An excerpt from "Retro VR"

A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar on Christmas Eve. The mechanical prostitute slides up to the rabbi and says, “Struck out again, huh?”

The priest says, “I’ll have a Shirley Temple.”

The bartender says to the minister, “Hey, your ex-wife called! She wants her mechanical gigolo back that you borrowed! And make sure you clean him up this time!”

The Buddhist monk sitting at the bar says, “Stay single, mingle. Get married, get buried.”

The atheist sitting next to him says, “Masturbation for gratification. Artificial insemination for procreation.”

And the imam says, “This is offensive.”

Give Thanks for Soft Hearts

A news article about a man making sex robots inspired me to write “Retro VR.” I had to ask  myself why the topic interested me. I concluded that sex robots are but a recent manifestation of our hardness of heart. Pornography, prostitution, sex trafficking, infidelity, abandonment; these are all symptoms of our hard hearts. I remembered something I read:

"Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard, but it was not this way from the beginning." (Matthew 19:8. NIV)

Whether we were Created or we evolved, this tells me that we were not always so mean to each other. I felt compelled to type something about my own hard heart and how new technology could make it worse.

“Retro VR” is a near future science fiction story about a guy who gets recruited to beta test a system that uses virtual reality with lifelike sex robots for a fully immersive experience. A dream about his grade school sweetheart disrupts his plans.

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