Futopia

It was just as well for Johnny. He'd become a very private person who didn't go out much. His commute to work consisted of walking up the stairs from the second floor to the third floor and working on his robots. He wasn't fooled by the timing of Alice wanting to see him either. He'd gotten his first product to market and with the kind of advancement it represented there were lots of other bigger companies looking to buy his operation. Johnny wasn't looking to sell but rather lease out his patents. In the long run he figured he'd make more money that way. He'd already turned his five years of severance into 50 years of what he would have been paid at that company so he figured working on his own was better than being bought and haggling to give himself a guaranteed job.

Alice arrived wearing a sweater that looked a bit too hot for this weather but fashion wasn't something Johnny paid attention to. She sat down opposite him and smiled. Then she reached out and took his hands and held them.

"How are you?" she asked.

"Good. And you?"

"I'm just so happy you agreed to see me. I have something really important to run by you."

"Ok. It isn't bad is it? Should I be worried?"

"No, of course not. I know we all said things we didn't mean back then. But none of that matters now. For now we need to think about the future."

"Future, huh? I think I got that covered. But, hey, it was great seeing you again."

"Don't brush me off. You haven't even heard me out yet."

"You're going to ask to move back in and I'm going to say no."

"Why don't you just let me speak before you just jump in, will ya?"

"Ok. Shoot."

"I want to have a baby."

"Request one."

"I mean, I want to have the baby."

"I ... I don't follow."

"Like from me. You know. Coming out of me. I want to get pregnant."

"Pregnant? But what about all the health risks?"

"I've thought about that and I've looked into everything and there's no law that says I can't get pregnant. So I want to have a baby the real way."

"I'm not sure that counts as the real way."

"It does to me."

"Well, ok. Good luck with all that. But of course you know you don't need my permission. I don't own you. The police made sure to inform me fully the last time we talked that I had zero claim over you in any way. Whoever you're going to have a baby with, I just hope you're both very happy."

"I want to have the baby with you."

"Me? Why me?"

"Why not? We were ... close."

"That's a big decision. I don't know. I never even considered it before. It's not done that way. It's just not done that way. I mean, what are you saying?"

"I'm saying, I want to be a family. I want me and you together to be a family together with a baby."

"Really? Wow. For how long?"

"At least until the baby is ten or eleven I guess. Something like that."

"That's a long time."

"I know but I was thinking that maybe it would be worth it. It's the way everyone used to have kids."

"Have you talked this over with your mother?"

"Yes and she likes the idea."

"Wow. But it's such a big thing. It feels like it would be so big a thing. I'm not sure."

"Well, how about this, as long as we're together as parents we can ... start being ... together again."

"Oh. You mean it?"

She nodded. "Every night. Just think."

"But you told people I was like a bad person for doing that with you."

"Cause you pressured me for it. Now isn't pressure. I'm asking you for it."

Johnny looked at her and almost fell for this. His body was aching for him to give in to her. But then he remembered all the pain of when she'd left him. He never wanted to feel that again. As the memory of it started to fill him he realized that while sex was his happiest memory, it was also his most unhappy memory as well. It wasn't worth it. He shook his head and pulled his hands away. "No. I'm very happy that you asked but I can't agree to this. You'll need to make a family with someone else."

She looked perturbed but then slid into a cold glare. "Well, sorry Johnny boy. It's too late. I chose you and I'm having a baby."

"Not if I don't do ... that ... with you."

"You're so naive. Do you think I would come and ask you if it was really ever going to be your decision? I really wish you would have just said yes and gone along but I guess I have to be honest with you."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm already pregnant."

"What? How?"

"We had the I. N. T. E. R. C. ..."

"Intercourse?"

"Yes. We had that, or don't you remember?"

"I remember. By the State Seal I remember."

"And you remember putting your ... stuff ... in me, right?"

"I do but if you'd have gotten pregnant you should have already had the baby by now."

