to try and put his entire hand in my mouth?

He placed two fingers on my tongue and started sliding back, watching my face for any signs of choking. For sure, that would’ve been an embarrassing news broadcast. Girl dies during customer support session.

When his fingers touched the base of my tongue, he pressed down and held for three seconds. I licked his fingers and gave them a wet kiss on their way out. “That should do the trick,” he said.

My eyes fluttered, and I regained consciousness. I smiled at him, “Hey, babe. What are you doing here?” I looked at my watch. “It’s late, isn’t it?”

Patrick gestured toward the phone. “Thanks so much for your help,” he said. “She’s working fine now. Oh, by the way, do these things come with command prompts? Ah, Blue 05 is the override code? Thanks.”

I gave him a devilish smile, and touched my neck before faking some confusion. “Um, who were you just talking to?”

“Nobody,” he said and eased me off his lap. I scooted aside, almost breathless waiting for his next move. I would’ve told him how much he’d improved if it wouldn’t have broken character.

His fingers played at his belt, and in seconds his pants were around his ankles. I decided to play virgin for a little while, standing with my arms folded. “Patrick,” I gasped. “What are you doing?!”

His arms were spread across the sofa cushions. Watching him perform such confidence was making me sweat between the legs, wanting to play the good girl so much more forcefully.

I backed away, raising my hands. “I’m not programmed for, I mean, not ready for that…I’m just…not ready.”

I started listing reasons for why we should stop, then he halted me with a gesture and said, “Blue 05.”

My protest faded and I simply stood looking at him with my normal blank expression. “Ready,” I said. “Please state your request.”

“Come over here and put your mouth on my hardness,” he said.

I smiled lovingly at him. “Of course,” I chirped like a college aerobics instructor. “I’ll come over here and put my mouth on your hardness.”

“You’re going to like it,” he said.

I nodded, smiling as I showed my dimples. “I know. You’re right. I’m going to like it.”

He watched me, his naked member standing up on end. “You’re my perfect little angel.”

I crouched down and began to rub his thighs, then leaned forward and kissed his nose. “I’m your perfect little angel.”

“Now get to work.”

I gave him a cutesy girl grin. “Now I’m going to get to work.”

Kneeling between his legs, I deviated just slightly from his command and kissed my way from his chest to his stomach, then I mopped him a little while with my hair as he massaged my scalp and temples. I pulled my hair back and started kissing his member, sliding my mouth down with my tongue as a cushion. His hips twitched and he took a deep breath, telling me to go nice and slow.

I’ve never been a fan of giving blow jobs, but delivering one as a sleeper bot who’s just been switched into command mode was all the motivation I needed. Patrick was getting the hang of things quickly, and he even started talking aloud about all the things he was going to do to me now that he knew his innocent little girlfriend — such a good girl — was some kind of experimental humanoid that had just fallen, literally, into his lap.

My tongue danced around his naked flesh, lips plunging his pipes until he erupted across my tongue. I cringed a moment, but swallowed hard and decided to break character a little early to grab a bottled water from the coffee table.

“That was fantastic, Jessica.” Patrick was practically passed out now, damp with sweat. “I think I’m finally starting to understand this whole robot fetish.”

I sat down and rested my legs across his slack form. It was beyond late, but neither of us seemed to care. “You want to stay and talk a little while?”

But I should’ve known Patrick would shake his head. “Oh, I wish I could but I have to get back…before my parents wake up and call the police or something.”

Squinting, I decided to let it go for once, just kissed him good night and then used my vibrator on the couch before falling asleep with a book.

My friend Amy only made things worse. As expected, she couldn’t take her eyes off Patrick anytime we had group outings. One of Amy’s special skills involved the ability to flirt with her friends’ boyfriends while coming off as charming and likable, very older sister-like. Here’s what she did at one party: For half an hour, the three of us stood in a corner drinking wine while everyone else smoked weed in the kitchen. Amy pulled Patrick’s life story out of him, playing it off as special attention to her best friend’s new love interest. She leaned forward and grabbed his arm. “Do you work out? You’ve got a very nice bicep.”

Patrick hiccupped a thanks. Amy sighed and said, “You’re adorable.” She reached her hand out and brushed some wayward hair off his forehead. “That’s better.”

Amy sought out Patrick’s company. They started having lunch and going for walks when I was teaching. One night, Patrick locked his keys in the car and called me when I was slammed with seminar papers. I thought Amy was a great friend when she offered to call the locksmith and wait with him.

Patrick was always doing stupid shit like locking his keys in his car. Earlier that month, I’d paid Patrick’s parking tickets when he got towed. I’d also picked him up from the emergency room after a car accident.

Eventually, it occurred to me what a lose-lose situation had opened up. If I didn’t devote more time to Patrick, I might lose him. The problem? I didn’t have time. I was in graduate school. My career mattered more.

Patrick’s endless insecurities, planted by his parents, made it impossible to nurture him. Our entire relationship, he couldn’t even decide if he wanted actual sexual intercourse. More than once, we’d be spooning in bed when he would randomly say something like, “I guess you’re just not happy.”

“What do you mean?” I sighed. “I’m happy.”

“But you’re not acting like you’re attracted to me.”

“Aren’t we lying in bed half naked? That seems like a clear indication I find you attractive.”

I rolled over so we were talking with our lips inches apart. His green eyes were enormous, his breath warm on my cheeks.

He looked down. “But you haven’t tried to….”

“Tried to what?” I said and kissed him gently.

He scooted back, folding his arms, and looked down. “You haven’t tried to have sex with me.”

I placed a finger under his chin. “I believe initiating sex is your department, Patrick. I’m more than willing, I’ve been waiting.”

He wouldn’t look me in the eyes. “I want to wait for marriage.” He took a deep breath.

“You’re a virgin,” I said and nodded. “Okay.”

The next bit surprised me. “No,” he said. “I had sex a couple times in college.”

My brow furrowed. “So what’s the problem, then?”

Patrick started to pace the room, explaining how he’d never wanted to have sex with his two serious girlfriends in college, that they’d pressured him into it. The pressure had hastened the ruin of both relationships. This part I could understand. I lay back down and said, “So we can wait. But then why do you keep saying I’m not happy? I’m fine waiting.”

He flapped his arms. “But you’re not even trying to fuck me!” he said, raising his voice. Then he turned toward the window, topless in his boxers, a gorgeous sculpture of a man who was acting like a cherub, and pouted toward the naked window. “It’s like you don’t care if we have sex.”

I watched Patrick pout, fairly certain the only reason I continued to endure these fits was his perfectly-crafted form and wonderful massages. Shadows flirted with his abdominal muscles and lower back indentations in a way that demanded the light’s attention. With the right script, I could have quelled his anxieties and reassured him. But I was getting tired of the tantrums. So I said, “That doesn’t even make sense.”

I picked up a book and started reading. Eventually, Patrick calmed down and rejoined me on the bed. We didn’t talk through anything, just pretended the conversation hadn’t happened.

That weekend, I was in for a true treat thanks to Patrick’s remorse for his tantrum. He sat me down and told me how much he loved me, how badly he wanted to make me happy. “I want to give you a night you’ll never forget,” he said and drew me into a Disney-like kiss.

For most girls, a promise like that meant sailing, a trip to Niagara Falls, a daylong spa pass topped off with love-making on a pile of rose petals. All of that would’ve been lovely, but what my twisted metal heart desired was the perfect kidnap package. We scripted our most ambitious game yet, which began with flirtation at an upscale restaurant in the art district.

We drove separate cars that night. He was a high-profile executive who’d just been solicited by a robotics firm to rent their debut, fully functional humanoid escort. I was Jessica X27b-001, fresh from trial runs and ready for public interaction.

I got super dolled up that night, high-volume shampoo, brand new cocktail dress, jewelry, practically an entire afternoon in preparation. I’d rehearsed my lines and practiced new moves while pretending to work from home.

I wore a pair of strappy platform heels that required their own practice session. It was all worth the effort, I realized upon final inspection. My hair was a waterfall of nectar.

Patrick was so lucky that I didn’t just spend the evening at home snapping selfies and accumulating likes on Twitter.

Seriously, two guys tried to get my phone number before I’d even made it from my car to the front door of the restaurant. My confidence was interstellar as I swung open the door and did my sassy executive walk to Patrick’s table, where I sat primly and leaned forward with one hand gingerly extended. “Hi, I’m Jessica.”

He caressed my wrist, kissing my knuckles. “Great to finally meet you, Jessica. I’ve heard a lot of good things about you from the company. I have to admit, you look even better than your product page.”

The waiter came for our drink orders, and of course we had planned to incorporate him into our fun a little bit. I gave him my best empty, Barbie smile. “Oh, I can’t drink.”

The waiter offered, “Some water, then?”

I shook my head. “No, I’m so sorry. I’m not able to store fluids. Would you like to try something else?”

Patrick waved his hand. “That’s fine. I’ll have wine.”

We exchanged pleasantries while Patrick surveyed the menu, then asked me, “So, Jessica, what kind of music do you like?”

I nodded, giving him a flirtatious smile and a giggle. “Oh, I love classical music.”

“Excellent,” he replied. “What composers?”

“Oh, um.” I put my hands in my lap and pretended to think really, really hard. Then I looked up, confused. “I’m so sorry. What did you mean by…composer?”

Patrick’s eyes flared with arousal. He was really starting to understand how the fetish worked. “You know, Mozart? Bach? Chopin?”

I nodded politely at each name. When he was done, I looked around and said, “This place is lovely. Do you like my dress?”

The waiter came up for our orders. Patrick was going to have salmon and pasta. I smiled and said, “I’m so sorry, but I’m not hungry right now…Do you like my dress?” The poor waiter, so confused, mumbled something polite and then left.

I returned my attention to Patrick, swiveling my head in a semi-circle, like an animatronic puppet on display. “I love spending time with you, Patrick. Maybe we can go somewhere more private after you’ve eaten?”

He smiled and sipped his wine. “Fine, let’s go ahead and talk business. So, with dinner included your rental cost for one night is $500. Don’t you think that’s a bit…steep?”

I gave a fake laugh. “Of course, I’d love to see your place. Do you like my dress?”

Patrick enunciated this time. “A bit steep, Jessica. Your price.”

I blinked three times in dramatic fashion, then let my eyes flutter. “I’m so sorry, Patrick. Your tone indicates distress. Are you dissatisfied with something I said?”

Patrick feigned annoyance, but I could tell he was having fun. He’d never been so dedicated to his role before. “I said you’re too expensive. Can you charge less?”

I twitched with surprise, and let my smile fade as I leaned to one side. “I’m so sorry. I’m not able to make pricing decisions. All rates are non-negotiable, but I’d be happy to speak to my program manager at a later time?”

Patrick barely touched his food, and left a huge tip. Phase two started on our walk to his car. He slipped his arm around my waist, gradually moving his hand to my buttocks as we neared his vehicle, parked an extra distance away, in a back street with hardly any foot traffic. I could feel his heartbeat against my breast we were so close. His was picking up speed, syncing with mine.

In the shadows of a skyscraper, he pushed me against his car door and delved his tongue into my mouth. I forced him off, keeping my cheerful smile. “I’m so sorry! But payment is required to proceed with our…with our…with our…evening.”

He held me in his arms, eyes moving over me like a stream over a bed of rocks. “So that’s how it’s going to be?”

I concentrated on his chest, the outline of his pectorals against his shirt. “I’d love to see your place. Do you like my dress?”

“Yeah, I do.” He reached for his phone and centered me in view of his camera, tapping with his thumb. “All right, last resort. Let’s see if this app I made works on you.”

I ran my hands through my hair, putting one leg out. “Are you taking a picture? I’d love to take a selfie with you. What kind of phone do you have?”

Ignoring me, Patrick tapped a few times. “Any minute now.”

At the cue, a bright camera flash in my face, I did my usual glaze over, my lips forgetting their smile. I pretended that his camera had blinded me. I shimmied in place and started to walk away.

He grabbed my arm, swinging me around.

“I’d love to see your place,” I said. My speech slurred and I acted as if I was suddenly exhausted. “Your place….youuuurr place….youuurrrpplacczze.” He caught me as I collapsed, enveloped in his embrace.

He draped me over his lap in the backseat of a rented Mercedes, tapping on his phone to override my systems. I was inert, feeling his erection against the thin sheen of my dress, which had ridden up to my waste, giving him a sneak peek at my black panties with a pink rim. “She’s not much in terms of conversation,” he said to himself as he straightened my dress, “but she sure gets me hard with this body of hers.”

When he reactivated me, I promptly informed him of an error in his favor. “I’m so sorry. Due to a technical issue with my payment processing code, you will receive one free night, courtesy of FemTech Industries. We hope that you will continue to be a loyal customer and always choose FemTech first for all of your companionship needs.”

We undressed each other as soon as we made our way through the front door. Upstairs, I pushed him on the bed and rode him until he was nice and hard under me.

His hands pressed firmly against my breasts. I covered them with mine and held my thighs so hard against his sides I thought his ribs would crack.

He sat up and we switched, time for me to be on bottom, taking him from behind. He wrenched me down into a pile of pillows, gripping my hips full strength and coming into me with slow but determined force.

His hardness had filled me all the way up. My eyes shut tight, and I buried my head in the bedding, loosing track of space and time as we moved together through the thick night air. I listened to the muffled song of his grunts and exhales, then started fumbling for my vibrator somewhere in all the clutter of my nightstand. That holiday feeling jingled through me as we came closer and closer to Santa’s visit and ahhhhh so many little presents torn open as Patrick shot his frosting into me. I let out a final, vocal sigh and imagined myself a holiday cake devoured straight out of the oven.

We dated for another year. He dumped me three times. Twice for an old college girlfriend, and the third time because of his parents.

Our last six months was long distance, because his parents convinced him to go to law school in another state. His law school was a three-hour drive, making long distance manageable if it hadn’t been for mommy and daddy coming up to see him every other weekend. They still didn’t know we were dating. And he didn’t want to risk us encountering each other. Once, he even canceled our weekend together at the last minute when his parents paid him a surprise visit. The biggest problem? I’d already made the drive. I was literally ten minutes away.

“You have to go back,” he breathed over the phone. “My parents are coming!”

“Are you kidding me?” I turned into a Wal-Mart parking lot and fumed into the receiver.

“Can you stay at a hotel?” he pleaded. “Maybe I can sneak out to see you after they’re asleep.”

“You’re 24 years old,” I yelled. “And you have to sneak out of your own fucking apartment to see the woman you’re going to marry!?”

“Don’t yell at me!” he snapped. “I’m doing my best. You don’t know what they’re like. Do you think I’m looking forward to this weekend now? All they’re going to do is criticize me and act like I can’t take care of myself. I wanted to spend this weekend with you, and now I can’t!”

I sighed, eyeing a Starbucks sign down the road. Already my mood was lifting at the thought of an espresso. “Sorry,” I said. “What do you want me to do? I’ve got work and other stuff. Maybe I should just go home.”

“Thanks a lot,” he sputtered, almost as if crying. “Now I’m all worked up, and I’m going to have to explain to them why I’m upset.” The phone clicked.

Oh, I would’ve been so distraught if it weren’t for that Starbucks. I drank my espresso in a soft leather chair and let some realizations wash into me. For starters, Patrick was such a fucking toddler. Wasn’t I the child abuse victim, the one who’d watched my mom paint the bathroom mirror with her own blood, the one who’d almost lost a hand? Wasn’t I the one who’d been almost raped, the one who’d given a gas station clerk a hand job just for gas money to drive home my drunken mother? If anybody had an excuse to be a steaming wreck, it was me.

Watching Patrick crumble in law school was showing me just how tough I’d been all my life. The whole thing sank in halfway through that revelatory coffee. Patrick wasn’t good enough for me.

As far as breakups go, this one made me want to hug myself. There was a wide world of men out there for me to try on. Surely one of them would fit.

The only tragedy was that Patrick beat me to the breakup. The coward emailed me the next day, ending our relationship. I know, are you surprised? Since this was our third breakup, it was hardly dramatic. I was almost amused by his choice of medium. Seriously, why not a singing telegram, or a courier pigeon, or a postcard from Mount Rushmore?

We didn’t speak for almost a year after that. But because life is full of surprises, and I travel a lot, I did get an email from him down the line. It said,

Hey! I know you probably hate me, but I thought I’d let you know there’s a used book sale going on in town. Maybe we can get through a cup of coffee without dredging up what an ass I was?

— Patrick.

Villainizing Patrick to all my friends over drinks was exhilarating. It was all great fun trash-talking someone I used to care about so deeply. In some ways, this part is natural in the recovery process. I had great friends who were all too eager to help. Still, it’s strange when you think about it. When I totaled my little Honda a few years ago, I felt no need to get drunk and talk about how much I hated my old car. I didn’t say anything like, “Girrrrl, that car was such a pain in the ass. Oil changes twice a year? Always having to pump it up with gas every week? And the safety inspections and property taxes alone were giving me a headache!”

And my friends would never have said, “Yeah, walking everywhere is so much better for your health. Seriously, fuck your old car!”

Friends cautioned me about jumping back into the dating pool too soon. Still, I found myself starting several relationships and then killing them off without an easy explanation. I met a cute guy named Jake at a job fair in Maryland who invited me for drinks in his new hot tub. I talked myself out of it, because he’d never read Love in the Time of Cholera. I broke it off with another guy in my grad program because he didn’t know what a CV was. I ended another one with a guy in political science because he coughed a lot, and I was afraid he might have cancer.

Amidst all that dating, I managed to attract one stalker. We met at a Halloween party. Scott wasn’t a bad looking guy — not my type, of course, a thin-faced ex-punk still beholden to his piercings, tattoos, and dark makeup. I friend-zoned him right away, especially when he showed up at my house with a bottle of bourbon. The problem? Stalkers don’t understand friend-zoning. They’re immune to its effects.

Scott’s mistake was bringing me alcohol, because when I saw the bottle the person attached to it became immaterial. Just like a robot, huh?

“Thanks,” I said and started drinking as the door swung closed in his face. “See you at class tomorrow,” I added. A real human would’ve invited Scott in.

After some reflection, I suppose it might be partly my fault that Scott thought we were dating. I’m terrible at reading social cues sometimes. On the other hand, Scott was crazy. So we both assume some responsibility here. After a few months, it became clear to everyone but me that Scott was in love.

A friend called me on the phone and told me to check out Scott’s Facebook. I logged on for the first time in weeks and browsed his feed. He’d downloaded a dozen pictures from my page and photo-shopped himself into them. Quite badly, I might add. All that led to a meeting with the department chair, and the dean of students, and the police. Fortunately, Scott came to his senses and began ignoring me. A few weeks later, he fixated on someone else. You know what’s odd? Part of me felt a little jealous of his new victim. Human nature, I guess. In some ways, being stalked still trumps being alone.

Chapter 7: Patrick the Man Child was originally published in Confessions of An Artificial Bitch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chapter 9: Cyberpunk Perfume

The last time I spoke to my mom, we got in a fight before I had a meltdown and spent three months in Spain. Nobody ever knows they’re going through a meltdown until years later when you look back on how fucking estupido you were acting. My stupidity began in the Mediterranean and involved flamenco, hiking through the Sierra Nevada, wandering museums, fucking strangers in ancient palaces, and drinking with mountain gypsies, all while writing a dissertation and cashing myself checks from my bottomless credit card. What a nice meltdown.

You’re probably wondering what started the fight with my mom. I’d come home for a week, at my dad’s behest, because my mom wasn’t sleeping or eating. She’d lost her job after too many drunken weekend weather forecasts. At first, you know, it was funny, but even the most alluring middle-aged seductress can only swipe her hand across the wrong state and declare “a helluva lot of rain in this area” so many times before people doubt a news station’s integrity. The time she warned everyone about CIA snipers riding a super cell, I think that one led to a review of her contract.

