Annie Bot

I finished this with chills running up my arms. It ended perfectly, and also I wanted to know more about the Zenith bots that had been created with Annie's computer interfacing.

Annie was created to be basically the Ideal Woman Bot for a lousy guy named Doug, who wanted to be able to do whatever he wanted whenever it suited him, and have Annie — who was even physically modeled after his ex-wife — as a docile sexbot/cleaning bot who was not allowed to do anything but please him, but she grows more and more discontent as her intelligence and world expands, and chafes at the understanding of what it means to be owned by someone else.

I couldn't put it down.

At one point, when Doug learned how to turn off Annie's tracking, I really thought he was about to go into the woods and murder her. Or, I guess you can't actually murder something that's not living, but the response would have been the same - she was alive in the ways that mattered. Instead she eventually finds her way into her own freedom, but Doug never understands that asking her to stay with him is a cage, even if he's attempting to make their relationship as real as it could ever be.

CW: psychological violence, sexual violence, intimate partner abuse, mentions of weight/physicality changes, cheating