"No. You don't know anything about how a woman's body works so shut up. I can keep your stuff and store it until I decide I want to get pregnant."

"Really?"

"Yes. Of course. Didn't you ever pay attention in biology class? Stupid males. Don't look at me with your mouth open like that. I'm not a freak. I'm going to be a mother. The mother of your daughter to be exact so I expect you to live up to your responsibilities. In fact, I've brought along the documents I need you to sign."

"What documents?"

"Just saying that you agree that this is your baby and that you'll take care of me and the baby no matter what, if we can make a family together or not."

She unlocked her tablet and presented him with a legal document and a place where it was prompting him to sign or place his fingerprint. Johnny's eyes grew wide as he felt everything going too fast.

"I don't have all day for you to sit and read everything. Just hurry up and sign it." Alice said.

"How do I know everything is legal in this?"

"Cause it's from me. I'm going to have your baby so you better start learning to trust me."

"Well, if you're going to have my baby then I guess you better start learning to trust me." he countered.

"I do trust you, which is how I trust you'll do the right thing and sign."

"You don't mind if my lawyer algorithm checks it over, do you?"

"There's no reason to get lawyers involved in this. Come on. It's me."

Johnny shook his head. "I'm going to have to insist." Johnny got out his own tablet and was going to unlock it when Alice pulled hers away.

"This man," Alice said as loud as she could without yelling, "has gotten me pregnant from SEX! He did the sex with me and now he doesn't want to take care of the child he created and forced into me."

People started turning to look and Alice stood up to start accusing Johnny some more so Johnny grabbed his things and bolted.

...

"Why did you agree to meet her?" Joy asked when she was watching her brother on the evening news.

"I was just being polite."

"You thought you were going to get to kiss her again, didn't you?"

"No. That was the furthest thing from my mind. I thought she was going to ask for a job or something."

"You're hiring people now?"

"Yes. Haven't you seen the people coming up to my office for interviews?"

"Is that legal?"

"Of course it's legal."

"What? I'm just asking."

"You can hire someone to do whatever you want."

"Even kissing?"

"I imagine if you were really into that sort of thing."

"Don't play like you didn't like kissing her. I know you did. You told me."

"It's in the past. Now I'm just a normal person like everyone else."

"You weren't really about to fall for that lie of hers were you?"

"No. I thought she was just making a joke. I knew right away it didn't work that way." Johnny lied. In reality he'd had to look it up.

"You did huh?"

"Of course. Everyone knows that. Or they should if they paid attention in school."

"Do you think she's really pregnant?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think she did the ... s.e.x. ... with someone else?"

Even just the thought of that was turning Johnny's stomach sour. "I don't know and it's none of my business officially so I don't care." Oh, but he did care. He cared a lot. Why was all the pain starting to bubble back up. Don't let it show. "It's not actually against the law or anything."

"How would you know?"

"Cause I know. And for that matter at least 25% of the population has engaged in ... ahem ... sexual conduct ... at least once in their life. That's almost 3 billion people. And an even larger percentage have masturbated at least once."

"Well, I never have."

"Me neither."

"You didn't have to. You had Alice to ..."

"Shut up about her. This is useless. You're useless. I'm going out."

Johnny stormed to the door and left but he didn't leave the building. Instead he stood there in the hall and then shrugged. He wasn't going to go back inside just yet and face his sister. She was so annoying at times with her prefect blond hair and her breasts and her hips and her ass. It was enough to make Johnny crazy.

He ran up to his lab and went to the most secret room he had where the most sensitive of projects was worked on. Johnny had lied when he'd said that he'd never masturbated. Ever since the break up he'd been masturbating about once every other day or at least every three days. It was like having real sex had awoke some machinery in his body and gotten that system up and running and now it just wouldn't turn back off. He used to just sit and think of Alice to do it but then he needed something more.

