For fans of Never Let Me Go and My Dark Vanessa, Annie Bot is a powerful, provocative novel about the relationship between a female robot and her human owner, exploring questions of intimacy, power, autonomy, and control.
Annie Bot was created to be the perfect girlfriend for her human owner Doug. Designed to satisfy his emotional and physical needs, she has dinner ready for him every night, wears the pert outfits he orders for her, and adjusts her libido to suit his moods. True, she’s not the greatest at keeping Doug’s place spotless, but she’s trying to please him. She’s trying hard.
She’s learning, too.
Doug says he loves that Annie’s AI makes her seem more like a real woman, so Annie explores human traits such as curiosity, secrecy, and longing. But becoming more human also means becoming less perfect, and as Annie’s relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder: Does Doug really desire what he says he wants? And in such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?
Read on for an extract from the newly released title…
The next morning, he is reaching for his coffee at the machine when he accidentally hits his head on an open cupboard door, and when he slams it closed, the cupboard bounces back open and a cup from inside falls out. It crashes to the floor, breaking into four white pieces.
Annie gets up from the table. “Are you all right?”
“What do you think? I hit my fucking head.” He kicks the ceramic shards so they fly across the kitchen floor. Then he shuts his eyes and presses his hand to his forehead. “Would it kill you to clean up around here sometimes?”
She does a quick scan, left to right, and notes all the things out of place: the eleven breadcrumbs on the counter before the toaster, the butter knife stuck in the jam jar, the banana peel in the sink, the garbage can lid open, the olive oil bottle left out of the pantry, the egg carton left out by the stove, the line of dried egg white spilled by the burner, the twenty-seven grains of salt on the counter by the microwave, the onion skin below the bowl of onions on the windowsill. On the floor lie, of course, the broken pieces of the coffee cup, plus dust particles from the past four days.
Doug opens the freezer. “No ice? Fuck this.” He wets a paper towel and holds it to his head.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asks.
“Just be quiet,” he says. And then, “When’s the last time you washed the floor in here?”
She looks down at the wooden floor. “Friday at seven thirty-eight p.m.”
“When I reminded you.”
“Yes.”
Squinting, he lowers the paper towel to look at it. Then he moves down the hall and into the bathroom. She follows quietly to where she can see through the doorway. He is leaning over the sink, examining the new mark on his forehead in the mirror. He comes back to the living room, and she follows him again.
“Okay, look,” he says. “We have to talk. I like my place clean. That’s why I got you in the first place, and now look at it.”
She rapidly scans the living room for out-of-place and dirty items, finding thirty-six.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “You’re not an Abigail anymore. But you’re a person who shares this space and you’re home all day. The least you could do is keep it clean. Why is that so hard?”
His displeasure with her is a 5 out of 10, and she must fix it.
“I can clean better,” she says.
“That’s all I’m asking,” he says. “Do you still know how? Would it be easier if I wrote out a list for you?”
“A list might help,” she says.
“Tell you what. You clean up today. You make a list of everything you do, and then we’ll talk about it when I get home. How’s that sound?”
“Very reasonable,” she says.
He nods and beckons to her. “Come here.” She goes in for a hug. “Don’t look so sad. I’m not mad at you. Every couple has their little fights. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No. We’ll have makeup sex tonight.”
“I will still be sorry then,” she says.
“What I’d like more is for the place to be clean when I come home. If it would help to switch you over to Abigail mode for a few hours, I could do that. We could set that up, a few hours a day. Maybe that’s the answer. I should have thought of this sooner.”
She remembers Stella. “I thought, when we switched me from sterling to autodidactic, we had to pick one mode and stick with it,” she says slowly.
“I thought so too. But maybe that’s for saps. I’ll look into it. It might give us more flexibility,
honestly.”
She does not want this, but she cannot contradict him. “I’ll clean,” she says. “I’ll learn how to do it better. I’ll look it up.”
“All right. We’ll try it your way.” He kisses her and leaves.
‘Annie Bot’ by Sierra Greer is published by The Borough Press.
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