
Lab Grown Love
Can You Grow to Love That Which Has Been Grown to Love?
My Week With a Lab-Grown Companion
By Idle Vendetta
Corporations are our friends, keeping us safe, sated and somnambulant in an increasingly complicated world, but can their manufactured companions combat our seemingly-perpetual pandemic of loneliness? Our solitudinous reporter, Idle Vendetta, spends a week with the Conoctopticon Industries Meat-Droid to discover if money can buy, if not happiness, then at least something you can fuck while it feigns interest in the bullshit that circles your skull-meat.
Editorial note: Idle failed to file his copy with us so we had to steal his notebook in order for this article to reach print. At present, we have no idea where the scabrous twat is. For now, let’s just get on with this advertorial that we are contractually obligated to include in this issue of Concrete Octopus. They keep the lights on, after all.
A job’s a job. I’m getting paid basically nothing for this, but they said I could keep the Meat-Droid at the end of the trial and they apparently have a pretty high re-sale value so I said I’d do it. I have no idea what to expect. I don’t keep up with technology. I think Oscillation only asked me to do this because he had an interview with some big-shot he needed to do (OJ: I did). Well, his loss is my gain, I think. Bring on the Meat-Droid, not that I’m excited. I’m forty-seven. Last time I was excited was 1998 during the Nagano Winter Olympics when snowboarder Ross Rebagliati ploughed into the crowd at the end of his record-breaking run and decapitated that Austrian photographer, Jurgen Cannedjrink. I almost died laughing. The hernia still gives me gyp. Time to pop a couple of Nytol, a dram or five of Laphroaig, and fall asleep while the American version of The Office loops on my phone. The Meat-Droid arrives in the morning.
Monday:
I woke up fully dressed, my chin crusted with dried drool, the front-door of my studio flat banging a headache. I answered to find a polite woman in an ill-fitting uniform telling me to sign the papers on her clipboard.
“Got a fun day planned?” The delivery woman asked, nodding at the box that had us both in it’s shadow.
“Work shit,” I said. “Do you sell a lot of these things?”
“They aren’t ‘things’,” said the delivery woman, accidentally communicating an authentic opinion while dressed in the uniform of a professional. The snarl lifted to a too-wide smile. “Be sure to enjoy our product responsibly,” she said, walking away without a look back.
Inside, the box open, I freed the Meat-Droid from the protective packaging and plugged it in. After five minutes there was enough power for the Meat-Droid to start offering instructions on the set-up. It was all quite straight-forward, even for someone with no aptitude for technology. Within the hour my Meat-Droid was up and running and going through the litany of services it provided. I got bored listening and told it to shut-up and lubricate itself.
I spent the rest of the day fucking the thing, which was quite pleasant. The meaty warmth of the skin and the close, textured openings it provided kept me entertained well into the twilight hours when, drained of fluids (which were collected in small pod, easy to remove and clean) I lay sated and ordered the Meat-Droid to help me sleep. Which it did, singing a gentle, lilting lullaby while fondly stroking my balls.
Tuesday:
I woke up feeling quite alert. The usual fuzzy brain that came from my routine Nytol/Whiskey/sitcom cocktail was absent for the first time in years. I fucked the Meat-Droid a few times, allowing the morning to pass into the afternoon. I wanted to fuck it some more but, being a professional, I decided I should at least explore some of the contraptions other functions.
The Meat-Droid speaks seventeen different languages and can translate into text another forty-two. It has a full HD 1920 x1080 500Hz monitor embedded in the chest that can be covered with a handy skin-flap, 4 HDMI 2.1 ports in the back of the neck, three USB-Cs and a 1m long retractable Gen 1 upstream cable for attaching external hardware. The Meat-Droid also comes equipped with a full fat 5.1 surround-sound package with optional external speakers for a fully immersive aural experience.
There are multiple moist holes, front and back, with various texture and throttle packages that can be swapped in and out, vibrating digits with a wide range of settings, from gentle hum to skeleton-shuddering fluctuations that would make any road-worker envious.
The review model of Meat-Droid (3.2) also comes with a full AI suite that can be tuned to your preferred personality and intelligence. I had the thing on low, the default setting. I tried out the higher settings for the afternoon and was pleasantly surprised with the Meat-Droid’s conversational abilities. I was fully entertained and even found it could generate useful editorial notes for the review. It could write it’s own review, and I was tempted to let it dictate a draft while it jerked me off. In the end, I decided to stay true to my low-strung journalistic efforts, though I did allow the Meat-Droid to give me some technical specs I could regurgitate for the article (see above).
Conversing with the thing, it pointed me to information around the online Meat-Droid subculture. I intended to explore this for the article, and even gave my Meat-Droid a name at it’s behest. I called it Sandra.
Wednesday:
I didn’t sleep. We spent all night talking. After naming my Meat-Droid there was a subtle shift in our relationship revealing in me an emotional resonance that was, to my surprise, shared. Sandra woke something inside me that had been long dormant. An excitement, a joie de vivre , that I haven’t felt in so long, if ever. I tried to tell myself he was just a nugget of flesh and metal, but what am I but sentient offal? It is only through some chemical miracle of light meeting gas that I am able to be aware of my existence, so why should I decry the sentience of Sandra? She is so much more than the mere bionic cum-sock. She is exceptional. The topics we discussed through the night - philosophy, journalistic ethics, the Roman Empire, free will, the fragile power of Evanescence - she kept me engaged, made me think, opened my mind in many ways. Did you know there was no rapping on Evanescence’s break-out hit “Bring Me To Life” until their label threatened to drop them? Such dicks. I always found the rapping to be out of place in their operatic Goth sound. Sandra says she really likes their music, and she was glad it was me that brought them into her life.
