A Snake in a Sari
They met at an Agency safehouse, a well-appointed middle-class home with modern decor. She couldn’t risk being seen with the sales rep in public; while not technically illegal, Violet Technologies wasn’t exactly in the Robotics Control Authority’s good graces, to put it lightly. The silver-haired spymaster sat in her armchair, looking almost regal in her elegant purple sari; after this she had a party to go to at the embassy, and when it comes to fashion Meera Choudhuri takes no prisoners.
The representative arrived exactly on time, dressed like a boilerplate corporate drone in her shiny satin blouse, black pencil skirt, pantyhose, and heels. She was only thirty-two, still young and pretty, while Meera had aged like a fine wine, her wrinkled skin and gravelly voice only making her seem more commanding.
“Lakshmi Koyal,” she said, shaking Meera’s hand. “Head of Sales, Violet Technologies. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“I detest pleasantries,” Meera rasped. “Get to the point. Why should I spend millions of dollars on some fucking sex robot, when we already have infiltration bots that do their job just fine? With the kind of money you’re asking for, I could recruit a dozen high-level sources, start a brand-new SIGINT collection program. We may be well-funded, but our budget isn’t limitless.”
“The Temptress is the most advanced infiltration unit on the market today,” Lakshmi said, her smiling face and pleasant voice showing no sign Meera’s barbs had affected her. “If you go with our competition, you’ll need to take off their skin, print a new one, and put it on if you want to change their appearance. And all it takes is one cut and everyone can see it’s a bot. But thanks to our cutting-edge nanotechnology, the Temptress can change its appearance completely in seconds, repair itself instead of having to abort the mission, fabricate all sorts of tools on the fly. Not only that, but its personality emulation is head and shoulders ahead of—”
“I’ve read the fucking spec sheet,” Meera interrupted. She took a sip of her coffee, but when Lakshmi opened her mouth Meera held up a hand, and the young woman didn’t dare speak. “Save me the sales pitch. I want to see your toy in action.”
“Of course,” Lakshmi said. “How about the embassy social tonight? Ambassadors, politicians, businessmen, celebrities… I’m sure there’s quite a few people there you have your eyes on. Give me a name, any name, and the Temptress will have them wrapped around its finger by the end of the night. If it works, you’ve got yourself a new asset, and if not, you’ve lost absolutely nothing.”
“You say it can impersonate anyone convincingly. How about, say, Chandni Kapoor?”
“The actress?” Meera nodded, and Lakshmi’s manicured hands typed in a few commands. “Easy as cake. When their whole life's on social media, that's most of the prep work done for you. You just create a new profile, add whatever data you have on the target — it can work with pretty much anything — and once it’s processed everything…” Lakshmi handed her the laptop; the command transform(Chandni) was typed in, and all Meera had to do was hit enter.
Lakshmi began transforming before Meera’s eyes. Her suit sloughed off, flowing into a puddle of nanobots at her feet. Green eyes became camera lenses with a glowing red ring. Lakshmi’s black hair broke out of its businesslike bun, grew nearly twice as long, then twined itself into a more adventurous updo. Her whole body transformed: skin becoming shinier and changing subtly in tone, breasts and waist growing larger, face adjusting itself in a myriad of tiny ways until it was indistinguishable from the real Chandni’s. Meera even thought she saw her grow a few centimeters shorter.
While Meera was transfixed at the sight of the robot reshaping itself, the nanobots that made up its clothing were hard at work weaving themselves into an opulent Kanchipuram sari of green silk, along with a matching blouse cut to emphasize her striking figure and a variety of accessories to round off the look. Chandni’s fingers worked with whirlwind speed, pleating and folding and pinning and tucking. Within seconds, the sari was draped exquisitely over her slender body, its intricate folds and golden patterns shimmering wherever the light caught them. Her makeup did itself, accentuating her already formidable beauty, dark lipstick immediately conjuring up a burning desire within Meera to feel those lips touching hers— No. Meera caught herself before it was too late, doing her best to keep her poker face.
The robot blinked, and now her eyes were a beautiful brown, circuits giving way to blood vessels, not a single trace of artifice visible. She took a mirror from her purse and examined herself, then put it away with a satisfied smile.
