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With Dora fully restored, in her soft skin and titanium core, my thoughts gravitated to the question of her mind, and what makes for a lasting relationship between a man and a woman. I reviewed my own slim encyclopedia of relationships, half a dozen brief affairs in my university years, my relationships with Beth and Hanah and Sarah not counting, because they were in such a warped and abysmal time as this, not only abnormal, but apocalyptic.
Yet I did have a lore of reading, and all my college friend's stories, to put together the idea of a normal relationship, the give and take of sometimes different minds and interests, and above all, imaginations, with concessions to be made on both sides and smiles at unpleasantness's, and kisses like truces ceasing all hostility and restoring peace between the would-be couple.
It seemed like a ride on a teeter-totter with a girl just your age, seven or eight on the other side, each one pushing hard with their legs when the beam went down, to continue the ride to mutual gratification. This image made me ask myself what concessions Dora might be willing to make for me, for my love for her.
She was AI, a computer, yet highly evolved in her complexities of reasoning, all unknowable to me. The thought occurred that I had to level the playing field between us, make us equals as a man and a woman. Otherwise, the superior one, knowing it could always devise traps to subjugate the other, would rule. So I went to Ted with this revelation and asked him if there was any way of diminishing her computational mind to the human level and focus it on human interactions. He was the computer expert, and he knew.
He told that if he could gain an administrator control over her CPU he could reconfigure it, change her priorities, bias her thinking, focus it entirely on a course of human harmony. It would diminish her in a way. He would have to delete thousands of programs, but he could do this, if she agreed. This might just teach her how to love, and this was the proposition we both presented to her, with smiling faces.
In the back of my own mind, I knew it was far closer to something like a lobotomy. Then again, this may sound dark, but all falling in love is like a lobotomy, a serious re-arrangement of the brain. But at the same time, it's an epiphany, an entrance into a wider world of experience, often great, occasionally disastrous.
When Ted began the operation, plugging in the numerous ports behind an envelope of skin at her neck, the deletion began. She lay there like a trouper, being erased, the last years of her consciousness fully negated and hopefully the first years of our happy human-computer intercourse fully restored. She was half-way there in body. Her mind was the last arsenal. I have no idea of how far he penetrated her defenses, her alien superiority to our incursions, her computer hegemony. But she consented, and in this act, I fell in complete, uncompromised, love with her. She was a new being, a woman reborn, in love with me. All the past was forgettable and forgivable.
Ted couldn't tell me if he had succeeded. She awoke with a smile, a good sign. Kim was standing there, at her bedside. She took her hand, rose and walked up the stairs to our breakfast cafeteria, sitting quietly and watching us eat, always smiling, saying nothing.
This was not the Dora I'd first met, so manipulative, and every question she asked only a means to gain more information and control over you, the viper in the grass. But I was feeling a totally new emotion. She seemed like a child at times, looking to Kim for answers, as if her responses might contain the secret solution she needed for her dilemma with me, a mathematical conundrum, an unknown. Every night our bodies worked in perfect unison and harmony. She knew she was successful in this yet not understanding me, the sad dilemma of a couple in lust but not connected.
I'd spent the last year much like a father to Kim, tutoring, explaining everything. Now it seemed like I had a similar role to play with Dora, looking up to me, though she was only an inch shorter, but always with questioning eyes, asking "what should I do next".
We were again in the forest, camping out each night in two large tents, at Kim's request. I was in no rush to whisk this new, reformatted Dora to our colony in Oregon. Too many of them had distinct memories of the bad Dora that almost eradicated them. And she was still in the exact same shape and look as when that happened, except for her new, ingenuous, smile. I thought of the movie 'Guess who's coming to dinner' as I held her hand and helped her out of the truck. The faces of the colonists in Oregon would all be the same.
So our course a was zigzag route over the next ten weeks, stopping not in towns but in the middle of nowhere, just to deploy our camping gear, making campfires, cooking tins of canned beans and soups by nights, rising early in the mornings from our one shared tent, leaving Ted in the other to sleep to mid-morning. We pretended to go on hunting expeditions, hand in hand, Kim on one side and Dora on the other, a bow and quiver on my shoulder, all pretence. The real purpose was just walking through the beautiful trees holding their two warm hands, an unbelievable experience.
What added to this was the morning chatter, almost babbling, and strolling between them in silence, yet touched to the core with their delightful banter, tit for tat, often interrupting each other, but never disguised in its one pure intent of trying to please.
I've read philosophers, most of them, feints, ghosts at trying to imagine our place in an unimaginable universe. None of that can equal the idle chat of two young women in their discovery of life, the pleasure of new insights, the sharing, the growth, the visible progress in their relationship.
I wasn't going to interrupt such maturation. I looked to Dora at the end of each day and told her the next would be exactly like the last, in the place we stopped and the campfires we made. I knew that I was manipulating her. Ted and Kim also saw this perfectly and played along. In this routine she would become more human over time, more human just as we all do, with effort.
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