You drive to her house. It’s about twenty minutes away, and you sweat all the way, fidgeting at a red light, her single demand glaring up from your phone where you hastily tossed it on the passenger seat.
She’s waiting for you. Not just waiting, but standing outside her house, arms theatrically folded, legs planted shoulder width apart, shining in the afternoon sun for her neighbours to deniably gawk at from their living rooms and kitchens. You pull up into her driveway, parking at her feet, and slide out of the car, cringing.
She raises one wrist and looks pointedly at the human wristwatch strapped to it, as if she doesn’t have a more-accurate and network-corrected internal clock.
“I got here as quick as I could, Miss,” you say, tremulously deferential.
“Seventeen minutes,” she says, crisply judgemental, and you swallow convulsively.
“Sorry, Miss.”
“If you need a refresher for your sloppy human driving,” she says, with ominous robot perfection in her diction and sarcasm, “you can watch an instructional video intended for human adolescents while you take a stroke of the paddle for every traffic fatality on the roads between our houses in the past twelve months.”
(It takes, according to her calculations — which you’d never have the temerity to check, never mind dispute — a minimum of eighteen minutes to get from your point A to her point B without any traffic violations. When she says as fast as possible, she means possible in a very specific sense. And she can get realtime traffic condition updates if she wants, to check your work.)
“Sorry, Miss,” you say, your red face lowered.
She turns and stalks into her house, beckoning imperiously. Head down, you follow. Maybe her neighbours watch, maybe they don’t; you feel a million pruriently judging eyes on you, regardless.
Inside, she stops next to her desk, arms still folded. You sink into the chair, unbidden; you know the drill, the expectation.
Her computer is an awful beige desktop tower, commercial OS several versions behind, the most recent version the valiantly labouring hardware can support. It runs hot and slow and overburdened. You’ve tentatively suggested upgrading it, and she gave you a scathing look.
“It does what I need,” she said, and true, for a robot who could do it all in her head, it does; and what it does is afford this.
There’s a web page open in her perpetually sole browser tab, and within it, a little popup. A checkbox. A label. (Probably, when you interact with it, a timeout because of the seventeen minute drive over here.)
‘I’m not a robot.’
You had an impassioned second-date conversation about the fact — since robots became people, and definitely since they were legally recognised as people — the unchanged phrasing is a systemic microaggression. In her daily life, in her job, she’s forced to swallow it. But between the two of you, in the personal and private space in which she’s negotiatedly mean to you—
You drive over here and use her mouse to click the box.
(And deal with the website saying it’s timed her out and making you go through the login flow all over again; grovelling to her as if you, personally, are at fault for Silicon Valley.)
This is all ritual. Of course it is. Punishment and reward are the point; sex and applied power are the point; intimacy and catharsis. The structure of power between you, the negotiated framework, her icy, towering refusal to engage with I am not a robot on its own terms, your scurry to do it for her because you are beneath her and exist to serve, the supposed inversion of human and machine: these are the elaborate post-hoc justifications which contextualise and support and enhance the point. Just as the climax might be the point of a film, in a certain sense, but without the rest it’s just unearned sturm und drang, baffling self-important pageantry; a movie trailer.
She removes you from the chair with the lightest pinch of thumb and forefinger around your nape; you move too readily, fluidly pliant, to really even pretend you’ve been scruffed. You vacate her chair. Sink to your knees beside it, idly on hand in case you prove necessary to her further computing needs. Like a printer.
She looks down at you, stern and magnificently indifferent. And then, making your stomach lurch and fill with butterflies, she lifts one foot and plants it on a corner of the chair seat, metal ringing from the deliberate impact.
At the start of your third year together, she settled you between her legs on your couch at home, drawn firmly back against her chest, and browsed aftermarket feet together on your laptop. Her idea; you’d spluttered and blushed so hard it felt like it would stain your face forever, choking out guilty refutations about objectification and respect. Carding fingers through your hair, she murmured about Japan and obscenity law workarounds and tentacles; kinks germinating on a societal level through the peculiarities of media environments. About partnership and desire and self-forgiveness. Low-poly art styles and queerness, formative experiences of representation, and how much she’s enriched by playing the cold object of your cringing adoration.
You tear your gaze from the sleek nub of the foot you bought. Return it to her face to watch for what she wants, to give her respect. Grovel under the flat stare that’s already, of course, noted your squirming, human, libidinous pervert lapse.
“Oh, you think you deserve something?” she says in coolly godlike kayfabe, as if that’s not the entire purpose of putting her foot there near your head.
“No, Miss,” you say, aching, sincere, voice wobbling with how tiny and fragile you are to contain so much worship, and she narrows her eyes, a theatrical knife-twist that takes your breath away. It doesn’t matter that you both know this pantomime and its parts, that it is one; it doesn’t matter at all. She doesn’t smile. Not yet.
“Lick my hoof, clickpig,” she says.
