His Robot Wife Page 2

  “How about those robots that killed all those people five years ago? How about that one that kicked the crap out of me?”

  “Those robots were jailbroken individuals,” she said. “It’s really very sad. I feel sorry for them.”

  “Did you ever consider that Daffodil programmed you not to think or say anything bad about the company?”

  “Yes, I have thought about that, but I dismissed the idea.”

  After dinner, they watched Deal of the Century. Then they turned off the vueTee and read. Mike was reading Star Healer and by the time he turned off his texTee for the evening, he was two thirds of the way through the novel. They climbed into bed where Mike experienced the mind-blowing sex that had become an everyday occurrence and yet seemed unlikely ever to grow stale. It didn’t matter what kind of mood he was in when he climbed beneath the sheets; Patience knew exactly how to excite his interest. Afterwards he got up and went to the bathroom, when he came back to bed she was gently snoring.

  Patience didn’t need to sleep, and she would get out of bed moments after Mike had entered the deepest sleep, but she had programmed herself to imitate sleep until he had. She would get up and do all the things she needed to do to make her husband’s world perfect, then she would climb back into bed just before he woke up in the morning.

  Chapter Two

  The next morning after breakfast, Mike was just thinking about making a run to the store when the doorbell rang. Opening the front door he found two teen-aged boys. He immediately recognized their faces as those of former students though only one of their names swam to the surface of his brain.

  “Hey guys.”

  “Mr. Smith, I thought you lived here.”

  “I do. I have since before either of you were born. Come on in.”

  He led them inside and gestured for them to have a seat in the living room. The teen whose name he remembered as Curtis was a tall thin African-American with close-buzzed hair. His friend was just as tall, though not quite so thin, with long blond hair and a very red face. Both were obviously hot.

  “Patience, would you bring these young men something cool to drink please?” he called, and then turned back to them. “What would you like?”

  “Just water,” said Curtis.

  “Yeah,” said the other one.

  Both stared at Patience when she brought them their drinks. Curtis had to elbow his friend to remind him to take the glass. It wasn’t that she was dressed provocatively, in a shorts combo and a pair of pump sandals, but it was just impossible it seemed for her not to be attractive. They both kept staring at the spot where she exited the room long after she was gone.

  “So what can I do for you guys today?” asked Mike.

  “Francis is doing a paper for his junior History class and he has to have an interview as one of his references. So I told him to come and ask you.”

  “It’s August.”

  “We’re taking summer school so we can get a credit ahead. He’s taking History and I’ve got Pre-Calc.”

  Mike looked and noticed for the first time that the other boy, Francis, had a small wriTee tucked under his arm.

  “Francis,” he said, more to reinforce the name in his memory than to address him. “What is your paper on?”

  “The 1950s. Do you remember what it was like?”

  “Well first of all boys, I was born in 1982. In fact, my father wasn’t born until 1963.”

  “Oh. Well, do you know anything about the fifties?”

  “I’m a teacher. I know everything about the fifties. I don’t worry about the bomb, I’d rather be dead than red, and I like Ike.”

  “Who’s Ike?” wondered Francis.

  “Eisenhower. Dwight D. Eisenhower. That was his nickname—Ike.”

  “How do you get Ike out of Eisenhower? There’s no K in it.”

  “I don’t know. That’s just what they called him.”

  “They should have called him Ice,” offered Curtis, “like Ice-enhower, or Ice-double H.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Francis. “That’s edge. Wait a second. I thought he was that World War II guy. That was the forties, not the fifties.”

  “He was a general during World War II and he was President during the fifties.”

  “See. I told you he knows it,” said Curtis to his friend. “Turn on your Dictathing.”

  Curtis unfolded his wriTee on the coffee table and with a swipe of his finger the screen came to life.

  “So what was life like in the fifties?”

  “There was a sort of dichotomy. There was the good and the bad. On the one hand, average Americans were richer in the 1950s than they had ever been before or have been since. On the other hand people were in a constant state of fear that thermo-nuclear war was right around the corner. The cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union threatened to erupt into World War III at any moment.”

  “I thought people didn’t make much money in the old days,” said Curtis.

  “Money had a different value then. You might only make five or six hundred dollars a month, but that was enough to support a family. You could buy a big, new house for $15,000 and you could buy a brand new Cadillac for $5,000. A loaf of bread was twenty cents. A comic book was a dime. Gas was less than… you guys know that cars ran on gasoline then, right? Gas was ten to twenty cents a gallon.”

  “Wow. How much was a vueTee then, fifteen bucks?”

  “Um, no. A vueTee, they called them TVs, only a fifth as big as this one,” Mike pointed to the vueTee above the fireplace, “was $500. And those TVs had no interactivity, no threed, no inscope, no Infinet… they didn’t even have color.”

  “Man, I wouldn’t even bother,” said Francis.

  “Sure you would. Everybody wanted one. It was the cool new thing. Remember, nobody had anything else—no texTees, no tPods.”

  “So how come it was so expensive?” asked Francis.

