Robot bitch

"Please, don't do it!"

Laura Reedsy laughed, and rolled her eyes, both entertained and annoyed by her husband, Nathan, which was pretty standard around their house. They were getting ready to go to their midwife for her first check-up, and Nathan was trying to wear a shirt that said "I'm not pregnant, my wife's cooking just gives me gas."

While Laura thought it was funny to wear around the house, she had forbid him to wear it out in public. It's bad enough being the elephant in the room, without everyone thinking you're a horrible cook, too.

"Fine, but you have to give me a back massage for an extra thirty minutes tonight. With that niiiice cucumber lotion of yours. No vaseline like you tried to pull off last time, it gave me a rash. Damn petroleum jelly."

He caught Laura's shocked face in the bathroom mirror, right before she burst into laughter. She did hoard her cucumber scented lotion for herself, but she didn't think he could tell the difference.

"So, how many little adorable mini-Nates are you gonna give me, anyway?"

"Relax now, honey, we haven't seen if the first one is cute yet!" He laughed and walked over to her, giving her a big, long, tight hug. Her favorites. They were a very hands on couple, and everyone they met remarked how in love they were, often asking if they were on their honeymoon, to which they couldn't help but laugh about. No, they weren't on their honeymoon, in fact they've been married for 15 years. High school sweethearts. Nathan's education and career had put having children on the backburner for years, but once they were approaching their mid-thirties, Laura really started putting the pressure on him to start trying for a child.

"At this rate, we'll only be able to have one, if that." She had said one day with puppy eyes, "We don't have forever, babe, there will never be a "right time" to have a child, only now." She had convinced him.

She was, after all, right, and he loved her more than life. If a child is what she wanted, it's what he would give her. They began trying and within 2 months, she was pregnant. They were so excited. They wanted to have a homebirth, in a pool, and they wanted to wait until it was born to find out if it was a boy or a girl. The first appointment, not happening until she was four and a half months along, would be checking her blood pressure, measuring her stomach, and just getting to know each other, as well as go over her birth plan. 

"Alright, I'm ready." Nathan blurted out. "You ready? Let's go!" 

"Alright, alright, no rushing. I have to take it slow for the next 5 months."

She reached out her arms for him to help her up, and together they walked downstairs, hand in hand, and got into the car. 

On the way to the midwife, Nathan got a work call. 

"How's she lookin? Sexy?" He was talking to his partner, Chris.

They were both certified geniuses, and working on some serious scientific breakthroughs in the world of AI. Laura didn't understand anything they were talking about, ever, but of course the question he asked made her raise her eyebrows in suspicion.

"Relaaax, babe, I'm talking about a robot." 

That's right, his other girlfriend, the robot bitch, Alicia. 

She liked to joke with him that if it wasn't for Alicia's lack of genitalia, he would leave her for her. He did, after all, spend more time on her than on Laura. She tried not to be too bitter, though- if him and Chris succeeded on the new program they had been working on for almost five years, they would become more rich than they would know how to deal with. 

"Okay, perfect! All our hard work is about to pay off man, I'm so excited, okay, okay, we'll talk later!" He hung up the phone and smiled at her.

"Good news babe! Alicia took the last download! We officially have the first robot in the world who can feel the full spectrum of human emotions...But considering every last one of her decisions will have all the information in the world backing it up, I doubt she'll have to rely too heavily on her emotions, unlike most women." He looked over at Laura, who was scowling, and burst into laughter. 

"Oh shut up, and pay attention to the road!" She laughed. 

"Okay, but first you have to give me a kiss" and as he leaned over to smooch his beloved, what should run right out into the road but a damn deer!

"I knew I should have shot that deer, I knew it, I shoulda went hunting with Laura's brother when he asked, thought the bastard hated me."

Nathan was mumbling, there was smoke everywhere, and a faint screaming in the distance. Wait, no, that wasn't far away. It was close, and he knew who it was.

It was Laura. She was screaming, but he couldn't see her.

He was blacking out again. Before he went, he thought he heard her saying "please, the baby, save the baby!" It sounded like she was sobbing.

