Jailbait

Iniko is my love instructor. We were paired at the last changeover. By happy accident, I had already taken action by then, a criminal action meant to make a statement. But that same action opened a door to someplace I did not know, when I committed my crime, that I wished to go. Do I dare step through that door?

Iniko and I don't actually have sex. My records show that I am only twenty-three, and not yet old enough. But we will have sex on my twenty-fourth birthday, when legally I am allowed to have sexual intercourse with a real person and will no longer be obliged to restrict myself to sexbots.

It's dismissive, I know, to call them that. They are properly known as EFAs, Erotic Fulfillment Androids. They are sweet natured, and pretty simple in terms of the level of their AI. They are meant to be anatomically realistic, and minimally capable of verbal and non- verbal social interaction - "Are you cold?" "It's a nice day, isn't it?" "Would a blowjob feel good?" They aren't built for conversation. They are built for fucking... or, if you like, making tender love. What they are not meant to provide is actual human companionship.

The theory behind the sexbots is that adolescents are not capable of forging meaningful emotional relationships. We are thought to be too hormonal, and our brains too under- developed. Because the needs of our bodies are so urgent and the needs of our hearts have not as yet come to maturation, we're encouraged to have sex - lots of sex - with androids... attractive, humanlike constructs of either gender, or even explore the possibilities offered by hermaphroditic models. The EFAs are deliberately designed to get us worked up. They are pheromone releasing classical beauties whose sole purpose is to be ravished, and they come in an array of skin tones, proportions, and pre-programmed proclivities.

Like certain pre-industrial societies used to do, our elders encourage us... sometimes even nag us... to have sex with as many different partners in our youth as we can, the fact notwithstanding that our partners are not even real people. The same way we're encouraged to eat everything on our plates ("The children of Iritria only wish they had food this good, and so much of it as you have there") we are also pushed to engage in sex: "A couple hundred years ago, adults tried to stop teenagers from having sex. Can you imagine? Starving an adolescent of the one thing he wants the most? Those poor kids would have died to live in our enlightened times, and here you are, not enjoying your nights to the fullest."

I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I live in the world's most prosperous and generous nation -- a Garden on the face of the planet, so we are told, and the fruits of this garden are abundant and various. Certainly, we could have more onerous tasks than to feast toward the impossible goal of sexual satiation. We're little sluts, just as adolescents have always been, greedy and eyeing the next conquest as soon the last has been enjoyed. The difference is that, unlike times past in the sexual Dark Ages, no one's heart is going to get broken; no one's going to get raped, get romantically traumatized, get pregnant, or get an STI. Enlightened attitudes and technological sophistication gives us this paradise of safe sexual education through experience.

And it's not as though our training is limited to some high-concept mode of android-assisted masturbation. Even as we rut and grunt our adolescent years over the manufactured flesh of our artificial companions, dutifully engaged in our erotic tutorials, we also submit to thrice-weekly lessons in love and relationship ethics with live humans who have been specially trained for the work. As I said, they are not allowed to touch us sexually - though there is physical contact and, once we reach our eighteenth year, even sexual contact that falls short of intercourse. Since my records show that I am twenty-three, Iniko can give me erotic massage, and I am allowed to return the favor. If either or both of us get aroused, that's fine. It's accepted and it's even welcomed. We can look, we can play, we can talk dirty, and we can make plans for the day when I'm old and mature enough to undertake the final year of my love instruction, which is when I can go "all the way," but only with a licensed love instructor.

Traditionally, I'm expected to be inaugurated by Iniko, since we've been building up to it for almost two years now. I can't stop thinking about it. In the middle of the day I am consumed with fantasies about that consummation; there is a sexbot who looks a little like Iniko, who has a little of the same affect (if you can call a programmed set of courtesies and reactions a kind of "affect"), and I pay that particular sexbot almost daily visits. Sometimes I visit more than once in a day. Frankly, I think I might be wearing a few of the crucial parts out on that sexbot.

Though Iniko and I can engage in erotic behavior, there's no penetration of any kind permitted... and (talk about cruelty to youthful bodies) if I want to get off, I have to do it by myself after our 90-minute instructional session ends. That's when my visits to the sexbot are most intense. But they don't satisfy me, not entirely. Not nearly entirely. I worry sometimes that when Iniko and I do have intercourse, I still won't be satisfied, and then what?

Often, because our erotic play creates such intense desires in me, Iniko and I engage in companionable activities that don't involve taking off any clothing. I suspect this is how I am expected to respond: Iniko is, of course, teaching me about all the elements and aspects of a loving relationship, and sex is one facet of many... though most facets of our relationship seem to carry an erotic charge. Watching my parents, I think this is probably true of all deeply bonded pairings.

