The Creation of Amy Page 8

  “I’ll tell you that later, but what do you think of the programs?”

  “Well, the programming from what I see is okay, but could be better… just…takes…time… It looks like you have a lot of time in it already. This computer is better than the one at work.” He was breezing through all the files as if he stored them on his personal desktop himself. “I’m looking at the bio-mechanics of this girl, you made her out of a metal skeleton, and synthetic muscle, damn! This is badass!”

  “Thank you,” Phillip’s enthusiastic praise boosted his energy. “You see, I finished the Charger and needed a reason to live.”

  Phillips glanced at the black beast. “Yeah, I noticed your Charger, it’s cherry; this lab is amazing! Did you spend your whole trust fund on it?”

  “Mostly,” he admitted, feeling yet even better still from his old friend’s excitement.

  “You were always better at bio-mechanics, but you always hated code.” Phillips said. He had already explored more than half of the files. “This girl must mean a lot to you. What is Amy to you, a girlfriend, or what?”

  “A daughter,” Morse stressed, “and before you even ask, she is capable of sex, but I haven’t done anything with her.”

  “Yeah, I see that on the screen here,” he said with a dirty leer at the monitor, pointing at the screen while forgetting his mission for an instant. He scrolled again with the mouse. “You also put the maximum limits on the muscle; that means she is very strong. I’ll bet you I could get her to jump twenty feet in the air by the looks of the materials and construction used.” He read a right-clicked icon pop-up of further detail from the hardware log. “Also, since she has a titanium skeleton, she could jump off the Empire State Building and still walk away if her internal mechanics were reinforced.” Phillips seemed to get misty-eyed over the details of Morse’s creation. “Man, you’re my hero!” he declared.

  “Thanks.” Morse’s ego absorbed all Phillips’s praise as if it were a ShamWow towel. “Let’s go into business together. I think we could make a fortune, what do you think?”

  “Hell, I’m in,” he said quickly as though he expected Morse to propose this plan. Morse felt reassured his own career change from his colleague’s eagerness to change his path too. “But, do you know what this makes us, the Wright Brothers of androids! You make the bodies and I’ll make the minds,” he quipped with a smirk. Stopping, he gazed at Morse with wonder in his eyes. “We could change the world with your OCD creation; I can quit my job, like you did.”

  Morse could see his friend’s brain processing their futures’ possibilities. He remembered his own thrill of it well. “Man, what the government is tinkering with is pathetic compared to Amy! We could program them to do anything: clean the house, get groceries, fight…”

  “Yeah,” Morse said. This was exactly what he imagined for the world’s future.

  Phillips leaned back in the chair, “I want my own girl. Will you make the body for me? I’ll be doing my finest work on this girl’s mind.”

  “Sure, but, you have to find a girl and convince her to be copied; that can cost money, but here’s the card to the talent agency I found Kara, which is her mom, or the girl I copied to make Amy. Oh, and this is the card to my lawyer, he makes a bulletproof agreement that you have the girl sign.”

  “You did your homework and covered your assets. Smart man. Kara? She thinks Amy is her daughter, really?”

  “Yeah, she’s very cool about all this—I made her piss her pants the other night, watch!” Morse went to Amy. “Look at me.” When she did, he demonstrated the game, covering his face with his hands and opening them. “Peek-a-boo,” he said. Amy laughed, made a goofy grin, clapping her hands oddly.

  Phillips gave a hearty belly laugh, “Holy shit! She is like a baby! I’ll turn her into a woman, fix some lousy code…,” he trailed off as he turned away from Amy to the computer. “No offense, Rob, but no wonder she can’t go up some stairs or even walk normal. All the body mechanics are fine; you did well there… I can’t believe you did this; why didn’t you tell me you were doing this, why did you lie?”

  Morse seated himself in a chair between Amy and Phillips. He had waited for this question. “The last night you saw me,” he began slowly, looking down at his hands. “I almost blew my head off with my shot gun.”

