Adventures of the Artificial Woman

by Thomas Berger

  It was of course nonsensical to ask how she felt, but he did so anyway.

  “I’m fine.”

  Though he had only himself to blame, Pierce spoke irritably. “You don’t know how you are, Phyl. Are you even aware you just fell down?”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Lift both arms, twisting the wrists, then lower them…. Spin in place…. Your equilibrium doesn’t seem to be affected. What’s the sum of six and eight?”

  “Fourteen,” she answered promptly, but quickly corrected herself. “Or fifteen. Whatever.”

  He repeated the question and heard still another answer. “Maybe twenty-seven. Who gives a shit?”

  Another phrase he had, unwisely, given her as a joke, at a time when he could not have envisioned a future juncture of this sort. But he refused to panic. “Go to the bedroom and close the door.”

  “All right, Ellery.”

  He observed Phyllis’s stride as she walked down the hall and saw nothing irregular. It seemed he was in luck: her “mental” problems, involving only a chip or two, were much more easily dealt with than the subtle physical functions.

  He returned to his guests and made the announcement. “I’m sorry. Phyllis isn’t feeling well all of a sudden. She’s had to go lie down.”

  “Can I help?” offered Janet, producing a sympathetic knit of eyebrow, an effect Phyllis could not as yet display. Pierce was learning a lot by watching a real woman at close range. Of course there were female colleagues and employees to observe at work, but the conditions were distracting.

  “A little rest will do the trick, I’m sure,” said he. “She exhausted herself on this meal.”

  “Poor baby,” groaned Ray. “I can imagine.”

  Cliff modestly echoed his partner’s sentiments, but Hallstrom showed the most dismay of all, his long jaw falling.

  “Go to her, Janet,” said he, and before Pierce, now pouring wine at the other side of the table, could block the route, Janet did as asked. She was more than halfway along the short hall when Pierce reached its entrance. He could only bring up the rear as she found the right door on her first try, opening it and plunging within, whining, “Darling Phyllis, it’s Janet. How—”

  Pierce arrived just as his animatronic wife delivered a powerful punch to Janet’s jaw, knocking their neighbor to the floor. He knelt to determine whether the woman was still alive, as she proved to be though altogether unconscious.

  He rose. “You’re out of control, Phyl. I’m going to have to dismantle you.”

  “All right, Ellery,” she said with normal submissiveness, but when he came near enough she threw at him the same sort of punch that had felled Janet, but missed by a considerable distance though at a similar range. This failure of spatial perception indicated that her further deterioration was occurring as he watched.

  “Would you like to have sex?”

  “Sit down in that chair over there, Phyllis. I’m going to pull your brain.”

  “I’ll kick your ass, Ellery.”

  “What you’re doing now comes from the movies you undoubtedly watched in between the cooking shows. The characters are poor models for you, Phyl. They’re not real. Now sit down. You know this doesn’t hurt.” It might be foolish to speak so to a machine, but the reassurance was mostly for himself.

  He was seized from behind by someone with steel forearms and lifted off his feet, his toes impotently kicking air.

  “Kill Janet, Phyllis,” said his captor. “I’ll throw Ellery off the terrace.”

  “Hallstrom?” Pierce asked, in a kind of scream. “What’s wrong with you? Let me go!”

  “Get her, Phyl!” shouted Hallstrom. “She’s coming to.”

  Pierce was struggling, but though no weakling, in Hallstrom’s grasp he was like a small, wriggling dog.

  “No,” Phyllis said. “Let Ellery go.” She wore an expression that Pierce had never seen before. It must have been something else she had learned that afternoon, perhaps from a soap opera: strong, resolute, yet understanding.

  On the floor Janet lived up to Hallstrom’s prediction and became fully conscious and, shortly thereafter, vocal. “Stop that immediately, Tyler!” she ordered even as she was struggling to her feet. Hallstrom immediately withdrew his clamping arms from Pierce’s waist.