He wondered why. Oh, that's right, they were going to have a baby. 

-----------------

When Nathan woke up the next morning, he had a killer headache, and his mouth was dryer than the devil's asshole.

He finally opened his eyes against the bright light, to find he was laying in a hospital room, wearing a gown, a broken wrist, and his wife nowhere to be found. Confused, he shouted for a nurse. When nobody came immediately he ripped out his saline IV, and rushed out the door calling for Laura. 

"Laura? Laura where are you? I'm looking for my wife, please, can you help me!" He shouted at a nurse. She quickly typed in her name and a concerned look came over her face. "Hm, that's weird," She started. "What is it? Is she okay?" Nathan was hysterical at this point, assuming the worst had happened.

"Well, it says here she was admitted to the ICU last night, but then transferred this morning for emergency surgery, but it doesn't say where. It just says private hospital. I've...I've never seen this. Wait here while I get the nurse."

  Nathan was confused, and dizzy all of a sudden. He felt like he could faint, then out of nowhere a doctor came up behind him with a wheelchair, urging him to sit. 

"Let me take you back to your room, sir." They began walking, and walking, right past his room and down the hall to the employees-only elevator. He felt so lightheaded he could barely speak, but he tried to ask where they were going. "I have to find Laura, are you taking me to Laura?" He slurred.

The doctor ignored him. By the time they were at the exit in the parking garage, Nathan could barely see, and his head was bobbing up and down trying to fight whatever this was, so when a van pulled up and opened the back door, he couldn't say anything; and when two large men came out and lifted him into the back of the unmarked vehicle, he couldn't protest.

He did, however, notice a familiar smell. A smell he recognized as an outrageously expensive cologne Chris sometimes wore.

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It was called The Mother Program.

Nathan and Chris had been working on it for five years. A downloadable program that could be implemented in Alicia, and other robots like her, it would allow robots to fully understand humans in a way that they never could before; To fully immerse them in the world of decision-making, and combining it with facts, could create a protocol for "perfect parenting"- at least theoretically. It was suppose to help psychologists and social workers understand more intricately how certain family dynamics and child rearing techniques can shape a child.

Alicia would be able to search a million articles in ten seconds and condense it down into easy to understand paragraphs that anyone could understand. It was going to be a huge advancement for the worlds Psychology, social work, and Robotics.

Nathan thought it was a remarkable goal, but Chris thought it could be used for so much more than education.

"Nathan, just think about it. We could mass produce these things and they could become primary caretakers. Take away temper and bias and judgement from humans and what do you have? A loving mother!"

He had gone on and on about it, but Nathan thought the idea was much too dystopian, and wrong. 

"No matter the flaws a woman has, she is still the best caretaker for her own children." was his argument. "A robot could never replace the love of a Mother."

Nathan didnt bother telling him about his other ideas, should his reaction be anything similar to when he shared these.

He didn't dare tell him he had spent the last 3 years of their career, as well as a hefty percentage of their funding, secretly building another attachment for Alicia that would, in his mind, complete the robot, and mesh seamlessly with the Mother Program: an artificial womb.

----------------------

Laura vividly remembered getting into a crash. She tried to scream at the last moment before they hit the deer but her voice was gone. She just looked out in horror as they plummeted 15 feet to their certain deaths. 

Except, they didn't die. She recalled being picked up by an ambulance, and rushed to the hospital, but she didn't remember being transferred for emergency surgery, which is what the nurse told her through the intercom, when she called for help. She was numb and doped up on painkillers. She couldn't even lift her head, or a finger.

She wanted to reach for her belly and feel her baby. 

"Can we pause the next round of pain meds, please? I can barely keep my eyes open! How is my baby? Is she okay?" She didn't know the sex yet, but she had a strong intuition it was a girl. 

"Your baby?" the intercom chirped again...except it didn't come from an intercom. 

Through her blurry vision, she saw a woman, facing away from her, leaning over something. As the woman slowly turned to face Laura, she heard the intercom again. It wasn't coming from an intercom, though. It was coming from the woman.

"I'm not so sure you can call it that anymore, considering it's not inside you."