  Phillips stopped typing and turned in his chair, listening. Morse watched the mood of his friend drop in that instant.

  “As I had the barrel of the gun in my mouth,” Morse went on, “I felt at peace because my life ended when Elizabeth died, and all my attempts over the years to get on track just brought more pain. Amber was a whore, and Heather went crazy, then she kills herself in my tub.” Morse inhaled heavily and paused. He swallowed, but the lump remained in his throat. Admitting all this with his friend still staring at him like this made him feel like squirming. “I had a hard time with all that. Just as I was about to pull the trigger, I saw Data on Star Trek. He was making a girl built like himself, and all the pieces began to tumble together for me. I took the shotgun out of my mouth, unloaded it, and threw it away toward the closet. That’s when I began revamping my garage and ordering parts and machines.”

  Phillips acknowledged he understood with a nod.

  “So, you have been working on this girl for two years straight,” Phillips asked, marking his word, straight, with emphasis. Morse nodded while inspecting his fingers. He wanted to make a topic change right now. “No wonder you seem pudgy! I take it you don’t get out much these days.”

  “No.” Morse did not feel offended by his friend’s poke. It was just what the mood of this conversation needed, a little macho ribbing.

  “And no girlfriends in between, I don’t know how you kept yourself from getting it on with little Amy here. She is sexy.”

  “Hey, I thought about it early on, but she is so innocent. I’d feel bad, so I have her call me, Father.”

  “Awe,” he teased, lengthening the word to mimic the way girls do it. Morse expected this reaction too. “Well, you brought her into the world with--what was her name? Kara? You bang her?” Morse laughed, shaking his head.

  “No, she made that clear very early, plus, I wasn’t thinking about that anyway, I was too driven do this.”

  “Damn, too bad,” said Phillips as he turned back to the computer monitor. “Oh well, at least we will probably win the Nobel Prize for this. Oh, damn, you patented everything too! Shit, this is great!”

  Chapter Eight

  About three weeks rolled by. Phillips had found his girl by the name of Adriana at the talent agency and got all the data he needed from her with Morse’s help. She was just as inquisitive as Kara was. 20 years old, she had beautiful long, blonde hair, and looked like a tiny angel, just as attractive, if not more than Amy looked.

  Morse got to work on the new android body, while Phillips continued programing Amy. Phillips was good with a keyboard, and with his fingers usually moving very fast, he demanded a steady supply of Mountain Dew, which Morse always had in the mini-fridge in the lab.

  Every now and then, Phillips would stop working at the computer and have Amy perform different tasks. She was able to walk up and down stairs now, also walk normally, her questions became less random and more focused, and she was able to carry conversations. She called Phillips, “Uncle.” Morse was moving along more quickly with the new android than he had with Amy, since with this one he had more experience.

  One evening, the two scientists went upstairs to just relax and watch TV and decompress from all the nonstop work. Phillips had taken a leave-of-absence from the research facility to work on their new venture. Morse enjoyed a beer as they were sitting in the sparsely furnished living room.

  “What are you going to name the blonde girl,” Morse wondered.

  “Stephanie,” Phillips replied with a sip of his own beer.

  “Why?”

  “I like that name, I thought about Brook, but nah, Stephanie,

  “Why did you name yours, Amy?”
>
  “It was one of the names Elizabeth wanted for the baby if it was a girl,” Morse said and took a long gulp of beer from his bottle.

  Phillips nodded. Then he held up his bottle for a toast and proclaimed, “To our mega girls!”

  Morse got confused and it displayed across his face, but shrugged his shoulders, and raised his beer up. They both drank to the salute.

  Morse asked, “Mega Girls?”

  “Have you ever heard of the video game, Mega Man? That was one of my favorite games,” Phillips explained.

  Morse’s face dawned realization, “Oh yeah,” he said. “I loved those games! God bless those ‘Japs!”

