Imagine what digital voice recognition could lead to. Combined with only slightly evolved versions of existing software "bots" -- which can already do rudimentary parsing of plain English text and respond with canned phrases -- programs capable of sifting sense from the sound of human voices could put a new wrinkle in the phone-sex business. "What more economical way to run the next-generation 900 line than to have a couple of Pentiums humming along, generating conversation, right?" says Jerry Michalski, president of the tech consultancy Sociate.

Further into the imagined future of robotics, androids like Star Trek's Data become a reality, and there the possibilities are obvious. Sociology professor Joel Snell predicted the coming of "soft and pliant," humanlike "sexbots" in a 1997 issue of the Futurist magazine, and warned of social consequences -- people becoming addicted to the superhuman pleasures of robot sex, jealous spouses destroying their sexbot rivals and suing the manufacturer, "technovirgins" going through life never feeling the touch of any but robotic flesh.

And then, of course, there's that bodysuit. Which, it turns out, has a distinguished conceptual pedigree reaching back through the annals of wild speculation almost to the dawn of cyberhype. Way back in 1990, technopundit Howard Rheingold published an article titled "Teledildonics," in which he introduced, with tongue lightly in cheek, the notion of a virtual-reality sex suit able to impart tactile sensations just as good as the real thing. To his chagrin, the technically improbable fantasy became a cultural icon in the years that followed. Magazines put it on their cover. VR hackers swore they'd have it up and running any day. Digerati saw it as a beacon leading to a world in which even the most basic of human realities would be turned upside down and inside out by the advent of the digital.

And now the icon can be found clinging to a mannequin in the offices of a San Fernando Valley porn studio. An irony, of course, is that someone has finally built what purports to be a working version of the device, however crude, and it looks more like a joke than it ever did. Who could possibly feel aroused inside such a contraption? Not even its chief booster, David James, who cheerfully admits, "If I had that thing on, I'd just start laughing." Ah, but think about it as version 1.0.