Ro-Girls

In the development of the first Ro-Girls, the possibility of models with an apparent age below 18 years was discussed and, finally, discarded, as the quantity of clients interested in such models deemed negligible in front of the possible public relation troubles.

This was the only one built, with the shape of future IT Corporation president Helena Eisenhower's dead sister, Egle .

Egle today resides in the IT Corporation Headquarter, where she participates to the day care operation.

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The first to reach the market was Melanie 19, released by Rochester's IT Corporation the 1st of December 2099.

It was the first of the "Million Dollars" Ro-Girls, the hand-built and almost experimental precursors of the modern day mass-produced Ro-Person.

The ludicrous price was chosen as part of the marketing strategy that led to drop the  "Robot" word from the product name, in favour of a shorter "Ro" that hinted at the city where the company was headquartered.

While one million dollars was a fairly excessive price, they were not as ridiculously overpriced as a comparation with modern RO-Gurls would suggest.

The break-even point for the planned 100 Melanies was, in fact, six hundred thousand dollars.

The hardware and the software were tweaked at each new unit produced, so that no two Melanie were really equal, even though their external image was exactly the same

This would have continued with the successive models, Lyndsay 22 ( 200 units), Thy 18 ( 400 units),  Elle 23 (500 units),  as the overall strategy of IT Corporation was to develop a one hundred thousand dollars machine for 2105, using the million dollars series and their owners as test beds and beta testers for what was going to be the mass market  machine's OS.

Shara was the first and, to date, only "Million Dollar" to ever be avowedly used for direct sexual entertainment, as a porn SM actress.

Slightly customized and optimized (by company "3Ro Customs") to simulate the behavior of real women in "special circumstances" , Shara was bought by KinkyKings LLC to operate as one of their resident performers.

However, when viewers discovered that she was really a robot, and all her reactions were simulated, she was soon relegated to second row roles, as "moving background", where she operated for some more months.

In the end, echoing what was already happening to most of her sister robots, she demonstrated too valuable as an organizing help and was moved to operate as the company's shooting set scheduling officer, making then an unexpected career through various organizational tasks, till she finally served as the company CEO Robert Duvall main assistant.

In fact, among the reasons the first machines were so costly to build there was their hardware, much sturdier then in their successors, and their state of the art computing architecture, powerful enough to implement an efficient self-learning semantic capability, even within the narrow limits allowed by the time simple quantum computing.

The learning capability used, among the others, a strategy called "mistake and evaluate", in which a dedicated entropy subsystem added small "mistakes" to the main computer output, and this then evaluated whether the "mistake" actually improved the results.

This allowed the first Ro-Girls not only to rewrite their OS subroutines, over time - to the extent that a five years old Melanie was usually three times as efficient as a brand new Thy, even if the Thy computers were about 15%  more powerful - but also to have moments of "blunder and correct" that were both endearing and, occasionally, leading to truly creative outcomes.

The late years of 21st century were a time of near stasis, for computing technology... simple quantum computing had long since delivered all the improvements that it could, miniaturization of quantum circuitry had stalled around 2080. In this situation, improvements  in performance-per-dollar required thorough software revision and refinement.

The unstated - but very much understood, by everybody in the automation industry - secondary goal of the first , "Million Dollar" series of Ro-Girls was to act as Beta auto-programmers, with the users providing the much necessary inputs in terms of human interaction.

IT Corporation strategy was to use the improvements that the Beta machines devised for themselves, to compose a final OS able to run in a much cheaper hardware, with the goal of producing machines in the 50000$ price range by 2120.

In these mass market machines the auto-learning capacity - and its inherent "bungleness" and "pseudo-creativity" - was supposed to be tuned down, as the "mistake and evaluate" - being, by design, a source of errors and blunders -  was to be completely avoided.

It was a cautious strategy, well balanced in face of the technical constraints of the time, but it was soon to be modified, as 2100 was not only the year Melanie 19 started its production run, it was also the year that Intel's chief scientific officer Elsa Ferranti released her quantum 3D pseudo-neuron/multiquantum technology to the public.

