A few months ago while walking home from work ( more of a chore than you might think in Singapore ... always 85F and 60% humidity; first world problems, right? ) I was thinking about a conversation with a colleague who enjoyed toying with ethics as they applied to robots, and more specifically what he felt would be the rise of robotic prostitution. For whatever reason I had latched onto this idea and used my twenty minute stroll to sort out a few questions I had about it. What should the consequences be for abusing an android prostitute? Would the fees be the same, less or even more? If you altered the programming of the android to suit the whims of each client, how would the android feel about it? Should ( or would ) a client feel guilty about mistreating the android? To me it seems a foregone conclusion that there will be people who develop feelings for androids, so how would that play a role in the entire equation?

Then, as I am want to do, I started playing around with story ideas involving an android prostitute in order to explore how these questions would be resolved. A series of stories or novels about an android prostitute would be fairly dull, I thought. And I really don't want to write erotica anyway. So something else had to be added.

What if the android was a spy?

Spies posing as seductresses in order to gain intelligence is an almost universal practice, historically traced back centuries upon centuries. Why not program an android to do the same thing?

Then I stumbled on an idea that I thought was interesting.

A pair of spies, both human, are on a mission. The female agent is shot and killed. But, her male partner, who happens to have a bit of a crush on her, manages to get her brain scanned and creates a positronic imprint of her thoughts, memories and personality. He then takes this positronic imprint and grafts it onto the most advanced android available ... which, if technology has taught us anything? Will always be sex related. So, naturally, the most advanced android is a Muse model sexbot.

So, now he has for a partner a spy in a sexbot's body. Infinite customization ( her hair is a hologram, her skin can change colors, her programming is adaptable, etc. ) but it comes with a price. Her default programming is to please someone. This would work great if he was trying to save his wife, or even his girlfriend. But what if the agent he was trying to save was actually a double agent that wanted to kill him? This would directly clash with the artificial intelligence of the android. Would this result in an android developing schizophrenia? Multiple personalities?

For sake of my own experiment, I said sure! And then proceeded to write a 1300 word short story about it. I showed it to my colleague and he thought it was good. Enjoyed the concept, thought the pacing was nice and steady ... and, more importantly, encouraged me to flush it out with more detail and make it a short novella.

And that was the genesis of my summer writing challenge.

Can I write one novella a month for the summer? And then get each one published to Amazon?

The editing would be done myself, with the aid of some software like Grammarly, and unfortunately the cover art would also be in my own hands. But that's beside the point. For someone who's never been able to lock himself into a solid writing schedule the challenge is: Can you write 50,000 words a month, every month, for five months ( while I'm on holiday between contracts ).

Well ...

Step one of my summer challenge is in the bag. I have twenty days to get step two done and posted ( wasted a lot of time needlessly, but I enjoy the pressure of the deadline so it's all good ).

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VUF95Q4

That's the fruits of my labor ... if anyone is interested in seeing what I did with the initial idea. It's one novella ( just a touch over 50k words ) so I didn't fully explore everything. And I also made a bit of a cowboy science fiction espionage story out of it, rather than a hard science fiction thriller piece. But, it's out there now and hopefully someone thinks it's fun.

If you want to give it a try, the first couple chapters are free on Amazon. If you have any questions about it, or just think it's a smoking pile of shit? Well, now you know my Giantbomb ID, shoot me a PM.

Keto

aka Cel / Moon