Steel Velvet (excerpt)
Carter Dallas tested off the scale on most IQ
batteries, but unlike the stereotypical “egghead,” he had twenty-twenty
vision and a love for sports that had earned him three letters in high school.
Upon graduation from MIT, every think tank in the country—not to
mention a few abroad, and the one on Moon Alpha—tried to wine and dine him
before he chose private research instead.
He had been instrumental in creating the Sigma Five Database that had
catapulted storage and retrieval systems into the next level.
Not to mention the fact that his work with navitronics had opened a real
possibility of colonization to the World Space Consortium.
However, all his spare time went into a private endeavor: laboring to
create the ideal woman....
He built his first android at eight—and had spent
the next twenty-five years working to perfect her. As he grew older, the chassis changed to reflect
developing awareness of form and function.
Proportions expanded alarmingly when he was about fourteen, and shrank to
more aesthetically pleasing levels in his mid-twenties.
After his thirtieth birthday, her
body had remained constant, but the face was ever-changing.
When he was a kid, he called her “Ann Droid,”
snickering with his friends over the joke, but as he grew older, he called her
“Galetea” —and kept the conceit private.
He strove for an unattainable perfection, a modern-day Pygmalion without
the safety-net of divine guidance.
Recently, the quest had taken on a more frenetic
pace. At his yearly
physical, Carter had learned it would probably be his last.
Something about a rare blood disorder...chemical imbalance...he didn't
really know—medical science had simply never interested him, to his mother's
abiding disappointment. All
he knew was that the meter was running, and he wanted to finish his
creation—to leave one thing of
beauty behind him when he went.
It was getting harder to concentrate for long periods
of time, and he often dropped things—his hands simply losing strength in
mid-task. He'd given up his
softball league already...and the weekly racquetball match with his best friend,
Jerry. He'd even given up the
beach house and moved into his studio laboratory to be closer to his work.
He was wrapping things up, like a Going-out-of-Business Sale, terrified
that it was already too late.
It was well past two in the morning.
The phone trilled, but he ignored it, knowing the recordcall would
automatically log it in, and knowing, as well, that odds were ten to one it was
just his mother's daily worry call.
She tried odd times, hoping to catch him unawares, but he was wise to her
ways. When he had moved
here from the beach house, he hadn't transferred the vidphone because he didn't
want her to see how far the disease had gone and worry even further.
So far he had been able to stall her from visiting by pleading a
deadline—but the excuse was wearing thin.
He dreaded the day that he could no longer put off that goodbye....
He was puttering around Galetea, adjusting a screw
here, replacing a fitting there, resettling a spun filament curl just so against
her bare shoulder. The golden
metal gleamed with a burnished sheen, like steel velvet, and he half-expected it
to be soft and warm beneath his questing fingertips, but the shining skin was
cold.
“If only you could talk to me,” he sighed,
running the back of his hand down Galetea's cool, golden cheek.
Her eyes whirred open and she looked at him.
“What do you wish me to say?”