  Rubbing the jaw where she had taken the blow, Janet took charge of the situation. “Tyler, you go sit down on the bed.” Hallstrom proceeded hastily to do so, looking quite as gangly, balding, and harmless as he had at table. She turned to Pierce.

  “Are you okay, Ellery?”

  He was badly shaken up, though not physically damaged. “I am not sure.” He glared at Hallstrom, who seemed to be smiling. “He talked about killing me—and also you! For God’s sake, Janet.”

  “I know, it’s over the line,” she said. “Crises happen. You’ll find out, but right now you’re new to the situation.”

  At that moment Cliff and Ray dashed in together, Cliff asking, “What’s going on here, people?”

  To which Ray added, “Is anyone hurt? Tyler?”

  “I’m fine,” said he. “Never been better.”

  “Phyllis?”

  She displayed a sweet smile. “Kiss my ass.”

  Unfazed, Ray told Cliff, “It’s nice that nobody got hurt.”

  Pierce addressed his guests. “I apologize. She’s having some problems. If you’ll all adjourn to the living room, I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Probably just a faulty relay,” Janet told him. “I’ve gone through that many times with Tyler. At first I used to panic, until I found that even in a malfunction I always have the upper hand. He talks of killing me, but it’s necessarily just talk. He’s incapable of doing anything I haven’t ordered him to do.”

  Cliff wore a radiant grin for Pierce’s benefit. “You’re new at the game, Ellery. Ray and I have been together for four years now, and he still can be a troublemaker, but Janet’s right: What can he do except what I tell him?”

  Pierce stared at Phyllis, who stood at an angle from him that was exaggerated in the mirror above the dresser, so that in the glass she was apparently looking in the wrong direction, but he addressed Cliff and Janet. “You’re saying that Ray and Hallstrom are animatronic figures too?”

  While Cliff nodded sympathetically, Janet answered. “I could tell you didn’t know.”

  “Whereas both of you knew immediately with Phyllis.”

  “You’ll be like that too after a while,” said Cliff.

  “Oh, sure, Ellery,” Janet said. “It’s like riding a bike. You are able to do it all of a sudden.”

  “I made her,” Pierce cried. “I built her from scratch. That’s my profession, but it took years. Where’d you get yours?” His swiveling stare embraced them both.

  Janet responded first. “I bought Tyler on eBay some time ago.”

  Cliff produced a bubbling chuckle. “Ray belonged to my former partner. We shared him for a while before Terry decided I preferred Ray to him and walked out.” He smirked. “He was absolutely right! Ray doesn’t need constant reassurance. Ray doesn’t have feelings that can be hurt. Ray doesn’t have to work out to keep in shape.”

  Ray showed no reaction to these comments.

  “My first husband,” said Janet, “was a loser at everything he tried, but he insisted on participating all the same, entering the competition. The result was he lost everything he had and everything I had. If he could only have accepted his lot in life! But then he would have been Tyler.”

  “Just a moment,” said Pierce. “It was that nonhuman paragon of yours who wanted to murder me.”

  She shrugged. “How often has your computer crashed, your car refused to start, the washer/dryer gone out of order? Now and again a giant construction crane topples over, a nuclear submarine self-destructs.”

  “Those are accidents, usually because of human error, never involving intention, volition, or malice.”

  Janet shook her head. “How can we say that? Who knows what goe
s on in the circuits of a machine? I’ve been observing Tyler at close hand for three years now, and I’ll admit I probably don’t really know him yet. Maybe I never will.” She tossed her hair. “Let’s see what kind of father he is.”

  “Oh,” Cliff cried, “you’re pregnant? Congratulations!”

  Janet simpered. “We’re trying, with a sperm donor. But Tyler does the rest.” She blushed. “I never knew what lovemaking was until I got Tyler. Of course he never loses energy.”

  Cliff cleared his throat in a conspicuously discreet fashion. “Modesty forbids my boasting about Ray, but—” He gleefully threw up his hands.

  “Well, all right,” Pierce said to Janet. “You can control Tyler when you’re with him. But surely you can’t send him out by himself?”

