“Why? What’s a traditional Argentinean breakfast?”
“Coffee with milk, a shot of seltzer water, and a croissant.”
“A steak croissant? With steak in it? And cheese?”
“No, just plain.”
“It’s Italy all over again,” said Mike, shaking his head sadly. “Let’s go to McDonald’s.”
After a couple of McOmelets and yogurt sticks, the two men and their two mechanical women reboarded the plane. Their same seats were reserved, so they sat for a few quiet moments before the rest of the passengers entered.
As the aircraft taxied toward the runway, the Daffodil stewardess gave the exact same safety speech that she had when they left Los Angeles. She varied not one single inflection or gesture. Patience frowned for a fraction of a second. Mike just happened to be looking at her at the time.
“What’s the matter?”
“She did that presentation perfectly.”
“Isn’t that, ‘to be expected’?” He made air quotes.
“I think it would be better if she varied it slightly, or even made one small error.”
“What a very unrobotlike thing to say,” laughed Mike. “Maybe I’m rubbing off on you.”
“You rub off on me every single day, both literally and figuratively.”
“Literally?”
“Human skin being what it is,” said Patience.
The plane took off and finally reached cruising altitude. Mike took his face away from the window and turned back to his texTee.
“How long now?” he asked Patience.
“About eleven hours until we land in Adelaide.”
“Isn’t there an Adelaide in Australia too?” asked Ryan from across the aisle.
“Yes.”
“It seems like people would get confused. They should have chosen a unique name.”
“There is also one in Canada, one in South Africa, and one in North Dakota,” said Patience. “Human beings can be repetitious.”
“What about Paris?” wondered Wanda. “Besides the Paris in France, there are cities by that name in Canada, Denmark, Arkansas, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Ohio, South Dakota, and three of them in Wisconsin.”
“But we’re not going to Paris,” said Mike. “Get your robot under control, Ryan.”
“Don’t mind him,” said Patience. “He’s just upset about breakfast.”
“Seltzer water,” said Mike through gritted teeth. “What the hell is that about? Why would you need to burp when all you’ve eaten is a piece of croissant?”
Mike read a while and played a few games on his texTee. He even watched an animated movie about a floating castle. But Patience could see that he was growing more and more restless being cooped up in the aircraft’s cabin. When he made his third trip to the restroom, she checked the time and found that they still had almost an hour until lunch.
Just as Mike reached the restroom door, Patience pressed her hand into the small of his back. He paused, but she reached around and opened the door, guiding him inside and then squeezing into the tiny room beyond with him.
“What’s this?” he asked with a knowing smile.
“It’s time to become a member of the mile high club,” she said.
“I’m a member in good standing since 2008.”
“I meant me.”
“I honestly don’t know if I can,” he said, looking around, “though you can obviously feel that I want to.”
“Don’t worry,” said Patience. “It will be perfect.”
Turning her husband around, she lowered his pants and underwear. Then turning her body, she leaned over the tiny sink, pressing her face to the glass. Holding herself up with her hands on the counter, she stretched her legs wide, pressing her right foot onto the door and the left onto the wall above the toilet. It was a position that no human, with the possible exception of an Olympic gymnast could have held for long.
“Give it to me,” she said.
“Naughty girl,” said Mike, reaching under her dress and finding no panties.
He fumbled with his erection for a moment—he was used to her guiding it in for him, but soon Patience felt him inside her. Lowering herself slightly and tilting her pelvis back a little more; he was soon sawing in and out. Grabbing hold of her hips, he pounded against her ass as he kissed the back of her neck. In a little less than a minute though, he began to slow down. From this and from the slight change in his angle of thrust, Patience deduced that Mike’s injured knee was beginning to trouble him.
“Fuck me,” she whispered. “Fuck me hard.”
Carefully contracting her mechanical muscles with each inward thrust, Patience reinflamed his lust and drove him toward his orgasm. Bucking his hips several more times, she felt him shoot into her. He draped an arm over her shoulder and bit her on the ear.
“That was good.”
There was a polite knock at the door.
“I think we’ve been found out,” said Patience. “Can you reach your pants?”
“I don’t think so.”
Pushing them both back until he was against the restroom wall, Patience put her feet down on the floor and felt him slip out of her as she stood up. Turning around, she used a ballerina’s plié to reach Mike’s clothes and pull them back up, refastening his pants around his waist.
“There you go. You go out first.”
“All right. Why don’t you leave your underwear off?”
“You are very naughty,” she said.
He kissed her deeply. “See you back at the seats.”
As soon as he was gone, Patience washed herself. She pulled her tiny underwear from inside her bra, where she had tucked it, and carried it out of the restroom with her. As she made her way back to her seat, the flight attendant gave her a knowing look along with the digital packet exchange. Patience dropped the panties in Mike’s lap as she returned to her seat.
“I could use one of those hot towels now,” Mike said, stuffing the panties into his pocket.
“Hot towel?” asked the stewardess, suddenly in the aisle next to their seats.
“It’s like I never left home,” he said.
A lunch of sandwiches and potato chips was served and immediately afterwards both Mike and Ryan fell back to sleep.
