His Robot Girlfriend (8 page)

Mike spent the remainder of the evening
gathering together everything that they would need for a day at the
beach. Then he watched the news and joined Patience who was waiting
in bed for him. They spent a very enjoyable half hour together
there, and afterwards Mike had just enough awareness to note her
leaving him alone as he dozed off.

In the morning Mike loaded the beach chairs,
umbrellas, and towels into the car, along with the ice chest full
of food and drinks that Patience had prepared before he had gotten
up. They hopped in the car and drove west. Though they were in
California, Springdale was a good three hour drive from the coast.
The time went by quickly though. Mike listened to the radio.
Patience watched him with devotion in her eyes.

After three hours and eight minutes of
driving, Mike reached Oceanside, California. He pulled into a
filling station two blocks away from the beach and topped off the
car’s fuel.

“
Hydrogen?” he asked,
pointing the hose in Patience’s direction.

“
No, thank you.”

He noticed that across the street was a surf
shop. He sent Patience over to rent a boogie board. When she
arrived back, she not only had the boogie board, but a shopping bag
as well.

“
What did you buy?” he
asked.

“
Since I have a new swim
suit, I thought that it was only appropriate that you have one as
well.”

“
Oh shit,” said Mike. “Good
thinking. I didn’t even pack one. I don’t think I even have one
anymore. It’s been so long since I came to the beach. I hope you
remembered that I am a fat, old man.”

“
I don’t believe that you
are fat or old,” said Patience, with a frown. “The average lifespan
in the United States is seventy nine point three years for men, and
you already look healthier after only a few days of exercise and
nutritional eating.”

“
Talk about damning with
faint praise,” grumbled Mike.

They drove the two blocks to the beach, but
the public parking lot was completely full. Mike paid forty five
dollars to park his car for the day in a private lot. Normally, he
would have complained about having to pay so much just to park, but
nothing seemed to bother him anymore. After trucking the ice chest,
chairs, towels, umbrella, and boogie board down to the sand, and
finding a good spot just above the high tide line, the two of them
went to the public changing rooms.

Mike liked the swimsuit that Patience had
picked out for him. It was long, almost to his knees, and was
bright orange, yellow, and red. He thought it was the type of suit
that a young man would wear. It made his head swell a little to
think that Patience thought it was appropriate for him. When he
stepped out of the changing room and saw Patience in her suit, his
mouth fell open. Her suit was without a doubt, the smallest bikini
that he had ever seen. Even on the internet. The little patch of
material in the front could not have been more than an inch wide
and it stuck up only an inch and a half above the joining point of
her legs. The back had no patch of cloth at all. It was just
string. The top could have been custom made for her, in that the
two triangular cups so fit her round ripe breasts that there was
not a jot of material wasted. Wondering if she might be arrested
for indecent exposure, Mike looked around. He was shocked to find
that most of the young women at the beach were wearing suits very
similar. It had been a long time since he had been here.

Though there were plenty of women with small
sexy suits on the beach, Mike noted that almost every eye still
turned to Patience as they walked to the beach chairs. While he
sat, Patience rubbed SPF 210 sun block on all of his exposed
surfaces.

“
I suppose you don’t need
any sun block?” he asked.

“
I’m shielded against much
greater radiation that I am likely to be exposed to here, Mike.”
Patience replied.

“
So you don’t
tan?”

“
No. I will remain always
the shade that you chose when you ordered me.”

For the next several hours, Mike and Patience
hopped through the surf, built a sand castle, knocked it down,
pulled each other along on the boogie board, and had a great time.
Though he was initially concerned about water getting into the
small openings in the back of her neck, Patience showed Mike that
she had protected against such a calamity by covering the area with
a clear plastic patch. By the time Mike thought about food, it was
early afternoon. Patience had packed quite a picnic
lunch--sandwiches, fruit, Jell-o, and diet sodas. After he ate,
they swam, and continued playing in the surf, Mike pointedly
entering the water without waiting for an hour. He refused to be
responsible for propagating an old wives’ tale.

