The Collector

Chapter Two-1

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 m**********n 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—what used 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 meticulously hand-finished pores in the epidermis, and tiny little hairs almost invisible upon the side of the neck and the tender little earlobes except upon close inspection. He was pleasantly surprised by the thinness of the object’s skin and the corresponding realism of its placid features. And those facial features were not exaggerated either—no grotesque bee-stung candy-red lips or ghastly clown-blue mascara or giant false eyelashes here. Yet just as the face was not the heavily made-up mask of some cheap tramp, neither was it the countenance of some glamorously stylized high-fashion model sneering unapproachably cool and distant.

Instead, it was pleasantly unremarkable, yet nevertheless quite pretty, a visage cream-complected and youthful. It was the face of some lovely young girl one once might have seen on the street any day, a face one could not help observing secretly from the corner of one’s eye, shivering with a comfortable animal longing somewhere deep within. Back in this time, when such things as streets and malls and stores still existed—and beaches, oh, yes, beaches, too—the discreet scrutiny of unsuspecting everyday females had been an innocent pastime that was the source of many pleasant, less than innocent thoughts.

The nose was narrow and delicate, and upturned girlishly at the tip, while the eyebrows arched smoky and shapely above the dreamily closed lids. The well defined mouth was intriguing, with the upper lip ever so slightly pushed up, as if somewhat prominent front teeth were ready to be exposed at the very first hint of a smile. Probably, thought Garrett with a little inward headshake, this face was not some slick composite generated from focus groups and statistical analysis but instead had been modeled upon some girl the lead designer had admired from a distance back in his old neighborhood when growing up, or perhaps a fellow student in graduate school. There was something endearing in the notion.

Marveling, he stroked the dark chestnut hair, wonderfully soft and flowing and ever so slightly fragrant. His hand was slow, his touch almost as gentle and appraising as it would have been had the object of his caress been a real girl. With an unconsciously caressing gesture he reached farther and found the activation touch point high up along the back of the skull. There was a faint click, both audible and tactile, but that was all. The thing did not suddenly begin to move, he saw in some relief, nor did it immediately begin to talk in cheap come-ons, but no, he realized that he was not quite correct. The doll did not speak, but it indeed was moving now. That movement was ever so faint, though, only the soft rise and fall of its tidy bare chest beneath the stray ovals of packing foam, an artful mimicry of a sleeper’s slow breathing. Still the lashes lay lush and unmoving upon the thing’s placid cheeks.

Gently Garrett drew his hand from the soft, fuzzy nape—now growing pleasantly warm—lightly down the side of the sleeping neck, and onto the silken round shoulder that fit so comfortably in the cupped palm of his hand. It certainly did feel like a girl, he thought to himself… More purposefully he began to touch the thing, experimentally, all over now. He was strangely stirred by the warmth of the smooth, yielding flesh of the long hips, by the silky flat belly and the graceful bowl of the ersatz navel, by the natural feel of the cool, pale little bosoms whose lovely dark n*****s crinkled as he toyed with the jiggling mounds in frank curiosity.

What a cleverly engineered piece of naughtiness! he marveled. It was dirtily fun simply to play with. As he cupped and squeezed as eagerly as a teenager, he suddenly had the wicked impression of molesting some unsuspecting girl as she slept, and that notion gave him a wondrously indecent quiver in the very pit of his belly. Ah, the thought of taking some strange girl unawares—not one of those kittenish little flirts from the escort service but some prim and proper young lady who had no idea who he was or what he was doing, or why. Mm, to grab her petite bare body and do things to it, to excite himself upon her and make her respond confusedly whether she wanted it or not… What a profound, intimate, intoxicating power that would be! He licked his lips at the notion, and he saw now that when he pinched the rosy nubbins of its breasts experimentally, the doll appeared to catch its breath, and it bit its lip prettily, cheeks beginning to bunch up in a shy little smile, as if dreaming. Lovely!

Garrett’s own breathing quickened, and he started to fondle his human-feeling new purchase in growing excitement. He knew the thing was made of heated silicone and rubber, quiet-motored joints, and sophisticated faux-neural chips, and yet still it could not help but call to him on some mindless carnal level which he could not deny. The doll was, after all, as bare and shapely as a ready young woman, its lines long and smooth and sculpted with intimate care. The russet pubic hair curling from its pleasantly yielding mons felt scratchily soft and warm and natural beneath his wondering fingertips—and, to his terrible delight, faintly moist at the bottom. And as it lay sleepily obedient with its graceful arms at its sides half buried in loose billows of puffy foam packing nodules, the thing even shivered now in flattering response to his caresses. The poor man was erect within his clothing, and he handled his slinky toy ever more eagerly, exciting himself with the feel of it.