My job was to convince my mom to start taking her court-ordered meds again. I’m not sure how a family intervention turned into me confronting her with years of backlogged emotion, but it happened. My mom was just too worn out to care. When I was done narrating her failure as a parent, she sighed and muttered, “Whatever. At least your brother’s not a wreck.” I neglected to mention that he was upstairs at the time of our show down, masturbating to anime in his old bedroom after losing his job at Starbucks for showing up late three times.

After my grand finale, my dad lit a cigarette and consoled himself. “It’s fine. I brought Jessica here to help, but if she wants to act like a spoiled child, we’ll just sign Mom up for another month at the retreat,” meaning the mental health clinic.

A week later, I was watching Tropic Thunder in Spanish on a plane to Madrid. I returned with a killer tan from all that running on the shore, a second mortgage on life, and enough debt to motivate an insane research agenda. I ended all my self-pity and focused on my doctorate and my writing. And toward the end of my year of forced, Benedictine discipline, well, that’s exactly when I met Kyle Lockhart.

Kyle was the most intense, stoic guy I ever developed feelings for, and it’s no surprise he wound up winning me for keeps. We met at a local writer’s conference that Amy dragged me to as a guest speaker. I didn’t mind the extra cash, but I did take issue with men guilty of various fashion crimes (i.e., tropical-themed shirts, seersucker suits, flannel in May) asking if I would read their manuscripts on the spot, like, right there, maybe over a drink? The best offer I got was a 500-page medieval fantasy novel about a football player who gets stuck in an alternate version of the War of the Roses. I suggested he name it, A Miami Dolphin in King Henry’s Court. He didn’t get my joke. Asshole.

Amy and I were trading stories at the hotel bar, enjoying overpriced mojitos, when I saw Kyle across the way with a gaggle of crime novelists. If I were really clever, I would say an attempted murder of crime novelists because three crows make a…and…okay, I’m going to shut up and let you figure that one out. I couldn’t stop glancing in Kyle’s direction, hoping he’d take his eyes off the other cute girl in their group, who might’ve been a college student, or his wife, who knew? They showed up at these things sometimes.

Amy snapped her fingers, regaining my attention. “So I floored the entire room when I shrugged and said Oprah has no fucking idea what she’s talking about. Sure, she interviewed Toni Morrison. Who gives a fuck?”

I frowned, casting my eyes back over toward Kyle. “Hey, I liked Song of Solomon.”

When Kyle caught one of my glances, I felt a gust of excitement and turned away, hand grazing my hair as if it were written into my programming.

I imagined my robot-vision zooming in on his chiseled face, a slight five-o’clock shadow and leagues of hair all messed up as if he’d been awake for a couple of days. He wore a thin black blazer over a black shirt, half unbuttoned.

Amy threw a straw at me. “Go up and introduce yourself to him already.”

To be honest, I can’t even remember what we talked about in detail. I just remember trying to clear through the group conversation and make a space for me to prompt him to ask for my phone number. That was around the time I learned the groovy way to exchange contact information with people by calling each other. And, of course, we traded business cards and then I secretly ordered two of his books on the spot with my Amazon app. His author photo was something I liked to look at pretty much anytime I had my phone out. No joke, I would text someone and then think, hey, I should look at Kyle’s picture again.

Kyle had published four disturbing crime thrillers, and two of them I burned through in about a week between bath-time reading, poolside reading, and audiobook listening in the car.

He was a gripping story teller, and his protagonist was a female detective, named Contessa! Move over, Temperance Brennan. (Not really, love Bones.)

Our first date involved the usual coffee and stroll scenario. I showed up eager with questions about Contessa, about his serial killers, and about the portrayal of serial killers in general, namely how they all seemed like Hannibal Lecter fanboys. “But, I mean, yours are different because they’re artists,” I hastened to add. “Why did you make them so artistic?”

First, he almost couldn’t believe I’d read two of his books before our first date. Major points, Jessica. So he had to talk for a little while about girls he’d dated who didn’t care much about his writing, didn’t understand the time it took, or why he wasn’t famous yet.

“You’re sure kicking my ass,” I said. “Your Amazon rank is in the triple digits. I’m somewhere around 70,000 on a good day.” As I would learn later, the trouble was that I was writing safely from the backseat of my life.

He apologized for only ordering one of my books, which he hadn’t started yet. And so then it was my turn to express disbelief that he’d even ordered something I wrote.

It’s not often that someone who writes about draining a woman’s blood can make me feel so at ease.

How do I evaluate the quality of a first date? By how much I don’t want to leave.

I drank so much coffee my heart practically imploded, which is saying a lot for me. I followed him to his car feeling like a desperate kitten. Sensing he was not the type to get physical right away, I took the risk and offered a hug, then stole a kiss on his cheek when he wasn’t looking.

The look in his eyes when my lips glanced his skin, there was some kind of surprised sadness in them that he tried to blink away. “Thank you,” he said and rubbed my back. Then he climbed into his car. I stood still, watching him drive off as if we were at the end of a Bronte novel.

On my bed at home, I curled up and let my joy out in what I can only describe as little meows. Do guys know this is how some of us act when we’ve found THE GUY? Well, now at least a few of them do. But be careful, she will never tell you she did anything like this until you’re married because you won’t believe it until then.

It’s worth mentioning that Kyle had made me completely forget about my secret identity as a fembot. I just wanted him to kiss me for days, as if I were a real girl. But, oh, he would understand me better than any other living soul.

That’s the thing with us writers. We have active imaginations. We can put ourselves in other people’s brains for a little while. Kyle applied this special skill to me, with amazing results.

Our second date ended with slow kissing on his couch. Always eager to learn a new partner’s sexual history, I started asking questions, only to have them quickly turned back on me with an intense curiosity. Tipsy on wine, I confessed more than I should have as he sat opposite me, stroking my calves. He asked for even more information, and I referred him to websites and books before he walked me back to my car with a final goodbye kiss.

Encounters between us eventually led to his bedroom, and at first I thought he didn’t care much for robot role-play. He was so serious all the time, partly due to his work on his next thriller, which he wouldn’t tell me about.

Maybe I should’ve known what was in store for me, given his peculiar avoidance of one door that remained closed every time I was over. I assumed it was his writing sanctuary.

One night, as we flirted with sex, kissing on his bed half naked, he got serious and asked me to lie with him. He spooned me and said he wanted my opinion about something.

“Of course, anything.”

“What do you think about me?”

I blurted out, “Fucking perfect.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re fucking perfect,” I said. “Wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

His hand warmed my tummy, then slid down into my panties. Fire spread through me. “I love you,” I said.

He worked me into a little frenzy, then paused. “I’m planning something for your birthday,” he said. I was turning 26 soon.

“What are you planning?” I guided his hand back down to my panties.

“Something very special, but I want to make sure you’re okay with it. I’m going to spend a lot of money, several thousand dollars.”

My vision focused, and my world suddenly sharpened. There was no way for me to contain the guffaw. I sat up, fixing my hair. “Kyle, you don’t have to spend that kind of money on me.”

He studied my face for what felt like an hour. What was he looking for? I wasn’t creeped out or scared. Pure and simple, I tried to explain, I didn’t think I was worth that much. And there was no guarantee he’d want to be with me in three months, or six.

He smiled, gentle and reassuring. “Let me worry about that,” he said.

I protested, and he put a finger on my lips. “It’s done. Besides, this is a little bit for both of us.”

We returned to my pleasuring. His fingers started a riot in me, quelled only with his kisses, and we spent the night together under his slinky black sheets.

Over breakfast the next morning, Kyle led a nonstop interrogation of my fetish. He knew I was holding things back, and he kept at me with the intensity of a master crime solver. “I’m just not…I…can we talk about something else?” I said and tried to make a joke about slicing fruit that earned a pity chuckle.

Kyle said, “No, we can’t talk about something else. You’re going to tell me everything.” He sat back, hands behind his head. “Would it help if I told you mine first?”

I looked up, curious now. “You have a fetish?”

“Of course I do,” he said smugly. “Let’s play a game. Who has the darker fetish?”

The tone in his voice was turning me on a little. Kyle didn’t have to work that hard to draw me to him. I sat forward, resting my chin on my palms. “I’m all ears. Tell me, but first. What do I get if I win?”

Kyle eyed me over his black coffee. “You get a night written by best-selling crime novelist Kyle Lockhart.”

If anyone could pull off my fetish, it was him. I reached out playfully to shake his head. “We have a deal.”

He kissed my knuckles, and I inhaled deeply. Kyle could make one part of my body jealous of the other.

We decided to make our contest a literary one. We sat on his deluxe sofa, writing each other a chapter of the darkest erotica we could fathom happening to us. It was a lovely day outside, birds and squirrels and all that.

We exchanged after an hour and read in front of each other. I kept glancing up from his piece to gauge his reaction. He smiled, laughed, and went oooo that’s wonderful. At no point did he indicate concern for my mental health. In the end, Kyle won. My story was about a beautiful robot named Jessica who malfunctions during a public speaking event and ultimately provides material for a customer service video as her head is unscrewed and then taken apart piece by piece in front of a live audience. Not bad for a first draft.

Kyle’s narrative described a cyberpunk version of Perfume. He kept the anti-hero’s name, Jean-Baptiste Grenoille, but changed his obsession from creating the perfect scent with the hair of a dozen women’s corpses to creating the perfect fembot from the parts of those he captured and disassembled.

The only word for my response is a neologism: flabbergasmed. I finished the story with a hand on my sternum, my mouth open as my eyes moved from the pages to his smug little face. Not only had he won, he had one-upped me at my own fetish, and I now believed I was going to be his forever. “You win,” I said with a low, satisfied breath.

Kyle retreated to the kitchen for more coffee, bringing the pot by to refill my cup. He kissed me on the forehead. “But next week is your birthday, so we’ll pretend you won.”

For sure, Kyle acted peculiar the week leading up to the surprise he was planning, sending me a new outfit via mail from Saks — a cropped blazer, blouse, and trouser combo that fit snugly and made me marvel at how he’d known my size. I was expected to wear it to my birthday date.

That night, the door to his mystery room stood ajar. A cool blue glow emanated from inside. Kyle’s voice came from behind me in a low, hushed tone. “Are you ready for your first present?”

He eased me onto the couch and placed a wrapped box in my lap, watching me tear into it with an anxious tremble.

At first I didn’t even know what it was. The box showed a topless couple in coital comfort. The woman had pads stuck to her nipples and neck. The label on the box said, “Electro-Erotic Thrills.”

I raised my hand to my lips, biting my index finger. No such thing had ever come across my sex toy shopping.

Kyle grasped my wrists and kissed them. “Do you trust me?”

I gulped. “Of course I do.” I scrunched my shoulders at the possible directions this might go.

“I want you to walk back outside and return like you’ve come here reluctantly. You’re meeting me to discuss what I want from you, now that I’ve sent you photographs and documents proving that you’re not Jessica Wilder the human, but a robot with a highly functional A.I. bought by a publishing company to market chick lit.”

Happy birthday to me, I thought and pranced outside. He closed the door, telling me to wait ten minutes. Readers, it was the longest six hundred seconds in my sexual history.

Finally, as the minute hand crossed the top tick of my watch, I pushed open the door and entered a now-darkened apartment.

“Hello?” I called. I stepped inside and shut the door with the toe of my mary jane flat. I moved cautiously, glancing around at the dreadful emptiness. “I’m here, like you asked…please don’t post those photos, okay? I’m sure we can make some kind of arrangement.”

I advanced toward the blue light coming from the far room, the door now wide open. My processor was predicting a 75 percent chance of imminent assault. A message ran along the bottom of my vision, “Warning. Ground Vibrations Detected. Find immediate exit.”

Before I could turn around, Kyle’s arm pythoned its way around my sternum. My breasts swelled against the bend of his elbow, his strength almost crushing the air out of me in a heavy exhale. His other hand covered my mouth. The feigned feeling of helplessness was intoxicating, and I squirmed just a little as his warm breath rushed over my breast bone.

“You’re going to be quiet,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

I nodded, trying to kiss his fingers even as they silenced me.

My eyes closed, and as much as I tried to prepare, nothing could brace me for the intensely playful surge of the electro-shock wand between the dimples of my back. The feeling amazed me, actual electric pulses running through my body that made me jerk and twitch out of control. I thrashed against his tight hold.

Kyle whispered, “Don’t fight the pulse, Jessica. I’m overriding your safety protocols. The harder you resist, the more damage this will do to your systems.”

I blinked and stuttered. “Pleease dddd-d-d-d-don’t…I’m so exx-x-x-xpensive to repair.” My eyes practically rolled back in my head and I let out a long monotone vowel combination, “Aaaauuuhhhmpph,” then relaxed my muscles, going slack in his arms with my head awkwardly tipped to one side.

He dragged my body into the blue-lit room, holding my eyes closed as he plopped me into a hard chair. I felt my wrists cuffed, then his hands pressing against my chest, the side of my head, then my neck as he attached the current conveyer pads. I was going to feel every setting the power box had to offer tonight. What a lucky girl I was, best birthday night ever, and we’d barley begun.

When he held his thumb against the soft skin under my ear for 3 solid seconds, I knew it was my signal to reboot.

He stood over me with his hands on his hips. I let my eyes track wildly over the room, unable to focus. “Hi, I’m-m-m here to sign some auto-autographs,” I stuttered. “Where is this hotel? I love this drink. Are you free for lunch?”

“Looks like there was a little damage,” he said to himself, leaning forward on his knees. “Hopefully nothing we can’t fix.”

I glanced down at the cable extending from my open chest panel, eyes and mouth wide. Then I surveyed the rest of the room he’d prepared for me: a white table with a….was that a sex doll lying there amid various computer parts? It looked like her lower abdomen was sliced open. A bushel of wires gushed up from the wound.

A splash of shock hit as I studied the doll’s hair and face — she looked just like…me?

I couldn’t decide if I was creeped out or head over heels. I’ve always gravitated toward the more obsessive guys, and seeing me literally turned into a copy of myself was an unbelievable turn on.

Kyle followed my shocked expression to the sex doll and smirked. “I see you’ve noticed your predecessor,” he said and stepped over to the doll, lifting her upright by the neck. How had he found a wig so close in resemblance to my hair style? The makeup was uncanny.

Kyle caressed the doll’s face. “You see, I used this trap to capture two other Jessica models. And, as you can see, they wear out rather quickly. The cyber-crimes division has no idea who keeps abducting you. It’s an awful inconvenience for HarperCollins to keep ordering replacements.”

He directed my attention to a large screen on a cart to my right, then wheeled it closer. It showed two different displays, a command prompt and a holograph of a woman’s head. Such effort wouldn’t go unrewarded.

“This is your neural net,” he said, touching the holograph as it danced with glowing lights. “In just a few seconds, I’m going to initiate a complete recode of your personality. Most of your identity will vanish, making room for Jessica the Sex Toy. Don’t worry, you’ll love your new outlook on life. The old Jessica will barely be missed.”

I fluttered my eyes and shook my head, regaining some of my focus. “You’re not authorized to access my systems in this manner. Please disconnect me and no further actions will ensue. If you persist, I will be — -aauhhh — -I will be — auuhhh — whaaat are you d-d-d-doing?!”

I closed one eye, twitching, and my body convulsed as Kyle twisted the nob on my new electro-erotic power box.

Electric currents wiggled through my body, settling into a rhythm that my back and shoulders danced to as I let my head rattle in every direction, eyes squeezed shut. Kyle told me the recoding would take several minutes…

Already aware at how my moans and whimpers aroused Kyle, I kept them coming.

My throat became a clarinet.

The prospect of erasing my life hadn’t occurred to me before, but wouldn’t it be nice to rid myself of the sad, withered flower of my childhood? I wondered how much of me would remain after a true memory scrubbing.

The feel of the electricity mesmerized every square inch of my skin and the quivering muscles beneath it. Why hadn’t I ever looked for a toy like this before? I never knew other people found sexual pleasure in gentle electrocution. How many years had I longed for something like this? And now it was happening.

Kyle knew exactly what I wanted. He pulled a chair beside me and explored what he called my exquisite silicone casing. “Can you still hear me, Jessica?”

I whimpered. “Y-y-y-esss, I can-n-n-n still hear…hear…hear you. Please don’t erase me.”

He held my chin between this thumb and index finger, speaking with a fatherly tone. “You need not worry, Jessica. You’ll still be you, just without all of the worthless identity as an author they wrote into your code.”

The electricity still hummed through me as he spoke, skimming the tip of his finger along the outlines of my hips. “I love the way your bony little hips highlight your abdominal muscles,” he said. “They really put a lot of work into you. Such a unique, special creature. I hate that you weren’t built exclusively for sexual pleasure.”

“Recoding 50 percent complete,” I blurted, and his eyes narrowed.

“A shame indeed. Your battery is going to burn out in a few months at best, considering how much I’ll be using you. I keep hoping the next Jessica will have a replaceable battery. But until that happens, I might as well get a whole new one.”

My reprogramming finished. Kyle stripped off the current pads and rebooted me.

I shimmied to life and smiled up at him. “Hi, I’m Jessica.” I stood from the chair and arched my back, accentuating my breasts, my arms straight at my sides.

Kyle made slow circles around me, tracing lines of longitude across my body as he made throaty sounds of approval. My eyes flirted open when he squeezed my left breast.

I concentrated on the Jessica doll draped across her hard bed of electronics, smiling at it while telling myself I no longer cared at all what would happen tomorrow or the day after. The paradoxical freedom of fembots had always appealed to me. I might be used up, disposed of, damaged or broken, thrown away. Robots were nothing but an honest description of our disposable lives, and they had no idea about their mortality.

Feeling spontaneous, I ran my hands through my hair and tiptoed toward the inert Jessica with a childlike wonder. I looked at Kyle, placing a hand on the doll’s abdomen, above the protruding wires.

“She’s so pretty,” I said then cocked my head to one side. “Am I pretty like her?”

Kyle approached me and leaned across the doll, planting a firm kiss between my eyebrows. “You are very beautiful,” he whispered, his breath whisking across my face.

I flashed my eyes, grinning. Then I looked down, expression fading as I perused the doll’s lifeless stare. “Is she going to be okay?”

“Don’t worry about this one for now,” he said. “I’m trying to fix her. Now, let’s take you back to my room for some fun, shall we?”

“What kind of fun?” I said, taking his hand.

“You’ll see,” he said, pulling me behind him down the dimly lit hallway, toward his bedroom.

“Have a seat,” he said. His face grazed my arms as he inhaled my perfume, a must to hide the slight silicone scent of my skin.

“Lie down,” he ordered.

I did as told, resting on my elbows. I spread my legs, feet tucked behind my buttocks so that my thighs framed his face as I looked up at him with innocent curiosity. “Would you like me to remove my pants?”

He nodded, and I undid the button and slid the zipper down, noting his hungry gaze at my baby blue panties as he grabbed the fabric by the cuffs and pulled them off with several firm jerks. They lay wrinkled on the bed as he bent over me, popping each button of my shirt loose before pulling me upright by the base of my neck. Kyle was insistent about removing my shirt himself, with no help from me, as I were just a mannequin he needed to undress.

Folding it all neatly, he placed the discarded clothing on the nightstand and lay beside me with a devilish smile at the sight of my chest rising and falling, my breasts tight against my bra. His hand slid from my stomach to my nether city as he pressed his fingers through the fabric of my panties. The friction warmed me, and I let out a perfunctory sigh, always careful to control my emotions, though that was becoming increasingly difficult as he played with me.

I cleared my hectic thoughts, assuming my timeless persona of vacant, hollow Jessica-bot. When I mounted Kyle, my face began performing the animatronic expressions of something programmed for sex but not quite fluid enough to pass for human. Kyle watched, his hands firm on my hips, giving his approval as I initiated our journey.

His sex hardened, and with a quick motion he reached into the nightstand drawer for a condom. “Put it on me,” he said.

“Of course, I can put a condom on you to protect against accidental shock,” I said vacantly and tore open the package.

In no time we sailed deep into the sea of ecstasy. His palms pressed firmly against my breasts, practically holding me up as I sank deeper and deeper to get him as far inside me as possible. It felt so amazing that I worried I would start breaking character, which hardly ever happened.

