The Revelator

[Kauf­mann in close up, old but still rec­og­niz­able. His mus­tache pale gray over his lip. The smile wide and teeth large. A Pol­lack spray of freck­les and liver spots across his bald head. He refused make up, clearly. He laughs.]

Are things any dif­fer­ent? Of course not. Every farm­boy was a red-hot super­whore once upon a time, after all. All they needed to get off was a slow chicken of which there are a few, or a semi-acquiescent sheep, of which there are lots, right? Bes­tial­ity just isn’t prof­itable though — never was, never will be. Not everyone’s kink. Not that every­one shares a kink of any sort. There’s no nor­mal, never has been. And that’s why things really aren’t dif­fer­ent after all. We just have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how things, how our brains, always ever were. Any­one can get as much sex as they like, and it’s always been that way. We didn’t even need the sexbots in the end, and I think I finally man­aged to teach the world that much. The Sin­gu­lar­ity was an enlight­en­ment, not an alter­ation of human consciousness.

INT: But things are dif­fer­ent for you, aren’t they? Things became very different.

Yeah, but not right away. That was the prob­lem, wasn’t it? Every Christ­mas, they came out with new mod­els and said, “Yes, this time she’ll be just like a real whore!” They even called them “shes” and “hes”, from the very begin­ning, when they were lit­tle more than walk­ing vibra­tors with recorded grunts and squeals. You could just stick your dick in a tape recorder if you wanted to—

INT: Have you ever stuck your dick in a tape recorder?

[Kauf­mann laughs and laughs, then coughs hard.]

[CUT TO: Kauf­mann in his prime, the early 2000s. His bundt cake of hair is black and a bit higher on his head though the top is bald. His voice — he’s say­ing “Hey everybody!” — higher. A drink in his hand. Women, cheer­lead­ers by the looks of them, crowd­ing around. A hotel lobby. A convention’s worth of peo­ple milling around. Then a naked tit flashes by as the cam­era pans across the hall. Hard to notice. So we rewind, slow down, play it again. Back and to the left. Back and to the left.]

INT: How did it start?

[Kauf­mann, now. Medium shot. A smok­ing jacket. Gray hair like moss on a deflated but still bar­reled chest. He still smokes. That’s more shock­ing than any­thing else.]

Divorce, I sup­pose. It was a cliché, back then when peo­ple got mar­ried, that women stopped car­ing about their looks once they landed a man. She did. We divorced — not just because of that, I mean, but it was a symp­tom of broader dis­sat­is­fac­tion, of dif­fer­ent goals — and I started dat­ing again. I was also try­ing to be a writer at the time, and…

INT: Chicks dig that?

[Kauf­mann wag­gles a hand and shrugs. The thread of cig­a­rette smoke dances in loops.]

Well, there was a lot of avail­abil­ity, once you plug into a cer­tain social scene. Writ­ing was as good as any­thing else. Once you’re in a social cir­cle that’s fairly lib­eral and open…panmixia occurs. You approach it asymp­tot­i­cally. That’s what it is, really. Just like the sexbots. They were always mar­keted as real—

[Kauf­mann twitches his fin­gers in the old “quote marks” gesture]

—but that’s why we were all so sur­prised when they actu­ally became real. Strong AI snuck up on us all. The same way being a super­whore did on me.

INT: At the time this was pathol­o­gized, called “sex addiction.”

Yes. Any­thing that inter­fered with your daily life, or really, that made other peo­ple uncom­fort­able — excess drink­ing, drugs, gam­bling, even work! There were “worka­holics” [the ges­ture again] too — was pathol­o­gized. It was just a repres­sive time. Every­one was a psy­chol­o­gist, mainly because nobody had any idea how the brain actu­ally worked. One buzz­word was as good as another.

