The Sparking Wit Podcast

Trevor: Anything else?

Emily: I think that's it. I'm sure if Marilyn reads the comments on the episode she'll find a lot more tips and recommendations.

{theme plays}

Trevor: Now, let's bring in our guest for the episode. Her name is Penelope Vandiver and she has been a full-time robot sexdoll for 11 years now. Thanks for waiting, Penelope.

Penny: Please, call me Penny. And it's no problem, I'm a big fan of the show.

Emily: Are the headphones fine, or would you like a direct connection?

Penny: No, these are fine.

Trevor: So Penny, you've been working as a prostitute for the entire time you've been a robot.

Penny: More or less, yes. Getting paid for sex.

Trevor: Which is one of the longest periods we've heard of, and is why we wanted to have you on the show and chat for a bit.

Penny: It's my pleasure. I had a short day yesterday and finished my charge early, so the timing was right.

Emily: How many hours do you work a day?

Penny: It really depends. Friday or Saturday it might be a 16 hour day, Tuesdays it might only be 4. Around Christmas and New Year's it's just constantly busy. But I try to take at least one day off every two weeks or so.

Trevor: We can come back to that. I wanted to start at the beginning. How old were you when you had your mind uploaded?

Penny: Hoo, let me try to do the math. 32, I think.

Trevor: And like I said before the show, let us know if you're uncomfortable with a question.

Penny: {laughs} I've helped people live out their dirtiest sexual fantasies for over a decade, and have been public about what I am the entire time. If you make me uncomfortable, I'll be impressed.

Emily: {giggles}

Trevor: Fair enough. So were you a sex worker before becoming a robot?

Penny: Not really. When I was in college, I had a sugar daddy relationship with a Lawyer in his 50s.

Trevor: Can't trust those guys.

Penny: {chuckles} but I dropped out and he felt less noble about fucking me and paying for things. At least I didn't drop out with debt.

Emily: Worst thing I ever did with my chassis was calculate the total interest we paid on our student loans.

Trevor: So what did you do to earn a living after that?

Penny: I bounced between retail jobs for a few years, then I wound up as a shipping clerk for a prosthetic fabrication shop. Easy job. It was two hours of work and then being on call to answer phones for seven hours. Plenty of spare time for me to fuck the boss and the cuter coworkers.

Emily: So you must have had a very high libido already before being human.

Penny: Hard to say. If they gave it a number, I don't remember it. I was rarely interested in monogamy around that time.

Emily: So how did you learn about mind uploading? This would have been only a couple of years after the process was commercialized.

Penny: I started seeing a lot more orders from A&D robotics, they became like 60% of our business. So I was bored one day and looked them up. Fucking dolls had never been one of my kinks, but I went down a rabbit hole and discovered their mind uploading services and testimonials. I think the uploading was a different company at the time.

Trevor: Yeah.

Emily: And it was love at first sight?

Penny: {Laughs} Hardly. They looked waxy, the seams were visible. The eyes didn't quite look right. I thought you couldn't pay me enough to live in one of those things.

Emily: So what changed your mind.

Penny: Turns out I was wrong about there not being enough money to make me do it. They had an ad for volunteers for chassis testing. They must have been having trouble getting female volunteers to load themselves into a chassis built for sex.

Emily: Was that A&D's first sexdoll model?

Penny: No, it definitely wasn't the first, because I remember the smiling testimonial from a previous sexdoll on the site. Might have been the second version, though.

Trevor: The 2S?

Penny: Maybe, I can't remember the exact model number, it was two chassis ago.

Emily: So what was the screening process like?

Penny: Not very picky. I had to answer some questions about my sexual history, but mostly they seemed interested in if I'd have a heart attack on the operating table. They told me I'd have to be a test bed in their lab for 36 months. For what they were paying me, it seemed like a steal.

Emily: Did they make you pay any expenses out of that?

Penny: Heh, no. I don't think they were as adept at screwing people over yet.

Trevor: The opinions of us and our guests do not necessarily represent the opinions of our sponsor and employer the Apollo and Diana Robotics Corporation.

Penny: heh heh. Oops.

Trevor: So how long did the process take?

Penny: From when to when?

Trevor: hmm?

