“Thank you. Now I’m kind of trying to get to bed.”
But Diane wasn’t finished. “But what will I do with you, dear? You’re already twenty-nine. You can’t go on like this forever.”
“I think you mean only twenty-nine.”
But Diane was on a roll. “By your age, I was married with two kids, and a third on the way! Gary was married at twenty-seven. Your sister will be married in less than two months, and she’s only twenty-five. I’m getting worried for you. Who will take care of you when you’re old and alone?”
“Socialized medicine or the apocalypse, whichever gets there first. I can take care of myself, Mom. For someone who talks about me being twenty-nine like I’m some Bronze Age corpse fished out of a bog, you don’t seem to realize that I’m an adult.”
“All right, then, who are you bringing to the wedding?”
“I don’t know! The Jolly Fucking Green Giant!” Kelly threw her left hand up in exasperation.
“Kelly Suttle. Do you think this is all a joke?”
“I think it’s a party, not a Navy SEAL operation, and you’re taking it way too seriously.”
“Oh, so it’s just a party. The biggest day of your sister’s life and my life’s work is just a party.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“When I started in the wedding industry here, this was just another middle-class town,” Diane forged on. “Now it’s one of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Everyone expects the moon! Last week a bride demanded that I find her a dress that changed color according to her mood. I’m not Merlin. These people think that I’m a Google and they can just enter their dreams into me and I’ll spit back whatever they want—”
“I met someone,” Kelly blurted out.
“You met someone?” Diane was utterly confused. “Do you mean on LinkedIn again?”
“No, a guy. I went out tonight with Priya and met this guy and we really hit it off.” Kelly winced, biting her lip. Palliating her mother might buy her some time. Or she might have just royally screwed herself.
“You met someone!” Diane’s tone was suddenly full of sunshine. “Who? What’s he like? What’s his name?”
“His name is—” Kelly drew a panicked blank. She looked wildly around the room. A spotlighted billboard caught her eye through the window—eSan, for all your hardware cleaning needs.
“Esan. I mean, Ethan. His name is Ethan.”
“Ethan, Ethan. I like it, it’s a good name. What does he do? Where does he—”
“I really have to go, Mom, it’s been a long night.”
When Kelly got off the phone, she threw her head down tiredly on her desk. If only it were so easy to create a boyfriend out of thin air.
Kelly didn’t sleep long that night, but she slept hard. Her lower back aching from the heels, she tossed fitfully between dreams of Anita hovering over her shoulder while she tried and failed repeatedly to build a tower of blocks, and a laughing Mariah Carey advancing menacingly toward her, brandishing a shoe like Priya’s, but with the gold studs grown to lethal, torturous spikes.
Then Mariah morphed, transforming into a handsome young man. He held Kelly’s hand, leading her through what at first looked like a nightclub, but turned out to be a high school gym, lit with swirling colored lights for prom. They drifted through slow-dancing couples, pausing to watch Clara and Jonathan get crowned prom queen and king by none other than Diane. The triad smiled approvingly at Kelly and her date in the audience.
The handsome man turned Kelly away from the stage. “Dance with me,” he said.
“I don’t know how,” she protested. Then he removed a giant key from the small of his back, like a wind-up toy, and handed it to her.
“You have the key,” he said.
Kelly woke up with a hangover, a backache, and a plan.
It was Saturday, so Kelly knew she would be fairly undisturbed at work. But to be safe, once she had taken the elevator up to AHI’s floor in the corporate tower, she did a quick walk around—empty. She was on track. She breezed down the hall to the lab, clutching a red and white bag from the hurried purchase she had made at Target on her way in.
In spite of her hurry, Kelly took a second to appreciate the lab after she firmly locked its door. She loved this space, but she couldn’t always get it to herself. Now, empty, silent except for the low thrumming of machinery, it had the cavernous atmosphere of a cathedral. It was a sort of space-age Geppetto’s workshop: brushed steel cabinets and counters, banks of computers, and 3-D printers mixed with limbs, eyes, torsos, hair, all in various states of half-formed humanity. Scattered around the workstations were a hoop with six casters attached to it; a flexible polymer band, sinewy with wires; a periscope-type contraption with an infrared sensor on it—skeletal fragments of the other engineers’ works in progress. At the back of the room, a few completed prototypes of earlier android models stood sentry, each progressively more believable than the last: a smooth white robot humanoid only in posture, a boxy male with clawlike metal hands, a young blond woman with waxy-looking “skin.” The scene might have been creepy to some, but to Kelly, it was home.
She had been making a mental inventory all morning—she knew the stock by heart, having had a hand in the creation of much of it herself—and knew there were enough completed spare parts to service her need. They would require some alterations to make a harmonious whole and, of course, the actual combining of the parts would take some doing. But Kelly had been putting in extra hours already, working out the kinks in anticipation of making her physical model of Confibot. And unlike Confibot, this model wouldn’t require exquisite precision of response. It didn’t have to align with a specific vision of user compatibility. It could just be what she wanted it to be, meaning it would be much more straightforward to assemble. For once, she could just follow her gut.
As Kelly raced around assembling parts, she realized she didn’t know what to make him look like. She rolled a tray of glass eyeballs from its shelf, assessing them: a hundred varieties of iris color, pupil size, corneal tint, veining. It would be safest to go ordinary. Draw as little attention as possible. But her hand hesitated over the center of the tray with the midrange colors, as if reluctant to actually pick one up. Live your life—the words Priya was always telling her echoed in her head. The usual rules were clearly already out the window here. The adrenaline was pumping. With swift decision, Kelly’s hand moved to the outskirts of the tray, toward the set of eyes her own had gravitated to first: a crystalline, almost lavender, shade of blue.
Well, then, why not go all the way out? As Kelly modeled her ideas on the computer-aided design software, then made them reality with the help of a 3-D printer and a shopping trip through the lab’s existing parts, she decided to let her heart, or something south of her heart, be her design guide. Ordinary be damned. She draped coffee-brown hair in waves over his tanned forehead, carefully working around the minuscule, fragmented solar panels integrated into his scalp as a power source. She made his hands long and clean, chiseled at the wrist. She sculpted the heck out of his butt. It felt a little creepy. But it felt a little good.
Luckily, the normal biweekly family dinner had been pushed since Diane was traveling to a trade show. Kelly had the weekend to herself, and she stayed in the lab the entire time, catnapping in her chair, leaving only for bathroom breaks and vending machine trips where she picked up bags of Fritos and cans of whatever had the most caffeine in it while furtively hiding her face from the security cameras. At one point she heard the window washing crew making their rounds. Later, an employee stopped by an office down the hall, presumably to pick something up, giving her a shock of adrenaline so strong it left her weak. As an employee, she had every reason to be here—but still. What would happen if anyone discovered what she was doing? There was no