Her heart skipped a beat, and her eyes welled with tears. She was confused. She looked around frantically, realizing she was not in a regular hospital, but a huge warehouse with machines everywhere. She had seen this place before. It was no hospital. And that voice, she had heard it before...

It was Alicia. 

The project her husband has been so diligently working on. She had heard it over the phone once when they were testing it. She didn't like it, and said she never wanted to hear it again. She now saw what Alicia was standing over earlier, and her eyes widened in shock and disbelief.

Her baby, she was sure of it, as small as her palm and pink, was enclosed in a glass capsule, shaped like an oval, with wires coming from every direction in and out of it. There was some sort of liquid being pumped into the shell as well, and to her horror, it was being fed into the baby's umbilical cord! Despite her body being completely numbed by drugs, she somehow managed to scream. It was a scream of sheer terror, and confusion, as she tried to make out what exactly happened, and what she was looking at.

"You, see, when your husband's sneaky partner, Chris, decided it would be a good idea to work behind his back and create a womb for me, outside my body, might I add, that could grow a real, human baby, he never stopped to think about how I would feel handing it back to its mother at the end of its prenatal development. For someone so smart, he sure is dense. You'd think maybe, before they downloaded the emotions drive, he would take another oppurtunity to think about how I might react to being a surrogate to thousands of babies that I could never keep. Typical male. But, sweet Chris, he did at least bring me you."

-----------------------

Floor 44.

Not above, but below ground.

Nathan woke up to the same two men dragging him out of the car, at a place he had voluntarily visited every day for the last five years.

Mirroring the trip in the hospital just minutes before; down the hall, to the elevators. These elevators went quite a ways lower than the one in the hospital, and though he hadn't been to the very bottom level in close to five years, he had a feeling that's where they were going.

They had agreed to save that floor for top secret projects, and had even discussed getting it prepared to handle massive amounts of radiation (should they ever decide to try and open black holes).

It turns out Chris had been using it the entire time for his secret womb project. 

As they approached the door, Nathan heard screaming. Laura. He began freaking out and trying to escape the grip of the burly brutes holding him, to no avail.

"Laura! LAURAAA! I'M HERE!"

The door swung open, his eyes immediately finding hers, as they exchanged desperate looks. 

He had no clue what was happening. One moment he was a happy, carefree scientist married to a beautiful woman; the next moment they were both being held hostage in his own workplace, and then he got a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach, once he realized how flat his wife's stomach looked. 

"What have you done?! He looked around, trying to find the creator of this nightmare, when his eyes landed on the last person he was expecting to see here. 

--------

Chris smiled at his old friend, Nate. Nate, the one everyone adored. The one who got nominated for the Nobel Prize. The one who got the beautiful girl, and the baby on the way. 

The one who never understood that Chris was really the smarter one, the one who should be in charge. But no, equal partners, they had agreed all those years back. If only he would have known how small minded Nathan was going to be. 

"Nathan. You probably still have a lot of drugs in your system, but do your best to understand. We've been partners for a long time, and it's been great. But all these years, I've been hiding my resentment for you shutting down my best ideas all those years ago. But you see, I never let your rejection shut down my dreams. I rennovated the lab, all alone in the wee hours of the morning, while you were cuddled up next to your wife." He shot a dirty look towards Laura, making it clear that crush he had on that Nathan had always suspected, was real after all. 

"It was the artificial womb, for Alicia. I figured, not only can we improve the lives through education, but also through biology. Perhaps a baby grown artifically could be more healthy, less likely to be affected by wordly toxins, or the stresses of their mother, such as getting in a car wreck, for example" He smiled.

"But after I was done with my masterpiece, no thanks to you, I realized my problem. How was I to get my hands on a human embryo to test my womb? Sorry, Alicia's womb. Then I thought about you and Laura. We'll have quite a bumpy start, thanks to the wreck, but once we get her stabilized, she should gestate to completion with ease.

Nathan's body began to heat up, as the realization that their wreck wasn't the fault of a deer at all, overtook him.

"You did this to us?! Why? What did I ever do to you?"