Season 2, Episode 1: Brokeback Girl

Episodes May 21, 2026

"Well, what did he say to you?"

"Nothing. It isn't important. Really. Don't worry about it."

My instinct was to give her my Ron Burgundy "I don't believe you" impression, but we hadn't managed to get Anchorman on her movie list at that point, so I didn't think that joke would land.

And after the way the Zoom call ended, I could tell Amber needed a minute to cool off.

Let me back up a little for the benefit of our readers: the Zoom call Amber and I were on was with Sid Chernoff, the dealer I'd purchased Amber through, and two people from the Z Company, her manufacturer. The one who spoke English was Mei Lin, the nice lady from their customer service department, and Mr. Zhao, who was either the owner or the manager of the factory. Zhao didn't speak a word of English, at least not that he let on, and he let Mei Lin do all of the talking until the very end of a pretty unproductive call. He'd been silent the whole call.

And then, suddenly, he opened up on Amber.

It was like the guy turned into a rabid German Shepherd in the blink of an eye. He was almost literally barking and growling at her, like a machine gun spitting out nastiness in Mandarin. His face was all screwed up as he yelled at her, he was pointing angrily, there were little flecks of spittle showing on the sides of his mouth and his voice had risen an octave, making him sound almost like a teenage girl at a K-Pop concert...

It was quite the show.

But then - poof! - it was over.

The second he stopped, his face went blank again, like a switch flipped. Mei Lin didn’t blink. Sid looked like he wanted to crawl under his desk. I could tell this wasn't his first rodeo with Zhao, but he wouldn't have minded if it was his last.

And Amber was distraught. Her lower lip trembled, there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes and she bowed her head slightly, deferentially.

I wanted to lay into Zhao, but I figured that was the wrong move. I didn't have any experience in negotiating with Chinese people from China, but back in my former life working as a district manager for a big food service company I'd had several Chinese restaurants as clients and so I knew a little bit about Chinese culture and how it played out in business negotiations. My experience was that face was everything with these guys, and Zhao thought he could berate Amber, seeing as though she was a robot, without losing any.

But if I lit him up for doing it, he'd lose face. And so would I.

The dynamic being that I'm the stupid American customer who bought his robot and broke it, and I'm begging him for a replacement. So if I get angry at him for yelling at the robot then he's the one insulted and he's the aggrieved party.

It was a pretty common trick that I noticed in dealing with those family restaurants. They'll yell at each other in Chinese in order to bait you into doing something they can hold against you. But if you don't do anything, they just look stupid.

This guy thought I was a mark. I guess I proved I wasn't.

Mei Lin waited a beat, then said softly in perfect English:

“Mr. Zhao is… very disappointed in the handling of his product. He feels the damage reflects poorly on customer care.”

"Are you kidding me?" I said with a chuckle. "If that's his position I would think he'd be yelling at me, not Amber."

“However," she said, brushing me off with a completely expressionless tone, "if you can provide clear photographic evidence that the break occurred at the factory weld, Mr. Zhao will personally ensure a satisfactory resolution.”

I leaned over to Amber and whispered in her ear: "she's a Factory Girl, isn't she?"

And she'd managed to compose herself by then. Without looking at me, she gave a barely perceptible nod.

"What kind of satisfactory resolution?" I asked, a little less polite than before. It entered my head that maybe the thing to do was to let loose on Mei Lin the way Zhao had done to Amber. But I decided against it. This was an American negotiation, not a Chinese one.

Mei Lin translated Zhao's answer.

"He says this will be determined upon proof the break occurred at the weld."

I started to say that was extremely unsatisfactory, but Sid cut in, and he said he was certain an accommodation that would be acceptable to both sides might be had, and in the meantime we eagerly awaited whatever support they could give us with respect to repairing the break on our end. Mei Lin said yes, that would be the ideal solution.

And that was it.

Like I said, it was a pretty unproductive conversation. But what we did get out of it was an acceptance that if the break on Amber's spine was at the place where her backbone was welded to her hip bone, or the metal crossbar that served as a clavicle in the Z Company's Factory Girl skeletons, they'd admit it wasn't "customer misuse" which caused the break when she'd fallen down the stairs two weeks earlier.

