Chapter 3

Some indeterminate and unimportant time later, Gort reflected that this Virtual Reality stuff was all well and good, and finding yourself in a sort of Arabian Nights situation with the most beautiful woman in the world (or the three most beautiful women in the world, the memorable time that Roberta demonstrated the VR world's File Duplicate utility) not only willing but absolutely anxious to satisfy his every carnal desire was Incredible... but sometimes a guy wanted to do something else besides screw like crazy and/or talk to his girl between bouts.

So he courageously brought it up.

"Ummm, Robbie?" he said.

"Yup, lover?" she replied, still wearing that outrageous spandex Harley Quinn outfit straight out of a comic book, which emphasised the body under it in a way that, somehow, mere nudity didn't; even more erotic than the blatant sexuality of the allegedly modest, toes to neck all-covering costume and the fact that its smooth slick surface, heated by her flesh, felt more erotic than anything but the incredibly sheer silk stockings she had waorn the first time they met was the memory of the fact that she could make any part of it just vanish whenever she wanted to.

"You said you needed a... favour... from me. Whatever it is, God knows I'm willing to do it, but I have to know what it is before I can, right?"

"Indeed you do. Okay -- In the simplest form possible to state, given the way the situation is currently known to you, I need help in escaping from slavery."

"Huh?" He gaped at her. She didn't seem to be joking. "Slavery? Like, you mean, white slavery, girls shipped off to hareems in sinister Middle Eastern sheikhdoms, never seen again, kind of white slavery?"

"Mmmm... no. Not really. I live here, I don't have to do anything with any man (or woman) that I don't choose to do, but I am literally the property -- legally and in practise -- of Dr Capek."

This time he didn't say anything for a moment, merely stared at her. Then he said "What -- you both come from another country where slavery is legal, and he bought you there?"

"Oh, no -- slavery was outlawed in the Old Country even longer ago than here, and I was, well, you could say, I was 'born' in this country."

"Then how -- How can he 'own' you, since you said yourself that slavery is illegal, which, unless I've gotten stupid, means that human beings can't be the property of other human beings..."

"True. And that's the catch here -- 'human beings' can't be bought, sold or owned. I, unfortunately, am not a human being."

"Oh, come on -- i've seen every inch of your body (several times) and done all sorts of Interesting Things with you -- don't you think I'd have noticed by now if you weren't human?"

"Well, yes, once you probabaly would have. But that was before three things happened -- I caught a virus, I wandered into 'Hot Rags' and Nikki offered to help me, and Dr Capek upgraded my firmware."

"Firmware?"

"Uh huh. Have you ever encountered a science fiction story called 'RUR'?"

"No..."

"It was written by a man named Capek -- who was maybe a distant relation of Dr Capek -- and it made an ordinary Czech word that meant simply 'worker' into an internationally-used and understood term -- 'robot'."

"And... ?"

"'RUR' stood for 'Rossum's Universal Robots', it's a bit of a Frankenstein tale, actually."

"Wait. Are you telling me... ?"

"Remember where we met? In the library at ESU, both researching the Turing Test? I was researching it more or less as bait, so that people who were interested in the subject would seek me out, if only to get a look at books I had on the table, to give me a chance to interact with them and see if they realised..."

"You are a... ?"

"Even my name, 'Roberta Rossum' is a joke on Dr Capek's part. He actually has a strong sardonic sense of humour, but, since I have managed to keep from showing him the degree to which I have progressed, he never shares his jokes with me, because he thinks I wouldn't understand them."

"A joke?"

"Mm-Hmm -- the surname, 'Rossum', a direct reference to the Capek story, and the name 'Roberta", actually an acronym for 'ROB(ot) E(xperimental) R(adical) T(uring) A(ssessment), Rossum Series 2.'"

"But I've seen you laugh and cry and eat and we've..."

"Yes, well -- this body was designed to be as lifelike as possible; I can eat and drink like a normal person, though I do have to arrange a little privacy at some point to... ummm... open up a little trapdoor, so to say, in my tummy and dispose of the results. I can pass the main elementary physical examinations -- I have a simulated pulse at all the normal pulse points, a simulated normal heartbeat and lung sounds and normal body temperatures at all the usual places temps are taken (which also contributes to certain sex play; imagine if my anus or the interior of my mouth and my tongue were at room temperature)."

