The Love Machine
Aimée Nokabolokov, pretty, blonde-haired junior research assistant at the Ainsley Behaviourist Studies Centre, stared across the desk at her superior, Professor Mank.
“If you accept this mission, Mis Nokabolokov,” he was saying, “I will personally see to it that your name figures large in the New Year’s Honours list! Aimée Nokabolokov, CBE, for services to science. How does that sound?”
“Oh Professor!” Aimée breathed.
“You will be famous throughout the world!” The professor’s glasses misted slightly with the passion of his rhetoric. “Men will come from the four corners of the earth to examine you” You will go down in medical history alongside such greats as Marie Curie! Estelle Lavatoire! Eva Kaparova!”
“Eva Kaparova?”
“First woman to screw a gorilla and live Miss Nokabolokov, think of it! The fear of intimacy reduced. An end to celibacy. No more frustrated spinsters tottering along to buy stockings and personal comforters in the back streets. You will have set them free, Miss Nokabolokov! You, and you alone, will be living proof that Project 38B is not only a going concern but a boon to western womanhood!”
“But… but I think I ought to tell you, Professor, I’m a virgin…” Aimée blushed, suddenly afraid that this awful confession might ruin her chances.
“Your mother will be informed,” Professor Mank said, smiling smoothly, “and sufficiently recompensed.”
“But… won’t it hurt?”
“Hurt? Hurt, child? Why, we spent three quarters of a billion dollars on the pressure differentials alone, ensuring that for women in your condition the process would not only be painless but almost virtually pleasurable. Do you know, in tests with feline prototypes, eight out of ten owners said their cats preferred it…”
Aimée gazed distractedly at the hands folded in her lap. She had always dreamed of a white wedding, a church with bells and a single choirboy singing like a lark. And afterwards a cosy little reception with twenty-four bottles of Chateau D’Oindeaux champagne and everyone eating vol-au-vents. She looked up at the professor now and wondered how she could tell him, now that he had given her this opportunity to go down in history alongside such greats as Eva Kaparova, first woman to screw a gorilla and live, that she, Aimée Nokabolokov, had for four years been madly, hopelessly, in love with him? Him, Professor Felonius Mank, the greatest anthropological innovator of the day, inspiration to thousands and friend of the hologram of Desmond Morris? She looked shyly at his broad, cruel mouth, the high dome of his touchingly bald head, those gently glistening glasses.
“Oh Professor,” she whispered. “How can I refuse?”
The laboratory has been prepared weeks ago, long before the final essential component had been slotted into place. Now the S.T.U.D. (or ‘love machine’, as the lower technicians had dubbed it) was ready. It stood even now erect on its plastic and beryllium plinth, awaiting input. Embossed across the inside of its right buttock, deep enough to avoid incongruous tactile associations for the partner during passionate embraces)it proudly bore its full title: Sensorite Thyrorhythmic Uteral Deliberator. Professor Mank patted it affectionately on the shoulder as he entered.
“Come along, Miss Nokabolokov, not a moment to lose.” He settled down behind a glass-panelled console and switched on the entro-collaterated palliative tuner. “Just get undressed will you.”
Aimée, her hands shaking at the prospect of appearing naked before a man – in fact, seventeen men and the laboratory iguana mascot – for the first time, did as she was bid.
“Good. Now a few short tests. Breathe in.” The professor crouched behind his newly-cantilated mamminoctroscope and gave her breasts a good going over. “They seem to be in fine fettle. Now the thighs please.” He lowered her briskly astride a chrome and aluminium Ginsaka ‘mini’ cuissipalpitator, custom-built by a tiny firm in Osaka, and felt her legs up with it. “Fine. Now just lean back a moment please?” And Aimée winced slightly as the zinc knob of the fluinatory enjacorator probed into her crotch. “Good. You’re in A1 shape, Miss Nokabolokov, virgin or not.”