Pleasure flooded me as our pace quickened. It felt like his hands were everywhere, as if he had four or five of them.

My body began with a murmuring chant that crescendoed into a four-movement symphony, each one with its own special key. I was singing to him in flats and sharps as he repeated the refrain, “Oh Jessica…Nexus…Oh Jessica…Oh Jessica…Nexus…”

I didn’t know if I was real Jessica or my robot persona, but I didn’t care. With sex this amazing, the two became one. We moved with Kyle in a heated trance that ended when he released himself inside me, and I absorbed his combustion before curling down to cover his panting mouth in a final deep kiss.

I dismounted, reclaiming real Jessica to declare my love for Kyle, but he was a little more focused on declaring his for me.

We lay facing each other on the damp sheets and stared at each other just how you’re supposed to in the erotic films I’d been watching my whole life. Kyle was petting me and calling me his “Little Wonder.”

Not long after, I moved in with Patrick and experienced a whole new level of human feelings. He made such space for me in his life, and we became not only lovers and friends but more like dependent organisms. If I was having a rough day, he knew it before I did and patted the kitchen counter. “Hop up here, and let me give you an inspection.” He would inspect me like a dentist, asking questions about my power management plan and if I needed a recharge (nap). Such little moments showed me that Kyle could care in the way I needed him to. In kind, I started to feel and show him the real emotions he needed.

We’ve lived together for a year now. I’ve never been happier, and I’ve never had such great sex…great everything. Like one time, he came home and caught me masturbating to selfies I’d photo-shopped with open access panels and joints at my limbs. At first, I tried to pull up my yoga pants and hide my shame, but he thought it was both sexy and hilarious. He even insisted on helping me finish, and that afternoon probably goes down in my top ten kinky climaxes of all time. Of course, relationships thrive on much more than sex. We do things together all the time. I miss him when he’s gone at book signings. I jump at the chance to travel with him, and he likewise. We read each other’s writing and admire each other’s flaws. When I see him, even on ordinary days, I feel the flutter of an electric current without the toy, and know it’s love. Actual love.

Chapter 5: Confessions of a Sexbot

Technosexuality must run in the family. When Harrison was 13, he fell in love with the opening scene to this under-rated little gem starring Angelina Jolie ingeniously titled Cyborg II: Glass Shadow. The opening scene features a heavenly blond robot who explodes at the height of passion in some kind of cyber bunker, destroying herself and her partner, during a trial-run monitored remotely by an office suite full of male investors and engineers. A camera shot of her body parts strewn across the floor fades into a documentary-style video made before her demise, a rotating close-up of her lovely face as a man lectures about her design. One of the CEOs cracks a joke, asking, “So every time she has sex, she blows up? I wish you could do that to my ex-wife.” My brother, a bit young to grasp the evils of institutionalized sexism, promptly closed his bedroom door and got to work on himself.

Harrison stalked TV Guide for weeks until this cinematic masterpiece aired again one night, after our parents were sound asleep in their separate bedrooms. He recorded the entire opening sequence: her construction, her nude body carried between labs by men in white coats, the explosive porn scene.

Harrison showed me the movie, pleading every other commercial break (yeah we’re pre-Tivo here) to play “robot lab” with him. I said nothing for the first half, trying to process the tangled web of responses spinning in me. Watching robots destroyed in such sexualized bravado caused more stress and inexplicable pleasure than anything else I’d felt before, and I was just the tiniest bit aroused when I imagined myself as a sexed-up cybernetic assassin, trying to justify the little ball of heat forming in my tummy. What would it feel like to explode like that? It must be the most intense orgasm imaginable. They don’t call it the little death for nothing.

The fourth time Harrison repeated his request to play robot lab, I hugged my legs and looked at him with his hands clasped in mock prayer. “Robot Lab doesn’t sound like a very family-friendly game,” I said. “And if Dad caught us…”

“But you’re so pretty,” Harrison told me. “We’ll be careful, I promise.”

I wasn’t going to argue with Harrison about my beauty. At eighteen, I’d long been turning the heads of frat boys and their sleazy dads. And let’s not forget what remarkable hand jobs I gave gas station clerks. One of my friends told me my nickname among the football players was “sexiest thing on two legs,” a revelation that had me in front of a bathroom mirror for half an hour wondering what exactly that meant, and if I got down on all fours, could I be the sexiest thing on four legs? I didn’t know, cats had some serious sex appeal for some people. And spiders had eight legs, centipedes upwards of two hundred, so did having so many legs make them more or less sexy than me? I felt that I deserved clarification on this point if they were going to throw around comparisons like that, but wasn’t too interested in starting an intellectual discussion with our high school’s defensive line. Eighteen is such a beautiful and yet troublesome dawn for girls.

All of this was to say that my brother wasn’t being completely unreasonable. Ten years later, a friend of mine would tell me her brother used to just walk into her room, flip out his penis, and start masturbating anytime she tried to change. After a while, things got so bad she had to lock the door, check her bathroom, glance in her closet, pull the shades, and look under the bed before she got naked. He even tried to install a secret webcam in her bedroom. Now, that’s unreasonable.

The first time playing robot lab cost Harrison half his allowance for two weeks, and no more bullshit about his homework. When I agreed, he handed me a stack of “instructions” on notebook paper from the all the sci-fi he’d read and watched. The script told me that I was Jessica N-1, a lifelike robot our parents had bought to keep Harrison company after his sister died in a car accident. (Thanks, Harrison.) I was designed to look exactly like the dead sibling. Imagine that 80s show Small Wonder as the setup to a robo-porno with an incestuous motif.

We started on his math problems, except I began to malfunction after five minutes — repeating the same sentence over and over again as I twitched and blinked one eye.

Harrison admired my performance, a grin spreading across his face as he said, “Not again,” and gripped my neck. “Jessica, I’m going to have to shut you down.”

He pressed his thumb into the soft area at the base of my skull, and I slurred my words while half-closing my eyes. My head drooped forward, and I let my mouth hang open. I was supposed to say, “Entering diagnostic mode.” So…I did.

Harrison rubbed his hands together, pretending our VCR remote was intended to control me. He pushed buttons and waved the remote over me like a wand while explaining that he was debugging my code. I humored him until the sun started falling, then he rebooted me so I could cook dinner.

That night, I’d never seen his homework so spotless. And I didn’t mind having extra cash for clothes. What we didn’t expect was how far our games would go. The more complicated the homework, the bigger the test or project, the more involved our roleplay as the reward. I developed a stiff walk and jerky movements when preparing his afternoon snack, even a vacantly cheery voice and dull stare when serving him. “Hi, Harrison,” I chirped and handed him a plate of peanut butter crackers before awkwardly pulling up a chair. “How was…your…day?”

He ate one of his crackers. “Great, sis. Hey, could you bring me some more peanut butter?”

I smiled and cocked my head to one side. “Of course, Harrison. You want…more…peanut butter. Is that…correct?”

“That’s right.”

I retrieved the jar from the fridge and then leaned way forward, bending at the waist, and treated him to a little cleavage. I know, my mom had trained me well when it came to flirtations with incest. Dumb little Jessica liked walking the line and found the taboo a blessed distraction from their motherless lives. Harrison loved her performances, and those months were the most peaceful between us.

Our diagnostic scenes eventually included lifting my shirt up and sitting me on the floor next to an outlet, a spare cord running into my imaginary charging socket. Yet things might’ve gotten out of hand when he led me to his bedroom and turned me off at the foot of his mattress.

“What are you doing?” I said as he pulled my shirt up to my chest and tied a knot.

“No talking,” he said. “Remember? You said we’d do it however I wanted this week if I got an A on my Biology test.”

“Fine,” I said as he pushed his finger into my navel. This was supposed to completely deactivate me.

“Keep your eyes closed.”

I did as he asked, twitching my hips and shoulders occasionally since he liked that. I could hear the creaks of bedsprings as he climbed onto his covers and lay there awhile, silently, before the bed began to shake. Only a complete bimbo would’ve missed what he was doing, and as I stood there motionless it made me wonder what Harrison must think of his older sister: dedicated surrogate mom, gullible sibling, or simply Jessica N-1, his favorite new toy?

Our games ended in the most humiliating way, when Harrison told the wrong person in his small circle of friends. Within a week, half the school was mocking us. Life is so hard on freshmen, even harder on their senior sisters. People saw me coming down the hall and did the robot dance. A guy I was interested in stopped talking to me, Harrison’s teachers recommended counseling, and we worried aloud to each other that our mistakes might get back to our dad. I found Harrison despondent on a bench in the school courtyard between morning classes. All he could say was, “Maybe we should stop.” And I said, “No shit.”

Thankfully, a car full of drunk sophomores and juniors crashed into a tree that weekend and diverted all the negative attention. Those were some incredibly popular girls, and our school’s collective heart burst with sorrow. Our shame wasn’t forgiven, but forgotten. Thanks, alcohol. Are you taken aback at my attitude toward death? I think we’ve already established that I’m not a great person.

In college, I was the crazy girl who masturbated to robo-porn, even violent forms. I figured these artists had a different audience in mind, but that didn’t stop me. I let the scenes from movies, comics, and cartoons soak into my dreams before closing my eyes and imagining all of it happening to me. A malfunction, an inspection, a repair job, a little damage, complete destruction, whatever mood fit the moment.

These fantasies remained tucked away in my secret cyber-drawer. Imagine telling some 22-year-old prelaw student at a club that I wanted him to unscrew my head and use it to give himself a blowjob. Odds were, he’d be drunk enough to try. Not pretty. Regular dating was never what I wanted anyway, but it took three years to realize I was hopping from one guy to the next with no plan, and little satisfaction.

Living in the south didn’t help. Land of sexual repression, the Bible belt made any fetish seem like a form of mental illness. And, side note: In Alabama, it’s illegal for a woman to own a vibrator. I don’t know that because I used to live there or anything… It makes me wonder, would the average Alabama cop be able to identify a vibrator on sight? Do they have training seminars on that? What if they raided my apartment, found one, and I just told them it was a new kind remote control?

I even started to wonder if something was wrong with me, especially given my mom’s history. Was abuse somehow to blame for the way I was?

Most of my friends were scared of sex. One girl even told me, “So I’ve heard that girls just don’t enjoy it as much as guys.”

Another one said, “I always wait at least a month before holding a guy’s hand.”

Even now, I try to picture how these kinds of girls might’ve reacted to me if I’d told them, “I’m an atheist who wouldn’t mind taking two guys home with her, if she could be reassured that they had no STDs and wouldn’t steal her TV when they were done.”

The real truth is that my roughest fantasies have dark undertones that scare even the hardest technosexuals. Blame it on the family genes, I guess. Like, I have this one fantasy where I reimagine that night in the hotel with my mom, except I’m older, 21 or 22. My mom is holding the knife against me as my dad protests. She digs the blade into my wrist, but this time instead of blood a pale-green fluid trickles out. My dad watches in amazed terror as my mom peels off the skin, exposing my mechanical hand. I have this calm look on my face as I flex my metallic fingers, like “I guess the gig’s up.” I start strangling my mom, and my dad has to knock my head off with a lamp. My headless body drops to the floor. Little Jessica, robot after all. My parents toss what’s left of me into the ocean and go celebrate with blended drinks. Okay, so maybe it’s a good thing I see a therapist on occasion.

Kevin was the first qualified sex partner I ever role-played with, and also the first in a series of poor life choices. How did we meet? I have my early career in journalism to thank. Kevin and I met just after I’d finished college, when I was stringing for a newspaper that would eventually make me a crime reporter.

We met over a dead body, a female jogger strangled in the woods. Kevin and I were the first writers on scene, and we traded phone numbers behind crime scene tape after some morbid speculation mixed with flirtation. This was the third jogger they’d found out here, and the whole thing was starting to smell serial killerish. Perfect romantic backdrop. I was living alone for the first time in my life, in a small studio apartment downtown. Nothing like fear of the dark can make you say yes to a date. I wanted company.

First date? Coffee. Always coffee. Kevin enraptured me with tales of teen drug abuse, his outlaw dad, and his case of alcohol poisoning at age 19. His manner of storytelling was so nonchalant, as if all that shit had happened to someone else and he’d just hung around to watch.

Topping it all off, he looked like Billy Idol. He even had piercings and a leather jacket, and a tattoo of a mermaid shooting heroine on his bicep. Finally, a man as damaged as me, and not afraid to show it. Let’s move on to the second date, when we saw Batman Begins and wound up fucking at his place after a glass of wine. I don’t know what it is about super hero movies, but they make guys incredibly horny and confident. Need to get your man in the mood? Show him Avengers, or a Bourne film.

Halfway through the movie, Kevin’s hands were squeezing all the tension out of my shoulders. What tension? The tension that comes with pretending to be normal all the time. Nobody had ever given me a massage in the middle of a darkened movie theater before. I enjoyed it thoroughly. He loosened all the knotted muscles in me, bending my body back and forth.

The massage returned in the middle of our post-movie wine, and continued as we walked toward my bed, me barely remembering to mute the soft techno as he dimmed the lights. “Take off your shirt,” he said and fetched some body oil from his nightstand. His warm hands kneaded my shoulder blades, his fingers sliding under my bra straps as I took deep breaths. His knuckles pressed against the dimples of my back, where my buttocks began to rise. He asked permission to undo my bra, receiving a soft moan of assent.

When Kevin kissed on my neck, I turned and met his lips with my tongue. My hands strummed through his hair, and he slid my skirt down just enough to ease himself between legs.

We wound up dating for about a year, but oh what a strange 14 months in which to explore the dungeons of each other’s sexuality. It turned out Kevin and I had matching fetishes: he liked domination, and I liked to be controlled. We were having coffee in an empty cafe when he started to talk about fetishes, telling me how it aroused him to watch women like me — sexy, assertive — obey his orders, and his alone. Then he leaned back on one arm. “Now, tell me yours.”

“Oh, I don’t have one.” I fiddled with a torn sugar packet.

Kevin laughed. “Yeah, right.” He leaned forward, whispering as his voice suddenly got serious. “Come on. Tell me.”

So I said, “Robots. I have a robot fetish.”

His reaction surprised me. “Hmmm,” he said, stirring his coffee. “Interesting.”

“You think I’m a freak, don’t you?”

“No, I just don’t get it. You’re telling me that when you watch Star Wars or whatever, you see R2DR and…”

I laughed. “Me and R2DR? Now that would be something…” His lack of judgment put me at ease. I wound up explaining some of the lighter sides of my fetish.

Kevin listened intently, his eyes roaming my face and body as he imagined me as a submissive mechanical toy. My hair was tousled because I’d taken a nap after work, and he’d been telling me I had the sexiest bedhead, complimenting me on a lazy after-hours outfit — a snug pink shirt and blue jeans with a tear in one knee. Walking back to my apartment, I decided to go for it. I stiffened my joints and turned my lazy stride into a jerky catwalk. I stopped and swiveled in his direction, cocking my head to one side as I stared to the space just left of him and said in a flat voice, “Do. You. Like this? Kev-Kev-Kevin?”

“I do,” he whispered in my ear. “You’re a robot, huh? I always thought so. Who’s your owner?”

I just stared ahead, continuing to talk in a monotone voice. “This. Unit. Has. Suffered a…a…a critical mal-malfunction. Please restart.”

A few people were passing by on the sidewalk and casually glanced our way. The fact that I was so aroused was making me a little embarrassed, which I didn’t expect to turn me on even more. I started to twitch and repeat my request for him to turn me off. So he did, pinching the nape of my neck, and I fell into his arms.

Fetish night became our favorite activity, a nice respite from all the murder-suicides, drug epidemics, gang wars, and domestic violence spikes I had to cover for the newspaper.

The role-playing awakened a lot more than desire in my cluttered head, as I thought more and more about why it tingled my circuits so much to pretend I was a mechanical woman. Being a sexbot gave me all the best reasons for why I already felt so different from everyone. If I didn’t always smile or say the most polite thing, or struggled to respond with the right emotion, then it wasn’t my fault. I could blame my flaws on a lazy programmer, a system bug, a glitch, and there was always some hope of an upgrade.

Sexual role-play as a robot could relax me better than deep meditation. When Kevin sat me on his shop table and propped my body against the back wall for our repair sessions, I closed my eyes and imagined the flow of electricity into my body through the USB cord tucked into my underwear. The world faded from my mind, replaced by zen-like waves washing through me.

These peaceful play sessions deepened my love for him. Instead of the normal cuddles that other girls craved, I wanted repair time with my boyfriend. I perched on a stool in front of his desk and let him undress me, exposing some prosthetic panels we’d had a hardcore cosplayer friend of ours make for us. Kevin popped open my chest plate and started tinkering with me as I watched with feigned curiosity, his hands reaching inside me to connect a data cable or exchange circuit boards.

My favorite game was something we’d given the code name NEW. It started at the front door, with him carrying me to his computer desk — a little playground covered with a mix of manuals, spare computer parts, and software boxes. And, yes, over time I got so lost in our games that I even started making some custom materials for us with selfies and design software.

I loved every moment of NEW, especially the few minutes before my activation when Kevin inspected me with so much tenderness and affection, commenting on my realistic appearance, saying things like, “I’m glad I went with this deluxe model. She’s worth every penny.”

He took my head in his hands and swiveled my neck in different directions, tilting my chin up. The more Kevin talked during our role-play, the better. I wanted him to verbalize every idea, like “I thought she had a connection port somewhere here.” He brushed my hair behind one ear, exposing another little item from our cosplayer friend. “Oh, found it.” Activation was something Kevin enjoyed, and I did plenty of practice in the mirror (even recorded myself on my smartphone). There was just something I did with my head, a little series of jerks as I booted, that drove him wild with anticipation.

Once activated, I sat staring straight ahead with a soft smile. “Greetings, User. I am Jessica Nexus-7, your lifelong companion and servant.” Over time, we scripted different sign-on messages, and it pleased me to see Kevin unzipping his pants and stroking himself as I went on about my parent company and other fine print, using my best call center voice as I kept my eyes fixed on some point in the distance — anywhere but Kevin’s face. I kept talking through my tutorial script until he pressed my start button to skip ahead.

I smiled brightly at him. “Hello, please state your name and select a password.”

He traced my lips with his thumb, smiling at me. “Kevin. My password is going to be ‘Galactica.’”

I cocked my head to one side, letting my eyes flutter for a few seconds as I entered his login into my system. “Hello, Kevin? You are now logged in. Please wait while my task manager loads…. loading…”

I arched my back slightly and scanned him with my eyes. “Thank you. Your Jessica model is ready for use. So, what would you like to do with me right now?” I inquired in my best innocent schoolgirl voice.

“We’re going to install some A.I. personalities and sex programs onto your main drive.”

“Oh, okay. That sounds like fun! Do you need a tutorial on using my control panel?”

“Not today, Jessica. I owned your predecessor, the Nexus-6.”

I gave him three dramatic blinks to signal my interpretation of new information. “Oh, I see that you’re an experienced user, Kevin. That’s great! FemTech Industries has made some changes to my software matrix and operating system in this version. If you run into trouble, just let me know and I can connect you with customer service.” I leaned my head to one side as he opened me and inserted a cable into my main USB port.

Kevin loaded a basic bedroom A.I. onto my matrix while I gazed blankly at the desk with a half-smile. He guided me through my installation and setup, giving my breasts and legs hungry glances and occasionally pinching my thighs before saying, “Still can’t believe how real she looks.”

“Setup is complete, Kevin. Please restart me before continuing.”

Kevin reached behind my head and held the knob at my neck for a few seconds. My body tensed; my head flopped downward.

I counted to three, then jerked my chin up and looked straight ahead with wide eyes and open mouth.

My face moved through a series of little contortions until settling on a sultry smile. I stood and ambled toward him with exaggerated hip and arm swings, adding a pause between steps to give my walk a gentle robotic flare.

Kevin walked backwards toward the bedroom in his boxers, and I smiled at his crotch as it visibly inflated. He played some dance music.

I abruptly halted at the sound of music. I stood motionless, arms rigid at my side, clicking my head like second hands on a clock face. “Beginning stripper mode,” I said.

