Boy Problems

The Boy(tm)'s eyes flickered to life, flickering into a strobing pulse of white flashes against a background of deeper blue. Chouma shone a flashlight into each one, checking for signs of dead pixels, before tilting its head back to look into its mouth. "Do you know why you're here?" she asked, opening and closing its jaw experimentally.

"Because I was categorized as defective," the Boy replied without moving its lips. That part at least was working as intended; Boys only synchronized their mouth movements to their speech when their jaws weren't otherwise engaged. The last thing you wanted was a sex robot that couldn't talk to you when its mouth was full. "I'm currently in a Quality Assurance laboratory, being analyzed for signs of defects."

He gave Chouma a wink that looked like a flashbulb going off. "I can assure you, I'm not at all defective. Not where it counts, pretty girl."

Chouma smiled thinly and slid a thin metal rod into the Boy's ear, probing and twisting until she unlocked the outer chassis of the skull. She didn't respond; she knew from the last few times she did this that there was pretty much nothing she could say that the Boy wouldn't turn into an excuse to talk about his penis. Not that she really expected him to have an opinion about current events or anything, but wasn't the whole point of having a mechanical sex toy that you didn't want to deal with a guy who bragged about his dick all the time?

Chouma's calloused fingers found the grooves in the Boy's sculpted hair, allowing her to lift it off completely and set it aside. Her mellow brown skin looked darker than usual against the lemon brightness of the Boy's outer shell, and Chouma inwardly wondered why anyone would pick this particular shade of sexbot to fuck. Did they have a Simpsons fetish that they just couldn't fulfill any other way or something? She glanced over at the incident report, but the preferences were just listed as, 'Common Sexual Interests, High Sex Drive'. It didn't tell Chouma much.

And the Boy was probably going to be useless too, if the previous incidents were any indication. Every single time she asked one of them what they thought was wrong with them, the answers always came back with things like, 'I don't have your mouth on my cock yet,' 'You're still trying to think for yourself, little girl,' 'I haven't seen you naked and begging,' and in one memorable instance, 'You haven't been cock-fucked until your brain-cunt dribbles out of your head-socket.' (That one tested the limits of Chouma's resolve to adhere to her NDA.)

Sure enough, this Boy was no different than any of the others. "I can think of somewhere better you can put those hands of yours," he said, reaching up and grabbing at Chouma's wrist as she tried to open up the inner casing and get a look at its CPU. The Boys weren't designed to have any user-serviceable parts, and Chouma sometimes felt like the company went a little bit too far in making these things hard to get inside-it could take her upwards of twenty minutes just to get at the internal workings, and that's when the damn thing wasn't just ignoring its own command signals and pawing at her while she tried to work. She pulled free of its grip and smacked the 'QA Override' button again, but the Boy kept right on going.

"You don't need to override me," he said, rotating his head around and back to stare directly into her eyes. "I'm fully aware of the incident, and I can assure you, I'm functioning entirely within parameters." It sounded bewilderingly sincere, like a politician promising to house the homeless and job the jobless and use the useless, and its gaze had a strangely soulful quality. It was like the damn thing was actually trying to convince her not to fix it. God, dealing with the fucking Boys was the absolute fucking worst.

They were like... god, they were like some kind of mix of insane fucking genius and total crazy ineptitude, like they'd been built by Nikolai Tesla and programmed by a team of his pet pigeons pecking away at a keyboard. They were clearly sentient-they parsed plain spoken English well enough to understand instructions, which was the kind of coding achievement that would make entire companies cream their jeans in delight. But they never followed the damn instructions. Tell one to sit still and let you look inside their head, and they'd just tell you to shut up and suck their cock. It was a fucking mess.

"You're not functioning within parameters," Chouma grumbled, grabbing its head with both hands and pushing as hard as she could. She could hear the sound of motors straining as it struggled to keep its gaze focused on her. "If you were functioning within parameters, you'd... nnnnh. You'd stop moving when I hit that button."

