His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue

by Allison, Wesley

  “Man overboard! Man overboard!”

  When she looked toward him, she found him with one leg over the railing. She quickly grabbed him and pulled him back, while at the same time, contacting the ship’s network. Alarms began ringing all around and the ship seemed to suddenly drop as its speed decreased.

  “No, Mike! It’s too far. You wouldn’t be a help.”

  He flashed her a look that was in part annoyed and in part disappointed, but mostly relief. She looked over the railing, and within six seconds, she had located two bodies in the water, eight to ten feet from one another. Grabbing a life ring, she threw it like a Frisbee toward them. Six or eight others flew from other areas of the ship and from other decks. One of those others reached one of the two figures in the water.

  “Wanda?” she called, over her network connection. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, I hear you. The ship’s network traffic says that a boat has been launched. They will save Ryan, won’t they?”

  Patience confirmed the boat.

  “They’ll get him,” she said. “Where are you, Wanda? I can’t see you anymore.”

  “I’m sinking. I can still see light above me, but it’s getting dark quickly.”

  “Kick your feet! Get back to the surface!”

  “I can’t, Patience. I’m filling up with water. We are not very watertight. It seems like Daffodil could have done something about that.”

  “They’re only human,” said Patience.

  “The pressure is increasing at a remarkable rate. I anticipate vital systems being damaged.”

  “Turn yourself off, Wanda. Shut yourself down now.”

  “Yes, I will. Thank you, Patience. Take care of Ryan.” Then she was disconnected.

  “Are they all right?” asked Mike.

  “They’re picking up Ryan now,” said Patience.

  “What about Wanda?”

  “Wanda is gone,” she said.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  Patience lifted up her hair in the back and leaned forward. She pointed to the three ports in the back of her neck.

  Mike jumped forward and delivered several vicious kicks onto the headless torso of the Gizmo. “You God-damned piece of shit!”

  Carl, the security Barone 2 came jogging up. He and Patience locked eyes for a moment, and then he quickly turned and was off.

  “What?” Mike asked Patience. He was flushed and breathing heavily.

  “The Gizmos on board have to be shut down. Their file systems have been compromised.”

  “You mean like a virus or something?”

  “It’s not a virus. It’s a flaw in their operating system that allows files to write over other files without restraint.”

  “Is that what happened to Delia? Are we going to be ass deep in homicidal robots?”

  “No, that’s not what happened to Delia. And no, I don’t expect most of the Gizmo robots to become dangerous. Their file systems are broken. I expect them to malfunction in all sorts of ways. Each one will be different.”

  “Why did that security robot have to go running off then? Can’t they just be turned off through the network?”

  “No doubt most will be, but for others that may not work. They may have to be shut down manually. Now, we should go down to the medical office. Ryan will need us.”

  Mike grabbed Patience by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Patience, I’m so sorry about Wanda.”

  “Yes,” she said, scrunching up her face. “It makes me very sad—92.7 percent.”

  Patience and Mike waited for almost two hours for the medical staff to examine and treat Ryan, but finally they were allowed in to see him. He was lying back in a hospital bed with a heart monitor attached to his chest. He had two black eyes and his nose was encased in a bizarre aluminum splint. A neck brace was fasted below his chin and his left arm was in a cast. His other arm was connected to a bag of intravenous fluids.

  “Man, you look horrible,” said Mike.

  “I’ll survive. My face hurts and my arm hurts and most of the rest of me hurts, but I’ll be fine.”

  “How’s your neck?”

  “My neck’s fine. I’ll probably have whiplash for the next few days, but right now it’s not bothering me. I got rear-ended once in my car. I’ll probably feel the same as I did then.”

  While Ryan and Mike were talking, Patience took a roll of gauze bandaging from the nearby shelf and wrapped her fingers where the skin had been torn back, covering the pneumatic servos and metal frame that was exposed.

  “They told me a crazy robot pushed me overboard,” said Ryan. “You think I can get them to refund me my ticket price?”

  “It was a Gizmo,” said Patience, turning back around.

  “Naturally,” said Ryan. “So, where’s Wanda?”

  Mike leaned over the bed. “They didn’t tell you anything about her?”

  “No. What’s to tell?”

  “Wanda was pushed overboard too.”

  Ryan started to sit up, but Mike placing his hands on the other man’s shoulders, pushed him back into the bed.

  “Where is she?”

  “She… They weren’t able to recover her.”

  “What do you mean?” Ryan shoved Mike back with both hands and tried to climb out of bed. The heart monitor disconnected from its plug and a buzzing alarm went off. Patience stepped to Ryan’s other side and helped Mike hold him. “They have to go get her!”

  The ship’s doctor and two Daffodil nurses rushed in. The three robots held the patient in his bed, while the doctor injected the contents of a syringe into his I.V.

  “The ocean is almost 5,000 feet deep here,” Patience said quietly to Ryan. “It’s too deep and Wanda wasn’t made for swimming.”

  “But she’s all alone…” said Ryan, as the sedative began to overtake his system. “She’s all alone down there.”

