It seems inhumane, and that’s because it is, because these girls aren’t human and never will be. One is swaying in front of me right now. You can barely see the seams where her plastic form has been sealed shut. This is aReal Woman TM.She’s waterproof, she’s structurally robust in ways a real woman would not be, and far more flexible. A lot of men say these robots are better than real women. Real women are real happy these bots take the abuse the average frustrated man doles out.
It all comes down to profit in the end. A real female is expensive to keep. She has to be fed and she has to be guarded, and she has to be kept in a situation that is clean and suitable enough to keep her looking appealing. Female robots can dance twenty-four/seven in a club and only need to be hosed out semi-regularly from the use they receive from the clients. Any damage can be covered by insurance, and when they wear out, or a new model is released, they can be sold to the private market.
I don’t mind theReal Women TM.I prefer that to looking into the hollow eyes of a real human female who has to have a good time because she’s dosed to the follicles with mental conditioners that ensure she has a pleasant and willing disposition. I’ve seen some of them too, from time to time, out on the streets with men who use them like… I don’t even have a good comparison.
As bright and sparkling and fun as we’re all desperately trying to make this Zeal night be, the world is a dark place and there’s no getting away from it.
I slide through this mass of heaving hidden desperation, helping people zone out from the horrors one sweet little pill at a time. It’s never been particularly easy to be a human, but they tell me it gets harder day after day, year after year. Sometimes I’m quite grateful for not being able to remember anything. It means I’mfree of whatever terrible things probably happened to me in the past.
Anyway, I’m bringing my own mood down by thinking too much. That’s always a mistake. I should be focusing on what matters: profit.
In that regard, it’s a good night at the club. The music is pounding, the lights are dim, and people are desperate to feel… something. Anything. It’d be easy to write the patrons here off as horny sex goblins who have to pay for it, but these days, there’s nothing we don’t have to pay for anymore. Sex is a commodity. The air we breathe is too. It’s accepted that nobody is entitled to anything. Even dying is taxed to the hilt.
A young man with blue half-shaved hair approaches me through the smoke and lasers. His pupils aren’t as dilated as he’d like them to be. He gives me a swift upward nod, a silent question delivered in an environment where nobody can hear themselves think. We lock eyes.Deeee deee diddilee dee…A light tone plays across my cranium and down my spine.
A word appears behind my eyes.
“Happy?”
I nod.
That’s all he needs to know. We touch chips by pressing the inside of our wrists together. A brief swipe is all it takes. I have code running to extract a certain amount from his account. A vibration behind my left ear indicates a successful transaction. We’ve all got the chips in us. They’re the only way to do business. Physical currency is outlawed, and bartering is basis for being defenestrated. They’ll throw you right off the side of the island through a specially prepared window if they catch you swappinggoods and services. That’s why, even though what I’m doing is technically illegal, I do it by legal means.
I slip a vial out of my bandolier and slide it into his hand. He pops the cap, throws his head back, and the pill rolls down the smooth interior and into his throat. I watch as it hits his system almost instantly, a broad grin spreading across his face.
Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin are all being dumped into his synapses. He feels like he’s at the birth of his first child, meeting the love of his life, orgasming, getting a promotion, and winning a gold medal all at the same fucking time. Nothing that ever happens in reality will match up to the way he feels right now. He’s made living obsolete in one swallow. For the next three hours, he’s going to feel as good as anybody ever could. And after? Well. There are other pills for that.
I keep moving through the crowd, waiting for the next eye contact or chip tingle to tell me I’m about to make another sale. I close my eyes and check my subscriptions. That sale I just made went toward my clean air count, which is good. I like to keep that at least thirty days in advance. If you run out of clean air subscription, they move you down to the dirtier parts of the city. They can’t stop you breathing outright, but they can make it very unpleasant to do so.
What it really comes down to is private corporate terms of service.
Eclipse bar is owned by Zeal, one of the big four corporate entities. The dancing girls all have cute little Z tats at the back of their heads, up on their hairlines. There’s Z-themed stuff everywhere. Even the toilets are shaped like big pink Z’s.
Zeal is the most fun of the corporates, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have any terms of service. One of the terms is not to perform commerce on their properties. If there is money to be made, they want to be the ones making it. Technically, this is very against their ToS.
But there’s sort of a loophole. They can’t sell what I’m selling, because all mind-altering substances were banned five years ago in one of the many mutual contracts between the corporates. Laws are complex. There are corporate terms of service, and then there are bigger laws, the older kind. Laws everyone is supposed to follow no matter who owns what. Private citizens can technically do what they want on their own land. It’s just that nowhere is anybody’s land anymore.
So anyway, I can pay a percentage of my income to them, and they’ll look the other way. That’s what I do. I break the law, they make money from it, we’re all happy, or at least a functional kind of miserable.
A big guy bounces into me. I have to dodge out of the way. He’s drunk. I think.
“You’re hot,” he says, his breath laced with alcohol. He reaches for my hand. I yank it away. Unauthorized chip hacking is rife, so I have to be careful. I’m not the only criminal in the place.
Navigating this world is not easy. There are real laws and then there are fake laws, and there’s subterfuge and espionage and split loyalties, and subscription citizenships and… it’s so complicated. I’m not sure that I really understand all of it yet, even after three years.
I’m subscribed to Zeal and Sudo. I got banned from Condor a while ago, and it’s best not to think too much about what’s goingto happen next time I have to travel through Peach space. My plan for the moment is to stay on New New York. It’s mostly owned by Zeal. But that means I have to be careful about how many terms of service I break. They’re allowed to terminate their services at any time.
Back in the day, a company withdrawing service would be a mild inconvenience. You might get your power turned off or similar. Now, you get a one-way trip to Earth under your own power when they throw you out the trash chute with all the other garbage. It’s technically legal to murder people as long as you call it a spontaneous unsubscribe.
So I keep sliding through the crowd, doing my best to blend in. I dance for a while, buy a drink, chat with some guys, slap one because he got fresh with me. Just girl things. My bandolier gets emptier as time goes on.
If I can get rid of most of my stock tonight, I’ll have enough money to pay subs on my apartment, keep up my food sub, and keep existing for another two weeks. Living the dream. I might even have enough to put toward memory recovery treatment. I’m not the only person who can’t remember what happened to them. It’s a bit of an epidemic around these parts.
Zeal got mind wiping technology as part of chip tech from an alien species several years ago, so the story goes. Might be true, might not be true. It’s hard to tell these days. As soon as it came into the world, all sorts of people got their brains washed pretty much immediately whether they wanted it or not. I’m not sure what I did to earn my amnesia, but I still don’t have a clue about anything that happened to me before I woke up in that hospital room.
If I get enough money, I’ll be able to undo that process. I’ve been a little ambivalent on that front. On the one hand, might be good to know what happened. On another… maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe it’s merciful.
“Pet.”
