We were now three months into our road trip across Europe, under Dora's guidance. We'd visited seven hubs in the northern nations and found that four of them were in tatters. But they were partially restorable, as Dora insisted, and at each of these we spent not two days of uneasy dreams on my part, but several weeks of busy chores. Kim and I were recruited to collect generators and sump-pumps, gasoline and hoses, then fire them up to drain the stinking basements of water, wearing rubber boots, while Dora waded heedlessly up to her waist, re-stacking certain components and setting up new battery banks nearby. Batteries were everywhere, just like generators and gasoline, heavy to move but not for Dora. She could carry a load of three hundred pounds in her slender, outstretched arms, as strong as a fork-lift, but far more beautiful. And her legs and back easily matched these loads without ever tiring.

The sight of it made me wonder how she could be so soft and gentle with me in bed, where a single twitch of even her thumb might snap my back in two. I felt like the proverbial eggshell in her arms or a manikin made of the most fragile glass, and yet she made love to me with never the slightest bruise. I had to admire her robot body and even more the mind that perfectly controlled it.

This co-operation of labour was also salve to our relationship. We walked and talked together and had to focus on the tasks at hand. I was now, along with Kim, an active participant in her efforts. Our conversations coalesced. She'd call a break at lunchtime, and we'd sit on some bench, shoulder to shoulder while Kim and I devoured some dried meat, silent, while Dora computed the next hundreds of detailed instructions she'd have to give us that afternoon. But when we began to tattle about work and weather as we finished our jerky, about how the day was going, our weary limbs, Dora would join in with full empathy, responding in a gentle voice to our cares more like a sister than the supervisor she was.

The only difference was her stature, sitting tall and resplendent, her titanium neck gleaming in the sunlight, while we were hunched and covered in sweat, our tee-shirts as dirty as our boots.

Yet my sharp, dialectic mind wouldn't rest with this image of her supreme superiority. It never had from the start. She had her own set of limitations, a daily re-charging of batteries or else she would go out like a light bulb. She had vessels, tiny reservoirs of lubricants to oil her steel frame and others to moisturise her human-like skin and occasionally fake some crocodile tears.

Kim and I needed no such oil changes or topping offs of fluids. We were water based, water spawned and our foods all water rich. We were creatures of both land and sea and could dive into any lake or ocean with a scream of delight. Dora was visibly scarred of any large water bodies, especially oceans. Salt was pure Kryptonite to her electrical array, as corrosive as Hydrochloric acid. And she didn't have a chance at swimming. She'd sink like an anchor to the very bottom with her body mass. We both had our separate advantages, some of them enviable. This realisation actually endeared me to her a little more, especially on our cross-Atlantic voyage in the sailboat. Yet I did notice during that trip, that she always had one hand on the tiller, or some other structural part of the boat, that insured her safety unless the whole craft sank. 

Then there was the operation that Ted had performed, at my bidding, upon Dora's mind, to make her more human. It was a simple and brilliant idea. The fact that she willingly submitted to it proved to me she had a desire to become much more human. All's he had to do was slow down her CPU. This was the one difference between us and them. They didn't think better, just a lot faster. He opened a portal in her skull and removed a portion of her RAM, along with several other black metal wafers far beyond my ken. Then he welded back other chips, closed the hatch, and she arose from the operating table, her eyes wide open the whole time and not seeming to mind it a bit, or maybe a byte.

I almost wished he could perform a similar operation on me, adding some perfect computer to brain interface to my band, so that I'd equal her in her own intelligence. But that technology didn't exist.  

In the following days I volunteered as her nurse. I did notice a frailty as she stood from her cot, sometimes a jerkiness of motion as she walked. Once she gently clasped my arm in the hallway, and this meant a world to me and our relationship, that such a superior being requested my aid.

The continental escape that followed soon after became a temporary glitch in this 'rapprochement' between us. But the elements were all there. After restoring a few hubs together, ever more hand in hand, we ditched the hateful white van for a medium-sized Ford truck, with no back seat. Slender Kim sat in the middle, happy as a lark, and Dora and I shared the front seat, often holding hands, lovers again, like two magnets, as we drove towards Greece and the sunshine, as it was now winter.

Kim revelled in the role of our adoptive daughter. She divided her focus equally between Dora and me, like slicing a cake exactly down the middle, asking me about the landscapes we were travelling through and listening attentively. Then she would turn to Dora with a grin and ask how glad she felt returning finally to Greece, to visit the ruins of her birthplace, her old stomping grounds, being the famous Pandora.

I wondered what relevancy this could possibly have on Dora.

But maybe, in her extensive memory banks, it might have sparked a semi-nostalgic longing, a flicker of pride, revealed in a faint smile.

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