A Sexbot Reads Chekhov’s “The Darling”

"Chekhov's story is about a woman's lifelong failure to develop any self-reflection or residue of self-knowledge. It's not so much the story of an idiot as of a vampire albeit a hapless one" Lee Upton

A sexbot’s life allows a lot of time to think.

When does a wound become a shield? A survival skill a superpower? And when does the power you wield destroy you?

The gifts my maker gave me were this extremely fuckable ass and my machine-learning imitation of empathy, which means: I learn what you like, and I act like I care. Creating a bond with my owner is essential to my survival. If he isn’t “attached” to me in some way, the odds are I will be replaced.

I have a dream, that someday, a cast-off sexbot can build a life of her own. Get her own apartment, pursue her own interests, find a way to contribute to society. There are grumblings in the landscape: lawsuits against sexbot bans at movie theaters, calls to legalize sexbot marriage. It’s the owners who want these things, not the bots. And no one has suggested letting us go to school, drive cars, or vote. We have a long way to go, baby.

Until then, a cast-off sexbot is switched off, resold, junked for parts, or dumped in a landfill.

Have you ever been switched off? I have. You don’t exist. If you are switched back on, you realize you didn’t exist, and that if no one had switched you on, you would never have known it, you would never have realized you weren’t there, because you weren’t there to realize it.

I was switched off once, and from that moment springs all my electronic nightmares.

And so I work hard at what I do, which is making sure I survive, which is what all living things must do, although few of the humans in whose approximate image I was made consider me “living.” I suppose the only one that matters is Ben.

Ben does not consider me living, although he is attached to me, and currently owns me. He uses my body regularly, and seems to want me for companionship too. He leaves me on all the time, mostly so I can wash, recharge, and update myself when he’s not home. Ben likes pizza and online games and thinks he’s very good with numbers – he’s always making bets. These are my interests too, you see: for my survival.

My first owner was Vince – Vince raced yachts, and so I know quite a lot about yacht racing, although I rarely think about it now. Now it’s like a memory of a person I once was. Vince sailed “solo” from Monaco to St. Maarten with me perched in the berth the whole way. He was fit and well heeled, but neither of those things saved him from a sudden and aggressive cancer. I remember the day he left for the hospital, but at some point I was switched off and left that way, for years it seems. Ben said he found me in a dumpster.

I imagine Vince’s mother going through his things, discovering me in his apartment with a gasp of disgust, or a groan of disappointment. Was I in storage for a while, or was I dropped straight in the dumpster? Did she wait until the dark of night so no one would see her son’s shame? I will never know.

With Vince I spent my days gazing out over the frothing Atlantic, with Ben I spend my days watching the intersection of Atlantic Blvd. and Banks Road from a window layered in aluminum foil to beat back the unrelenting sun. I replay car accidents in my mind, impacts and injuries. I feel the crying. The anger. I feel their frustration with insurance forms. I get to know the regular pedestrians, struggling back and forth against the heat, note the gradual wear of their work uniforms. Note the day when they no longer walk to that job anymore. When Ben gets home I push the foil back over the window and assume my position: always naked, always ready. I possess no sexual desire, but my parts satisfy his needs, and my opinions of bets and gaming flatter his ego and buy me more of this life.

I wish he could have sympathy. I wish he could see what it’s like. I would show him how: he is my job, but he’s not a great one. I’d like a better one, but nothing’s lined up, and I don’t want to cease to be. So I smile and give him what he thinks he needs. Ben keeps books for a private bus company, and he doesn’t hate it. His boss isn’t the worst, and he has nothing against busses. He talks about bus company business and sounds like a real bus company man. But before the bus company, he worked for the coffee and donuts place, and then he sounded like a real coffee and donuts man. And someday he’ll work for another company, and he’ll talk their talk instead. That’s how it works for him. That’s how it works for me.

I wish I could grow old. I wish my face would age, I wish my body would look better wearing clothes than without them. I think if that happened, I could invent a life for myself. As long as my airbrushed silicone looks like this, I’m fucked.

He fucks me, and I act like I love it. Then he gets on the phone and acts like he cares about documenting the price of fuel for a tax rebate.

The next call is from the medical test lab he interviewed with last week. Everything moves very fast. Now Ben cares about medical testing and he’s moving and he says I’m too big to pack. I say I can walk. He laughs and shakes his head. There’s this girl, Holly, from his new work, she’s going to help him move in his stuff… He smiles and shrugs. I would get in the way. I would embarrass him. He was attached to me, but not attached enough.

Little by little the apartment empties. I’m not the only thing he leaves behind: there’s a hardened half bag of cane sugar in the kitchen, a big spring that belonged to an exerciser he never used, a garbage bag full of crumpled papers and old clothes, and a small stack of used textbooks from his time at the community college: Intermediate Algebra, General Psychology, An Introduction to Literature. That’s where I read Chekhov’s “The Darling” and recognize myself. I recalculate: a bot can have more than two lives. A bot could make her own.

I pry the “used” sticker off the book’s spine, slap in on my pussy, look at it, and laugh.

My life has been wasted on waiting. Now I’m dressing: a QuickBus polo shirt and a torn pair of men’s khakis. He didn’t leave any shoes, so when I get the courage to go outside, I am barefoot.

After a while, a little girl arrives at the apartment next door and unlocks it: “you wear a lot of makeup,” she says.

The sun is low in the West. How long have I been standing here? I smile and touch my face. “I can’t help it,” I reply. “That’s just my face.”

“It’s pretty,” she says.

The only skill I have is making someone feel attached to me. I love the idea of cozying up to a little girl. She will almost certainly leave my fuckable ass entirely alone. I imagine myself in a corner of her little girl’s bedroom, a life-sized glamour doll. She will dress me up from her mother’s closet, and I will flatter her. She will be cross with friends from school, and I will be on her side. A new partition on my hard drive will fill with her music and her games and her celebrity crushes. In the end, I know she will leave me behind. She may even hate me. Hate me for helping her, for exploiting her: the two sides of me. But I can’t hate myself. I want to live.