Penny: From what stage to what stage? I know you normally measure the time from entering the facility to exiting the facility, but I was for testing and stayed at the lab.

Emily: Let's say from entering the facility to your first memory as an operational gynoid.

Penny: ooh, probably six weeks.

Emily: Wow.

Penny: Yeah, I had a little room for myself. I actually had to share it with another volunteer, Dominique. They had us on different schedules so we used the same bed.

The first week it was all passive scans. They shaved my head and showed me anything they could think of.

Trevor: Porn?

Penny: Some, but less than I would have expected. There were interviews too while my brain was being mapped. Start of the second week, they installed the probes into my brain. I had to carry this tiny handbag thing everywhere with wires going from it to the back of my neck. I barely slept at all that week. There were some more physical requests that week. No real sex, but they did make me masturbate regularly. I don't know if that's part of the process for everyone, or just me.

Emily: It's optional now. They can do some things later while you're out if you're not comfortable with masturbating while someone is monitoring your brainwaves live.

Trevor: Emily had a hand in her sweatpants the entire time during her mapping.

Emily: Shush

Penny: But yeah, it was a lot of that. A lot of blood tests too. I think that's for brain chemistry or something.

Emily: It is

Penny: They didn't actually tell me the date they were going to put me under for the final mapping. It was probably a good thing. I don't think I would have been able to sleep if I had known. I was going through a normal set of tests, and they told me it was time.

Emily: No fasting?

Penny: They were monitoring my diet, I lost a good 5 pounds, so I don't think it mattered much. It wasn't even a different room, I laid down on the exam table and they brought in the knock-you-out doctor.

They had talked about it all before, more than once, but I was still nervous about it. Maybe nervous isn't the right word, it was more of a light-headed feeling, like i couldn't believe I was actually going through with this.

Emily: I had a pretty similar feeling.

Penny: I can't tell you much about what happened in the next three weeks. It was all compiling and building my new mind.

Trevor: And your body?

Penny: I hadn't seen it in person, assembled, but I had seen the renderings. Blonde, seams, no pubic hair, surprisingly modest tits. Smaller than my current set.

Emily: Are those 1200cc?

Penny: 1100, but high profile.

Trevor: So what was it like waking up the first time as a gynoid?

Penny: They had told me my libido would be higher, and I thought I would be fine, but I wasn't prepared. I might have emptied my external lubricant all at once, if the tank had been full.

I wanted to be fucked with an urgency I hadn't experienced before ... and I didn't have my motor control calibrated yet. All those hands touching my body, touching it everywhere, and I couldn't move. I couldn't even tell them to stop or keep going. I

{electrical distortion noises}

Emily: Sorry, that was me. Resource allocation issue.

Trevor: Do you need me to pour some cold water on you?

Penny: {giggles}

Emily: Ha. Ha. Ha. It's an intense moment for anyone, and Penny's seemed extra intense.

Penny: That's why they needed someone to test. For the early models, the sexual aspect was hit or miss. For some models, intercourse was no more pleasant than giving a handjob, then for some models the sensations were overwhelming. And for some models the aspect bounced between the two.

Emily: That sounds like loads of fun.

Penny: For the next year, that was my life. I lived in the lab and two shifts hooked me up to new hardware and loaded new firmware updates.

Trevor: You had no contact with the outside world?

Penny: I still went on social media, still read the sites I visited before, still texted my sisters and some friends. Every now and then someone would take me home with them, but that's about it.

Emily: I'm hoping at this point you could talk.

Penny: {laughs} Oh, I was walking and talking within the first hour after activation. But I don't want to give the impression that I was being passed around like an object. These men - mostly men - were spending all week pleasuring me. I was happy to go home with whomever asked... or whomever won the raffle that week.

Trevor: It does sound like you enjoyed yourself.

Penny: It's hard to be too angry about being able to climax from giving head. That was a fun early realization. I loved the days where they tried to overload me: Toys in all three holes and clamps on my nipples. I think my record was 194 climaxes in one 24 hour period. And of course they fil-

{electrical distortion noises}

Emily: Gah! Sorry!

Trevor: Do I need to adjust you?

Emily: I'm enjoying this so much, though. Thanks again for sharing, Penny.

