With this latest revelation my mind seemed to split in two, with two opposite roads to travel. I continued mechanically, like a robot, on the course I had been on, aiding my robot companion Dora on her mission. But a debate was beginning to play out in my head and with only the three of us, no distractions, no other cars on the road to swerve around, no other voices in the villages where we stopped for the night, no lights, no music, only crickets and the birds starting to sing songs as we awoke, it grew louder and louder.
Should I continue to aid and love Dora as a life-long partner, and bandage up the remnants of AI, or ditch her and do the instinctive, human thing and destroy the nemesis? It was such a heavy choice it made me review my whole life and assess my character for some clue.
I wasn't the best of humans. As a father I had the worst track record. I had fathered at least six children, two with Beth, one each with May and June, another with Hanna and then Sarah. Yet I barely knew their names and spent no time with them, though they were now between the ages of three and seven. What kind of father was that?
On the other hand, I had bigger issues to resolve. Society and all its rules were long gone. I had fashioned our tribe, and the children would grow up happy in their mother's laps and the sunshine and occasional fogs of Oregon. My job was to be their distant protector, roaming the world, somehow making it safe for them, for their whole lives, a Herculean task I imposed upon myself, like a fool, the eternal wanderer. And I had two, odd companions to prove my madness, one a non-human, whom I loved like one and the other a young girl, dragged along, almost kidnapped, as she was not yet at an age of making life decisions.
All of these conflicting thoughts raged on in the back of my head, and it took effort to hide them. But this continued over several weeks as they found no resolution. We drove first to Ankara, then Damascus and finally to Tel Aviv where Dora had her three-and four-day seances with what was left of her old self. I knew I grew taciturn over this period, distant and unresponsive to their chatter. I felt like a chauffeur again and Kim noticed the change. I never even tried to guess what Dora was thinking, she being a computer.
But a fourteen-year-old girl's eye is sharp, is like a powerful telescope examining the stars, the night sky, like a panoply of emotions, capturing a hundred pictures a minute, with every twinkling course of light full of meaning, and then sketching out a fuller panorama of adults in her restless mind.
She saw this cooling off of enthusiasm in me and began to play the matchmaker between us, with simple guile. One evening when we made a pit stop for Dora to recharge, as she lay seemingly asleep in the back of the pickup beside a row of car batteries with jumpers applied to a small, silver knob on each hip, to her own batteries, and just the two of us in the front seat waiting, Kim snuggled up to me and asked with a worried tone and tearful eyes what the matter was between Dora and me, as if we might somehow divorce, ending this adventure and she in the left middle, to be abandoned by one or the other on the far side of the world
This fear of her's brought me around, like a splash of cold water. I put off all deliberation and that was a great relief. I kissed Dora again five times a day, telling her how much I loved her and how happy I was in this expedition. I decided to leave the whole course of my future, our future, to fate. In other words, I wouldn't change our present course, or even think of it, till some stark, new event demanded it, if some such event cropped up, which I hoped wouldn't happen, as our road maps were all happily sketched out all the way to China, and then Japan, where Dora's brother Pan might be, the deciding factor.
Once again Kim resumed her beaming smile on this road trip, more talkative than ever and comfortably snuggled between us. Dora acted like nothing had happened, demure, always smiling. It was an elegant solution to a problem she didn't want to address. Ignore it like it doesn't exit and over time it will erase itself from the blackboard, by being so much overwritten with new distractions, new events, that it becomes illegible and with that, forgotten.
Females are expert at distraction. It's an art. Just their looks and motions in close proximity can make it impossible for a man to concentrate on some pressing concern. Their soft voices, their charms, seem to have been designed by nature to erase all cares. In the same way that they can quiet a baby's crying and lull it to sleep, they can detour a man's deepest focus on some dark issue with a query about dinner or a compliment about his beard as he sits in his chair mussing, or the pleasant smell of his pipe tobacco, derailing his train of thought completely.
I always suspected I was Dora's slave. But I never guessed I'd be Kim's, as she sat between us humming nonsensical tunes like some little cherubim. It was two against one and I lost the battle to their sweet and constant lullabies. Yet it was a sweet surrender, pillowed and perfumed. A lackey can hardly complain when he enjoys a feathered bed and the love of two women.
We drove on through what was once Persia, then into India, visiting several hubs that were all in ruins from what looked like monsoon rains. We spent some nights in our tent, at any roadside stop when we were tired of driving, or else in the most luxurious penthouse suites of hotels in some large city. We seemed to alternate one for the other. Both were equally desirable accommodations we looked forward to, the latter for its silk sheets and soft beds, the former for its intimacy and the necessity of cuddling close together in two conjoined sleeping bags on the cold ground, but in silken arms wrapped around one another for warmth, the campfire outside dimming to a glow with serene quiescence, like the thoughts in my own mind.
Strange to say but we were like hobos one night and the highest royalty the next. We could enact any role we chose, because we were on a stage with no one else, no lights, no script, no audience to applaud or condemn us. We could do anything we wanted in this silence, and we did.
