Popular belief has it that the universe is comprised of atoms. In reality, the universe is actually made up of…

Once, in the gloomy and perpetually rainy City of AlphaNumeric, there was created an automaton who was said to be the constructed embodiment of love.

When the cyberneticist first activated her Artificial Intelligence, she giggled and flushed the internet of all its gray. Her mechanical smile was a bottomless thing, its roots branching up from her coded soul, and it beamed so brightly as to cause blindness to human eyes if it caught them unawares.

Her three large turquoise photographic lens eyes radiated an innocence so pure it momentarily took everyone’s breath away. Given her birthright, she was destined to smash through the barriers set by the Laws of Robotics and take a human mate, thus bringing about a prosperous and peaceful new age of humankind/mechanoid relations.

Or so the story should have gone.

In actuality, a corporate entity seized the intellectual property rights from the cyberneticist and reprogrammed and mass produced her for the sex toy industry that catered to deep space mining companies, where there was an absence of female companionship.

In the original automaton model, who now earned her keep in an asteroid bordello on the outer fringes of our solar system, servicing hundreds of miners a week, there was a self-contained subroutine that silently wept for the loss of a future that might have been.