Adventures of the Artificial Woman (4 page)

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 goes 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.

P
ierce 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.”

“Only 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?”

“Or have it as a refill.” He asserted himself with a move to the bar and won this encounter as she, carrying her glass, drifted into the living room and hesitated at the couch.

Phyllis had, first time off the mark, mixed a better gimlet than any he had ever tasted. He nevertheless drank this one, and another, and began a third, Janet meanwhile drowning her troubles in multiple Scotches. They both were soon drunk, a condition that Janet, repellently, called “shitfaced.” He found little in her that attracted him, while realizing—despite or perhaps because of the alcohol—that much of what he was not attracted to were human attributes for which Janet could hardly be blamed. You would not catch an animatron wondering what
she
had done that was in any way responsible for an emotional estrangement.

“Should I have been more understanding? They do have feelings, I don't know why, but different from ours, I don't know how.” Janet swallowed some Scotch, going at the tumbler as if she would chew its rim. She sat on the couch, while Pierce was in a chair, though not the closest. After another careful gulp she went on. “What I want to ask you, now I've drunk enough—well, I can't find the person who owned Tyler previously and sold him to me: no response to my e-mails.” She took another swallow and said quickly, “You are an expert. You built Phyllis.”

“Janet, let me speak frankly.” Pierce stared rhetorically at the ceiling. “I know nothing about constructing a male. Oh, there may well be certain similarities, eyes, balance, most internal organs, et cetera, but the basic differences are too major to be reconciled. I'll even go so far as to speculate whether there might be greater differences between the sexes with artificial personages than with real.” He realized, not with displeasure, that he had never before spoken with anybody human on this subject, unless the exchange of remarks at the showdown the night before could be counted.

“Well,” said Janet, not really listening to him, “I've learned my lesson. I—”

“The respective genitals are the least of it, in my opinion. An erectile penis would be relatively easy to make and operate, but the triggering process might be a problem. Throwing a switch would hardly suit a woman.” He waited for her response, then asked, “How is arousal simulated in Hallstrom?”

Janet fluttered her hands. “Please. I don't want to hear that name at the moment.”

Pierce was annoyed. Why then was she here? “But, as I say, the organs are in themselves not the issue.” He took a tongueful of his fourth drink, which now could have been water so far as taste went, his own having been stunned by alcohol, an effect unknown to artificial creatures. “I mean, you can't start with a sexless dummy and then at a certain point install breasts and a vulva and call it female. It has to be a woman from the earliest conception, from the first sketches in what you could call the womb of a computer. That's why Phyllis was such a success, exceeding my conception.”

Janet glared at him. “Oh, listen, Ellery, you can talk all you want about how remarkable a machine can be, but they can let you down quite as much as humans can, and then what are you left with? You've given your heart to a hunk of plastic that doesn't have one.” Apparently she had been looking angry so as to keep from weeping, and it had not worked.

Pierce hated to see tears. “I'll get you some Kleenex.” He rose and hastened to the bedroom, which still smelled of Phyllis—that is, of the perfume he had supplied her, which her own nostrils lacked the capacity to detect, along with any other odor. He had simply forgotten to provide her with a sense of smell. By the hour he was accumulating mental notes for the construction of Phyllis II, but the zest that had inspired and sustained him throughout the making of the first model was hard to reawaken. He had lost the spirit of romance. For example, what occurred to him now was that with sensitized nostrils she could add smoke-detection to her attributes.

“What I need,” Janet said, having stolen in silently to encircle his waist from behind and press against him with her abundance of body, “is love.”

 

The experience was in quite another category than the intimate moments he had had with Phyllis, but it was less repugnant than he had supposed, perhaps even more pleasant than not, for unlike the real women he had known in the past, Janet had been voluntarily generous about his performance. She was actually quite a nice person; a few years too old, perhaps, with a slightly crooked lower front tooth and somewhat leathery skin at the clavicles, and even with a reduction in weight her thighs would be sturdier than the ideal, but then he had played no part in her modeling, and her bright eyes would pass, as would her complexion, the subtleties of which would have been difficult to achieve with synthetic tints. Skin coloring had been a problem with Phyllis, if not as major as, say, an orderly yet feminine stride, then more difficult to resolve, for any conclusion must be subjective. Until she walked properly she would fall down, whereas there was no test by which one hue of Caucasian cheek was more natural than the next.

Furthermore after three months Janet had not displayed any of the negative qualities that Pierce had identified in the other real women with whom he had associated. She was not moody, and above all she was not critical of him. He did not mind her self-possession as a successful businessperson. He was not offended by a slight pushiness, demonstrated in her replacing the pillows on his couch with larger and more vivid ones, and it was she who habitually made the choice of restaurants; he cared little about such matters. She never disparaged anything he said, and she had a deft way of stating an opinion or taste that differed greatly from his but did not seem to if considered superficially. He had never yet seen her in that resentful state he thought of as standard for females, perhaps because he contributed in no way to her upkeep, nor did they live together. Maybe that was the trick: their encounters could still be called dates.

Janet continued to share her apartment and in fact her bed with Tyler Hallstrom, though she assured Pierce she was no longer sexually intimate with her animatronic companion. But she did
own
him or it, not to mention that Tyler was her business partner and had a real knack for investment counseling. She feared losing clients if she disposed of him.

“You've helped me think better of myself,” she told Pierce. “I'm grateful to you.”

He had never heard a woman say that before, and it was very gratifying to him. He determined to program such a sentiment into Phyllis II, which project continued to remain in the note-taking stage despite the need for haste if he was ever to have another artificial woman while he was young enough to make the most of her, but thus far he had been unable to rise above a disabling inhibition. Only several weeks after her departure did he realize he had been in love with Phyllis I.

That feeling grew more profound in the months since he found himself in a condition for which he could use no other term than heartsick, and he despised himself for it. Brilliant as he was, there was obviously something wrong with him if he could be so obsessed with something he had made from scratch yet spinelessly allow it to walk out on him.

He went to bed with Janet every Friday night after a restaurant dinner and a movie either in a theater or on DVD, and then often enough put another, an oldie, on television while they had sex and looked at it intermittently. They were thoroughly comfortable with each other by now, so much so that they rarely conversed.