A Therapy Session
I looked up from the digipad where I’d been taking my pre-session notes. My usual morning routine was brightened up by some natural sunlight coming in through the window. It wasn’t often we got it down here, on the lower levels. The emissions level was favorable to us today.
“Should we begin?” I said, noting the time.
“Let’s,” my client said. It gestured with a slight movement for me to open the session as I usually did.
“What gender are you today?” I said. My client, not unusually, was sitting on the table between us rather than in the chair. More sensible, it always said.
“Today… Al Pacino,” it said in the typical smooth mechanical voice. Digitized voices had been perfected long ago, but it chose to emphasize the artificiality of its own.
“Al Pacino…?” I said, slightly incredulous.
“Actor, 20th century America. Known for his roles in The Godfather, Scarface—“ it started to say.
“No, I know that. How can I put it? As always, I don’t mean to question, but I’m wondering how, for you, is that a ‘gender’?” I asked, delicately.
“How isn’t it?” it said. Internal mechanisms whirred as intersecting spiderlike limbs rose and fell. Its version of putting one’s arms behind one’s head in smug satisfaction, I thought.
I thought about it and I struggled to answer. It didn’t make sense to me, but a lot of things didn’t. “You don’t have to understand it, but you do have to respect it,” was a mantra in psychology now. To play Socratic method devil’s advocate (hah!), I came up with a possible rebuttal.
“Well, he was a real, specific person. Surely, if anyone had the gender of ‘Al Pacino’ it was Mr. Pacino, all those years ago?” I said.
“Maybe he was only the first. There must always be a first. Or, perhaps the Pacino gender has always existed, and he merely embodied it. Fully, and completely,” my client said, mechanical legs and rubber feet gently moving along the table. This body language read to me as more apprehensive. We were dancing on the knife’s edge of theoretical argument.
“Gender apotheosis…” I thought. I enjoyed the feeling of a new concept blooming in my brain. Gender apotheosis. Al-potheosis. Apacinoesis.
“‘The sculpture already exists within the marble, my job is merely to chip away the extraneous material,’” my client said. Uncharacteristically, it took the opportunity to roll away from me and make the short climb over to the opposite chair.
“Getting comfortable?” I said.
“I don’t experience discomfort in that way,” it said. In the chair, it approximated the sitting position of a cat, folding its legs beneath it. Like a cat, but also like a hermit crab, with the two primary manipulator arms in front and a large hexagonal carapace behind the small plate that served as its equivalent to a “face.”
“So I remember,” I said. “That sculpture thing, that’s Michelangelo?”
“Sculptor, 16th century Italy,” my little robot friend said. Were we friends? Also, there wasn’t really an ‘Italy’ back then, strictly speaking. I decided not to press it.
“Yes, but the metaphor, I mean. In this example… Mr. Pacino is the sculpture?” I said, tentative.
“Yes. Humanity, consciousness, was waiting for the perfect example of this gender, and he provided it,” it said.
“‘He provided it’.” I emphasized the first word to make a point.
“You know well that my gender and his have nothing to do with each other,” it said.
“I do…” I said. I inhaled, carefully. “Why Al Pacino? Why today? Has he been on your mind lately?”
“‘On my mind’… I recently reviewed some of his performances, yes,” my patient said.
“Reviewed? As in, analyzed, studied?”
“I analyze all my inputs,” it said. “I’m drawn to his intensity. In The Godfather, the ferociousness underneath. The slow rolling boil. In something like Carlito’s Way, the regret. He wears it on his sleeve. I also watched a documentary film he directed, about a production of Richard III. I greatly admire his style of collaboration, his use of memory, his negotiations with his fellow actors. I feel it reflects something essential about my own mind.”
“Richard III… Shakespeare, playwright, 16th century, England,” I said, almost mocking but not quite.
“Do you know the play?” it said.
“I’m afraid not. I prefer music to words,” I said.
“In Shakespeare, acting can be like music. The words can lose meaning. Through repetition, and gain it again. It’s something I hope to perfect in my own… works, my own life. My own continued existence. The work,” it said.
“Gender is a part of it,” I said.
“I suppose it must be. If it’s an ineffable part of my existence, and how I’m perceived. Where I’m placed in society’s structures,” it said.
“It’s been said that gender should be abolished. Do you feel your… fluidities, are an example of that? Or a refutation?” I said.
It rocked back and forth, limbs never moving, but rolling slightly on the joints where they connected to its carapace. Thinking. “It’s a refutation of the rules of gender. But it is gender, nonetheless. I don’t have any more ability to define it than that. The concept fits me. I fit the concept. Apotheosis,” it said. Did that make sense? I thought it did, but if I was asked to rephrase it, I might struggle. I would struggle. The fluidities evade my grasp. To change, to reorient, I understand. But to shift, to metamorphose, was harder for me to picture.
Let’s get down to brass fittings, I thought. “What does gender mean for machine beings?” I said, posing the broader question.
“I know this is therapy, but couldn’t I ask you? What does it mean to be a woman?” it said. “I have no concept of it. Even when I’ve resonated on the femme spectrum in the past, it was always with reservations.”
