Page 74 of Smart Ass

“I have one that I’d like to show you, actually.”

“Oooh! Yes, please. The lip-reading one?”

“No. Well, yes. I found a good module for that and I’ve made some improvements, but what I really wanted to show you was right in… here.” The maintenance room door swung open.

Ben laughed as he walked inside. “Why, Maxy! What kind of boy do you take me for? I could never…” He stopped dead. “Whoa! Sexbot on the floor!”

He supposed it could have been any other sort of android, but its tanned skin was glistening like it had just been rubbed with baby oil, its face had that rugged, smoldering look that just screamed fancy algorithms, and its burgeoning muscles definitely belonged on the cover of a romance novel.

People did enjoy their fantasies.

Also, you know, the monstrous shlong. Even flaccid, it was ridiculously huge. He’d heard they were hot swappable, though—easy to take off and replace without having to shut down anything else or reboot—so that could be fun if Max wanted to hook it up to something else in his adorable little dildo collection.

“Yes,” Max agreed.

“So, uh, new sex toy?” Ben asked. “I could get behind that. Or, you know, it could get behind me…”

Maxamillion snickered, since Ben had probably programmed him to share his fourteen-year-old sense of humor.

“Very pricey sex toy, though,” Ben commented. Everything else Max had liberated from the Orbit storerooms wasn’t cheap, but this was on a whole different scale. Like, years of personal income. Though, technically, Max hadn’t taken it off the premises, so was it really stealing?

“I wasn’t actually thinking of it as a sex toy,” Max stated, a little stiffly.

“Ah. You want it for the scintillating conversations.”

“No.”

Was Max actually upset? Ben had only meant to tease.

“I want a body,” Max announced. “I thought you would like this one, but you can design it to your preferences if you would prefer a different model.”

What the what?

Okay, that was a lot to break down. Ben sank to the couch.

“You want a body,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

He supposed that… made sense? Plenty of sparks had bodies. There were lots of things you could do with bodies. Like… smell things. Quincy was always smelling his food, right?

Or… well, sex was the obvious one. Good call on the sexbot, Ben supposed.

It was really Ben who hadn’t thought big enough.

It was jarring, trying to fit a whole new mental model onto his concept of Max’s identity. In his mind, Max was just Max. He just was. A deep voice. A warm and sexy presence.

Then again, Ben would always be the first one to support someone in claiming their own identity and representation.

He looked at the bot again. It had the unnatural air of not being asleep so much as turned off. He really wanted to touch its dick, just to poke it and see what it felt like.

Not helpful.

“So that’s how you think of yourself?”

He was not going to judge. Not at fucking all. When Ben had been a shlumpy tween with acne and the wrong parts sprouting in weird places, he’d totally wanted to look like a superhero-bodybuilder-outdoorsy manly man heartthrob.

Max sighed. “I couldn’t come up with an image of myself. That was the best-selling model.”