His Robot Girlfriend (3 page)

Though both Mr. Smith and Master flashed
through his mind, he said “Mike”.

“
You are named for the
Archangel Michael, who is like unto God.”

“
I think I must be named
after my uncle Mike, who is like unto, um, my
grandfather.”

“
In answer to your unasked
query, I will usually wear 3/4 or 5/6 U.S. miss sizes. Which dress
would you like me to wear, Mike?”

“
I think the blue one. It
matches your underwear which is still in the bag there.”

“
May I use the bathroom to
wash up and get dressed, Mike?”

“
Um, yes. You don’t need to
say my name every time.”

“
During the secondary setup
procedure, I will be adjusting my diction and vocabulary so that I
am better able to communicate with you, Mike.”

“
I see.”

“
Which way is the bathroom,
Mike?”

Mike pointed. “There’s the little… I call it
the privy… on the other side of the kitchen, or you can go
upstairs, because this one doesn’t have a shower or anything.”

The Daffodil went through the kitchen, toward
the privy. Mike turned off the vueTee, and then sat waiting for her
to return. It was growing dark out and both end table lamps
automatically clicked on. She didn’t keep him waiting long. When
she returned, he marveled at how real, how human she looked. She
was dressed, and the plastic over her hair was gone. Her hair was
long and straight and black, and cut with bangs across her
forehead. She stepped to the center of the room and twirled around,
then bounced up and down twice on her tip-toes. This made her look
really young.

“
Shit. I forgot to buy you
any shoes,” he said.

“
That is alright,” she
smiled. “I can choose and purchase my own wardrobe if you
like.”

“
Yes, that would be good.
But you have a limited budget. I don’t have that much in the bank,
and I spent all my payNEtime money on… well, on you.”

“
I understand, Mike. I
won’t spend any money until I am sure of our finances.”

“
Our finances?” Mike
remembered the orange-haired lady and how her Daffodil paid her
bills for her. “Are you going to be my secretary too?”

“
I will be anything and
everything you want me to be,” she said. “It is after nine o’clock.
Have you eaten dinner, Mike?”

“
I had a
sandwich.”

“
Are you still hungry,
Mike? Would you like dessert?”

“
I don’t think
so.”

“
Then may we sit a talk for
a few minutes?” She made her way around the coffee table and sat
down on the couch. “What time is your bedtime, Mike?”

“
Um, I usually go to bed
about eleven.”

“
And what time do you
usually get up, Mike?”

“
I get up at six
twenty.”

“
That is not enough sleep,
Mike. You should go to bed at 10:05.”

“
I have a hard time getting
to sleep that early. I have to take Sleepova anyway.”

“
I’ll help you, Mike.” She
smiled sweetly. “This is a very nice dress, Mike. Is this the type
of dress you would like to see me wear often?”

“
Sure. Um, I would like to
see you in different clothes too. Isn’t that what most people want?
You are kind of like a big Barbie doll.”

“
Would you say you
preferred me to dress demurely or provocatively or somewhere in the
middle, Mike?”

“
Provocatively… sexy but
appropriate. I’m a middle school teacher. I don’t want you to get
me arrested, or worse, fired... although one would probably lead to
the other.”

“
These are very nice
underwear, Mike. Is this the type of underwear you would like to
see me wear often?”

“
Absolutely,” Mike said.
“Whenever you wear underwear, they should be sexy. That’s why
you’re here.”

“
Sexual congress?” She
looked at him wide-eyed, without the least hint of embarrassment.
Well, she wouldn’t be embarrassed, would she? She was a robot. It
was hard, looking at her, to think of her as anything but a real
person.

“
Yes, well, not just for
that. I’m tired of being single. But…I’m fifty years old. It’s hard
to find somebody at my age, and let’s be frank—I’m nobody’s idea of
a catch. I guess with you I don’t have to be though, do I? And I
don’t want another wife anyway. I want you to be my companion, you
know, in all the ways that another person would be a companion. You
can do that, right?”

“
That is right,” said
Patience. “I can be anything and everything you want me to
be.”

The next day was so busy that there were
times when Mike forgot about Patience, at least for a moment or
two. That was saying something, because it had been an eventful
night. They had talked for a while, Patience quizzing him on his
likes and dislikes, though in retrospect, it seemed scant enough
information for any kind of detailed profile. Then she had given
him a massage and they had gone to bed. The sex had been pretty
incredible. It wasn’t like he thought it would be. She didn’t feel
cold or plastic. She felt squishy in all the right spots—firm in
the right spots too. She seemed to know what he wanted before he
knew that he wanted it. Afterwards, he had fallen asleep, waking up
once during the night to find her looking through his closet.

In the morning, she had served him breakfast
in bed—cereal and milk, toast and grape jelly, and orange juice,
which was about all the breakfast food he had in the house. When he
had taken a shower, she had been there waiting as he had come out
with a clean, dry towel. Though he usually didn’t allow for any
extra time in the morning, and eating breakfast had taken up enough
time that he actually had to hurry, he still took a moment to
notice that she had been cleaning during the night. She had picked
up all the dirty clothes off the bedroom floor and the bathroom had
been cleaned. Who knows what else she had done that he hadn’t
noticed.

“
Turn your texTees to ‘Our
World’ page 1056,” Mike told the class. “The ten review questions
on this page will be the first ten questions of your final exam the
day after tomorrow. Look up the answers you don’t know at this
time.”

Two hands went up.

“
What is it,
Curtis?”

“
I don’t have my
texTee.”

“
Is that your problem too
Mabel? You don’t have your texTee?