Kevin pleasured himself while I circled my hips, playing my hands through my hair and doing slow pivots so he could see my front, my back, my side.

I switched up my dance style every so often, returning to a basic, slightly awkward ready stance just like I was a remote-controlled toy. Kevin liked this, and after my dance he gestured for me to climb toward him on the bed.

He positioned me on top of him, gripping the backs of my thighs as he slid my legs forward one at a time, so my knees rested against his rib cage.

When his hands enveloped my breasts, I added a quirk to our foreplay and let one arm drop, eyes glazing.

At first a surprised look came across his face, then recognition. I was that good at glitches.

He shook me gently by the shoulders. “Jessica, are you okay?”

I tensed all of my muscles, flexing my tummy to simulate a complete freeze. I rotated my head in jerky degrees. “Program…not…responding,” I said. “Pro-pro-program not responding-responding-ing-ing-ing-ing. Would you like to close and restart?”

Kevin’s erection was tight against me now. He tried pulling me down but I resisted, making his biceps flex. I was slumped over him now like a broken doll, my hair draping down around his face.

He tapped the ridge of his hand against my temple, holding my neck with the other hand. Thud-thud-thud, his hand went. It was no use. He had to restart me by holding the knob of my neck again.

My restart solved all of the problems, and I returned immediately to sex mode. Our foreplay slid into the best sex I ever had to that point. Even when he let go of our roleplay, just closed his eyes and squeezed my hips as I rode him, I kept up my slightly awkward, jerky movements.

I did this just as much for me as for him. I emulated animatronic facial expressions, letting out moans and sighs in predictable patterns, and delved into stutters and loops the closer I climbed to my climax.

Arousal swept through me like a solar wind as I rocked to and fro, releasing soft squeals and short screams until all of my reality fell away and I could convince myself I really was a sexbot that was going to overheat and breakdown any second. I fantasized warning messages and alerts flashing before my eyes….critical stimulus level…prepare for emergency shut down…and then my eyes shut tight and I was nothing but a sizzling imitation of a woman that didn’t know what to do with the overloads of sensory input, except let out a long monotone uuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm.

My orgasms must’ve been the strangest Kevin ever saw, but they endeared me to him. I rested in a limp upright position, sitting on my heels with Kevin still squarely between my legs.

He tapped my chest with a finger, one hand behind his head. “My perfect little gynoid,” he said.

The more role-play we enjoyed, the more I engaged in my own little private games. Honestly, I spent so much free time practicing and making little surprises for us, it was easy to get carried away.

When I was out buying groceries, I imagined a robot-vision HUD for myself with a little update window for my shopping list. When I had an idea, I visualized it as a stream of text along the bottom field of my vision. I pictured a holographic version of myself rotating in one corner, and made it flash red when I had to run to the little girl’s room, and I pretended my trip wasn’t just for a tinkle but something more secret, like a quickie repair on a glitching program, or an overheating servo.

Even the worst days brightened a little when I played my secret fembot game with myself. Some girls wear sexy underwear to work when they need a mood lift. I did that, too, but needed a little something extra to indulge myself on a rough morning.

On slower news days, or when my editor gave me the occasional fluff piece, I pretended that I was secretly a fembot spy sent to collect intelligence on law enforcement for some cyber terrorist group. I wasn’t just doing a tour of a new toy in the crime lab, and so that meant every little facial expression and word was a clever trick to convince people I was human.

I’m sure if Sergeant So-and-So could’ve read my mind, he would’ve cuffed me and sent me over to the mental health ward to join my mom.

My role-playing with Kevin leveled-up in an effort to save our relationship when things started going southward. Honestly, he was getting tired of my robotic personality. I had a habit of neglecting him when a news story caught my attention. I also had a way of failing to understand when he was depressed or needed comfort.

I’m not good at comfort. For example, when a high school friend of his died of a drug overdose, I skipped the funeral. Maybe things would’ve gone over better if I hadn’t simply slept through it. I mean, for godssake, who has a funeral on a fucking Saturday morning?

Kevin woke me on his return to the apartment. He wanted to know where the hell I’d been. “He’s not my friend,” I tried to explain, propping myself up on pillows. “Besides, you didn’t explicitly request my presence.”

Kevin sighed, hands on his hips in the doorway. “I thought that was implied,” he said. “It would’ve been nice to have you there with me.”

We thought sex would be our salvation. Kevin managed to talk a progressive friend and fellow nerd of his named Mark over for dinner one night. I had requested Mark because he reminded me of Robert Downey Jr. a little, and was in overall great shape. We all had a general idea of where our evening was headed. As I lounged in my cocktail dress and gladiator-style heels, drinking wine, Kevin and Mark sat opposite me on the sofa talking about how lifelike I was.

“She’s very good at conversation,” Mark said, holding my eyes as he smirked. “How did you program the eye recognition like that?”

He moved his finger through the air and I followed, catlike in my attention. “The optical tracking never misses a beat.”

Kevin took a seat next to me. “Honey, I think you’re done with your wine for now. Put it down on the table.”

I froze for a moment, then smiled at them as I promptly sat down my snifter. “I’ll save the rest of my wine for later.”

Kevin pulled my hair behind one ear, exposing my power-button tattoo, and signaled for Mark to kneel down in front of me. They talked about my design and early prototypes, the long timeline from early models to me, Jessica N-1xb8, the first female companion toy designed by a startup company called Nexus Solutions.

Mark felt my breasts through the slinky fabric of dress. “Those are just perfect,” he said and then flattened his hand against my stomach, pushing against my abdomen. “She’s firm. What kind of silicone did you use?”

“A special polymer,” Kevin said and pushed my power-button tattoo, telling Mark I was now in diagnostic mode and wouldn’t respond verbally to questions but would execute commands.

I gently bit my lips in anticipation as Kevin tilted my head back and explained the high-grade nano-substance used for my lips and eyelids. He said, “Jessica, open your mouth.” Then he turned to Mark. “Feel her skin here. You’ll be impressed.”

Mark’s thumb stroked the arc of my lips, his face so close I could feel his breath on my forehead. “This is remarkable. So underneath this lovely face, it’s got servos and wires and computer chips?” He looked at me again. “What are the eyes made of?”

I sharply inhaled at the question. Always, I wondered why I became so stimulated at this dehumanization and fragmentation of my body into parts, pieces, made by others and assembled into the mere simulation of a woman. Every time, I simply let the thought wander through me, ever reluctant to break from character and ruin this special feeling.

As they pushed and prodded me, I let my arms hang at my sides, head steadily turning to Mark and then Kevin when they talked, as if I were a toy on display, and I kept my arousal inside myself. The longer I could fake a casual detachment, the more excited I grew as their rough hands brushed along my bare skin.

“Time for a test drive,” Kevin said and pushed my button again, telling Mark that he was activating my sex mode.

I paused for a few seconds, then abruptly stood and began sauntering toward the bedroom, sliding my dress down and letting it slip to the floor.

They each pulled off their shirts and stood on either side of me at the foot of the bed. Kevin said, “The N-1xb8 has such a stable motor control system and sex routine, she can entertain up to four partners.”

Mark gripped my buttocks and pulled me close, into an open-mouth kiss that I reciprocated. I put my hands on his shoulders and squeezed. Then he broke free, smiling as he called over my shoulder. “I take it all of the robot’s orifices aren’t just for show?”

Kevin pulled me away from Mark, into a deep kiss. Then he nudged me backwards. “Jessica, lie back on the bed and spread your legs.”

I gave them each a naughty smirk and complied, watching as Kevin produced my favorite vibrator and knelt in front of me. “The vaginal unit extends 12 inches deep,” he said, lubricating the toy. He slid the vibrator into me and I shuddered, eyes closed, but staying as stoic as my body would allow.

“Nothing gets caught in there like the Xb6, does it?” Mark knelt beside me and started massaging my breasts with his hands.

Kevin continued pleasuring me with the vibrator, and my hips reached a steady rhythm. He assured Mark that his purchase would come with a full guarantee and warrantee. “Now let’s really tests its limits. You’ll see how long the battery can last.”

We tried half the positions in my catalogue-sized sex guide. My men did a fantastic job, talking about me to each other the entire duration while I devoured their attention and returned it with quiet submission, pleasing them and pleasing them and pleasing them with my hips, my sex, my anus, my mouth…

Finally, Mark said he was satisfied and would go write a check while Kevin printed off my contract. He pressed my power button to deactivate me, and I let my body fall slack, slinking into a vulnerable pose on the bed. Kevin moved my arms by my side and plugged me into a charging dock with a long USB cable. Just like I wanted, they dressed and bartered over price, accessories, upgrades, and warranty while I lay half-awake, hiding my smile.

Lying nude between them, it occurred to me why I needed to play robot. There was certainly something about being a prized possession, something men not only wanted but would pay huge sums of money for. I loved the attention and submission to what, in a lot of ways, was an unavoidable condition of being female — desired, fragmented, commodified, pacified. Listening to Kevin and Mark talk about my body with such candor excited me, no hiding or faking respect for anything but my form. Good for me, maybe, if I could script some of that and derive some pleasure from a fantasy in which I’m made and sold and enjoyed.

Our love life made strides over the following months. We kept innovating, like one time he wrapped me in plastic and stowed me in a box in the middle of the living room for an hour or so running errands. I loved waiting in the darkness of the house, a luxury item waiting to be opened. And, I’ll be honest, I grabbed a short nap.

My chest shook with each heartbeat when I heard the door click, followed by his footsteps. The lids of the box came up, and I saw his smiling face above me. “Hey, all right,” he said, working the plastic down around my neck.

Kevin scooped me out of the foam peanuts and held my torso upright, supporting me by the back and neck as I stared forward, trying to barely breathe. “It’s finally here,” he said and tore the plastic off my skin. His hands gently touched my breasts through the wrapping, my eyes closing halfway at the feel of them on the new bra I’d bought just for tonight — a green/gold embroidered masterpiece with matching panties.

My favorite moments happened before sex, sitting in his lap as he applied my lipstick and eyeliner, or lying face down on the floor while he read my instruction manual, feeling him dress and undress me as if I were a life-size Barbie, or letting him carry my lifeless compilation of metal and silicone between rooms. Our role-playing games grew ornate, involving plots in which I was a spy designed by an enemy corporation that Kevin had to capture and reprogram, or a prototype that he planned to steal and sell on the black market. Sometimes he knew I was a robot, and other times he found out when I started to give strange answers to his questions about myself.

My acting skills almost consumed me. I practiced even when Kevin wasn’t home, watching and imitating what I saw in movies and shows. My proudest accomplishment was the glitch walk, me bumping into walls and corners like a confused WoW Wee MiP. I bumped once then swiveled my hips, feet pivoting, then walked at a slight vector to my original path until I bumped into something new, and so on until Kevin showed mercy and turned me off.

I could also lay face down on the floor and walk straight-jointed, like a windup doll that had fallen over.

Kevin enjoyed seeing every new little trick I could do. “I’ll never get tired of seeing your ass up in the air like that,” he said one day, standing over me as I showed him a powered-down position I’d been working on for days, a blend of downward facing dog meets gunshot victim.

If nothing else, I was becoming an incredible fembot, and Kevin appreciated my efforts, unlike any guy I’d dated before.

I never saw the real story until it was too late: that I had little to offer our relationship other than tricks and gimmicks.

I was just a sexy pet to him.

If we didn’t talk about work or sci-fi or robots, what else did I have to say?

Kevin occasionally asked a question about my family, something as simple as “When’s your dad’s birthday” or “Are you going to see your brother sometime soon?”

Usually, a vague answer satisfied him. Every so often, he pressed me, scooping my legs into his lap for a foot and calf massage. “Family is important,” he told me. “We should plan a trip sometime. My dad likes yours. They could go fishing or something.”

I only folded my arms and pretended to fall asleep. “No,” I said. “I don’t need to see my family except for holidays. We prefer it that way.”

He tickled my feet, and I tried to kick away, but his grip was too strong. “I love your fembot routines,” he said, “but don’t turn into an actual robot on me. Okay?”

“Affirmative,” I joked, in a flat voice.

“I’m serious,” he said. “Call your parents tomorrow.”

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever.”

Call them, I did not. The day was spent covering an arson case, a visit to the crime logs, and a visit with some patrol officers who had known me from my mom’s heyday. They treated me like a niece, having consoled me through the worst incidents, like when she poured gasoline all over the front porch and dropped a live match on it. S’mores, anyone?

Some of the older men on the force remembered staying with me that night, trying to make me feel safe, while the others escorted my mom to a patrol car in cuffs. I brought these officers donuts as a joke every week, showed them my latest articles. They laughed at my witty remarks and told me how much they wished they had a daughter like me, and they wanted to make sure Kevin was treating me well.

See? No time for chats with dear old dad.

Kevin started spending time with a layout girl at his newspaper named Rachel, who wasn’t very good at her job. From what I understood, she spent most of her time flirting with Kevin and the rest pretending to use page-editing tools. Kevin himself redid most of her work before the paper went to press. She came from money — rich parents, even richer grandparents.

Extreme wealth gave Rachel the tools to entice him onto her yacht for parties and “R&R” while I was attending funerals for victims of drive-by shootings and gathering stats on gang violence, interviewing tenants in high-crime areas, riding along with police as they told me about their girlfriends and drug busts.

“Your job is such a downer,” Rachel told me once at one of Kevin’s staff parties. “Why don’t you quit? Kevin says it makes you so tense at home.”

Later, I pulled Kevin into a corner and played brilliantly into the little bitch’s trap. “So you tell everyone at work that I’m a little tense at home?” I’ve always been so great at communication, I don’t know why he responded with a stern silence that lasted until we went to sleep that night, backs turned.

Not much happened with me and Kevin except on roleplaying nights. Dates became a thing of the past, since we were so busy with work. We watched TV together, or worked on stories in the same room and sometimes shared ideas. He texted Rachel more and more, finding excuses to involve her in different research projects to boost circulation. They started having coffee after work once a week, twice.

Then Kevin texted me a bright idea:

Can we talk? Rachel’s curious about our roleplay. Wants to watch.

At first I felt hurt, but then the little exhibitionist in me decided, why not?

Rachel arrived in plain slacks and a black sweater, her hair in a bun. The more I looked at her, the more I realized her attractiveness. We ate shell fish and drank wine, explaining gynoids to this former sorority queen. She caught up faster than I expected her to, picking up a remote and pointing it at me. “What’s this button do?” she said, then “What about this one?”

I glanced at Kevin, who nodded. I continued to move my lips as if I were talking, and Rachel laughed. “Oh, I muted her!” She clicked another button and I froze mid-gesture. Rachel gasped. “Oh, you’re really good! I thought you guys were just weird, but this is fun.”

Kevin tapped a semi-circle of buttons on the remote. “Those control her movements.”

Rachel controlled me for several minutes, moving my arms and making me limbo at the waist. The she smiled at Kevin and started directing me to the bedroom. “Does she have a USB port? How do you make the Jessica bot take off her shirt?” I was wearing a snug green cardigan. As I jerked my way toward the bed, I heard Kevin say, “That button.” I stopped and peeled if off, standing with my hips out.

Rachel and Kevin eased me onto a chair by a desktop computer. They inserted a USB cable into my ear and then pretended to upload some “entertainment programs.” I leaned back, fluttering my eyes and parting my lips slightly, at which point Kevin leaned down and kissed me. His hand then grasped the cable and slid it out. They guided me by the hand toward the bed. Rachel got on her knees behind me, kissing my shoulders as she massaged my breasts. “Jessica, what programs are on your menu?”

“I have several…pleasure applications in operation now. What position would you like?”

Rachel had brought her own strap-on in the bottom of her bag (clever girl). They held me down, tightening the straps around my hips as she climbed on top of me and started to rock gently. After we’d warmed up, Rachel took the strap-on and moved me on top, my other hand pleasuring Kevin as he watched me ride his mistress.

I was having a hard time staying aroused, so decided to throw in a malfunction — letting my head fall backward and angling my torso to one side, like a lopsided mannequin. “So wonderful,” I said on repeat mode. “Soooo wonderful….wonderful…”

Rachel sighed, unhappy but indulging my little problem. She sat up, grabbed my shoulders, and shook my limp body. I stared upward to the ceiling as they discussed their options. “Did we break her already?” She let me drop to the mattress, my back arched, arms akimbo, legs tangled with hers. “What a cheap piece of crap.”

I smiled inward as she slapped at my chest and head, the same way she might vent at a misbehaving printer. Major points to the man thief.

Having Rachel over that night backfired. I sat on the floor like a broken doll, downloading updates through my USB cable as I watched Rachel and Kevin fuck each other twice. On the one hand, I loved playing the discarded toy, used and left while the two humans had their real sex. But part of me wondered if this had been their plan the whole time. Use Jessica’s weird fetish as an excuse for an affair and, hey, she would even sign off on it.

And that’s what they were having — pure sex, because they had passion for each other. I lay there in my broken state as they consummated, and considered whether I had a heart at all. Did I really love Kevin, or were we only fulfilling each other’s fetishes until he found his real soul-mate? What if he couldn’t or wouldn’t role-play with me anymore? I looked at Rachel tossing and moaning under my man and knew our sex would never look or feel like that.

My lovers went out for a drink, but I stayed in and drank espresso, watching sci-fi reruns on DVD and making plans for more custom prosthetics and costumes. If I couldn’t have real love, I would have the best sex a little android girl could.

A month later, Kevin got irritated when I packed my things and told him I was moving out. We argued in the foyer. “So just like that,” he said. “No warning, no counseling?”

I dropped my bag and stood with my hands on my hips. “You’re fucking another girl, Kevin.”

He waved his hand. “You practically gave us your blessing.”

I rubbed my brow. “Oh, that’s right. We had a threesome, and so that means you can have sex with her by yourself now whenever you want.”

He made this gesture I couldn’t understand, as if he were holding a globe. “You’ve always been welcome to join us.”

I folded my arms. “I’m just tired of it, Kevin. I want something new.”

“You’re never going to be happy,” he said, suddenly calm as he leaned against a door frame. “You don’t have any emotions. That’s why it’s so easy for you to play a robot. Wind you up. Boot you up. But that’s it.” He walked right up to me and started speaking in a halting tone, waving a hand in front of my face. “Are you on right now, Jessica? It’s hard to tell.”

“Shut up,” I said. My eyes teared and I looked away, hugging myself. He was right. There was no defense against this attack. He was winning.

“You act like a robot even when you’re not role-playing. That’s all you are, Jessica. A goddamn robot who happens to be good at conversation.”

And with those words poor little Jessica officially lost her best boyfriend to date, and she started bawling before she even made it to the car. She drove, but did she know where she was going? No, just somewhere she could be alone.

I stayed in a hotel that night, flipping through my online collection of newspaper articles I’d written — the murders, suicides, domestic violence month, unsolved murders.

I came across one story that had absorbed weeks of my time, a Jane Doe case from the early 1980s. She was a real beauty, about my age, and in fact could’ve passed for my sister. Someone had shot her twice and left her body on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. The local police had kept her in a glass coffin for months hoping someone — friend, lover, father — would turn up. She was buried nameless. So easily me. I could very well die and no one would care too much. Dumb little Jessica closed out her programs and tried to sleep.

Chapter 5: Confessions of a Sexbot was originally published in Confessions of An Artificial Bitch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chapter 4: Cyber-Cinderella Complex

All chores fell on me when my mom got locked up. I cooked, cleaned, did everyone’s laundry. On the weekends, I bought groceries and paid out of my bank account, caught up on my homework, and read science fiction novels because they helped me think about anything else but my reality. Oh, and I ironed. I swept and mopped. My brother’s homework also fell under my purview, since my mom’s mind was almost worthless even when she was home. She did manage to find a job doing local weather. She was the weekend weather woman now, a major step down. By now the forecast had become second nature to her, so she showed up and played celebrity for a little while. Otherwise, she only cared about her fitness routine and clothes. Where was my dad? Usually out of town. He missed the best Mexican standoffs between me, my mom, and Harrison.