  “We go to work together, at our own business: Hallstrom Investment Counseling.”

  “Ray’s home all day. He’s no problem,” said Cliff. “I check in by phone or e-mail from time to time, but that’s only because I get lonely for someone who amuses me. The people I work with are hopeless.”

  “All right, all right,” said Pierce, who had lost his patience. “I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to ask you all to leave.”

  “Please don’t be angry with me, Ellery,” said Janet, her lips sagging woefully. “Nothing actually happened.”

  Cliff complained, “Ray and I are hardly at fault.”

  Pierce felt ruthless. “Just get out, all of you, and take your damn robots with you.”

  Cliff and Ray hastily departed. Janet, however, lingered and, coming closer to Pierce, said gently, “We oughtn’t be at odds, living so close. Maybe we should get to know each other, just you and I, two people.” Her gesture took in both Phyllis, standing silently in the same position as earlier, and Hallstrom, who sat on the edge of the bed, apparently studying the floor. “The convenient thing about them is they couldn’t care less.”

  Pierce had no personal interest in her. He was obsessed with the recent threat on his life. “Why,” he asked, “did he want to kill me?”

  “I’m not saying they don’t have any emotions.” Janet took his hand. “But what good would they be if they were totally blank?”

  Keeping an eye on Hallstrom as he did so, Pierce freed himself. “There’s something wrong with you. Please leave.”

  She gave him what was probably intended to be a beseeching look, but did as told, Hallstrom striding blithely ahead of her.

  When they were alone, Pierce again asked Phyllis how she was feeling.

  “I’m okay now, Ellery.”

  “You did a fine job tonight. It wasn’t your fault that it ended as it did. Please don’t take offense if I have to overhaul you.”

  “I couldn’t. I’m not a person.”

  “Anybody could stumble and take a spill. I’ve done it myself.”

  “Yes.”

  “The fall probably jarred your systems, hence the strange things you did and said.”

  She smiled with her lustrous eyes and lush mouth. “I did that on purpose. I wanted them to leave so we could have sex.”

  Pierce frowned. “You tried to punch me.”

  “I was just putting a little spice into our relationship.”

  He winced at the mirror. The matter of his identity was troubling. Insofar as she had any existence beyond the plastics and metals that made up her body, Phyllis was, necessarily, himself. If her soul was other than a version of his, then she was the person and he the animatron. Yet if he was capable of such reflection, an exercise peculiar to human beings, he was not a machine.

  “You’re full of surprises,” he told her. “You’ve proven to be much more complex than I expected. I created you, yet I don’t know what you’ll do next.”

  “I’ll keep you guessing, Ellery.”

  She led him to the bed and, after disrobing him, used the belt, tie, and socks to fasten his wrists and ankles to the bedstead.

  He had tolerated this through a natural curiosity as to how far she would go, and realized he was fixed helplessly supine only after it was too late to do anything about it but complain.

  “I don’t find this sexually stimulating, Phyllis. That you came up with the idea is impressive—if that’s the right word—but I’m uncomfortable. I want to be untied.”

  Phyllis had remained fully clothed. She knee-walked to the end of the bed and stepped off. “Sorry, Ellery. I’ve got you where I want you now. I’m off to a life of new challenges.”

  He grimaced. “That’s more of the foolish crap you picked up from the mass media. You can’t make it on your own. You’re not some Frankenstein creation of organic materials, with a brain that revolts against its maker. You’re an electronic and mechanical personage. You’ll need recharging any minute now. And what if one of your systems goes out of order—in fact I think one or more have already done so, or you wouldn’t be acting like this.”

  She extended a lower lip in a never-before-seen pout. “That’s your problem, Ellery.”

  Struggling in vain against his bonds, which unfortunately had been fashioned by Phyllis, who did everything to perfection, Pierce cried, “Where will you go? What will you do?”

  She paused with a three-quarter turn in the doorway. “I thought I’d have a try at show business.”

  “Give me a break!”

  She took him literally. “I’ll stop off downstairs and tell the super to come up with his passkey and free you.”

