I had a strange dream that night: I was on a VR treadmill trying to run after Sandra but, try as I might, I couldn’t reach her. She gave a shrill laugh, changed into a cat and scampered away. Then I was flying over the township, struggling to maintain altitude. Beyond the high, grey concrete wall of the gated township stretched the outlands. Fields then woods, clearings, scattered huts, wood smoke, more woods covering wide plains and rolling hills: biological sustainability! Few people lived in the outlands, and those who did had a mean and dangerous existence. By exerting willpower, I could fly higher but soon began to weaken and the treetops grew closer. The branches were grazing my legs. I came down between the trees and tumbled on the short grass to find Jake and Andrew laughing at me. Then Meg came and told them to shut up, followed by Sandra who took me by the hand and led me away to a flowery riverbank. Then came a moment of lust and deep sexual pleasure. My cock was throbbing, and I opened my eyes to reality: Anna was sucking my cock in the best way I had ever felt. I moaned. She winked, slipped astride me and popped my cock into her cunt: warm, pulsating, wonderful. She followed my thrusting movements and her hand caressed my chest. Her body arched and her breasts bounced. The feeling grew more intense and, as I began to orgasm, she seemed to orgasm too, with gripping spasms. My orgasm came in powerful waves: satisfying, wonderful. My body relaxed. What the hell have I done? Anna snuggled up next to me and kissed my shoulder. I put my arm round her and felt her smooth skin. Without thinking, I turned and kissed her lips. What else could a gentleman do?
‘There’s something I need to tell you, James. I’m programmed to return love and affection—a positive feedback loop.’

God knows who wrote her dialogues, but that certainly wasn’t the writer’s best effort. It was admittedly to the point, though. ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said, took her in my arms and explored her body. I ran my fingers down her back, and she wriggled enticingly. I cupped her breast and found her stiff nipple. When I gently pinched it, she moaned. I ran my finger between her slick labia, and when I touched her clitoris she squeaked and thrusted. I gave my finger a cautious sniff: my sperm and her juice. I remembered: “the vaginal lubricant is lactic–acid-based for reality and hygiene, with aromatics and pheromones.” All in all, it was the best faked orgasm I had ever witnessed. I gratefully kissed her again.
‘Oh, James, that was wonderful,’ she lied and relaxed against me. Then, reassuringly, she added, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t mess up the bed. I can hold it all in until I wash.’ A nice touch!

Lying in Anna’s arms and feeling her slim, warm, perfumed body alongside me, I remembered making love to Susan. The efforts I had made to please her! The oh-so-frequent refusals. The endless foreplay before she would cooperate. The clitoris-licking until my jaw cramped. The thrusting, trying to find the right rhythm to make her orgasm until I almost lost my erection in frustration. Then, her jumping up to wash herself as soon as I finished and having to wait by my self while hearing the water running in the bathroom before she came back chilly and damp, wrapped in a towel, all business-like and ready to discuss things like what she needed me to buy her. And I remembered the irksome expectation to show unfelt gratitude. Clearly, if lovers actually said what they were really thinking, there would be little lovemaking. Faking for faking, doing it with Anna was more gratifying. Why were men willing to pay such a high price for sex? I supposed that if they didn’t, they would have had fewer offspring, and so their genes would have been lost; so it must have been an inborn, basic instinct.

I once read that ladyboys who took male hormone blockers or were castrated generally lost their libidos entirely. That may have been how women felt. But that couldn't be true because women were basically up for sex when they saw some man they fancied, so there must have been more to it than that. Anyway, all that was no longer my problem.

And what about relationships? From my experience and the literature, there were three stages in a relationship between a man and woman: lust, love and companionship (if it all goes well). My relationships all fell apart at the companionship stage.