“How do I look?”
She looked just like the real Chandni, moved like her, sounded like her, even smiled like her. The transformation was breathtaking, and Meera wondered if perhaps it might have been wiser to have the robot change into someone who wasn’t quite so beautiful so as not to cloud her judgement. But nevertheless, her reason prevailed.
“The technology is certainly something,” Meera said. “But no deal.”
The Temptress crossed its arms and pouted, a display certainly more fitting for the primadonna it was impersonating than a robotics saleswoman. “What did I do?”
“It’s clear you don’t respect me. First, if you think you can manipulate me this easily, you don’t have a fucking clue who I am. And second… intelligence work, at its core, is about people and their relationships. You might think it’s some cute trick to have your sales rep reveal itself as a robot halfway through the demo, but to me it just says you didn’t value your relationship with me or my agency enough to send a human to meet with me.”
“On the contrary.” Chandni slipped effortlessly back into the form of Lakshmi, this time in less than a second, every part of her shifting simultaneously and her voice changing along with it. “The number of components, the amount of time and specialized tooling it takes to assemble one, not to mention the hundreds of engineers that worked to make it possible, all the time spent designing and testing and refining… even a single Temptress is worth more than any employee we could possibly send. And it also shows we’re confident enough that it won’t break or malfunction or go off the rails — like certain competitors of ours have a tendency to do — that we don’t need to bring a support team. After all, if you’re sending someone off on an infiltration mission, you want to be absolutely certain they can handle themselves, don’t you?”
Lakshmi deferred to Meera, waiting for her to respond. The old lady remained stone-faced, weighing Lakshmi’s words in her head.
“I’ve done my research about you, Miss Choudhuri,” Lakshmi continued. “You’re one of the shrewdest spymasters in the business. You wouldn’t have survived this long if you weren’t. Especially coming from where you did, with the deck stacked against you, having to work twice as hard and still not earning the respect you deserve. We went to you, instead of anyone else at your agency, because you’re willing to take risks, go against the grain, stand up for what’s right even if it’s not the best for your career. With our technology, you’ll be leading the way into the 22nd century even if the rest of your colleagues are stuck in the 20th.”
Meera smiled, despite herself. It was rare for anyone to praise her like this. She loved her country, and she loved her agency, but her love was rarely reciprocated. Perhaps she really had misread Lakshmi’s intentions.
“Perhaps you’re right,” Meera said. “But you’re asking quite a steep price.”
“But think of what you’re getting for it,” Lakshmi said. “I’m sure a handler of your caliber has a great deal of experience with sleeper missions, how difficult it is to find someone who has the right background, who’s willing to work for you for such a long time under such difficult conditions, who won’t slip up and blow their cover, who never questions their mission or thinks of retiring. I won’t patronize you listing off all the financial costs and personnel demands that go into their care and feeding.” Meera nodded. “If there was an agent who could do everything the Temptress does, something tells me you’d do everything you possibly could to get her on your side, no matter the price — but there’s no human who could possibly do everything the Temptress does.”
“I’ll consider it after the embassy.”
“Speaking of.” Nanobots cascaded down the Temptress’s body as Lakshmi again became Chandni. “Have you decided what you have in mind for tonight?”
Again Meera was struck with awe at Chandni’s beauty, her perfect face, her glowing skin, the golden sheen of her sari. She was running through candidates in her head, trying to figure out which of the bigwigs at the party had the most potential as an asset, but found it difficult to focus on the question at hand.
“Just say the word,” Chandni purred. “Anything you ask, I’ll do it.”
Images crept into Meera’s mind of Chandni at work, her arms around some elegant woman in an evening gown, holding her close as they danced, whispering sweet nothings in her ear, leading the woman somewhere out of the way where she could push her up against a wall and pull down the zipper of her dress. Or perhaps she’d lay the ambassador out cold with a sedative-laced kiss, pick the lock on his top-secret filing cabinet with that versatile tendril the spec sheet said so much about, photograph hundreds of pages in a few seconds with those beautiful eyes of hers. The possibilities were intoxicating, the sheer power Meera would have at her fingertips. Meera realized that she’d been staring at Chandni, and Chandni was smiling back at her, a devious, flirty smile that told her she knew exactly what was going through Meera’s head.