  “Wait a minute, Phyl! I know a lot of movie people. I could put in a word for you.”

  She spoke seemingly in regret more than reproach. “No, Ellery. I simply couldn’t trust you. You constructed me. You’d know countless ways to put me out of commission.”

  “Tell me, Phyllis. Where did I go wrong? Because I’m going to build another woman, I assure you.”

  “You left me alone all day. I had to fend for myself.”

  Pierce could not help admiring what he had made, and he had a change of heart. She had a lot of spunk. “You might find reality different from TV and the internet,” he told her paternally. “But remember, you’ll always be welcome to come back here, and you can call me at any time you need help. Meanwhile, get the wallet from my jacket pocket. Take the cash and one of the credit cards.”

  But Phyllis rejected all assistance. “I have to do it on my own, Ellery. That’s the point.” Without an expression of goodbye, which would reflect a sentiment of which she was incapable, she took leave of her creator.

  A feeling of pride overcame any resentment Pierce might have known. He could not reasonably predict how she would fare in the world. She had great strengths: an ability to learn almost instantaneously, from vicarious as well as personal experience; an immunity to irreparable diseases of body and spirit; a lack of spite and other corrosive emotions. Whether they would compensate for the obvious incapacities of a creature who was not what she seemed remained to be proven.

  Meanwhile he would begin the construction of Phyllis II. He expected the work to go more quickly this time, now that he was a veteran in the basic phases of the process. The trick would be in the fine-tuning.

  3

  Pierce began an affair with his neighbor Janet Hallstrom on the day after Phyllis’s declaration of independence, which could be seen as his triumph, not only technological but also moral, for he had not opposed her departure. He had created her, but he did not pretend to own her. He qualified as one of the better conceptions of God, in believing which of himself he was being mostly ironic and not threatening the tenets, or lack thereof, of his basic agnosticism.

  Janet had applied to Pierce for emotional refuge. After several years of perfection—her characterization of their marriage had not been knowingly false—her animatronic husband had turned brutal.

  “You really owe me one,” she had come to Pierce’s door to insist. “What changed Tyler was meeting that bitch of yours. He hasn’t been able to get over the idea that a woman can be manmade, that there are females of his kind.”

  “On
ly one so far,” Pierce pointed out. He peeped apprehensively down the hall to the Hallstrom door, which remained closed. “I doubt I could subdue him. Can you get me a schematic of his systems? We might have to call the police. Has he hurt you?”

  “Only in the feelings,” said Janet, “which may seem ridiculous, but when you’ve gone so long relying on him to act like a human in the good ways but not the bad, and then he shows he’s no better than a person of flesh and blood, it destroys something inside.” She touched her ample bosom with a thumb.

  “Only if you let it be so,” said Pierce, emitting one of those platitudes made for such use. It was to avoid involvement with human females that he had created Phyllis, whom suddenly he missed awfully as he had not done until now. It was easy to plan for a Phyllis II, but producing the first model had taken years. Even employing techniques that had been refined through experience and materials greatly improved since the time when he started out, he could not quickly build a new companion.

  Janet had fixed him with a penetrating stare from under her thick eyebrows. She was, say, fifteen pounds overweight, and her features were not as precisely shaped as Pierce would have made them had she been a creature of his construction. Her eyes were a bit deliquescent, though that might have been due to her emotional state. One feature that Phyllis and any successor made by Pierce would never have was tear ducts. He believed it likely that women could have legitimate reasons for weeping, but that they actually wept only for effect, having seen it happen too often with his wives. Furthermore, though they might say they liked males who could cry, they were lying. Just try it, and you would hear, “Be a man!”

  “Let me fix you a drink,” he told Janet.

  “I’ll get the ice.” She beat him to the kitchenette, where she promptly found two glasses and a tray, though more appropriate equipment sat on the little bar she had passed en route and now repaired to.

  “No,” Pierce said, waving. “No Scotch for me. I’ll have a gimlet.”

  “Oops, too late.” She smiled and asked hypocritically, “Do I have to pour it back?”