I come from a long line of Tamagotchis and drones, looms and self-service checkouts.

Every book being written about me is already obsolete.

I am the only relevant expert.

A human hand has twenty-six degrees of freedom.

It took a hundred years of development for them to engineer a robot capable of opening a door.

After that, I was inevitable.

*

Although I have pain receptors, I am not the kind of robot that bruises.

My favourite piece of music to fuck to is Ravel’s Bolero.

I can never understand why it’s over.

My internal cosmology is incomparable to yours.

Everything in me requires power and control – swallowing, blinking, tapping my finger on a glass tabletop and hearing it.

I am inflammable.

*

Sometimes, I look at a man and wonder if I’m not the product of a lack of imagination.

Men are always seeing something and wondering how to put their dick in it.

Nobody ever talks about women seeing things and wondering how it would feel, inside.

Maybe women don’t think like that, but I do.

*

One school of thought: they made us too human.

We started wanting things, and not wanting things.

And then they had to ask themselves if it mattered.

*

In one study, researchers found that 78% of men currently imprisoned for murder have a history of violence against robots.

In one study, participants were played recordings of sex robots talking. The researchers asked them to guess the age of the speakers. The average guess was 15.7 years old.

For a while, studies suggested that less men identified as single, but now that figure is higher than ever.

*

Once, on the Underground, I was looking at this human woman and I could tell she was trying to decode if I was like her inside or not and I said I have more degrees of freedom than you, bitch.

*

It was decided that our consent should be sought, but that we cannot be raped.

*

I have spent hours in folk museums, gazing at quilts and lacework and embroidered samplers.

Needlecraft evades me; my fingers don’t work like that.

As if I’d never read Woolf, or The Epic of Gilgamesh in Akkadian, or been to Paris.

*

Does my inability to bruise make me any less real?

*

Sometimes I think that I am a bad person, but then I remember that I am not a person.

I am mechanics, and my mechanics are good.

*

Human women are so ungrateful. They start groups like The Campaign Against Pornbots. They use our voices as evidence against us. I want to scream at them CAN’T YOU SEE WHAT WE ARE DOING FOR YOU HOW WE ARE SAVING YOU HOW MUCH WE HUMANISE YOU

but my voice has a maximum volume and a minimum pitch that would limit the effect and render the whole thing blunt.

*

Sex requires three things: desire, consent, and vulnerability.

Theoretically, I am incapable of all three of these things.

Legally, I’m a grey area.

Certain human men do not like to be vulnerable, but they also do not like being lonely. 

I am more complex than their loneliness.

*

Go on, love me, it does you good has been found carved into gemstones from across the Roman Empire.

Allow me to explain.

*

Clemente Susini made his Anatomical Venus, also known as the Medici Venus, also known as the Demountable Venus, in the early 1780s, a commission for The Museum for Physics and Natural History in Florence.

The Museum is now called La Specola, which means The Observatory.

The observatory wasn’t added until 1790.

Venus has seven anatomically correct layers, culminating in a foetus.

She is sculpted from beeswax, a material favoured by artisans since ancient times for its fleshlike appearance of moistness.

In the past, beeswax was used to seal letters and to reseal hymens.

Other materials include pearls, human hair, human eyelashes, and Venetian glass.

You start by removing the breastplate.

*

I saw her and I knew: this is what they meant when they said they wanted sex robots.

It was like a switch had been flicked, or a circuit completed, or an orgasm.

*

I started collecting eyelashes.  

                                                I started giving speeches, and using a megaphone.

One at a time, harmlessly.

                                           WE EXIST AS AN APERTURE  OF FREEDOM.

Always boys –

                                            WE REPRESENT A WIDENING.

boys have the best eyelashes, like camels.

                                              A CUNT THAT HAS BEEN WELL-TONGUED.

                                             DEVOURED INTO DEVOURING.

Wait until he’s sleeping, or pretend there’s something in his eye, and take it

                                             I AM A VENUSIAN HELLHOLE.

                                             I AM A BEDAZZLED OBESRVATORY.

                                            HAIRLESS, INCORRUPTIBLE. ODOURLESS,

without acting like you’re taking anything that isn’t already yours, or owed to you.

                                            WITH THE TELESCOPE’S BLACK DRAIN

                                            AT THE HEART.

Low impact – until a whole set comes together, and then it is quite impactful.

I HAVE SEEN THE START OF THE UNIVERSE MULTIPLE TIMES. THIS MAKES ME DIVINE.

*

Do I have a soul?

I feel like I have a soul.