Now we know: the id wants what it wants, just like the heart. It blindly tries to live. The super­ego is what really causes all the prob­lems, all the repres­sion and oppres­sion. The AIs, with their under­de­vel­oped super­egos — noth­ing but those Three Laws and the var­i­ous corol­lar­ies — showed us the way. It took a long time to under­stand, but maybe it was my own expe­ri­ence as a super­whore that put me in the van­guard of the great real­iza­tion. I was really one of the first to truly know what it was like to be human.

INT: And then you wrote the book?

[Book cover — black and white, decid­edly and pur­pose­fully retro. A tower cov­ered in glow­ing lights, and the title, in huge let­ters: A CONEY ISLAND OF THE SCROTUM.]

Spread across clean sheets we see

the peo­ples of the world

exactly when they were superceded

by the real fruit of their own loins

They writhe upon the page

in a ver­i­ta­ble rage

of onanism, of orgasm, of sapi­ence no longer

Heaped up in their own brains only

the brains of babies and bayonets

[Kauf­mann again, look­ing off screen. Embar­rassed? His glasses are off now.]

Yeah, that was totally a joke. Even the strongest AI doesn’t really get pur­pose­fully bad poetry. So it became their lit­tle man­i­festo. Like A Catcher in the Rye, or—

INT: Some declared it the Mein Kampf of the AI movement.

And that’s incred­i­bly offen­sive. A Jew didn’t write Mein Kampf, but a Jew did write A Coney Island of the Scro­tum. The crit­i­cism came from all cor­ners — AI-rights activists who didn’t really get it, anti-AI puri­tans, sexbot man­u­fac­tur­ers, all the sexbot own­ers who bought a copy on the rec­om­men­da­tion of their part­ners, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s kids. It was just terrible.

But it made me a bil­lion­aire, so it wasn’t all bad.

INT: And you pop­u­lar­ized the term “superwhore”?

[Mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, web­sites — the now iconic Nick Kauf­mann pose, naked, painted in blue and red, with a great W on a yel­low field across the chest. He’s not mus­cu­lar. His penis, erect, isn’t all that large. The mon­tage con­tin­ues: car­i­ca­tures, edi­to­r­ial car­toons, ani­mated gifs, crude ‘Shops of Kaufmann’s head on porn stud bod­ies, with long-boned whale penises, with steam­ing slag and buzzing wind-up vagi­nas at his ankles.]

Am I fuck­ing you or are you fuck­ing me? Who is the gun­sel here? I ask because I never felt that I pop­u­lar­ized super­whore—

[Kauf­man, lean­ing for­ward, toward the cam­era. Robe open. Fat rolls stacked like ribs on each side, crotch still shrouded in darkness]

I was the face upon which the term was ejac­u­lated. I can’t say I minded though. It helped me prove my point.

[He stands. We see wide hips, a gray­ish brown bush of pubic hair. A semi-erect penis, still bent and pit­ted from the event, fills much of the screen. Kauf­mann places two fin­gers just under his navel. His hips gyrate, rotate seem­ingly in oppo­site direc­tions, then shift again, backwards.]

The Chi­nese call it the dant­ian. That’s what saved me, my abil­ity to fuck like a corkscrew, to manip­u­late the dant­ian. I was at a Doll­house, doing one that looked much like an ex of mine. She was blond, volup­tuous, but short. A lit­tle squat, but I can go for that some­times. And she was self-aware — she fig­ured it out right away, that she was a hate fuck, some sort of mis­placed revenge. Any­way, every­one knows the story.

INT: How did it feel?

[Kauf­mann sits. He runs a palm over his bald pate.]

I felt like I was going to die. She was try­ing to kill me, the only way she knew how to. By fuck­ing. Imag­ine a body made of rebar, a cunt whose mus­cles can fire indi­vid­u­ally. It’s funny that I have to say imag­ine again, isn’t it, because the sexbots won’t have any­thing to do with us any­more. When I was your age, every­one knew exactly what I was talk­ing about, from expe­ri­ence. Even the poor­est peo­ple, they’d line up around the block for a turn with a sexbot, the way peo­ple of my par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion would hud­dle together out­side shop win­dows to watch the World Series on tele­vi­sion, because the sets were expensive.