“Their biological clocks are off,” observed Patience.
“Accessing ‘biological clock’,” said Wanda, tilting her head. “Circadian rhythms—what an odd concept. References… further reading… I believe the term ‘jet lag’ may be more appropriate in this case.”
“Perhaps you are right.”
“May I ask you a question?” asked Wanda.
Patience nodded.
“Were you engaged in sexual congress in the aircraft lavatory?”
“Yes, we were having sex. You should try it with Ryan when he wakes up.”
“I don’t know if Ryan would like that.”
“You should try it and see, but if you prefer, you could simply put a blanket over his lap and fellate him right where he is.”
“Ryan says he doesn’t like oral sex.”
“I can’t believe that is true,” said Patience. “Mike says there are two kinds of men: men who enjoy blow jobs and liars.”
“Mike could be wrong,” said Wanda.
“Mike can be wrong. In fact, he is wrong about a great many things. I don’t believe this is one of them.”
Ryan woke from his nap an hour later and immediately got up, heading forward to the restroom. Patience urged Wanda once again to follow him, which she did. She returned 14.87 minutes later, passing her friend an information packet that included a video. Patience decided that she wouldn’t watch it. It was enough to know that the redhead Daffodil had managed to complete the assignment.
Mike slept 4.23 hours, and his robot wife had decided that she would wake him at the 270-minute mark. But he opened his eyes and sighed. She leaned over and kissed him on the lips.
“That was an unusually long nap, Mike.”
“I guess I needed it.”
“It is better to sleep than to sit around being bored.”
“Speaking of… are we there yet?”
“A little less than three hours left.”
“Christ,” growled Mike. “Why did I ever let you talk me into this trip.”
“Calm yourself, Mike. They will serve dinner in a little while. In the meantime, I have ordered a movie for you that you can watch for the rest of the flight. It’s Watchmen, the ultimate-anniversary-ultimate cut. You can watch it here and then finish it tonight when we get to our staterooms.
“All right,” said Mike.
He ended up watching about half of the movie on the plane, viewing all the way through his meal of halibut and potatoes, but went back to his book afterwards. Not long after though the aircraft began its approach to Adelaide, Antarctica and Mike, as well as the others, began gathering things together for arrival at their destination.
The local time was 9:36 as they walked through the passageway from the aircraft, and a glance out of one of the many windows showed a dark nighttime sky. The transportation terminal was huge. Small tram busses picked up travelers here and there and zoomed them down the wide, carpeted hallways. And robots were everywhere—carrying luggage, pushing carts, doing maintenance, and guiding wayward humans.
“These are all Daffodils, aren’t they?” asked Mike. “I don’t see a Gizmo anywhere.”
“The terminal workers are all Daffodils—PWX model 20-010s for the most part,” confirmed Patience. “I see a few 20-008s. Of course among the passengers I see Daffodils, Gizmos and a few Brauns.”
“Which way to pick up our bags?” asked Ryan.
“They’ll be transferred directly to the ship,” said Patience.
They hopped on one of the tram busses for the ride from the aircraft gates to the port. It was a trip of seven miles, and they never left the interior of the building. Lining the way on either side were offices, restaurants, and dozens and dozens of duty free shops offering visitors anything that they might have forgotten to bring with them, from luggage to electronics. There was even a Daffodil Style Store.
At last they looked down into the huge glass half-dome that formed the western end of the enormous building. After climbing off the tram, they stepped onto a great escalator, which carried them down to the vast open area. Conveyor belts were moving luggage from east to west along either wall. Hundreds of people in the center of the room were being organized into groups by dozens of uniformed humans, assisted by scores of similarly uniformed robots. As they reached ground level, Mike faltered, unsure which way to go, but Patience took his elbow and pointed. A three by three foot placard read “Rio Daffodil & Me.”
The four of them joined the group with about sixty other human beings, each with his accompanying Daffodil.
“Are we early?” wondered Ryan. “This isn’t a very big group.”
“The arrivals are staggered, sir” said a nearby Daffodil in a white cruise uniform. “We have about 280 passengers, both human and robot, arriving each hour.”
“For how long?” wondered Ryan.
“Most of the day. Our full complement is 10,080 passengers.”
They waited only a few more minutes and then were herded toward a large door leading outside. Here was a great people-mover belt, twenty-five feet wide, that visitors stepped onto allowing themselves to be carried away from the terminal building. Safety rails with moving handholds lined the sides, but the belt was moving so slowly that nobody needed them.
“When are they going to check our papers?” asked Ryan.
“Wanda and I have already transmitted all the relevant information,” said Patience.
Outside the wind was whipping up a bit. Quite a few stars were visible in the night sky, despite the wash of light from the nearby city and a few fast moving clouds. It had been a balmy 99 degrees when they had left Springdale the morning before. Here, it was a brisk 68, and it was getting cooler.
“This feels great,” said Mike. “How cold is it going to get, Patience?”
“It should stay above 50 degrees our entire visit, Mike. But in another month, temperatures will begin dropping rapidly. In winter, it is still well below zero, even in the daytime.”
“I could live here.”