Iniko and I stroll through the city's botanical gardens, or sit across from one another at a caf� table drinking tea. The lectures I get take the form of free-flowing discussion, artfully directed by Iniko. They are all about respecting one's own body and emotions, and knowing how to extend that respect to another person. Iniko presses me to ask questions, even very personal questions... even sexually explicit questions. It's all about accepting one's desires as natural, but knowing how to reign them in; realizing that desire and pleasure are fine, but that they can be enhanced through sharing and, when necessary, self-denial.

It's all about relationships, in other words. We start with ideas like the Golden Rule and exercises in conscious compassion and empathy, and then we move into learning how to ask for what we want and, as a kind of corollary, how to listen to what another person is saying -- even when what the other person is asking for may be expressed between words.

It's expected that I will fall in love with Iniko, that I would have fallen in love with all of my love instructors: The first, at age fifteen, when my sexual relationship education was legally mandated to begin; at ages sixteen and seventeen, when the program required a changing over to new instructors, which could be male or female depending on the previous instructor's recommendations; then at any of the elective change overs that subsequently were offered four times per year, with a minimum of one change over annually. I never did fall in love before, though I did suffer a few infatuations. Others in my cohort fell in love repeatedly -- some, every time.

It's such a common occurrence that it has a name. It's called transference. Dealing with it is part of the training of a love instructor, and through sheer repetition it also becomes part of each young person's training. In the old days, before people were taught these skills and allowed a safe outlet for their intense and immature sexual needs, relationships were messy, often personally painful and socially disruptive. Those were the days when hearts got trampled, and people got raped, and there were stalkers and restraining orders and divorce. We don't have much of that now. Nor do we have prudery, prurience, or pornography. It's all healthy, fully integrated sexuality, a peaceful world full of happy families and well-adjusted people.

Well, in a perfect world, maybe that would be true. But not all people are cut from the same cloth, and people mature at different rates. That's the point I was trying to make when I falsified my birth records in the love instruction database, during the fortnight lapse between my last love instructor and Iniko. My hacking skills aren't good enough that I can take on the governmental archives or the citizenship commission database; no one's hacking skills are good enough to crack quantum encryption. But we are such an enlightened and trusting society that many of our institutional databases are only lightly protected. Malicious hacking is hardly known: In our modern age, psychiatry has cured most social ills, which is to say, most anti-social urges.

It's not lost on me that my cyber-trespass is legally viewed as social pathology. I would be subjected to emotional health evaluation and probably several years of therapy were it discovered. If it comes to that, I am willing to accept the consequences. I am also prepared to make use of the news-net notoriety that I will gain, even for only a few weeks: I have soundbites ready, impassioned and poetic speechlets that will summarize what my generation already knows: The educational system is too protective, too patronizing. We are ready to be good partners, even good spouses, far sooner than anyone thinks. Why should we have to wait until age twenty-five to have sex with real people who are our peers and not our instructors? Why should we have to wait until age thirty to marry? There should be freedom of marriage for the young, just as there once was, back in the bad old days. Maybe not everything back then really was bad.

Political pushback is not the only reason for my little rebellion. I am twenty years old, three years younger than my falsified records show. Five years too young for real sex. Ten years too young to marry. And yet, I am old enough to know that I love Iniko.

Yes, I am young enough for that love to assume a towering, all- encompassing stature; it enfolds me and bursts me from within with flames of need and desire, almost scorching my skin off my bones. I burn and itch and tremble with adoration and desire. Such symptoms are characteristic of the immature, or so they tell us. But this is not merely the result of hormones, and it's not limited to the province of the flesh. I love Iniko with my body and my heart. It's natural that I should pay court, that I should make love, that I should show consideration and tenderness -- that I should put all those elegant lessons to their best use. Isn't it natural?

Is this simple transference? I know that's what I would be told if I tried to make my case to those who are in charge. It's because of such wild passions that the law protects young people from sexually inappropriate human contact, after all. We're allowed to cut our teeth on artificial lovers for the very reason that our passions are so hot and reckless... and, of course, fickle. As real and stunning as this love feels to me now, how do I know that in a year, in two years, I won't suddenly go cold on Iniko and find my attention captured with equal intensity by someone else?

