Chapter Six

"What the heck happened?!" Dyckman cried as Rupert carried Galatea through the door of the hotel room.

"Oh, she was hitting on some man-whore Mecha in an alleyway," Rupert said, laying out the parts on the floor.

"Hitting on a Mecha? Golly, what else is she capable of?" Dyckman said. "Did he do that to her?"

"No, these two girls were trying to shake her off him, but she wouldn't budge till they knocked her down.

Rupert got Galatea functional by morning. She limped slightly and she wasn't as chirpy as usual, but she might need a few adjustments.

They checked out late next morning. As they went out, a dark, sprightly figure entered. His green eyes avoiding Galatea's face, he headed for the stairs almost at a run. Galatea, carrying the bags, paused to watch him pass by.

"Galatea, bring the bags out here," Rupert ordered.

"Yes, sir, master, sir," she muttered

Back in his workshop in San Francisco two weeks later, Rupert called to Galatea a third time to bring him the other batch of skin substitute in cold storage. Andrew, who was having his leg enfleshed—for lack of a better word—looked up through the open doorway Rupert had hollered through.

"Is she malfunctioning?" he asked.

Rupert shrugged. "I guess you'd call it that. She went nuts over some good-looking lover Mecha when Dykman and stopped over in Rouge City."

"And did this lover Mecha love her in return?"

"Nope, his kind ain't optimized for the kind of stuff you were built for."

"Why not, if he is a lover?"

Rupert hesitated. "Well, you know what a prostitute is, right?"

"Yes, a prostitute is a person engaged in the industry of selling her or his sexual favors to those seeking them."

"Let's say this Mecha was built specific for just that."

Andrew blinked, something he had never been able to do until he had received his facial skin. "It is good then that you got her away from him."

"Yeah, but try telling her that." He went to the doorway. "GAL-A-TE-A!!!" he bellowed.

Galatea came to the doorway, her head tilted dejectedly. "Yeah?" she asked.

"Get me the skin substitute now!" Rupert ordered.

"Yeah," she mumbled and glumped away.

She came back a minute later, carrying the plastic container containing a shapeless blob of skin substitute. She plunked the container down on the worktable and loped back to her nook.

"Perhaps this event is not so useless or troublesome," Andrew said as Rupert started molding the skin over his artificial veins and nerves."

"How's that?"

"She is not striking at me so much."

Rupert's bushy brows knotted. "Uh, striking at you?"

"Striking at me, the colloquial term for soliciting my attentions."

"Ohh, you mean hitting on you. Y'know, there's something to be said for that. Must be a relief for you."

"You can call it that."

Galatea leaned her elbows on a worktable in the back room and sighed. Rupert was doing a good job on Andrew, but the way he molded that skin substitute, she knew he'd never look as good as Joe.

No robot looked as good as Joe.

She sighed again and slapped the switch on her thigh.

"Are the stars out tonight?"

I don't know if it's cloudy or bright,

'Cause they all disappear from view,

And I only have eyes for you."

Afterword:

I hope this wasn't too lame for everybody, and that it was an effective bridge between two movies with similar themes and similar creatures; and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed dreaming it up and writing it. I meant it all in good fun.

Literary Easter Eggs:

Café Boucher—The name Boucher is a tribute to classic SF writer Anthony Boucher, who wrote the story "The Quest for St. Aquin", about a robot who discovers God.

Alex—I didn't expect this character to show up, and I may use him again in another story. In some ways, he seems to have been inspired from another Alex, the sociopath "hero" of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, which Stanley Kubrick, the mastermind of "A.I.", also made into a movie. There's a trivia bit that Kubrick had intended Joe to be more like the antihero of his previous effort, so in some ways my Alex may be a shadow of what could have been.

""I'm your Venus…"—I know, I took a mild departure from Bicentennial Man, but I heard these words from Shocking Blue's "Venus" on the radio as I was drafting this, so I decided to throw this in (I imagine Galatea, like Joe, has several soundfiles in her music centers besides "Respect")…and then they played Aretha Franklin's "Respect"!

"Come on, Joe, don't do this to us."—I have to tell this story: Shortly after I saw "A.I." for the first time, I had a vocational evaluation in which I worked a few days at a small department store, where they had me doing markdowns using one of two small hand-held scanners attached to briefcase-sized computers. One was mounted on top of a shopping cart, while the other was mounted on a rather elegant tripod on wheels. I have a habit of naming things ("It's just what I do."), so the one on the shopping cart I named Emma (I don't know why I chose that name); the one on the tripod I called Joe (for obvious reasons…). "Emma" was the more docile scanner, but "Joe" liked to beep at me for no reason at all, especially when I was marking down lingerie and bathing suits (Its way of saying "Ooh, la la!"? Maybe I chose the right name…or the wrong name), so I used to scold it: "Come on, Joe, cut that out/don't do this to me/quit that!"

Joe spazzing—Based this on the death scene of Pris the prostitute replicant played by Daryl Hannah in Bladerunner, and a similar reaction from a malfunctioning leg robot at MIT's robotics lab.