They reached the end of the people-mover belt, which had taken them a quarter mile. It was only a dozen steps to the next such belt, this one angled forty-five degrees to the left. Each of the next six successive belts turned to the left a little more and then others continued straight, taking the arrivals out onto a rocky peninsula. The wind whipped up a little more as they stepped onto the last of forty conveyor belts, and they realized that the dark sea was only forty or fifty feet away on either side of them. This belt deposited them on a tarmac right in front of a small, jagged hill.
“Right this way, folks,” said a Daffodil, standing in front of them. She waved her hand toward a semi-circular portal cut into the little mountain.
In the gloomy darkness, the portal looked like nothing so much as a great mouth, but once they had braved the entrance, they found a long hallway lit with blue neon lights and lined with illuminated photographs of people enjoying themselves on Rio Cruise Lines. Interspersed among images of rock-climbing, surfing, lying on the beach, dancing in discotheques, eating steak and lobster, and speed boating were video walls of other people doing those exact same things.
Before they knew it, they were out the other side of the passage through the mountain and were staring at the great ship. Gone were the long and tall but relatively narrow pretenders to Titanic’s crown. M.S. Bacchanalia, like her sister ship M.S. Saturnalia, was less a ship than a floating island. Two immense hulls rested side by side, each 1600 feet long and 300 feet wide, connected by a massive frame making them essentially into a giant catamaran. Upon the frame was a resort fit for Vegas, Sanya, or Monte Carlo. Three casinos. Two spas. A park with a river and a pond. A complete water park with seven water slides. Sixteen lounges. A canyon with rock climbing hills and dirt bike trails. Basketball courts, tennis courts, squash courts. An ice-skating rink. A theme park with a roller coaster, ferris wheel, and miniature golf course. Thirty restaurants and cafes. Two showrooms, three movie theaters, a jazz club, a disco, a karaoke bar, and a comedy club. A rifle range, a bungee jump, a fishing pier, and over fifty stores and shops.
“I thought it would be bigger,” said Mike looking up.
“This is the heaviest moving man-made object on Earth,” said Wanda.
“Somebody did a lot of research to come up with that gem of trivia.”
“Right this way, folks,” said a Daffodil in a ship’s uniform. Even Patience couldn’t tell if it was the same one that had directed them on the other side of the mountain, at least until they exchanged packets. This bothered her for some reason.
The gangway was an escalator, much smaller than the one in the terminal, which carried the tourists to a large opening on the port side of the ship’s hull. Inside was a lobby, decked out in red and gold. Passengers looked quickly around and then were off, down one of several long hallways fore or aft. There were no ship’s crewmen here, either human or robotic.
“This way,” said Wanda. “I’ve downloaded our directions.”
Mike glanced at Patience. She nodded. They followed Ryan and Wanda down the long hallway to another large lobby, and then into an elevator.
“Sangria Deck,” Wanda said into the elevator control.
“This looks exactly like where we got on the elevator,” said Mike, as the door opened. “Are you sure it moved?”
“You can see the name of the deck on the wall right there,” said Wanda. “Whenever you go from one floor to another, just look right there and you won’t get lost.”
“Or you could always just stay with me,” said Patience.
They turned left and then left again, and then walking down another long corridor, this one a bit wider than t
he other. Doors lined either side and it was only about thirty feet or so until they arrived at door marked 9185 on the left and 9184 on the right.
“This is our cabin,” said Wanda, opening the former.
Inside was a beautiful room. Though quite small if judged against a typical hotel room, it was far larger than any ship’s cabin that any of them had ever experienced—which in Wanda’s case was none. Beyond the bathroom door on the left, was a queen-sized bed, and beyond that, a desk, dresser, and comfortable lounge chair. Opposite the dresser and chair was a dinette set. And a large vueTee hung on the wall.
“Nice,” said Ryan.
“Ours is better, isn’t it?” Mike asked into Patience’s ear.
“Yes, Mike.”
Turning around, she opened the door to their cabin and led him inside. It was a mirror image of Ryan and Wanda’s with the bathroom and then the queen bed on the right, and the dinette on the left. But beyond the lounge chair was a sliding door out onto a patio with two reclining lounges.
“Yes, this is better,” said Mike.
Chapter Ten
Mike went right to bed, but he didn’t sleep well. Patience put their clothes into the dresser drawers and hung up her dresses and Mike’s suit and slacks. She set up the bathroom as close as possible to the configuration that her husband was used to at home. Periodically she would stand near him as he alternately tossed the blanket from him or pulled it back on. She was unable to tell from his vital signs if he was hot or cold at any particular moment. She was looking at him when, at 5:38AM local time, he suddenly sat up.
“Are you all right Mike?”
He looked at her for a moment. “Yeah. I have to pee.”
Getting out of bed, he made it to the small bathroom in three steps. He was back in two minutes, twelve seconds.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Patience asked as he climbed back into bed.
“I don’t like an unfamiliar bed.”
“It seems like more than that,” she said, but almost immediately he began to snore loudly.
He woke again after three hours and climbed out of bed.
“What time is it?”
His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue Page 9
