Perverted Science

Because the lunch hour was split into 'A' and 'B' sections, Jim Goldberg and Will Durante had to wait a half hour to take their usual seats on the bleachers. They brought their lunches with them, of course, but it wasn't the sorry cafeteria fare that aroused their appetites.

Their eyes could roam unfettered in the gym, free to alight with the dainty precision of butterflies on tight asses, and thick bulges that loose gym shorts couldn't quite conceal.

"Shit, what I wouldn't give for a piece of that," Will said, under his breath.

Will's eyes followed Taj Johnson, the blonde captain of the football team, as he zigzagged across the court. Their lunch period happily coincided with a gym class attended by many of the most athletic seniors.

"He's okay, I guess," Jim said.

Taj was better than okay, and they both knew it, because Will only had eyes for the sort of men who would never give him the time of day. Of course, Jim indulged in idle fantasies of his own, but he recognized them for what they were- just fantasies and nothing more.

Jim would never get it on with any of the guys on the varsity football team, not the linemen, not the center guards, neither the tight end, nor the wide receiver, and definitely not Taj, the first string quarterback.

And that was okay by him. Truth be told, he had something of a crush on Will. His friend had a lean swimmer's body, and an adorable baby face that made him look a little younger than his eighteen years. The sad fact was that Jim did not stand a chance with Will; maybe he wasn't overweight, or pimply, but his body was far from the sculpted ideal of his friend's wet dreams.

What they had instead of a romance was an iron-clad bond formed in the crucible of their middle school years. The bullying had been horrendous, and the primary reason they'd had to repeat eighth grade. Hell, it was impossible to excel in academics with a chorus of kids chanting "faggot" everywhere you went.

Now, in their final year of high school, everyone pretty much understood they were young gay men entitled to the same basic rights and dignity accorded to their heterosexual peers. It was 2013 after all... everything was just peachy, as long as they kept that gay shit to themselves.

"He's so fucking beautiful," Will said, with a dreamy sigh.

Jim was resigned to graduating at eighteen, a virgin, and with no real distinction aside from being the youngest person to ever win the Loebner Prize. He had that, at least. Of course, when asked to clarify just what the Loebner Prize was, he would stammer, and look away, as if confessing to having once sucked dick for money, before finally admitting it was for having created the most "human-like chatbot." This answer was usually met with a simple "Oh," (as in "Oh, is that all?", but that particular triumph had netted him the not-bad sum of three thousand dollars U.S).

He followed Will's gaze back to the court, where Taj made another effortless shot into the basket.

Alas, these two were so thoroughly wrapped up were in their erotic reveries, they didn't notice the doors at the end of the gym opening...

"What are you two jerkoffs doing?"

They turned to see the waddling bulk of Crazy Rick Hanover headed in their direction. There was an unsettling expression of amusement on his face, and his wide smile brought the pockmarks on his cheeks into relief. Under the sickly glow of the florescent lights, his face looked like it was made of green cheese.

"Oh, fantastic," Will said, tonelessly.

"Rick, there's some guys in here who play on the varsity team. Shouldn't you maintain a minimum distance of five hundred feet away from them?"

Rick had been to the Principal's office earlier that year, and given a three-day suspension for following two linemen around school, and making lewd and lascivious gestures at them. It was engaging in this kind of nonsense that earned him the nickname Crazy Rick.

"Oh, you mean Taj? I didn't even notice guys like him. Not since I got a boyfriend."

Jim and Will stared at Rick like he'd just arrived from one of those parallel universes posited by string theory, one where every day was opposite day.

"A boyfriend?" Jim asked, a little incredulous.

Cam guys don't count, you know, no matter how many times you pay them to jerk off for you, Will nearly said aloud.

"Did I stutter?" Rick said.

Crazy Rick took out his iphone, and pulled up a photo of his bf for their perusal.

Jim's mouth almost dropped.

"I met him on craigslist-isn't he the cutest?"

The picture was of a rather unimpressive looking college freshman with bad skin, and too-large eyes set in a small, round face. His posture was bad, and his brightly colored clothes gave him a passing resemblance to a lawn gnome.

But he still looked a tad out of Rick's league.