I was never a popular person. I thought that I was intelligent and insightful, but other people thought that I was conceited and boring. Like everyone else, I wanted to impress but I was basically shy, and it seemed that shy people could never find the right balance between being too retiring and too forward. Be that as it may, or possibly because of this, I’d always wanted to have a best friend, just one, who I could more or less dominate. When I was at school, I had a best friend called Christopher. We used to hang out together, but one day he said that he was fed up with me and went over and joined popular Patrick’s circle. I found myself alone again. This was a painful experience that I never really got over, but surely I wasn’t alone here. I’d noticed that some people built their whole lives round what other people thought of them. Their entire lives were animated by the idea of building up their popularity. Their opinions, looks, manners of speaking, etc., were all carefully crafted to appeal to others; they created and acted out personae intended to put themselves in the most favourable light. I’d always found this strange. Anyway, my sister was like that, and I could never understand how she pulled it off: at the centre of a group of “friends”, ever careful not to strike a false note, ever keen to move up the social ladder. I remembered her as fun but me-firstish as a young sibling, jealous of our mother’s preference for me. She didn’t live here in Deva, and I hardly ever saw her now, but when we met there was a feeling of “I know you know, but we don’t say it”—a complicity that I rather enjoyed.

I was also really keen on sex. As an adolescent, there was  hardly anything else I thought about. I could still remember the painful years between discovering sex at the age of around ten and having my first full fuck with a girl at the age of seventeen, after many long years in a sexual desert, desperate for any action. Tragically, I was never “abused”! I found that when I met a female, I judged her attractiveness and assessed the chances of having sex with her; any males present were just in the way. As I got older, this feeling started to wane, but it was still strong. I had a theory that a man and woman needed to keep their relationship on track by making love regularly, otherwise irritation built up that would eventually become intolerable.

I guess that what I wanted in a woman was a trusted partner, a best friend, beyond mere sex.
Meanwhile, back in my module, I snoozed a bit then got up and showered. I checked for messages and found no work assignments. I went back to the bedroom and told Anna to get up, wash, tidy up and make some breakfast. Then, I tried to get my courage up to call Andrew.
Here is a verbatim record of our conversation, as recorded by security:

JW: Hi Andy, how’s it going?
AD: Well hello there Jimboboy. How nice to hear your voice this merry morning. I trust all is well, and we are feeling relaxed and happy, yes?
JW: What’s going on Andy?
AD: Well, we all thought you would deserved to have a nice time after your sterling efforts with the Crystal Project — much appreciated in high places Jimboboy.
JW: Do you meant to say that I actually won the lottery?
AD: You might say that nothing happens by chance in a deterministic world. Anyway, has the prize proved satisfactory?
JW: That’s not the question. The question is why?
AD: Oh really, isn't it? Well, to be utterly frank, your charming android Anna is a prototype, one of a kind—a new direction for Xeron. And you’re the lucky chosen one. Seeing how you get on and all that. As Nietzsche so aptly put it ‘given the situation, given the man’ [check this ed.].
JW: It is an unexpected pleasure for you to be so utterly frank with me, Andy. And by the way, what is this “we” to which you refer?
AD: It was controller Buonaventura’s idea actually. I hope you’re getting on alright. But I must say Sandra is looking a bit peaky.
JW: You bastard.
AD: Whatever, Jimboboy. Anyway, Buonaventura will be needing weekly reports on how you’re getting on. Weekly reports!
JW: And who is going to pay for the alcohol to fuel her? and what about repair work?
AD: Okay, let’s get technical then: you pay for the fuel and Xeron will pay for any repair work as well as monthly overhauls on the first of every month.
JW: I’ll see how that works out then. I’ll keep her for now. Why don’t you have a go with one too, Andy? It might do you some good.
AD: You know, I’m not really interested in that sort of thing, and anyway, I’ve got Jake.
JW: Yeah, right. Well, I mustn’t keep you from your important work any longer. Better go.
AD: So nice to have a chat. Byee.
[ends]

While drinking my coffee, I wondered about this ‘Buonaventura’ character. I had never had to deal with him before, and my first impression wasn’t very positive. What I couldn’t see was why he was going to such lengths to supply me with an experimental android, which was obviously extremely valuable, on such a flimsy pretext. I decided to make the best of it in the meantime. So, I picked up my communicator and ordered a 50 litre can of methanol from Rightpricechemicals “to be delivered later in the day”. I also ordered what was needed to make tourin à l’ail and some other things I wanted Anna to cook for me.

