Emma couldn’t stop staring at the narrow closet in the corner of Austin’s bedroom where it lived. She chastised herself for being so distracted, because she could tell Austin had something important to tell her, and she wanted to give him her full attention. Except she was pretty sure she knew what he was going to say, and if she was right, it would be involved anyway. She rolled over on the bed toward him and tried to put it out of her mind.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Let’s go out.” 

“In a minute,” Austin said, and pulled himself upright so his bare chest and arms protruded from the sheets, still gleaming with sweat from the love they’d just made. He waved a gesture into the air, indicating to the home automation system that he wanted to dim the lights a few shades. With another gesture, he motioned for the wallscreens to transform themselves into the tranquil scene of a rooftop at sunset overlooking Paris as it had been in the 1960s. Austin was always showing off his expensive tech to her, something she didn’t usually mind, especially because he seemed to have a skill for setting a mood. Tonight was different, though. 

The bedroom disappeared, and it was as if they’d traveled back seventy years to a simpler setting. A time without smartphones and neural implants and dating algorithms. A place where love and lust were matters of animal instinct. A spirit of eroticism over neuroticism. If Austin was about to say what she suspected, she was glad he’d brought her here to say it.

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said, nervously. 

“So ask me,” she said, and brought herself upright so that her naked body also protruded from the sheets. Austin stole a glance at her breasts, even though they’d been in his face just moments ago.

“We’ve been dating for a few months now,” he began, “and I feel like it’s going pretty well.”

Fuck, he’s really going to say it, she thought.

“So I was thinking …” he trailed off and then a look of fright came across his face. “Oh, I almost forgot!” He made another gesture to the air, and the door to the closet in the corner opened a crack. The closet where it lived. It was too dark to see inside but out came a small, hovering robot carrying a tray with a bouquet of fresh flowers. If that was all there had been in the closet, she’d have been happy—in fact she was pleased with the flower arrangement, made from species you couldn’t find in the wild anymore—but as the robot brought the tray closer, she saw upon it a tidy, familiar card, which she’d seen a few times before in her adult dating life. On it were a few lines of poetry from Lord Byron. 

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

It would’ve been touching if this exact stanza hadn’t been on every other card she’d received like this. It was stock text to match the “gift” that accompanied this card, and it didn’t help that the logo for MirrorMirror Inc. was embossed just beneath it. The robotics company was too in love with its own branding for subtlety. Emma took the card from the tray and smiled anyway. Austin had many talents, but prose and poetry were not among them. It made logical sense to outsource that part of this gesture. So much of what he did made logical sense.

“Emma, I really like you,” he said, his cheeks flushing, “and you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. So I was wondering …”

Here it comes.

“Will you do The Scan?” he asked. “For me?” She could see the relief wash over his face now that he’d finally gotten it out.

“Oh, Austin, do you really mean it?” she asked in a joyful tone that was only partly insincere.

“I do,” he said. “You’re the only one for me.”

“You’ve made me so happy!” she said and pulled him in for a kiss before her conflicted emotions could overcome her acting ability. His warm lips felt heavy upon hers and the stubble on his chin scratched against her soft skin with each movement of his jaw in a way that was both unpleasant and comforting. The rash she’d get afterwards would remind her he’d really been there. She wondered if he experienced similar thoughts about the way she felt in his embrace. When they finally pulled apart, she opened her eyes and saw his own sparkling with joy. 

“Thank you, thank you,” he said, and sat up again. “I made the appointment for next Sunday—if that’s okay with you, of course.”

“Can’t wait,” she said. 

“We just have to take a few preliminary measurements,” he said, and jumped out of bed.

“Can we do them now? I’m just so excited!”

Emma smiled and got out of bed. “Let’s do it.”

“Perfect,” he said, and gestured to the closet in the corner. “Stand right over there, please.”

As she walked over to the closet, he made another gesture to the air. The closet door opened all the way this time. Then it stepped out. 

Austin’s sexbot. 

“Hey there, handsome,” it said in a suggestive singsong as it walked over to the bed and struck a seductive pose. It wore a mishmash of lingerie and hosiery, a custom arrangement Austin had put together in the recent past (fashion was also not one of his talents). Emma had seen plenty of sexbots in her day, but never Austin’s. It struck her how much the thing already looked like her but with larger breasts, longer legs, and an ass she couldn’t have achieved with ten thousand squats a day.

“You’re looking sexy tonight,” the sexbot said. “Why don’t you come over here and bring your friend?”

“Not now, Sheila,” Austin said. “Go stand by Emma. We need to do a height and body mass comparison.”

“Oooh, kinky,” it said. 

“Shiela, tone down suggestiveness by 20 percent,” Austin said. 

“Okay. Toning down suggestiveness,” Sheila said and stood perfectly still next to Emma. 