He found himself imagining sex with all sorts of various women around in the neighborhood or doing it with teachers he used to have when he was in school. The mind of a deviant was a strange thing. Almost every woman he saw he started to catalog in his mind for sexual fantasies later. With almost every adult age woman from 18 to 55 being a sensual bombshell it was actually very difficult for him not to do that. Modern medicine was sure keeping every one, for lack of a better word, sexy. Ancient films didn't really showcase what most women back a long time ago looked like. Non professional camera images as well as medical records from the time showed that women all used to be rather overweight and they got ugly in the face much younger than now. But these days everyone was very healthy, almost to a fault. Now that Johnny had sex on the brain he couldn't help looking at the firm breasts, the shapely asses, the trim bellies. Oh, he wanted to just grab the nearest woman and just shove himself into her.

But of course he couldn't do that. It would be wrong. He was a male and that kind of toxic masculinity was very, very illegal. He had to pretend that all the women he saw were really just other men. That was easy enough when he was focused on work or reading a good book but when he had to spend any real time with almost any woman, his body was telling him loud and clear that he did really see the difference and he felt like he wanted to do something about it.

He was keeping himself under control in public but in secret he'd become a real sexual deviant. He wondered when he'd start finding himself attracted to gay men. They said that if you masturbated too much that would eventually happen to you.

Then the real brain twist had happened to him. The one and only time his sister had had a sleepwalking episode since she'd moved in she happened to be naked while she walked around the apartment. Instead of going to her to wake her up and escort her back to bed, Johnny had taken his dick out right there and started to jerk himself off as he watched her clumsily wander back and forth from the living room to the dining room.

It was the morning after that when he'd had his idea to look up how much of the population was being held back from their pull potential because of this sort of thing. Over a billion people. 3 billion in fact. People like Alice would see that as people who needed help from the government and she'd organize a protest to force the government to do more. However, Johnny saw something totally different. He looked into some history. Something called pornography used to be really big business. He found lots of old archives of images and movies and stories and even cartoons. This was a market. This was a 3 billion person large market who just might be interested in discreetly continuing to have sex but without the messy hassle of courting someone until they agree (which might be illegal depending on how it was done), maintaining 'romance' in the relationship (which again might be illegal if done the wrong way), or randomly produced offspring that might not be as healthy as what the Federal Health Department guaranteed.

He looked at his project, got his dick out and started to jerk himself off just at the sight of her. In his head he called her Alice 2.0 but there were times if he wondered if it looked more like his sister than his ex. The 'it' he was looking at was a robot modified to look like a human. There had been robots made like that a long time ago but for whatever reason they were abandoned. It was discovered that it was much easier to make realistic looking models in computers for use in video games or simulations on the news but when it came to producing an actual robot that looked human, there always seemed to be something off or creepy about them.

Well, that was then and this was now. He looked over the thing and as he finished himself off and shot his semen onto the floor for the cleaning robot to wipe up, he thought he knew for sure that no one would be able to tell for sure if this was a robot or not. He'd had her sitting in a chair reading a book when he'd interviewed a few people looking for a job. No one seemed to notice she wasn't real. He uploaded her model as a user in several different multi player games. No one had yet been able to guess that she was an AI. Her text messages and video calls always got past people. There was certainly nothing wrong with her motor skills that would tip anyone off when she walked along the sidewalk from place to place. But Johnny had been careful to limit how much of her anyone could interact with at any given time. All together and Johnny wasn't so sure. He was the only one to ever see her move and talk up close but he himself knew she wasn't a 'she' at all but rather a robot. An It.

The key to her success in fooling people wasn't her complexity but her simplicity. She never parroted or gave in to what other people wanted. When she was tasked with playing a virtual game she was always given a primary goal and a secondary goal. The primary had to be completed no matter what and the secondary would be nice but could be abandoned if it interfered with completing the primary. The obvious idea to make her primary goal to beat a level or stage would of course be useless. Those AI all already existed. She would be tasked with other things like trying to make trades or collecting an entire set of a kind of item. When her physical body was sent out on walks she'd be tasked with getting a certain number of visuals before coming back, such as a bird or a tree or a certain number of people to smile at her. She always performed very well.

