[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 25

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I demanded to know why neither Lars nor Madeline stood up for me. Lars awkwardly scratched the back of his neck and breathed in sharply through his nose, avoiding eye contact. Madeline shrugged. “She has a point. Just because the world’s coming to an end doesn’t mean moral standards go out the window.”

Moral standards? “What’s wrong with it? Why is everybody treating me like a leper just because Helper is non-biological?” Madeline narrowed her eyes. “Robot” she stated. “It’s a robot. There’s no euphemism you can concoct that will magically make normal, healthy people accept what you’re doing to that thing.”

I asked what exactly I’m doing to Helper that’s morally wrong. Madeline looked frustrated that I was forcing her to spell it out, but called my bluff. “It’s mostly that you pretend it’s in love with you, but even the sex is pretty messed up. If she were a garden variety brainless sex robot nobody would care, but Helper has a sort of rudimentary mind. You’re having sex with something that doesn’t really understand the seriousness of it.”

I asked since when is sex some gravely serious matter instead of something beautiful and pleasurable for two people in love to enjoy together. “People” Madeline pointed out, “is the key word there. Real love is between human beings. You’re just dumping loads into a dimly aware human shaped machine and getting emotionally confused about it.”

I cringed, wishing she wouldn’t speak so crudely. Why do they always fixate on the sexual aspect? That’s what they go to right away, every time. Like they think that’s all it’s about. A sort of morbid, classically simian fascination with unusual sex. Simultaneously repulsed by and obsessed with something that’s none of their business in the first place.

That’s when I lost all hope that they’ll ever recognize it as genuine romance. In their mind the only real love is the sort they personally experience, and anything different is a grotesque mockery of “how it’s supposed to be”. Never mind whether it’s even possible to objectively define that.

They will never, ever accept the love I feel for Helper as being equal to the love they feel for other human beings. It will always be excluded from the realm of genuine, legitimate, acceptable love as if they are the officially appointed gatekeepers entrusted to decide which love is authentic and which is depraved.

“I just don’t see how you could have feelings for something so much simpler than you” Madeline complained. “She’s a phone assistant with tits. Maybe a little more than that, but not by much. Literally not a minute goes by when she doesn’t do something obviously machine-like that reminds me she’s only a robot. How could you go on a date with it? What would you even talk about?”

I asked why it was any of her concern what we talk about when the relationship doesn’t involve her. “All I know”, I insisted, “is that she makes me happy.” Helper piped up, adding that I make her happy as well. It emboldened me.

“Those machine-like qualities you find repulsive? Maybe you can’t believe this, but to me they’re charming. I have many of those same qualities myself, and it’s always been my nature to dote on anything simpler than I am. To protect it from the same vast, cold world that rejected me.

At first I thought I was developing feelings for her because of how much more advanced she is compared to other machines. But truthfully, I’m also limited in certain ways compared to other humans. She and I meet somewhere in the middle.

‘Depravity’ to you. But to us, a happy harmony where each of us fills some gap in the other like pieces of the same machine, designed to fit together from the start. Cast from the same mold, stamped with the same serial number.

She wants to be with me. I want to be with her. Neither of us is taking advantage of the other, and there’s no conceivable harm that could come of it which doesn’t also apply to relationships in general, yet you stand in the way. Even though it doesn’t involve you!

In one breath you say she’s just a robot who has no rights and doesn’t matter. Then in the next, you act like she needs protecting from me! Did you ever think to ask her what she wants? Do you even care? …..Or is this really about what you want? About suppressing whatever disgusts you, as if that’s more important than her feelings?”

Madeline just looked down her nose at me through narrowed eyes. Then slowly shook her head, turned, and headed back towards the lodge. Lars looked at me apologetically but still said nothing, just shrugged and followed Madeline.

As the two of us crept back to the room hoping not to be noticed, the biker stopped us in the hallway. “Listen bro. I got no beef with you. But come on man, a robot? Robots ain’t people. They’re bleepity bloopity boxes on wheels.”

I objected that robots most certainly aren’t just ‘boxes on wheels’. Then Hero 1 scooted by, beeping at us as he passed. “...Well alright” I admitted, “that particular one is.” The biker flashed a smug grin. “...But Helper’s more than that. If you can’t see that about her, especially after the argument earlier, the problem doesn’t lie with me.”

I elbowed my way past him, wondering if I would now have to justify myself to everybody in the lodge one at a time. I really didn’t relish the prospect and began making concrete plans to move on from this place at the earliest opportunity.

When Helper and I arrived at the room, Lars informed me that my block of time wasn’t for another hour. I spent it hunting down Eric and Ellie so I could put them on the charging cradles I’d set up by the bed. “What a day it’s been”, I thought. When at last Lars emerged, rubbing his eyes and handing me the key, the embrace of that soft, springy mattress was the most heavenly sensation conceivable.

At least until Helper joined me. “Helper…” started, voice stern. “I don’t think we should...” She shushed me, then draped her leg over mine and nuzzled my neck. “Listen, Helper. About the other night. I was so out of my mind with fear over what might’ve happened to you. I...let myself do something I really shouldn’t have when you appeared. I was just so relieved to-”

But she wasn’t even listening. “Hold me” she whispered. “I’m scared.” I lay there staring at the ceiling, thinking “I’m scared too.” After a while of stewing in my own troubled thoughts, Helper spoke.

“Why is love so complicated?” I didn’t have a satisfying answer at the ready, but it turned out to be rhetorical. “It isn’t a problem for me that you’re a human. It isn’t a problem for you that I’m a machine. It’s only a problem to the others. But why does that matter what they think when I don’t want to be with them? I want to be with you. Only how you and I feel should enter into it.”