“Professor – ” Aimée wanted to tell him that those few moments with the fluinatory enjacorator had been among the most intimate and exciting of her life, but now she realised she would never be able to express what she had felt. How could she expect the professor to understand?
“I will now ask you to lie down please, Miss Nokabolokov.”
Aimée went meekly to the white bearskin rug covering the five-metre-wide dais in the middle of the laboratory floor. Although she was naked, she not feel cold. Two tungsten Aram lamps shone down on herm and she peeped nervously into the Pentax lens of a duo-cast multiband Mitchell that was to capture her every gasp and movement on nine thousand, four hundred and seventy-five metres of specially prepared magnesium-tonalised Kodachrome.
Somewhere an air vent hummed.
“Are you ready, Miss Nokabolokov?” It was the great man’s voice, relayed with a minute buzz of static over the two-way diatonic speaker-input Vox box.
“Yes,” squeaked Aimée.
“Here comes the S.T.U.D.!”
With a faint hiss of pistonised nitrogen from its thigh cylinders, the love machine began to move towards the tiny pink form of Aimée Nokobolokov lying prone and trembling on the rug. Professor Mank, sitting in the control booth, made a slight adjustment to the vertical hold on his Zeiss automatic spectrochromomometer and checked the RIRO-optimised programme. All was running smoothly. The machine’s gait was relaxed, balanced, giving no hint of the life that lay currently dormant within its plexifoam genitals. Professor Mank sent a pulse of power to the atronodes and the dermatoxical Greenburg heat-seeking penis quivered.
Aimée cast a frightened glance towards the control booth, but the sound of Professor Mank’s clear warm voice over the intercom reassured her.
“It’s all right, Miss Nokabolokov, S.T.U.D. is programmed to begin deployment at a distance of three point six metres from target. It accords with the national average for a man of his build and concomitant IQ. Now, reach out a hand and stroke his stomach with the first three fingers of your left hand will you?”
Aimée looked up at the machine looming over her, and hesitantly stretched out a hand towards its smooth nuvoform belly.
“Your other left, Miss Nokabolokov,” Professor Mank’s voice said sharply, “please concentrate, this is important work.”
Aimée obeyed, but unfortunately her fingertips were moist and her hand slipped down to brush the tuft of sable Crinkogloss follicle specially imported from a leading toupee manufacturer in Botswana. The penis immediately reared up to forty-seven point seven degrees.
“Miss Nokabolokov, take care! You’ll overheat the cardiorensic cycle and you’re not even meant to inaugurate digital-gonad engagement until at least six and a quarter minutes into the encounter.”
“I’m sorry, Professor.” Aimée looked penitently at the glass panel behind which Professor Mank weas sitting, but she could no longer see anything of him but his bald head poking over the edge of the console.
“Now, let him stroke your hair.”
The universal joint in the robot’s shoulder lowered its arms, and the haemotactic sealant on the fingertips, result of five years’ technology and painstaking research, gently slid through Aimée’s shining locks.
“Now, take his other hand and place it on your breast.” Aimée did so. “Good. Now, moan.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Moan, Miss nokabolokov. I want to monitor S/T.U.D.’s reaction to audio-visual stimuli.”
“Oh,” said Aimée.
“And again.”
“Oh-oh.”
“Once more with feeling. Let’s have real passion this time, Miss Nokabolokov.”
“Oh-oh-oh,” moaned Aimée. She was beginning to feel slightly dizzy in the hot, dry atmosphere.
“And now pull him down beside you, Miss Nokabolokov. I want to see you seduce this robot.”
“But I don’t know how, Professor…”
“Just follow my instructions. Hold him round the waist.” The love machine lay down beside Aimée’s pink body on the bearskin rug and its android pulse-rate went up to the regulation one hundred and forty-two thumps per minute. “And now kiss him.”
“Like this, Professor?”
“Harder.”
“Oh Professor,” moaned Aimée.
