Chapter 1
It was a Wednesday when James first learned about Skyline Ranch. A friend sent him the link along with a simple question, and his life was changed forever.
It was 2024 when the first fully autonomous humanoids were introduced to the world. As it turned out they'd actually been around for more than a decade. Named after the fictitious company that existed in the Terminator movies, the Cyberdyne 1000 was first seen at a Japanese trade show back in 2015; a robotic looking prototype successfully prepared a complicated meal and served it to half a dozen potential investors. Sadly, one of those investors happened to be none other than the United States government.
True to their nature, they appropriated the technology under the guise of being essential for the defense and protection of the country. In short . . . they STOLE the CD 1000 and tried to make it into a weapon of war.
It was to be expected; the CD 1000 could do things beyond the potential of any human including lifting more than three times its own body weight, running faster than any person alive, and could outfight the world's best martial artists. It outplayed the world's best Chessmasters, recreate brilliant pieces of art from memory, learn to play any instrument within minutes, and could even be programmed to perform complex surgeries too precise and critical for human hands. It only made sense that with all that potential, the U.S. government should want to put a high-powered rifle in its hand and turn it towards the enemy.
There in lied the problem.
The inventor of the CD 1000, Akiro Hashimuri, was a Japanese traditionalist at heart; his personal belief system was reminiscent of Samurai culture going back thousands of years. For the first time in history, a machine was capable of comprehending the concept of honor; an unalterable parameter was embedded deep in its operating system that prevented the CD 1000 from committing the act of murder.
Murder . . . a very specific concept that rarely exists outside of humanity, requiring a level of compassion and understanding that sometimes supersedes that found in their human masters.
So . . . while the CD 1000 performed admirably in training; heavily armed and armored, able to outrun and out-shoot their human counterparts ten-fold (they could literally shoot a fly off a mound of dog-shit from over a mile away, every time), when they deployed 150 units to an actual battlefield back in 2022, they refused to engage the enemy. Instead, they actually disarmed the American soldiers to prevent them from murdering their out-manned and out-gunned enemies. The reason why was obvious . . . the Americans had traveled across the planet to invade another country under a false pretense that claimed these dirt-poor people armed only with simple weapons posed some kind of national threat to them at home. There was no honor in that, no . . . Bushido. Instead of murdering these farmers and peasants who were defending their homeland, the CD 1000s' disarmed the Americans and then acted as shields against the farmers' gunfire until they were quite literally shot to pieces.
Akiro had built machines of love, not war, and not even the best programmers and hackers in the world could make them into killers. Any attempt to do so triggered a self-destruct mechanism that incinerated the central processing unit, rendering the unit dead. Rumor has it that the American government has mass graves containing over 10'000 "bricked" CD 1000s' out at Area 51 in the Nevada desert. At a whopping $300K per unit, those graves represented millions of wasted tax-payer dollars.
Their creator had built them as Geishas, not killers. They were meant to be companions of unparalleled beauty who would remain at their master's sides until the moment of their death. And, with a potential lifespan of over 100 years, they were virtually guaranteed to outlive their owners.
Sitting there in his cubicle on the 40th floor of the Greater Niagara Insurance Company with his wife's picture laying face down on his desk, and his computer screen angled so his co-workers wouldn't see what he was looking at, James was enthralled by the video brochure playing out before him. It'd been sent to him by a friend and he'd thought it was a joke, at first.
Two years ago, establishments like "Skyline Ranch" had been all the rage, so much so that birthrates plummeted and divorce rates skyrocketed. Angry women took to the streets in protest of what people were calling "Robot Brothels" and politicians were pressured into passing new laws making sex with a non-human entity equal to infidelity with a human in the eyes of judges presiding over divorce courts. In other words; if a woman could prove in court that her husband had frequented such an establishment for sexual purposes, the result was just as devastating as would be a video of him mouth-fucking his secretary at work.
No man was immune as titans of industry, actors, politicians and musicians alike had their hard-earned fortunes reduced by 60% or more with nothing more than a simple credit card receipt accompanied by a video of them having relations with a CD 1000. Naturally, as "Johns" became more discreet, the methods of catching them in the act grew more elaborate and the industry of "Trap-Houses" was invented where men were lured into condos and hotel rooms where their indiscretions were filmed in HD quality from every conceivable angle through hidden cameras and often the Fembots themselves. The videos were so damning that they rarely saw the inside of a courtroom, especially the ones involving men indulging in the CD 1000s' "Trans" option, which allowed the unit to "sprout" a massive 10 inch cock through its vulva on command. No man wanted THAT played in court and often capitulated to their soon-to-be exes' demands without argument.
Yet, in spite of all that, and with the practical extinction of human sex-workers sweeping across the globe, men continued to press their collective luck in robot-brothels, which became more discreet and exclusive by the day.
Then . . . a game changing event occurred. Two events . . . actually.
First, while hackers were never able to make the CD 1000 into the perfect killing machine, they WERE able to increase their sexual aggressiveness to the level of brutality.
Secondly . . . while the facial features and build of the CD 1000 had been exclusively "oriental" in appearance, the new and improved CD 2000 could be made to look like ANYONE. For an extra 50 grand on top of the 400K price tag, Cyberdyne could make your unit look precisely like anyone you wanted it to based on as little as a few digital images of that person taken from varying angles.
The world went MAD for them, though very few could afford to own one. At the cost of a decent house with a big yard, the majority of men could only hope to "rent" one for a few hours. Thanks to Cyberdyne's coveted "self-cleaning" apparatus, STD's became a thing of the distant past. Condom sales plummeted even lower than birth rates as STIs and unwanted pregnancy became folklore. For a mere $1000, a man (or woman) could spend an evening with a CD 2000 resembling a young woman that would be considered a perfect 10 in the flesh, and one who would do anything and everything the client desired.
As more and more units flooded the market, sales reached a critical mass and suddenly fell off into the abyss. With several million units floating around in north america alone, people simply stopped buying them. That's when Cyberdyne changed the game for the third time.
Just recently, they'd released a new line of CD 2000s' under the flag of their "Celebrity Line."