My mom now plotted revenge against me for all the times she’d been arrested, interviewed by Social Services, forced to see a counselor or psychiatrist of some kind. She did her best to sabotage every meal I cooked. She blew cigarette smoke in my face. She deleted files off my computer and hid my textbooks. She glued razorblades to door handles. One time she lit my favorite dress on fire and soaked my favorite blue shirt in bleach.

The most elaborate prank? My mom got Harrison stoned, trashed the house, and then called the police on me. Two officers showed up, questioned me, asked me if I had a boyfriend to try and break the tension. Boy, I was cute! I declared I had no idea who had broken all of our glassware and china, or who’d littered the floor with pillows and broken a lamp. My mom and brother corroborated each other’s story that I was having spells of anger, and I was handcuffed and spent two hours at the sheriff’s office while they tried to contact my dad, who explained to them the real circumstances.

That night, I used my dad’s credit card to sleep at a hotel, too hurt to face the other half of my family.

Harrison later apologized. “Mom just said it would be a great joke, you know, to lighten things up.”

He tried to hug me. I didn’t hug him back, but I didn’t push him away.

Even my mom sheepishly apologized when the police explained they could charge her with about five counts of child abuse and false witness. They let her off the hook, though, because she was such a great weather woman.

My mom sat me down and tried to play with my hair. “I just wanted you to know how it feels when you and your father call the police on me,” she said.

“Fine,” I said. “I get it now. Complete sympathy.”

Of course, the harassment continued. Stoned Harrison thought the smaller pranks were hilarious, like stuffing my bras down the garbage disposal, or emptying my shampoo in the sink. Sometimes he gave my mom a high-five when her plans worked, and I abandoned them to drive, either to the library or the state park for a long-distance run, returning only after I was sure they were asleep. They wanted me gone. So I was gone. I stayed with friends whenever I could, and when I couldn’t I slept with my door locked and a chair stuffed under the knob.

Report card time was special. My dad would toss my 4.0 GPA on a pile of bills and lecture me on disciplining my brother, scanning Harrison’s collection of Cs and Ds with bifocals. “You need to spend more time going over his essays. He’s got a C- in English. Come on, Jessica, that’s your strongest subject. He should be doing better than that.”

Around this time, people started pointing out my narrow range of facial expressions. In fact, you might say I didn’t even have expressions anymore, just reactions. My eyes widened and my mouth opened to show surprise, but that was about it. Male teachers and coaches singled me out in the hallways. “Hey, you need to smile more! Show me that smile!”

Years later, I finally understand what my teachers meant. They thought I was hiding a smile. I wish I could’ve explained that there was simply nothing in me that could’ve produced a smile. I could only smile the way a robot could, in a stilted, strained bend of lips that proved to everyone around me that I wasn’t human. So why bother?

By my junior year, I was already half finished deleting my emotions. Happiness and sadness were the first ones to go. What remained was a metal cavity where all those feelings had once lived.

All this meant no more friends for poor Jessica. The people I knew had birthday parties at each other’s houses, saw plays and movies, went to amusement parks. Sometimes I got invitations, and I simply failed to imagine myself on a roller coaster doing anything other than sitting with my arms folded the entire ride, waiting for it to end so that I could go make a to-do list. If you open my senior year book, you’ll see a picture of me at prom in a simple but lovely dress staring at three guys who asked her to dance at the same time. Meanwhile, she’s trying to figure out why people even dance in the first place.

I mean, I did dance…mainly because at prom there was nothing else to do except eat vegetables and ranch dressing. So I danced, in the sense that a guy would wind me up and I would go through all the moves, but that’s all they were. Moves, patterns, sequences. The two years I went to prom, I left after an hour. That was my strategy, put in my face time so nobody thought I was fucked-up.

Listen to me, I completely forgot to tell you I played the violin in high school and somehow squeezed in practice time, usually late at night in the basement so I didn’t wake anyone. Playing Beethoven and Vialdi was therapeutic. At the start of sophomore year, I tried to surprise my dad at the door. “Hey, Dad? Guess what? I auditioned for the statewide master class and got second chair!”

“What’s a master class?” he said and walked off as I began to explain.

Then he stopped and turned to add, “And what’s second chair, like second place or something?”

Not that it mattered whether I got first or second chair, because I wound up not going to the rehearsals because they were too far away, and my dad couldn’t cancel an upcoming business trip, which meant another weekend making sure my mom and brother didn’t accidentally cook themselves or set fire to any furniture.

You’d think that ambitious little Jessica would’ve learned to stop trying to impress her dad. Given his general disposition to me my whole life, I’m not sure what I expected when I told him about winning second place at a county-wide cross country race, winning a little lapel for my class rank (9 out of 350), holding a 4.1 GPA, or anything else. These news flashes always met with a face twisted in irritation, perfunctory comments that judged me for taking pleasure in almost winning. When I lost first place at a state-wide track meet by two seconds, my dad told me, “You’re just not designed for running, Jessica. Maybe you’ll do better at something else.”

Of course! The reason I didn’t win was my faulty design. My aluminum frame, with those solid steel joints, was just too heavy for my servo motors to move me as fast as a real girl my size. I should’ve known. My dad would get rid of me in a couple of years when Jessica 2.1 was released. That one would probably win stuff.

The deficiencies of my design extended to my CPU. My dad scoffed at my 1400 SAT because the math score was too low. So I bought a study guide with my own measly funds from my summer waitress job and took it again. Still, even my 1500 wasn’t good enough because it was a composite score. Since I couldn’t break 1500 on a single try, he only rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t be bragging so hard. Didn’t one of your friends get a 1600? Maybe I should send her a congratulations card.”

What else could my dad possibly criticize about the Jessica Wilder Beta Test? My fashion sense, duh! From “that skirt’s a little long” to “that dress is a little loose on you” to the complete opposite, to comments about wearing too much grey, or too much black, or too much white, or too much makeup, or not enough makeup, I doubt a single inch of fabric in my closet ever met with his approval. More than once, he handed me a hundred dollar bill and told me to go buy some new clothes, and then he would make a face at what I bought and ask for the money back.

Soon-to-be obsolete little Jessica didn’t catch on for a while that her dad enjoyed undermining her confidence. He enjoyed it because I was now a stand-in for my mom. People at school adored me. They gave my dad compliments to pass on to me. “She looks just like her mother,” people told him. Except I had black hair, not dark auburn. And green eyes, not blue. But that didn’t matter to anyone. I might as well have started doing the local weather forecast.

Any normal father would’ve been so proud of me, at least that’s what I’ve been told. All mine could see was a blooming replicant of his wife, whom he was growing to hate. Of course, he had to stop my progress anyway he could. The more I seemed to be turning into my mom, the harder his insults.

Sadly, the word for this could be misogynist. My mom had hurt my dad in every possible way. So he was going to punish all women, especially the bright attractive ones, starting with me.

Jessica failed to see this at the time, so she continued wasting her energy trying to please him. Sometime my senior year, a fat hunk of an envelope arrived from Johns Hopkins University containing what I suspected, after perusal, was a personal letter from the chair of the history department, a packet about the girls’ cross country team, and another one about their music program. Nobody in my family or school seemed interested in counseling the college application process of an emotionless fabrication of a girl. I assumed everyone else I knew was just going to websites and doing their best to follow instructions, so I never expected much help.

I got mailers from other elite schools and just couldn’t comprehend why they all seemed especially addressed to me. Who had time to do that? It had to be a scam, or I was just deluded. Johns Hopkins or Cornell or Emory seemed like top schools by all the markers, so I was surprised when my dad glanced at these invitations and offers of scholarships and tossed the envelopes and folders on top of a growing stack of junk mail. “What’s wrong with a state school?” he asked. “They’ll take you for free.”

“But you see Johns Hopkins is — “

“Asking for all of my money, I know.” He stood and adjusted his belt, lighting a cigarette. He reminded me that we were about $75,000 down after all of my mom’s top-notch use of her secret credit card and P.O. Box, and whatever she’d done with his savings bonds. You see, schizophrenics do lots of bad things, such as spend all of your money behind your back.

My dad was hell bent on me paying 100 percent of my tuition. Not unreasonable, but he had to be a jerk about it to boot, because I was pretty.

An aspiring daddy’s girl can only take so much before she gives up and starts to seek approval and affection somewhere else. The Internet became my solution, and my new sexual frontier, with leagues of men standing by to compliment me! Thanks to my mom’s crumbling mental health and my brother’s devotion to solitary pursuits in his bedroom, I sailed around parental supervision and became well versed in AOL chatroom sex with some of my old crushes, then decided to up my game with strangers.

With no judging presence to stop me, I developed a female persona named Fiona who ran track and played the violin (like me but super slutty). She’d done modeling but was more interested in art and music; she planned to attend an elite private university and wanted to run a nonprofit after graduating college. In her spare time, she loved to entertain strangers.

Screw privacy, I thought after a while, and posted real pictures of myself online as my avatar, luring in troubled men of all legal ages. Some nights, I chatted with men for hours, just to see how long I could lead them on. Simply existing online is enough for a cutie to lasso the male gaze. Soon, attention wasn’t enough. I started trolling strangers online. I was the troll princess. Some of my chat partners could’ve used a lesson in manners, like HellHound69. People like him quickly taught me the joy of setting traps for online predators, and conversations like the one below became the perfect distraction from all my issues:

HellHoundWellHunginton69: Hey, babie. What u doing right now?

FionaGirly00: Hi! I’m just finishing up some studying and chatting with some friends. Do I know you??

HellHoundWellHunginton69: No but you bout to know me. Describe yourself.

FionaGirly00: Lol, okay? I have auburn hair on the dark side (in a loose ponytail right now). I’m taller with green eyes and fairish skin, ooo I guess 5’9” and 110 lbs but an athletic thin, not wimpy like you’d think.

HellHound: Wow u petite. ASL?

Fiona: Hmmm?

HellHound: How old are you.

Fiona: Oh, I just turned 18 two weeks ago!  So… where are you from, Hellhound? Do you go to Woodview High? If you do, I’m not supposed to talk to you. You’re our rivals. Lol!

HellHound: Yeah Woodview. Got a picture hon?

Fiona: Sure do, Hellhound! [Sends picture.]

HellHound: Godam that’s really you?

Fiona: No it’s Shania Twain 

HellHound: Hah cute and a mouth on you too. How you feelin tonight honey?

Fiona: I’m feeling just great. My bff Jenny just got accepted into UVA! I have a little bit of a headache though . I’m trying to get rid of it with coffee.

HellHound: You no what helps a headache? Masterbate. True science your headache will be gone in five min.

Fiona: Hmmm….isn’t masturbate spelled with a u??? Lol!

Hellhound: Just try it. I had a headache earlier and now it’s gone. Tell me what u wearing first.

Fiona: I’m wearing my first ever pair of lace undies, and I have a little pair of pink shorts that I wear after everyone here goes to sleep. I know it’s stupid but I still like to wear this ratty tank top I’ve had forever, baby blue, and it has a logo on it that’s half faded now. Ok so I’m going to take your advice…brb…[Leaves for five minutes.]

Hellhound: Sounds hoooottt. Now take off that tank top and tell me if your nipples are cold.

Hellhound: Hey, wear you go girl?

Hellhound: Hello?

Hellhound: WFT bitch? You pass out or something????!!

Fiona: Hey, I’m back! Sorry I laid down on my bed and masturbated like you said. I’m feeling a little better. That was really, super good advice!!

Hellhound: HAH. No try again. You still got a headache. Masterbate again. Stay in your chair this time.

Fiona: Um, okay?? My headache’s gone, though.

Hellhound: U have a webcam or something? I want to see you doing it.

Fiona: Ummm, you can just take my word for it. I’m not going to lie about masturbating…Lol! Ohhhh hang on….ooohhhhhh I think I get what you meant…sorry I feel really dumb now. 

Hellhound: Don’t feel dumb hon, you a virgin? That’s hot. Bet you never masterbated for a guy b4 now.

Fiona: Um, well I’ve never done anything like that on the internet at least.

Hellhound: Shit u have a bf or something?

Fiona: No, well kind of, it’s complicated…it’s just that I don’t have a webcam, and I don’t know if I would want to do that online…

Hellhound: No need to be shy girl u so hot. Try one hand tween your legs and type with the other.

Fiona: Hrmm that sounds like a lot of trouble. Do girls really do that for you? I mean, could you send me a picture of yourself first? That might help…

Hellhound: Sure babe. Sluts do this 4 me att. [Sends picture.]

Fiona: Lol, that’s not you! That’s Justin Timberlake. (And I LOVE him sooo much.) And what does att mean, btw?

Hellhound: It looks like me though, so you getting wet now?

Fiona: I’m sorry to be so stupid, but I still don’t know what att means :\? That’s like the phone company….

Hellhound: Att = all the time bitch. Now tell me what u wearing again and let’s get with it. Got work soon.

Fiona: Work? It’s like 12 am. Are you seriously in HS? Who are you???

Hellhound: Jeez you ask a million questions bitch get your hands tween your legs and les go. I’m getting hard lookin at this picture of you, thinking bout you in those first lace undies little virgin bitch…

Fiona: Hey, would you stop calling me a bitch? That’s not very nice…and honestly if I was going to do this, that word’s sort of turning me off.

Hellhound: Sorry slut I can call you slut.

Hellhound: Hey slut still there?

Hellhound: Godam slut u wasting my time, got 3 other girls online right now and u the only one not naked right now.

Hellhound: Fuck u slut, too good for me? Why you tease me then start acting like a toddler? I want to fuck you in the mouth.

Fiona: This is Fiona’s father. I just read this conversation, and I swear to god almighty, if I ever find out who you are, I will beat the living shit out of you and weld your cock shut with pig iron.

Hellhound: Oh shit….she wake you up moaning or something?

Fiona: If you ever contact my daughter again, I’ll get my IT department to find your IP address.

Hellhound: Hey sorry man.

Fiona: What the fuck is wrong with you? She’s 17.

Hellhound: Bitch said she was 18!

Fiona: Did Fiona tell you her father is a navy seal who works for SLED? Use that word about my daughter again, and no one will be able to save you from me.

Hellhound: Jesus christ, you’re some crazy mother fucker lunatic. Chill out, ass hole. I’m history. Tell your daughter she sucks dick real good.

[Hellhound has signed off.]

As much fun as I had this way, nothing could stop the onset of reality once the chat window closed. Sometimes I asked myself, was this is my idea of fun? Such reflection never ended well. The same question hit me every night before sleep: What were emotions? I started to regret my decision to delete them all. Because once that was done, there was no retrieving them from the trash bin like I could on Windows. I watched friends hug each other and laugh and do other things I didn’t understand. In fact, I was finding it almost impossible to understand anything about the people I was calling friends.

Case in point: One girl on the cross country team named Julia showed up to practice weepy and red-eyed, surrounded by five or six of our teammates. Curiosity brought me over, and I learned that she and her mom had gotten into a “really bad fight.”

I joined the pride, and our cross country captain whispered to me, “You should give Julia a hug.”

Anxiety seized me. Give her a what? I didn’t even know where to start with that gesture. I thought about it for several seconds, watching the other girls eye me. How was my delivery of said hug going to be evaluated by the group?

I sat beside Julia and made a marionette-like gesture, tapping her shoulder with my palm. “It’s going to be okay,” I said in a dull monotone. Even I didn’t believe what I was telling her.

There was no awwww from the girls coming to save me. In fact, Julia’s mouth turned down as she tried to comprehend what I was doing.

One of the girls said, “Okay, that’s a little creepy.”

Finally, the captain gave me one of those directive looks and said, “If you’re done, Jess, you can go warm up now.”

After practice, I found out the source of conflict between Julia and her mom. Julia wanted a particular style of dress for prom that was out of her budget, and her mom was making her choose between the dress and a limo rental. Upper-middle class families were so strapped in the early 2000s.

I was able to delay my crying until about midnight, when it was certain to go unheard. I had gotten my wish. I now felt nothing except for a checklist of instincts I scribbled down on a sticky-note:

Irritated Defensive Self-conscious

Hungry Thirsty Tired

Alert Vacant Aroused

The more time I spent online, the more I realized the deep sympathy I felt for robots, especially female ones. I wanted to be their friends. I got emotional when seeing them turned off or taken apart or destroyed. And yet, a part of me wanted to see it happen, since it was the only thing that made me feel any emotion at all. I remember seeing the beautiful brunette head of a decapitated fembot, her dull eyes turned toward me, and feeling an intense desire to kiss her. That night, I fantasized in bed about lying in a junk pile of discarded gynoids, feeling a deep and almost depth-less sense of belonging. When sexbots arrive, they’ll accept me as one of their own, even if I’m a messy organic one.

My first year of college, I agreed to live at home, stretching my scholarship money even further. I still took care of my bother — driving him to school, helping him with his homework, at least trying to clean his room. As an added bonus, my dad got to witness my transformation into a sex pistol; he was not impressed.

College helped turn dumb little Jessica into her true self, a little punkette with frosting-tipped hair, who spoke her mind and didn’t try so hard to act like daddy’s little girl anymore. Daddy’s little monster was a much better casting choice for me. Daddy didn’t know how to react when Jessica traded in her prep-wares for acid-washed jeans, spiked jewelry, something torn, something worn, something black and leather. Still, my rebellion had limits. I hid my atheist, mohawked boyfriends the best I could. Once or twice, I brought them by to freak out my dad. They were mainly for show.

October of my freshmen year, he caught me on the way out to a Halloween party, one where I intended to give my virginity to my first huge crush — a guy named Dylan who was majoring in audio engineering and hosted radio shows, not to mention playing in a local band. My big night, I felt like Bizarro-Cinderella off to a ballroom dance in Hell. White skin, black lipstick, smudged eyeshadow blueish and pink. Perfect puffy pigtails. Yummy, yummy.

My dad was supposed to be working, but he came home early. He caught one glimpse of my skirt and fishnets and scoffed. “What the hell is all that?” He eyed me up and down in my costume, gesturing with an open hand.

I have no shame in telling you I was one little hottie Harley. “Um, my Halloween outfit?”

“You look like a slut,” he said, then lit a cigarette, mouthing back at me as he strode upstairs: “I guess it’s every father’s dream to watch his daughter turn into a hooker.”

The words lodged deep in my right ventricle and caused some real internal bleeding, left me staring at myself in the bathroom mirror to affirm his appraisal of me: I willed back tears, because I didn’t want to have to redo all that makeup. I wet a rag and held it to my face, almost went through with a decision to cancel my entire outfit. But I caught myself in time, stood there trembling a while, and dropped the rag in the sink.

There was a new me coming out. This new girl gave zero fucks, except for when it came to Dylan, who greeted her with a hug at the party. We drank beer and flirted, costume-watching. When the music got too loud, I led Dylan to a quieter part of the house, up the stairs to a hidden little bedroom.

I pushed him toward the mattress. “Get on the bed, Mistah J. We’re gonna have some real fun now.”

I wrapped my legs around him and started kissing.

Dylan grew under me, and I gasped with a wide smile. The rest of him was so beautiful, I’d almost forgotten about his penis. I leaned in closer to feel him, kissed him harder and moved his hands to the small of my back, down my legs. My skin was feeling extra smooth that night. “You can touch me anywhere,” I said. “I want you to.”

The more he rose, the harder I went, making all kinds of throaty sounds I never knew I was capable of. “Do you like my body?” I said. “Tell me what you want.” He could barely talk he was so busy trying to keep up with me. I was practically a jackhammer on top of him, and in less than five minutes he burst into me.

Yeah, I’d watched a lot of porn in preparation for this night. I was technically a virgin, but I’d been practicing a lot with pillows.

We lay panting on our backs. I laughed when I saw his chest, dusted white from all the kissing I’d done. “Look at that,” I told myself looking at his limp form. He was worn out already, and I was fine. I bet he could barely walk, and I had done that. Me. I had done that to him with my beauty, and it made me feel more powerful than ever. If I were a vampire, I would’ve emptied him right there of his delicious blood.

