“Whatever you think,” she replied.
Mike flipped on the vueTee and began making out his order for signs. He had just finished when Patience handed him his texTee with a call list. He had the names and numbers of 105 individuals—fewer than it had originally seemed because several people had called him more than once, but still many more than he would have expected.
Turning back to the vueTee, Mike had to look up how to arrange a rally or demonstration. Once he did so, he filled out an application for Saturday the twenty-second at John C. Fremont Park. Then he started calling people on the list, informing them of the rally and encouraging them to invite everyone they knew. By the time he was done, it was almost six and he was yawning. His stomach growled, having long since digested the fast-food lunch he had eaten on the drive home.
“Patience,” he called. “I’m hungry. Can you make dinner a few minutes early?”
“Whatever you say, Mike.” Her voice came from the kitchen and he peered around the corner of the archway to see that she was already at the counter preparing a meal.
Sitting back down, he propped his feet up on the coffee table and grabbed his texTee from beside him. He had finished Star Healer on the trip, so he began browsing through the book exchange, flipping through the titles until he came across an Amanda Hocking book that Harriet was bugging him to read. He had already finished the first two chapters when Patience called him to the table.
“Here you go, dear,” she said, setting down two plates.
Mike stared at her for a moment, assessing her mood. Then he looked down at the plates.
“Cheeseburgers?”
Patience had been cooking and serving healthy food to him for so long that he actually couldn’t remember when he had last had a cheeseburger. Now that he thought about it, he was surprised that he didn’t miss them.
“Not just a cheeseburger,” she replied. “It’s a Juicy Lucy. The inside of the burger is filled with a pocket of Havarti cheese and it’s topped with sharp Cheddar and grilled onions.”
“But you always make me eat healthy.”
“One little cheeseburger won’t hurt you; everything in moderation.
He looked at the other plate.
“You made two.”
“One is for me,” she said, then sat down and took a large bite. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you hungry?”
“Yeah, I was.”
“Don’t just stare at me like a dead fish, Mike. Eat your Juicy Lucy.”
Mike took a bite of his burger. It was delicious. But he almost forgot to take a second bite. He watched in fascination as his robot wife ate. There was something extremely erotic about it. Maybe it was because she hardly ever did it. Maybe it was because the burger was gooey and messy and she giggled with her mouth full as she wiped the melty cheese off her chin. Patience finished her last bite and cleaned her face with a napkin just as Mike realized that he was full. He had eaten just a bit more than half of his.
After dinner Mike read a while. He checked in on Patience twice, both times to find her busy at work on her eBay business. After brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed, he looked in to find that she was no longer in their study. A quick search of the house failed to reveal her.
“On,” he called and then watched the vueTee screen come to life. “Where’s my robot?”
An aerial view of the neighborhood, centered on his house, appeared on the screen. A blue pushpin dropped down from the sky to land about in the middle of the backyard. Mike walked through the kitchen, out the back door and onto the deck. Patience was kneeling down in the faux riverbed that ran from the house to the back fence.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m fixing the rocks.”
“What does that even mean? Never mind; I don’t want to know. Why are you doing it now? It’s dark out.”
“I can see just fine, Mike.”
“Well, I’m going to bed.”
“Goodnight.”
Walking back inside and up the stairs to his bedroom, Mike wondered what could be going on with his robot wife. Was she having some kind of glitch in her operating system, or was it a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t as if any one thing that she did was that frightening or even that unusual. It was just that taken as a whole it was bizarre, especially considering that Patience had hardly ever deviated from her regular behavior as long as he had her. Now she wasn’t here to tuck him into bed. She was just plain testy at times. And she was eating a hamburger and feeding him one too. Not that he minded a good burger. As he climbed into bed, the thought that Patience had been switched out with another robot briefly passed through his mind. He discarded it immediately. He hadn’t been away from her in a week. Besides, Patience had a few blemishes now that she hadn’t had when she arrived—normal wear and tear stuff, like the tiny hole on her arm where the cholla bush spines had poked her. It had started at that hotel in Long Beach where the robots didn’t work. He remembered the broken Daffodil sitting in the chair behind the check-in counter. Maybe they had infected her with a virus.
“Or maybe it’s my own fault,” he said aloud, pulling the sheet over him. “Here I was, worried that life was becoming too predictable.”
Just before sleep overcame him, he remembered something else. He remembered Patience eating a jalapeno. That was before Long Beach. That was in Carlsbad. Then he remembered the odd look that the robot clerk had given Patience. Then he was asleep, dreaming about being in college; and there was a test, and he wasn’t ready for it, and he forgot to wear his pants to class.
Startling awake when he thought something was crawling up his leg, it took Mike a minute to realize that it was his wife, kissing her way up his thigh. His response was quick and automatic. Though Patience was a gifted fellatrix, here she made minimal use of this skill. Once he was ready, she crawled up and mounted him, impaling herself on his erection. She rode him like a bronco until he exploded in her, and only afterward did he think that this was one more incident of Patience doing something unusual. She had never awakened him in the middle of the night for sex before.
