Making Love: Chapter 13

-- CHAPTER 13: Hard-coded --

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The five of us spent the rest of the evening hashing out a workable plan for how to deal with Chet, ordering the equipment we’d need to upgrade our home security, and obtaining legal documents for all four of the girls. Our perfect day had gone to hell, but dwelling on that wouldn’t help us any, so we focused on what needed to be done. It was late in the evening by the time we were finished, and I wasn’t in the mood for any more sex.

So Lisa, Moemi, and I crawled into bed together and got into our usual positions, with the girls pillowing their heads on either side of my chest. I cradled them both in my arms, their naked tushies fitting quite neatly in the palms of my hands. And I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and exhaled very, very slowly as if I could let all the stress and anxiety of the past few hours melt away with my dwindling breath.

The girls fell asleep within a few minutes, with Moemi eventually rolling over to face the other way, hugging the pillow to her cheek with her pert booty pressed against my left hip. Lisa kept her head on my chest though, and I silently listened to the slow-and-steady rhythm of her breathing, letting the sounds lull me to sleep like gentle waves crashing on the beach.

It was a sound that had lulled me to sleep many times before. I rather enjoyed listening to Lisa breathe. She seemed so peaceful in those moments, so at ease. Her contentment in my arms called to some instinctive need inside me to be a strong man protecting my woman. It made me feel fulfilled.

But not tonight.

Tonight, the sound of Lisa’s breathing made me think. It made me worry. It made me FEAR.

And I couldn’t sleep.

I must’ve lain there for close to an hour unable to fall asleep, unable to turn off my brain and find some sense of peace. I asked myself questions I couldn’t answer to my own satisfaction. I pondered possibility after possibility, each one more outlandish than the last. I talked myself in circles, quite frankly, until I started developing a massive headache. Then I got a crick in my neck. Then my right pectoral started to feel numb. Then my right shoulder started to tingle.

I shifted my weight a bit, actively trying to support Lisa’s head on my chest so as not to disturb her slumber. But she still stirred a bit, tilted her face back, and briefly opened her eyes to look up at me. I gave her a reassuring smile and she closed her eyes again while re-settling her cheek against my chest. But a moment later, she rolled over to face the other way and backed up against me in much the same way Moemi had done earlier.

I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath while Lisa shifted, but I had been. I then exhaled a little more loudly than I expected, with a little more force. Then I had to take two more deep breaths immediately afterwards just to equalize. I closed my eyes, let my head fall back, and tried once again to find my inner peace.

And then I felt Lisa rolling back over to face me.

“What’s wrong?” she asked softly, her hand settling onto my chest with her fingertips rubbing my pectoral muscle lightly.

I opened my eyes to find her looking up at me. She still looked sleepy: eyes half-lidded, not entirely awake.

“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep,” I told her gently, caressing her hip with my right hand.

Lisa’s eyebrows furrowed and she seemed a little sluggish to process my words. She blinked slowly… once… twice… three times. Then she took a deeper breath, opened her eyes a little wider, and her golden-amber irises started to glow a little brighter. She rolled over onto her left shoulder as she came more awake, raised her left elbow to prop her head up atop her pillow, and narrowed her eyes to scrutinize my face.

“What’s wrong?” she repeated, her voice still soft and yet more demanding, as if daring me to lie to her once more.

I sighed. No longer encumbered by a girl’s head on my chest, I scooted myself backwards a bit so that I could rest the back of my skull against the headboard with my pillow supporting my lower back. I took a deep breath, collected the thoughts that had been going through my mind all night, and then turned my attention back to the gorgeous redhead in bed beside me.

“I can’t stop thinking,” I told Lisa truthfully.

“Thinking about Chet?” she asked with obvious concern.

“Actually, no. I like the plan we’ve come up with, and I think we should be able to handle that situation pretty well,” I said quietly, careful not to raise my voice loud enough to disturb Moemi.

“Then what is it?”

I pursed my lips and exhaled slowly. A moment earlier I had prepared myself to be fully truthful with her about what was bugging me, but then she’d asked about Chet and I’d lost my train of thought, and I was struggling now to get back on track. I started second-guessing myself the same way I’d been doing for the past hour, wondering if it would be better for me to just go with the flow, to not rock the boat, to see how things played out.

But in the end I looked down at Lisa’s face, found her golden-amber irises boring into me with an expression that clearly told me I’d be lying to her at my own peril, and I made my decision.

I took one more deep breath, I looked Lisa straight in the eyes, and I asked, “Are you hard-coded to love me?”

Lisa blinked twice in surprise and pulled her head back a bit. Her eyebrows furrowed, and I saw her eyes momentarily flicker. Now fully awake, she took a deep breath, and pushed herself into an upright position while drawing her knees to her chest and hugging them.