Penny: Oh, it's nice to take a stroll down memory lane.

Trevor: Do you think you can control yourself, honey?

Emily: {grunting noises} Fine... Maintenance mode active. Voice control enabled.

Trevor: Emily, suspend creative visualization protocols. Reduce empathetic responses by 75%.

Emily: command acknowledged. Timeout variable required.

Trevor: Sixty minutes.

Emily: Changes applied.

Trevor: Restart personality.

Emily: Rebooting... I don't know if it's better, but I think the distortions should stop. We'll try to edit around this.

Trevor: Nah, our listeners love a little bit of the monotone.

Penny: Oh, I'm sure. Lots of my customers like me in a lower consciousness setting.

Emily: Can we continue with the interview now?

Trevor: OK honey, I promise I will make it up to you later.

Penny: I'll be happy to help with that. You look absolutely delicious in person.

Emily: We're getting off track.

Trevor: That's fair. So Penny, you said that was your first year. What did you do for your other two years working there?

Penny: Not to skip ahead, but I wound up signing a second contract, so I was a test platform for six years.

Trevor: Wow.

Penny: After that first year, they had made substantial progress with sexual feedback in the lab, so it wasn't necessary to have me there on double-shifts. I got a little apartment and commuted like any other employee, except I was commuting in the first new car I had ever owned.

That was about when they switched from having me test the physical components to having me test the social components. That may not be the best way to put it. How a gynoid feels when having sex itself was in a good spot, now they wanted to help gynoids get sex. Or sexual partners. Or be more sensual, however you want to put it.

Emily: That sentence got away from you.

Penny: Yeah, it did. {laughs} Basically, it was automatically creating muscle memory for robot women. I can't count the number of times I did the 'walk across the restaurant and sit in front of your date' routine. All sorts of permutations of what type of dress and shoes i was wearing, what part of my body he was looking at, how long a distance I had to walk... and then over and over again with little adjustments to my hips, my stride, my face.

Trevor: Sounds more dull than cumming 150 times a day.

Penny: OK, so it wasn't just walking across the room or along the beach. I also watched tons of videos of strippers and helped them turn that into something a gynoid could use. And then there's the fine art of masturbating for someone else's entertainment. So I only dropped to cumming 90 times a day {laughs}.

Trevor: {laughs}

Penny: And yes, I also practiced and mapped sexual positions. They had a few male robots they rotated in, and sometimes the researchers got in on the fun.

Trevor: I know I would.

Penny: So if you ever wondered how Emily got so good at sex after becoming a robot, now you know. {laughs}

Emily: Trevor and I discussed which sexual subroutines to install before my upload.

Penny: ... Yeah. Researchers started fucking me, then men in other departments wanted to fuck me, and then suppliers wanted to fuck me. Or the someone in-house wanted to the suppliers to fuck me. I'm a sexdoll, so I was happy to do it. After that it was a natural evolution to doing it for money. When I signed the contract, it didn't explicitly say anything about forbidding or requiring turning tricks. But I had been having sex nonstop for two years with and in front of near-strangers. If they were going to pay me extra, might as well.

Trevor: What was your chassis like at this point?

Penny: Improved. The seams were still there, but they were thin enough that you couldn't see them in a dim room, or from across a lit room. They fixed up my face a little bit. My human face and original robot face had thinner lips and more of a square chin. The longer you're a gynoid, the less attached you are to how you looked as a human, you know?

Emily: I was never that attached, but I was going from 50 years old to 20. Image continuity was a moot point.

Trevor: But we did discuss those changes together. So was it a red-light district thing, or a call-girl situation? How were customers selected?

Penny: I admit, I was still worried about someone abducting me or breaking me or something along those lines, so I did insist on a background check, proper ID, some sort of security, that sort of thing. And I had to review them personally. But A&D did a good job, I think there was just one guy where I said 'no thank you'.

By the end of year three, I was in a nice routine of seeing clients Thursday through Saturday night, having Sunday for myself, and working in the lab Monday through Wednesday. And the data I got from clients was added to the data collected in the lab.

Trevor: So whose idea was it to run it all back for another three years?

Penny: I guess technically it was A&D who made the offer first. Or they made the offer to have me apply, it's a little hazy.