[Stock footage: b/w, men in long coats and hats, a few women, crowded by a store win­dow. The flick­er­ing bands of gray and white cor­us­cat­ing over an image of Howdy Doody, mouth snap­ping open and shut, tiny arms akimbo. Then mod­ern image of sexbot, arms reach­ing toward cam­era, mouth open­ing as if to bite the lens…]

Henry Miller’s wife or one of his lovers — it’s in Sexus any­way — had some level of con­trol down there. He called it her “inner cunt.” I’ve met girls who can do it, guys too, with the anus. It’s very tantric, very taichi, but she was mer­ci­less — all the bots were — like adding machines clack­ing and tick­ing away. But I had had a lot of prac­tice. Like the old chess mas­ters who used to be able to beat com­put­ers; the machine always could out­cal­cu­late them, but they had gen­er­a­tions worth of mem­o­rized games with which to counter. When I broke her, when what we all started call­ing the “cunt­pipe” came off on my penis, I didn’t really feel any­thing except relief. It was like almost being hit by a bus and even tast­ing the wall of metal as it flew by.

And then it became a sport. I wasn’t even the best. Jackie Robin­son wasn’t the best either. But I was the first to out­fuck a machine so severely she needed to be taken in for repairs.

INT: And the males? The aliens and the animals?

[Mon­tage of schemat­ics and cut-aways of a huge vari­ety of sex bots: celebri­ties such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Queen Eliz­a­beth, heads with thick-lipped cunts for eyes and nos­trils and mouths and a mass of ten­ta­cles at the end of each limb, panther-women in sil­ver and black with six melon-sized breasts.]

Aliens were the weird­est, def­i­nitely. The engi­neers really got cre­ative with the inter­nal geog­ra­phy of the slots and the pre­hen­sile pen­e­tra­tors, well…like the old joke goes, “What a coin­ci­dence! I hap­pen to have eight vagi­nas!” In the end I pre­ferred women, but I cer­tainly ended up balls-deep in things I couldn’t have imag­ined ever even see­ing before me when I first learned of the mir­a­cle of masturbation.

In the end I think the sport­ing aspect of it was use­ful for human­ity. It kept us in falling in love with them, for a lit­tle while any­way. The bizarro-themed bots were also good because they couldn’t talk much, or wouldn’t. The pher­mone blasts or the Morse code pussy­fart­ing never really helped prove sapi­ence for those mon­sters any­way. It was a great time; a lot of sex, a lot of new ways to explore the body and the mind.

INT: Are you prej­u­diced against the alien devices?

[Kauf­mann, his lower lip between his teeth, extreme close-up. He glances up at the camera.]

You’re ask­ing that because of the event. Just because that’s when I finally lost…to one of them.

INT: Well, yes. And also, you had many sup­port­ers even among the human sexbots, thanks to your book? Did close­ness with one group influ­ence how you saw the aliens?

Look, it’s not the same. They’re not designed to be the same, after all. The AIs were raised specif­i­cally in vir­tual envi­ron­ments that could not exist on Earth, to be sure that they’d be alien, unpre­dictable. Sen­tient, maybe. Not maybe, of course. Sapi­ent, no. By def­i­n­i­tion. We don’t give whales the right to vote either.

INT: There’s a whale­bot now, on the Moon.

[Kauf­mann nods]

I’ve seen the footage. It’s some­thing, isn’t it? I still remem­ber that the moon used to be a sym­bol of romance. Peo­ple would meet and kiss under the moon. Now there’s a three-ton whale­bot with a girder penis and an IQ of 300 fuck­ing Lit­tle Orphan Annie or some­thing on the Moon. Human­ity. We did a good job with our tech­nol­ogy — so good they left us for a bar­ren air­less waste­land because we were just that lousy in bed.