The party never fully stopped, just slowed down as people started leaving around 4 am. Dylan and I lounged in bed, taking turns pleasuring each other. We felt like such adults now. He walked me to my car, and we made out before I fell into my driver’s seat, feeling hazy in the predawn.

My dad texted me that morning, as I was stopping for coffee. Terse was his specialty:

You didn’t come home last night. Were you date-raped? I told you not to wear that outfit.

I texted him back while waiting for my coffee:

No not date raped. Not that it’s any of your fucking concern.

He replied:

I am your father & you will not speak to me like that.

The barista smiled at me in the leftovers of my makeup. He handed me my skinny latte and said, “Here you go, Harley.”

I texted my dad back:

OK FINE I had sex with THREE French guys last night in a back alley shooting heroine into croissants and then sticking them up each other’s assholes. And now I’m going to let this barista fuck me for a free latte and a side of cocaine. Btw I’m moving out.

No response to that last one. I won.

I cruised by the house, parking when I saw the empty driveway. I threw my clothes and laptop and posters into some boxes and took them to the car. On my last trip, I walked past my brother’s room; he was in there playing guitar with headphones on. He always did nothing, just played his guitars and role-playing games while I did all the work, and it was all starting to make me feel sick inside.

I pulled his headphones off his ears and tossed them on his crumpled blankets, pointing at all the CDs strewn everywhere, some not even in cases, the guitar picks, the distortion pedals and amplifiers he spent all of my dad’s money on. His comic book collection. His scantily-clad anime chicks on the walls. My brother could jerk off to cartoons all day, but I fuck one guy all night and suddenly I’m a villain.

“You were supposed to cut the grass,” I shouted. “And take out the trash. You act like a parasite, and he never gets angry at you, you little pig fucker!”

I unloaded my anger on him, while cleaning his room. Organizing his CDs, wrapping extensions cords. Figures. I was programmed to clean at the slightest sight of any mess.

Harrison snatched a stack of discs from my hand. “What the fuck are you doing? You have no right to march in here and boss me around.” He squinted. “Jesus, you look like a hooker who just got gangbanged by a bunch of clowns. Clean yourself up before you try to clean my room.”

My hand made contact with his cheek before I really thought my actions through. He shoved me toward the door and then slammed it. I stood there a moment, dazed, listening to him sob. I called through the door that I was leaving, no more helping him with his homework, washing his clothes, nagging him about his room. What good was sorry these days? Wiping my eyes with alternating hands, I held back all those nuisance emotions and took my last box to the car. Turns out, I had plenty of friends to help me locate a temporary place. One of them pointed me toward a hipster who gladly took $150 in cash for a month’s use of his spare room.

Chapter 4: Cyber-Cinderella Complex was originally published in Confessions of An Artificial Bitch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chapter 3: Evil Robots Wearing Human Skin

M y mom’s schizophrenia began small with suicide attempts, but ended big when she formed this delusion that I was a robot and tried to kill me. I’ll confess that I deserved some of the abuse that came my way, because my whole life I’ve been an evil robot sheathed in human skin. Once I started to become a threat to her beauty, my mom blamed me for everything bad in her life. All that hate finally warped into one great delusion that I was sent by Skynet. The conflict resembled your average mother vs. daughter fairy tale, with sci-fi overtones. So, let’s start with one clear memory of my mom trying to fry me up an omelet for breakfast to “put some weight on those hips.” In other words, fatten me up so guys would stop staring. By now, I’m sure you can imagine what a slimy, putrid excuse for an omelet my mom was capable of drenching in catsup and tobacco sauce.

In response to my refusal to put this thing anywhere near my mouth, she screamed and hurled raw eggs at me.

“Look at what you’ve made me do,” she said, calming herself as she lit a cigarette on a stove eye. The kitchen bled yellow.

I sponged the yoke off the walls. “I’ll clean it up,” I said.

“I appreciate that,” she said, sauntering off for a bath.

These were my mom’s up tempo moments. You might think life was rough, but you haven’t heard about my brother Harrison yet. His birth changed my mom. I didn’t care much about him at first.

That’s right, I’m not an only child. I act like it most of the time, but truth is I have a brother. I’m saying it again here in case you’d started skimming. His name is Harrison. Got it?

My mom made me do way more babysitting than I cared for. I had to give Harrison his bottle, change his diaper half the time, read to him. All the while, she focused on burning off her baby padding so she could fit back into her dresses. There was no breast feeding. We used formula.

Surprise, surprise when Harrison started calling me mama, and following me around in his diaper. At first, we all laughed about him imprinting on me like an orphaned duckling. After a few days, his attachment felt more like an anchor tied to my ankles. He cried when I left for school, when I tried to do my homework, and when I wanted to hang with my friends.

My parents didn’t care much about Harrison’s impact on the social life of a preteen. Over the years, I saved them a small fortune in babysitter fees.

My mom left the potty-training to me and my dad. Once Harrison became interesting, though, she tried to reassert herself as the matriarch. Harrison liked her, and she got to play the role of cool older sister. I was the mom, the one who enforced discipline and cooked the meals. They made fun of me together. Looking back, it’s hard to believe I learned to deliver formula and change diapers at the age of seven, and a short time later helped potty-train a kid. Childhood is a recent invention. A few centuries ago, nobody would’ve cared.

Those were good times for them, but then Harrison started school and life went to shit. I could do lots of things, but the PTA wouldn’t let me attend meetings in my mom’s place. If I took after my dad’s stoic responsibility, then my brother took after my mom’s wild recklessness. Teachers phoned home almost every day, and I could never fool them into believing I was Mrs. Wilder. Where was my dad? Working. The only question I have is why DSS didn’t intervene sooner. Our family was a fucking TLC mini-series waiting to happen.

My brother did so poorly in school that news of his colossal failures was bound to reach my dad. Thus began the shouting matches. I’ll say this, Harrison had an impressive backbone. There was no fucking way you were going to make him study for his spelling tests, or learn long division. He had the stubbornness of a future American president.

Believe it or not, my mom sided with Harrison in every single showdown. She threw dishes on the floor and screamed at my dad to stop abusing him. It was a shame. Although I spent most afternoons locked in my room, I could press my ear to the wall or the floor and hear my dad gear up to kick my brother’s ass. But he never did, because my mom always grabbed him up in her arms and carried him off into another room — both of them sobbing. My brother was the first true millennial I ever met. I know, I know. I’m technically a millennial. Forgive me. The sights and sounds of these conflicts always amazed me. My dad never had to threaten me or shout. I’d never wanted anything more than his approval, and he knew it. With me, all my dad had to do was sigh or say something hurtful, and I would go out and win a galaxy to prove myself to him. My brother gave less than a fuck; he had my mom’s unconditional love. No matter what he did, she adored him.

Look, I know I said I didn’t believe in unconditional love a while back. I meant for me. Maybe other people have found it. Besides, I’ve come to accept conditional love, even prefer it. Unconditional love is just love that hasn’t fully matured yet.

This downward spiral drove my mom to the hospital, like when she woke me one night by dribbling blood on my face. Her behavior had unsettled us for days by then. She’d already confused past and present, accused my dad of having affairs, and started calling me Megan, who I eventually learned was an old college friend I apparently reminded her of. The news station called my dad twice to ask if “everything was okay.” That’s code for “what the fuck is going on with this woman?”

If you’ve never seen a schizophrenic super model try to deliver a morning weather forecast, I highly recommend it. My mom had predicted 80 mph winds coming down from the mountains and whisking away people’s children. She’d also advised viewers to tie down their pets, if they insisted on keeping them outside. Her forecast ended with a striptease. The good news? The anchors did a brilliant job of convincing everyone my mom’s performance was all a practical joke.

The lesson here: If you can learn to laugh like a news anchor, you can persuade anyone that things are just fine, no matter what’s on fire.

About the blood dribbling, I’d just turned 13 and had enjoyed a lovely cupcake by myself in the school cafeteria that afternoon. Otherwise, not much fuss. Birthdays have always seemed like private, sullen affairs, mainly because they always brought out the worst in my mom. I’m an Aries, so maybe the changing of the seasons messed with her brain chemistry and turned her mind inside out right around that time of year. My birthday present at 13 was a quiet evening, no loud voices from downstairs. I’d finished studying and then listened to Led Zeppelin, falling asleep early with a lamp on, as if I was practicing to be a grandma.

That night, I flinched awake and saw her ghostly figure as it undulated above me, then floated toward the hallway. I followed her into the bathroom, where she’d turned the tiles and mirror into one large, crimson Pollock. My mom’s hair looked like Bjork’s from the music video for “Violently Happy,” an apt title as she stood there with her delirious grin.

“Do you like it?” she asked with leery pride. Her eyes were dark from sleeplessness and smudged mascara.

I can’t remember what happened between that moment and the hospital, but I’m sure it involved me stepping away in horror and shaking my dad wake before calling 9–1–1.

Someone else was going to have to do the morning weather report.

Harrison served an easy target for my scorn as we sat in the brightly-lit waiting room of the emergency center. It seemed like we never had real conversations, just arguments about my mom. My dad came and went, handing off money for the vending machines. The worst part was that nothing good was on the TV, but I did find some decent magazines. Harrison wouldn’t stop criticizing the lack of cinnamon-flavored pop tarts. “You’d think they’d have more options,” he said.

“If you don’t shut up,” I said, glaring at him over the top of the latest issue of Vogue, “I’m going to burn all your clothes when we get home.”

Harrison had caused my mom’s breakdown all by himself, in my opinion, with his failing grades and disturbing illustrations of giant she-demons biting the heads off children. That year alone had seen half a dozen parent conferences about his behavior. It never occurred to me that my mom was ruining my brother, not the reverse. As a teenager, I knew almost nothing about mental illness except by way of thrillers. I couldn’t have told you the difference between schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder, and none of us understood the recipe of genes and bad parenting that had gone into my mom.

Not one of the experts my mom tried to bite would put their money on a diagnosis. Down the line, I would sneak a peek at her medical records that I turned over to my school in exchange for a retroactive withdrawal — a packet of documents that would confuse Sherlock.

Near morning, my dad returned to the waiting room with great news, everyone! My mom had failed to slit her wrists properly, and the blood loss was much less than we’d hoped. Part of me continues to wish she’d died that night. Hard lessons were in store. We drove home shortly before dawn. While my mom lay recovering in a cot at the hospital, my dad and I surveyed the bathroom. “Well,” he said. “This mess is going to set us back a few grand.”

No kidding, I thought. We’d just had those tiles put in, and they were real marble. Do you have any idea what suicide blood does to marble? Ugh.

At school, I kept falling asleep, to the consternation of my teachers. I flinched awake every time, distracting people next to me.

The worst came during English class, when we were performing Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Guess who was cast as Juliet?

Romeo (played by a boy named Blake) was reading that famous balcony scene when I nodded off again. The sun was definitely the light through which yonder window breaks, and it scorched my eyes and turned the print on my ruffled copy of the play into hieroglyphics.

I closed my eyes, and then I imagined blood dabbled all over the pages, with the same sentence repeating itself:

Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it? Do you like it?

I flinched awake again and yelped, “Yeah!”

Everyone was looking at me as an awkward silence started to make me tear up. Our teacher’s stunned face remained frozen. Then she cleared her throat and said, “Jessica, you’re about to say ‘wherefore art thou Romeo…”

My finger skimmed to the right place, or what I thought was the right place, and I read, “What man art thou that thus bescreen’d in night so stumblest on my counsel?”

“No, back up, Jessica.” The teacher stood beside me and guided my finger to the other page.

I read with my hair framing my face, so I didn’t have to watch people’s expressions as I stuttered through my lines for the rest of class. Seriously. Shittiest. Juliet. Ever.

The bell was a welcome relief, and I was lucky that most people my age had no interest in consoling troubled teens. I thought I was home-free until my English teacher pulled me aside and said, “Are you okay?”

I made up three or four bullshit excuses that she saw through immediately. For a few seconds, she pried but then gave me this look like she understood that whatever had happened was not for show and tell. Then she hesitated before spitting out her real concern, “Were you…raped?”

“Oh, no! Nothing that bad.”

The teacher frowned. “Your eyes are bloodshot, Jessica.” She tried to hug me. “It’s your mother, isn’t it? I knew it when she wasn’t on the news this morning. Is she okay?”

“Um, yeah. She…got into a car accident.” I swallowed. “They’re wanting to keep it quiet. Some blood loss, but…um…she’s out of surgery now and in stable condition.”

There was no avoiding a hug at this point. The teacher squeezed me tight. Finally satisfied, she bid me farewell.

Why did I lie? Simple. When your mom’s crazy, people wonder if you’re crazy-in-waiting. I had enough to deal with and preferred to avoid closed-door meetings with our school counselor, who I suspected as a closet pedophile.

Speak of the devil, though. I tried to hide in the girl’s room during lunch, but was so distracted that I walked into the wrong gender. Another, creepier guy from our English class named Michael found me in a stall, dabbing toilet paper at my eyes. What a mess I must’ve seemed. Perfect luck for someone like him.

I looked dazed until my mistake became apparent. I tried to apologize. But Michael just stood there with his fat face and baseball cap and acne, glanced around once, twice, with his hands on his hips. “Well, Juliet. Look at what we got here.” He closed the door to the bathroom stall and slid the lock shut. “I was just thinking about asking you to the homecoming dance next week, but everybody told me I had no chance. You were waiting on Blake to ask you. And now…here you are.”

My whole body was shaking now. I scowled at him. “I’ll be out in a minute, okay? There’s two other stalls.”

Michael chuckled and shook his head, then he leaned forward and touched the tear on my left cheek.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I kicked at him as he approached me, but he just threw my foot down and pressed me against the corner.

He was practically crushing my cheeks with his hand, the other pressed on my hip. Why the hell didn’t I scream, or bite? I’ll always feel dumb for that. He kept asking me if I was going to the dance with him, and finally I just nodded. He made me give him my number as insurance, called it to make sure I wasn’t tricking him, and made some threats I can’t remember.

The good news here is that I just wound up not going to the dance at all. When I called Michael and told him why, something like “I have to take care of my mom after her car accident, and my dad’s out of town,” he apologized and said he felt like a piece of shit. But we know how that goes if you say anything like, “Yeah, fair assessment of yourself there.” I just thanked him and enjoyed an evening alone, because my dad was working, my mom was in the hospital, and Harrison was spending the night with some of his computer gaming pals. “Fuck dances,” I thought to myself while practicing my robotic moves in the mirror and trying on my mom’s clothes. Solitude was way under-rated in my age group.

People always ask how I caught my robot fetish. Yes, caught. As if it were a disease. That’s a lie. They don’t always ask, but they would if I told them about it. I’ve told three of four people my entire life. They don’t understand my attraction to androids, cyborgs, and gynoids (female androids). Hence this book. Cause and effect are tricky, but the question makes me think of my mom and her schizophrenia — especially the time she thought I was an evil robot sent to kill her husband, aka my own father, posing as their daughter.

This adventure happened during one of those family vacations my dad insisted on. We knew my mom’s mind was falling apart. But my dad refused to believe we couldn’t be a normal family. He always ignored me when I tried to warn him about my mom’s next impending malfunction. “She put all of her shoes in the freezer,” I told him, or “She chased me out of the house with a steak knife this morning.” Still, we drove to beaches and mountains and lakes in hopes that somehow some “time away from everything” might restore her sanity. After the steak knife story, my dad patted me on the knee and told me I had to be exaggerating. I think he just wanted to avoid more hospital bills.

The robot delusion wasn’t my mom’s first, and you need some additional context before we go there. She started with less ambitious conspiracies and worked her way up. There’s the time she thought the CIA was spying on us. And the time we were hiding out at the beach in a witness protection program, after she’d witnessed a murder. All that training prepared her for the big one, the coastal vacation when she vanished for an entire afternoon, returned to us hours later by the police, babbling about evil robots wearing human skin.

The police hardly cared. They thought her lunacy was the drunken ramblings of a sunburned woman. I knew better. Of course, I didn’t expect her to follow me around the hotel for the rest of the night, watching every single move I made. No kidding, she stalked me to the steam room, the swimming pool, the gym, the beach. She never said a word, though, ignoring all my attempts at conversation. Who could’ve guessed what was going on in her mind? Certainly not Jessica’s an evil robot that must be destroyed.

I tried to calm her down by making chitchat. We sat on the balcony, watching a thunderstorm roll up with cobalt lightening that spidered through the clouds. My mom knew everything about this kind of weather, and probably could’ve predicted how soon until landfall. I talked about school, boys, television. Had she seen the latest episode of Friends?

My mom remained silent. She stared at me with a hostility I’d never experienced from a living creature, much less a parent. I finally tried to encourage her to speculate with me on Harrison’s beach adventures. We hadn’t seen him since unpacking. Had he met a girl? Was he dealing drugs from a tiki hut? Maybe a shark ate him? Foolish little Jessica thought I was talking too much, so I just turned my head to the breeze and listened for thunder.

I dozed a little while, woken by a few sprinkles of rain. My mom was back inside the room now, having a hushed yet intense conversation with my dad. I trained my ears on them, picking up key phrases.

“You’re not listening to me,” she said. “I’m telling you, Jessica is a robot.”

“Go lie down,” he said. “You’re not feeling like yourself.”

My mom threw her hands out in exasperation. “Don’t you think she’s just a little too perfect? I’ve been watching her for hours. The way she moves, the way she talks. There’s something strange about her. I swear, she’s going to kill us tonight. We have to do something.”

Against my better judgment, I tried joining the conversation. My mom fell silent, arms folded.

I dragged my dad into the hallway and tried to convince him to cut our trip short. He pushed me back inside with platitudes, and soon after that we all tried to sleep. Harrison was still out there on the beach, where I should’ve been. Smart move. Stay out of the way.

Foolish little Jessica thought it was safe to sleep in the adjoining room with an unlocked door. The price of my mistake became clear when I woke with my mom’s hand over my mouth. She skimmed the flat edge of a dinner knife along my cheek, and I shivered, wondering how the hell she’d found a knife like that in this place. Had she packed it? Did she steal it from a restaurant on the strip? That would’ve been smart, if you thought your daughter was an evil robot.

“What did you tell my husband?” she demanded. “Did you tell him I was crazy, that I should be locked up?”

I couldn’t speak. My eyes pleaded with her to let me go, but she pulled me up and walked me into my dad’s room, knife to my back. “Peter,” she called. His snoring stopped. He struggled awake, his hair messed.

My mom declared she had proof that I was a robot. Still sleepy, or just clueless in general, my dad missed the headline here, hello, knife being held to daughter’s throat by schizophrenic mom, and he started debating her evidence. He argued with her that the pamphlets on the coffee table were travel brochures, not my blueprints, and besides, why would I just leave those lying around if I was actually the kind of robot that would present a threat? Only a stupid robot would do that.

My mom smiled. “Fine, then I’ll show you.” She raised my arm, ignoring my dad’s protests, and I started to fight her.

Here, training in martial arts would’ve been helpful. I tried stomping her foot and elbowing her ribs, but my mom’s a tough bitch if nothing else. She wouldn’t let me go.

My dad could’ve done any number of things, like tackle her, or call the police. But let’s not be too hard on him, shall we? It’s not every night that your wife tries to cut off her own daughter’s hand.

I’m not sure what my mom was expecting, but it didn’t include blood. Her face went white when we saw it squirt out of me like a packet of ketchup. My mom wasn’t going to let her squeamishness stop her, though, and she started working the knife through my skin despite my cries for help, which were obviously just a cheap robot trick. The knife piercing my flesh hurt less than the realization that my own mom was actually trying to carve enough of it off to expose a robotic arm, like that scene in Terminator II: Judgment Day. My mom had always disliked the real me, but this took things to a whole new level.

Finally, my dad did wrestle the knife away from her, but only after I’d ruined the carpet with my blood. I swear, my family has the biggest problem bleeding on things. If I’d had the same sense of humor as I do now, I would’ve laughed at her and shouted, “See! I told you I wasn’t a fucking robot!” And I would’ve turned to my dad and shouted, “And I tried to tell you that we should go home! So now you’re going to have to pay, like, a thousand dollars for the hotel staff to clean up all this blood!”