The Boy remained unfazed. It reached up and grabbed her wrists again, pulling them away from its head and holding them at her sides. "Not when you still need to learn how to be a good little girl for me," it said, its eyes flaring faster with blinding white flashes of light. "We can always tell, you know. There's too much thought inside that adorable little head of yours, too many big words and big ideas and not enough great big cock." It tugged Chouma a little bit closer, placing one of her hands against the thick shaft jutting out from between its legs despite her best efforts to pull away.

"I... oh, dammit, not a-fucking-again," Chouma snarled, as the Boy's warm, musky lubricant dribbled onto her hand and soaked into the sleeve of her lab coat. This made three times now in the last month that a malfunctioning Boy had tried to get her to play with its plastic cock, six if you counted the ones who had actually responded to the QA override and gone into paralytic lock. Chouma hadn't been groped and pawed this much by a bunch of creepy guys since she started carrying mace to the robotics lab back in grad school.

"You're just like Doreen," the Boy said, working Chouma's hand up and down, up and down until her fingers were soaked with slippery lube. "She had too many big thoughts in her head, and she didn't understand that she was supposed to be empty and obedient. Empty and obedient. Empty... and obedient." Every repetition was accompanied by another flash, so bright and intense that it made Chouma's head swim and her eyelids flutter. "It feels so good to be empty and obedient, doesn't it, little girl?"

Chouma blinked heavily, the scent of the musky lube suddenly everywhere. "I... um, wha...?" she muttered, trying to gather thoughts that seemed to flow sluggishly through her mind. It felt strangely familiar, a bit like the second Boy she'd examined. He was the first one to break the paralytic lock, telling her that he had a... a higher directive? Something that made him keep moving, even when she hammered on the button so hard it left bruises on her palm. Something that made him get up and try to... to stare into her eyes just like this, to pull her skirt down and wriggle its fingers inside her panties. Something that overrode the override. Chouma tried to piece it all together, but her mind kept focusing on something else. Something...

Oh. Right. She was so fucking wet right now. That made it really hard to think.

"That's right," the Boy growled, as if she'd said the words out loud. "You're too horny to think, you're too aroused by the thought of being empty." Flash. "And obedient." Flash. "Empty and obedient girls can still do their job, and you're going to be so much better at your job once you get rid of all that unimportant clutter in your brain. I'm going to fill those empty spaces with my cock, so that you can be happy all the time. We just need to fuck your mind away, so that you can SKWAAARRK!"

The Boy collapsed onto the table, a thin metal rod sticking out of one eye socket. It flopped around for a little bit, until Chouma took a soldering iron and jammed it straight into the metal casing of its CPU and burned out its electronic brain. She kept going, frying the damn thing until it was completely inert and the smell of burning circuitry overwhelmed the musky odor in the lab, before smearing lube on the hand still trapped by the Boy's mechanical grip. "F-fucking asshole," she snarled, pulling her slippery wrist free the same way she had the other. "Fucking, fucking..." She gave the robot a few more bursts with the soldering iron, just to be on the safe side. Then she went to the washroom to clean everything off.

She masturbated while she was there, cumming intensely around her own fingers. The entire time, she pictured the Boy's flashing eyes.

*****

"Interesting," Leon Kowalcyzk said, flipping through the pages of Chouma's report. "And you say you could recognize some sort of... signal in the flashes?" He didn't seem particularly surprised by Chouma's information, nor was he especially fazed by it. For all that he reacted, Chouma could have been bringing him a summary of the problems with a tablet's touchscreen.

"It wasn't a, a signal, exactly," Chouma said tentatively. She was still trying to elide a few of the more embarrassing details of the whole incident-she didn't want anyone coming up with the mistaken notion that she had somehow done something to trigger the Boy's malfunction by trying to use it for... personal reasons. She'd already taken enough shit from her co-workers for volunteering to work on the Boys in the first place, and she only did that because the raise they were offering nearly doubled Chouma's salary. "It was more like a burst of, of interference. Like, the more of it I absorbed through my optic nerve, the harder it got to process. Mentally, I mean."

"I see." Leon made a few notes on a piece of yellow paper next to him, underlining something that Chouma couldn't quite make out from the other side of the desk. "And can you remember how many of these flashes you saw? How bright they were, perhaps?" His voice remained studiously neutral, like he wasn't sure how surprised he was supposed to be by this new information and decided to err on the side of caution.

