Villainous Aspirations

Villainous Aspirations



Page 1



“An individual who breaks a law that
conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly
accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to
arouse the conscience of the community over its
injustice, is in reality expressing the highest
respect for the law”

***
Prologue
Computer crime is the ultimate earner for those
ingenious criminal minded characters, who see
past the opportunity to make a fast buck here and
there. Computer crime accounts for almost 55%
of criminal statistics. Imagine if some genius
came up with idea of actually making the
ultimate robot! One that could not only think for
itself, but could also perform the everyday
functions of a normal human being. Now
wouldn’t that make you think? And what if
things went wrong? What if your creation not
only tried to manipulate your life, but that of the
entire world’s population? Progress is a
wonderful thing, but sometimes; even the most
beautiful things in life can turn out to be very
sinister!


Villainous Aspirations



Page 2


Chapter 1

The screen showed an excise operative being
interviewed in front of wooden crates, then it
switched to an open-mouthed sex doll, a scrolled-
down page of regulations, another sex doll,
Sony's robotic dog, and finally a computer.
With the sound turned off, and viewed
from the awkward perspective of the floor, it was
difficult to tell what the news story was about,
but if Danny had got it right, somebody was
trying to import a batch of sex dolls with an
elementary communication system, with a
Robotic electronic brain, dolls that did aural as
well as oral. And they'd tried to import them as
electronic equipment, when legally they were sex
toys, or maybe the other way round.
"Would you ever want to have sex with a
robot?" asked Danny. "I mean, when Sony or
whoever gives up building miniature dogs and
gets around to making humans with genitals,
would you ever want to sleep with one?"
"Eh?"
He felt Sharon's head turn on his arm and
knew her eyes had opened, though he wasn't
looking at them.
"You have an amazing line in pillow-
talk," she said. "You're supposed to say stuff like
Villainous Aspirations



Page 3


'I love you', not ask me if I want to join a robot
orgy."
As they lay together, flush and satisfied
on the shag-pile carpet between the sofa and TV,
images from the screen played over them like
nightclub lights. A Channel 5 newsreader looked
down at his notes on the desk, out of picture, so
he appeared to be staring below the screen at
Sharon's bare breasts and her mass of hair like a
dark fur coat lying by her side. His face displayed
earnestness, but his mouth was silenced by the
mute and opened and closed stupidly in goldfish
gulps, as if he couldn't find the words to describe
the arch of her back, the beautiful curve of her
hips.
"An amazing line in cushion-talk,"
corrected Danny, dryly. "All the pillows are
upstairs. The padded thing under my head is a
cushion."
Sharon's head rubbed up and down his
arm. "I'm way ahead of you," she said, "I've
thought about this before. It depends on how
lifelike they are. If they're perfectly lifelike,
attractive and sensitive, great lovers, then the
answer would be yes, I'd be happy to sleep with
one. How about you?"
"I can't see me trading you in for
something with batteries."
Villainous Aspirations



Page 4


Sharon slapped his bare belly. "If only
you could hear yourself."
"I can."
"But you haven't given me an answer."
"My answer's no," he said. "I couldn't
sleep with one. I'd never be able to see them as
human."
In the unused fireplace beyond Danny's
head stood a bowl of fern-fronds, spray-painted
every colour but green, since that would have
looked weird, but now appearing as many shades
of blue with the curtains closed and no light from
anything but the TV. Beyond his feet in this
small room, against the wall and close to the
door, was Sharon's upright piano, the piano she
was slowly unlearning.
Danny reached for his trousers without
disturbing Sharon, and checked the time on his
mobile. Five minutes to nine. At nine he should
be out on the street, waiting, but he could be out
there in two minutes.
"So, if somebody with a real partner
sleeps with one of these hypothetical robots," he
asked, "is that infidelity?"
Sharon gathered herself to speak, then;
hesitated. "The answer has to be the same,
doesn't it? It depends on how life-like they are. If
Villainous Aspirations



Page 5


they've got feelings, emotions, the whole
relationship thing, then yes, it's infidelity."
"You're kind of upping their status, giving
them the same value as real people."
"Or, applying the same values. Yes, I
am." Sharon sounded indignant, like her point
was obvious. She shifted, bringing her arm over
Danny's chest, her leg over his, brushing his hair
away from his ear, where she talked quietly. "But
only if they can talk and think, otherwise they'd
just be a glorified dildo."
"No, I don't think that works. Try this - if
a robot has a human partner, but slips off to a
hotel and sleeps with another robot, is that
infidelity?"
Sharon's body jerked against him, and
then settled. "Absolutely! This is assuming you
can't tell they're robots, that they have emotions,
are capable of love, not just sex-machines. If you
can’t tell, how are you going to treat them any
different? You wouldn't even know if they'd slept
with a robot or a person."
"I just don't think that'll happen. They
may look great and be wonderful in bed, but
you'll always know they're not real."
"Maybe they're already out there," she
said. "You see them on the street, even fancy
them, but you just can't tell."
Villainous Aspirations