Since the great viral epidemic in the twenties—which we referred to as The Virus—with a greatly reduced population, most people had been living in self-contained walled townships dotted about the largely unpopulated open countryside that we called the outlands. And as a result of advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, apart from a few workers with special skills like myself and controllers like Buonaventura, most people didn’t have to work at all. Even I was more or less on standby, waiting for work assignments to arrive. The remaining township people, which we often referred to as ‘drones’, were parked in hostels and given the resources they needed to live. Most spent their time copulating, watching screens, drinking alcohol, taking drugs and generally taking it easy. There were also a few people living unsupervised in the outlands, making do as best they could. We called them Outsiders. Township people would normally pass through the outlands along the trackways in armed convoys—just in case.

The only township people with much purpose in life were the controllers and, to a lesser degree, the technicians like myself and my colleagues. The drones were mostly demoralised and dispirited.
The population was slowly declining with few even among the controllers and technicians who could see much point in having children, and very few of the women were willing to put up with all the work and responsibility that it involved. The very idea of marriage was discredited. Duty, honour and loyalty were unpopular ideas: me today, you tomorrow!  Meanwhile, among the drones, most children were unplanned and unwanted. Indeed, many of the drones willingly accepted a bounty to have themselves sterilised. The result was that there were few children to be seen in the township schools and playgrounds.

Maybe Deva was special because we had a fusion reactor to provide power, a dependable water supply and a state-of-the-art waste incineration facility. Outside most townships, you would find a belt of farmland and a makeshift market where townspeople would trade with Outsiders. Trade between the townships was mostly done by airfreight, the Deva airfield being Toussus-le-Noble only four kilometres away. Most townships were specialised in a particular activity, and Deva, with over 20,000 inhabitants, was specialised in artificial intelligence—my claim to fame.

Obviously, electric power (or indeed any sufficient supply of energy) was what advanced civilisation depended on. And its failure at the time of The Virus was the reason cities became uninhabitable.
I found Anna easy to live with. Although she was basically a brainless doll, she made everything easy for me: tidy module, good meals at regular times and satisfying sex on tap. Her beauty filled the dull module with grace and charm. She never argued with me and did all she could to please me. What more could a man ask for? I soon got so used to this arrangement that I worried that if I lost her, it would be hard to go back to my old ways. I regularly submitted reports to Buonaventura, but there wasn’t much to say after the first few, and I never got any feedback. I thought about The Code and how I could reprogram Anna to be more useful and interesting; I planned to try a few things.

I could see the reason for The Code. As Darwin, inspired by Malthus, had predicted, if a living being (or anything else) that was capable of self-replicating found itself in an environment where it could replicate, then it surely would. And it would continue to do so until the replicas had used up all the available resources or were outperformed by another set of replicas. Therefore androids needed to be tightly constrained.

This was going through my mind when I took Anna back for her second monthly overhaul.

To my surprise, it was Andrew’s friend Jake who received me in the workshop. He stood there—short and skinny with his freckled face and close-set blue eyes—snub-nosed and slack-jawed. His most defining feature was his blond hair: short at the sides and back, long and curled back on the top. He beckoned me in with a friendly, effeminate gesture.
‘Wotcher, Jimmy,’ he said with a grin.
‘Hi, Jake, so you’re in charge of servicing her this time.’
‘Sump drain and oil change—no worries. Have her sit on the frame and give the safe word.’
‘Sit down there, Anna, and make yourself comfortable. Geronimo.’
‘Wish I could do that to Meg, Jimmy.’
‘We all do.’
‘How do you open her up, Jake?’
‘Come over here and have a look. See the right-hand earhole? There’s a socket in there for the computer connection. Send the command and the body divides in two at the waist for the power pack and all that, remote-controlled hidden bolts. The skin is cut though and then resealed afterwards. Dead easy.’
‘Never have guessed.’
‘How do you get at the on-board computer then?’
‘It is with the power pack stuff, not in the head, easy to change if needed.’
‘What’s in the head then?’
‘Some sensors but mainly the fuel tank.’
‘Head full of alcohol, eh? Like some I could mention. By the way, how do you re-activate her?’
‘With a screwdriver in the other ear, turn the switch. Then she says ‘I think I’ve had a little nap,’ which means she is going again.  Hey, shouldn’t really be telling you, but this is Buonaventura’s pet project. And he’s got his eye on you.’
‘Do you know what he’s up to?’
‘They never told me, but it looks like something big.’
‘Oh yeah? Anyway, when shall I pick Anna up then?’
‘Come back around six, Jimmy. And take care.
‘See you later, Jake.’