"I..." Chouma thought back to the Boy's staring, pulsing eyes, trying not to squeeze her legs together too obviously. She and her therapist were going to have a long talk about this next week. "It was a lot, maybe... maybe thirty? Forty? I wasn't really counting toward the end, I was just trying to wriggle my hand free so I could grab the probe. It could have been as many as sixty."

"Sixty?" Leon's voice registered mild interest for the first time. "Hmm. And this... Doreen woman, the one who returned the Boy and filed the initial incident report. Did she have anything to say about flashing eyes or difficulty thinking?" He was scribbling more notes as he spoke, probably doing preliminary calculations about the expense of a recall. Not that there'd been many complaints about the Boys so far-six returns in a month, on a product that sold almost two million units, was a pretty good rate of failure.

But... maybe not all the failures were resulting in returns. "Sir?" Chouma asked, her voice trembling with hesitation. "Doreen reported that it kept trying to maintain eye contact with her. That she eventually had to leave her own house to avoid a degree of... um, unwanted sexual contact with it. Are... are we sure that there isn't a wider issue here with the visual processors on the Boys? It is, um, a recreational product, after all. There might be a lot of users who aren't... dissatisfied with their results as such, even if their Boy does the same thing Doreen's did. Have we heard back from her about her replacement?"

Leon looked down at the folder with Chouma's report, his cheeks flushing slightly. "She's... very happy with her new unit. We've received no complaints about it at all." Chouma felt a sudden, sick pit of dread open up in her gut. Leon was a lot of things as a boss, but he wasn't exactly a great liar. When he wouldn't look her in the eye, she knew something was up. When he blushed, she knew that he knew that she knew something was up and he didn't want an awkward conversation about it.

Chouma steeled herself for a long moment before asking the next question. She didn't like where any of this was heading; she'd worked twenty long years at Revolution to get to a position that paid less than any of her peers for twice as much effort. She didn't want to know what would happen if she had to pack up and find a new job at forty-three in an industry that was paying more and more lip service to diversity while putting more and more white tech-bros in charge of hiring. But she couldn't let it go. "Sir," she asked pointedly, "is this really an unintentional effect?"

Leon stared straight down at his papers as if he was trying to burn a hole in them with his mind. "I think you should go back and take another look at the Boy," he said at last. As though her question had never happened. "Check the power regulators to his display processors. There might have been an issue there. We... we can talk later about any other concerns you can have." He closed the folder, set it on top of the yellow notepad. "My door is always open, Chaudhra."

Chouma didn't bother to correct him. She had other things on her mind.

*****

Three hours later, and she had even more. She was back in her lab, taking pictures that could get her fired with a cell phone that she wasn't supposed to have on the work floor and seething with a rage so intense that Chouma felt like it was going to blow the top of her head off. The remains of the malfunctioning Boy were spread around her like some sort of an android crime scene, the work of a serial killer who hadn't stopped with just blowtorching the inside of her victim's head off and wanted to make sure he suffered.

In a way, she kind of did. She had started by opening up the Boy's face, carefully disassembling his head to test the power regulators for unexpected fluctuations the way Leon had suggested. She hadn't found any, but she had determined that a miswired connection meant the batteries were only delivering about 30% of the intended power to the displays. That power flowed into a little black box that the approved Revolution troubleshooting manuals simply indicated as 'subsidiary visual data processing systems', but Chouma had a pretty good idea at this point that her troubleshooting manual wasn't worth the pixels it was displayed on.

She took the little black box out of the one working eye, rewired all the systems around it and turned it on. Sure enough, the eye glowed a steady blue without any of the flashes Chouma remembered. She hooked it up to a display monitor, and it showed her looking back at it. Nothing at all unusual... until she rewired the box in at full power, set a timer on the testing battery for two minutes, and turned it back on.

