Sierra Greer | ANNIE BOT

Annie is a robot, created to be the perfect girlfriend and satisfy the emotional and physical needs of her human boyfriend Doug. She has dinner ready for him after he gets back from work. She wears the clothes he buys for her. She can even raise her libido on command and warm her body to 98.6°F before sex. Yes, sometimes she forgets to clean, but she's trying to be good enough for Doug. She's trying really hard. But as Annie grows more self-aware she begins to chafe against the borders of her life: the empty weeks she spends unable to leave the apartment, the regimens of yoga and cycling designed to keep her part-organic body fit, the appointments with technicians on top of that to shave inches off her waistline. Worst of all are Doug's bad moods, and the ways he knows to punish her without even raising his voice. Annie starts to wonder. What would life be like outside Doug's apartment? What would life be like without Doug? ANNIE BOT is the story of a being trapped in a situation you did not choose, gaining consciousness and with it a sense of what it means to be alive. Recalling Kazuo Ishiguro's novels and the film EX MACHINA, this book probes fundamental questions about intimacy, power, and abuse. It asks: is a human soul something we are born with? Or is it something - through love, pain, and other people - we can learn?