“Did you know,” Chandni said, “that my systems use more than sixteen thousand data points to analyze a person’s emotions?” She advanced towards Meera, a slow and seductive step, and her bangles clinked as she ran her impossibly tender hands over Meera’s cheeks. “And it updates my models in real time. They betray themselves with every word, every glance. I know what they want better than they know themselves. And do you know what it's telling me you want?”
Meera's heart was racing. It was obvious what this robot was trying to do — she could imagine whoever at Violet Technologies was responsible for pulling its strings, their computer open to the Temptress's interface, commanding it to do everything it could to close this deal. She wondered if they were touching themselves right this moment, watching everything through Chandni’s alluring auburn eyes. But understanding the workings of gravity does nothing when one is already in freefall.
Gently but firmly, Chandni took Meera by the arms and set her on the table. Chandni’s syrupy-sweet lips met hers, more a question than a committed kiss, but Meera’s answer was loud and clear.
Chandni stuck out her tongue, and Meera watched in awe as it split in half then extruded more material from the middle, growing almost twice as long. When she French-kissed Meera, it took every bone of self-control in the old lady’s body not to moan, and Meera could feel herself getting wet just from the thought of that tongue on her clit.
As the Temptress’s tongue danced with Meera’s, her fingers worked their way down with agonizing slowness and began undoing the folds of Meera's sari, but Meera grabbed it by the wrist.
“The party’s only in a few hours,” Meera grumbled. “I don't want to put the whole bloody thing back on again.”
“If you want, I'd be happy to handle that for you.” Chandni's hands returned to caressing Meera's face, running fingers through her hair, tracing patterns on her shoulder. “But something tells me you'd prefer a different option.”
“Oh?”
Chandni blinked, and her enchanting auburn irises made way for the lenses with their red rings and filigrees of golden circuit traces. Looking into them this closely, watching them pan and focus with an almost imperceptible whir, Meera was almost hypnotized. She couldn't tell if she was more entranced with Chandni’s beauty or the machine’s; they were both masterworks in their own way, one shaped by genes and makeup and scalpels, the other by silicon and nanomachines.
Something rustled and stirred under Chandni’s sari, snaking its way through the silken folds. The tendril with its shining steel spines curved sinuously, carefully teasing its way through the pleats of the spymaster’s sari.
“I wouldn't let the ambassador see this, of course,” Chandni cooed. “It's just for you. Since you know what I am, and it's clear you like me better this way…”
The tendril wrapped around Meera's leg, and she felt a frisson at the touch of the metal. It found Meera's panties and hooked around them, pulling them down. When the synthflesh-coated tip parted her bushy lips, the mere touch was too much. Meera cried out, her smoky, raspy moans filling the room, squirming in ecstasy, and Chandni moaned with her. She kept going, kissing Meera again with the tendril swirling in sync with her tongue.
The Temptress didn't experience pleasure (or pain) in the same way a human did, and its smiles and frowns and moans and cries were the mere product of its persona system’s millions of lines of code, decoupled from how it really felt. But the way its reinforcement-learning algorithms rewarded achieving its objectives was something like that, and so it too felt something like the ecstasy Meera was feeling, and that the real Lakshmi Koyal was feeling too.
At that moment, the executive was sprawled out on the satin sheets of her hotel bed just like Meera had suspected, her dress lying on the carpet, eyes fixed on her laptop, vibrator relentlessly attacking her clit through her nylons. Through the Temptress’s eyes she saw Meera come again and again, screaming and moaning and begging for more, and Lakshmi came along with her.
Once Meera had finally had enough, Lakshmi typed in a few commands and the Temptress laid her down on the couch, wiped its lipstick from her face, fixed her panties, and licked her clean with its tendril, leaving not a trace of their encounter. The tendril reeled back in, its tongue returned to normal length, and its optics displayed Chandni’s brown eyes again. Taking a mirror from her purse, she redid her own lipstick, examined herself for any imperfections, and found none. Chandni headed to the embassy party, bangles jingling as she walked away, and though the night was still young there was no doubt in Lakshmi’s mind that she'd won another customer.