One thing that confused me was Dora's recent attraction to Kim. It was easy to understand why Kim welcomed this affection with open arms. She'd lost her mother at five, then lived with only her father in the woods. After that came almost speechless hillbillies, until she found me, another father eidolon, and even more woods. Then Ted joined us, hardly a gamechanger as far as conversation and company went.
I was guessing that finding and adopting Dora caused a seismic shift in her outlook, the conversation and company of another female. I remember from times before that mothers and daughters her age rarely got along. But that was from a society long gone, restrictive boundaries mothers usually imposed, chains to youth, gatekeepers, with little communication beyond concerns and caveats.
Dora was no such mother figure, an out-of-the-blue kindred spirit. They were both aglow in new friendship, their shared perspectives, displayed in excited girl talk on emotions and topics Ted and I could never even conceive of. But they were potent, these outpourings of two female minds, punctuated by frequent hugs of recognition.
Dora was still, as always, the problematic one, the enigma. I wondered whether she shared Kim's enthusiasms or simply mimicked them. She might be playing her, as with a toy, as AI had done with us, either to understand what it was to be a teenage girl, or worse, as my darker musings hinted, to learn how to use and control her against me, two against one, domination.
No man stood a chance against two concerted women with no other players involved, like on some deserted island. This had all played out in our one colony back in Oregon where the women outnumbered men almost two to one, and one of the reasons I left. The clear majority always rules. It's the strongest, a law of nature.
A deeper question yet, as I thought on, not just involving her behavior with Kim, was Dora's bigger plan, her real intentions towards humans.
She had me driving her to every AI hub in Europe like a common taxi driver, or every fragment of one, so she could see its status, repair what was repairable, assimilate all she might rescue, then move on to the next.
This was certainly not my idea of fun, and I wondered how I had been so seamlessly sidetracked into fulfilling her mission, charmed by two girls giggling in the back seat.
This was the female mystic in full play. I had these thoughts only during the nights when I was alone in bed, while Dora sat motionless in some nearby basement, tingling with electricity, plugged in to the arrays of the next hub on the map, sucking in more terabytes of data, like some vampire sucking blood, or spreading it, like a mosquito a disease, either one deadly to humans.
All the other hours I had no such forebodings. I was seduced by Dora's constant kisses and chat, along with Kim's, taken with the excitement of this new mission, partners in the back seat while I drove, the silent chauffeur.
On the subject of those darting kisses that she would plant upon my cheek, lunging from the back seat every ten miles or so, around each curve in the road and each new vista, interrupting her excited conversations with Kim, as if it were a gesture that I wasn't completely forgotten, both of them quivering with the prospects of their next destination, I thought it unnatural behavior in a cold titanium robot controlled by the trillion logic gates of a CPU. She could certainly sit still when she wanted.
With each repeated kiss would come the echo of a famous line, from the poet Ernest Dowson, such was my over-educated brain. Let me preface this detail with noting that he led a brief, abject existence in the slums of Victorian London, died of venereal disease at thirty-two, knew only the love of prostitutes, yet managed to write two brief poems on love included in every anthology of English poetry ever since, and for good reason, they are diamonds.
The line in question, which reverberated in my skull like the knell of a village church bell at someone's death was this:
"Surely the kisses of her bought, red mouth were sweet."
I wondered if I paid for Dora's kisses, not the daytime pecks but the nightly embraces, with equal loss. Perhaps mankind's mad and lusty flirtation with technology and its dire results deserved a similar, sad epithet, on some unread tombstone.
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