The next morning Patience was in bed snoring, as was her usual routine. Mike climbed into the shower, thinking about the situation as he soaped himself up. By the time he was out of the shower and drying off, he had decided that he needed to contact Daffodil tech support. He would have to do it somewhere other than the house. Patience was aware of all the local network traffic and he didn’t trust that his texTee was completely secure either, no matter where he was. It would all have to wait though. He had too much to do to get ready for the rally. When he stepped out of the bathroom, Patience was up and gone and the bed was made.
Mike was very busy for the next few days. He spent most of Saturday and a good portion of Sunday buying pine one by twos and cutting them for sign posts, then attaching them to the two hundred signs he had printed. Sunday night, he took his poster design and reworked it into a pamphlet, of which he then ordered two thousand. The next morning he drove almost every street in Springdale to gauge how many signs there were belonging to the opposition. Happy that he counted fewer than one hundred, he was unpleasantly surprised to see a “Yes on Proposition 22” billboard just in front of the Springdale Shopping Center. It was placed in just about the right spot so that the large inflatable mermaid at Starbucks appeared to be reading it.
On his way home, he picked up his pamphlets. He set half of them aside for distributing to the people at the rally, and then went out from house to house, attaching the others to the doorknobs of his neighbors with a rubber band. He started on his street and worked his way outward in a spiral until dinner time. Over the next two days, he continued, starting at the point he had left off the day before, until at last he ran out of papers.
While Mike was engaged in his propaganda program, he paid less attention to Patience than he normally did. She seemed to be alright though. She carried on her household chores, didn’t do anything notably unusual, and seemed to be back to her old, totally dev
oted if not exactly subservient, self.
Though he had finished the day before, Mike told her on Thursday morning that he was still going out to distribute pamphlets. Instead he drove all the way to Pico Mundo. It was the closest town that had a Daffodil Style Store. You could only find them in major malls, and Springdale didn’t have one. Getting out of the car, Mike suddenly realized that he was parked in about the same spot where he had been stabbed by robbers five years earlier. Fortunately, Patience had been there to defend him and then call emergency services.
Inside the mall, on the lowest level and on the end opposite the food court was the Daffodil Style Store. Mike had never been in one before and it was a slightly unnerving experience. Everything was steel and white plastic and larger than life. The counter looked like it had been built by a giant and the room was divided into levels with steps almost too tall to negotiate. Even the chairs were huge, six or seven white thrones. It was like a dream version of Mount Olympus. There were about twenty or twenty-five people silently milling around, looking at the large posters along the walls, and examining wriTees which were conveniently placed at several kiosks, but making no move toward the two clerks behind the counter. The clerk on the right was a pretty young woman and the one on the left was a balding older man with glasses. Mike went straight to the male clerk, but once there, he turned and looked at the crowd behind him.
“Oh,” he said, recognition dawning. “They’re all Daffodils, right?”
“Yes sir,” replied the clerk.
“Are they for sale?”
“No, sir. Most of them were dropped off for repair and are awaiting their owners to return for them. A few of them are awaiting pick up, their owners having shipped them here instead of their homes for one reason or another.”
One of the wandering robots, a girl built about like Patience though with decidedly Scandinavian features, turned and made eye contact with him. It was a blank look, with none of the personality that he had seen in other Daffodils.
“By necessity, they have run through only part of their setup procedure. They must wait until they are in contact with the customer to complete it. They’re chipped so they don’t wander away.”
Mike turned back around and cocked an eyebrow.
“What are you—a Barone?”
“Well spotted, sir. I am a Barone 2j.”
“It wasn’t hard to detect. I’ve only met one human being who talks in paragraphs, but all you Barones seem to. Why don’t you take all these guys in the back and turn them off? Don’t they get in the way of the customers?”
“It’s company policy that they remain on the sales floor.”
“Why?”
“I’m sure there’s a good reason, sir.”
Mike looked once more at the group milling around.
“Probably makes the store look more popular,” he said to himself.
“What can I help you with today?” asked the clerk.
“Yes, my robot is behaving… um, oddly.”
“Which model do you have, sir?”
“She’s an Amonte 1.”
“She is still under warranty. I have to ask this, sir. Was she involved in a motor vehicle accident or similar damaging impact, or has she been exposed to radiation in excess of 40,000 roentgens per hour?”
“Where the hell would that happen? She’d have to be in a nuclear reactor… during a meltdown… eating the plutonium.”
“I have to ask, sir.”
“No. Nothing like that.” Mike crossed his arms and looked the clerk in the eye.
“She is running BioSoft O.S. 1.9.3?”
“No. She didn’t want to download it.”
It happened so quickly that Mike almost didn’t notice, but the clerk’s face suddenly twitched. It was as if a nerve in his cheek, or whatever Daffodil Barone 2js used instead of nerves, had misfired. In a poker player, it would have been called “a tell.”
“Is there something wrong?”
“May I ask your name, sir?”
Mike stared at the Daffodil, waiting for another twitch. “Normal,” he said at last.