  “Rob, we’re going to be worshiped by ‘those ‘Japs’ when these come out. They live for robots and anime.” He took another quick sip of his drink and went on, “We could make synthetic pets too, imagine dogs and cats that didn’t crap all over your house! We could even bring beloved pets back from the dead, in a way. Hey, we can even teach our girls to play the guitar! Oh, I bet they would be good!”

  “Well,” Morse said, “Amy has some pressure sensors in her skin, but they aren’t as sensitive as true skin.”

  Phillips, seemingly with all the answers quickly responded, “Hey, they don’t need to feel anything, all they need is their eyes.

  “This is the most fun I’ve had in years! Hey, we could also dress them up in superhero costumes and have them fight crime!”

  Morse laughed, and Phillips, growing serious said, “I’m serious, guy, they could kick some ass; maybe we could have them learn to fight with samurai swords. They would be deadly.”

  “Don’t program my girl to be a killer now. I’m pretty sure anything we program these girls to do, we would be responsible for.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. Gee, you were always so tightly wound.

  “Imagine android dealerships all across the nation, where a fat guy or an ugly geeky guy like myself could just buy one of their girls, just like buying a car.”

  “Wish they were around when I was younger, I’d have a collection of them, one for every day of the week,” Morse quipped.

  “You know, you could make them go to work for you and have the androids give you your paychecks, but I’m sure shortly after they come out, there will be idiots claiming that it’s slavery.”

  “No doubt, then there would be ones that will be afraid they will become self-aware and try to wipe out humanity!”

  Phillips laughed, “That is why programing will be so important, and you’re lucky you know me. We will have to come up with a cookie cutter set of programs, and if anyone tries to alter them or hot-rod them in any way, they will just shut down due to irreparable computer failure.

  “Hey, Rob, in about a week, I think I’m ready to do some more tests with Amy. I’d like to take her to the government lab, have her run and jump at the gymnasium. ‘Sound good? That way, no one will see her, and we won’t have to drive a hundred miles to somewhere not populated.”

  Morse nodded, “Sure thing. I’m guessing we will be telling Ford, then?”

  “Listen, Ford has been missing you at work; the guy that replaced you isn’t nearly as good. If he sees what you have been spending your time on, he will be begging you to go to work again, probably double your salary. Hell, if he sees Amy, he might keel over from a heart attack!”

  Morse smiled, “Can’t wait.”

  During the next week, Amy’s programing advanced exponentially, even with her memory capacity still not close to one-quarter full yet. She learned to brush her own hair, how to dress herself, and even to put on makeup and brush her powder-coated teeth.

  The two scientists were having fun the whole time, and Phillips tried to teach Amy how to play a guitar. The attempt so far was not going as well as he had anticipated.

  Then, on that following Friday after Phillips got permission to use the government gymnasium, Phillips, Morse, and Amy went to the facility in the Dodge Charger.

  When they arrived, they all walked into the gym, and there was no one else there.

  Amy walked fast, proud, and responded quickly to questions and orders.

  Phillips sat on the bleachers closest to the floor. “We’ll wait for Ford; he wants to see what this project is that you’re doing.”

  Ford entered the gym and walked over to them, “Hey Robert, nice to see you again.

  “I hear you have been keeping busy.”

  He shook Morse’s hand.

  “Mike,” Ford said, greeting him. “So, what’s this all about?”

  Morse spoke up, “Director Ford, this is Amy,”

  He gestured toward Amy.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Amy,” Ford said to her, shaking her hand now.

  She shook his hand effortlessly and returned, “Nice to meet you too.”

  Ford asked again, “So, what’s this secret project you have been working on for two years, Robert?”

  “Amy is an android, she is my project.”

  Ford looked at Amy, laughed, and said, “This young lady is an android? Yeah, right! I may be old, but I am not senile yet! Seriously, what’s your project?”

  Phillips looked at Morse, “Do what you did with me,” he suggested.

  Morse pulled out a piece of bar-stock steel, gave it to Amy, and told her to bend it, so she did.

  “Give that to Doctor Ford,” Morse told her.

  She handed it over, and Ford scrutinized the piece of steel, and tried to bend it back, but could not.