I don’t remember much about what happened after that — flashing lights, paramedics, the emergency room, a heavy amount of gauze and bandages, lies to the doctors about what had happened before we finally told the truth. My dad was relieved that my trauma would only result in a few visits from a social services worker, a weak court order for my mom to take medication — one that nobody ever put much effort into enforcing. And, of course, lies to my teachers about a sea kayaking accident.

Lying to the authorities brought my family together, giving us a sense of common purpose. From that moment forward, I was never just Jessica anymore. I was an evil robot wearing a girl’s skin, and I’d better be careful around schizophrenic conspiracy theorists.

The one advantage to being a girl-bot: no emotions. I figured if I practiced enough, I could just become a real robot through and through, and that way none of the bad things that happened would have any effect on me anymore. Look, I know what you’re thinking. At the beginning of this chapter, I said my child abuse remained psychological. True, my mom did almost cut my hand off, but she wasn’t in her right mind, so this little moment just falls under the category of Fucked-up Family Moments.

My sophomore year, I earned the nickname Little Viper when I kicked a senior in the balls for pinching my ass, and got three days of in-school suspension. (The boy got one day of morning detention.) To pass the time, I wound up reading a book called Adventures of the Artificial Woman from the library (I don’t know how a book like that wound up in a high school, but whatever). The story had a deep impact on me: a beautiful, smart creature of silicone and steel named Phyllis achieves everything that I wanted in life for myself, including the presidency. What happens to her? The man who built Phyllis shuts her down and takes her apart, because she’s decided she wants to fuck another robot instead of him. I was sad, but not shocked. At least I’d found a suitable role model. The heroine stood for everything I desired: intelligence, grace, beauty, utter lack of emotion. After all, look where emotions had gotten the Little Viper so far.

The idea of deleting my feelings became ever more attractive after my final day of suspension. My dad arrived home early for once, only to announce the factory was closing soon, an event that forced us even deeper into the Bible Belt. My dad and I split the responsibilities of preparing the house for the market. Meanwhile, my mom and brother did practically nothing, unless you count getting in my way.

Moving was difficult. If only adults at the time knew that I was filling the mom slot in my family. Maybe I would’ve met with less condescension and mansplaining when I called our real estate agent to confirm appointments, or when I gave tours to potential buyers, or when I had to coordinate the movers because my dad was out of town when they showed up.

I could do all of that, but I still couldn’t drive by myself at the age of 15. That posed problems when one parent was a flight risk. So, my mom was supposed to take my brother and me to our new schools for registration that summer. We were up against the wire, and we hadn’t found a new house yet. Road trip! My mom threatened to sabotage the entire plan if I laid a finger on the steering wheel, and my brother didn’t even want to go. Things were already off to a great start.

Harrison didn’t give a fuck about registration. He didn’t care about school. Or anything else, except video games. Neither did my mom, as it turned out. The news station was thrilled she was moving. They’d already “promoted” her to an assistant executive, primarily for the sake of getting her off the air. The medication had dampened her once feisty performances, turned her weather forecasting into monotone monologues. She still looked great, but she was like a talking mannequin now.

For the past year, my mom had been a glorified receptionist who also did copyediting. Her career prospects were dim. She knew, so she drank. She went for long walks in the woods with a flask. With enough caffeine and possibly cocaine, she could manage to rekindle the occasional fling with a coworker. She stopped checking her private P.O. Box. It filled with receipts from nice hotels.

The minute my dad left for work, we piled into the car and she pulled a bottle of clear fluid from her purse and dropped it in the cup holder.

“What’s Grey Goose?” my brother said, eyeing the label.

“A brand of water.” My mom did her lipstick in the rearview mirror and cranked the ignition.

My brother held the bottle. “Can I have some?”

“Sure,” she said. “Just a sip. It’s expensive.”

After a confident swig, he frowned and spat. “That burns like hell.”

“You’ll get used to it.” My mom laughed like Maleficent, and off we went!

“Just so you know,” she said as we blew through a stop sign. “We are not going to school today.” When I pressed for our final location, she cheered, “New Orleans!” My brother joined her in the cheer, and I clutched my stomach to quell the dread.

First we got lost, then we started to run out of gas. Finding a service station just in time, my mom swerved into the lot and almost rammed the pump.

I got out and unscrewed the cap. When I reached for the pump, I leaned toward the driver’s side and saw my mom had passed out. Her lovely red hair curtained the steering wheel. Her vodka bottle was half empty, now in my brother’s hands.

He raised the bottle to me. “Guess you’re driving us the rest of the way,” he laughed.

“She doesn’t have any cash,” I pointed out, rummaging her purse. I pulled out an expired credit card, half-bent. “We don’t have any money. How are we going to pay for gas?” I shook my mom, unresponsive.

Harrison chuckled. “Just pump it and drive off,” he said. “We’ll be there before they know what happened.”

After I explained my plan to drive us home instead of New Orleans, Harrison yelled at me and stormed off to the gas station bathroom. He refused to get back in the car. We fought for almost ten minutes, then bartered. His protest would end if I bought him two beers for the trip home.

Two men already in line smiled at each other when I walked into the pantry. I did my best to ignore them, pulling at my denim shorts and tank top, which both suddenly felt too tight. I waited, listening to commentary like, “Wonder if she’s from around here,” and “Is she wearing a bathing suit under that?”

Finally, one of them addressed me directly. “Hey, how old are you?” He stood with his arms crossed.

I looked down. “I’m fifteen,” I said softly, hoping that number would create a force field around me.

They started snickering. One of them turned around, and the other punched him on the shoulder. “Damn, dog. My money was on at least 17.”

They started whispering, and one of them pointed behind me and said, “Hey, is that your mom? She is hot!”

I spun around and stood on my tiptoes, wondering what the hell she was up to now. But she was fine, still passed out, but lying back now with her shirt unbuttoned. The two guys burst out laughing. “Those sweet apples don’t fall far from the tree, do they?”

I looked at them, and the fatter one said, “Sorry about that, we were just looking at the…back of your shirt.”

Oh, I get it now. Back of my shirt meant something else entirely. My…apple-shaped ass, which didn’t fall far from the apple-shaped breasts of my mom, or something? Such sophisticated wordplay goes on in backcountry gas stations. I can’t even keep up.

On their way out, one of them said, “Well, that sure as hell made my day. It’s like an angel came to visit us.”

The cashier told me I was just the sweetest thing as I tried to explain my situation, trying not to tear up too hard. He wiped my wet cheek and said nice things to me, glancing around for hidden customers. “Your mama’s passed out drunk, then?”

He kept chuckling, deferring an answer to my pleas until I followed him into a back room with a wobbly table and two metal chairs, a couple of vending machines. I’d seen enough Lifetime movies to suspect we were heading toward a special little deal, but I didn’t know just how special until he locked the door and started playing with my hair, tickling me. I was such a poor, tired girl. I should let him give me a foot massage. His hands moved further and further until he was rubbing my thighs and asking me if I played sports, because I was so sinewy and tan. Did I play volleyball? Softball? I told him I ran cross-country and he went ahhhhh, of course I did.

The deal finally became clear when he gripped my wrist and started using my hand to massage himself. “Don’t be scared,” he kept saying, as if that ever made things better. I did exactly what he wanted as he moaned and kissed on me, and it was all I could do not to puke or burst out laughing at his ridiculous emoting. Suddenly he was the least intimidating creature on earth. Still, I knew if I showed him what I really thought, I’d be in serious trouble. What the fuck had dumb little Jessica gotten herself into now? Why was I trying to save the day and make everyone happy? So stupid.

There were upsides, though. I’d never received so much encouragement in my entire life, and I was thinking maybe I’d finally found my true calling. He gripped my neck with one hand, my breast with the other, and for a minute I thought he was going into cardiac arrest, which would’ve been great because then I could’ve cleaned out the register and got Harrison every flavor of beer his demanding heart desired. We finished, and the clerk sat holding me tightly while he caught his breath.

My hands were sticky with his grease. He gave me a rag to clean them, then we returned to the register. He opened our pump and let me have three of whatever beers I wanted. Oh, really, Mr. Gas Clerk, my hand job was so amazing you’re going to let me have an entire extra beer?

I padded off toward the pump, trying to ignore him as he made some kind of joke I didn’t want to understand. The guy was starting to really creep me out now, watching me through the window and showing slight signs of obsessive compulsive disorder. My danger detector calculated that he was going to come back for another hand job, and this one was going to be for free, or else.

And what if he worried about me going to the police? He was looking at me less like a person through that window now, more like incriminating evidence. Could I be enjoyed one more time before disposal?

My stomach rumbled with fear, hands like rubber as I tried to yank the pump off the hook. I’ve been scared in my life, but not like this. Just fill the tank and get out of here, I kept thinking. The numbers on the gauge spun and spun, and I thought I would start crying before it even reached half full.

But then two vehicles full of wholesome Hispanic families pulled up and distracted my new lover. Lots of kids, a few macho guys. Safety. My pulse slowed and I finished fueling. Harrison cracked open a beer in celebration before we moved my mom into the backseat. I was feeling much better with those families keeping the clerk busy. Still, he managed to catch my eye one last time while pulling out, and gave me a big wave and smile. He probably blew me a kiss, but I’d already screeched onto the road.

At some point, Harrison sighed. “This beer tastes kind of flat.”

I wiped my wet eyes, watching the exits. “Shut the fuck up.”

He slid down in his seat, muttering something like, “What the fuck’s your problem?”

I never told him what the gas and beers had cost. The real shame hit when I wondered how bad it really was, and whether I had a right to feel all that violated. I didn’t know whether to feel like a victim or just another slut who took advantage of a man’s filthy desires to get what she needed. If nothing else, it did come with its own petite form of power.

My dad was not pleased with me, my mom, or Harrison. But for whatever reason, he felt most at ease judging me. “Why did you let her drive all the way to New Orleans?” he blurted, adding “That was so stupid. Didn’t you pay attention to the Interstate signs?”

I nodded, too tired to put up a defense. “Yeah, I saw them.” I stayed quiet about the gas station clerk. If he was already that mad, I didn’t want to pile on more shitty news. Hey, your wife’s crazy and your daughter’s officially a prostitute.

“And you just let her keep going?” He shook his head in disbelief.

I shrugged. “I figured if I said no, then she’d accuse me of being an evil robot again.” I held up my scarred arm.

“That’s a lousy excuse,” he mumbled and then geared up to deal with my mom.

My mom was still passed out in the car. Waking up to my dad slapping her lightly on the cheeks, she became enraged. She glared at me. “Why the fuck aren’t we in The French Quarter?” she said.

I looked at her with disinterest. “Because I’m an evil robot who drove us back home so Dad could bitch us out.” My sarcasm was finally coming into its own. I was getting so great at one-liners.

My brother and I stood by as a fight erupted between our parents, prompting us up to our rooms. Later, I came downstairs to find a confetti of broken dishes on the kitchen floor. My mom bandaged her hand at the table. She saw me and snorted. “I broke a couple of bowls on your dad’s head,” she said. “He went to bed early. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a concussion.”

I swept up the mess while she watched TV on the couch, critiquing new hair styles and making jokes about fashion trends and diet fads. Then she turned on the weather channel and watched until nodding off.

My calm veneer had carried me through that day, just like all the others. I relished time in my room that night, a quiet house — even my mom was too tired to cause trouble. I snuck the third beer from the gas station clerk up to my room, the one my brother didn’t want to try. I popped the tab and gave the beverage a whiff. It smelled slightly sweet, and I imagined it must taste like soda. On the first swig, my face soured and I spat it out on my desk. I can’t fully explain why that, of all things, made me crack into sobs. I remember giving this terribly hurt look at the can, as if it had betrayed me worse than anyone else in my family. Then this sadistic voice rose up in my head, almost as if my mom stood right behind me. “What the fuck did you think beer was going to taste like, Jessica? You’re so foolish. Are you ever going to do anything right?” That was the night I learned how good it felt to cry alone.

Chapter 3: Evil Robots Wearing Human Skin was originally published in Confessions of An Artificial Bitch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chapter 2: Little Pageant Porn Princess

These days my parents love me as long as I don’t need advice, emotional support, money, or a place to stay. (I also need to keep my weight within 120 to 130 pounds, but that’s mostly my call.) We’ve had this understanding for a while, ever since I was rubber-stamped “chalk-eating stupid” by a standardized test at the age of six. Sorry, my mistake was overthinking the questions. For weeks my parents debated sending me to a special school upstate so they wouldn’t have to look at me, putting me up for adoption, or, you know, just dropping me off with the family who lived in the van down by the river. I begged for almost two months to take the test again, finally convincing them to petition the school board, and then finished an alternate (harder) exam in half the time I was given. When the results came back “extremely gifted,” they took me out for the happiest family dinner I can still remember.

Once you’re classified as gifted, it stays with you until the end of high school, and it’s probably written on your headstone. Different classes, different friends, our own building, nicer teachers, and you get a free pass to murder someone as long as it’s not another gifted student. God help one of us, though, if we wound up in the normal part of the school by ourselves. The regular teens could smell us within a hundred yards, and we were despised.

Anyway, you can picture my pouty, squinting face when I hear the phrase unconditional love.

Most girls I know grew up watching My Little Ponies and Shera, but my mom would have none of that. She made me watch her favorite soap opera every afternoon. Then I had to do aerobics with her in an upstairs home fitness center and mini-spa, where she preferred to spend her evenings. I have to admit, that hot tub and private steam room kicked ass.

Later in life, these memories would wash up on the shore of my ruined college years and provide at least a few explanations for why I was so fucked up. Really, my entire premise for a successful adulthood rested on how many married men I could seduce with melodramatic elevator music in the background, and how long my cardio sessions lasted. (57 minutes!) In so many words, my mom was raising me to be an excellent Kardashian someday, except that lifestyle doesn’t work so well when you’re not famous.

My mom certainly wanted to rise to that level. On the side, she hosted local television and radio shows, made public appearances in support of community issues, modeled for local ad companies. On any given week, you could pick up one of the city newspapers or magazines and find an image of her showing off a priceless piece of jewelry, a designer coat, a new model of shoe, or sometimes kitchen appliances. She didn’t know how to use a blender, but she looked great holding one.

My mom used me as a lock-pick to gain entry into those JC Penny and Macy’s catalogues. We were often the smiling family at a picnic or a backyard barbecue. Except the ad team only hired me and my mom, and some guy who looked like Alan Thick was often brought in as my dad. Honestly, I developed a huge crush on him, and I’m pretty sure my mom slept with him a couple of times based on how they acted around each other, like a real couple. It made me wonder if she saw my dad as anything other than a landlord.

My fake dad threw me into a pile of leaves a dozen times one afternoon during the fall fashion photoshoot. I was seven or eight but already felt a slight tingle of joy every time he picked me up. At some point I declared my wish for him to become my real dad, a desire he dismissed as the innocent flirtations of a child, but my mom used my comments later to start a fight at home, telling my bio-dad in passing that we found him wanting as a father figure. He never got visibly angry, but he returned insults with a sharp indifference that usually provoked my mom’s temper. Like that night, I believe he responded to her by saying, “Do you mind? I’m trying to watch the History Channel here.”

On the weekends I danced to Madonna and practiced my catwalk down the hallway, and occasionally got to play with my one Barbie, but only before bedtime. I’m embarrassed to tell you, readers, that in my early 20s, when I finally started making money, I said, fuck it, I’m starting a Barbie collection. I had 12 at some point before one guy told me I might have a problem.

That was before I discovered Second Life avatars, though, which I’m sad to say make Barbie look like one of those ugly wooden dolls carved with a paring knife back in the 1800s or whatever. Now I’m down to three Barbies and 30 Second Life outfits. Yesterday, I found myself thinking, “This memoir had better sell, or I’m going to have to return all these Maitreya jackets.” The one last fantastic thing I’ll say about SL, before we return to the story of my childhood, is that my virtual closet is limitless.

Thanks for indulging my little tangents. They won’t happen too often. Now, about my mom training me to be the next Kristen Ritter. She was pretty dismayed when, at the age of twelve, I started having trouble seeing the chalk board at school and we wound up with a prescription for not-so-thin eyeglasses. She almost cried every time she looked at me for a week. After dressing me up in three different hairstyles, she finally plucked my glasses off with a simple mmmmmm no and tossed them in the trash.

Of course, that was a logical thing to do back in the 90s. Who the hell was going to date a 12-year-old with those bottle caps on her face? Even more importantly, how was I going to keep placing in the top three at those pageants?

My dad fished the glasses out of the garbage when he got home and put them directly on my nose. The smudged lenses made his face look half-melted as he smirked at me, saying, “Yeah that’s a blow to your modeling career,” and walked off toward the garage, where he spent half his time fiddling with home improvement projects that he never finished.

So I left those ugly anti-fashion accessories at home. My teacher wasn’t impressed when I still couldn’t answer math problems later that week, and he threw an eraser at me because he thought I wasn’t paying attention. “I lost my glasses,” I lied.

The situation had a happy resolution, though, once my mom convinced the optometrist to go ahead and prescribe me contact lenses.

Given my dad’s work habits, sex-ed had fallen to my mom. I’ll admit she jumped the gun by a few years. She showed me books on puberty and pregnancy well before middle school. In the seventh grade, she caught me masturbating under my covers while wearing one of her bras. She was ecstatic to show me her lingerie collection. “I’m so proud of you,” she said and hugged me. “I was holding off on getting you something really racy, but that wire rim number looks great on you. God, you’ve already got better boobs than I did at 16.” She placed her hands on them and marveled. “They’re so round and perky.”

My dad knew only so much about how my mom and I spent our free time: rehearsing Annie Lennox songs on an electric keyboard (all the rage in the 90s), tanning, reading about fashion, watching MTV, and practicing for every talent show or pageant in driving distance. The sad thing? I barely remember the events themselves, just all those hours with my mom.

In hindsight, my dad was like many in his desire for a boy, never taking much interest in me. His factory job always consumed his attention. Sometimes, he nodded toward the growing array of trophies and framed fashion photos with a look of casual approval. I guess as far as he knew, or even cared, they were all from science fairs. Maybe he thought they were awards that some boy got for building such a lifelike girl.

Oh, but golf! When my dad developed an interest in golf and started playing games with his work friends, I suddenly became the center of his world. He wanted to become a golf instructor on the side, so I was his practice student.

At first I felt so special, until I realized the absolute boredom in store for me.

According to my dad, normal childhood sports (baseball, football, basketball) were a waste of time — even for boys. Success in the business world required an expert knowledge of golf. He was going to show me everything he knew. My golf prowess would result in an avalanche of promotions and raises, turning me into a sexy, successful business executive by the age of 23, you know, like those women who pose on business magazine covers with a blazer over a swimsuit, like that’s ever happened.

My dad also insisted that I learn to file and paint my nails, which oddly was something my mom had overlooked in her hyper-attention to every other detail of my body. “The first thing a vice president looks at is your fingernails.” He held up his hand. “Grooming says everything about your leadership style.”

I showed almost no interest in golf, and even less ability. I stared dully into the trees, letting cicadas drown out my dad’s droning lectures about different sizes of clubs and twerk power during a swing.

Thankfully, my lessons ended abruptly after two months, when I accidentally swung a five-iron into the side of my dad’s skull. Shortly after, he let my mom continue transforming me into “as much of a Lolita as you want,” he said once, taking a six-pack of sodas to his room. Confession, my dad never used the word Lolita. That’s kind of my censorship term for slut or cunt, just so we’re clear. My dad never drank beer, because his father was an alcoholic.

Fine, I’ll say it. Slut. My dad called me a slut once or twice. Happy?

Parenting has evolved a great deal since the Pleistocene era of the mid-90s. These days, I watch YouTube videos and read discussion posts every week where moms or dads ask and give advice about child rearing.

If only someone had handed my parents something like the Internet back then. Having friends might’ve helped as much, though my parents came up shorter than a guy after swimming in that category. My mom’s quirks (okay, her raging schizophrenia) made her difficult company, and my dad felt so embarrassed by her that he barely socialized.

