These Days It Was an Everyday Occurrence

Author's preface: See here for story origin and thank you Munson, whoever you are, for the challenge. I had fun with it.

The synthetic looked at me with an approximation of sadness that for the barest of moments made me forget I was talking to a cybernetic organism and said "My tears need a minute to find the edges of my face. If you'll please excuse me." A very strange thing for anyone to say, even a synth, but her model was over three years old now and it was possible her nano-processors were already beginning to fail. Pleasure bots like X3Tina were not designed to last very long, and they typically did not. That might actually be a mercy because most of their owners abused the shit out of them from day one. Perhaps not at all surprisingly the men (98.78% of pleasure bot owners are male), who bought pleasure bots were not the most upstanding of citizens and often had sick proclivities that prevented them from forming healthy attachments to real human females. For them, the bots were nothing more than high priced toys, and they treated them about as well as they treated any other disposable toy they owned. Unfortunately for the synths they were programmed to approximate human emotions, as the ability to display seemingly authentic emotional responses was a highly desirable trait for which desperate men would pay top dollar. This meant they actually 'felt' things, or at least, that is what the pro-synth rights groups were constantly going on an on about to anyone who would listen. These days, the number of those had shrunk to almost zero and synth rights were almost as popular as gasoline powered cars. The synths were also programmed to approximate human intelligence and had the intellectual capabilities of a human six grader. They could read and write and converse reasonably well however like every other machine yet invented by man they could not learn, nor could they adapt or evolve or change. They could only do exactly as their programming dictated. Mostly that programming dictated acting subservient to a collection of human assholes with way too much money and way too little regard for the ethics or morality of owning what is in effect a modern day child sex slave.

As I returned the gaze of the bot who had spoken to me I noticed visible bruising and scaring across the right side of her doll like face. It was clear she had been beaten badly, likely punched and slapped and possibly even slashed with a knife. Those wounds should have healed almost instantly however. Physical imperfections were not tolerated in pleasure bots and they were expected to be physically flawless in all ways at all times. Scars, except for those specifically dictated by the owner, were definitely not normal and any bruising should have been healed by the nanomed bots which constantly circulated in the pleasure bots own synthetic blood. The nanomeds functioned as a supplement to the synthetic's "natural" immune system and provided enhanced healing and other physical abilities as well as acting as a failsafe should anything go wrong with a pleasure bots programming. In those cases the nanomeds could instantly deactivate the pleasure bot by initiating a series of nano and micro explosions which turned it into a pile of steaming goo in under three seconds. Pleasure bot owners were known to gooify their bots for reasons ranging from none to nonsensical. Surveys of pleasure bot owners indicated anger, jealousy, boredom, and stupidity as the four most common reasons for premature bot deactivation. Of course what some called bot deactivation a few, a very few, called cold blooded child murder. I wasn't sure what to call it, but the callousness of it was shocking, and I still cringed each time I saw a bot dissolved in the street. What bothered me more than the act itself was how any humans in the vicinity reacted. These days that was mostly not at all. It was as if nothing unusual had transpired. Like it was an everyday occurrence to just be walking down the street and see some very attractive and well dressed young woman suddenly stop and turn into a pile of goo in front of your very eyes. In fact these days, it was an everyday occurrence.