Love and Sex

Sex in The AI Dystopia is a dehumanizing, commercialized endeavor. A single company, Matchmaker, has near-total control over who you are allowed to have sex with; their AIs pick someone for you, and the only place where intimacy is permitted is within their privacy booths.

The Matchmaker Company

Matchmaker controls access to sex through their monopoly on intimacy booths and the means of arranging a date. This is enforced by the following clause, found in almost all customer agreements:

4.       The customer shall not use The Company’s goods, services, or property for unauthorized purposes, such as conducting commerce or facilitating unauthorized sexual liaisons.

The key word here is unauthorized. Unless you obtain permission from Matchmaker, you cannot use Chit-Chat to contact a friend and invite her to your apartment to have sex.

The first step in arranging a liaison is to open the Matchmaker app and request a date. You specify the time, the kind of venue you are interested in (nightclub, park, concert, etc.), and the level of intimacy desired; they will then find a date for you. Group dates are permitted, and you may invite your ‘Matchmaker Friends.’ Your entry fee will be paid via the company (they take a cut off the top), and the rest of the charge for the date must be split evenly between the participants.

Once the date begins, you are free to socialize, dance, and even to flirt, until one or both of you decide to make an ‘offer’ by clicking a button in the Matchmaker app. Once both parties have made and accepted an offer, they may move on to the intimacy booths. These are rented out by the hour, with the proprietor of the property where they are located entitled to a cut of the proceeds. Booths are everywhere; in nightclubs, in parks, and even on the transit system, for those in a hurry. Matchmaker guarantees privacy; they do not have any monitoring equipment within them, and their AIs are forbidden to snoop. However, people are known to carelessly leave their mobiles on, and the UCE sex police can request suspected genderists as their partners in furtherance of their investigations.

At the end of your date, you are encouraged to give your partner a love rating, and to send a contact request if you wish to be ‘friends’ with them.

Business Partners

Sex is a big business, and everyone gets a cut. The Communications Company, which owns your mobile, gets a share of the revenue stream from the Matchmaker app. The Entertainment, Parks and Recreation, Transportation, and all other companies having intimacy booths on their premises get a 50% cut of rentals. The Cosmetics Company, The Clothing Company, and other fashion-oriented vendors make money on finery with which to impress your date, and the Drug Company gets rich on Firefly, a powerful aphrodisiac commonly available in nightclubs.

Gendercultists

If Matchmaker’s AIs determine that you consistently prefer one sex over another, they will intervene by imposing a gender-balance quota on you, typically 60/40, and monitoring your behavior. If you comply, you will receive a social merit bonus for voluntarily correcting your behavior. If, however, your partnering choices remain out of balance, you will be warned, then suspended, then banned. Once they cut you off, any act of intimacy may send you to jail: according to ancient law, consent must be officially recorded before engaging in sex, and the only way of doing so is via the Matchmaker app.

At this point, most agree to remoderation or decide to abstain from sex altogether, but perhaps you do not. In doing so, you become a gendercultist, living outside both the Terms of Service and the law. You will begin plying parks, subways, and nightclubs, looking for potential partners; when you find someone you invite them to your apartment, or accept an invitation to theirs. This is illegal, so you power down the bots, cover all the sensors, and put your mobiles and headsets into an isolation box, hoping to evade the AIs. You have been successful so far, but eventually you will be caught: maybe someone will forget to close the isolation box lid, or perhaps you will crawl into bed with an UCE sex cop. Either way, eventually you will be hauled into the Halls of Justice, lose your job, and possibly land in prison.

Pair Bonding

Try as it might, even UCE cannot erase love from the human heart, nor deny the desire to pair off for life. They have agitated to have the practice outlawed among the Citizens (it is already forbidden among the Zealots), but have been so far rebuffed. People retain the right to marry and live their lives together, though it may take years for the necessary paperwork to go through. This is pure bureaucratic delay; a single AI could easily process a year’s worth of marriage applications in less than five minutes.

Sex criminals are not eligible for pair bonding; if you have ever been convicted of unsanctioned intimacy or genderism, then the request for a marriage license will be denied. The safest practice is therefore to defer sex until after you are married — unless you are Matchmaker Friends, in which case you can carry on as much as you wish, provided you pay the booth fees. Some are unwilling to wait, and unable to afford frequent visits to the privacy booths, so they engage in unsanctioned sex. If caught, their hopes of a life together will be forever dashed, and it is unlikely that they will be permitted to see one another again.

UCE Practices

While UCE may seem puritanical, they are in no way averse to sex, which they consider an important part of a healthy lifestyle. All Zealots are expected to have communal sex on a regular basis, neither too often nor too infrequently, with their anonymous partners being chosen by lot. Pair-bonding is strictly forbidden, with violators subject to immediate culling.