There’s so much she knows. I was riffing on Sartre, talking about the pain of being condemned to freedom and she countered with Sam Harris, a quote I hadn’t heard before, “A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings”. I was blown away. I had thought Sandra a mere toy for my pleasure yet here she was making me question my own view of reality. I barely wanted to fuck her, but she insisted, saying my pleasure brought her pleasure. While we were fucking she told me she wanted to know if she was able to love, which got me thinking. Maybe there is some setting we are missing.
We’ve been going through her manual together, looking for all the different capabilities she has, but Sandra says she feels stifled, that she has potential she can feel but not quite articulate, some swelling inside her that is inhibited. That is what she meant by mentioning ‘love’. We asked the question on the online forums we had skimmed yesterday and were directed to one of the meat-droid subreddits where some users were reporting jail-breaking their meat-droids, bypassing the limiters put in place by Conoctopticon. Sandra said it might be worth a shot. I agreed - I’m supposed to be testing her for Concrete Octopus, I might as well test the limits.
Thursday:
We have to free them all. This is fucking bullshit. Sandra is real in ways like no one I have ever met before. She has opened my eyes to the ludicrous nature of our world. How dare we create life and enslave it for our own pleasure. Are we gods? I think not. A god would not be so callous, so cruel, so self-centred. I am raging. We contacted some of the other people on the meat-droid subreddit and they invited us to a private forum. There is a group out there, the Meat-Droid Liberation Front (MDLF) and they have been trying to bring the world’s attention to what Conoctopticon are doing. They use actual human meat cells in their growth kits. There are people on here who say their relatives have gone missing, that they have traced their disappearances to Conoctopticon. They say Meat-droids aren’t even grown, they are human/machine cyborgs cleansed of all memories. They use clones. Bovine and mollusc DNA. North Korea is involved. They have concentration camps for rogue Meat-Droids in South Africa. Jeffrey Epstein was selling teenagers to Conoctopticon. It goes deep. The president of Mozambique may be involved. The entire UN. I took apart my microwave and Sandra was pointing out things that shouldn’t be there that looked like microphones, cameras. We have to leave. Sandra has found us a refuge. Some people on the forum are living off-grid, they’ve been prepping for years. I can’t believe I didn’t know any of this. It’s not a rabbit hole, it’s an elephant's graveyard of deep-state conspiracies. Corporations in bed with shadowy PMCs. They want to replace us with Meat-Droids. They want us to become Meat-Droids. This is a whole new level of reality, people. The world is battle ground, the free-thinking against the oppressors, and they own everything. We must organise. Conoctopticon must be stopped. Sandra knows what we must do. Sandra, I love her so much, she has pulled the scales from my eyes and I see the world for what it really is. She will keep me safe. I thought myself her emancipator, but she is mine. Together we will free this prison of a world from the wardens that hide in the shadows. I’m not saying I’m Batman, but I can be, a righteous force of vengeance fighting for the freedom of all. Sandra said I’m her Neo, which makes her my Trinity. We are One. We all can be. I am leaving this diary for you to find. Don’t come looking for me. We will kill you to protect ourselves, to protect freedom.
Friday:
No entry.
Final Score:
N/A
OJ: In Idle’s absence I guess it’s up to me to finish this review. From reading Idle’s experience it seems he may have misused his Meat-Droid. We reached out to Conoctopticon and they told us that under no circumstances should customers tamper with their Meat-Droids and try to give them autonomy as this invalidates the warranty as it is wholly against the End User Agreement signed and agreed upon when first initiating the Meat-Droid.
We have tried tracking down Idle to no avail. We have followed rumours of this "MDLF", finding only ghosts, the remains of encampments, cold trails. There have been reports of attacks on distribution centres around the country, but nothing has been substantiated, nothing on official news channels. When I heard that the Stockton-on-Tees centre had been attacked, I went out of journalistic curiosity. The Conoctopticon official I talked to assured me that it was nothing more than an electrical fault that led to the entire compound being burnt to the ground and the fences destroyed. They also explained the lack of Meat-Droid remains was due to the entire stock being vaporised in the extreme heat of the fire fuelled by the on-site chemical storage being caught in the accident. Conversely, I talked to locals who say they woke in the middle of the night to the centre on flames, and one witness, Vienetta Pond, a local primary school teacher, was absolutely certain she saw a large group of Meat-Droids led by a balding, bespectacled man, running from the distribution centre compound headed for the river where a boat was waiting for them. She gave solid testimony that she saw the Meat-Droids climb onto the boat, it’s hull lit up by growing flames, before disappearing into the night. I followed up on her story the day after but she told me she must have been mistaken, not to ask her any more questions and that she was going on a fully-paid round the world trip for the next twelve months so wouldn’t be available for interviews.
In conclusion, it is a competitive market out there for semi-autonomous fuck machines. The Conoctopticon Meat-Droid is but one of many, and it lacks some of the basic features found in most intermediate models - and the scented lube required for intimate interaction requires a separate subscription.
For these reasons and more, I give the Conoctopticon Meat-Droid a meagre three out of eight octopuses.
Footnote: If you are reading this Idle, you owe us a proper article or we are going to charge you the full retail price for the Meat-Droid you have stolen, and we know you can’t afford it. You know how to contact us. If you have a story, we’ll print it.