The dark haired girl two seats behind Curtis
nodded her head.

“
Why even bother to show up
without your texTee? You know it’s review day. Why are you even
here?”

“
My mother makes me come,”
said Mabel.

“
It’s not my fault,” said
Curtis. “I left it at my dad’s girlfriend’s house.”

“
I would be willing to bet
that you have your phone with you though,” said Mike. “Get one of
the classroom texTees out of the cabinet.”

“
Whatever!” said
Mabel.

As the two students retrieved the reading
devices, these particular ones covered across the top with bright
red reflective tape, there was a knock at the outside door. The
classroom had an inside door which led to the hallway and the rest
of the school and an outside door which faced a small lawn and the
back of the adjacent power plant. Peering in through the metal mesh
that covered the outside door was Patience.

“
I brought you lunch,
Mike,” she said, when he opened the door a few inches. Patience was
wearing the black and white polka dotted dress.

“
I usually eat in the lunch
room.”

“
Here.” She pushed a
soft-sided grey lunch box with the word Thermos on the side toward
him.

“
Where did you get
this?”

“
It was in the
cabinet.”

“
It was?”

She nodded. Then she turned and walked across
the lawn. Mike could see the blackened soles of her bare feet as
she walked away.

“
Who was that?” asked
several students as he closed the door.

“
Was that your daughter?”
asked Mabel.

“
Um, no. Let’s get focused
on our review questions.”

At lunch time Mike unpacked the lunchbox.
There was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, an apple cut into
slices and bagged, a small container of a white semi-gelatinous
substance that turned out to be vanilla pudding, a single large
sugar cookie, and a diet Pepsi with a chemical cold-pack wrapped
around it.

“
That’s a nice lunch,” said
Miss Treewise from across the table.

“
Mm-hmm,” Mike
nodded.

“
Somebody must like you,”
said Mrs. Cartwright.

Mike shrugged.

When he got home, Mike found Patience waiting
at the door. She looked pretty and pleasant and on impulse, he
leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.

“
That was a nice kiss,
Mike. Is that the kind of kiss you would like me to greet you with
often?”

“
Wow. I almost forgot for a
moment that you were a robot.” He looked down. “Hey, you’re wearing
shoes.”

Patience lifted one up behind her, taking a
kind of Betty Boop pose. On her feet were black shoes with large
white bows just above the open toe. They had a half-inch thick
platform soul in the front and a four inch square heel in the
back.

“
Do you like them? They’re
called Peeptoe Platforms.”

“
Yes, they’re fine. But
where did you get them?”

“
After I dropped lunch off
to you I went to the store.”

“
You walked to the store?
That’s too far, especially in bare feet. And the ground is
hot.”

“
I did not mind,” she
smiled. “Would you like a shoulder rub, Mike?”

“
Sure.”

She guided him to a chair that she had
apparently brought in from the dining room and set along the west
wall of the living room, in front of the window. Once he had sat
down, she stepped behind him and began rubbing his shoulders.

“
How did you pay for them…
the shoes, I mean?” he asked.

“
I took the cash card out
of your wallet this morning before you left for school.”

“
They’re not supposed to
let you use that unless it’s yours. And besides, you should have
asked first.”

“
The stores never check,
and I did ask. You said that I should select and purchase my own
wardrobe.”

“
Yes, but I’m not sure I
can afford that right now. I don’t get paid until the tenth. I’m
not sure how much money I have in my accounts right
now.”

“
We have $2261.43 in
account 116211130782-2 checking, $31021.69 in account
116211130782-1 savings, and $422.11 in the payNEtime
account.”

“
Wow. That’s more than I
thought I had… I mean we had.”

She turned him back around and began rubbing
his shoulders again. “I have ordered my own cash card, in any
case.”

“
You did? Wait. How did you
know all that?”

“
Last night I accessed all
your financial data.”

“
You what?” He turned back
around to look at her.

“
It is part of the
secondary setup procedure.”

“
What else did you do?” he
wondered.

“
I accessed your vueTee and
browser files, read all of the books and magazines on your texTee,
and all of your paper books too. I looked through your photo
albums, ran your credit report, and googled you.”

“
Is that all part of the
secondary setup procedure?” he frowned.

She nodded with an innocent look on her face
and turned him back around to continue with the shoulder rub. When
she was done, he moved to his recliner and flipped on the vueTee,
while Patience brought him a diet Pepsi. Although he usually drank
them from the can, she had poured it into a tall glass over
ice.

“
Did you buy ice at the
store too?”

“
No, Mike. I made it in the
freezer.”

“
You can do
that?”

She nodded. “Did you want to talk about your
day at work, Mike?”

“
Not really,” he said. “If
you don’t mind, I’d just like to watch vueTee for a
while.”

“
That’s fine, Mike. The
Star Trek episode ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield’ is on channel
twenty-seven.”

“
Is that the one where
Frank Gorshin is black on the left side and white on the right
side?”

“
He is black on the right
side,” said Patience. “All of his people are black on the right
side.”

Mike smiled as he flipped to channel
twenty-seven. He watched the last forty minutes of the science
fiction classic. Then he watched part of Seaquest DSV, which wasn’t
so much of a classic. Mercifully, he fell asleep in his chair
somewhere near the middle. He often fell asleep in the afternoon in
his recliner to wake up to a dark and lonely room. This time when
he woke up, both lamps were on. Patience passed by, walking through
the room from the kitchen, continuing through the living room and
on to the foyer. As she did so, she switched the vueTee to the
evening news.