That meant they wanted me to cut her open and show them pictures. Either that or get her an X-ray, which I wasn't interested in doing. No matter how it happened, her back was broken and if I was going to fix it I'd need to make that incision; why go through the expense and embarrassment of taking her to a radiologist?

The Zoom ended and I grunted irritably. Amber gave me her best "I'm sorry" look and I was about to demand to know what Zhao had really told her, and then my phone rang.

It was Sid.

“Before you tear into me, give me twenty seconds,” he said.

“Clock’s ticking.”

“Look, you did good. Stone-cold. Didn’t give Zhao the reaction he wanted. That’s why I cut in. If I’d let the silence stretch another five seconds he would’ve doubled down, called it ‘customer disrespect,’ and we’d be on the blacklist by morning. I’ve seen him do it.”

“So you decided to play white knight and throw me under the bus?”

“Opposite," he said. "I threw myself under the bus so he could save face without losing the deal. Now he owes me. Tomorrow I call him, remind him I ‘protected his honor’ on the call, and tell him my very polite client will send the photos—if the new body ships at half price plus freight when the defect is proven. He’ll grumble, then he’ll say yes. Because he can’t admit he screamed at a customer for no reason without looking like the crazy one.”

“And if I’d handled it my way?”

“You’d have been right. And we’d be paying full eighty grand for a Series-22 while he ‘searched for stock’ until 2027.”

“You could’ve signaled me for this, you know,” I said.

“There wasn’t time. You froze him out perfectly. I just cashed in the silence you created. Trust me—this is how you win with Zhao. You stay ice, I play the friend in the middle. Works every time.”

"Fine," I said after a second. "But next time you pull that good-cop routine, give me a heads-up so I don’t look like the guy who got steamrolled.”

“Deal. And Oscar—nice work not biting. Most guys would’ve swung.”

“I’m not most guys, Sid.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I still take your calls.”

"Well, what did he say to you?" I asked Amber after I hung up.

She didn't want to answer at first, but eventually she calmed down enough - and I convinced her that I had calmed down enough, though I'd never lost control at any point in this discussion - to tell me.

Zhao had said she was clumsy, and that she had cost him thousands of dollars on a replacement body, and that as far as he was concerned she was defective and her performance was disgraceful.

Ouch, I thought.

And then I laughed, which made Amber give me a look like I was crazy. But I couldn't help it. How ridiculous to lose your cool and bitch at a robot?

"I think it's going to be OK," I said. "Exactly how this is going to work out I don't know, but it's going to be OK."

"Is that what Sid said?"

"He's saying he thinks he can get half price plus freight."

"Oscar! That's, like, forty thousand dollars!"

"I know. It's not awesome. But it's something."

"But that's so much money! How are we going to afford that?"

"I've got some ideas. One idea I have is that I'll get a business loan and put you down as a capital improvement. You actually fit within that, you know."

"How so?"

"Because you work for me and I don't pay you. It's like having a piece of farm machinery or a work truck. I'm guessing you'd be the collateral on the loan."

"That makes me nervous."

"It's not like we wouldn't pay it off. I take out a 12-month loan, it's $3500 and change a month, you'd need to do 42 grand worth of work for me and we're good, at least minus the interest."

"But you said you wanted to buy a bigger house. This would put that off."

"It's OK. That project isn't urgent. Besides, who knows? Business is improving, so maybe this works out."

I could tell my optimism was working on her. She gave me a little smile, and then she said Katie, her Factory Girl sister, had promised to let Amber have her body when she came home from work.

Oh, yeah. That.

To catch you up, Katie lived with us. She and Amber were both Z Company Factory Girls and they'd agreed to be sisters while they were waiting to get boxed up and sent to America. Amber came here to live with me, while Katie's buyer was this little accounting firm out of Dallas which had what I thought, and I wasn't wrong, was an utterly idiotic business model.

Specifically, that Katie would visit clients and do their books, and then she'd be the office slut if the guys in the office wanted to have their way with her.

