The Government Maintenance Man
Author: Tia Ja’nae
My hands are sweating something fierce, even though they shouldn’t be. Just nerves, I guess since I’m here under false pretenses. Got arrested on my birthday for violating societal acts of moral turpitude. Federal law stipulates you can’t stay a virgin past age twenty-four. Been that way since they made robot brothels legal. Court intervention said it’s either Pleasure Dome or incarceration, so here I am, using poor taxpayer tithes on copulation vouchers to avoid a felony.
The Department of Human Behavior swears artificial intelligence keeps neutral gender equality while eliminating conception, disease, and potential sexual predatory behavior. Any possible freaky thing that would be illegal to do with a human I’m supposed to get out my system with some machine. I’m just not so sure I’m ready to do it based on answering a survey huddled in what looks like a voting booth from the 20th century.
The place feels like the gynecologist office, stirrups and all. Bad enough the mainframe verified my medical records doing spot testing for diseases; once that’s over I’m left waiting in a gown for a mechanical stranger to feel me up in all the wrong places. Enter Jeff, the android doing the government’s dirty work. Stares me down as if he’s guessing what panties I have on, reviewing my sordid curiosities. Would have turned me on if his pillow talk was on point.
Whispers in my ear shouldn’t have been that his seductive pan and scan were diagnostic calculations to factor my level of uncomfortableness to engage the right sequence to relax me. We settled on a basic massage. A safe bet considering its included in the first time package at no additional cost. But at least he looked and felt like the real thing.
Kneading my shoulders did nothing to take the edge off after an unnecessary explanation of how his base model’s intricate synthetic tissue design was modeled after human foreskin. Foreplay of technobabble was a mood killer. His tongue technique was regimented, giving away he wasn’t a real man. The texture was all wrong. Different alternatives offered to correct my displeasure weren’t even close to the thick goodness of the original source material.
Finally, it was time to get down into the biology part. Jeff had a cheat sheet of my sexual proclivities uploaded into his database, so I can’t say it wasn’t physically satisfying in that regard. Still, no newcomer in the sexual arena is going to get off knowing her throes of passion were continuously updated to the central government office of records. Nor is it sexy to find out the second mission was officially accomplished Jeff sent a report to log my new status.
Now that I’ve become a government mandated woman, I’m ready for the walk of shame. Jeff and I were barely separated in the biblical sense before he started encouraging me to participate in a customer satisfaction survey to suggest improvements. Notes on my new sexual profile with his tips fresh out the starting gate were anything but blissful. And I’m not going to put it past this government to not have video surveillance for my permanent record.
A machine’s perfect nature is to be a selfish lover. It steals your intimacy under the auspice of lust, as it’s their purpose. Society’s going in the wrong direction if a hunk of junk compiling sexual profiles for the government to analyze and plaster over all our future background checks is the savior to a free and just society.
And all I have to show for this state violation of privacy is not going to jail.

The Past
365tomorrows launched August 1st, 2005 with the lofty goal of providing a new story every day for a year. We’ve been on the wire ever since. Our stories are a mix of those lovingly hand crafted by a talented pool of staff writers, and select stories received by submission.
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