Usually abbreviated as "3DN", it soon became the basic brick of computing in the 22nd century, the way MOSFET NAND cells had in the 20th century.

As in every technical paradigm shift, initial improvements were swift and huge, with the component halving its volume and reducing fivefold its price every year, for more than a decade.

These improvements did not dwarf those seen,  a century before, in the Gordon Moore era, but changed the landscape of computing technology beyond the expectancies of even the  most optimistic technologists.

By the time the last "Million Dollars" Ro-Girl was released, the costs of the computing hardware in it had gone down from 500000 to  4000 dollars, which meant that the "Million Dollars" were not just repaying their costs, they were netting a hefty profit for the company.

This, with new processes that lowered dramatically the production costs of the skeletons (from CFRP to syntherised Titanium-aluminium), artificial muscles and other ancillaries, meant that by 2108 the original plan for a 50000$ machine had to be shelved, as it was now possible to build much cheaper robots, and the consumer base that was supposed to buy those 50000$ toys was shrinking much faster than anticipated - as simpler, less anthropoid but otherwise more efficient robots were replacing humans in almost every moderately repetitive job - and new, unexpected competition had emerged from Chevrolet Automation Industries (CAI), who had already had a discreet success in the high-end market with its "Half Million"line, and was reportedly readying for production a 30000$ series.

The situation  prompted a change at the head of IT-Co, with Helena Eisenhower assuming the CEO role and Frieda Rausch replacing her as responsible for the new product's development.

The two operated a drastic revision of the "Affordable Ro-Girl project".

The super-optimized, closed OS concept was shelved - hardware was changing so fast, by then, that every bit of self-improving ability in the Ro-Girls was needed, both to tame computing systems idiosyncrasies and exploit every available resources, both because research had shown that clients preferred a machine slightly buggy  but able to solve some issues on its own, to a perfectly functional tool that needed to be taught how to do any new little thing.

As the computing side of the technology was improving at a remarkable pace by itself - mainly by the efforts of chips producers - IT Co concentrated on reducing the osts and augmenting the reliability of  the body hardware.

After a two years long delay,  IT Co finally introduced to the U.S. market its first mass-market model, the 15000$ Nina, in the fall of 2110

The "performers" are two Nina robots, a blonde Rev 3 and a redhead Rev 2, that Le massaud bought - used - just to create this piece. The robots occupied the stage 24/7, with their unnatural calm, exchanging enigmatic quips.

The piece was destroyed during the French anti-robot revolts of 2137. Courtesy (c)  2120-2180 Musée des Homme  de Terre.

The reason for the delays were to be found not only in the need to reshape the GirlsOS, so that it could integrate an even improved "M&A" and self-learning potential, but also to accommodate much greater customization features in the basic architecture.

This was decided late in the project, observing the increasing customization efforts made, by owners of "Million Dollars" machines, to hide the nature of their robotic assistants.

If, in 2100, showing to  own a 1.6 millions Melanie 18 (a top of the line, hand-refinished version of Melanie that seemed younger than the base model) meant displaying one's own wealth and lack of prejudices.

Still owning the same machine in 2110 was tantamount to admit to be some sentimental fool.

Yet, for most of their owners, getting rid of their Ro-Girls was hardly an option.

In most cases, the machines had turned from useless toys into the type of "super-competent assistant-you-can-fuck" that two centuries of women emancipation, and of feminist empowerment, had all but vanished.

Also, many of these robots had, over time, bridged much of the designed cognition gap that was supposed to keep them away from troublesome, actual sentience and a dangerous of self.

They had become almost human and, very humanly, their owner preferred to spend hundred of thousands dollars to keep them at their side, making them more socially palatable, than simply replace them for a newer, cheaper, "better" machine.

Eisenhower came to the conclusion that owners of the cheaper robots would have wanted to be able to "hide" the robotic nature of their companions from the very start and, hence, the ability to seamlessly differentiate two robots on the assembly line would be a plus.