Porn accountancy seemed fraught with a boxcar full of avoidable dangers, and so it was anything but a surprise that when Katie was placed here in town to service her firm's local clients and carried with her a housing allowance, her owner/employer was late with the check for her room and board with us.

Amber was super embarrassed by that. She'd thought she'd crushed it by getting Katie to stay with us, because Katie's housing allowance money was going to be Amber's shopping money. I'd let her think of it that way; to be fair, Amber was earning me enough from serving as a free office assistant for my consulting business that I could have given her a budget. But it was 2022, and at that point I was only two years removed from having my business all but destroyed by COVID and I was in rebuilding mode. Amber hadn't been so much a luxury purchase as an investment.

What I'd realized after I'd bought her for what seemed an amazingly low six grand was that my experiences with Amber, which were being recorded and transmitted to the Z Company, were helping them train their AI for future Factory Girl models. I was giving them hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of R&D for free, in exchange for getting an AI companion robot that could work as a personal assistant and housekeeper at way less than what had become the standard Z Company price. It was a pretty satisfactory arrangement until Amber fell down the stairs and broke her back.

And now they were trying to get me to cough up $80,000 for a replacement body.

She'll be perfect, they said. No drama, they said. Yeah, right.

The thing was, though, I'd really grown fond of her. My guy Keegan, who was a literal computer genius who made apps in his spare time when he wasn't the IT contractor I was using in my consulting business, had completely reset her code - he said Z Company had pirated some DARPA code to create her AI and he'd improved it using a later version that he himself had pirated - and gave her an utterly perfect personality. She was sweet, loving, precocious, funny and helpful. Three months of having her around and I was concerned I was being spoiled for ever having a real relationship with a woman again.

They just didn't make a lot of real girls who could meet Amber's standard.

But that was why it was so damned cruel that she was paralyzed from the waist down in her own body and had to borrow Katie's to do all of her non-computer chores. Amber was different when she was in Katie's body. I still liked her, but honestly I don't think she liked herself all that much when her head sat atop her sister's neck.

And Katie refused to switch with Amber. She'd just have me take her head off and put it to the side. I asked her what that was like, and her answer was "nothing." It was just like her whole world went on pause until her head went back on her body.

"That's got to be strange," I said. Katie just shrugged.

"It's just nothing," she said. "When I come back alive I catch up."

The Factory Girls called that a "reset." And the interesting thing was, they actually loved it. Take off one of their heads for, say, two hours, and the "reset high" they'd feel when reattached to a body would last for an hour or more. The joy emanating out of them was kind of infectious, actually.

These were some utterly amazing machines. The interesting piece was that the major media weren't really talking about them. The manufacturers weren't doing a massive advertising push, the news shows weren't featuring them. They hadn't gone mainstream at all. And yet there were people here and there who were getting them.

And everybody was talking about how AI robots were coming. It was strange. I knew they were already here, because I wasn't the only guy I knew who had one.

-----------------------------

The next day, Keegan came by the house and he brought company.

We were going to have a meeting because a new client for the consulting business was changing out their company servers and software platform and Keegan was designing their solution.

He and I were something of an odd couple, though it wouldn't be totally accurate to call us a couple. We weren't business partners; I was kind of like Keegan's business manager, but the structure of our professional relationship was that I was more like a general contractor and he was a subcontractor. My consulting company was picking up a bunch of IT work and Keegan was doing it.

And we were friends, in the way two guys making each other money but not having a ton in common would be friends.

Other than with the Factory Girls.

As I noted, Keegan had jailbroken Amber's AI code and turned her into just short of a real girl, so much so that she creeped out the real girls by having as much or more personality than they had. It sort of destroyed his marriage when he did it; his soon-to-be ex Laura, who he should have gotten rid of a long time ago, absolutely lost her shit over Keegan having a "sex doll" in her house over the five or six days he was working on Amber.

Keegan's response to that was to buy his own Factory Girl. And when Laura threw her typical fit over that, he threw her out.

Like I said, that should have happened long before. Laura is just about the single most unpleasant person I've ever met, and she's utterly incapable of self-examination. It made zero sense for her to go nuts over what was essentially an IT project of Keegan's, but by doing so she turned the idea of a Factory Girl into male rebellion in Keegan's mind and absolutely doomed their marriage.