When night eventually fell they strolled
along the beach, listening to the pounding of the waves. They
walked to the opposite end of the stretch of sand, several miles
from where they had parked, and found a seafood restaurant. They
smiled and talked over the candle-lit dinner, though Patience
didn’t eat. Then walked back down the darkened beach, hand in hand,
pausing every so often to look at the moon reflecting off the
waves. When they reached their picnic site, they found they were
all alone on the sand.

Patience leaned over and kissed Mike deeply,
her tongue darting in and out of his mouth. He returned her kisses
and more. She deftly removed the tiny bottom of her swim suit and
pulled him over onto her, as he frantically pulled at the strings
that held up his trunks. Their lovemaking left a sensual imprint in
the sandy beach.

“
Like sea otters,” said
Patience.

“
That was a pretty good
day,” said Mike.

They gathered up their belongings and carried
them back to the car. Loading the things in the back seat, Mike
opened the passenger door for Patience and then climbed in to the
driver’s side.

“
Yes, this certainly was a
pretty good day.”

The next morning Mike woke up late, but
feeling great. He stretched in bed and then looked around. He had
become used to being greeted as he woke with breakfast and that
smiling, perfect face. But Patience wasn’t there. He wasn’t
concerned. She was probably cleaning, rearranging the house, or
buying and selling on eBay. Shaving and then popping into the
shower, Mike shampooed his hair and washed his body, finding quite
a bit of sand here and there. When he had dressed, he walked
downstairs to the family room to find breakfast laid out for him on
the coffee table—toast and orange juice. He sat down and ate while
watching vueTee.

As he ate, he heard several vehicle horns
honking outside. Not paying too much attention, he turned back to
the vueTee. Battlefield Europa was on. Then he heard more honking.
He was not one of those people who liked to get up and go outside
to see what the neighbors were up to. He generally shied away from
going outside the house at all, especially during the summer. The
median temperature for June in Springdale was well over the century
mark. But as the honking continued, Mike got up out of his chair,
brushing off the toast crumbs, and walked through the hallway to
the front door. Opening it, he was hit by the blast of hot air from
outside and he squinted his eyes at the bright sunshine.

Mike had just managed to unsquint his eyes
when another car went zooming by, honking, and he saw the source of
the disturbance. Patience was in the center of the front yard, just
beneath the shade of the large weeping willow tree, on her hands
and knees. She was transferring potted pansies from small cardboard
containers into neatly cut holes that she had made in the rich
black soil of the flower bed. Her shapely ass was pointed toward
the street and she was wearing the same tiny string bikini that she
had worn to the beach.

“
Patience!”

Patience looked up with a smile on her
face.

“
Come in here.”

Jumping to her feet, Patience hopped to the
door. Her arms and legs were stained with dirt. Mike let her in and
closed the door after her.

“
What do you think you’re
doing?”

“
I am planting some
flowers, Mike. Now that the house is clean and orderly, I have
decided to spruce up the yard.”

“
The honking horns weren’t
an indication to you that you might be obstructing traffic? I’m
surprise you didn’t cause an accident.”

“
I was nowhere near the
road,” said Patience, innocently. “The motorists have been honking
warnings to each other, but it had nothing to do with
me.”

“
The drivers were honking
because you had your ha-ha pointed at them. Why are you wearing
your bikini?”

“
I did not want to damage
my clothes. I have ordered some work clothes, but they have not
arrived yet.”

“
Well, go get cleaned up.
We have to go to Walmart.”