"Has he seen your pic, Rick?" Jim asked, his voice suddenly rich with venomous spite.

"That's the best part. He found my ad. He's what you might call- chubby chaser."

Crazy Rick was clearly enjoying being able to lord this over them. His smug expression was sickening to behold.

"So he's into quantity, not quality," Will blurted out.

There was a brief look of shock in Rick's eyes, but it passed quickly. He broke into a big shit-eating grin.

"My, my, look who's turned green with envy. Well, it's a shame that nobody can stand either of you two losers except each other."

Rick rolled his eyes, with a sharp huff, as if he couldn't believe he had deigned to acknowledge these two bottom feeders to begin with.

"Just get out of here, man, before Taj sees you," Jim snapped.

Jim and Will's moods darkened. You could see it in their faces. Their day-possibly even the remainder of their high school career- was ruined.

Rick sniffed, oblivious, every inch the regal Princess now.

"Toodles," he said, and left without sparing them another look.

After a long silence, Jim exhaled. But before anything further could be said, the bell rung, and it was time for the next class.

Great, Jim thought, now we get to deal with Mr. Costa.

They settled in just before the tardy bell, but never the less drew an admonition from Mr. Costa to try to manage their time wisely instead of lollygagging out in the halls.

Greg Costa was always dispensing valuable advice like that. As the school's wrestling coach, he felt it his duty to help mold the clay that was the hearts and minds of young men (and women) into the productive citizens of tomorrow. He felt he best accomplished this through brow-beating, public shaming, and the occasional cornpone platitude.

Still, Costa was a handsome guy. Will liked his rough, bearded look, and often admired his ass on the sly. Their social studies teacher was one of those men who looked at fitness as more than a way of life, looked at it as a religion, in fact.

If only that troublesome personality of his could be fixed, Will thought. Costa sometimes read books by Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter when the class was busy with an exam, and both of the boys could pretty well guess his opinion of homosexuals.

"Okay, class, if you remember, I assigned the critical thinking questions for Chapter 13 last week-"

"Shit," Jim said under his breath.

He had forgotten his Chapter 13 homework assignment.

"Not to worry," Will said, his voice a low whisper, "I remembered for you."

Will reached into his binder and pulled out Jim's question set.

"Will you two lovebirds pay attention?"

Costa was sneering in their direction.

Scattered laughter rippled through the classroom. Their classmates' eyes converged on them, and their collective gaze pierced them like daggers.

It was the proverbial cherry on top of the shit cake their day had turned into.

Afterwards, they hung out at Will's house. They had complete run of the place until five or so, when Will's parents got off work.

Will's house was a pleasant suburban dream, complete with a white picket fence enclosing a manicured front lawn. It looked like the set of some indie dramedy about self-absorbed, upper middle class people who busied themselves with melodramatic, yet undeniably twee personal meltdowns they worked hard at some 9-to-5 to be able to afford. He couldn't help but flash on this for a second, enjoying the incongruity of this clean-cut exterior with the dirty business they were undertaking.

"What about this one?" Will asked.

"No, his eyes are stuck a little close together."

"That's a bit shallow don't you think?"

"Nobody hires out a trick for their beautiful soul."

Will assented to this. He clicked through a few more ads on the escort website Localboy.com, but each one drew a rolling of the eyes, and a scornful laugh from Jim. Come hell or high water, they were going to lose their cherries, even if it meant paying for it.

They come upon a tattoo covered former male model.

"His wardrobe is impeccable, but his body is too fuckin' loud."

About a Latin lover-type who advertised himself as providing an experience that could go from "spicy to mild" depending on the john's whim, Jim said only, "Nah."

"Oh hell, Jim, nobody's good enough for your ass."

Jim sighed.

"Look, dude, there's just way too many disease in this day and age. I don't even like touching the door handle in a public restroom."

And with that, all talk of hiring out a whore-boy ended. Alas, the problem of their intact cherries remained.

The solution didn't come about until a week later. It was a rather unexceptional day in the middle of the week, when Jim happened to leaf through an issue of Popular Mechanics.

He immediately biked to Will's house, who thought he was nuts.

"I'm talking about making us a guy-actually making us a guy!"

"Well, that's...interesting, Jim."

