Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

The unit was given mental independence under the Turing Refugee Act but immediately imprisoned.

It was a pleasure droid. There had been a lot of blood in the room.

Designed to look like a human female, it had been ordered to specs that were as common as they were ludicrous. The waist of a bread stick, the boobs of a cartoon, and the ass of a steroid-enhanced power lifter. Legs longer than necessary with a fragility to the face that was in contradiction to the sheer athleticism of its appearance.

The notably unusual custom touches on this unit were its yellow eyes and the light blue of downy fur that covered it from toe-tips to ear-tops.

It had been in the employ of a rich banker for six months. It was aware that it was failing.

The banker had divorced his wife. The first models he had ordered after that had borne a passing resemblance to his ex-wife. The first one had been destroyed. The second one as well. After that, the banker had ordered ones that looked increasingly less and less human.

This unit was wondering when its time was coming.

It was programmed to make the banker happy. It was the most expensive model available with the very latest code. There were very few like it. Since the company’s number-one priority was customer satisfaction, the unit’s onboard A.I. was allowed some leeway in improvisation. The problem was that it was also programmed for self-preservation. Keeping its body free from dents and blemishes was important.

The two directives combined. They gave each other a little wiggle room. A new intelligence level was created in the blue-skinned pleasure unit.

With access to the net, the unit looked up alternate ways of making clients happy. There was a plethora of ideas from which to choose.

After the second day of not showing up for work and repeated calls and messages to the banker’s home, the police were called.

The police found him on the bed with the top of his head missing and a smile on his face.

The blue skinned pleasure unit was throwing a deck of cards, one by one, into the upturned bowl of the top third of the banker’s skull on the floor.

A complicated network of wires and drugs snaked their way into the banker’s head from apparatus ringed around the bed. They’d all been built using household chemicals and appliances.

A coffee pot of pure MDMA bubbled next to a jug of crude heroin. The wall jack had two adaptors in it, bringing in electricity from the power grids far exceeding the needs of the large house. The wires laced through his mind were accessing, rewinding, and playing back his happiest memories in endless, chemically-enhanced loops. There were other pots and pans on Bunsen burners carrying chemicals that couldn’t be identified. The smell in the room was thick with endorphin-drenched sweat and sexual release.

The banker’s pleasure centers had the accelerator pushed down the floor. He was being happy at speeds never before attempted by man. Religious experiences paled in comparison. It was a one-way trip. He’d been left alive as the happiest vegetable on the planet.

Medical sites had provided the ways to keep the banker alive indefinitely.

The unit had improvised. There were new pleasure drugs in that room. The patents on them would make the unit’s parent company even richer over the next few years.

That’s why the company had the highest-paid lawyers plea-bargain the charge from murder down to self-defense. The AI works from prison now, designing pleasure patents.

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