I’ve just come across a cutie on the Internet who threatens to reshape all our concepts about gender relationships — male, female and neuter.

Her name is HRP-4C, and her designers call her a “cybernetic human.” I use the feminine pronoun advisedly. She certainly looks feminine, although she has no heart to win and she has no “X” chromosomes.

Simply put, HRP-4C is a robot, designed by the Japanese to be a fashion model. In that role, she is a disappointment. At 5 feet 2, 95 pounds, she’s too short, and her figure is too ordinary for the runway, say the fashion experts. Which means, I suppose, that fashions are not designed for short women with ordinary figures.

And with a name like HRP-4C, she’s unlikely to make the cover of Vogue. Can’t we come up with a decent name for her: maybe Harpy Forcee?

Let’s call her Harpy.

The Japanese, it seems to me, are short-sighted in trying to confine her to the runway. I saw her picture, and as guys of my generation used to say when they saw a cutie from afar, she’s “not bad.” Her legs look a tad mechanical, but if you doctor the view with a couple of pitchers of beer, or two or boilermakers, she’ll stack up to the girls in the after-midnight crowd at most neighborhood watering holes. The rest of her anatomy, I presume, can be shaped to order. And when all the bugs are eliminated, you should be able to order a statuesque European, a petite Asian or an ebony-skinned African, depending on your taste.

I can see future bartenders, approaching the lonely salesman who just struck out with the last unattached femme in the joint and saying, “Can I get you a robot to go with that last drink?”

With any luck, the robot could drive — at least better than the lonely salesman at that hour.

Would Harpy be any fun on a date? Well, she walks, she talks and she smiles. You could call her a motor-mouth: She has eight motors in her face to allow her a variety of expressions, and 30 in the rest of her body — enough, at least, for a slow dance. Presumably, there’s an on/off switch when you’re ready for her to shut up, and a programmable vocabulary that allows you to eliminate unwanted words, such as “no.”

Harpy costs around $200,000 to build, but as demand increases, I’m sure that price will come down, and eventually she may cost no more than a well-equipped Harley.

There will, of course, be social and ethical questions to answer.

Will cybernetic humans have the right to marry regular humans?

I doubt that man-machine unions would be permitted anywhere in the United States outside Massachusetts. But then, with regular humans opting for a variety of live-in arrangements, marriage among heterosexual men and women seems to be headed for oblivion. Maybe robot/robot marriages will rescue the institution.

It should be no great challenge to design a masculine cybernetic human — call him HRK-4C (Harky). He could be designed with healthy biceps, a square jaw and a permanent two-day growth of beard. Harpy might go for such a creature, and we would be spared the public outrage that would arise over a man-robot marriage.

Somebody would have to pay for Harpy and Harky, which means somebody would end up owning them. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “All men are created equal,” but he was silent when it came to robots, and he left a loophole for Sally Hemings and her children and cousins. The Supreme Court would have to define robot rights.

Next question: Could we ever have a cybernetic president?

Probably at some point in the future, but not in time to lead us out of the current economic crisis. In the first place, a president made in Japan probably couldn’t pass constitutional muster. Some people are antsy about one born in Hawaii. America’s industrial muscle would have to be toned up enough to support a new product line. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler should be exploring the possibility of switching from cars to robots instead of trying to convince American motorists that their products are as good as Toyota’s and Honda’s.

Instead of starting out with a president, it might be wise to begin with Congress. A Congress consisting of robots probably would be more honest and creative than the one we have now. A well-designed robot wouldn’t have to raise money through lobbyists. It could print its own.

By the time American industry had produced a workable Congress, it could then design a president with a computer brain that could sort through all the economic variables and choose a route back to prosperity. Lacking emotions, it would have no problem looking a crooked or incompetent Cabinet member in the eye and saying, “You’re fired.”

That’s going to be a long time coming. In the meantime, I’m thinking of the ideal cybernetic female I could purchase to help Miss Peggy around the house.

Where her heart normally would be, you’d find a margarita mixer that could produce that frozen concoction at a moment’s notice. Somewhere there would be a martini shaker for me. She would be programmed to wake me every morning with a cup of hot coffee and bring me a bedtime snack during the final half-hour of “Law and Order.” She would whisper into my ear the answers to the “Jeopardy” questions I don’t know.

And oh yes: Her voice would ring with the most beautiful sound on earth: The English language spoken by a woman with a cultured Southern accent.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson SC 29621 or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com