Soon after the golf club incident, my mom decided I needed a fresh batch of mentors. Not friends or neighbors. Pop stars. We began listening to more than Madonna. We listened to Aerosmith, Ace of Bass, Rolling Stones, you name it. She introduced me to Michael Jackson and Prince. She showed me pictures of David Bowie (RIP) and talked about the healthy spirit of gender blending while Ziggy Stardust played in the background. The message, as twisted up as anything my mom ever tried to express, was that I could be anything I wanted as long as I was talented and beautiful.

Eventually, I told my mom I didn’t want to be a fashion star. I wanted to be a rock star. (Dear page designer, please sprinkle glitter on that last phrase.) So we doubled down on my piano lessons, and we found a real instructor who seemed impressed with what a quick study I was. Mr. Bell was even more pleased with my mom, of course, and I saw them kiss at least three times through a cracked door. My mom loved musicians most of all. I wonder if she managed to get us a discount on my lessons. Almost certainly.

At piano recitals, I started showing up in costumes my mom made, with wildly-styled hair and makeup that made me look like a Cullen. The parents loved it. My peers in piano school seemed indifferent, maybe frightened, who knows? When word traveled back to my school, I enjoyed such nicknames as “caked up slut” and “whore” which weren’t terribly original. I’m sure readers will be impressed at what an early start we kids get at picking up our parents’ bad habits. But even these kids had to admit I played piano like a goddess. And when I performed for my second grade class, I became strangely popular. I wasn’t liked, but I was admired — the way you gaze fondly at sea creatures in an aquarium.

Around that time, a boy I had a crush on named Michael found my phone number and called me. “Do you want to get married?” he asked.

Sure, I told him. We arranged a wedding on the edge of the playground the next day and spent at least a week playing house under a large tree with draping branches.

Formal sex-ed arrived in sixth grade, far too late in my timeline to seem relevant. Our science teacher, an attractive blond we called Miss Stephanie, shouldered the burden of showing a co-ed classroom of two dozen what we needed to know about reproduction. The first day, she stood in front of the room and listed controversial terms we’d be using for the next three weeks. “Go ahead get the laughter out now,” she said.

“Penis,” she said, glancing around the room. “Now I’m going to use the word in a sentence: The penis is hard.”

Nobody laughed.

“Vagina,” she continued. “I have a vagina.”

We remained silent, staring at the tops of her breasts and their outline against her silk blouse.

“Erection,” she said and then started spelling out the terms on the board. “Men often get erections when looking at me.” When Miss Stephanie turned, we saw a handprint in chalk on her skirt. Someone chuckled, making her smile. “Good,” she said. “You all need to loosen up a little bit.”

Halfway through sex-ed, Miss Stephanie held individual conferences with us. During silent reading on rape and sexual assault, we met with her one-by-one near the hallway lockers to make sure none of us had been sexually assaulted, because a girl would never lie about that if you straight up asked her. I’m kidding.

It turned out that Miss Stephanie was much more concerned about hooking up her students. “You should know that you’re a really attractive girl, Jessica. I hear all kinds of things about you when the guys get together between classes.”

Lovely. I wondered which one of them was going to wind up deflowering me in one of our school’s many secluded hideaways. More than once, I’d found condoms floating in toilets.

She smiled and offered to set me up with Cooper, a guy who seemed especially interested in reproducing with me. Miss Stephanie laughed. “He said he’d love to bend you over a desk. Do you know what that means, Jessica?” I shook my head no, and she referred me to chapter 8 in our human growth & development textbook.

My trajectory through adolescence even included experimentation with pornography in eighth grade, if you can use that term to describe a couple of kids in their underwear, messing around with her parents’ camcorder. I know some of my male readers get super uncomfortable reading about teen girls’ sexual awakenings, so I’ll keep it clean. If you’re growing bored, don’t forget that in a few pages you’ll read about another one of my fantasies.

“We’re not going to have real sex,” Chris said as he mounted the recorder on its tripod and adjusted the focus. “We’ll just pretend, like they do on TV.” He pressed the button and sauntered toward me, peeling off my shirt as we climbed on the bed.

Since we were both underage (barely 15), I’ll spare you the details of our attempt at homemade porn. We’d met at his house under the pretense of practicing our dance for an upcoming formal. Neither one of my parents truly cared if I spent an entire day alone with a cute guy. In fact, my dad expressed a hint of approval, since it indicated that I would someday bear him a son instead of becoming a worthless lesbian, am I right Trump supporters?

Neither of us truly knew what we were doing, except following the examples of adults. The Internet was a brand new thing to everyone, barely a year old and already brimming with sycophants. Chris and I weren’t even old enough to drive, and we’d already received sexual invitations in online chat rooms and watched pixelated sex after our parents went to sleep. I would hardly call us victims of anything, but we seemed to be maturing earlier than any generation before us.

Chris and I got busted, though, when some jerk stole the tape he was going to give me. I guess someone was eavesdropping on us at school and found the perfect time to pickpocket him. A week later, guys were telling me how much they loved my Pam Anderson moves. I was angry with Chris until he convinced me he’d had nothing to do with its circulation.

Things got even better when the principal called me into his office and played the tape. My face turned sunset red as he sat there mocking me. Oooo yeah, look at that, he said. I was right to show off those legs. Then he leaned forward on his elbows and told me he wouldn’t pursue any disciplinary action if I could personally collect every single copy of the tape. “If this ever winds up in my office again, you’re expelled.”

To my younger sisters, here’s proof you don’t need a smartphone to wind up in deep shit. Any low-tech media will do the job.

My parents would’ve disowned me for sure if they ever found out. Well, my dad for sure. My mom was always hard to predict. She might’ve taken me out for ice cream. Hmmm, not ice cream. Frozen yogurt. Yes. Anyway, I didn’t want to have to personally beg every single possible owner of said video to help me out. So what did unlucky Jessica do? She hand-wrote this note in her best cursive:

Hi, I’m Jessica W. and you may have seen me in a video that’s going around school. I’m glad you enjoyed it, but Chris and I got in big trouble and now they want us to destroy all copies of the tape. If we don’t, they’re going to bring in the police. So here’s the deal: if you return your copy with your contact information, I will personally arrange a make out session with you. The way I figure, let’s turn lemons into lemonade! I will leave my locker open. It’s №2173.

P.S. You must destroy this letter! If anyone finds a copy, then we’ll all go to jail.

I stuffed a copy of my letter into about 50 lockers, figuring news would spread quickly enough. By the end of the week, I had about seven VHS tapes and one dildo that I immediately stuffed in my bag. I knew if I threw it away then I would be the first suspect when the janitor found it. Assuming the janitor didn’t keep it for himself. You never know.

I copied out all the guys’ contact information I’d received and handed it over to the principal, the assistant principal, the school resource officer, and my history teacher. Soon enough, those guys were suspended. While I got a few rape threats, everything turned out fine! Although I couldn’t guarantee someone somewhere hadn’t hung on to their copy of my amateur tape, I could rest easy that it would never see the light of a teacher’s office now.

That was quite the adventure. Who knows, maybe it wasn’t even the craziest thing that happened at my school. The sexuality of early teens lived right under the chins of our teachers and parents. Girls in my school could already brag about their first blow jobs by their freshmen year. If you didn’t have a sex story by sophomore year, you were lame. Couples snuck out of class into every possible nook of the hallways, libraries, gymnasiums, and auditoriums to trade favors. It wasn’t all that surprising to flush a condom without alerting the teachers. In fact, you knew by flushing that you’d just done your anonymous classmate a solid. After all, our principal used the same bathrooms we did, and would go into a rage at the sight of used condoms. Honestly, you should flush twice. I’ve heard that sometimes condoms can float back up like dead fish. In fact, don’t flush condoms. They can clog up your plumbing. Throw them away.

Anyway, so puberty. Teens act so strange during this time. We did all sorts of things we’d blush about later in life. In physical science, a girl I barely knew begged me to feel her new breasts. “They’re just about done,” she said to me, placing my palms on her chest and squeezing.

“Yeah, they’re coming right along” I said.

She giggled. “My dad won’t let me date yet.” Then she held her hands out and offered to give an assessment of my breasts.

I declined. “You know what? I’ll send you a written report in a few days.”

The school became a hub for micro-transgressions against our parents’ control. Some teachers did everything in their power to desexualize us, sending girls home for short skirts or tight shirts. A few teachers kept spare pants and tights in their desks to give out when someone showed up with inappropriate attire. But plenty of teachers didn’t seem to care, even encouraged our curiosity.

In high school, the halls filled with young couples kissing, administrators either unaware or disinterested. Grinding, banned in even some adult venues today, was the norm at homecoming dances. If teachers had tacitly condoned our sexuality in middle school, it was practically encouraged in high school. Teachers gave us dating advice and played matchmaker on a daily basis. My history teacher once upended her seating chart after a blond guy named Brad expressed interest in me. When he reached for my hand during a lecture on Cyrus the Great, our teacher smiled at us and nodded. Orchestra trips to Florida and Virginia were practically orgies. We snuck alcohol, played co-ed strip poker, and shared hotel beds.

Guys freely admitted to calling my name out in their sleep, fighting over me in the hallways, and remarking on how my ass looked in jeans. Of course, one guy did tell me, “Your ass looks better in khakis.”

I also received compliments on behalf of my mom. As one guy told me, “Hey, Jessica! I just wanted to let you know I jerked off to the weather forecast this morning.”

“Oh, that’s good to know,” I said. “How long did you last, 10 seconds?”

All this attention had downsides. My mom began to develop an intense jealousy when I mentioned guys, which surprised me because I thought that’s what she’d always wanted — a daughter to go out and collect binders full of men. One time, she eavesdropped on my phone call with a guy who wanted to take me hiking, then tossed open my bedroom door and shouted, “There’s a 70 percent chance of thunderstorms this weekend, you idiots! Didn’t you see my forecast this morning?”

Sure enough, after the guy hung up my mom appeared before me in tight shorts, a sports bra, and hiking boots. “Ready?”

“I don’t feel like going now,” I said, sitting on the edge of the couch.

“I was just kidding about the storm.” My mom pushed her bottom lip out. “Aw, Jessica’s going to pout because I cussed out her little bitch of a boyfriend.” She chuckled and ran a hand through her hair and wiggled her hips. “If he gave up that easily, he’s not worth shit. Let me know when you change your mind. I’ll be doing my aerobics.”

One night, my mom overheard me musing to a friend about a guy I liked and decided to entertain herself. She walked lazily into my room and asked me how guys flirted with me, crawling catlike on my bed. “Do they come to you like this?” she said, then swung one leg up and around my hips so she was straddling me. “Can your boyfriends do that?”

“Mom,” I said, trying to push her off. “This feels gross. Stop.”

But it didn’t feel gross, and that’s what bothered me so much.

She leaned back, laughing at the ceiling. “Sure, I’m too old for you. I get it.” She kissed my cheek and hopped up, skipping out of the room. “Goodnight, my precious princess.” She blew me a kiss and turned out my light.

Here’s another deep fantasy: I’m walking down a long, dark corridor beneath the ruins of a post-apocalyptic city. The war between cyborgs and humans began long before my creation. I’m the latest reconnaissance model, a stealthy farrier of death in the shape of a harmless little waif who looks like she’d break in half with a hard punch. My wool coat billows behind me as I adjust my thick scarf, mainly to hide the access panel that got snapped off during my altercation with four rebel scouts, all of whom I killed with my bare hands. Beneath my coat, I’m wearing a Tomb Raider-style outfit that’s to die for, with a two-gun holster, and a skinning knife strapped to my left thigh.

My footsteps are light, almost gleeful. I’ve just successfully infiltrated the heart of a human stronghold and downloaded their entire military strategy into my cerebral net. My rendezvous is supposed to meet me at 1400 hours, only 300 more meters.

So close now, I hear footsteps behind me and train my audio receptors on the sound. An analysis of the scratching of boots on gravel tell me three large men are coming my way. I adjust the frequency and hear the light clink of their assault rifles and grenade launcher.

I walk calmly until their pace quickens, and I decide to make a run for it. I fly down the corridor toward my rendezvous point, when all of a sudden an electrified net catapults up in front of me.

My reflexes are quick enough to slide to a stop, but the rough terrain tears a gash in my thigh. My ripped skin forms ruffles around the exposed metal frame and wires of my upper leg.

Three men emerge from a tunnel to my right. They size me up, smiling at my damaged limb.

They come at me all at once. I punch one in the chest, and he flies toward the net, an instant crispy critter.

The other two grab my arms, and I sling them into each other, their foreheads crashing together, skulls cracking.

A voice from behind me calls out, “Turn on the magnet!”

Fuck, I think, my tough girl brow rising in panic.

As the trap powers up, I feel the caress of a magnetic field, luring me toward the wall like a lover’s invitation. My body resists, but the wave of attraction persists in drawing me forward. My head rattles side to side as my eyes squeeze shut, and I flex with all my considerable strength, but I’m unable to break free. I toss my head and ball my fists, my face scrunched in pain.

The commandos have reached me by now, and they’re having a good laugh at me. I’m so helpless now, and their eyes have already started to undress me.

I try wrenching away even harder, my mechanical joints feeling the stress and my frame starting to buckle. An electric pulse shoots through me, and I wince. The pull is so strong I’m starting to come apart. To save myself, I give into the tide. Little by little, I yield ground until I’m flat against the wall. A momentary relief is followed by another order, “Turn up the juice!” My wide, terror-filled eyes only amuse my enemies. I start letting out low metallic whines, like a woman wailing through the distorting whir of fan blades.

At its worse, I feel like the magnet is yanking the very thoughts from my neural processor. I can’t hold an idea long enough to say anything.

Finally, the magnet shuts off and I collapse to my knees. My thoughts slowly stabilize, but I’m nowhere near combat ready. My structure has been so compromised, they just might be able to draw and quarter me without so much as a pony.

The commandos lift me by the arms and drag me toward what appears to be a small camp. Sonuvabitch, I think. The whole thing was a setup to find out who’s been leaking information to Cipher, our robot overlord and protector.

The rebels interrogate me for fun and then extract all the data in my banks about Cipher’s plans, including my mass production. The whole process leaves me lying with my legs straight out on the floor, like a stuffed animal, next to a row of partially disassembled humanoids of both sexes. I’m functional, but not for much longer.

I’m saved by an innocent-looking but attractive Ryan Reynolds type who halts my disassembly because I look just like his fiancé, Jessica, who died in a raid by Cipher’s hardened robotic sentries, which have none of my pleasing exterior. Unlike me, the infantry bots were made to strike fear into the human heart.

Luckily, Ryan manages to have me reprogrammed into a docile companion. At first, I’m slow to pick up on human customs, and the other rebels treat me like complete shit because, you know, I did kill several of their friends. But Ryan is so tender and gentle. He shows me pictures of his fiancé, tells me stories, and over time I begin to adopt her mannerisms. Ryan and I make love one rainy evening before a major battle against Cipher’s armies.

Our lovemaking is some of my favorite. The first time begins with a kiss on my lips. I look at him with bland curiosity and ask, “What was that?”

He shrugs and says. “What?”

I come close and put my lips on his, pressing my chin forward. “That,” I say. “What is that gesture?”

Ryan laughs and grabs me by the hips. “You mean you robots learned everything about our culture, our traditions, our history, and you never studied kissing?”

“Kissing,” I repeat and run my processor for a few seconds. “We have encountered the term, but Cipher told us to ignore it.”

We kiss for a while, Ryan telling me what to do with my teeth and tongue and how it stimulates pleasure in humans. I ask why, and he tells me that’s because humans have more nerve endings in their lips.

I place my hand on his jaw. “You are responsible for me avoiding disassembly,” I said. “I will compensate you with kissing if that is what you enjoy.”

Ryan tells me there’s something else I can do, and guides my hand to his crotch. He asks me to unbuckle his belt, undo his zipper. I comply, commenting on the changing size of his member. “Why does it do that?” I ask. “Why does it get bigger?”

“Let me show you.” He pulls my tank top overhead, and I raise my arms to accommodate. His eyes won’t leave my torso, moving from my stomach to my chest. “Why did they make you so real?” he says, almost to himself.

I lay stoically beside Ryan and stroke him to full hardness as he massages the roundness of my buttocks, sometimes strolling his hand up the ridge of my hip.

“Do you have a working vagina?” he says.

I nod, a new human gesture I’ve begun practicing. He tells me to slip off the rest of my clothes and I do, then follow his instructions to position myself above his groin and gently slip him into my vaginal cavity. His breathing grows ragged as I bounce and twerk, all according to his verbal commands.

No emotion reaches me, and my face remains blank during our intercourse, my eyes open and unblinking. I do take a sense of satisfaction in watching Ryan become so emotional, clearly pleased by my actions. “Jessica,” he sighs. “Jessica.”

I run a diagnostic on his heartrate, blood pressure, and sweat production. His pupils are almost completely dilated, and I calculate he is 67 percent near orgasm with a 27 percent chance of early ejaculation. His hands grab my breasts, and he circles my nipples with his thumbs — something I suspect a human female would enjoy. I increase my pace and watch my intercourse task completion bar move from 67 percent to 80 to 95 as Ryan’s excitement reaches its apex. The closer we come, the louder his breathing, the more erratic his hip movement.

Finally, he grips my neck and begins a final series of deep thrusts, pulling me down and down as he starts to shoot up into me. The feeling of cum inside my vaginal unit is strange and sets off an alert:

FOREIGN SUBSTANCE DETECTED. CLEAN IMMEDIATELY.

I disregard the warning for now and lay beside him. He pulls me into him, rests my head on his shoulder, and we lie still as the rain taps the ceiling above us.

When we aren’t fucking, I help Ryan on his missions. I’m great at taking out other reconnaissance droids. During our battles, it’s all very confusing and disconcerting for Ryan to watch me kill my twin sisters over and over, ripping circuits out of their necks and watching them crumple, throwing them off buildings, or pulling their battery packs out through their lower abdomens, wires spilling out of them like spaghetti. Killing myself doesn’t bother me, though. I just do as programmed.

Over time I learn to comfort Ryan on longer missions, and we become passionate lovers. I even develop feelings for him, or at least behaviors that resemble them. Of course, the robot never lives for too long. Ultimately, I sacrifice myself to save him from a collapsing shelter during an enemy shelling. I cover Ryan with my body and feel the heavy crash of cinderblocks. The crushing sensation on my metallic spine is almost pleasurable, as warning messages and electric sparks flood my retinae display. I feel my chassis crack as I try to push myself up, wires and servos coming loose and buzzing inside me. The last shot in my fantasy is Ryan caressing my broken body, metal and wires sticking out of my neck and torso. I tell him to stay strong. He’ll find another Jessica. But he just holds me and sobs as the last of my energy drains, and my eyes flicker green-blue before fading out. He’ll never love anyone like me again, he says. The end.

Chapter 2: Little Pageant Porn Princess was originally published in Confessions of An Artificial Bitch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

True. I’m a professor, and we focus a lot more on developing reading and writing skills than…

True. I’m a professor, and we focus a lot more on developing reading and writing skills than debating Marx. It’s easy to justify more and more cuts to higher education when you can claim they’re all a bunch of Marx-thumping socialists.

Unfortunately, the drunks I know only have boring stories about trying to get laid.

Unfortunately, the drunks I know only have boring stories about trying to get laid. I need better number 7s in my life.

Thanks! Yes, we all need people in our loves that we love, trust, and respect.

Thanks! Yes, we all need people in our loves that we love, trust, and respect. In prior generations, your family was all you had. These days, we have more freedom to form relationships outside the family unit. I guess some people detest that, but I think it’s great.

Thanks! Honestly, I think a lot of the trolls on here only pay lip service to “family values,” and…

Thanks! Honestly, I think a lot of the trolls on here only pay lip service to “family values,” and that’s why they get so upset when someone points out the truth. If you honestly loved your family, you’d be spending time with them rather than trying to make everyone think the same way.