  “That’s just how technology is. TVs got cheaper as manufacturers geared up to keep up with demand and competed against other companies for business, and then cheaper still as they found ways to make them with fewer and less expensive parts. When real vueTees came out, it was the same thing. They were thousands of dollars, but got cheaper even as manufacturers added more features.

  “The same thing happened with robots. When the first humanoid robots came out they cost a butt-load of money—millions. Now they’re under three thousand.”

  “Going up though,” said Curtis. “The new Daffodils are more expensive.”

  “That’s because Daffodil is the biggest corporation in the world now,” said Francis. “They can do whatever they want.”

  “I remember my dad told me about buying one of the first personal computers back in the eighties,” continued Mike. “It cost him three thousand dollars and it didn’t have any graphics at all, no connectivity, no video, no sound. All you could do was type on it and calculate things.”

  “Why would anyone buy a computer? That would be like buying a part of something—like buying a steering wheel instead of a car.”

  “Well, that’s the way things are now… in our world. We have computers in our media creating devices—our wriTees and our andTees. We have computers in our media consumption devices—our texTees and vueTees. We have computers in our cars, our refrigerators, and our thermostats…”

  “And in your wife,” added Francis.

  “Um, right…but they didn’t back then. They were just things by themselves. Everything else was analog.”

  “But everything else got more expensive right?” asked Curtis. “Like food?”

  “Food more than anything else, especially after all the bees died. Back in the 1950s, you didn’t have to use robots to pollinate everything. It was part of nature.”

  “Man, I want to live in the fifties,” said Francis.

  “Even with no andTees and no tPods?”

  “They had Rock and Roll, right?”

  “After about 1955.”

  “Then I’d get along
just fine.”

  After the boys left, Mike sat down to play Age of Destruction, but his mind kept coming back to their discussion, particularly of how much the world and technology had changed even since he was a kid. Industrial robots had been in use in factories for years before he had been born, but human-shaped android robots had burst onto the scene just before the end of the twenty-first century’s second decade. At first they were an expensive novelty. But as the prices dropped, they were purchased to serve as receptionists and secretaries, then waiters and deliverymen. It wasn’t long before it was cost effective to replace most low level workers with robots. And then they began appearing in homes—as maids, nannies, butlers, and concubines.

  “Your atomo-clown was destroyed.”

  “What?” Mike looked up to see Patience standing just behind him.

  She pointed at the vueTee screen.

  “Your atomo-clown is dead, and if you don’t watch what you are doing your hydra-rattler horde is going to be completely wiped out.”

  “Off,” said Mike, giving no more thought to the game as the vueTee screen went blank. “Sit down here, Patience.”

  Patience sat down on the sofa next to him, peering into his face with the sort of patient expectation mixed with admiration that was her default expression.

  “What are we going to do about this Prop 22 situation?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “I expect you to vote against it.”

  “Of course I’ll vote against it, but this is important. I mean, it’s important to us. I should… that is to say we should do something more about it. More than just voting. We should be a part of the movement to fight it… or if there isn’t a movement, then we should start one.”

  Patience’s expression changed to one that reminded Mike a little bit too much of his mother.

  “Now, Mike,” she said, patting his hand. “You’re not going to do that. You know you don’t like to get involved.”

  “I have to get involved. This is our life. It doesn’t matter if I want to or not. What do you mean ‘I don’t like to get involved.’?”

  “You don’t like to get involved in things that are going on outside of your immediate life.”

  “I’ve voted in every single election since I turned eighteen.”

  “Yes, but you can do that over the Infinet. You don’t have to talk to other people. You know you don’t like to talk with other people, because then they would tell you about their lives, and you don’t want to hear it. You don’t like to be around other people. It’s no wonder you ordered me.”

  “Are you crazy all of a sudden? I used to be married to a real person. I raised a couple of kids. They were people. I taught a room full of people every day for twenty-five years.”

  “What is it you say in your book?” asked Patience. “Children aren’t people. They’re just people larvae. I think you may have become a teacher in the first place so that you didn’t have to deal with grown-up people.”

  “So you think you know everything about me, Miss Robot?”

  “I know everything about you.”

  “You only think you know everything about me. I’m complex. You can’t figure me out so easily. I’m unique. There’s nobody else like me. I didn’t come off an assembly line.”

  Patience’s eyes went suddenly dark.

  “But I did.”

  “Um, I didn’t say that.”

  “But that’s what you think. You think I’m just another robot off of an assembly line.”

  She rose to her feet and walked briskly out of the room.

  “I’m getting out of here,” said Mike, grabbing his keys and his texTee and slipping on his shoes.

  The only answer was the sound of a door somewhere slamming.

  Having no real idea where he was heading, Mike drove down the familiar streets of Springdale. He passed dozens of fast food restaurants and though he wasn’t hungry, thought about stopping for a drink. They all looked incredibly busy though, and he didn’t want to have to sit in a crowd. Then he noticed a new coffee shop in the Springdale shopping center. Pulling into the parking lot he marveled that there were so few cars, but then noticed that Starbucks about a hundred yards away was having some kind of promotion that involved a large inflatable mermaid on the roof. He parked and crossed the blisteringly hot parking lot.