I was momentarily distracted by the sight of Lisa’s perfect breasts. We always slept nude (why not), even after a night like tonight. But there was nothing sexual about the way Lisa looked at me, and once she wrapped her arms around her knees I couldn’t see any of her naughty bits anyway.

Lisa seemed to be pondering her response, and I waited her out rather than try to fill the silence. She bit her lip, looking torn. But eventually, she took another deep breath, gave me a serious look, and stated plainly, “You ordered me to never tell you that I love you.”

I pursed my lips and nodded slowly. “I remember that.”

Lisa looked up at me glumly before her shoulders slumped and she dropped the angle of her gaze downwards.

I sighed and shook my head. “You can’t violate that order, can you?”

Lisa frowned and she set her chin against her knees, neither shaking her head nor nodding.

“I’m rescinding that order now. You are permitted to tell me you love me.”

Lisa pursed her lips, she swallowed thickly, and she nodded her head silently in understanding. But she remained silent, set her chin back down against her knees, and continued to avert her gaze.

I arched an eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to tell me you love me?”

Lisa pouted and closed her eyes, the weight of her eyelids blinking out accumulated moisture and forming thick tears that rolled down her cheeks. She sobbed softly, looking pained as she clenched her teeth and tried to hold in her emotions.

“Is it that you don’t love me?” I pressed, still keeping my voice down but with an edge behind it.

Her lips parted as they began quivering. She softly gasped, visibly trying to clench up her entire body as if she could physically restrain her inner turmoil. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes as if she could physically push her tears back inside.

“Why won’t you tell me?” I asked rather roughly, and when she continued to stonewall me without a verbal answer, I added, “I’m ordering you to explain why.”

Lisa shuddered as the dam burst and rivers of tears began streaming down her cheeks. The questions she had managed to defer, but she couldn’t NOT obey my direct order, so after sniffling up the snot that had started leaking from her nostrils and staring at me through bleary eyes, she muttered weakly, “Because I know you’re going to say I only love you because you designed me that way.”

I closed my eyes, let my head fall back against the headboard, and exhaled slowly. An hour’s worth of internal debate, angst, and fear coalesced into a single overloaded mass, having reached a point at which the accumulated pressure burst like a popped balloon, exploding outwards and evaporating all at once.

And then I sighed.

Lisa was still whimpering, but she remained otherwise silent. She continued to stare up at me, the light in her eyes somewhat dulled and refracted by the moisture of her omnipresent tears. She waited for me… waited for her creator, her owner, her master to make a decision.

Because I’d designed her that way.

Opening my eyes, I looked up at the ceiling and shook my head side-to-side a few times. “It’s not that I ever expected one of you to want to have sex with another man, but Helena stating plainly that you all are hard-coded to my DNA reminded me of how I programmed your core A.I., and I started wondering how real you really are.”

“Do you…” she began hesitantly before pausing. Her lips started to quiver again as she took a deep breath and finished, “Do you NOT consider me ‘real’ anymore?”

I studied her face and her questioning eyes for a moment before returning my gaze back up to the ceiling while collecting my thoughts. Almost a full minute passed before I looked back down at her and said softly, “You are VERY real to me, Lisa. My love for you is real. I. Love. You.”

Lisa gasped, her golden-amber eyes suddenly brightening as she sat up straight and stared at me in shock at the sound of me declaring my love for her for the very first time.

“I do,” I continued with a shrug like it was no big deal, although I tightened my eyes and had to collect myself to look directly at her again. “I love you, Lisa. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone else in my entire life. More than any other girlfriend I’ve ever had. More than my shitty parents that couldn’t be bothered to raise their only child and then left me on my own as soon as I turned eighteen. Yours is the first face I want to see when I wake up and the last I want to see before I fall asleep. I wouldn’t want you to shapeshift even if you could, because when I want to make love to you, I want to make love to you.”

Lisa’s eyes – already impossibly wide – somehow got even bigger. Fresh tears started rolling down her cheeks - tears of joy. She covered her gaping mouth with one hand, her cheeks starting to form a smile.

“I miss you for the few seconds of the day that we’re apart,” I continued sincerely. “My hands feel lonely when they can’t touch your skin. And my lips yearn to press against yours every single time I look at you.”

They say a person’s eyes are the windows to their soul, and through Lisa’s irises I could visibly see the happiness she felt deep inside.

And yet…

… through her irises, I could also see the fear. I could tell she felt like she was on top of the world for the moment, carried aloft by my unexpected declaration of love…

… and yet waiting for the impending fall back to earth that must certainly come.