This goal was reached by designing the new robots' faces supports as a collection of interchangeable pieces, using an heuristic program that produced cute faces out of any casual combination of the basic cheeks - jaw-lines - ears pieces, and by adding the possibility to change the colours of skin, hair, iris.

The number of combinations was significant, about one million possible model shapes, which meant that at most ten robots should have been identical, over the projected run of the series.

Ninas couldn't receive height changes or significantly modified body shape, though - all were shipped with a tallness of about 173 cm and an apparent weight of 55 kg (effective weight, about 104 kg - contrarily to the all-carbon million dollars series, their spoefic weight was 1.9 and they could not float in water), which was the then current "ideal fashion model".

2111 saw not only Nina - rather, Mazda's "Ro-Pack", a 22nd generation MX-5 and a fully customized Nina for just 32000 dollars  - becoming the first shopping choice of the men in  mid-life crisis, but also a big divorce settlement that showed, to the general public, that these robots could change things much more than their "toy" nature initially suggested.

In May of that year, actress Ivanka Trosma (née Akimbo) divorced from her wife, industrial mogul Katherine Trosma, alleging that Katherine had sex with all her four "Million Dollars" machines. The separation was troubled, and exposed to the public something that most Ro-Girls owners tried to conceal: the finely reproduced genitalia and anuses of the robots were designed to allow their owners to use sexually their Ro-Girls.

The separation was fierce, bloody and the funniest piece of gossip of 2111 - it attracted widespread media attention for a number of reasons.

While not being the first husband caught with his fingers inside a Ro-Girl's jar, Katherine was completely unapologetic, to the point of declaring that she had no intention of discarding even one of the four robots, as each one had proved a better companion than Ivanka ever was.

This would have been labelled misogynistic by the media, had Katherine not been a  world-famous misandrist and the owner and CEO of the only Fortune 500 company with a majority of women in its board, as Trosma Energy employed a record 75% of women executives.

In this context, only some fringe male-ist outlets found the courage to comment, like the infamous John Large in his "The Male Observer" blog:

 "As many men of her age did, lesbo-power poster-child Katherine Trosma has found happiness with her fembots. Feminazis usually tell us that these people are confused, ill-functioning males that are frightened by women. Super-lesbo Katherine tells us that it is her wife that is crap, while her and the 'bots work just fine. I have never thought that I'd ever agreed with her, of all women, but I feel that the lady may be onto something, here."

Another surprise came fromthe hearing to decide whose mother would receive custody of the couple's four daughters.

The four fraternal twins, born from surrogate uteri out of Katherine "parasperm" and Ivanka's  eggs, asked to remain with Jilly, Katherine's "Melanie 19" robot.

From the hearings, it became apparent  that both spouses, very career oriented, had delegated the rearing of their children to a series of caretakers to, finally, assign the task to Katherine's most trusted collaborator - Jilly.

The children, aged 8, had come to see the robot as their mother and Katherine as a somewhat distant but loving father, but could hardly bond with the very self-centered Ivanka.

In the end, as it was customary, Ivanka obtained a fairly favourable settlement, about 80 million dollars and three of the couple's mansons , but custody of the children remained solely to Katherine, and they continued to grow up with the robot - the first publicly known examples of what was going to become the norm for new generations.

As we wrote, Ninas were built around the then standard fashion model body shape... it was only a matter of not very much time before someone would realize that they could be a perfect, cheaper replacement to the troublesome human mannequins.

This someone was Julius Monroe, an Elite agency executive that bought a Mazda "Ro-Pack" after a divorce.

He soon realized that not only his Nina was a Smartphone that did most of its job by itself, but also that virtually all of the  professionals that he met assumed that she was a former model (Monroe didn't like the "barely legal" look favored by most Ro-Pack buyers, so his Nina was customized to have an apparent age of thirty) that was training, under his mentorship, to become an executive.

He immediately realized the opportunity, and founded a model agency of his own - with backing from Ro-Girl enthusiast Seikh Afa Gah of Dubai - that employed "upgraded" Ninas (essentially, Ninas with stunning facial features designed by artists, based on on past superstars, using a new and lighter skeleton, that would become standard only in the successive Anna model).