“Yeah,” he chuckled quietly at last, only half aloud, shaking his head a little ruefully as he gazed down at the thing he fondled, “I think I am gonna f**k you bad, you little w***e…”

“Mm, please,” whispered the long-limbed artificial creature suddenly, surprising him. “Please?” The youthful-looking eyelids with gorgeously dense curling lashes rolled open to reveal beautiful green irises. Garrett’s hands froze, and his eyebrows went up, while the deep emerald orbs in the lovely visage below him swam for a second and then, to his delight, seemed to focus upon wandering his face. “Please, sir,” she begged softly, looking worshipful and needy, pupils dilated huge with longing. “P-please…?”

Garrett swallowed. “You really want it, huh?” As an engineer he was powerfully curious about the voice-response programming of the thing…and yet as a man he was wickedly aroused by the mock-woman’s husky, seemingly heartfelt pleading. Licking his lips, therefore, he began to fondle her once more.

“Mm, I want it,” she assured him, eyes gleaming. The corner of her lips quirked. “Bad.”

“You want my d**k in you?” he wondered dirtily.

“Yes, sir,” she whispered, smiling slyly in the most inflaming mixture of eagerness and girlish coquetry. Her upper incisors were indeed just ever so slightly prominent, but appealingly so in some manner he could not quite define, and they gleamed even and pearly and strong.

“Oh-ho, you slut!” chuckled Garrett. Grinning, he wormed his middle finger into the top of the thing’s full-lipped, springy vulva, and he found what felt like a c******s, and he began to rub demandingly at the already-wet little nubbin, making the shapely form tremble. “You want me to f**k you?”

With its fair cheeks flushed, the lovely doll nodded jerkily, biting its lip as if unable to speak for the intensity of the intimate mastering of her body.

Snorting with the joy of it, he yanked with his other hand at the upstanding n*****s that crowned her bare breasts, one after the other, and he was wickedly pleased to hear her gasp, and to watch that artfully crafted head toss tightly back and forth, making shining auburn waves shake and roll about cool, rounded shoulders. “Want me to come in you, bad girl?” he growled. “You wanna be my used, sweaty c*m-w***e, all hairy and pink and dripping?”

“Ooh, yes,” the desirable girl-thing told him, “yes.” Her eyes flashed. “And don’t you dare use a condom,” she begged prettily.

Garrett’s breath caught in his throat. He recovered quickly, though, prodding that burning purple c**t more aggressively. Oh, that w***e! he marveled to himself. That beautiful, teasing w***e! “Yeah?” he demanded excitedly. “Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah,” she assured him with an artful little shudder. “I just need to feel you inside of me so bad! Mm, and every gooey drop of your c*m…” She shivered with the anticipation of it all.

Oh, those designers were good, he thought to himself. There was mimicry in the algorithms, and yet there were subtler verbal linkages at work, too, something like a linguistic Rorschach test. However, he began, apparently she would respond in kind—whether slutty and eager as now, or perhaps shy and inflamingly demure, or even stern and commanding like a dominatrix if only he had groveled just right. It would have been interesting in a way to experiment some more with the reactions, to see how wide the vocabulary was, to determine which spoken ideas led to what response, to find out if he could beat the game by contradiction or nonsense that would make the poor confused speech programming stop cold. And yet he simply wanted to f**k that teasing little wench, too, for though his mind felt somewhat silly about it, his brutish flesh was indeed most wickedly aroused. The poor man couldn’t help himself.

Breathing heavily, then, he wrestled the shapely bare thing out of its low box in a swirl of disturbed packing peanuts, and he plopped the unresisting body on its narrow back upon the floor and then stood between those inviting pale thighs. Hastily he began to strip himself, instinctively flattered by the way those wide, worshipful eyes blinked up at him. Garrett fumbled with buttons for a frustrated moment, and to his delight, as he tarried, the long arms of the expensive love doll bent upward of their own accord, and the graceful hands reached up, and almost shyly the thing began to fondle the lovely mounds of its own petite bare bosoms.