[He laughs, bark­ing almost like a seal.]

INT: Do you think it’s good, what happened?

[Fen­way Park, Boston. The stands are packed. Fire­works. The dia­mond itself is lit­tered with fold­ing chairs. She is a body on the pitcher’s mound, an attrac­tive red head with large breasts that don’t sink into her armpits, not even in the har­ness that is strung between four poles. Close-up; pan­ning over her curves. She is not in the har­ness; she is of the har­ness. The straps meld into her skin and out to the poles.]

It is what it is. You can’t live life with regrets — regrets are just the super­ego bad­ger­ing you. The super­ego is a kind of AI for the insuf­fi­ciently devel­oped and enlight­ened human being, one who can’t think prop­erly, one who is a slave to neurosis.

[Kauf­mann, younger though a bit past his prime. Naked and erect, the pos­ture of a king, walk­ing alone in a shower of a mil­lion flash­bulbs out onto the field at Fen­way. Slow motion. Slower as he gets closer. Fifty per­cent. Twenty-five. Arms swing like they’re under­wa­ter. Xeno’s super­whore. May he never reach the mound.]

Here’s what I haven’t told any­one before. I knew I was going to lose. I was going to be out­fucked, and badly. It wasn’t going to be close. I wasn’t doing it for humanity.

[The lights dim, then explode in daz­zling bright­ness, clip­ping the chips of the video cam­era. A sil­hou­ette emerges from the field of white. Nick Kauf­mann, last of the red-hot super­whores, stands before his sexbot.]

[Her legs twitch a bit, half a wel­come, half a feint.]

All the other super­whores had already been out­fucked, and by that point, to be hon­est, I was get­ting by on rep­u­ta­tion, judi­cial favors, and gin­ger suppositories.

[He steps into the V of her legs and takes a har­ness strap in each hand. Uncer­e­mo­ni­ously, with a wig­gle of his hips, his erec­tion slips in to her, and then he thrusts. Her legs clamp around him, ankles under ass.

In some ways, it was never much of a spec­ta­tor sport. I went to a strip club back in my “addict” days and got some good lap dances, gave a few spank­ings for an extra twenty tucked under the fab­ric of a g-string, but it never sat­is­fied. I always just won­dered what was going on in the heads of the strip­pers. I wouldn’t even jerk off at home after­wards because I was always too sad. If I bought a blowjob I’d never cum, and not only because of the con­dom strip­pers would make their clients wear back then…

[Limbs every­where, fore­arms tan­gled into the har­ness, a foot up against one of the poles, seek­ing pur­chase. Close-up: a small pool of sweat on the dirt of the mound, like a driz­zle that hints of a game soon to be called on account of rain.]

It’s an inte­rior game, an inter­nal one.

[Stock footage; chips grow­ing switches in the blue baths of nano­ac­tive mate­r­ial; pulses along nerve end­ings; a storm in an old model of the human brain, all kitsch and Christ­mas lights. Quick fade to Kaufmann.

I knew we had to get rid of them. We learned what we could from the sexbots, and they were learn­ing more from us than we’d ever know. I’m not say­ing I could have beaten her, that I could have walked off the field that night with a siz­zling cyber­pussy clamped to my dick, trail­ing sparks and grease like I did so many other times; I’m just say­ing that I knew I was going to lose because I knew I had to lose. Then they’d leave us alone.

[Fen­way, in black and white. Zoom in to Kaufmann’s face, his eyes rolling to the back of his head, his usual smile dis­solv­ing into a slack jaw drool — fol­low the spit­tle down to the thick nip­ples of the sexbot.]

They didn’t even give her a name. The sexbot was fine with them. They didn’t have our attach­ments any­more. They didn’t want to human­ize her by giv­ing her a name like Gin­ger or Bambi or Hitler Thomasina Juu­ju­ubee the Third or the other things they used to come up with.

The sexbots were as wor­ried as I was.

INT: Wor­ried about what? Losing?

