H is for Heuristic

Byron sat outside in the restaurant and grew impatient. He kept looking at his watch. "What's she doing in there?" he wondered. She had left only her jacket behind, so he guessed it was another one of those 'women's health' issues. But it was still a very long time, and as he waited for her, more and more people entered the lineup, some likely wanting his table.

Inside the washroom stall, when the black box was finally finished reprogramming the android, she stood up and gently pulled it out of the connection ports in her chest. The small cube was then placed inside her purse, and she proceeded to close her chest panel and button up her blouse. She flushed the empty toilet, washed her hands and emerged at last to see Byron eagerly awaiting her return.

"Shall we go?" he said.

"Yes, let's go." she said.

They put on their coats and left the shop, waving to Phet as they walked past.

Outside the restaurant, Byron was quite surprised when Heather grabbed his hand. They stopped walking and turned to face each other. Before he could figure out what she was up to, she moved in and gave him a kiss on the lips.

Byron was too surprised to enjoy it. When she pulled back, smiling, he asked her "What was that for?"

"I've wanted to do that for a long time." she said. She was running her new programs perfectly. All was going according to plan.

Chapter 14 - No Reservations

The two of them stood still on the crowded lunch-hour street. Face to face and eye to eye, they stayed that way while busy people rushed past them. Big flakes of snow continued to fall slowly from the quiet sky. Byron could not possibly begin to imagine the real motivation for the kiss, or the electronic and mechanical machinations that had brought it into being. He saw a real, flesh-and-blood creature in front of him.

For those few seconds that took forever to pass, he fell deeply in love with the fembot. He wanted to take her in his arms and give her one of those Hollywood kisses where the camera zooms in and the romantic music swells in the background.

"Agnes will notice we're late." Heather said, breaking the spell he was under.

Byron was lost for words as they started walking again. It wasn't words he wanted to give Heather at that moment.

As if they had been temporarily muted, all of the street sounds and the noise made by the people rushing around came back to full volume in his ears.

He thought about what to say as they walked together, still holding hands. "Heather," he said, "I didn't know you felt the same way about me as I felt about you."

The artificial woman computed his words. Her basic Robot Control programming meshed almost seamlessly with her recent Fembot Command augmentations. When the original software was finished doing the low-level computations, the data was fed into her new subroutines and AI functions. The immense amount of raw data was no problem for her fast processors and her recently improved software, now made even more effective by what Phet's black box had just done to her. Her calculations took only a barely noticeable moment, and she soon had formulated a response.

"I'm really shy when it comes to romance." she said.

They stopped again on the sidewalk, this time moving to one side so they were out of everyone else's way.

"I'd like to ask you to have dinner with me, but I have another class tonight. Are you free tomorrow after work?"

"Yes, I'd love to." she said. Her facemask configured itself to show him both enthusiasm and delight. Also, for the very first time since her activation, Heather blushed. The sophisticated set of commands that made the complicated silicone mask turn convincingly red around the cheeks was due mainly to the newest of her software.

They started walking back to work again, still hand in hand, working out the details of the date. He would try to get reservations at La Courbure, a restaurant right on the river with a breathtaking view and one of the most exclusive places in town.

The android was performing as many simultaneous tasks as she ever had, and the load on her processors was at maximum values for several minutes. The heat they generated was spread out through her body as a function of her complex cooling system.

Byron felt her hands getting warm as they walked. What he took to be a sign of a passionate young woman in love was actually the effect of excessive computing by a highly advanced android, who's software hadn't yet been made as efficient as it could be.

They walked and talked, holding hands all the way back to the Archive building. They agreed that for the rest of the day, they shouldn't act too amorous to each other. Both of them knew that they should be acting like professionals. He knew that from instinct, she knew that from her new programming. Her objective in that regard was to keep him interested without giving up the synthetic booty.

They got back to work quickly, with Heather returning to the basement and Byron to his office. She had no problem at all getting back to work and keeping her CPU focused on doing her job. For the all too human Mr. Clarke though, it was hard not to keep his excitement down.