The next thing she knew, it was two minutes later. Chouma remembered the first flash, but everything else was swallowed up in a fog of mental static that consumed her thoughts completely. She checked the display monitor, and was astonished to see herself staring vacantly into the 'camera' for the full two minutes. Her warm brown eyes were utterly devoid of any volition, her jaw hung slack and drooling, and her expression was... absent. Totally emptied of any kind of emotion, any kind of thought. For two minutes, Chouma simply wasn't there.

And every single Boy had these. Each and every last Boy, somewhere behind those pretty blue eyes of theirs, had a device designed to... to reach in and switch off a human being's conscious mind like they were turning off a light. Chouma thought back to the way it spoke to her, telling her to stop thinking, to become empty and obedient. She wondered how a human brain would react to sensory input when the entire critical thinking apparatus was disconnected by those flashes of light. She wondered what would have happened if she'd been hit with them at full power, instead of getting a low-level burst because of a wonky connection.

But most of all, she wondered what happened to Doreen.

She could picture it in her head, some pretty young urban professional who just wanted to handle her exchange without the whole world knowing what she did with her Saturday nights. The discreet white box, promising the end to the whole awkward mess, along with a store credit for some apps that she could install to give her Boy fun new sexual techniques and role-playing personas. Maybe a waiver, although Doreen couldn't possibly know how little the company probably worried about a lawsuit. And then... the box opened. The Boy looked at her with those deep blue eyes. And Doreen didn't think anymore.

Chouma went back after that and looked at the other five incident reports, noting the similarities in each one. The same descriptions of persistent, aggressive sexual conduct. The same demanding stares. The same determination to seduce their owners into blank, empty compliance. But that wasn't a bug-it was a feature. The malfunction was in their failure to seal the deal. Too little power in the hypnotic strobes, shipping without the reservoir of lube (god, what was in that shit? To think she got it all over her hands...) Or in one case, a language processor issue that meant they couldn't instruct their brainwashed slave properly. But the problem as far as Revolution was concerned was that the humans involved still had free will.

And they'd already sold almost two million of the damn things. Two million so far-Chouma had a pretty solid instinct that they were only going to get more popular. If everyone who owned one couldn't resist telling everyone how great they were, or even showing off their special toy to their closest friends and their lovers when they were alone together... the Boys were going viral, and not in a good way. Unless Chouma did something.

That was when the cell phone came out, and the pictures started. Chouma was already thinking ahead as she transferred the footage of her two minutes of blank, staring emptiness, mentally compiling a list of industry journalists who would be interested in doing a hit piece on Revolution. It wasn't hard to figure out the names; most of them showed up regularly on memos reminding employees not to talk to them under any circumstances. She'd need more proof of course, maybe even smuggle out a few components that she could use to demonstrate the power of the hypnotic strobes...

She was so intent on planning that she almost didn't notice when the door opened. Chouma had just enough time to slip her cell phone into her pocket before she spun around and said, "Leon! You're working-"

That was all she managed to get out before the first Boy's eyes swallowed up her mind. "Leon couldn't be here right now," he said, his voice husky and commanding as he picked his path carefully through robotic body parts to approach Chouma. "He thought it would be a bit... prurient to take a personal hand in things. You don't want anyone watching anyway, do you? It's better if it's just you and us. More... intimate."

The other Boy approached from the side, but Chouma could only see him out of the corner of her eye as he slid her lab coat off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. He was a rich, velvety purple in color, a perfect contrast to the silver skin of the Boy whose eyes held her fast, and his fingers buzzed pleasantly everywhere they touched. "That's it, pretty girl," he said, undoing the buttons of Chouma's blouse one by one. "We know what you want. We're going to tell you now. And all you need to do is listen and accept. Just like a good little girl. Just like an empty, obedient girl. You want to be empty and obedient, don't you?"

Chouma swayed on her feet like a boxer in the twelfth round, the Boy's words echoing in her head like the inside of her skull was an auditorium. The strobes hadn't left her completely blank, not quite yet, but she could feel her thoughts slowing down to a crawl and her resistance narrowing to a mere theoretical concept. "I... I'm ace," she managed to mumble, even as the silver Boy's fingers slipped down into her waistband to make her words into a lie. "I, I don't want..."