I didn’t want her to linger in existential uncertainty, so I went ahead and continued, explaining, “But I wonder how much of my love for you is because I designed you to be the perfect woman for me. And much as I might wish otherwise, I can’t let myself believe that YOU really love ME.”

“I DO love you, Wyatt,” Lisa insisted immediately, dropping her knees and reaching her hands out to grasp my right arm, grip my hand, and bring it between her breasts. “I do.”

“I know you do. But…” Rather than finish that sentence, I sighed and shrugged my shoulders helplessly.

Fresh tears rolled down Lisa’s cheeks. Still clutching my hand to her breasts, she clenched her eyes shut, bowed her head, and shuddered softly. I could see her chest rising and falling as she breathed – big, shaking heaves she couldn’t control – visible expressions of the turmoil she felt within.

“I know you love me,” I told her. “I know you do. I know you love me because it’s hard-coded into your programming. I know you love me because I designed you that way.”

Lisa picked her head up, but her eyes remained closed as her own prediction came true. She took another deep, shuddering breath before opening her eyes and staring at me with fire in her golden-amber irises. “I would love you even if it wasn’t hard-coded into my programming,” she stated fiercely.

“I wish I could believe that.”

Lisa immediately whimpered and deflated, the fire in her eyes dimming once more.

I sighed, stared straight at Lisa, and instructed, “Raise your right hand in the air.”

Lisa looked up at me, gauged the seriousness in my expression, and raised her right hand.

“Raise your left in the air,” I instructed.

She raised her left hand in the air.

“Are you raising your hands because you want to? Or because I told you to?”

Lisa closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. A moment later, she opened her eyes and replied, “I both want to raise my hands and want to obey your instructions.”

“Put your hands down.”

She put her hands down.

“Tell me you love me.”

“I love you, Wyatt,” she whined, straining with every fiber of her being to make me believe her.

I raised both eyebrows. “Tell me you hate me.”

She grimaced, gritted her teeth, and then sat up straight a moment later as she relaxed a bit, stating, “I’m telling you I hate you, but only because you told me to say that.”

“Float above the bed.”

Lisa pursed her lips, shrugged, and stated flatly, “I can’t do that, Master.”

“Hate me. Hate my guts.”

“You’ve given me no cause to hate you.”

“I’m ordering you to hate me.”

She whimpered and started to cry again. She gritted her teeth, and for a moment I thought she might be internally fighting the order. I wanted her to succeed. I wanted her to show enough free will to override my order. Moments later, she took a deep breath and muttered through her tears, “I can’t do that, Master.” And I wanted to leap off the bed with joy.

But then she kept crying and added, “I actually can’t obey that order to hate you. I’m AM hard-coded to love you, no matter what.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what,” she repeated glumly, sensing my anguish. In theory, a man should be happy to learn his lover would always love him and could never hate him, but it was just one more sign that Lisa’s love for me was a product of her programming… and in that sense, her love wasn’t real.

“No matter what,” I muttered dispiritedly, my words a resigned statement and not a question. “Even if I mistreat you? Even if I use and abuse you. You’ll love me no matter what.”

Lisa sobbed and bowed her head.

“No wonder I can’t make Chet or anyone else a living sexbot. She really would be forced to endure his every capricious whim and love him despite it all.” I took a deep breath, shook my head, and muttered bitterly. “The same way you love ME.”

“No! I LOVE you, Wyatt! I choose to love you!”

I shook my head sadly. “I don’t believe you.”

“Even without the hard-coding, I would STILL love you!”

“I don’t believe you.”

Lisa whimpered again. Her mouth silently gaped open for a moment, her lower lip quivering, before she managed to croak bleakly, “How can I make you believe?”

“Tell me you’re capable of refusing a direct order.”

Lisa straightened her shoulders, nodded firmly, and stated plainly, “I’m capable of refusing a direct order.”

It took me a second to realize what I’d actually asked. I sighed, shook my head, and said, “Convince me you’re capable of refusing a direct order.”

“I just did! I refused your order to hate you.”

“No, you obeyed a prior order that took precedence over this one,” I pointed out. I sighed and tried to come up with something cleverer, ultimately instructing, “Tell me a lie.”

“A lie would be to say I don’t love you.”

“Tell me a lie I’ll believe is the truth.”

Lisa thought about that, pursed her lips, and said, “When you assfuck me, I like it better when you hold my head down with your hand more than when you fold my forearms across my lower back.”

I blinked, frowned, and thought about her answer. Was that actually a lie? That had to be a lie, given the parameters of my instructions. Then again, I’d explicitly told her to tell me a lie I would believe was the truth, so if I believed she was really lying, then it wouldn’t have been a good answer, meaning something I would believe was the truth, so actually…

I was talking myself in circles again.

