Tenured Position

Bologna has an uncontrollable urge to reach across the table and touch its face, but her left hand pins her right hand down. Her left fingertips prickle. They sense danger, knowing an incorrect display of affection can land someone a tenured position. For a moment, her two hands are no longer connected to the same brain.

Her right hand has a mind of its own. She feels her face burning a molten shade of shame. For believing that the woman sitting across from her is real. For desiring to stroke her cheeks as soft as peaches. Her fresh-from-a-pitcher-of-milk-tinted skin magnificently poured over her cheekbones. Her rosy ' grown in the lab' cheeks grown from cells of genetically engineered muscle cells extracted from a twenty-one-year-old woman just after an orgasm illuminating radiance from every perfectly formed spongy pore.

The Titan, whom he demands to be called, has designed the new girlfriend model to be the Rolls Royce of all the sex robots. One who agrees with everything they say. One who talks dirty to them and fucks with a hydraulic pussy.

"The design is quite simple, really," He is quoted, boorishly bragging on the day of Galaxy XAI's conference in Dubai. "The slipperiest liquid gold brake fluid transmits to the girlfriend model's brake pads, commanding her to squeeze tighter with each thrust from a penis of a man rich enough to buy her," he ebulliently overshares. She shares the same hydraulic braking system as a Maserati," His eyes blink with pride while flashbulbs pop in front of him as he unveils his new custom built girlfriend, 'Melania II,' to the shocked gasp of a full house.

"And who better to test her desirability?" the sick fuck smirks as he directs the attention to Bologna sitting at a small cafe table with another girlfriend robot. "Then someone who's been served an Aperol Spritz laced with enough ecstasy and ketamine to turn an elephant on," he laughs maniacally to a thunderous applause.

Bologna bites through her tongue until she tastes blood. The searing pain overrides her overwhelming urge to chatter like Lorenzo does see he sees the beautiful yellow goldfinch outside their living room window. The last thing she remembers before she falls to the ground are the hot white stage lights blinding her and the soul-crushing bleakness she feels when she wakes up in the data mine infirmary and she realizes she hasn't died. Her new life has just begun.

Every evening when she returns home from work at 8 p.m. even more dejected than the last.

"How the hell am I going to last another 60 years in this dead-end job?" She laments to her mother, who's busy lounging on the couch. "This life is a joke," she pouts, throwing her coat down on the floor. "It's a bad joke, a nightmare really, and I'm the butt of it. Why'd you have to give me such a stupid name?"

"Mother of God, Bobo, do you have to always be so dramatic?" Her mother scolds haphazardly. She lays her Italian accent on thick and pretends to parent her surly twenty-year-old daughter while she paints her nails a cheerful orangey red.

"No one takes me seriously." Bologna whines, but it comes out more like a question in the upspeak: so many of her generation of failures to thrivers have now, as she slumps down next to her mother. "Those robots have gotten fucking mean. One punched me today and told me to "fuck off, phony baloney" when I told them that they're under quota." She mutters, shoving the old one-eyed Siamese, Lorenzo, off the coffee table, and rubs the big bruise on her forehead. Lorenzo returns her hostility with a fishy-breathed hiss as he slinks off to his cushy retirement pad in a patch of warm sunlight underneath the television set. Bologna kicks her shoes at him, but he's used to her vitamin A deficient aim and he licks his fur contentedly with all the nonchalance of a kept man.

"You don't know how good you guys have it." Bobo fights back tears.

"Oh, we know it, dear," her mother laughs. "Don't we, Lorenzo, baby?" She purrs to the cat. "Cheer up, love." Her mother heaves herself up from the couch. "I'll pop a frozen dinner into the microwave for you. Food will make everything better."

"I can see when I'm not wanted," Bologna sulks, "so I'll be eating dinner in bed." Her tone is terse. It has a Robert De Niro 'don't fuck with me' vibrato, and paired with her posture with its kyphotic curve of a ninety-year-old woman's osteoporosis, she makes it clear to her mother that she isn't game for anymore teasing, even if it does include an anthropomorphized Lorenzo. When her mother used to speak as Lorenzo, in his Italian lover-boy voice full of rolling r's, it used to send them both into fits of laughter. But now that humans lived easily into their hundreds, Bologna's 'tenured position,' a term used in the Artificial Intelligence Age as jargon for a life sentence job until retirement at eighty, her job as assistant manager for the day shift maintenance crew of robots that service the miles of computers in the data center had disabled her ability to spot irony. She snatches the plate angrily off the TV tray that her mother had arranged in front of the couch and stomps off to her bedroom.

There is no more eating meals in the kitchen. Kitchens now are simple, small, rectangular rooms the size of a coat closet. Just a cheerful turquoise boomerang printed Formica-topped cabinet that held a small microwave on top and a plastic tub to wash the Melmac dishes and plastic silverware with government-assigned gallon jugs of water assigned to each household. They’re designed to look vintage, a harkening to households where mothers stayed home, a design Prefab GTP relays to 3D printers all day long that spit the cabinets out like paper to match all the others in the hybrid dormitory homes of retired parents and their worker children.

When word first got out about the data center a year ago, Bologna's mother had picketed with all the other concerned citizens of Sauk County. They held homemade signs with "You can't drink Data" and "Build community, not data centers" as they marched back and forth protesting in the parking lot to the entrance of Mirror Lake State Park.

"It tastes like cardboard," Bologna warns Lorenzo, who’s now waiting patiently at the foot of the bed for her to set the plate down. His palette is undiscerning as he laps up the remains of the Friday ration of Saulsberry steak gravy with his sandpaper tongue. "It's delicioso," she says in a monotone while she stares out the window and watches the day crew of robots splashing in a pool of disinfectant that had once been a crystal-clear lake.

BIO: Laura Bogner is a writer and visual artist who lives a quiet life in Joshua Tree, California after many years of living in the fast lane of Los Angeles. Laura has published fiction in Punk Noir Press Magazine, Urban Pigs, Rock and A Hard Place, Space Cowboy Books Podcast, and Literary Garage.

Follow on Social

Literary Garage: Storytelling with grit, heart, and no off-ramp.

© 2025. All rights reserved.

Connect

Follow us on Substack for updates and news

Special Features Editor and Warrior God: Michael Downing