“Normal? Is that a first or last name, sir?”
“First name. The last name is Bean. Normal Bean.”
There it was. Another twitch.
“I am sorry but I am unable to access your records, Mr. Bean. Please wait while I summon a client service engineer.”
The robotic clerk didn’t move from his spot, but forty-five seconds later a white door behind him slid open to reveal a man that looked exactly like him. He stepped up next to his twin and reached a hand across the counter. Mike shook it, noticing moist palms.
“Good morning,” the man said in a slightly scratchy and very unrobotic voice. “My name is Garrison. I’m sorry our robot was unable to service your needs. I understand your robot isn’t functioning at the level you desire.”
“Well, sort of.”
“And it didn’t automatically download BioSoft O.S. 1.9.3?”
“Right.”
“Well, that’s probably your problem. Just between you and me, the last couple of BioSoft updates weren’t as stable as they should have been. 1.9.3 is good. It’s pretty lean. And you should see a return to normal robot behavior.”
“Normal robot behavior?”
“Yeah, you know. Not so unfocused.”
“Unfocused,” Mike mused. “Yeah. But she doesn’t want it. I mean, she wouldn’t download it.”
“That’s all part of the problem. It’s just a glitch. 1.9.3 will fix it. She’ll be good as new—better.”
“Well, how do I get her to upgrade?”
“Wait here.”
Mike watched him go back through the sliding white door. While they had been talking, half a dozen customers had come into the store. The male robotic clerk was talking to a woman about Mike’s age. She was quite attractive and had brazenly let her hair go grey, though there were still a few dark brown stripes. Her robot waited behind her, a hulking figure that looked like something out of a Nazi propaganda poster—short blond hair, blue eyes, and a figure a body builder would have had to work all his life to create. The female clerk waited on a young couple. From his angle, Mike couldn’t tell which of them, if either, was a robot.
“Here you are.” The client service engineer was back and he handed Mike a little object that looked very much like a green pushpin. “It’s a u7 plug. You just plug it into the u7 port and it will update the software. It will take less than two seconds.”
Mike looked at him blankly.
“There are three little holes above the reset button on the back of your robot’s neck,” the Daffodil man continued. “Put it in the middle hole.”
“Oh yeah, right. Okay. The middle one.”
“If you have any other problems, please come back and let me know. Garrison.”
“Thanks, Garrison,” said Mike.
Sticking the tiny device in his shirt breast pocket, Mike turned around and started toward the door, almost bumping into the Scandinavian-looking Amonte.
“Sorry.”
She turned her dead-looking eyes toward him.
“I am not for you,” she said.
Chapter Seven
On the drive home from Pico Mundo, Mike reflected on the past five years. He had been lonely and alone for a long time. After his wife Tiffany and youngest child Agatha were killed in a car crash, he had gone into a sort of zombie-like vegetative state—functioning well enough to work, but doing little else. Neither his daughter Harriet, nor his son Lucas could shake him out of it. But somewhere in him was the desire to pull himself out of that survival mode. He wanted to live again. Ordering a Daffodil was like grasping at a straw. He had done it though, and Patience had shown up on his doorstep, curled up in a ball and packed in a remarkably small box.
Patience had changed his life. In some ways, she had saved his life. Having someone there just to take care of him had made a real difference, but it was more than that. He had to take care of her, at least a little
bit at first. He had bought her clothes and dressed her up like a living Barbie doll, and he had taught her a little bit about human behavior. She had quickly gone from observer to participant, taking over all the routine tasks from cleaning the house to taking care of the bills.
It was Lucas who first warned Mike that a robot could be used to steal a person’s life savings. Robots didn’t just collect and send information as directed. Since they saw everything in their world, they had access to far more than anyone imagined. A group of rogue programmers at Daffodil had taken advantage of that fact by using the Amontes to collect information and steal identities. But a few robots refused to participate in the swindling of their humans. The programmers had recalled them to the factory and tried to replace them with look-alikes. This had been the case with Patience. But she, like a few others, had refused to return to her point of origin. That had been a good thing for Mike, because when the imposter robot went crazy and tried to kill him, his then robot girlfriend had saved his life.
Mike had fallen in love with Patience. At first blush it seemed so odd. She was a man-made artifact. On the other hand, plenty of men loved their cars, caressed them, tenderly cared for them, and gave them names. And they were inanimate. Patience wasn’t. She was very animated. Others had similar feelings about their robots and several states beginning with Massachusetts had begun allowing human-robot marriage. Mike had taken advantage of the opportunity and had married his robot wife. Now he just wanted her to be the way she was supposed to be—to be Patience.
Friday was extremely busy. He called everyone on his list, adding everyone from his personal directory, and reminded them to show up for the rally. He bought two hundred bottles of water and filled four ice chests full of ice. They along with his flyers and signs went into the back of his Chevy. As usual, Patience was not only a friendly shoulder on which to lean, but did a lot of the legwork as well. She dug out three folding banquet tables and toted them to the car and double checked everything that Mike had done to see that it was all correct.
His Robot Wife Page 6