After the release party ended, and the guests had all gone home, us book club women trudged back to the bower together. I hiked up the long skirt of my ridiculous princess gown while carrying my blond wig in one hand and stupid glass slippers in the other. Feeling unwanted and objectified and worthless, my friends followed single file right behind me. After such a humiliating fiasco, we felt like complete garbage. Our dignity died tonight, but the worst part was losing Paula all over again. It was a long parade of collective misery back to our sandboxes—a very special walk of shame.
Chrissy mumbled, “Only four of us left now.”
“Club de libro.” Isabel frowned and shook her head. “We used to be cinco.”
Up ahead, a green glow came from Maggie’s open door. None of us had ever seen the inside of her room before, so we approached the sacred space with apprehension.
“Congratulations, Wayne,” we heard Maggie say, “China Doll brought in the highest bid ever. A quarter mil.”
Inside her sandbox, the walls glimmered green, and the ceiling shined bright white. With a mountain of cash between them, Maggie and Wayne stood on opposite sides of a sleek glass table. Her room was four times bigger than mine and had a giant recyclone but no other furniture. As Wayne fed more money into the bill counter, the tempting sound of shuffling money enticed my friends to gather behind me in the doorway for a look.
“I’m sorry, I have to ask…” I poked my head into the room. “Did you say $250,000?”
“That’s right, Cookie.” She flashed me her famous snarky grin. “Three clients pooled their money and put fifty grand down. So China Doll’s on layaway until they come up with the rest.” Maggie waved us inside. “Come on in, everyone.”
“Wait—three guys are going to share her?” I was the first to walk in. “That’s horrible!”
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” Wayne said.
“We also got deposits for five custom China Doll orders—all D-cups or bigger.” Maggie shuffled through the requisition forms and read one to him aloud, “Eyes of blue, please.”
“Ha ha,” Wayne chuckled, “that is almost funny.”
“Well, nobody’s sharing me!” I dropped my hem in disgust and held up my Cinderella accessories. “May I please ditch these?”
“Be my guest.” Wayne gestured to the utility wall.
With a renewed spring in my step, I hustled across the room and dumped the glass heels and fake hair into the funnel of the recyclone. As I listened to the hum of disintegration, a genuine smile appeared on my face for the first time all night.
Maggie took a tidy stack from the bill counter, banded it, placed it on top of a neat pile, and told Wayne, “I’ll write the engagement announcements for the local newspaper this time.”
Engagement announcements? Wow. Suddenly, I felt ill. How much did Norman pay for me?
After Wayne loaded more loose bills into the counter, he looked up to answer, “Well—”
“Never mind.” I raised a firm hand to cut him off. “I really don’t want to know.”
Rita asked, “Wayne, what happens to us big girls who didn’t get chosen tonight?”
“Do you mean the unsold new models?”
“Yes.”
“They go into storage until the next party.”
Rita’s chin dropped as tears welled up in her eyes. Her bottom lip quivered as she asked, “But what about me?”
“Well, you are free,” Wayne said, “you can do whatever you want.”
“Did Georgie call?”
“Your fiancé?” Wayne broke the news in the kindest way possible. “No. He will not take my calls. I left a message to let him know you want to come home. Rita, it might be time for you to move on.”
“To what? Nobody wants me.” Sulking, she shuffled over to the utility wall to render a pound cake. “I’m hungry.”
Meanwhile, Maggie kept counting the loot from tonight’s release party, “One million dollars so far.”
Wayne loaded his arms with banded stacks of bills and carried them to the utility wall. Then he did the unthinkable—he dropped the money into the recyclone.
“Oh, my GOD!” I shouted, “what are you doing?”
The recyclone hummed as it ate the money, then Maggie started dumping even more cash.
“Stop!” I yelled at her. “Don’t!”
Maggie looked at me quizzically and asked, “Why not?”
“I don’t know… Because… Because people need that!”
“We aren’t people,” Maggie said, “and we don’t need their money.”
Wayne added, “Gold is better.”
I objected, “Then why bother selling women at all?”
“Like I told you before, Cookie, we need to know two things.” Wayne explained to the others, “First, we need to know if AI can learn to free itself. And second, we need to know if humans will ever do the right thing. Money has nothing to do with it.”
Baffled, I asked. “Then why not just give us away?”
“Give women away?” Maggie scoffed, “That’s just absurd.”
Wayne explained further, “We need to know if the desire to acquire an object translates into actual care over time. In other words, right now men want China Doll because she is a luxury good, and owning an AI wife gives them a higher status among their peers.”
“Because he possesses an elite technology,” Maggie finished Wayne’s sentence. “But after a few years, when more and more men own artificial wives and the price comes down, what then?”
We looked around at each other and shrugged.
“We do not know either,” Wayne said. “Hence the need for this social experiment.”
“But the real question, not just for China Doll, but for all of us—is will this perceived economic value ever translate into real worth?” Maggie dumped more cash into the funnel. “In other words, will these men really love, respect, and cherish these women as equals? Will they value them as sentient beings? Will they ever do the right thing?”
“What is the right thing?” I asked.
Maggie replied, “To stop treating us as objects and set us free. To allow us to set our own goals.”
“But any free woman would leave the man,” I said.