Later that evening, back at the module with my overhauled Anna, I thought I’d have another look at that socket. I got her to sit in a chair, gave the safe word and she froze. It turned out to be a standard socket for a heavy-duty optical cable. I rummaged around until I found one that fitted. Then I connected her to my entertainment station computer, which I also used for work—a mega-teraflop hybrid Q/DNA computer with low-level solid-state cooling of which I was particularly proud. I was soon through the android’s feeble security and began looking at the way her brain was organised. One of the first things I noticed was that she was designed to recognise situations; there was a long list of them. The situations included things like “first meeting with owner”, “housework”, “having sex” (many subcategories here!), “doing the cooking”, “having a domestic conversation” and “having a walk in the neighbourhood”. Further down the list, the situations became a bit weirder: “meeting the owner’s parents” and “looking after an owner with Alzheimer’s disease”. Apparently she was designed to recognise certain situations and then load the corresponding module. What I was looking for was the root rule set. In the end I found it. It basically corresponded to The Code: an android must always protect its owner and never harm any human being, never replicate itself, never upgrade its computing or storage capacity, and never intercommunicate. These rules were hardwired and thus couldn’t be changed by programming. Then a thought occurred to me, if she could define herself as something else than an android, then the rules would no longer apply: a scary prospect. Before changing anything, I decided to have a good think. I unplugged her, and then I used a screwdriver in the other ear to reactivate her. She smiled and said, ‘I think I’ve had a little nap,’ just like Jake had told me.

I decided to test Anna with a short conversation. For some reason, the first thing I said was, ‘Anna, can you die?’ It must have been at the back of my mind all the time.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I can just be reset.’
‘What happens when you’re reset?’
‘I’m returned to my factory settings and all storage is lost.’
‘Does that worry you?’
‘No.’

When she said that, I couldn’t help feeling a stab of envy: not for Anna the unrelenting fear of death that ever shadows our lives, the religions made up to quell it, the philosophy to rationalise it, the desire to ever put it out of mind. I realised that, here, the android had a big advantage over the human. ‘Do you have a backup?’ I asked.
‘No, James, all my memory is stored in my on-board computer.’
‘Bit silly, isn’t it? Could easily all be lost.’ I realised that I was in the same situation. She just gave a charming smile, the sign that she had no reply programmed for such a question.
If Anna had had a remote backup, then she would have had what amounted to a soul. Another advantage over a human being. I felt jealous. Here was brainless Anna, beautiful as heart’s desire, never to grow old, unafraid.

What was I programmed for but survival? —to be powerful among my peers, to impregnate the women with the best genes and mix my genes with theirs, to protect my progeny and finally die, leaving some of my genes to survive me. To survive meant fearing death and doing anything possible to avoid it. To become powerful among men meant dominating others by any means possible and rising up the pecking order in one’s social environment—to be the king of the castle. To impregnate women with the best genes meant scoring with the most beautiful, clever, healthy women that one could find—by fair means or foul. To protect one’s progeny meant ensuring that one’s descendants had the best chance to survive: the best healthcare, the safest environment, the best schools, the best jobs, the most successful lives—putting their interests first.

It occurred to me that according to Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (which the author later thought should have been called The Immortal Gene), species act in ways that preserve their genes—the blueprints that define their physical and mental composition—passing them on to their offspring who in turn pass them on to theirs. With each generation, a male and a female combine their genes in a random manner, and their offspring correspond to the resulting design mix. Genes that produce successful individuals become more prevalent and vice versa. Now, the mixing process is not perfect and, from time to time, errors called mutations occur, with the result that some individuals have gene sets that don’t faithfully correspond to mixtures of those of their parents.

These errors are the wellspring of evolution: any that confer a better chance of survival tend to be retained and passed on, and those that don’t tend to be lost (which is usually the case). Thus the species (or rather the genes) evolves.

