Читать книгу How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch - Sarah Archer - Страница 11

On Monday morning, Kelly had difficulty getting out of bed when her alarm jackhammered its way into her consciousness. She had fallen asleep so deeply when she finally arrived home just a few hours earlier, that her brain was stubbornly refusing to follow her body into Awake People Land. She sat up, yawning, propping her arms over her bent knees. Through the fog, the memory of an odd dream resurfaced … she had a watery image of herself guiding a stranger into her car in the parking garage at work … leading him into her living room, pulling up his shirt, and pressing a button on his back. Coffee. She was going to need a soup-bowl-size cup of coffee.

When she trudged into the living room, she started. There, sitting on the couch, was the man. Definitely not a dream. Though he was dreamy, even in his vacant-eyed, lifeless state. Kelly felt a flutter of excitement. She had just built the most advanced creation of her career. It was time to see how he worked. Suddenly she didn’t need the coffee anymore. She located the button on his back and powered him on.

A thousand imperceptible motions started at once, but the effect was that he suddenly looked stunningly, palpably alive. Ethan turned and beamed at her. “Good morning, Kelly,” he said.

“Um, hi,” she replied.

With the morning light wafting through the window, picking up the glint of Ethan’s white teeth, the jewel-like facets of his irises, the copper notes mingled in the waves of his perfectly groomed hair, Kelly became very aware that she was standing there in the same rumpled clothes she’d had on since Saturday morning, with no makeup on and her hair probably doing a fair imitation of a tangled set of earbuds. But she shook herself straighter, reminding herself how illogical it was to be self-conscious. In the “Are intelligent robots beings with rights?” debate, Anita’s stance was a staunch no. They were machines meant to turn a profit, and she was adamant that her engineers think the same way. Kelly had been taught early not to anthropomorphize her creations. You could never maintain the rigor and objectivity of science if you developed an attachment to your work. But while that mind-set was Kelly’s accustomed pattern in the lab, here at home, stripped of the clinical accoutrements of steel and soldering irons, she was finding it took a conscious effort to maintain the same kind of distance. Especially when this creation was already so anthropomorphic.

She strode past Ethan into the kitchen and pulled down the makings of her favorite guilty pleasure breakfast: a box of Cheez-Its and a jar of Nutella. She dunked with vigor. Working herself blind all weekend had really worked up an appetite. “Come here,” she called to Ethan, and he dutifully approached the kitchen. “Want one?”

He accepted the Nutella-topped Cheez-It as if it were the greatest gift anyone had ever given him. Which, technically, it was. “Thank you, Kelly. This is so generous of you.”

“It’s a Cheez-It, not the Hope diamond,” Kelly responded. She watched with some anxiety as he chewed and swallowed, but he simply smiled back at her. She gave herself a little internal high five. This was the first time she had built a comprehensive food and drink consumption pathway, including programming Ethan to dispose of his own masticated food waste in the bathroom, and so far, everything was looking peachy. She crunched a Cheez-It with glee. “There’s nothing on this Earth I love more than Cheez-Its and Nutella,” she mused.

Kelly had an extra bounce in her step as she got ready for work, singing that annoyingly catchy new Taylor Swift song in the shower, flipping her hair back like a mermaid when she was done blow-drying it. When she walked back into the bedroom, she jumped again. There Ethan was, sitting at her computer, his face aglow with a sort of bright-eyed shyness. He leaped from the chair. “I hope you don’t mind me using your computer, Kelly,” he said. “I wanted to give you a little something.”

Peering at the monitor, Kelly saw that he had found his way to her design program. And on the screen was a bouquet of digital flowers, exquisitely drawn in a rainbow of pixels, yellow gladiolus flaring above a shimmer of violets, the colors more real than life. The image rotated slowly, showing fifty or more unique flowers bundled into the arrangement.

“Why did you do this?” Kelly asked, utterly baffled. She hadn’t commanded him to give her flowers, hadn’t programmed in anything of the sort. Immediately she was intrigued to understand this unforeseen behavior of her creation.

“I know that they’re not as nice as real ones,” Ethan responded anxiously. “But since I have no means to buy anything, I determined a drawing to be my best alternative—”

“But why flowers? Why give me anything at all?”

“To make you happy, of course. Do you not like them?”

Kelly stared at the bright image sweeping softly around the screen. She realized that she’d never been given flowers. “I do,” she said after a moment. “Thank you.”