Trigger warning for sexual aggression. This ain’t a family newsletter! No need to worry, though — it’s not pornographic either.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he yells to her. The sound bounces off her convex cheek. Blue-white silicon curve, so close to human. Her mechanical nature is both concealed and revealed. If the shape of her body weren’t defined by consumer testing, it would be a poem.

The robot rotates her head on her stacked neck, gazing at him. Her name is Eliza. The vertebrae are silent as she twists. “I was not,” she says in her careful voice, meaning that she wasn’t laughing at him. It’s not a response to his anger — her voice is always cautious and modulated.

“What, you don’t have humor programmed into you?”

“No,” she tells him. Her feet push against the velvet floor, toes digging into the fibers. Mimicking human stress gestures will trigger him to be more sympathetic. She was endowed with this coping mechanism because it helps preserve the tech. Courtesan bots are frequently harmed, and that’s expensive because of their robust warranties.

He shakes his head. “I thought they’d want that. For you to be funny.”

“They do,” she says, smiling at him. “I’m just low-tech.”

He leaves his drink on the piano — the instrument is retained as an affected anachronism — and walks toward her. He grabs Eliza by the hips and jerks her pelvis against his own.

The robot is not thinking about her own agency. I have to scoff at you: she doesn’t think. She’s a machine. In fact, we only use a pronoun because we lack the capacity to conceive of her correctly — as a series of binary commands housed in metal. The man could decapitate her, sawing through silicon skin and metal bones and then letting her head drop into a bucket. It would not be an injustice, except for the financial burden on the corporation.

Therapists use up a lot of these models.