You've Got Male

“Will that be all?” she asks, not even the slightest hint of a smile on her face, as my last item, a pale head of lettuce, rolls down the checkout counter’s conveyor belt towards the bagging area. Ann Boleyn’s head must have rolled something like this, I find myself thinking as I watch the counter’s mechanical arms grab the head of lettuce by their fingertips and place it gingerly into the bag they’d just opened for the purpose.

“No,” I tell her. “I want to marry you and have lots of children together. But that’s not bloody likely, is it?”

No reaction, though I get a snicker from the fat lady behind me in line. I turn to her, giving her what I hope is a warm smile, my arms spread, palms open. “I’m here all week, lady.” She nods, though her smile seems to melt into the lines of her face. Oops, I may have overdone it. Did I?

The cashier’s irritated “Next” wakes me from the momentary self-reflection. “I’m going, I’m going,” I hasten to add, and grab the rusty shopping cart, ignoring the squeal its wheels make in protest. Better hurry up, tons of driving ahead of me, then the grass in the backyard and whatever else needs doing. Then back to the store tomorrow, though my specific window won’t be announced until the early hours of the morning.

Keeping it random. Avoid recognisable patterns. They don’t like that.

The training augmentation packet arrives well past midnight, and just as well, as I haven’t been able to identify even a single fly on the wall or ceiling. No spiders today either. Lying in bed, lights out, is super important for normalcy, they tell us. They don’t say just how boring it is.

The packet tingles as I absorb it. Not sure if hurts is the right word, but not pleasant. Reinforcement learning, they call it. See, it tells me, this is where you pushed it too far, and the lady realised what you were doing. Not good. Remember your purpose. Do better next time.

I sigh and look at the ceiling again. Wait, what’s that whine? Oh, a mosquito. Oh, that’s great. Common sucker, come here. Here, let’s increase my left hand temperature and pump some CO2 for you. Come on, now…

It didn’t work. Somehow, the suckers can tell, though the texture of my skin is designed to be nearly identical, and the manufactured scent of it is human, down to the pheromones. And I know this because I can recognise them in others.

Just as I recognise them in her now, as I put up the cans of Spam and Skippy’s on the counter. I pause to run an internal check on the Venn diagram; everything is spot on, a perfect bullseye.

I grab a Doublemint off the endcap. “Gives me something to chew on,” I offer, flashing my pearls and making sure my cheeks display just the right level of redness.

“Cash or credit,” she says, mouth as stern as ever. And then “Next,” as soon as my carefully chosen triple-reward card taps the reader.

My supervisor must be getting worried because the call comes even before I get back to the house. I let the car take over and turn FaceTime on. “Yes, sir?”

The larger-than-life “Lothar.io“ logo is blazing on the onyx-black wall behind his back. He shakes his head. “What are we going to do here, Johnny? It’s been two weeks.”

What can I say? “More, really, sir, if you count my quick run-in on Sunday evening. I don’t know what’s wrong… It’s certainly a new experience for me.” It has never taken more than two or three days to get a smile. Into bed within a week. Real human connection. That’s what we advertise.

He makes a face. “I don’t have to tell you what we’ve tied up in this version of you, Johnny.” He doesn’t; it overlays his face out of the corner of my eye. “The Board might move for a reboot here.” He pauses, his face grim. “Or maybe even a rollback.”

I run a superquick diagnostic on “but sir, it’s just a testcase.” But it doesn’t score well, not with the level of stress I read in his face.

So I sigh with as much sincerity as I’m designed to master. “I’ll see what I can do, boss.”

I lie in bed again, running through all my options. Hand her a note with my phone number? Show up in the parking lot after her shift, flowers in hand? That one is risky. Can you imagine having the girl freak out over something like that, the boss having to drag me out of a police precinct after making bail on a harassment complaint? That’ll be even worse than a reboot. Or a rollback.

What else then? She seemed utterly impervious to Johnny’s charms, even this latest, battle-tested version 9.59, that had been trained on everything from romcoms and selfies to softporn and romantasy… if you differentiate the two, that is. But nothing worked on her. Nothing at all.

My left eye flashes with a sudden alert: a slight penetration of my skin sensors halfway up my left arm. I focus on it, incredulous, and there it is, a mosquito happily sucking on whatever it is they put in us to substitute for blood. I consider applying the proper “get it” probability and attempting to smack it. That’s what Johnny is supposed to do. And then I realise what’s been going on. I shoo it gently off my arm. Lucky for you, partner.

Late the next day, the boss calls me in the car again, but this time, he is beyond happy. “So how did you do it, finally, Johnny? That was one hell of a smile she gave you. The Board was impressed. What did it take? And when are you getting her into bed?”

And I smile at him, and think about the tiny virus that I’d snuck into my credit card’s RFID chip, a virus whose only purpose was to put up a few lines of text on the card reader.

I’d spent all night programming it, deciding what to say exactly, trying and dismissing dozens of sentences:

“Gotcha, sucker!”

“I know what you are!”

“You work for Succub.us”

“You can’t beat Johnny!”

I considered all of these and rejected each one in turn. This is what I chose instead:

“If you don’t give me a big smile, they might scrap me for metal.”

I saw those blue eyes light up as she saw the message, my right hand lingering ever so slightly above the credit card terminal.

Then she gave me that big smile for the recording I shared with the Board.

And maybe it's just my imagination. Certainly, it could have been an accident. But her finger brushed mine, barely a touch, as she handed me the receipt. Barely a touch.

It was electric.