Trevor: Was it a close decision?

Penny: We did have some discussions. They were interested in keeping me around, and since they didn't have to go through the expense of uploading my brain and building my personality, it was going to cost them less than getting a new volunteer.

So I got them to guarantee 4 full nights a week for prostitution and give me an 80/20 cut of the proceeds. Plus a new chassis, and some core personality editing.

Trevor: Really? Even now that's a bit risky.

Penny: Yeah, maybe it was stupid, but I was really happy with my new life and my new friends. I kind of knew by then that I wasn't going to go back to a normal life. And knowing that I was going to be a sextoy forever, I decided I should lean into it, if only for my own sanity.

Emily: You were really happy, but you needed to keep sane?

Penny: Poor choice of words, maybe. But I was feeling insecure about the things I wasn't doing. Every now and then I'd join another woman in a threesome with a man, but I wasn't really into girls. I leaned submissive, but wasn't deeply into it. There were still a few sex acts that I'd do, but not enjoy.

Trevor: You didn't just consider some temporary programming for those clients?

Penny: It's not the same. Even when you're seeing a dozen men a day, that's a lot of downtime, especially when you don't really sleep anymore. I wanted to remember those things fondly, look forward to doing them again. I didn't want to feel like a woman pretending to be a sexdoll, you know?

Trevor: So you don't feel like a woman anymore?

Penny: I'm not a philosopher. I feel like the best version of myself, how about that?

Trevor: Fine by me. It's not just one kind of person becoming a gynoid. Can you describe what that process is like?

Penny: I wish there was a better story, but my personality was offline while they edited it. I went into the lab and 4 hours later I woke up a new woman. But I immediately felt less tense. It's like before it was always in the back of my mind that I might run into a situation where I'd have to fake enjoyment or come up with a pleasing excuse to avoid something, and now that wasn't there.

I had a regular customer say he could tell the difference. I think he said something along the lines of that I didn't look like I was trying to please him any more. I looked like I knew I was going to please him. Whether that was the editing, no longer worrying about renewing the contract, or just him trying to be nice, I can't tell.

Trevor: So, if you don't mind me asking, between natural decay and the editing, how much of you is the original programming?

Penny: At my last maintenance session it was 62%.

Trevor: Wow

Emily: That's very low, even for a unit your age.

Penny: It's not a big deal, you just have to plan for it. I have my assets in an S corporation shared with the other gynoids in my building, so my life won't change much when that number gets below 50.

Trevor: As much as I'd like to discuss artificial personhood law, I can almost hear our listeners finding something else to listen to.

Penny: {laughs} I get it. And I'm certainly not an expert on it. But I'm also getting a little ahead of myself.

Trevor: So now that you were a more confident sexdoll, did they put you through different tests during your second contract.

Penny: Not really. It was the same testing and attenuation of autonomic motion.

Emily: Big words.

Penny: I know six big words, I use them when i can {giggle}

The big changes were outside the lab. I built up a larger clientele, saved more money, got shown off to some C-suite executives at A&D. It was a very rewarding experience.

Trevor: So did you sign up for a third contract?

Penny: No, at that point it didn't make much sense financially. And they were doing some testing with customizable personality modules that with my existing level of editing, I wasn't really able to do.

Emily: Can you explain those to the audience?

Penny: Oh. Sure. The best way I can describe them is intense method acting. Your partner tells you the parameters of the character they'd like you to play, you ask them some additional questions to fill in the blanks, and the program helps you build a personality overlaid on top of your own that matches what's desired. I've seen it, and it's very convincing, but the bot performing has enough control to come out of it if there's a dangerous situation. And you're getting the authentic emotional response that your character would feel.

Trevor: So it's safer than a traditional overlay?

Penny: Absolutely, and much easier to change so it's not always 'co-ed fucking her way to an A on her history final.' You can have that basic character, then run her performing the initial seduction of the professor instead. Run her at a party. Run her coming back for more after the semester because it was just so good the first time. Lots of options.

Trevor: Fans will remember episode 25 where Emily tried out 'naughty personal assistant' for me.

Emily: The only time I tried one of those overlays. I had system slowdowns for days trying to get myself thinking straight again.