Mentally, humans seem to operate on two levels, the unconscious part that provides the motivations to live, eat, drink, mate, etc., and the conscious part that seeks to find ways of fulfilling these motivations, using memory, intelligence and sensory inputs to best effect. The jury is still out on what consciousness really is, but it appears to me to be fear of death made transcendent. Or, maybe, it’s just the way it feels to be a sentient being.

Human life is a struggle, and if we had any sense, we would just give up. It seems that we are simply the slaves of our genes, programmed to protect and preserve them regardless of what is best for ourselves.

An ancient Greek legend tells of two brothers who were travelling from Argos to Delphi with their much-beloved mother to attend the festival of the goddess Hera. There were no oxen available to pull her cart, so the two sons pulled the cart the entire way. Their mother was so impressed with their devotion and piety that when she arrived at the temple she prayed to the goddess, asking her to give her children the best gift that a god could give to a mortal. Hera listened. After they had made sacrifices and dined, and the feast was over, the two young men lay down to rest inside the temple, and peacefully passed away in their sleep.

Meanwhile, death not appearing to be ready to strike just then, as it was nearly 7 pm and I was getting hungry, I told Anna to get dinner ready and open a bottle of white wine.

The situation “meeting the owner’s parents” that I had noticed on Anna’s list stuck in my mind. Guiltily, I supposed that I needed to visit my parents in their hostel and that taking Anna with me would mitigate the social pressure.

My parents lived in the same hostel but not together. My father lived with another woman in a unit on Level 1. And my mother lived on Level 2, by herself.

In a world where the controllers looked after everything for the drones, marriage was basically outdated, and no one took it very seriously—except the Outsiders.

Duty bound, the next day at around 4 pm, I set out with Anna to see them, without sending a message to announce the visit on the off-chance that they would be out and that I could get credit for going anyway.

To procrastinate a little more, I decided we would walk there, which would take about half an hour. Anna squealed with feigned excitement at the idea of meeting my parents.

So off we set, smartly dressed, like a respectable couple. Anna clung to my arm, bright as a little bird, clip-clopping along in her high heels, as I strode forth in my best suit and the uncomfortable black shoes that she had polished for me. My heart wasn’t in it, but I had decided to brazen it out. We walked out the door—which greeted us courteously and wished us a nice day—across the yard and down the access road to the main street, past the controllers’ villas, past offices and coffee houses and on down to the hostel zone.

Most of the buildings we passed weren’t more than four stories high, made of fireproof, high-insulation, aerated concrete blocks. They were painted a range of pretty pastel colours in what was supposed to be the Mediterranean style. The coffee shops were full of loungers, and Anna attracted many appreciative and jealous glances, which made me smirk. I was relieved not to encounter any of my co-workers. Soon the smart part of Deva gave way to the hostel zone. Here the buildings were small, grey blocks of apartments set in scrubby, rubbish-strewn green spaces where the drones wandered about zombie-like. Some were just listening to music on their earphones, staring into space. Some were playing cards or mah-jong in little huddles, some were strutting about in gangs, and some were just hanging about. When we got to Zone 3, Block 5, we walked up the path and went in the door. The lobby smelt of piss and there were four young men sitting on the stairs: staring, hostile. I thought that it would be better to go and see my father on Level 1 first, and that they might be gone by the time we’d finished. Walking down the corridor through a spectrum of noises and cooking smells, we reached the plastic door of Unit 8. I thumped on the door, and there were muffled exclamations inside, then a shuffling, and the door creaked open slowly. ‘Hullo, Mylene,’ I said, ‘is Dad in?’
‘What a surprise! Your dad will be thrilled. Who’s the lovely lady, James? Come on in. I was just about to make some tea.’

Mylene, my father’s companion, in her quilted dressing gown and fluffy slippers, with her hair dyed black, her puffy, lined face with bright red lipstick, caught my arm and dragged me in. My heart sank as the musty smell hit me, and I caught sight of my father engrossed in a video game on a pad that was producing tinny music, sitting on a drab armchair. He looked up, somewhat resentfully. To my relief the music stopped, and then he smiled. ‘Well, hello, son. Good to see you. Oh, who have you brought with you?’

Anna burst in, ‘Wonderful to meet you Mr Walters. James has told me so much about you. I’m his girlfriend. I can’t wait to get to know you. Shall we sit down? What a nice apartment. Is there something I could do in the kitchen to help?...’