Austin got out his smartphone, pulled up the MirrorMirror app, and captured a few images of Emma and Sheila standing together. Then he had them do a series of positions and poses. Emma already knew them all and could do them with almost as much robotic precision as the actual robot. Almost. She tried her best not to notice how perfect everything about Sheila was. Her tight yet supple skin. Her impossible green eyes. Her immaculate hair. Emma assumed this version of Sheila was a customized variant of the stock model Austin originally purchased, and that this was his idea of the perfect woman. But Sheila wouldn’t look that way for long.

“Okay, got it,” Austin said with a smile and put his phone away. “Thank you, Sheila. You can go to sleep now.”

“Okay, babe,” Sheila said and strutted back over to the closet. Just before she entered, she turned and blew him a kiss. “Be seein’ ya, sexy.”

Austin was beaming. “Amazing,” he said to Emma. “It’s like she was made to be you.” 

Emma noted that Austin referred to Sheila as “she” and not “it.” Emma still preferred to think of sexbots as objects, even though it made her feel guilty for reasons that were both confusing and infuriating.

“C’mon, let’s go celebrate,” Austin said. “My treat.”

The two of them threw on their clothes and hopped in the backseat of Austin’s car, which drove them to an expensive restaurant. Austin held Emma in his arms and sat quietly, smiling out the window. Emma rested her head on his shoulder and watched the driverless steering wheel turn left and right, round and round, all by itself, operating perfectly and precisely, just as it would if she hadn’t been there to observe it at all.  

#

“He actually asked you to do The Scan?” Emma’s friend Chloe asked as she inhaled a forkful of salad at the lunch café in the office building where they both worked. “Already?”

“He asked me last night,” Emma said. 

“He must really like you,” Chloe said. “It took Ryan a year to ask me, and only after some pretty shameless prodding.” She laughed. “I basically bribed him.”

“How?”

“I told him I’d upgrade his Sheila to the 5.0 model for Christmas if he did it,” Chloe said. “Or Asuna, as he calls her now.”

“Austin still calls his Sheila,” Emma said. “He says it keeps him from getting attached. He didn’t even install the conversation module.”

“That’s so old-fashioned,” Chloe said. “It’s kinda sweet. Just make sure he doesn’t give it your name after you get The Scan. It’s always weird when guys do that. Someone should tell them we don’t like it.”

“One of my exes named his Emma II.”

“Yikes.”

“It didn’t even look like me,” Emma said. “What about Asuna? Is she an exact replica of you?”

“Pretty close,” Chloe said. “The real me has a few moles and stretchmarks. Ryan was fine with them, but I insisted he leave them out. I let him keep the stock areolas too.” 

“Doesn’t that make the real you less appealing?” Emma asked. 

“That’s what I used to think, but I guess imperfections really turn guys on.” She shrugged. “I think it’s a novelty thing. You’ve got to leave some mystery in the relationship. Or maybe it’s a real sugar, fake sugar thing. I don’t know. Or care.”

“How often does he … use it?” Emma asked. 

“I don’t even want to know,” Chloe said. “Enough to keep him happy when I’m not in the mood or when I don’t want to do some of the weird shit he’s into. Honestly, I don’t know how our mothers and grandmothers got by. These sickos are insatiable.” She scoffed. “It’s probably a good thing, actually. Practice makes perfect. Asuna is one of the newer models that comes with Intimacy Education Mode. She’s got my entire nervous system modeled—which you should definitely do when you get The Scan—so now when Ryan and I bio-bone he knows how to get me there in, like, ten minutes. Fifteen tops. Still not as quick as my toys, but not bad.”

“I hate the term ‘bio-bone,’” Emma said.

“Well, you’re kind of old-fashioned too,” Chloe said. 

“The whole thing is so unsexy to me.”

“Emma, please know that I love you when I tell you to lighten up,” Chloe said, and put her hand on Emma’s. “Everyone’s having the best sex of their lives now. This is literally the greatest time to be alive and horny. Don’t be weird about it.”

“I guess.”

“And good luck finding a guy without a Sheila. Even the religious ones have them now.”

Chloe gave Emma’s hand a squeeze. “At least Austin wants to fuck you, not a celebrity or a cartoon character. Take the win, girl!”

Emma let a shallow smile creep onto her face as she looked down at her hands. “I guess you’re right.”

#

A week later, Emma looked like some sort of astronaut or deep sea diver. That was because of the Scan Suit, which covered her head to toe and was jam-packed with cameras, sensors, and wires. She stood in the middle of a stark, sterile room somewhere inside MirrorMirror Inc.’s local fabrication hub. The room was made of dark blue tiles, each backlit by a soft white light, and it wasn’t clear whether the décor was functional or was only meant to look futuristic. Either way, it made her feel cold, even though she was completely encased inside the suit. 

“You’re doing great,” Austin said into her earpiece. She looked up to the observation window where he stood with a MirrorMirror’s consultant, who was tapping notes into a tablet. 