“Now get on top of him and play with his ear lobes. You know where his ear lobes are, I take it?” Aimée was stung by what she thought an unnecessarily sarcastic remark on the part of the professor, but she did the best she could. “Coefficient of linear expansion up by seven point three-four per cent. Now we’re getting some place.” Aimée swallowed. “Now put your thigh between his knees. No, don’t move it around, just leave it there. Okay, life the right breast and place the nipple gently in his mouth.” Aimée looked up, he chin trembling slightly. “What’s the matter, Miss Nokabolokov? This is no time for cold feet, S.T.U.D.’s thermostats are far too finely tuned to cope with that kind of nonsense.”
“Professor, I – ”
“Do you want to back out? Do you want to set the cause of science back a dozen years?”
“No, it’s just that – ”
“Then what are you trying to do, Miss Nokabolokov, give this boy a retro-ejaculative predicule here? He’s a delicate piece of engineering, he could blow a thousand dollars’ worth of fuse just by breathing heavy. Now straighten yourself out, Miss Nokabolokov, I don’t wish to tell you again.”
Aimée, ashamed of the tears that were brimming beneath her eyelashes, did the best she could. And afterwards she cried; cried while the professor stood surrounded by the seventeen technicians and lab crew drinking glasses of Chateau D’Oindeaux champagne while they watched the playback on the tele screens; cried as the sandy-haired teenager from the hospitality block came up and wrapped a silverfoil blanket round her shoulders and took her off for a hot cup of sweet powdered tea; cried while she dressed, and collected her mother’s shopping, and left the Ainsley Behaviourist Studies Centre for the five-eighteen hoverjet back to Basingstoke. It wasn’t for the loss of her innocence that she cried. It wasn;t for the new an unfamiliar life she would now lead as the first woman ever to screw a robot and live, and the round of interviews that would follow, the profiles in the magazines and the adverts on TV and the toiletries she would promote. It wasn’t even the realisation that she would never now be able to have her white wedding with its church bells and its choirboys and its forty-seven guests eating vols-au-vents. It was the sadness in her heart at the way Professor Mank had neglected to even look at her when it was all over in order to cross to the dais and shake his creation by the hand. It was the dry impersonal mutterings of the tech crew as they extracted read-outs from the apparatus and dismantled the monitor screens and packed away the unused emergency medical equipment. It was the first gently whispered words of the love machine itself as, casually towelling its genitals, it leaned towards her ear and gave her a smile from its bright Purlogloss enamellated teeth.
“You shag great, kid,” it said.
Aimée tied her scarf tighter under her chin, because the wind was very cold.
1975
PS
Oh dear. Another one about sex with robots.
This was probably the first, written at university for a competition in the student magazine Isis, and it got an honourable (or perhaps that should be a dishonourable) mention from the judge Brian Aldiss. In his adjudication he wrote that it was ‘well received, but perhaps not quite suitable for the hallowed auspices of Isis magazine’, or words to that effect. He was probably right.
A girlfriend read it shortly afterwards and her sole comment was, “Mank? Honestly, my dear.” I admit it was a cheap shot, a conflation of manky and wank; but women also tend not to like gusset, moist, squirt and flap, so one can’t afford to be too sensitive about that sort of criticism.
By the way, it was only when I started to pull some of this ancient stuff together for uploading onto the website that I became aware of this rather unsavoury theme. Maybe there was something in the air. It does seem to have anticipated the modern age, however, with computers in the home now ordering stuff for us at the raise of a voice, actual sex dolls, and the rise of AI. Some people think it’s only a matter of time before the Terminator films become documentaries. But I disagree. Knowing nothing about computers, I can’t imagine how they can possibly get to the point of self-awareness, let alone become capable of out-thinking the race that created them. Similarly, the theory that there are so many stars out there that by the laws of statistics and probability alone, there must be intelligent life somewhere else in the universe is so academic as to be virtually redundant. We are never going to meet them, so why even worry about it? There are enough things on earth queuing up to kill us as it is – sex robots are the least of our worries.