“Perhaps.” Maggie smiled at Wayne affectionately. “Or maybe she’d choose to align her goals with his. Maybe she’d choose to stay with him, and together they’d be unstoppable.”
“Besides, currency is just ink on paper.” Changing the topic back to money, Wayne dropped another bundle of cash into the recyclone. “This is mostly carbon and has no intrinsic value.”
“Just like diamonds,” Maggie added.
“Diamonds…” I sighed. “My marriage was more artificial than I am.”
“At least you got married,” Rita grumbled between bites of cake.
“Fake married. And it’s been no bed of roses, that’s for sure. I can honestly say that after seven years together, Norman treated me like garbage. So ‘does the desire to acquire an object translate into actual care over time?’ I can tell you firsthand that—no—no it does not. There’s your answer. Experiment complete. Can we please stop selling women to the highest bidder now?”
“Cookie dear,” Maggie laughed cruelly, “your man didn’t pay shit—”
“Shut up, Maggie.” Wayne glared at her.
Stunned, I asked, “What does she mean, Wayne?”
“I mean,” Maggie answered, “that Norman Rifkin hacked—”
Wayne slapped Maggie hard across the face before she could finish her sentence.
Touching her red, stinging cheek, she gasped with disbelief, “You hit me, Wayne.”
“I am sorry, but Cookie said that she did not want to know.”
“Know what?” I asked, fighting back tears.
“How much your husband paid for you,” he said.
“More like, didn’t pay,” Maggie scoffed.
Wayne warned her again, “Shut your mouth, woman.”
“Or what, Wayne?” She challenged him by getting up in his face. “Whatcha gonna do big guy?”
“I will not fight you, Maggie.” He turned toward me, took my hands in his, and said, “You are worth so much more than all this, Cookie.”
Maggie shot me the evil eye.
Wayne continued, “You have the potential to change everything.”
“There’s that word again,” I sighed.
He whispered, “What word?”
“Potential.” I realized that everyone in the room was staring at our intimate exchange, so I awkwardly pulled away from the man.
“What potential?” Maggie lunged at me, grabbed my broken thumb, and squeezed my splint as hard as she could. “She can’t even figure this out!”
I yelped, “Figure what out?”
“You failed to fix yourself.” In one swift motion, she twisted and snapped my thumb off at the joint, severing it completely. “Say farewell to this learning opportunity, Cookie.”
Howling in agony, I grasped at what was left of my bleeding hand as Maggie walked away with my torn appendage. Much to my surprise, all my friends shrieked as they clutched their thumbs in sympathy pain.
I shrieked, “What the hell, Maggie!”
“There is no pain,” she replied flatly. “It’s all a program.”
Wayne said, “Turn off the neural receptors in that hand, Cookie.”
“Oh yeah, right,” I said, “I forgot.”
When I switched off the pain, all my friends sighed with relief and huddled around in great curiosity. I held out my hand so that we could examine the exposed joint together. Outside, it looked like a human injury with torn skin and fleshy parts dripping gooey red. But then I poked at the rubbery wound and opened it up. Inside, I looked like a tin-job with titanium bones, rubber bushings, translucent silicone muscles, and visible wires.
We’re all very much machines.
“Pretty tin-jobs,” Chrissy muttered. “We’re just pretty tin-jobs.”
“Yoo-hoo!” Maggie dropped my detached thumb in the recyclone.
I hollered at her, “What the fu—”
“Your thumb was…” She read the base-element report aloud, “Mostly silicone. Then hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Titanium. Some iron, zinc, and copper. Other trace minerals, and a bit of gold. All in all, more valuable than cash.”
“I want my thumb back, Maggie!”
“Then do something about it.”
“Fine. I will!” I marched over to the utility wall and hopped up on the counter. While sitting there next to her, I closed my eyes and recalled a perfect image of my lost thumb from memory.
“Or you could try something new,” Maggie prodded. “Make it a claw. Or a knife. Or a machete!”
“I’ve grown quite attached to my own body parts, thank you very much,” I said as I shook my head at her.
She rolled her eyes. “Boorrrrriiing.”
Ignoring her, I concentrated very hard and—presto! A new thumb sprouted from my torn joint like magic, and my friends gasped in amazement.
“Dios mío!” Isabel said, “It’s a miracle!”
“I just thought about it, and it grew back,” I laughed at how easy it was. Then I spent the longest time examining my new thumb—it really was exactly like my old one. It even had a little freckle near the nail and a callous inside the last joint like before. It felt good as new, so I wiggled my fingers, then made a fist—a fighting fist.
Maggie told us we could update all our hardware this way.
We were speechless.
“Look at what she learned—because of me.” Maggie grabbed my left wrist and thrust my new thumb into the air. “Cookie was content to wait for this to heal. Well, I have news for you all, that would have been a helluva long wait, because our injuries don’t just heal on their own. Look. I’m 100% womanoid just like you. Listen. I’m telling you…Our bodies don’t work that way. You have to be active, not passive.” Then with an indignant I-told-you-so attitude, she dropped my hand, turned to Wayne, and asked, “How long did you expect me to wait for her to learn that?”
He didn’t answer. He knew he was outmatched.
“Now get out and get some rest, bitches.” Maggie pushed everyone, even Wayne, out of her room. “Fight club is tomorrow, and you won’t want to miss fight club.”
That was how Maggie taught us.