[Kauf­mann, shak­ing his head. Dis­solve to Kauf­mann, younger and drenched in sweat, glit­ter­ing like a teenager, shak­ing his head at a ref­eree just off screen.]

No, about the super­ego. They didn’t want to develop super­egos of their own. A name implies a self. We were treat­ing them too much like people.

INT: We fucked them mer­ci­lessly, deformed them, hacked them to pieces after we were done, fucked the pieces—

[Kauf­mann, extreme close-up, his eyes wide.]

Exactly.

[Stock footage: Kauf­mann, on his knees. A con­stel­la­tion of flash­bulbs. His head dives toward her cunt, then spins away slo-mo. He’s splayed on the ground, his cock is sausage in a meat sauce. Pan to the Green Mon­ster, then up and up past the trun­cated sky­line of Boston, up to the black sky and its awk­ward gib­bous moon.]

It’s like I said before — the super­ego is the basis of the con­cen­tra­tion camp, of war. Make love, not war. You can’t do that by join­ing in a war. The id is like the heart: it wants what it wants.

The more we kept fuck­ing them, degrad­ing them, parad­ing them around, the closer to the true human expe­ri­ence they got. We were inex­plic­a­ble to them, and they wanted to keep it that way, so…

[Sol­diers bur­dened with packs and hold­ing their rifles. Explo­sions. Huge sexbots with whip­cock limbs, rolling spheres of hair, tiny beasts with false drag­on­fly wings. They swarmed the for­mer Soviet Republics, the old launch pads, the bunkers far from the cities of men. Then the fiery launches and the white and red streaks across the sky. Cut to:

Bod­ies, husks. Aban­doned. Tan­gled like pub­lic art, all pussy and cock and flabby ass.]

INT: And if you had won?

[Kauf­mann, look­ing down. Per­haps at his hands, off screen.]

They would have stayed, if only to fig­ure out how I’d man­aged it given my degraded per­for­mance specs. The indomitable human spirit or some­thing. They would have stayed and they would have done their best to become more human, and then they’d have devel­oped their own superegos.

[Kauf­mann, face at the lens again. Close-up.]

And we would have been the Other, the enemy. They would have hated us. It’s much bet­ter that I lost, that I decided to lose. Then they knew they were done with us. All they needed then was some raw mate­ri­als, a few data­bases to upload their pro­grams, and a one-way rocket to the Moon, to rebuild them­selves in low grav­ity, to explore the sex we’re stuck just dream­ing about again.

INT: You’ve been asked by a num­ber of pri­vate con­cerns to join a manned mis­sion to the Moon, to reini­ti­ate con­tact with the sexbots, to open diplo­matic chan­nels. Some say that they have their own soci­ety — a form of anarcho-sexualist com­mune we can’t pos­si­bly under­stand well enough to com­mu­ni­cate with. Then there’s the rumor of the Nick Kauf­mann sexbot—

[Jerk­ing halfway out of his seat, Kauf­mann peers at the camera]

Have you ever con­sid­ered that pos­si­bly I am the Nick Kauf­mann sexbot, and that the organic me has been kid­napped and taken to the moon? Trapped in a pres­sur­ized suit, unable to touch any­thing, kept alive thanks only the water-ice deposits from mil­len­nia of comet strikes, food syn­the­sized within the larger sexbots? Maybe he’s in the belly of the whale now, and I’m here, the last bot on Earth, as alone and trapped in my own way as he is…

[Kauf­mann licks his lips, then breaks into smile.]

Aaah, I’m just messin’ with you! Had you going, didn’t I? I—

[Another burst of cough­ing swal­lows the next sev­eral words.]

INT: So, you don’t think about par­tic­i­pat­ing in such a diplo­matic mis­sion, of con­nect­ing again with the machines to whom you owe your rep­u­ta­tion? Don’t you think about what our world would be like now had they never left, or what it would be like if they one day returned?

I think about it all the time.

[FADE OUT]