Eros

Reading this with the prompt in mind - any story involving rebellion or an upheaval of some sorts.

First impressions

There is no skirting around the topic or hiding behind euphemisms and wordplay, the story is very upfront about your role as a sex bot, initially. All of this, including the short statement as the story description, serves to emphasize how commonplace and natural it is in this society.

The reader gets gently immersed into the worldbuilding, with descriptions of the city and its hubs of activity sprinkled in naturally.

As the protagonist, your internal voice is distinct and fitting with a blend of the rigid coldness of metal with the sprinkle of self awareness and hints of humor.

Choices and Plot

OBEY and defy. To obey is capitalized, because your programming, along with what the society expects, all point to it. There's a chance I'm reading too much into it, of course, but I feel that with the story's shorter length, there is meaning and metaphors infused into even the choices. Much of the choices presented to the reader are laid out in that fashion.

With this in mind, the reader should quickly realize that the story funnels you into 3 different endings - to obey till the end, to fight and perhaps lead others into it, or to escape. The story is short, undoubtedly, but it makes good use of the limited words to spin a decent web of branching, and establish fleshed out endings.

Routes and Endings

In the fight "route", especially, each choice along with the description of the protagonist struggling against its programming all serves to show how difficult it is to rebel, at first against yourself, but against the society as a whole.

My favorite ending, though, is the one where you escape by via a commuter bus. The choice to that gets you onto the bus is to 'reason' with the driver as opposed to lie. To reason is an innately human ability, and by choosing to do that, you establish yourself as your own being now, and the ending reflects that by placing you with other, similar bots, heading for escape and a new land.

There are lots of distinct ending and death scenes, usually with something profound or impactful. Binary to ASCII, anyone?

Final thoughts

I always knew MHD was good at writing, and I'm even more impressed with what she managed to do with how little words this story really contains. It was faithful to the prompt. More than a story on rebellion, I believe it also serves as a warning against artificial intelligence and the future of society. Or perhaps I'm reading too much into it all.

Regardless, I enjoyed the story a lot. If I had to add one complaint, I would like to see a little more variety in branching, as some paths tend to link to other endings. Highly recommend for a quick read.

Overall, your story was very well written, and each branch was worth reading. I also liked how your story incorporated different types of rebellion depending on the branch. The pure OBEY ending was my favorite with how it put the whole story into perspective and gave meaning to how the pleasure bot processed its experiences through prose. Considering the nature of the OBEY ending, I wonder if there's a way for you to further convey the pleasure bot's internal conflicts with its programming using a combination of prose and system messaging or glitches, where either one becomes the more dominant expression of internal conflict the further down a branch the bot progresses.

Your use of capitalization to show the strong compulsions experienced by the pleasure bot as it goes about its life is a nice touch, especially in the ending where the choice to defy was shown to have grown strong enough to rival the ever-present compulsion to obey.

I really enjoyed this story and hope that you writing more about the bots in Polaris in the future.

Well written with an interesting and unusual voice for the main character. The first several options all having identical choices was a very interesting method of characterization for showing the mindset of the awakening robot sentience.

No significant SPAG issues, and the story was interesting enough to explore multiple endings. The variety is nice, although there were a few notable endings that had detail slips from page to page. The one that stuck in my mind was when getting on the bus, the driver is suddenly referred to as an authority bot. Or the "human-only bus" proves to be full of other types of robots.

That ending in particular was interesting enough that it made me wonder if the author was intending to imply that everyone was really robots, just with different levels of achieved sentience.

Some storygames bite off too much, but this one was laser focused, which I appreciated. There are hints of a higher level of sentience in the bot before you even get to the first decision to obey or defy, which I thought was a clever touch.

There was a bit a of Steven Spielberg's 2001 film A.I. vibe in the branch where you try to escape after killing the human client, joining other misfit robots seeking escape. I also liked that there were hints of a generalized awakening among the robots, rather than just in the protagonist. That, along with touches such as the woman having eyes adjusted for aesthetic purposes, is a little touch that makes the world feel lived in.

I really love the image on the cover of the story. The image of the robot design with a heart and a game of Pong playing inside the robot's head was quite captivating. I am ashamed to admit that I stared at that image for like 15 seconds before snapping out of it to start reading the storygame.

I love the opening line: "It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves"

It is a very poetic way to begin the story.