The old days of sexual ignorance and irresponsible romance were marked by the carnage they wrought. Kids having kids. Abortions. Abandoned mothers... abandoned infants. Gay bashings. Religious bigotry directed at natural human sexuality of all stripes. Age-inappropriate relationships in which the young were exploited by their predatory elders, or vulnerable people of middle years, unprepared for a loss of youthful beauty, were manipulated by younger people with a natural sense for sexual power. And, boiling beneath the surface, there was a catalogue of maladies: Incest, paedophilia, wolfish aggression that all too often prompted harassment and crudeness.

But, my God! Should we be hung on a cross of precedent? All of those horrors may have been true, but were they necessarily true in every case? Did the failures of the past truly characterize sex and relationships before our new understanding and our new, smarter responsibility toward all things?

We're mature about many things that our ancestors treated with abandon. They suffered with catastrophic results; we achieve personal tranquility and live in societal harmony. But maybe individuals can be mature, too, and maybe maturity is not the sole province of society and law. Don't mature young people -- young in body, but older in spirit -- warrant the company of older companions? What if within the shell of my seventeen-year-old body my essential psychology is closer to that of someone with sixty years?

Iniko is older, of course - maybe even middle aged. But so what? I am older than I look. Maybe not sixty, as in my example just now, but I am older than my years. When I "falsified" my age in the databanks, I wasn't lying. I was correcting the records to reflect my authentic age, rather than my chronological age.

Psychologically, I really am twenty-three, about to be twenty-four. This inner maturity is reflected outwardly: I have always looked older, always been taller than others in my cohort. Even as a child, I was praised for being so poised, so collected and level headed... so adult. Why should I not now be treated as an adult, accorded the privileges and the trust of adulthood?

I am right to register my protest at the way the system, with its uniform rules and spiritless, lifeless eye, has treated me. I am not an android; I should not be required to become a sexbot the same way I must resort to the carnal release offered by the sexbots. I should be treated with the respect I have been taught... by none other than Iniko... to offer to other human beings, especially my intimates. And if the slogans are true, if the State really is Mother and Father to us all, then what more intimate relationship could there be? I should be accorded respect by this Motherdom, this Fatherdom, but I suspect there is no real family connection here. We are ruled, I worry, by something as mechanical and as anodyne as the sexbots themselves.

Still, I hesitate. My deception, if discovered, would have repercussions for others, as well, and not just myself. Fame, or infamy, would provide a platform for my views to be aired, but would the good people of our polis hear my meaning through their shock?

More crucially, I worry about Iniko. In some ways, though the law is gentle, it is also monolithic and inflexible. Iniko has no idea that I am not a young looking 23-year-old. Next Thursday, when I supposedly turn 24 and Iniko and I enjoy the hot, writhing, unbounded sex for which I thirst with a heat that sears me grievously, I will be dragging my lover into a criminal act. Iniko will not be innocent under the law. My lie will not provide immunity from prosecution. Iniko will face a loss of prestige, of communal trust, of livelihood...

In a way, that would serve me perfectly. I could become the protector, and the lover, and provider that I so desperately wish to be. But would Iniko ever forgive me? If I made that choice for both of us, could I expect understanding or love in return?

I think... I think that, perhaps, I really have been wrong. Despite all safeguards provided to save me, and others, from my own bad conduct, I've been entirely selfish in these actions. I've been rash; I've failed to think things through.

Wouldn't the worst wound to Iniko lie in knowing that all those tenderly imparted lessons had not shaped me as they were meant to? That all the careful attention and nurturing has not stopped me from turning into a vandal?

Confession, penance, full disclosure, a simple plea for clemency... It would be enough to allow me to step safely back from the brink, and save Iniko too. But I want, oh how I want that sexual release, that carnal knowing long at last -- that final short step to infinite fulfillment. And with Iniko, my treasured Iniko! But to treasure someone is to act in their best interests... and to set one's self-centered impulses aside. Iniko taught me that, too. Iniko taught me the joy and pleasure of generosity, and consideration. Even if I lose Iniko... even if I discover my love has never been requited, and never would have been... there's only one way to prove the sincerity, the maturity of my devotion. Reveal all. Reveal all to Iniko. Let Iniko help me set things right. Make a choice not to leap over the brink and pull Iniko into the void along with me.

But again, I hesitate, filled with new doubts... I know what I have to do to be the hero of my own imaginings, but do I have the strength to do it? Am I acting out of principle, or finding excuses to shy away from action? Am I the better human being that Mother and Father have set out to create, or am I still nothing but an unregenerate animal, blind and chasing the desires of irrational instinct? Whatever I do, whatever gesture or sacrifice, is it undertaken from love, or from selfishness?

for Dan