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On page 24 of issue #5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 9, we see a

pregnancy

test with a positive result. However, later in issue #7, we learn that Buffy is

a robot.

How could this be the case? Could the original

Buffybot

even perform the physical action required to take this test?

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    This question is REALLY hard to answer without using some terminology or describing some situations that really don't seem accepted on this site.
    – Jeff
    Commented Apr 3, 2012 at 20:02
  • Rolled back the edits. This was deliberately phrased as it is to avoid spoilers.
    – Tony Meyer
    Commented Dec 4, 2016 at 3:42

2 Answers 2

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The original duplicate was intended to be a 'special' toy for Spike. He wanted to vent his frustrations (in several forms) and was presumably capable of a wide range of activities.

Spike is hundreds of years old, and has likely explored many facets of sexuality (given that humans invariably acclimate to many different stimuli, and studies have shown that this is one facet of behavior where acclimation is possible).

It's therefore not surprising that 'she' would be capable of such an action. Spike could easily have many reasons to want the robot to be capable of this, given his complicated and evolving feelings towards Buffy. He could have wanted the ability to terrify her, and see the expected physical responses.

In short, there is no in-universe answer outside of "apparently, yes, she can and does urinate because she must have to take the test," but it is not unreasonable to assume it would have been a 'feature' of the original.

As to how the test was able to read as positive, that is harder to determine. Modern tests (such as the one used) test for the presence of hCG, a hormone found in human blood and urine after implantation.

We can only assume that in their attempts to make the Buffybot more realistic and able to fool more and more types of examinations, they accidentally caused her blood/urine analogs to contain a protien sufficiently similar to hCG that it triggered the reaction on the test.

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    +1 because this answer is not only reasonable, but somehow still polite. A neat trick.
    – Tynam
    Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 12:33
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    @Tynam: It wasn't easy, I'll tell you.
    – Jeff
    Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 14:38
  • Also, considering Warren made the Buffybot and he was a misogynist that only saw women as being good for limited functions, it would be pretty surprising for him not to incorporate those functions into his creations.
    – thumbtackthief
    Commented Feb 13, 2015 at 21:49
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    @Tim: Check the edit history of the question. Until ~24 hours ago, the question didn't ask how the test result could be positive, it asked how the robot could even take the test. Valorum altered the question at roughly the same time they provided their answer.
    – Jeff
    Commented Nov 2, 2016 at 14:25
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    Rather than re-ask what would essentially be a duplicate, I've widened the question to include the mechanism and the result.
    – Valorum
    Commented Nov 2, 2016 at 15:56
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In-universe, Andrew speculates that there's some kind of issue with the Buffybot's "trueblood", that her inability to metabolise food properly may have altered her blood pH, creating a false positive on the test.

enter image description here
Buffy: Season 9 - #09

And yes, I'm fully aware that that's not how pregnancy tests work.

On the question of the mechanics of how the Buffybot is able to urinate at all, that's down to the fact that she was designed by Andrew to effectively replicate the functions of a human. That evidently includes eating and pooping (but not menstruating, which is what prompted her to do the test in the first place).

enter image description here

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    This doesn't answer the question of how Buffy could have taken the test, though. The test was a standard urine analysis test, not a blood test.
    – Jeff
    Commented Nov 2, 2016 at 14:52
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    @Jeff - I assume her trueblood was mixing with her ingested foods to generate power, replicate bodily fluids, etc. She has a functioning metabolism, just not one that works well.
    – Valorum
    Commented Nov 2, 2016 at 15:53

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