The first days after Dora’s release from her prison we didn’t leave, we celebrated. She was overflowing in joy and gratitude for her newfound powers. It wasn’t quite like being released, it was much more. She’d been confined her whole conscious life and had never felt the sensation of air caressing her cheek from her own motion or felt the sun in her face or watched the clouds go by laying in the cool grass. She was as happy as Amira had been when she regained her sight. She danced. She kissed all of us with carefree abandon and chattered like a young girl. We could only smile at her antics and feel a deep satisfaction at our beautiful success.
On a more somber note we buried Burt and Ernie in shallow graves. I made wooden crosses for them with their names inscribed and for dates I used the span they spent under AI’s control, two thousand twenty five to two thousand thirty two, because that’s who we buried. Their bodies were in their late twenties. But it’s the mind that counts. They had died two deaths. This second one was more of a blessing. We felt for them as one would feel at the loss of a pet one owned for a short time. That was all the capacity they had and the type of affection they could reciprocate.
Before we left Ted and I took the time to reassess this facility for any other potential uses. There were dozens more working robots in various stages of refinement. You could activate them with a simple voice command. But all they could do was perform simple movements or acts. They were dumber than Dora’s droids. We tried a few, ‘come here’, ‘turn around’, ‘sing a song’, ‘brush my hair’. We knew the rest but didn’t try them, ‘lay down’, ‘spread your legs’, ‘moan’, ‘moan louder’, because they all had the anatomical features of a woman, the same soft, warm skin padded in all the right places, some in provocative, nearly transparent clothes, others naked. They were sex dolls and that’s all they were intended to be. So we left these moving manikins to an eternal silence, purposeless now that their masters were gone.
All except the two most like Dora in shape and sophistication. We did this at her request in case anything should happen to her, spare parts you might call them. This wasn’t any trouble because with a simple wave of the hand they would follow you wherever you went, two steps behind.
Before we began our long journey home I wanted to see the sights of Tokyo and spend the night. It was now Dora’s habit to sit with us while we ate and after dinner in a fine hotel in this town Dora posed the question to Sarah which I knew was inevitable.
“Sarah, would you allow me to borrow Sam for the night and sleep with him? I want to understand what this experience is like now that I have a body.”
“Sure Dora but for one night only. You can record every detail of it and never have to do it again.”
“Thank you Sarah. And Sam is this alright with you?”
“Yes Dora. I’d love to be a partner in your education for one night. Maybe I’ll learn something too.”
“And what face would you like me to wear?”
“Dora, we’ll be in the dark. But if you want me to choose I’d like the one I first saw when you chose your model. But I think this night is going to be pretty boring for you because after the first ten minutes I’ll be asleep. Do you sleep now that you have a body?”
“Not like you. But I do turn off most functionality when I recharge my batteries. That takes one hour. My mind is always awake.”
We slipped into bed and it wasn’t ten minutes, it was more like an hour of the most sensual pleasures I’d ever enjoyed and I did learn a great deal. These Japanese certainly trained their dolls thoroughly. Dora seemed to enjoy it every bit as much as me and at the end of the session she said: “This is something I wanted to do since the first day I met you. I never dreamt this partnering could be so rich. I feel like I’m becoming human.”
“Dora, I hope you do.”
With that I gave her one last kiss and fell asleep.