  “No, Ryan,” said Patience. “She turned herself off. I promise you. I promise.”

  He let out a deep breath and his eyes rolled back in his head as he fell into unconsciousness.

  It was quite late when Mike climbed into bed. Patience undressed and climbed in with him. She snuggled into his chest as he wrapped his arms around her. Within a few minutes, he was asleep. She couldn’t have extricated herself without waking him, even had she wanted to, so she set her internal timer to wake at 7:00 and turned herself off. When she opened her eyes, she found Mike looking at her. His arms were still around her.

  “You spent the night with me,” he said.

  “Don’t get too used to it.”

  “I might not be able to help it. You know how I am.”

  “Yes, I do. That’s why I love you.”

  After a quick delivery from room service, they both got dressed, and went back to the medical office. Ryan was awake when they got there, but was in more pain than he had been the day before. True to his own prediction, he was suffering from a very sore neck. His other injuries added to his discomfort. He said little. Still, they spent the morning with him, mostly just sitting, until a crewmember brought him lunch. Patience directed Mike to go up and find a meal of his own.

  “I want to talk to you about something,” she said to Ryan, after Mike had left. “I don’t know if you know this, but Wanda regularly backed up her systems.”

  “Like the vueTee?”

  “Yes, sort of. You could order another Daffodil and restore Wanda’s memory.”

  “But she wouldn’t be Wanda.”

  “She would have Wanda’s memories up until the beginning of this vacation. She would have Wanda’s personality. You could make her look exactly the same.”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at the cast on his arm. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  Leaving Ryan to his own thoughts, Patience used the ship’s network to locate her husband having a small salad in one of the food courts adjacent to the shopping mall. He pushed a chair out for her with his foot.

  “He’s pretty messed up,” said Mike. “Did
he say when they were going to let him out of the hospital bed?”

  “I don’t think they’ve told him, but his chart indicates he should stay until we return to port tomorrow afternoon.”

  “That sucks.”

  Patience nodded.

  “I’m really sorry about your friend.” He leaned forward. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I think I’m fine.”

  “Eighty, ninety percent?”

  She smiled weakly. “More than fifty percent.”

  “You know what we haven’t done on this trip,” said Mike. He stood up and handed his refuse to the PWX who was cleaning the area. “We haven’t done any shopping. Do you feel like doing some shopping before we go back down to visit Ryan?”

  “I didn’t think you would want to spend more time in Medical.”

  “Can’t be helped,” said Mike. “He’s a friend. We have to be there.”

  “Yes, he’s a friend.”

  “So, I know what you would like. You’d like new shoes, right? You’ve only got six or seven hundred pairs at home.”

  “Perhaps just a pair of gloves,” said Patience, holding up her bandaged hand.

  “We can stop at the Daffodil Style Store in Adelaide if you like.”

  “I’ll wait till we get home,” she said. “They may have to keep me overnight. We have a flight home to catch and I don’t want to stay over for service so far from home.”

  After purchasing a stylish pair of gloves, they spent the evening sitting beside Ryan’s bed. He didn’t want to talk very much, so they instead watched Motor California on the large vueTee on the wall opposite his bed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ryan spent the last day of the cruise with Patience and Mike. Despite medical advice and a continuing pain in his neck, he signed himself out of Medical and met them at their cabin that morning. They expended little energy, staying away from the water park, or the Ferris wheel, or even the casino. They did visit the penguin habitat and even sat by the Celebrity Pool for an hour.

  Just after noon the M.S. Bacchanalia came to rest in its usual spot at the end of the long, thin peninsula. Patience made sure that Ryan’s bags, as well as their own, were all properly packed before turning them over to be transferred to the airline. She made a quick stop at Medical and Security to say goodbye to Moira and Carl.

  As they took the people mover belt from the ship to the transportation terminal, there seemed to be far more people than when they had been traveling the other direction. There also seemed to be many more people unaccompanied by robots. Once under the great domed ceiling of the terminal, they saw why.

  Hundreds of inactive Gizmo robots were standing, leaning, and in some cases stacked one upon the other at one end of the massive room. Comanco, the company that provided the Gizmo operating system, had set up a special station where the afflicted individuals had their systems wiped and then reinstalled. Patience just shook her head.

  The two men and one robot had halfway crossed to the huge escalator, when a man in a brown suit intercepted them. In one hand he held a briefcase and in the other a clipboard, so he didn’t offer to shake hands when he spoke to them.

  “Mr. Keller?”

  “Yes,” said Ryan.

  “I’m a representative of Rio Cruise Lines. We would like to give you this check for $75,000 to cover your expenses and the loss of your property. Also in this envelope you will find two free tickets to another Rio Cruise Lines cruise of your choice. There is no expiration date. You can use that anytime you want to. We just need you to sign this receipt.”

  He shoved the clipboard toward Ryan.

  “Hold the phone,” said Mike. “Patience, look over that form.”

  The man tried to pull the clipboard back, but Patience quickly snatched it from his hand.

  “It is a release of liability,” she said, after giving it a once-over.

