Sexbots 2: The Rapebots Are Coming

Last post, I pointed out that, like jetpacks, aircars, and hoverboards, sex robots actually exist in the real world today. But this post is about the possible dark side. And I don't mean all those men who will be turning away from heterosexuality in favor of robosexuality, which will likely hit the economy pretty hard. I mean crime.

Now, take your typical Russian mafia/secret police (same thing) hacker. He tends to be consumed with his tribe's desire for revenge against the non-Russian world. He spends way too much time designing viruses, worms, and botnet assimilants. He gets a sexbot. Once sexbots are mass produced, every gangster will have to have at least one sexbot, partly as a status symbol and partly because gangsters hate women. What does our botnet master do with a sexbot? Well, maybe he keeps one for actual sex. Any extras, though, he hacks into rapebots. And he could hack any sexbot connected to the Internet into a rapebot.

Take a certain yakuza (Koji-kun's father in Spanner) whose favorite manga is the infamous Rapeman. By 2014, sexbots are being mass produced in Japan. He's going to turn a male sexbot into a robot Rapeman no matter what. Then he's going to send his Rapebot after that treacherous gaijin whore who stole his number one son away from him. Little does he know that the gaijin in question, one Shira Thomas, is enough of a hacker that she can use her smartphone to hack his rapebot so that it goes after, say, poor Koji-kun in order to rape him. And yes, she's yaoi fangirl enough to do it.

And then what about the malfunctioning sexbots that innocently rape any human female at hand due to some glitch?

Of course, when you talk about the dark side, you must mention potential military uses. No, not as (robo)sexual partners for lonely soldiers. No, as weapons. What if the US military decided it wanted to use rapebots as a weapon of war, especially against the hated "Wogs" in the Middle East? And some of those sexual combots get even further hacked because some psychopath has developed a fetish for serial killer rapebots? Now put one of those serial killer rapebots in the hands of angry power-seeking narcissist Drusilla Becket, and then you'll really have a cyberpunk story then...

And then how about the microchipped humans who get remotely mind-controlled into sexbots? The principle is the same as the ex-con soldiers mind-controlled by the military, or the "Manchurian candidates" who have long been the special darlings of all the spy agencies.

One of my planned major story threads in Spanner involves Shira's amazing ability to hack combots to do her will against their own masters (or just rip their own heads off). How did she learn this ability? By learning how to hack sexbots, especially the one she gets for Christmas from her adoring Aunt Willa in Book 2.

Black hat sexbot hacking? You know that idea's cyberpunk to the core. In fact, back in 1993 Mike Saenz of Shatter fame created an all-CGI cyberpunk comic book called Donna Matrix featuring a bondage sexbot whose brain is replaced by a combot's, so the idea's already part of the cyberpunk canon...

Next: meat puppets...