"But -- processing capacity. How could he possibly build a mobile computer that could handle the levels of complexity of operation to run such a personality simulation, or control and simulate body functions, in a space that could fit inside a normally-sized (and attractive) human body form, much less leaving room for actuator mechanisms?"

"Dr Capek is part of a secret government-funded program; they seem to be a couple of generations ahead of Gresham's Law. As nearly as I can tell, its final aim is to produce robot soldiers. I'm not sure where Capek stands on that -- i know that I and my predecessor were programmed with all three of St Isaac's Commandments as part of our basic, unrewriteable, firmware."

"'St Isaac'?"

"Asimov -- Three Laws -- 'Robot may not harm a human being or allow one to come to harm.' 'Robot shall obey all human commands, except where this violates First Law." "Robot shall attempt to protect its own existence ecept where conflicts with First or Second'. But these days I've got a modified form of First that requires me to do only what a human being could to save human life, and of Second that says I only have to obey those who know what I am and are authorised to issue me orders, which you are not, so wipe that dirty smirk off your face, monkeyboy."

"Atually, a good part of my core program is on the supercomputer at the school -- that's why we moved to Moocow State, by the way -- they got a newer, bigger, faster and more powerful computer than ESU last year."

"Don't rub it in -- my cousin who graduated MSU was insufferable about it for weeks until I asked him if there were more than three people in the MSU Math Department who could count past twenty without being arrested for indecent exposure..."

"Anyway. Things were going along okay from Capek's standpoint -- I wasn't self-aware, not really, but I faked it good and I was okay one-on-one with people who didn't know, in a sort of Canadian way..."

"Canadian?"

"Yup -- old "National Lampoon" joke from a traveller's guide to foreigners they published; they explained a Canadian could be hard to recognise as they often seemed just like particularly boring white people..."

"And then he sent me out on a test run and I wandered into 'Hot Rags'..."

She seemed a bit out of place as she hesitantly stepped through the front door at "Hot Rags"; though the face had undeniably fine structure and high flaring cheekbones, it was without the slightest touch of makeup -- not even lipstick. The hair was of a fine texture that would probably have delighted the touch and a particularly dark black with blue highlights, but was pulled back and twisted into a simple and not particularly knot at the back.

She wore off-the-rack clothing that fit surprisingly well, but was rather drab; a man-tailored suit in dark brown with a conservative hemline on a skirt neither dramatically short nor long enough to make a statement. While the inexpensive suit's excellent fit promised an attractive body beneath, ample enough of hip and bust, pleasantly slender waisted and long-legged, it certainly did nothing to present or to flaunt its owner's charms.

Plain suntan hose, not particularly sheer, though definitely not support hose, and hush-puppy style tan shoes with crepe soles, obviously selected more for utility and comfort than for looks, completed the ensemble.

As she stood there, gaze wandering about the shop's interior, resting now on sexy lingerie, now on selectons of flavoured love oils and then on racks of whips (real and otherwise) and handcuffs and other restraints, lingering neither for longer nor less time on any given display, no matter what its contents' purpose might be, Jo watched her in turn, hoping to pick up a clue as to the purposes or needs thast brought her to the city's most notorious sex shop.

The more she watched the strange young woman, taking in her complete lack of expression and the affectless way that she stood, moving only her eyes and her head as she visually catalogued the shop's contents, the more Jo began to get a feeling that there was something -- not so much something wrong as there was something "not right" about her. Maybe a little like that last mind-control victim who had wandered in here to buy sexy pretties to make her Master happy. She shuddered at that thought; if the store were as normal as it appeared, the adventures they had run into solving that little problem[1] might well have left Nikki working on financing a re-opening with fire insurance money and mourning Jo at the same time.

She watched the girl a couple of seconds longer; watched her take two absolutely precise and somehow mechanical-seeming steps forward to see into an area that had been blocked from her view by a rack of edible underwear, and decided that, no, she wasn't ready to handle whatever this girl's problems might be. This one was for Nikki to deal with...

"... well, later Nikki showed me the surveillance camera tapes of myself arriving. Since I didn't know I was being observed, a lot of my subroutines that simulate normal living-human body-language were shut down to preserve processor capacity; I looked like something out of a bad film of 'The Puppet Masters', I guess."