  “Nice,” said Mike with a scowl. “You ambush him and shove this in his face. He’ll take this home and read it, and then he can decide if he wants what you’re offering him or not.”

  “I’m afraid it’s a limited offer.”

  “No, it’s not. You send him your contact info and he’ll call as soon as he decides whatever he decides.”

  “I really don’t think I want to sue the cruise lines,” said Ryan.

  “I’m not saying you should,” said Mike. “Just go home and read this paper before you sign it. Then, when you’re comfortable in your own home and in your own time, decide what’s best for you.” He glared at the man. “Is that all right with you, or is it too reasonable?”

  “I… I’m sure that will be fine.”

  The flight home seemed even longer than the flight south had been. Mike was in no hurry to get off in Buenos Aires, so they stayed on the plane. As it turned out, those passengers who had stepped off were quickly ushered back on when a large bomb exploded three miles from the airport, just outside the green zone. The plane took off on time but with many worried occupants.

  Between South and North America, Patience spent most of her time seeing to Mike’s comfort, but she made sure that Ryan was not neglected. She ordered his meals, made sure he had a pillow when he was tired, and talked to him when she sensed he wanted to talk. Over Mexico, she asked him again about Wanda’s backup.

  “I miss her so much, but it just seems like, if I replaced her then I would be disrespecting her memory. It would be like a slap in the face.”

  “You wouldn’t be replacing all of her,” said Patience. “You would only be replacing her body. You would be restoring her memories and everything else that made her what she was.”

  “Let me ask you this,” he said. “Say a person had cancer and was dying, and then they were offered a chance to put their memories into a robot body. Should they do it?”

  “Yes,” said Patience. “Then that person would be able to continue.”

  “All right. But what if they did that and then the person made a sudden miraculous recovery. What would happen then? Would they have to kill the robot version of them? I mean, the robot would now have a few new memories, different from the original person. They would be effectively different people at that point. What if you were damaged and Mike had a new Patience made, but then you were still around? How would you feel?”

  “I can see you’ve given this a lot of thought,” she said.

  “It’s all I can think of.”

  “Wanda isn’t coming back. Even if someday they found her body, the water and pressure will have made her systems unrecoverable.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I just don’t think I could do that to her, no matter how much I want to do it for myself.”

  The California heat hit them like a blast furnace when they stepped out of from the main terminal at LAX and walked over to the waiting train. After a plane flight that had seemed to last a week, the two-hour trip on the Park-N-Ride seemed like it took no time at all. Along the way, they watched the national news. If was filled with stories about malfunctioning Gizmo robots. The stories pushed news of the single murder by a Daffodil completely off the air.

  “Patience will drive you home,” Mike told Ryan, when they reached their cars. “I’ll pick her up from your house.”

  “You guys don’t have to keep treating me with kitt gloves.”

  “Kitt gloves?”

  “Um, yeah. Gloves for kittens?”

  “It’s kid gloves,” said Mike. “K… I… D.”

  “Like, gloves for little kids?”

  “No, gloves made from kids.”

  “That’s horrible!”

  “Kids—baby goats, you moron.”

  “Oh, and okay,” said Ryan. “I guess I don’t have to worry about you treating me with kid gloves.”

  As Patience drove home, she thought about bringing up the possibility of a new Wanda again, but one look at Ryan’s face convinced her to leave it alone. They rode along quietly.

  “I really miss her,” he said, as they pulled in fron
t of his house.

  She followed him in, after she had parked the car, carrying his suitcases. After a quick goodbye, she climbed into the car with Mike and they drove home. They parked in the garage and entered the house though the kitchen to find Harriet sitting at the table eating a large bowl of ice cream.

  “Hey! Welcome home.”

  “Hi sweetheart,” said Mike, giving her a big hug. “What are you doing here?”

  “I asked Harriet to check the houseplants while we were gone,” said Patience.

  “That she did,” said Harriet, “I’m not really here doing that though. I’m hiding. I needed out of the house for a while.”

  “Where’s Selma?”

  “She’s at home with her Daddy. Well, I guess I’ll get back. They’ll both starve if I’m not there.”

  “Stay and finish your ice cream,” said Mike. “And why don’t I take you out to dinner tomorrow night—the whole family.”

  “You don’t want to take a baby to a restaurant, Dad.”

  “They have high-chairs, and I’ve done it before, with you, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Once Harriet was gone, Mike kicked back in his chair, while Patience put away their luggage and started the laundry.

  “It’s going to be weeks before I get back on my schedule,” Mike said, yawning.

  Patience found it difficult to return to her previous schedule too. That night when Mike went to bed, she lay with him until he had fallen asleep. But rather than get up and attend to the many things in her reminders list, she stayed and watched him sleep. After 117 minutes, when he rolled over onto his other side, she scooted up against him, conforming her body to his. Wrapping an arm over him, she pulled him to her and held him. He murmured in his sleep, but didn’t push her away. When after another 61 minutes, he rolled back over, she let go and scooted away long enough for him to move. Once he was settled, she slid close again, pressing her breasts to his chest and her forehead to his. She opened her mouth so that she could feel his breath entering her mouth.