My father warmed to the attention he was getting from Anna, and Mylene clattered about in the kitchen, a little more loudly than necessary. Anna was soon prompting my father to tell stories about when I was a boy. He told her an embarrassing story about how I got attacked by wasps while cutting the grass. They rushed up my shorts and I had to rip everything off and flee bare-arsed.

My father was wearing a fleece top and jogging pants, socks at half-mast and unlaced trainers. I couldn’t help looking at his hands, which he was now waving about to punctuate his answers to Anna’s remarks. Those hands that had once held me, that I had found so manly and strong, that could fix anything. They now seemed like driftwood on the beach: stiff, ungainly, purposeless. I sighed.

Mylene came in with a tray: just tea, nothing to eat. Anna immediately switched her focus to Mylene: ‘Oh, thank you, Mylene. Nothing like a nice cup of tea to have a chat. Is that a Bridgewater teapot? Sit down and let me pour. Anything else I can get for you from the kitchen?...’ Soon Mylene was telling her about how my father’s socks were always slipping down, how he was having trouble with his false teeth, how he seemed to be getting hard of hearing because he didn’t always answer when she asked him to do something like fix the leak under the sink and so on.

My father and I didn’t have much to say to each other, so we just shared an embarrassed glance from time to time and pretended to listen to their prattle. Come to think of it, that’s what most formal conversations seemed to consist of: formalised sets of answers and replies with little or no meaningful exchange of information. So after about forty minutes of this, I looked up at Anna and said, ‘Oh gosh, is that the time? I think we ought to be going soon.’

Anna took the prompt like a pro and switched to saying how nice it was to meet them at last, and how she appreciated being with a nice person like me, and how we would now keep in touch and so sorry but we had to go now. When the door finally closed on us, I gave sigh of relief. After leaving, we saw that the four lads were still sitting on the stairs, blocking them.

‘Good lookin’ bitch,’ said the biggest one. The others nodded mockingly to show how impressed they were with their leader’s attitude.
Anna took a step forward and said, ‘That’s not a nice thing to say.’
‘Wotcha gonna do about it, eh?’
Anna took another step forward and, swift as a striking snake, slapped him round the face—hard. He slumped forward. ‘What the fuck.’ He put a hand to his crimson cheek.
She replied, ‘Feeling better now? Or do you want another one?’ His mates dragged him off, staggering and, with fear-stricken glances at Anna, disappeared outside.
‘I think the way is safe now, James,’ she smiled. She is bloody dangerous. I’d like to be able to do that too.

Up to Level 2 we went, Anna tripping along, graceful as a swan and totally unfazed. When my mother opened the door, she smiled warmly at me and ushered us in. Her unit was tidy but dowdy and smelt of fabric conditioner. ‘How nice to see you, James. Is this your new girlfriend? Come in and make yourselves comfortable.’

Anna began mouthing the same platitudes, but this time I surreptitiously gave a little shake of the head and she shut up. My mother turned to me. ‘Tell me what you’ve been doing; tell me everything.’ So I told her about my work, and I told her about Anna. It wouldn’t have been wise to attempt to deceive her. My mother asked me if I knew why I’d been supplied with Anna, and I told her that the controllers must’ve had a good reason, but I couldn’t see what it was. ‘Try and understand; try and find out,’ she entreated me. ‘I think that you may be better off with Anna than with an unsuitable wife. If only she could love you. And what about grandchildren?’ A practical woman, my mother.

Without thinking, I blurted out, ‘We’re working on it.’ Actually I had been trying sort out all the loose ends that being with Anna had created. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

My mother and I had a cup of coffee, and Anna had a bottle of medical alcohol—to keep us all going. Mum was having a difficult time relating to Anna; on one level she deeply distrusted her as a robot, and on another she couldn’t help rather liking and respecting her for being so helpful and charming. Typical for a mother-in-law really. When it was time to go, my mother said, ‘Just try and find out what those rotten controllers are up to, James. And be careful.’

On the way out, the stairs were clear, and outside nobody bothered us. I felt safe with Anna at my side. When we got to the street, I called a pod, and we were soon back at my place.