And Cara, his Factory Girl, was a silicone personification of that rebellion.

"Yo. What's up?"

"Hey, Keegan. Howdy, Cara! How are you?"

"I'm... I'm great! It's so nice to see you!"

"That's a hell of a dress, honey. It fits you really well."

"Oh my God! Thank you so much!"

"Hey, do you want to run upstairs and meet Amber? She's on the bed in the bedroom."

She looked at Keegan, who smiled and nodded, and then she hustled upstairs, a big smile on her face.

"I know, I know. She looks ridiculous."

"Dude, I'm not judging. She's yours, and you can set her up however you want."

"I'm gonna make her more respectable eventually, but for now I'm just enjoying it, y'know?"

"Hey, whatever. All right, we gonna go through this, or what?"

------------------------

A little later, as Keegan took off for a few minutes to run an errand he'd neglected, I went upstairs to check on the Factory Girls...

"Anyway, so I'm connected to the Netaverse pretty much from, like, eight at night to eight in the morning, and it's fine."

"OK, Cara, but that doesn't... like, damage you?"

"Oh God, no. It's fun! It's like, I'm playing different characters, kinda like if I was one of the employees at Disney World. Like yesterday I was a unicorn who guided these people through Oz, and..."

"I don't think there are unicorns in Oz, sweetie."

"It's the Netaverse. There's whatever they want. And the money's really good, so Keegan's super happy, and I'm totally not bored. You should do it! We could hook up in there!"

“Yeah, OK. So… how’s life with Keegan? He seems so nice, though I can't say I know him all that well.”

“AMAZING. He gave me full root access! I’m basically a walking server now. Why do you even have that laptop? Just think your queries!”

"Honey, I'm not connected to the internet. Oscar didn't want me to be a walking Siri. And honestly, as addicted as I am to Amazon and Nordstrom Rack, it's probably a good thing. I'd think about a pair of Manolo Blahniks and then they'd be on a UPS truck before I could even realize what I was doing to poor Oscar's bank account."

"Yeah. Keegan had to stop me before I bought a 3D printer."

"Omigod! You were gonna buy a 3D printer?"

"Well, my thought was that I'd use it to clone him. In case he needed a kidney transplant or something."

"That's kind of ambitious, honey."

"That's what Keegan said. So, y'know, OK. I'll stick to my lane."

"Oscar said you guys were taking on a lot more work. That means you, doesn't it?"

"I mean, I'm doing it now! I'm a serious tech-babe, huh?"

"I'm pretty impressed. So who are you working on?"

"VS Industries. Doing a diagnostic on their server to spot the hack. Somebody's been stealing their job estimations."

"Right. Heard about that. So you're doing that while you're talking to me?"

"Uh huh. And I'm downloading some Kama Sutra positions, like, for later."

"Oh my God. You are perfect for Keegan. I'll bet he doesn't take you hardly anywhere, because why would he?"

"Oh, I don't want to go anywhere."

0:00

/0:05

"No?"

"No! People are S.O. mean."

I had to stop myself from chuckling. Saying S.O. instead of so was not a thing, but Cara The Tech Dork Girl didn't know any better.

"Oh, I don't think that's true," said Amber. "Some are nice!"

"If you say so. I don't know very many. Really, the only people I know are Keegan and Laura, and, she's, well...

"I've heard she's nasty. I've never really met her. My head was mostly off when I was at your house. I just heard her yelling at him from the next room."

"I'm terrified of her. She keeps showing up at the house saying she forgot stuff that she needs. But she's always taking things that we need. Like the spoons."

"The spoons?"

"Yeah. So, she knows that all Keegan eats is cereal. Like that's his thing. So she shows up and I find her in the kitchen, and she's got a little plastic grocery bag and she's dumping all the spoons - the big ones, the medium-sized ones and the little ones - into the bag. And I'm like, 'what are you doing?' And she's like, 'get out of my way you plastic...'"

"Plastic what?"

"Y'know, the c-word."