Chapter Two

Garrett’s sleekly silent collection of lifelike, electrically heated, semi-mobile, voice-programmable, and intimately anatomically correct love dolls could not provide true companionship, of course. None of the exquisitely beautiful things was a wife, after all, or a girlfriend, a woman who would love him and adore him, would look up to him, would share her life with him. Despite brilliantly designed software which produced repartee that was admittedly most satisfactory in the heat of the moment, their conversations could not help but be short-lived and limited—certainly they could not serve as even mere acquaintances with the variety of memories and feelings and minds of their own. Nor could any of them provide that simple yet somehow deeply rewarding camaraderie which even a cat or a dog would have given the lonely man.

But sexually these exquisite love dolls were indeed the next best thing short of a human partner, giving an experience definitely more than halfway up the continuum between simple masturbation and actual lovemaking. Even when clothed and posed in some innocuous fashion they were still beautifully graceful, almost minor works of art. They were to the most elegant mannequin standing haughty in the plate glass window of the most upscale boutique—whatused to stand in those now-incinerated or blast-flattened places, anyway—what a Rembrandt or a Titian had been to a too-bright print of flowers or a sailboat that might have hung in a motel room rented by the hour.

Garrett first had purchased one of the lifelike contraptions on a naughty whim, but then, embarrassed at himself, when the shipment came, he had not even opened it for a long time. Once he finally nerved himself to drag the heavy box out of his closet, though, he still told himself a little uneasily that he was not committing himself to anything. The thing he bought could serve simply as a clothes mannequin, after all, or a part of some life-sized avant-garde diorama-sculpture. He was simply a wealthy man—fully clothed, by the way, he reminded himself dutifully—with a penchant for collecting miscellaneous artifacts and objects d’art. There was nothing strange or out of the ordinary here. Nothing at all.

When he opened the seals on the heavy box and started removing the paperwork that lay on top, he fidgeted slightly, for apparently these devices did not come with even a robe or a wrap. There was a body in that big flattish box, it appeared, a bare one, and the poor man had the strange sensation of being a grave-robber or some sort of pervert. As he progressed in brushing away the foam packing peanuts, however, soon he could only blink down in astonishment. He had known both from the advertizing copy and from the very price, that this thing would not be cheap and sleazy-looking but instead at least passably realistic, and yet this truly was impressive.

It really did not look like plastic or rubber at all, so finely detailed it was, with meticulous