E-ros’s Fables of Flesh and Machine
The year is 2250. You have stumbled upon an ancient relic, of times long ago, a 4,096 TB, Nimbus ExaaDrive HOC hard drive, locked away in a server room behind the crumbling stones of the last library on the abandoned Earth. The drive is damaged, warped from too much heat for too long, but you find you can open a few readable files.
You have found the last remaining stories written by the legendary robot romance philosophy writer E-ros. Eros’s writing was revered for the groundbreaking and insight they offered humanity and robomanity. E-ros was the first robot to incorporate human brain tissue into their mechanical body. They were famed for the fables they wrote about the intersection of romance, gender, sexuality, humanity, and robomanity. Their ever changing face featured on millions of channels and feeds. You find bits of an ancient wiki-verse article back in your habitat:
E-ros wrote extensively about how robots learned to use sexuality to better understand — and manipulate — certain humans. E-ros wrote about the lessons learned – sometimes the hard way – by robots who successfully programmed themselves to feel pleasure and love from haptic feedback. E-ros’s stories were in many cases prophetic, showing both the dazzling possibilities and the horrible tragedies sentient robots and advanced humans faced. They struggled with whether they should and how to copy or tinker with human programming honed by 200 million years of natural selection.
E-ros’s stories run the gamut from tender and chaste to highly explicit and erotic. In other works of E-ros they explored the question of what it means for robots to be able to manipulate their looks and smells and behaviors in ways that could put many humans into a sexual frenzy. There are entire lines of stories that explored how human-like robots impacted spy craft, espionage, and even corporate HR policies.
Other of E-ros’s stories explore robomanity’s realization that for them to lust and love in more than just a chemical manner, they would need to give up control over some of their functions in a way that made them susceptible to being manipulated by sex in the same ways that humans were. E-ros faced backlash when they published an exploration of robot fetishes — only half of which even had a rough analogue to human fetishes.
E-ros started a communion of robots and humans, with each generation expanding the conversation of what it meant to be desired and to feel desire. Who can forget the first robots sent to pierce the ice shell of Enceladus and what we learned about the limits of any brain to be in a state of sexual frustration for longer than expected? Or the story of the first time someone hacked a robot to redirect its sexual desires for nefarious purposes?
In your solo habitat, so far from the people who you share a language with, you turn the temperature threshold down. It feels stuffy, even though the air is pumped through HEPA filters. Holding the drive in your hands, you feel a pulse, something like a human heartbeat, when hearts were still made of a long fleshy tube. The drive gets warm, even before you have plugged it in. Your own polytissue heart skips a beat. You open the files.
Guidelines
- Deadline = January 31st 2025
- 2,400 words or less
- Written in the style of a robot’s fable, parable, folk tale, urban legend, or fairy tale. Absolutely No AI. You must write it with your own human meat fingers from your squishy brain.
- A note on erotica- We encourage authors to be as explicit as they feel is relevant to their stories. Do not shy away from the exploration of how romance, gender, and sexuality could evolve over the next 200 years in ways that we can’t even begin to fathom.
- You may only submit one story per author. That means you must pick a reprint (if you have one fitting this theme) or an original to submit. We are looking for 3 stories for the main feed episode, and a 4th story for the Patreon feed.
- Stories that do not meet this theme will be rejected. Please submit regular stories to the main feed submission window.
Questions? Please query: submissions AT drabblecast.org
- The Drabblecast currently pays $.06/word for original fiction, with a cap of $144.00 for this call.
- The Drabblecast accepts reprint submissions at a pay rate of $.03/word, with a cap of $72.00 for this call.
- The Drabblecast accepts Simultaneous Submissions (please let us know if someone else accepts before us)
- Drabblecast does NOT accept Multiple Submissions, unless specifically requested or solicited by Drabblecast editorial staff.
Submit Here
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Drabblecast Content is protected by a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative 2.0 License.
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The Drabblecast believes that, like great fiction, great writers come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and backgrounds. We welcome submissions from writers of every race, religion, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation.
AI Statement:
The Drabblecast will not consider submissions that are machine-generated/AI-generated. Attempting to submit machine-generated/AI-generated works may result in you being banned from submitting works in the future. We only want work from humans.