Dollbot Cicily by Will McIntosh opens with Cicily, the down-on-her-luck narrator, in a burger joint eating her basic menu food and browsing gig economy jobs when she is hassled by a young man. He asks her if she was the original model for his dollbot (sexbot). She rebuffs him but, after she leaves the restaurant, he and his (premium menu) friends hassle her again:
I picked up my pace as Red Sideburns’ friends raced from across the street to intercept me. One was carrying a lifesized female dollbot in a negligee. I wound through pedestrians.
“Just look,” Red Sideburns called. “Tell me this isn’t you.”
They weren’t going to give up. I’d have to make a scene. I stopped short, spun to face them. “Leave me alone. Stop following me, or I’ll call the police.”
One of the premium boys was holding the doll out, its lifelike nipples visible through gossamer fabric.
It looked exactly like me.
Not sort of. Not even, Oh what a strange coincidence. Exactly like me, down to the freckle. Down to the crescent-shaped scar on my knee I’d gotten roller-skating when I was ten, although not the long surgery scar on my shoulder that I got in the car accident.
A small crowd had formed. They looked at the doll, back at me. I was blinking and swallowing. A teenaged boy let out a high-pitched giggle.
“Were you the model for the body, or just the face? It’s hard to imagine this body is under those clothes.” Red Sideburns gestured at me with his chin, his gaze locked on my chest.
The boy holding the doll switched it on. Its eyes rolled open, revealing my light brown irises, flecked with hazel. The doll turned its head from side to side, taking in the scene.
“Is this a gang-bang?” she asked brightly. “You know me, I love a good gang-bang.” p. 54-55
If this squirm-worthy (and unlikely) encounter doesn’t put you off reading further, the story then sees Cicily set off to her home in a drainage tunnel (I wasn’t kidding when I said she was down on her luck). On the way there she realises that the 3D images used in the dollbot’s construction probably came from a previous modelling job she had when she was younger.
When Cicily arrives home she tells her friend what happened to her before she changes her appearance (during this section we also learn that Cicily is a single mother whose child is in the temporary care of Child Protection Services—something that will become permanent if she can’t get some money together).
The now disguised Cicily starts looking for gig jobs repairing Cicily dollbots so she can learn more about them, and her first customer (of three) is Conrad, a seventy-something “old bastard” who Cicily notes isn’t even “mildly embarrassed” at getting his “fuck doll” repaired, and who refuses to pay when she leaves a scar on the dollbot after she has finished. Cicily, seeking revenge, quickly installs a patch to the dollbot’s software that lets her remotely telepresence to it later that evening. When Cicily does so, she finds the old man asking his dollbot to the prom, at which point she starts overriding the software and giving her own replies to his conversation. Later on she uses the override to take a hundred dollar bill and throw it outside the window while Conrad is having a shower.
Cicily later sets up the same scam with two other dollbot users, Jasper (a sensitive type who reads Anna Karenina to her) and Joey (who runs nine different types of dollbot, “a veritable United Nations of ethnicities”, through various fashion or strip shows, etc.). These jobs take place in the same time period that Cicily visits her daughter, who has been rented out as child labour by CPS to do hazardous tasks. We also, at another point in the story, see Cicliy almost drowned in the tunnel when it floods.
Over time (spoiler), Cicily become increasingly attracted to Jasper—he thinks his dollbot has become sentient, and they (Jasper and the dolbot, with Cicily telepresent) later go away for a couple of nights to a dollbot conference. Eventually, of course, this burgeoning relationship turns out too good to be true, and Jasper loses his temper when he and the dollbot (Cicily) argue: he goes on to trash and bury the dollbot.
Some time after this pivotal event Jasper summons Cicily to repair his dollbot and, once she has finished, she slips into the bathroom before leaving to change her appearance back to what it was before her encounter with the Premium boys at the start of the story. Cicily gives a stunned Jasper his money back and (essentially) dumps him out of a relationship that he never knew he had, giving him some life advice on the way out the door (peak irony from someone who is living in a drainage tunnel, is a voyeur and thief, and is perilously close to losing custody of her only daughter).
The final scenes see Cicily steal a lot of money from Conrad (she has the dollbot make it look like the money is burnt so it isn’t reported as stolen) and, on the way to recover her daughter from CPS, she telepresences to Joey’s dollbot and throws all his other bots out the tower block window before making the Cicily dollbot do the same.
On finishing the story I thought it reasonably well done (McIntosh creates entertaining and/or amusing plots), but the more I thought about it the more the piece soured. This reaction was, I eventually realised, due to the story’s facile worldview and its stereotypical characters—the three rich, male (and probably white) characters (as well as the Premium boys at the beginning) are all portrayed as losers, weirdos, scumbags, or all three—even Jasper, who Cicily is attracted to at one point, flies into a deranged rage towards the end of his story arc. Meanwhile, our hero Cicily is painted as a sexually and economically oppressed single-mother. These are, essentially, clichéd identarian characterisations that stem from viewing sex and wealth through the lens of critical theory, where men are always oppressors and women always the oppressed (likewise for the “rich” and “poor”). These binaries also suggest that Cicily has never had any agency in, or responsibility for, anything that has ever happened in her life.
The other thing that bothered me is the way that reader sympathy is manipulated—I’ve already described what the men are like, but more troubling is the story’s portrayal of Cicily as some sort of hero, even though she is someone who, with her gross invasion of privacy, thefts, and criminal damage, is more unpleasant than any of the men—unless, I guess, you subscribe to the idea that, if you are in the oppressed class, anything you do to your oppressors is fair game (for Old Testament types, think “an eye for an eye”). That can, of course, mean you end up as morally repellent as your so-called “oppressors”.
If you can stomach the above, there may be something for you here.
∗∗ (Average). 17,350 words.