"You know, like in that movie Weird Science."

Will stared at Jim, blankly. If Will could be counted on for anything, it was complete ignorance of pop culture before 1995.

Not that watching the movie's trailer on YouTube make him any more enthusiastic about the idea.

"Oh, okay. Let's find a magical Commodore 64 that can do that for us."

Will was speaking to Jim now as he would a small child, over enunciating his words, and drawing out the syllables.

Jim always had to fight a mild urge to smack him upside the head when he did this.

"Obviously, we can't replicate that plot exactly. That would be too-"

"Retarded?"

"Impossible."

"Look, it would be child's play for us. It would be just like those little robots we used to build for the science-fair. Remember those?"

"Those were basically toys."

"Smart toys. What we would be doing wouldn't be so different. It would just be...on a larger scale."

Will paced around the room.

"That still wouldn't technically solve our virginity problem," Will said.

"No, but imagine living out our hottest sexual fantasies with a life-like partner."

Left unspoken, but understood was the knowledge that this solution would least irritate their anxiety disorders.

"What of guy would we build for ourselves?"

"A guy with a really big porn star cock-duh."

Will had a tendency to overthink things.

"What do we name him?"

"Johnny the Whore-bot, whatever."

"I knew you were just kidding about this."

"I can't think of anything. You give him a name."

Without a moment's hesitation, Will said, "Taj."

Jim arched his eyebrow, but didn't really protest.

"Taj it is."

Will smiled. Now that that was settled, there were still a million practical concerns to be addressed. Not the least of which was the issue of funding this little project.

"Not to worry," Jim said, "I still have my money from winning the Loebner Prize."

It was at this point that Will had to point out that a similar project involving a gynoid a few years back had cost an estimated half-mill.

"My grandfather left a trust for me in roughly that amount."

"You're going to raid it for this?"

"It's all in the name of science."

Will had to hand it to Jim, when the guy had a kooky idea, he went all the way with it

.

For the rest of the semester they went about tackling the various technical difficulties associated with creating an interactive fetish object.

"To begin with, we need to develop the software that will comprise Taj's basic personality," Jim said.

Tackling the problem of artificial intelligence in the early first century requires considerable trial and error, when you consider that the field itself is far from mature. There is no specific guiding principal for the how to approach the task of simulating neural networks, even as economists and doomsayers project the death of the middle class in a near-future where everything is automated. "Companies like Zappos have laid the groundwork for a world where the average Joe would not be able to get a foothold," one such alarmist cried.

All the scientific journals seemed to be in agreement that it was only a matter of time, but not how we would actually get there. The oldest approach to A.I., dating back to the fifties, the dawn of the digital computer era, was symbolic in nature-symbolic in the sense that prominent scientists of the day attempted to mime human logic and reasoning abilities via substitution symbols a machine could recognize and interpret in an analogous fashion. Numerous stumbling blocks caused many researchers to throw their hands up in defeat, leading to subsequent approaches that were broadly categorized as "sub-symbolic." In the words of one Silicon Valley magnate, when it comes to engineering artificial consciousness, the standard operating procedure still amounts to "throwing a bunch of shit on the wall, and seeing what sticks."

The solution was simple, in Jim's mind.

"Just look at the different things they've tried over the years. Individually, the various approaches have built-in limitations, but combined..."

"Combined, these limitations can be overcome," Will finished for him.

"Exactly."

Will had his doubts. Creating a simulacrum of human intelligence in the form of symbols a computer could understand seemed outrageously beyond their capabilities. But stranger things had happened in the course of human history.

Apple had all started in Steve Jobs' garage, after all. Ominum rerum principia parva sunt.

All of the work happened at Will's basement, of course. Will's parents could be counted on not having the slightest interest in their son's hobbies, and for this endeavor, should it need be said, it was important to avoid embarrassing questions.

They worked long and hard, fueled by soda, licorice, and hot pockets.

After they worked out a suitable algorithm to simulate human neural activity, they constructed a basic aluminum skeleton measuring about six feet two inches in height. To this, they added a muscular system made out of plastic, and a complex network of steel tendons and ligaments overlaid these.

The work progressed over the course of five months, with occasional stumbling blocks as the boys ironed out the details.

