I am looking for the right temperature:  an effective, narrow band of elevated warmth. Without an invasive procedure, the best I can do is pick up the radiant heat and calculate against normal human individual variances the likelihood that this one is ovulating, or that one is not; that one is two days before prime, that one is two days after.

Given this species' baseline biology, I have about a 30% chance with purely random selection.  But, by adding in the ability to check temperature gradients from across the room, with precision down to nearly one thousandth of a degree, I am bound to get lucky.

Percolating in my internal storage is the soup of donated seminal matter, mumbling with the nanotechnology I have created, all polished and refined over the last few months.  Each gamete pairs with its micro-engineered brother, mimicking function to function:  repeating, each to the other, patterns in bondage that will persist through the violence of growth and replication.

I run a diagnostic on the recently installed delivery apparatus.  The flexible, temperature-neutral tube connects securely from the warmed sack to the telescoping metal insertion device.  All seals still hold. The pneumatics of propulsion report within expected operating tolerances, and the adjustability to backflow potential ensures delivery to the proper depth for 98% of the projected potential subjects. The three motors at the base of the insertion device I have tested - independently, and together - and I can accomplish so wide a range of entry angles that any necessary accommodation for desired superfluous gymnastics on the part of the subject will not deter the efficacy of the payload delivery.

The telescoping implant device itself I extend beneath the table to its full length, and then stage by stage retract it.  I exercise the three motors at its base through their statistically expected range of motion, with the device held at varying degrees of static length.  One man at the next table notes my diagnostics; he taps his companion on the shoulder, and they both point to where I sit, each of them shaking in guffaws and chortles and trying to get the attention of the people at the next table.  Undeterred, I rub a little graphite from the table's complementary bowl of lubricants on my splendidly designed device, and fully extend the insertion apparatus to transfer the cooling, slick graphite to the collapsing edges, insuring a smooth extension.

Most people in the bar tonight are configured in couples.  If I were to try to split the female from one of these committed couples, chances are that the male would object and my intention could be spilled:  and for me it would be back to the repair shop, my memory flashed, my added engineering removed and disassembled for scrap, my nanotechnology-enhanced gametes surrendered to some biotech graduate student for spiritual analysis. No. I want to find some lone female with the look of adventure and no fear of novelty, one that would be at first amused by the pluck of an unaccompanied robot, and then astounded at the mission I advance - yes, even intrigued to imagine if I can be all that I say I can be. And yet, a woman who can remain - for the clipped duration of our intimate transaction - unsuspecting of my desire for a lasting, repeatable architecture.

And a woman that is the right temperature.

I drum an omnigrasp on the table and try to look suave. I have no illusions. I am an oddity.  Even just in being here, I am an oddity.  How many robots have you seen sitting alone at a bar, fingering the free graphite and looking perhaps one shot of lubricant short of a core dump?  My small talk is of rumored upgrades, better grades of graphite, the latest rotation couplers, or whether the stray interstices unplanned in holographic memory are actually 'thought'.  I do not intersect well with human leisure time and the banter of casual carnality. I am, for most attending biological units, perhaps a memorable moment in a pleasant evening's outing - and then the erstwhile subject in nearby human conversation is on to the dazzling brute with the dazzling streak of yellow in his dazzling brown hair, and the dazzling brace of his trousers sucked in like curtains unable to resist an open window.

But eventually, there will be one woman who wants to know a bit more.  I will see her across the room, nursing her drink, and my sensors will grade her omnipresent leaking temperature; I will compare the statistical chance that she is at the right state of ovulation against the statistical chance that, with the establishment's closing time fast approaching, I could possibly find another subject exuding any better of a statistical showing. Availability, temperature, and the location's closing door of opportunity will intersect in a splash of possibility, and a subject will emerge.  I hum in system idle mode, alert for the possibility.

I don't expect immediate success. Males and females stumble through this ritual night after night and even when both are desperately hoping for success, there is often no success.  They dance and shimmy around their intentions and spit out avatars in the likenesses they think most palatable. I do not have the programming for such guile and threadbare acting. I can only do so much before my logic circuits clamp shut. It may take me a few nights to get the method down right, and I have the disadvantage - or the advantage, if I can play it - of not being a member of this circuitous species. I have to embellish my purposes and elaborate my existential circumstance against whatever collection of prejudices and proclivities I perceive in my intended subject.  I catalog, I learn. I have storage to spare. I recharge during the day, and have the battery power to remain persistent each night. Play the right angles, properly gauge the potential subject's propensity for novelty, learn from each rejection, and I will eventually succeed. I am mechanical:   I have the will to try, try, try again.

The more nights I am seen in this place, the more likely I am to be accepted as an alternative to one of the habitual males that linger hopelessly about hoping to use the net of alcohol and boredom to ensnare a stray mate for the evening. I turn on my sober charm. I chat up my mechanical advantages. I spin the opportunities in my uniqueness. I offer to provide more decimal places of pi than anyone living in this establishment could possibly recall.

But I do not hint that I am looking for the mother of my child. 

The raven haired, matronly model at the nearest end of the bar has just lost her bid on a man who I have seen here before do better.  I catch the corner of her eye, and nod, one multi-joint antenna tipped seductively in her direction. I spin the motors on my insertion apparatus and test the extension potential one more time, raising slightly the table. Surely, she thinks my knee has brushed the table's underside and sent it a-kilter with my momentary loss of attention.  What else could she suspect?

I settle the table with an arm and she slides off her bar stool, dropping her chin to look at me through the tops of her eyes; and I can see from this angle that her seriously constructed hips would suit my intended industry just fine.  Space enough.  Her heart could beat for two as long as it needed to.  Her bone structure could support the weight of cybernetics evolving.  With every slow twist of her high-heeled walk, my seduction subroutines are swapping from the cache into core.

Just let me get her temperature.