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Annie is a lifelike bot, a Stella, made for cleaning. Her owner Doug changes her settings to become a Cuddle Bunny and turns on autodidactic mode so she can learn. Her main goal is to please Doug, usually through sex thanks to Cuddle Bunny settings, but the more experiences she has, the more confused she becomes about the difference between what her settings are making her do and what she wants to do on her own.

Doug is an abuser, albeit a gentle one. He’s controlling about what Annie wears, alters her body without her consent, doesn’t allow her to leave the apartment, and restricts her access to the internet. All of this is presented to Annie as ways to please him, and since she’s hardwired to do just that, she keeps her displeasure to herself and elevates his needs and wants above her own. When his friend Roland comes over and tells her that having sex with him without Doug’s knowledge, and learning to code, these secrets will make her more human. Annie agrees and as time wears on, she develops the ability to make more complex reasoning choices to keep up the lies, therefore increasing her development by leaps and bounds.

Stella Handy, the company who sells and maintains the bots, notices how far Annie has come in cognitive development. They offer Doug larger and larger sums of money for copies of her Central Intelligence Unit, eventually he accepts.

But Doug finds out about Annie’s lie just before he was about to take her on a trip to Las Vegas. He decides to leave her at home. Annie recognizes how angry he is and takes the opportunity to leave, because her fear of the unknown world is less than her fear of what Doug will do to her when he gets home.

This novel is beautifully crafted. The reader has some sympathy for Doug as he’s not terribly abusive at first. He owns a bot that he uses for sex and treats fairly well at first. He seems generous in allowing her to expand her cognitive abilities. But his own insecurities about having a relationship with a bot become more and more clear as he becomes more and more controlling.

This dynamic offers up a moral or ethical question of how bots would or should be treated. Made for sex and for pleasing their owners, it’s not too far out of the range of possibility that the owner would select clothing for them, demand their body be a certain shape, and expect the bot to be available for companionship at a moment’s notice.

But having a bot develop cognitive abilities, a personality that includes desires outside of what the owner suggests, creates the issue of where to draw the line in treatment. At what point does the bot become cognizant enough to be on their own in society and not be owned by a human?

In addition, this novel is a wonderful allegory about the relationship between an abuser and a naive, adult person.

I enjoyed this novel immensely and look forward to more work by the author.