  His eyes widened fully, “What the…” he stammered.

  Morse, not missing a beat, ordered Amy, “Straighten that bar.”

  She took the “v” shaped bar-stock from Ford and straightened it. She held it up, looking at Ford, and handed it back to Morse where he stuffed it back into his nap-sack.

  White faced and gaping mouth with his eyes still wide, Ford said, “That didn’t just happen!”

  He instantly collected himself, “Okay, men, you have my attention. I’m going to watch this exercise, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure,” Morse said.

  To Phillips, Morse said, “Okay, Uncle Mike, do what you need to do here.”

  Ford sat down next to Morse. “Uncle Mike?”

  “Yeah,” Morse offered the explanation, “I’m Amy’s father, and Mike is her uncle.”

  Ford nodded in acceptance.

  Phillips told Amy to jump straight up, one-foot off the ground.

  Amy jumped and landed perfectly.

  “Amy, jump five-feet off the ground, same way,” he next directed her.

  Amy crouched slightly, jumped five-feet off the ground, and landed perfectly.

  Phillips beamed at Ford and Morse, then returned his attention to Amy, and told her to jump ten feet off the ground, in the same way.

  Ford, who seemed incredulous, gasped, “No way!”

  Amy crouched a little lower than before, then jumped ten-feet straight into the air, her ponytail flopped straight up on the way down, and she landed in a crouch a little bit lower than before, then straightened up again. She stood facing the three men, all with hanging jaws in astonishment.

  “Like I said before,” Phillips said to Morse, “I think she can do twenty-feet. Shall I tell her to do it?”

  “Do it,” Morse gave permission to proceed with a nod.

  Phillips said to her, “Amy, jump twenty-feet in the air.”

  Amy crouched even lower with her right hand on the floor and jumped.

  The three men could not believe their eyes as the little girl jumped straight into the air, almost to the ceiling rafters. She began her descent back to the floor and her hair went straight up again, but looking actually graceful. She landed on the gym floor with a thud, a perfect landing, then straightened up, and looked at the three men.

  Morse asked her, “Amy, are you okay?”

  “Yes, I am. There are no system problems, Father.”

  Phillips, playfully gloating about being right, reminded Morse, “Like I said, she could jump off the E
mpire State Building and still walk away. You over engineered her.”

  “Oh, I know, I just get worried,” he said and shrugged.

  Next, Phillips said to Amy, “Amy, I want you to run as fast as you can from one end of the gym to the other and back. Give yourself time to slow down, no running into walls.”

  “Okay,” Amy obediently responded, and ran from one end of the gym to the other.

  She was fast, but awkward.

  “She runs like a duck, what the hell,” Phillips commented.

  Morse laughed; Ford seemed still astounded that this was actually happening.

  “Either her body mechanics are out of balance,” Morse surmised, “or Kara needs to run next to Amy, so she can correct herself.”

  “Does Kara run like that?” Phillips wondered, “If so, we are screwed!”

  “I never saw her run,” Morse realized, “but, I bet I can get her to come maybe tomorrow.”

  “In the meantime, I’ll try to play with her programing a bit. But, I’m damn proud of her jumps.”

  “Yeah, so am I,” Morse agreed with shared enthusiasm. “She was graceful. When we get her running better, we will have to get her to run and jump.”

  “Agreed,” said Phillips in a satisfied posture.

  “Let’s see how much she can bench-press over at the weight room.”

  Ford stood up and announced, “Hey, I need to get back to work, but is this a secret project? If so, I won’t tell, but the team would love to see this girl in action when you decide to unveil her.

  Morse answered him, “Yeah, keep it quiet. Let us work the bugs out of her first.”

  “You assholes are inventing the future, I’m very jealous,” Ford muttered.

  “So, I am guessing that you will be quitting soon?” Ford now asked Phillips.

  “No decisions have been made here yet, Director.”

  “Oh, you’ll be quitting, that girl is worth a fortune.

  “God bless you both, and good luck.”