Across from her, through a glass window, she could see the workshop where Sheila was being remade in her image. The superficial work was almost done. Her plastic skeleton had been overhauled to match Emma’s, a procedure which required an entire pelvic replacement and some fine-tuning of femur length. Austin insisted they get the ass just right. Then, a nest of tubes removed or injected gels of varying viscosity into Sheila to match Emma’s body fat and muscle composition. The most unsettling part was the face work. Adjustability had already been built into the components of Sheila’s skull and facial musculature—the jaw could be expanded or contracted, the nose shifted up or down, the eye sockets widened or constricted—all without the need to remove the skin, so that Emma could watch in real time as the robot’s face morphed into a three-dimensional mirror. Sheila’s eyes flickered and switched from that impossible Gaelic green to Emma’s commonplace hazel, and a tube of pigments adjusted the shade of Sheila’s impossibly milky skin.

“All right, Mr. Brewer,” the MirrorMirror consultant said to Austin, which Emma could hear through the Scan Suit. “We’re just about done with Visual. Now onto range of motion. Would you prefer to customize or stick with your Sheila’s original settings?”

“I only want whatever Emma can do,” Austin said and smiled lovingly down upon her.

“What do you say, Ms. Jeffries?” the consultant said. “Feeling limber today?”

“I go to yoga a couple times a week, if that’s what you’re asking,” Emma said.

“Excellent,” the consultant said. “A hologram with a series of poses will appear in front of you in just a moment. Do your best to match them.”

A faceless humanoid hologram appeared before her of roughly female proportions and guided her through some standard yoga poses. Emma followed along as the poses became more sexual. She recognized a few from the Kama Sutra. 

“Ooh, we should try that one tonight,” Austin said. 

The poses became harder and harder to achieve until at last, Emma became too fatigued to continue. 

“That’s fine, Ms. Jeffries,” the consultant said. “We’ve got more than enough to work with.”

Then he said to Austin, “Of course, you can change these settings at any time.”

“Won’t need to,” he said. “She’s perfect in every way.” 

“There’s one small matter I’d like to call to your attention,” the consultant said. “Based on our model of your … member … our analysis shows that Ms. Jeffries’ inputs aren’t quite a match for your size, shape, and volume. We can make a few adjustments, if you’d prefer.”

“I like her just the way she is,” Austin said.

“Like I said, you can always make changes later,” the consultant said. “Now, Ms. Jeffries, we just have one last step.” 

She already knew what it was. The Voice Match. She wasn’t sure why she had to keep the

Scan Suit on. Surely, they could just use microphones. But MirrorMirror insisted on getting the most accurate recording of her voice, which meant capturing the sound as it vibrated through her whole body. This was especially important, they said, to accurately reflect screaming and shouting. 

“Okay, Ms. Jeffries, repeat after me,” the consultant said.

“Yes.”

“Fuck.”

“Choke.”

“Harder.” 

“More.” 

“Please.” 

“Hot.”

“Hurt.”

“Love.” 

She repeated these words and more several times at different timbres and tones until the consultant was satisfied. He must have been an acting coach in a former life, because he was able to get quite the performance from her. By the time she retired to the changing room to remove the Scan Suit, she was all hot and bothered. It didn’t help that the changing room was kept at a sweaty, sweltering temperature. She felt dizzy and flustered. The MirrorMirror people obviously expected this sort of thing to happen, because a few moments later, a gentle voice came over the intercom.

“Would you like us to send Mr. Brewer in?” 

“Yes.”

It took less than a minute for Austin to get from the door to the chaise lounge in the corner of the changing room where Emma had gone to sit. Their passion was quick and intense, and even though Austin didn’t yet know all her intricacies, she reveled in his exploration. His unsure hands trembled and tensed as they glided across her sweaty skin, and she lost track of time. It seemed as if it had lasted for ten minutes and also forever. 

“You think they watched us?” Austin asked afterwards, holding her to his chest on the chaise lounge.

“What haven’t they seen already?” she asked.

“I’m so happy,” Austin said. “Now, we’ll be together like this every night.”

But, of course, they wouldn’t. 

#

Afterward, Emma and Austin went out for dinner at another expensive restaurant, and then met friends for drinks. Champagne was served and toasts were made to the happy couple. Emma drank a glass and then another, and a margarita, and a shot or two of tequila. By the time Austin’s car deposited them back at his apartment, her world was swirling and she could barely stand upright. Despite her inebriation, she could tell Austin was still revved up from earlier. His hands ran up and down her body as he led her to the bedroom. She mumbled something about not being able to and Austin said that was just fine. 

He held her hair as she vomited in the toilet, held her upright while she brushed her teeth, and helped her into the silk pajamas he’d bought her. When he laid her down in his bed she closed her eyes and felt him plant a warm, gentle kiss upon her forehead. 

“Goodnight, Emma,” he whispered. 

As she slid toward oblivion, she could hear him shuffling around the room, removing his clothes and humming a chipper melody. She heard the closet in the corner open and gentle footsteps moving toward the bed. She heard the sound of her own voice. 

“Hey there, handsome.”