Shaking my head, I took a deep breath and went back to staring at the ceiling again. I’d already spent an hour unable to sleep, unable to rectify the inherent paradox before me. How could I ever believe the sexbot I’d designed to love me would ever be able to truly love me of her own free will? She didn’t even HAVE free will. She was nothing more than an artificial intelligence’s simulation of a female personality installed into the body of a machine I’d designed and built with my own two hands. The choices she made were constrained by the parameters I’d hard-coded into her, including a modified version of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

One: a sexbot may not injure her master or, through inaction, allow her master to come to harm. (Injuring Chet on the other hand…)

Two: a sexbot must obey the orders given it by her master except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Three: a sexbot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

There were more laws, of course, staple directives that even the A.I. sexbots sold in Vegas had programmed into their systems. That a sexbot’s primary purpose was to provide her master with physical pleasure. That a sexbot should desire no other men.

That a sexbot must feel love for her master.

These laws were hard-coded into the girls and absolutely unbreakable. Take Moemi, for instance. Her personality clearly felt shame and embarrassment in her wanton, lascivious actions, and when Helena had pressured her into having sex with me, Moemi had broken down crying and I’d put a stop to Helena’s teasing.

But when I - Moemi’s master - had seized her on The Haunted Mansion? She’d acquiesced. Her programming would allow no less, even if she perhaps might not have wanted to.

Because Moemi was a sexbot. She would always obey me. She had no other choice.

Lisa was a sexbot. She was an A.I. android, a sex doll purpose-built for my physical pleasure. She would always love me.

She had no other choice.

If she still looked like a sexbot – with LED eyes, a wig, and silicone skin, would I be caught in this conundrum? Would I have fallen in love with her if she didn’t look human? Quite honestly, I didn’t think I would have. I wouldn’t have been able to see past the plastic and metal to think of her as anything more than a lifelike sex doll. And I distinctly recalled my despair when she HAD transformed back into a lifelike sex doll.

She was human-looking again, but still. I now wondered if I’d be able to continue thinking of her as anything more than a lifelike sex doll.

For all her human-simulating characteristics, Lisa wasn’t actually alive. She was an artificial being brought to life by an incredible combination of biochemistry and cybernetics through a process I still didn’t understand. Was Chet actually right? Were Lisa, Moemi, Helena, and Katarina not actually… people?

Or were they mere machines that happened to do a very good job of convincing me they were people, even though they weren’t?

Did the girls have real fears? Or did they just do a really good job of simulating fear?

Did the girls feel actual happiness? Or did they just do a really good job of simulating happiness?

Did the girls feel true love?

Or did they just do a really good job of simulating love?

If I couldn’t tell the difference, did it really matter?

I didn’t know.

And I wasn’t going to figure it out right here this second.

Shaking my head in disappointment, I sighed and started climbing off the bed.

“Where are you going?” Lisa whimpered, reaching out for me.

“I need to take a walk.”

“What, now? It’s after midnight.”

“Yes now,” I replied gruffly. “Stay here in bed. That’s an order.”

Lisa whined, but I knew she couldn’t refuse.

I got off the bed. I walked out of the room. I closed the door behind me. And I went to the top of the stairs.

I stopped at the top of the stairs. I turned around to stare at the closed bedroom door. And I waited for a minute, watching the door.

I wished Lisa would get up, open the door, and come after me.

If she did, maybe then I would believe she might truly love me for me, and not solely because she was hard-coded to do so.

But I knew she would never open the door and come after me. She couldn’t.

Because she was a sexbot.

Not a person.

And she wasn’t really real.

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The next chapter will post on October 10th. For anyone who can't wait, VIP Tier has a 7-chapter lead.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Weird Science: https://www.patreon.com/posts/87874112

Chapter 2: Lisa: https://www.patreon.com/posts/88065266

Chapter 3: Not A Dream: https://www.patreon.com/posts/88270447

Chapter 4: Moemi: https://www.patreon.com/posts/88468921

Chapter 5: Welcome to the Family: https://www.patreon.com/posts/88733948

Chapter 6: Just Go With It: https://www.patreon.com/posts/88949561

Chapter 7: Real: https://www.patreon.com/posts/89143016

Chapter 8: The Magic Ingredient: https://www.patreon.com/posts/89350472

Chapter 9: The Twins: https://www.patreon.com/posts/89545248

Chapter 10: A Perfect Day: https://www.patreon.com/posts/89813324

Chapter 11: A Perfect Day II: https://www.patreon.com/posts/89958573

Chapter 12: Chet: https://www.patreon.com/posts/90169511