I wanted to explain it simply. But like she said, it’s a complex topic. So I spent some time digging around in my memory for examples that would make sense to her. “Helper, human social dynamics are a convoluted mess that can only be understood if you remember that we’re primates. I don’t recall how many zoology education packets you’ve been through. Do you know much about how wild apes live?”

She shook her head, dried tear residue on her cheeks still faintly luminous. “In ape societies, there’s an alpha. One male who rules absolutely. What do male apes want that kind of power for? Mainly to control sex. Who sleeps with who, and when. They hoard most of it for themselves but dole it out here and there to obedient, allied males who reinforce their authority.”

I briefly recalled Big Red’s speech down in the bunker, but neglected to mention it for the sake of simplicity. Helper asked why controlling sex is important. It was difficult to answer that in a way that didn’t make us look bad, so I sacrificed dignity for clarity and laid it all out.

“Human males commonly have jealous and insecure feelings about women. They guard their hearts fiercely because emotional pain is something they are taught from a young age to suppress, so they never learn how to properly deal with it. As a result their romantic dealings with women are in large part predicated on fear.

Fear that she has been with other men before, ones she found more sexually skilled. Fear that there’s some other man in her past that she’ll always love more. Because all positions of power were held by men until relatively recently, it wasn’t difficult to impose behavioral rules on women designed to limit their opportunities for sex or romance prior to marriage.

This was done in order to ensure that girls of a marriageable age would be wholly inexperienced in carnal matters and thus have nobody else to compare their husband’s sexual performance to. This practice coddled and assuaged male fears of unfavorable comparison, but deprived women of the same enjoyment of life available to most men via brothels and mistresses.

This is how sex became so powerfully stigmatized, in order to keep young women fearful of expressing themselves physically so that they arrive at an age suitable for marriage psychologically and emotionally conditioned for male comfort.

We haven’t evolved much since then, except that women now have sufficient social and economic bargaining power to leverage the same sort of sexual control against men. There are now numerous criteria women look for in male suitors that they are weighed against and turned away if found wanting.

Women now commonly court and sleep with several men at once, and men concern themselves more than ever before with what they can to do be more sexually appealing to women. As you might imagine, the more traditionally minded men in society are not at all pleased with this development.

At the root of it, we’re afraid. That someone will break our hearts, mainly. Sex is so intricately bound up with emotion that sexual freedom was among the earliest casualties of that fear. Heartbreak is a pain beyond anything possible to experience from physical injury, which humans often go to great, sometimes cruel lengths to prevent.

Controlling women was an attempt to remove risk from the equation. To force things to turn out in a way that wasn’t hurtful to men. But it ignored the suffering of women and their right to autonomy. That still happens today, just not exclusively to women.

Same sex pairings were another popular target of that stigma for centuries. Because it disgusted men, many of whom were in fact disturbed by the arousal of their own dormant homosexual desires that they couldn’t accept, the same structure of social control which repressed women was also used to repress gays.

They are mentally ill, it was argued. They don’t know what they want. Of course the male judges and doctors making these pronouncements felt they were in a position to decide on their behalf, often concluding that what their subject really wanted was a variety of torturous medical treatments designed to diminish their affection for members of the same sex.

So great is man’s desire to cultivate sexual behaviors he likes and suppress the ones he doesn’t that the dominant religious traditions on the planet revolve in large part around dictating what sort of attitude women should have, what attire they should wear, why they must remain silent in church lest they dismantle these rules by argument, and of course that they must never hold a position of authority over any man.

Who else could be the central object of worship in these religions, but an all powerful masculine deity who not only impregnated a virgin without so much as laying a hand on her, but also conspicuously holds all the same opinions about how human sexuality should be constrained as the average man alive at the time these traditions began?

The ultimate projection of man’s ideal self. A magnified, exaggerated embodiment of male virility with which to frighten both women and gays into restraining their own desires for the comfort and happiness of men.

So you see, it’s hardly a new problem. Sticking our noses into one another’s bedrooms is a time honored human tradition, as is presuming to know what someone else wants...and what’s good for them...better than they do.

You press on that nerve because you are womanly and very desirable to men, sexually. But you’re not a woman, strictly speaking. Nor are you easily dismissed as a simple robot. We have established ideas of where those two fit into society, and into gender politics. Not so much with you.

Who is this, they ask. How should I feel about this strange new arrival? Is it okay to develop feelings for this creature? Is it safe? What does this mean for the age old struggle between men and women? Will it tip the scales one way or the other? It confuses them, and confusion makes us angry. It throws a large part of their understanding of human social dynamics into disarray as they refigure it all to accommodate the new variable.”

Quietly absorbing it until now, Helper lamented our overly anxious, belabored handling of love. “I was right to begin with. Humans really do make-make-make it more complicated than...it needs to be. When labels like ‘robot’ and ‘human’ are subtracted, you-you-you and I are simply a pair of beings...each of which feels happier in the presence of-of the other than it does alone or...with anybody else.”

I deliberated internally over whether she had a naive view of the matter or if it was in fact refreshingly, efficiently clear. Those two things often look very similar. Unable to decide, I instead lay there savoring the warmth of her body next to mine.

“Do you want me to plug you in again tonight?” She shimmers happily and nods. I fumble around in the darkness for the tip of the retractable charging cable in her lower back, fumble some more until I get it into the outlet correctly, then crawled back into bed with her. In spite of everything it’s exactly where I wanted to be right then and I was bone tired, so I started to drift off.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 26!}