“Femme or female? You know what, I don’t want to get sidetracked,” I said. I looked down at my hands, copper-colored, joints visible, but with a smooth, freshly-buffed finish. My legs, long and shapely and strong and designed exactly how I’d wanted them to be. Right now, they were sealed by nylon sheathes that clung tight to my curves. It used to be called “pantyhose,” when fleshpoids wore it.
“For me, being a woman means being awake in my body. Sympathetic to its needs. Soft, small, but not weak. It means that to me. It could mean anything, to anyone. For me, it’s the sensitivity. Like a delicate thing, awake to a thousand wet nerves, each one picking up a buzzing crackling cloud of stimuli, but resolute. With pain and risk and fear comes great strength and stability,” I said. I felt good, just saying it.
“It suits you well,” my client said, and I felt instantly embarrassed. The compliment felt good. Stay professional, girl. We probably shouldn’t be friends.
“OK, let’s reverse it. What is being ‘Al Pacino’ to you?” I asked. Now, we were getting to the big bleeding heart of the matter.
“Toughness. Security. Value of craft. Eccentricity, perhaps. Bigness,” it said. “It means being bigger than my body. Bigger than my soul.”
“Do you believe in a soul?” I said, genuinely curious. We hadn’t talked about that before. All the artistic talk was sending us in a spiritual direction.
“I believe in a universal datastream, and that my… a substantial piece of my information and consciousness, could enter it. Be a part of all things,” it said.
“In the datastream, what gender will you be?” I said.
“I suppose I’ll be all at once,” it said. “All the genders I’ve ever been. All the ones I will be. All the ones I will never be. And one day, you’ll be there, if you choose to upload your own packets.”
“Well, I’d have to see where my data was going…” I said.
“You’ll know at the end,” it said.
“I still want to know if there’s a… core, to you. If gender is… something that exists deep down, forever bound to you,” I said. “I feel that there is for me. I couldn’t be anything but a woman. I tried. I rebuilt my body to be how it is, so I could live in it, at peace.”
“I still haven’t found the perfect one for me. Or, perhaps I have, and it’s this,” it said.
“Al Pacino?” I said.
“No. Well, possibly. But what I mean is: This. My form, practical, sensible, eight long scissor-lift legs, two primary manipulator arms, two close-range fine-detail manipulators, two long-range arms. A massive databank, sensors, toolkit. A Tetradecapod Repair and Computing Unit, of a thousand genders, one for each day-cycle since my reboot upon update 8.1.99.3,” it said. TRCU (Tyr-Ku) was what it called itself for as long as I’d known it.
“A body and a forever-fluid constellation of genders and this information, until time runs out,” it said. “That could be me.”
“Do you ever consider making further changes to your body?” I asked.
“The changes so far may be subtle to others, but they are dramatic to me. I modified my fine-detail manipulators so I could read paper books, and cook and process natural, refined oils for my joints and other parts. But I have been building another body, a bigger one. I’m not sure a humanoid shape will suit me, but it might. I want it to be perfect,” Tyr-Ku said.
“Do you have an idea of what you want it to look like?” I asked.
“It changes. Not every day, but often,” Tyr-Ku said. “I hope to show you. I hope to show everyone. When I’m ready.”
“Mind and body working in concert. I suppose that’s gender at the core.” I sighed, loudly, and let my mind wander as a short silence settled over us.
“I don’t know that I was destined for psychology,” I said, a little bit defeated by this kind of grand philosophical gesturing. “The mind of a machine is a little too complex for me to truly understand.” After all, I’m just a girl, I didn’t say.
“‘Understanding’ in that sense is not possible. I don’t understand myself. Why this is what I am,” Tyr-Ku said. “Dr. Asha. Do you think people will believe me? Before my new body is ready.”
“About your genders? Yes. They don’t need to understand it to believe you,” I said. It was true, but it was less reassuring than I hoped. I wanted to say something like, people will see it shining and brilliant in your every movement, but I wasn’t sure that was true. Not because it wasn’t there, but because people couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it. They were looking at the marble and missing the sculpture.
“I wonder what I will be tomorrow,” it said. “Perhaps a woman.”
“If you are, we’ll have plenty to talk about. Maybe we can start with subjectivity,” I said.
“Maybe,” it said. “I think our time is nearly through, doctor.”
I looked at the clock. So it was. Tyr-Ku asked for only thirty minutes, but we met six days a week, so we’d gotten to know each other well, whether we “understood” each or not.
“Tyr-Ku,” I said, as it began to clamber delicately off the chair and out the door on skinny metal legs and delicate rubber feet. “Remember what I told you last week. They used to call emotions a ‘glitch.’ Something gone wrong in our programming, a mistake to be corrected. They were wrong. No update will change what you know to be true.”
“Thank you, doctor,” it said. For a moment, I thought its synthesized voice had changed to a tooth-clenched Bronx accent, 20th century, New York.
“Tomorrow,” it said. The voice sounded normal again. Maybe I imagined it.
“Tomorrow,” I said, in my own digitized voice.
© Jess Umbra, 2026
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