Initially, reaction from fashion houses and designers were mixed, then the advantages of the robots became evident.

If needed, Ninas could work 24/7, with five minutes intervals for battery swap every twelve hours or permanently tethered to small continuous-charge cables, hooked to one of their five charging ports (left and right big toes, anus, belly, left ear).

They could not lose shape, took no drugs to withstand the near starvation required by the age "perfect shape", could learn to do every movement by just seeing it once, had no psychic breakdowns nor could they host STD, even if used sexually (they had internal UV-C lamps that sterilized the cavities, after use).

By the end of the decade, Ro-Girls would represent the bulk of the file and rank fashion models, with few humans resisting in the super-model ranks, more by virtue of their value as social icons than for their beauty.

As these last had no turnover from new generations, fashion model effectively ceased to be a human profession in 2128, when Thylane Campbell, the last human model in the business, retired.

Ironically, during her long career Thylane, a "para-sperm kid" born out of tissues from two of the greatest models of the early 21st century, was often accused of not being human herself.


One of the unintended, possibly positive effects of the robots overtaking humans in the role was that, by the late '20s, fashion models ceased to be seen as the embodiment of women's ideal beauty, even though they were even more beautiful then ever. But, by then, looking like a model meant, effectively, looking like a robot.

Other service enterprises that used beautiful women , forcing them to work in stressful situations, took notice of what was happening on the world's catwalks and saw the opportunities and the challenges.

In 2117, Nina was replaced by the Anna model.

An asian-looking Anna Mk II at Colorado's Chicken Ranch 13, Oct. 2118

Anna was much cheaper than its predecessor, starting at 8000 dollars for a base model, and included more extensive customization options.

By then, the IT Co assembly line had been completely robotised, with fully autonomous automatons from CAI (CAI produced most of the fully autonomous, non-anthropomorphous industrial robots in use in North America - bitter competitors as they may have been in the Ro-Girls  field, CAI and IT-Co collaborated in other fields, and had informally agreed a market partition - Industrial fix-station robots to CAIs, driving car systems to IT Co.)

This, in turn, simplified the management of a more extensive set of composite components, that allowed to choose the height of the new robots, and to alter their body shape, away from the fast-discrediting "ideals" used for the Nina model.

The much lowered price didn't help IT Co to contrast the sagging sales of her 'bots in the civilian sectors, but fired the interest of many entrepreneurs.

Three months after its introduction, the historical "Chicken Ranches LTD" of Nevada commissioned the first Anna Sub-series, the so-called "Mk II". This sub-series had more powerful internal sterilization systems (their UV-C lamps were uprated to 100 watt, though this required the robots to connect to the grid, through the contactless induction socket in their thumb, after a "use"),  a revised GirlOS trimmed to show a lower apparent intelligence (IT Co only ever client to have asked this) and a wide variety of tallness, shapes, colours.

From their very start, the Mk II were designed specifically to provide sexual services - they were sturdy machines, costlier than the basic model, designed to provide sexual entertainment 24/7 for about 8 years.

At this time, the industry had still not decided to add a visual clue to the robots, so that they could be easily identified - The red "R" on the left cheek was still to come.

In Nevada's traditional brothels, the human workers and the robots shared space, while the seconds were acquired.When it was verified that clients couldn't really tell humans from ROs and that a Ro-Girl paid itself in just four months, the age of organized human prostitution was virtually over.

"Chicken Ranches LTD" laid off its last human worker, in Nevada, in 2219. By that time, the enterprise had already opened twenty-three "Chicken Ranch" in states that did not allow human prostitution.

At the same time, recognising the similarities with their business model  and the opportunities, AVIS and Hertz spawned, each, a subsidiary specialised in renting "Escort Ro-Girls".

Sexual services was not explicitly provided, but these machines were programmed to always say "yes", unless the request meant their complete destruction.

