Frankissstein. Jeanette Winterson

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СКАЧАТЬ sex when it’s a bot. I mean, there’s no can’t do it till you’re sixteen or whatever, so we get some schoolkids wanting a try – yeah, boys, ’course it’s boys – and I reckon it’s better than sticking it up some girl who’s dry as sandpaper and doesn’t fancy you.

      Yeah, you can be old, you can be ugly, you can be fat, smelly, you can have an STD, you can be broke. Whether you can’t get it up, or you can’t get it down, there’s an XX-BOT for you.

      Public service. I tell you, it is. Do you think I might get an MBE? Mum would love that.

      Women? What about women? Are you a feminist, Ryan? I’m not, but my mum is, so don’t think we haven’t heard about this back in Wales.

      There are male bots but I don’t bother with them. Why not?

      Anatomy, Ryan. Basic anatomy. You must have done that when you were training to be a doctor.

      Basically a boy-bot is a vibrator with a body attached. He’s like a shop-window mannequin with a dick that doesn’t work. No thrust. He can’t shunt her from behind. She has to sit on him and bounce up and down, very tiring, or joggle him on top of her like she’s blending a milkshake. Also tiring. No fun when you’ve had the bath, the candles, all your favourite love songs on PLAY AGAIN. The things women like to get them in the mood.

      Women prefer a hand-held vibrator. Better control, better delivery, and they can watch TV at the same time. I’ve done the market research. Well, not me personally, my mum does that side of the business. My mum? Oh, very much so. Like I said. Day one.

      And with the boy-bots it’s a question of scale as much as anything. Female bots are petite – even the Swedes like ’em petite – but if you build a boy-bot small it’s a turnoff, like fucking your son, and women don’t get off on that, not many of ’em anyway. Women want a hunk, but if you make your bot hunky, women can’t lug him around. And in a small apartment, when he’s not in use, so to speak, he’s in the way – y’know? I mean, he can’t go out for a beer when you want some personal space.

      Plus women tend to drive smaller cars, and she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself trying to squash some Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson into her Renault Twingo.

      If we get into nightclubs – and we might, because I don’t know what to do with the money I’m making – then I might try hen-night specials where we supply some boy-bots to see how it goes – just for a laugh – like ride-my-pony sorta thing? Women might enjoy sitting on top if I can get the action right. I’ve got some ideas from when I used to repair pop-up toasters.

      This market is global. This market is the future.

      Let me tell you something about China, Ryan. That one-child policy? Thank God they’ve stopped it. All those strangled girl babies chucked in a paddy field somewhere. There’s millions and millions of Chinese men who’ll never have a female partner because there aren’t enough girls to go round. That’s right – what goes around comes around – like a sushi belt – you’d think they’d know that, wouldn’t you? The Chinese market will be mega. That’s why they’ve got the factories – and they love technology, and a lot of Chinese men will prefer a bot because they like the submissive type. Modern Chinese women are too independent. I went to the factory – I’ve seen it all.

      Anyway, I’m opening my own factory in Wales. China can’t have it all their own way. Show some competition, I say, and if they’re in a trade war with bloody America who knows what will happen? Price of bots could go sky-high.

      Mum said we should do a Karl Marx and control the means of production.

      Also, I want to put something back into the community. There’s no jobs in Wales, Ryan, not since Brexit. They voted Wales for the Welsh, like everyone in the world was just killing themselves to get over the border and open a new coalmine.

      All the money in Wales came from some euro-fund anyway, but there’s a lot of inbreeding in Wales. I think it would be good to have a bit of immigration – all that inbreeding affects the brain. Brexit! Jesus! Might as well have built a wall made out of leeks right round the place.

      So I have to do my bit. I’m opening a big factory that will make the whole bot. Top to bottom. And I’m having a smaller workshop – got enterprise money for it – that just makes heads. Bit more artisan. They are quite good at handicrafts in Wales. Tea towels … pottery …

      And there are a lot of out-of-work hairdressers as nobody can afford to get their hair done, not now it’s just Wales for the Welsh.

      Why do I need extra heads?

      A lot of the XX-BOTs get their faces bashed in. Get thrown at the wall or something. I seriously thought about a detachable nose at one time. You can change the face yourself on some of them, but it’s fiddly, and I think buying a spare head to start with is a better idea. Sex can get a bit rough, can’t it? I don’t judge.

      Also, I’m thinking of manufacturing an Outdoor type. Tougher. Rugged. Sorta Lara Croft. We’ll need our own production line for that. It might be for the fetish market. Dominatrix. Spanking. That sorta thing. The Chinese won’t touch it. Brits will like it, I think. I’m in talks with Caterpillar and JCB.

      This is the future, Ryan.

      Are you coming to my live show? See the girls in action? Look, here’s a taster on the iPad. What do you think of the music?

      Walking in Memphis. I love that song. My favourite line – There’s a pretty little thing waiting for the King …

      They’re all pretty. We’re all kings.

      What did you say? Does it make real life more difficult?

      What is real life these days?

      There never was a wilder story imagined, yet, like most of the fictions of this age, it has an air of reality attached to it.

      The Edinburgh Magazine, 1818

       Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

      That is why we invent stories, I said.

      And what if we are the story we invent? said Shelley.

      Still shut in by rain, I write and write.

      Claire sits sewing in a corner. Polidori nurses his lame ankle. Yesterday he jumped out of a window to prove his love for me. The idea was Byron’s. When he is bored he is dangerous.

      All we do is drink and fuck, said Byron. Is that a story?

      That’s a bestseller! said Polidori.

      We sleep. We eat. We work, said Shelley.

      Do you? said Byron, who is on a diet for his corpulence, and besides, he is insomniac, and idle. He cannot find the lines, he says, for his supernatural story, even though our enterprise is the challenge he set. That is irksome. We are irksome.

      Polidori is busy with his own tale. He calls it The Vampyre. Blood transfusions interest him.

      For want of excursion or diversion, the gentlemen fell to discussing the series of lectures we had recently attended in London. Lectures delivered by Shelley’s doctor, William Lawrence, on the origin of life. Life, Doctor Lawrence СКАЧАТЬ