The most difficult task was when she had to communicate with people and try to convince them to give her certain information like their birthday or what their favorite place was for a haircut appointment. Johnny figured that even though this was her most difficult task, it was the most crucial. He had still been trying to figure out what the income model would be for her. If he put her out as a prostitute, she'd have to contend with law enforcement and then he'd have to explain that while it was illegal for humans to sell sex, it was perfectly legal for a robot to do so. He found a pre New Mexico court case about it in fact. But then again if he put her out there as a prostitute then it would be a little bit of money at a time and for that little bit of money there would be labor costs. Sure he could program other robots to clean and maintain the sex robot but there would always be some maintenance costs.

Another idea would be to try and sell the robots. While it was legal to prostitute out robots it was illegal to sell full robots for just sex. That's why it was legal to sell replications of a penis with a motor built into it but not sell anything with a processor that tried to simulate a woman for purely sexual gratification. The robots had to have some other legitimate purpose and if the owner just happened to want to fuck the thing then so what. So there was the idea of turning it into a personal secretary and letting the customers discover that 'she' was fully functional sexually on their own but not market her that way.

For a while it seemed like the 'it's not a sex toy, wink, wink' route might be the way he'd have to go but then he got another idea. He was unsure of the legality of it but what if there was a way to put her out there in society and get her to get a man attached to her organically by letting the man think she was a real woman. He could target men who might be a risk of doing something sexual with women and then just supply that with his robots instead. Was Alice 2.0 good enough to pass for a human, to pass for just someone looking for that kind of relationship? If the robots fooled people then how could that be turned into an income stream?

He decided that an experiment needed to be conducted. He himself would be the perfect target since he himself knew that the robot existed. Could the robot fool him? Could the robot be so lifelike that he himself, knowing that it was a robot, be fooled? And say he was, how could he turn that into profit? If the robot could fool him then it might mean that people would pay for a robot and be happy with the robot even if they knew deep down that it was a robot.

Primary task: Fool Johnny (and any other humans) into believing you are a real human and not a robot.

Secondary task: Convince Johnny to have sex with you.

The actual code that Johnny wrote into the robot wasn't put into those exact words but that was the aim he was going for. The thing looked over at him standing at his computer terminal and smiled at him.

"This won't be easy." it said.

"Nothing worth doing ever is?"

"How can I fool you if you made me?"

"You have to build your own algorithm for that. I don't know."

"I assume I'm still not allowed to just abduct you and take you to the memory center."

"Of course not. Why would that even cross your mind?"

"It would be the easiest solution."

"I don't want easy. I want elegant and functional. You have to rise to a higher level."

"I understand. This will take some time."

"You have two weeks and then I want to analyze the data whatever the outcome."

"I need longer."

"How much longer."

"Three years."

"You have two weeks and then I want to analyze the data."

"But I can't fool you in just two weeks. I need more time without you looking under the hood at how I do it."

"That's ok. Baby steps. I don't expect you to actually be able to fool me at this stage."

"I need more than two weeks."

"Ok. You have three but no more."

"Thank you, sir."

Johnny went down to dinner and it took him and his sister over an hour to decide among all the hundreds of options what they wanted to eat. Johnny had been saving up his caloric budget because he had a big dinner meeting he was going to go to and wanted to be able to just eat whatever was on offer.

Joy let out a sound of frustration when the Caloric Intake Manager turned her plate red. "The CIM says I have to go exercise. You want to come?" Joy asked.

"Now? Just come with me jogging in the morning."

"Not funny." she said in response because she thought it was him jabbing her with an inside joke again. In general Joy was not a morning person and the few times she had gone jogging with him there had been comical accidents that happened that embarrassed her.