Page 6


They'd been like this from day one,
recalled Danny, so secure in their relationship
that they could talk about sex, about sex with
other people, knowing it would never happen.
Sex with robots wasn't a very romantic subject,
as Sharon had pointed out, but she liked to know
what he was thinking about after they made love,
and if he didn't say then she might make a point
of asking.
Sharon adjusted her long skirt, leaving
her knickers close to the piano pedals but
bringing the skirt material over her legs and
pelvis. "I feel like he's perving at my bits," she
said, looking up at the screen. "Anyway," she
added, settling back on Danny's arm. "Rubber
dolls are history. The first sex robots will be
males."
"No way! The first robots will be built by
geeks, by male geeks, and they'll build females."
"No, it's males who're produced purely for
sex. You've got the male angler fish, that tiny
little male who bites the female and becomes part
of her body, shares her blood, loses his eyesight,
just hangs in there and produces sperm. Then
you've got bees and ants with their pathetic
drones, and female black widow spiders and
praying mantises saying 'thanks for the shag, now
how about dinner?'"
Villainous Aspirations



Page 7


She lay still for a while. Danny played
with her thick hair.
"But they're all built for procreation, not
recreation," he said.
She kissed him on the cheek. "You're so
adorable, even if you do sometimes talk
nonsense."
Her skin was hot against his, a comforting
heat.
"I owned a vibrator once," she said. "I
think I told you. When I was a student; Top of
the range. I can't remember the price, but I do
remember it was a week's rent. And I gave it a
name."
"A man's name?"
"No, no gender. I called it Aspiration. A
tacky name, looking back, but I were younger;
and didn't know better." Here tone sharpened,
became more rational. "This is very nice,
sweetheart, and I don't really want you to go, but
aren't you going to be late?"
Danny sighed.
"What time are you being picked up?" she
asked.
"Nine."
Sharon sat upright, her wavy chestnut
cascade swinging around to settle on her back.
She picked up the TV remote and a small clock
Villainous Aspirations



Page 8


appeared in a corner of the screen. "You'd better
get dressed; you've only got two minutes."
She looked for her bra and found it within
reach on the sofa. Danny turned his baggy white
shirt the right way out and fed his legs into his
chinos. The TV showed commercial logging of a
rainforest.
Sharon still held the remote, and for a
while Danny thought she might switch the sound
back on. Instead, she cocked her head to one side.
"That's good."
"What is?‖ –―People cutting down trees?"
Sharon was a fanatical tree-lover.
"No, this is still the news, and they're
talking about run-of-the-mill destructive
behaviour, so they must have run out of really
bad things that happened in the world."
She climbed into her cotton top, speaking
through the material as it covered her face. "You
remember two days ago, they could barely fit all
the bad news in. All those train and plane
crashes."
Her face appeared through the neckline,
for a moment it was sad, as she remembered her
own personal bad news of that day. Then she
appeared to put it to one side. "All those news
editors cursing their luck. Not enough time to
squeeze all the disasters in. And here we are two
Villainous Aspirations



Page 9


days later watching sex dolls with the brain of a
cricket and regular pillage of the planet, and in
the papers it'll be stories about pigs with faces
like well-known actors and pictures of the Virgin
Mary found inside potatoes, because clearly
nothing much has happened in the world. "
Danny tied the laces of his shoes and
stood up, smiling. He was the one who usually
found news programmes unbearable. Sharon
generally tolerated them with the same
forbearance as the rest of the planet, perhaps a
little more, as she worked in TV herself, behind
the scenes.
Now fully dressed, she put an elbow on
the cushion that had been behind his head and
regarded him. "Where's the job?" she asked.
Whichever way she stood or sat or lay, on
whatever item of furniture, it never failed to look
elegant, at least in Danny's eyes.
"Somewhere in the Thames Valley
district; it should only take a few hours."
He hoped she didn't ask anything more,
because he wasn't prepared to lie to her. This
wasn't a job in the regular sense, it was a favour
to Dan and he wouldn't get paid for it. Sometimes
he did genuine call-outs in the evenings and
nights, and that's what she'd assumed he was
doing now, and he hadn't bothered to correct her.
Villainous Aspirations



Page
10


Between the seat of the sofa and an armrest was a
plastic pouch of CD-ROMs. He picked it up and
bent down to kiss Sharon on the lips, closed
mouth, a kiss goodbye.
"Good luck," she said, which wasn't
something she normally said when he went to
work.

Danny stood on the threshold of his house, at the
top of the four broad steps that led down to street
level, looking out on to the ancient street and the
church opposite, under a London sky turning
deep blue between clouds, now the early summer
sun had gone.
Elegant Georgian townhouses faced each
other across the tarmac, separated from the
pavement by basement patios and uneven black
iron railings. All the ground floors were in off-
white stucco, except for a few rebels in light
pastels, and one in tan. Above the stucco, plain
brick rose up to create straight facades that hid
shallow-sloped roofs. And dotted along the
kerbs; setting off this man-made glory, were
rowans, and ornamental cherries and small
London planes in full leaf.
The church opposite took up an entire
block, from one side-street to the next, rising
directly out of the York stone pavement where a

Xem chi tiết: Villainous Aspirations