That’s just what they did. Cleaned up and
dressed in something Mike considered more appropriate, though still
fetching—a short red dress-- Patience met him by the door. Climbing
into the car, they drove the short distance to the discount
superstore, where they purchased several pairs of shorts and simple
tops for Patience. Mike also had her pick out a large
floppy-brimmed hat. Though he knew that she wouldn’t get sunburned,
it just didn’t seem right for her to be outside all day in the
summer sun without one. Patience took the opportunity to purchase
supplies for upgrading the yard. She bought garden edging, tools,
flowers, fertilizer, and a yardbot. Mike was skeptical about
spending two hundred eighty dollars on the boxy device which
wandered around the yard cleaning the artificial turf that now by
law had replaced all of the lawns in water-starved Springdale, but
Patience made a convincing argument that it would beautify the
outside of the house.

Returning home, Mike sat down in his recliner
again and Patience, now dressed in white shorts and a little
spaghetti-strap top, along with work gloves and her new floppy hat,
returned to the yard. Mike watched the news, but began to feel as
though he should be doing something around the house too. He went
to the hamper, in the utility room just on the other side of the
upstairs bathroom, thinking that maybe he could do some laundry.
But the hamper was empty. He looked in the study to see if anything
needed to be dusted. It didn’t. As a last resort he made his way
into the kitchen to see if the refrigerator needed to be cleaned.
It was not only cleaner but neater than it had ever been. He threw
away an old bottle of steak sauce, even though he was sure it was
still good.

Perhaps there was something he could do
outside. Though he grimaced when he glanced at the digital
thermometer by the door—132 degrees—he opened the door and stepped
outside.

“
Patience!” he shouted when
he saw her.

His robot girlfriend lay prone on the turf,
her arms and legs splayed in distressing angles. She was still half
shaded by the willow tree, but her legs were sticking out into the
direct sun. Rushing over to her, he knelt down and gently rolled
her over. Her once human looking face, now motionless with eyes
open, seemed more like a mannequin than anything that had once had
animas. This effect was only heightened when Mike lifted her up in
his arms to carry her to the front door. She weighed less that a
human being, somewhere around eighty pounds Mike guessed, but
unlike a human being, she didn’t bend and conform to an easily
carried form. Her arms continued to stick out and her legs stayed
stiffly straight. Kicking open the door, he carried her to the
white couch and laid her down. She didn’t move and her eyes stared
lifelessly at the ceiling.

“
Shit, shit,
shit.”

Mike felt her wrist. Her arms were hot from
the sun, but there was no pulse. But of course she would have no
pulse. He tried to see if he could detect anything wrong by looking
into her eyes. He couldn’t. They looked just as they had looked,
but without the slight movement that her eyes, like human eyes, had
shown. Mike thought that they looked like they didn’t have Patience
in them anymore, the way that he suspected a human being’s eyes
would look when that person died, though he had never looked into
the eyes of a dead person. Not even Tiffany’s.

“
Tech support!” shouted
Mike, as the thought hit him like a bolt of lightning.

He grabbed the remote off of the coffee table
and turned on the vueTee. Quickly switching the browser to the
Daffodil site, he saw the familiar large daffodil along the left
side. The four large buttons filled the right side of the
screen—Barone, Amonte, Nonne, and PWX. There didn’t seem to be a
button for tech support. Mike moved his face very close to the
screen. At the very bottom was a small flower symbol. He moved the
curser over the spot and pressed. Immediately a man in a blue
jumpsuit appeared on the screen.

“
Good morning,” he said.
“This is Daffodil Tech Support. For a list of known issues, press
one. For a computer diagnosis of your problem, press two. To be
contacted by a Tech Support representative, press
three.”

Mike started to press three, then changed his
mind and almost pressed two. At the last second, he moved his
finger over the one button and pressed it. The blue clad man on the
screen was replaced by a long list of text. The topmost line said
“sudden crash upon software upgrade”. Mike moved the curser over
this line and pressed.

“
A small service software
update was pushed through the InfiNet 11:38 6.9.32,” said the next
screen. “A small percentage of Amonte models have failed to reboot.
This is a known issue and a patch is currently under development.
Your Amonte may be restarted with the power button located on the
back of the neck.”