The car rentals giants charged their fees using the same models used for cars, which meant that a basic Anna Mk.III - essentially, the same physical specs of a Mk II, but with a "brain" much more powerful than the basic series - could be rented for 60$ a day, when the ranches still charged 300$ an hour.


By 2125, when "Chicken Ranches LTD" went into bankruptcy, robot escort rentals had replaced every form of organized prostitution, legal or illegal, in the U.S., bar - maybe; no decisive proof of their existence has ever surfaced so, the experts agreement is that these organizations never were more than an urban legend - some paedophile ring in the mid-west, forced by the lack of "underage" robots.

Unsurprisingly, the few legislative attempts at reigning in the "Robo-Whores Industry" expansion stalled under a combination of legal challenges, corporate lobbying and sheer lack of interest.

Women's representatives in congress and the various states, in fact, faced an unprecedented conundrum.

To regulate the sexual use of robots opened the field for religious objection to the sexual use of any kind of artificial implement - after decades of slow men emasculations, more than 80% of the women in the country relied solely on artificial stimulation to obtain their sexual release.

No overweight, long-time unemployed woman of the mid-west wanted to shelve her Hitachi, just to save the job of some scrawny young bitch that used to earn twice as much as she did in her lost 9-17 work.

2125 saw an epic reversal of CAI and IT Co fortunes, in the Ro-Girls sector.


In 2124, a new census confirmed a dire image of the market, one that even he falling sale data of the precedent two years had failed to draw.

80% of the U.S. population was unemployed and survived on a combination of social security cheques and odd jobs. As a result, the top price that this class of consumers could be expected to spend on a classic Ro-Girl was 800 dollars.

Of the remaining 20%, 85% was employed by state or federal governments, who banned the possession of Ro-Girls on the base of "safety concerns".

Thus, only 3% of the U.S. population could afford to buy a classic Ro-Girl  of this, only 40% were males and, of these, 50% already had one.

With the rental services refusing to change their Ro-Girls before these reached fifteen years of service - robotic industry did not have the lobbying power to force through a regulation in that direction, in 2121 and 2123  - this meant that the days of growth were over.

IT Co responded by creating the 799$ series Mika, that dropped some of the Anna customisation features. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to slash the price down to that elevel, so more cost-cutting was needed and led to these machines looking slightly in-human.

IT Co had inadvertently planted its flag deep inside the "uncanny valley" - the gulf of creepy looking things between endearingly human-looking ones, and enderily non-human-at all others.

For its two years of production, Mika was outsold by its predecessor, Anna.

CAI reached a similar conclusion , in its analysis, but instead of embarking in a 800$ machines, he questioned the sageness of continuing along the path, now that it was evident that the environment had changed so much.

In this, CAI was aided by having absorbed two of IT Co "dissidents", former IT Co chief engineer Ursula Leguam and marketing director Ulla Öll.

The two observed that the happier owners of Ro-Girls were the ones that used the robots as way more than just scenographic sexual toys.

If the robots were perceived as more usable, capable, utile, than they would have a greater value for their owner, and a greater price could be asked.

They decided to ditch, but not entirely, the "Ro-Girls" paradigm, for something new and audacious.
 
They called it "The Ro-Gurl".

The First Ro-Gurl model, Kei

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The Ro-Gurls were modelled to be androgynous, appealing to both men and women, and to have a double set of genitalia, which could be used at wil,l for the satisfaction of adults of any sex and horientation.

They were also programmed extensively to help in a large set of domestic chores, from cooking (they had a seven-tastes "tongue" and smell-sensors in the nose) to supervising children.

At 2000$, the Ro-Gurl was costlier than an IT Co Mika, but much more useful and extremely family-friendly.

As a result, by 2130, when the model was revised - and its price lowered - 2 millions Ro-Gurls, of every size and shape, had entered American families, where they entertained the mother, the fathers and, when they grew up, the very children that they had raised.

Over the next few decades, two adults and a Ro-Gurl would become the form of the new nuclear family.

The age of the Ro-GIRLS was over.