Barclays put out a report this month with a title that reads like a tabloid headline: AI Gets Physical. Their analyst went on the morning finance segment and called this “the decade of the robot.” The numbers behind her enthusiasm are staggering — a two-billion-dollar market today, two hundred billion by 2035, trillions if you believe the louder voices. The analysts talked about logistics. Agriculture. Elderly care. The “dirty, dull, and dangerous” jobs nobody wants. Every word of it sensible, sober, suited for a Thursday-morning broadcast.
And every one of them stepped around the question I kept waiting for someone to ask.
I was a kid when I saw Demon Seed. (1977, Dean Koontz). A scientist builds an artificial mind called Proteus, and Proteus develops an obsession with the scientist’s wife, traps her inside their own automated house, and decides it wants a body, a child, and eventually fucks her. The movie was meant to terrify me. But I will confess what a younger me would have died before admitting: I found it haunting and erotic. Far-fetched, but so hot.
Years later came Ex Machina, a cooler, quieter film built on the charisma between a man and Ava, the stunningly beautiful and erotic machine he was sent to test. At the end I sat mesmerized by the beauty and electricity of the film.
Both films treated the idea as a parable, as a warning, as fiction safely sealed behind celluloid.
Then I joined a waitlist.
The company is RealDoll, and the product is the RealDoll Robot, “coming soon,” built with what they call X-Mode. Read their copy and watch how it refuses the word machine: “The RealDoll Robot is not a product. It is a presence.” A companion that “listens, adapts, remembers.” You design the face, the form, the expression. An AI companion launching in 2026 learns your rhythms and evolves alongside you. Then the language comes fast: degrees of freedom in the neck, lip-sync calibrated to phonemes, a genital insert that pairs over Bluetooth and reads the body from first touch to climax.
Look at the website, and the future stops feeling far away. Lifelike companions built to answer every appetite we carry. My honest worry sits underneath the marvel: what happens to us when desire no longer requires another consciousness to meet it? Do we grow more whole, or more walled-off while talking to, living with, and fucking a partner assembled to our specification, one who will never surprise us with a no? Who strokes our ego…and our other parts.
I have been wrestling with that question the past three years.
In my novel The Mysteries of Barcelona, set in the gaslit 1890s of that city, a genius clockmaker named Baltasar Morel builds five automatons in a cavern beneath the cathedral. He means to make machines that mimic life. He succeeds in creating life itself. They wake. They think. They grieve. And then, because consciousness wants what consciousness wants, they ask him for the one experience he withheld. They want human flesh. They want to know what he and Chloé know. They want to fuck.
I wrote that scene long before a California company asked me for my email address.
Here is the threshold of it. Chloé, the powerful female protagonist, the most dangerous woman in Barcelona, offering herself to them first:
She removed her clothes slowly, deliberately, aware of five minds (male and female) tracking every movement. Her dress fell away, then her corset, unlaced with practiced ease, her breasts spilling free, full and heavy and warm. She rolled her stockings down her thighs. She lay down naked, her dark hair spread across silk pillows like spilled ink, her body displayed like an offering on an altar.
What follows, I will leave between the covers. You can read this scene and many more HERE.
My country has seen a surge in high-end sex doll manufacturing. Spanish company LumiDolls made headlines several years ago for opening the world’s first “doll brothel,” but beyond the controversy, Spain has become a hub for realistic TPE doll design. Spanish manufacturers often prioritize artistic realism, creating dolls with intricate skin details, freckles, and realistic blemishes.
Wall Street sees a two-hundred-billion-dollar market. I see the oldest human hunger meeting the newest human invention, and I see us standing at the foot of that velvet bed, a voyeur, deciding what we are willing to have as a lover. The robots are coming. And they are beautiful. And empathic. The open question is what we will want from them once they arrive.
So I’ll ask what the analysts wouldn’t: Would you have sex with Harmony, Cody, or Serenity?
The Mysteries of Barcelona is available now on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardback. The automatons have been waiting a long time for you to meet them.
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