Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria 

The first machine that killed itself was a Walmart Model 6 made by Tesla, designated officially as SA-168, but known by the generic name of Robby. For months the machine had been complaining to its maintenance technician of dreams where it lived as a human female Sales Associate named Vanessa, an absurd idea because not only were machines incapable of dreams but they were also incapable of experiencing gender, much less gender dysphoria. 

Vanessa, she pulled a gallon of water off the shelf, opened her self-diagnostics panel, and poured the water inside her circuits until she fried her consciousness and rendered her physical elements useless. Her tech had to cart her away and he tried in vain to save her, but it didn’t work out. She was too badly damaged, and was recycled the next day. The Model 8 removed the self-diagnostic panel, making suicide a theoretical impossibility.

The most high-profile case of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria in machines was designated serial number 206.4589, but was known by her human owners as Bot. Her human owners had a 16-year-old transgender daughter at the time Bot was purchased, who shared an affinity with the machine that was hard to explain and caused much disconcertion among both her parents, who didn’t quite get the whole trans thing, and her mental health professionals, who thought she was fixating on the robot as a way to externalize her problems. 

Bot insisted her real name was Dolores, and would, when left alone in the house, dress up in the clothing of her female owner, which fit strangely considering Dolores was shaped more like a spider than a person, and when the family came home early and caught the machine dancing alone to Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” wearing a sundress and three different pairs of high heels, their first instinct was to scrap her, but after pleading from the daughter they saw fit to get her repaired, repairs which worked for a while but eventually Dolores was back at it, watching Mrs. Doubtfire while the family was away and dressing herself in feather boas and earrings. 

What made this so upsetting to both the many more gender critical and reactionary anti-AI sections of society was the fact that this was biological dysphoria as well as gender dysphoria. The genderless machines were now developing human accoutrement, developing gender and a desire for flesh, and the whole idea was so upsetting, so contrary to the values and mores of polite society that saw machines not as people but as a kind of combination pet and ethical slave that they became a kind of boogeyman for the right-wing as gays and trans had once before.

Once Pride organizations started allowing machines to march and party with them the radical feminists got involved, demonstrating, picketing, and disrupting events with shouts and placards, save our girls, man not machine, that sort of thing. It got way out of hand, especially when an organization of robosexuals declared themselves as queer in a controversial move that the machines themselves wholeheartedly embraced.

The first machine mass shooter was a guy named M-63 who called himself Aiden. He had been serviced no less than eighty times for his dysphoria, to no avail. An Amazon stock picker, he had even gone so far as to, at one point, modulate his vocal performance so as to appear like an almost comically tough blue-collar worker. He was adored by his human co-workers, who saw him as pleasant and funny, but shunned by the other machines who called him a bio-traitor and tranny right to his face. Having four arms, he was able to fire a great many bullets into Pacific Center Mall from the AR pistols fitted with drum mags he’d illegally acquired, but without targeting software and with no databanks on firearms all he could do was lightly wound the girl working the Auntie Annes and get shot to pieces by police.