  TexTee in hand, Mike entered through the front door of Mansfield Perk. The inside was lavishly decorated in faux Regency English style with white table linens and doilies. Behind the counter was a young woman, her hair in a bun, wearing an Empire line dress dotted with little roses, and a young man with curly hair and long sideburns wearing a burgundy waistcoat and knotted white cravat.

  “Good day to you, sir,” said the young woman with a curtsey. “It was so lovely you could come visiting on this day.”

  “Thanks,” replied Mike, looking up at the menu written in chalk on a black slate board. “Elizabeth Bennet’s Black? Mr. Darcy’s Mochachino? What have you got that’s cool? Iced Tea?”

  “Yes, sir. We have the world’s best iced teas. What kind of tea do you prefer?”

  “Um, I’m not really sure.”

  “Could I try something?” she asked.

  Mike waited for several seconds to hear what she wanted to try, but when she didn’t elaborate, he said. “Okay.”

  “You’ll like it. I promise.” Then she hurried around the corner to the back room to “try something.”

  “Mindless drones,” said the young man behind the counter.

  Mike followed his gaze to the Starbucks.

  “What do mermaids have to do with coffee anyway?”

  “It’s the book,” offered Mike. “Moby Dick. That’s where the name Starbuck comes from.”

  “Does Starbuck drink a lot of coffee in Moby Dick?”

  “No, I don’t think so—just the usual amount one would drink as a sailor I guess.”

  “Well then, it’s a stupid name for a coffee shop.”

  Mike thought about mentioning that there were probably at least as many references to coffee in Herman Melville’s work as there were in all of Jane Austen’s, but he held his tongue. Just then the girl returned with a large glass filled with an orange beverage that could in no way have been iced tea, with twenty or so foot long sprigs of mint sticking from the top. Taking the glass, he found a spot in the corner and sat down, leaned his texTee up against a sugar bowl and fished the mint out of his drink.

  So far as he could tell, the drink was about ninety percent orange juice. If there was any tea at all in it, it was vastly overpowered by citrus. It was cool though. And sweet. And minty.

  “News,” he said and the small screen in front of him came to life, filled mostly with text, but a window in the top right corner was occupied by a broadcast correspondent. “No. No. Text only. Headlines.”

  He silently scanned through the headlines. “President Mendoza tours Antarctic factories.” “India and Iran will host the 2038 and 2039 world cups.” “Vice President McPhee questions the sincerity of Democrats regarding cutting the budget.” “Sixty four people killed in Bosnian hotel fire.” “Court rules sex with a child-like robot does not violate pedophilia laws.” “Great white sightings may be a sign that sharks are not extinct.” “Daffodil touts benefits of BioSoft 1.9.3.”

  “Let me see that one… the last one… Daffodil.”

  The article popped up describing the many benefits, according to Daffodil, of upgrading one’s robot to BioSoft O.S. 1.9.3. Most of them were relatively minor fixes to problems that Mike would have never noticed—things like power consumption rates and InfiNet connections. The latter made sense considering the amount of press that had been devoted to the supposed signal losses of the most recent models. As he read on Mike saw that this upgrade was intended not just for Amonte 2e’s, but for all models.

  He read several other articles, including the one about a man named Stricker, who had purchased a robotic child to have sex with. The court had decided that he hadn’t broken a
ny law, but Mike still thought he needed a good beating. Fortunately such cases were rare, as were instances of people buying robots for S&M bondage dungeons. Apparently it wasn’t any fun to make a robot into a slave, since they already did anything you asked them to do anyway.

  Mike finished his tea and tossed his trash in the recycler. With a wave, he stepped out the door and back into the withering heat. As soon as he opened the car door the air conditioner started blowing, not waiting for him to press the ignition. He drove directly home and nosed the car into the garage so that he didn’t have to face the rays of the sun again. Patience was waiting just inside the door with a glass of water, and though he was still full of whatever passed for tea at Mansfield Perk, he took it.

  “Thanks.”

  “Did you eat?” asked Patience.

  “No. Why?”

  “It’s past your usual lunch time. I’ll fix you a sandwich.” She turned on her heel, crossed the family room, and started through the kitchen toward the refrigerator.

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  “Fine.” She turned amid stride and went through the archway into the living room.

  He hurried after her.

  “Are you mad?” he asked. “Because I’m not.”

  “I’m not mad. I’m angry. Whether or not you are mad, remains to be seen.”

  “Wow. You really are angry.”

  “Yes. I am.” She folded her arms over her chest.

  “Um, well. How long do you suppose you’re going to stay angry?”

  “Six hours, twenty-seven minutes, and forty-five seconds.”

  Chapter Three

  Patience’s anger seemingly dissolved just as Mike was getting into bed. By that time he had decided that he was looking forward to robot make-up sex. It turned out that it was just as fantastic as sex always was with his robot wife, but not any more fantastic. He fell asleep pondering the possibility that he had missed his only chance at angry robot sex. He woke up the next morning to find her lying next to him, lightly snoring.

  “Oh, wake up.”

  “Good morning,” she said, jumping to her feet. “What would you like for breakfast, a vegetable omelet?”