Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem

Gynandroics were quite a number of elderly prostitutes, no longer able to ply their trade; their years of experience made them masters, by remote, of the art of love. But the technology wasn’t limited to the erotic in its application. Take for example the twelve-year-old schoolboy who, receiving a poor grade for spelling errors in composition, used his father’s muscular remote to beat the English teacher to a pulp and break all his furniture. This remote, called Body Guard, sold like hotcakes. It was kept in the garden shed to protect the family from burglars. The boy’s father wore electrode pajamas to bed, and when the alarm went off, signaling the presence of an intruder, he could deal with the culprit or even culprits without having to get out of bed, because the remote would hold them until the police arrived. The son borrowed his father’s pajamas while his father was out. I had also seen picketing and street demonstrations against Gynandroics and comparable Japanese companies. The protesters were mostly women. In the few states where homosexuality was still against the law, legislators were trying to decide whether a homosexual, in love with a man who was not, was breaking the law if he sent him a female remote which he, the homosexual, was operating. When the Supreme Court finally ruled that relations per procura (with the aid of a remote) lay within the lawful bounds of matrimony provided both parties consented, the Kuckerman case came up. Mr. Kuckerman was a traveling salesman; Mrs. Kuckerman ran a beauty salon. They spent little time together: she couldn’t leave the salon, and he was on the road a lot. They agreed to intermediate their union, but couldn’t agree whether it should be by remote-husband or remote-wife. The Kuckermans’ neighbor brought down upon himself the wrath of both when he suggested, trying to be helpful, that they compromise and use a teleferic pair: a remote husband with a remote wife seemed to him a Solomonic solution to the problem. The Kuckermans considered it idiotic and insulting. They had no idea that their argument, after it appeared in the papers, would lead to a phenomenon called teleferic piggybacking—because a remote, too, can put on an electrode suit and operate another remote, and so on ad infinitum. The idea was received with enthusiasm by the underworld, because it is as easy to find the operator of a remote as it is to locate a radio transmitter. The police had no problem solving teleferic burglaries and murders. But if the perpetrator remote was operated by another remote, by the time you got to the second remote the criminal, the human, had broken radio contact with his “middleman” and left no clues.
    The catalogs of Telemate and Sony offered remotes from Lilliputians to King Kongs, as well as famous people-in-history remotes, uncanny re-creations of Nefertìti, Cleopatra, and Queen Navarra, not to mention movie stars. In order to avoid lawsuits for “resemblance to persons living or dead,” anyone wanting a copy of the First Lady in his closet, or his neighbor’s wife, availed himself of a mail-order unassembled model. The customer, in the privacy of his own home, could put together the Playmate of his choice, following the instructions. Narcissists ordered their own likeness. The legal system could not handle the flood of new cases, moreover it became clear that one could not outlaw remotes as one outlawed the manufacture of drugs or atomic bombs by private individuals, because the remotes were already big business and indispensable, besides, in agriculture, technology, and science, including astronautics. It was only by remote, after all, that a man could land on such planets as Saturn or Jupiter. Remotes were also used, of course, for mining and for rescuing people in the mountains and during earthquakes and other natural disasters. The Lunar Agency had a special contract with Gynandroics for moon remotes. I would soon learn that they had indeed used