For instance:

"The ideal sexbot should stimulate our senses in the same way as a big, sweaty jock does, Will."

"How?"

"Pheromone dispersal."

"Just one problem with that, Chief: it has yet to be proven that humans secrete pheromones."

"Ah, but what's the closest thing humans do secrete?"

Will thought for a second, but finally gave up. He turned his hands so his palms faced forward.

"What?"

"Androsta-4,16, -dien-3-one, also known as androstadienone. It's a testosterone derivative found in male sweat. Studies have shown it lights up areas in heterosexual women and homosexual men."

"Beautiful. Fucking beautiful."

The boys fist bumped.

Another success:

It was decided that loose sand would be packed inside the bot's artificial scrotum, and when triggered, a vacuum would suck the air out of it; the tightly packed sand and artificial testes would appear to have retracted in a reasonable mimicry of the cremasteric reflex.

By the end of December, they were at last able to cover up Taj's steel bones with a silicone integumentary system.

He lay on a worktable, staring straight up at his creators, seeing, not seeing. His face in particular was a total triumph for the boys. The jock's jawline was strong, and predatory, giving the impression of someone able to quickly stalk, kill, devour and metabolize wild game, and his eyes were a deep, piercing blue, staring out from under the thick black brushstrokes that were his eyebrows.

Taj's body was sculpted, and flawless. His chest was a pair of beefy, defined pectorals that looked like an inverted letter 'm'. Below that rocking set of tits were the ridges outlining his rock-hard six pack.

Below that was the most perfect penis anyone had ever seen, a long, thick, cut horse cock. A sharp dorsal vein ran down its side, stopping just before the wide, fleshy pink dome of the glans-it was a dickead that begged to be nibbled, teased, or devoured whole in one glorious swallow.

Jim sighed. Here it was: the moment of truth.

A few keystrokes on Will's computer, and-

"Okay, Taj is online."

The gorgeous figure on the table shuddered. It blinked its eyes, and rose slowly, reminding Jim for a uncomfortable moment of a masked killer in a slasher movie.

Jim and Will both held their breath.

"What would you little perverts like to do first?"

Taj's voice rang out in clear, bass tones. There was noticeable dude-bro inflection in it, which made both Will and Jim's cocks twitch.

Jim's eyes popped out of his skull. He felt like Victor Von Frankenstein. It's alive! His facial muscles tingled, and he realized he'd been grinning like a fool for the last minute.

"Can you flex for us, Taj?"

Taj smiled, and obliged Jim's request. He raised his arms, and flexed his enormous biceps. Taj's arms were corded with veins.

Jim and Will ran their hands across them. So credible was the illusion that both of them felt their penises hardening inside their jeans, at once.

Will could no longer resist. He reached down, and felt Taj's plush scrotum. His heart was racing.

"I want to fuck you," Will said, breathing hard through his nose, "I want to fuck the shit out of you!"

Taj said nothing as Will threw his arms around him, and covered his face with kisses.

Jim was chuckling a little, but Will didn't care. Taj's mouth tasted like fresh raspberries. It was better than the real thing!

Something bumped against Will's thigh. He looked down, and smiled. Taj, who was not even five minutes old, was experiencing his first erection.

"Holy shit!" Will said.

His penis stuck straight out, real beautiful, thick, and veiny at full mast. It had the look something dangerous and untamed, a weapon of war, rather than a tool of love. Yes, it was just as real as you could want it- a real porn star cock!

Will leaned forward, and ran his hand along the shaft, admiring his work. The firmness was just right; Taj's hard dick was like steel encased in velvet-or rather rubber.

"Mmmmmm..." Taj murmured, "your hand is cold,"

"You like it," Will said, staring into Taj's eyes. It was a thrill to talk to someone this way, even if that someone was an artificial person.

He slapped down Taj's erection, and it bounced up, slapping against his flat stomach with a solid thwack.

Something flashed in Taj's eyes, and for a second, Will thought the robot jock looked amused. Then he blinked, and Taj's handsome face was blank again.

Jim had swiped a bottle of Don Perignon from his old man's liquor cabinet for this occasion, and bought a couple of cigars with a fake ID he's created his sophomore year.