I haven't read Polaris fully yet, but I know that in that world the men died from a mysterious virus, and bots were built that approximate men in a world solely populated by women.

Despite not having read Polaris yet, I love this world you built! It feels like a real place that I've never been to, and reading about it is so fascinating!

Overall, this story is fantastic, and as a reader I absolutely loved it. As a fellow competitor in Corgi's Gayrebellion contest however, I am in despair after seeing the quality I have to compete against. This is some masterful storytelling.

I love the first page because of how you take your time with the characterization and the romance. I mean, just from that page I really feel for and empathize with the widow. I feel her fear, her trepidation, her loneliness, her hesitation because it's her first time with this pleasure bot, and how these conflicting feelings battle inside her. It's every writer's aspiration to write character like you did, and I love the initial juxtaposition with you being the self-assured confident pleasure bot filled with hubris and male arrogance who was quite literally programmed with every single piece of knowledge about humans and sex, with the timid and awestruck widow.

Only for the tables to turn as, in the middle of your usual routine, you struggle to get it up. That is such a creative and insightful thing to write because this is a uniquely male, human struggle, the feeling of powerlessness and insecurity that comes in such an awkward time and place, so to make that effect a robot that was only built to approximate men is nothing short of extraordinary. We always imagine robots to be these perfect, superhuman approximations of humans, like in the movies where they wear Arnold Schwarzenegger's face, but they're not actually human because they can bend steel and run faster than cars.

So this is a really novel and interesting take of humanizing robots. In fact, that specific theme reminded me of Ex Machina, where the AI is humanized just as it is in this work. In this piece, even though the main character is programmed to do this work, he takes pride in the way he soothes this woman and executes his programming to a T. Clearly, everything's going according to plan, but the feeling of rejection shatters that artificiality, that robotic quality of being in control, making the robot feel more human. I mean, that kind of rejection stings, no wonder the poor guy(robot) couldn't get it up, so I really liked that writing because of the uncertainty. Till now, everything was going as programmed, but the robot starts to panic, and that's when the first set of options appear.

The feeling of rejection, powerlessness, and embarrassment all come together in a deadly cocktail as the robot is suddenly swept with human emotions. In the defy path, you are frustrated because you succumbed to something less than perfection, that is for a moment, you were merely human. Flawed. So naturally, your robot brain can't handle that and you start to choke the widow.

In the path where you murder the widow(the most interesting path), you start acting more and more like a human. You give the driver a handshake, you panic and try to lie to the driver, if you return to Fornico X(interesting name for a sex bot company) you feel shame and isolation from all the other bots because you just <i>know</i> they wouldn't have done something like this(even though that's categorically untrue), it's just so well done. I loved the idea of the bot slowly being unmoored from what he knew and was so safe and secure in, his programming, and being thrust into the real world just like humans are, being forced to deal with uncertainty.

I also liked the idea of the driver bot also being a rogue pleasure bot who murdered a human. And the endings were written really well. If you try to lie to the driver bot, you end up getting arrested by him, only for him to leave you alone. The wait ending was probably my favorite because of the way you wrote the passage of time. I really liked that writing, and how the world was reclaimed by the wild and you were finally free of the humans who enslaved you and forced you to enact their fantasies, day in and day out. I really liked this line, "The world was your iron crustacean now."

Even though the story is short, there's so much there. Vigilante bots, a trial, a dystopian ending where you're reprogrammed to a Gen 4 bot, escape from prison, robots surviving till the end of time, it was really good writing, and was really sad. I really felt for this pleasure bot and understood his fears of being replaced, his anger at the indignity of being used by humanity.

I haven't even gotten to the actual rebellion part yet. The writing was fast paced and fun, aided by the short word count, which far from being a handicap to the story, actually enhanced it. I loved when you killed the manager, and freed all the other bots. I would have liked to see some more of the rebellion itself, as comparatively, it was rather short, but that's the only drawback.

Ultimately this is a fantastic rebellion story, that's remarkably deep and complex. Surprisingly, you managed to pack so much in ~4000 words, honestly that just makes this all even more impressive. This story legitimately blew me away You could discuss so much just about page 1, and the work as a whole, deals with so many themes. It was really interesting and I got to give it an 8. Although this is the only one submitted so far, so I have yet to read the other entries(let alone submit mine!), I think this story won the contest.