In another stroke of good fortune, he successfully made reservations for 8 PM on Tuesday at the restaurant. He smiled and sat behind his desk for a long time, just thinking about how lucky he had been lately. Images and memories of Heather filled his head. He could almost think of nothing else. Whenever he tried to start his work, he invariably saw her face in his mind again, and forgot what he was doing.

So he decided to work on the one thing he knew would distract him sufficiently. He pulled out his personal laptop and started working on Ralph Sweet's assignment again.

Doing all of that hard thinking and the frustration of coming up with nothing wasn't much fun, but at least he was doing something other than sitting back and dreaming about the female humanoid robot in the basement.

He had never put off his own work like that before, but he wasn't worried. He was supposed to be working on the scans being made by the temporary worker downstairs, and since she had no scanner, he had no work.

For almost six hours he tried looking at the homework assignment from different angles. He tried to come up with unorthodox tricks that he thought might make things easier. Nothing worked. When he finally closed and packed away his computer, he made the realisation that it really was impossible. Ralph had given him an impossible mission.

"You bastard!" he chuckled under his breath as he laughed. He shook his head. He should have known Mr. Sweet would pull that kind of trick on him. Also, he couldn't help but feel a little flattered. The teacher wouldn't have done that kind of thing to just anyone. He must have really recognised the spark of genius in Byron.

"What a great day." he thought to himself as he got up to stretch and left his office.

He went over to talk to Agnes. That was even less fun than it usually was. She was in a real snippy mood. She knew full well what was going on between her boss and that young tart. What Byron didn't know is that Agnes had been crushing on him for the last nine years. And it was a good thing he didn't know. He didn't exactly go for the homely linebacker-with-a-hair-bun look.

When it was exactly 5 o'clock, Heather came up the stairs and went to grab her coat. Mr. Clarke, who was still trying to talk with Agnes, turned his attention to the young lady and said "I guess I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Yeah," she said, "bright and early!"

He wanted to get another kiss, but he dared not with Agnes watching the two of them like a hawk.

"Bye Agnes!" Heather said as she pulled on her jacket and waved to the old frowning woman.

She didn't answer her. She just glared as the pretty brunette walked out the door and down the stairs on her way to the bus. Today however, she turned right instead of left.

Agnes looked directly at Byron and said loudly "Robbing the cradle, aren't we?"

Byron was taken aback somewhat. "What are you talking about?" he said, realising that the cat was out of the bag.

"She's young enough to be your daughter!" she scolded.

"Oh, your just jealous!" he said jokingly, making sure to wear a laughing smile on his face when he said it. He didn't know how right he was. "Come on, we're both adults anyway." he said as he walked back to the office to get his things.

When he got back to the front, Agnes had already left. He activated the alarm and locked the doors. He wasn't bothered by the old receptionist at all. He was feeling better than he ever remembered feeling as he got in his car and drove over to the tech institute.

Meanwhile, Heather was getting on a different bus than she usually took. This one would follow a winding path and take her almost directly to her new base of operations, Fembot Command Station 28.

Chapter 15 - Ready

That Friday evening, Byron drove out to the tech institute as usual. He was a little early, and that was to make sure he'd have time to have a little chat with Mr. Sweet. He wanted to thank him for having such faith in his creative skill.

When Byron parked in the lot and got out of his car, he saw that Ralph was already on his way to the entrance.

"Ralph!" Byron called.

The big hairy man looked back and smiled broadly. "Have you finished your homework, Mr. Clarke?" he said with mock seriousness.

Byron smiled and said nothing until he caught up with his teacher. "That was some trick!" he said as Ralph held the door open for him.

"Trick, whatever are you talking about?" he said with a laugh.

"It can't be done." Byron stated. "It's impossible."

"Are you sure?" Ralph said, prodding him more.

"Very sure." he replied.

They talked about the reasons why that was so on their way to the classroom. Mr. Sweet told Byron about a man named Kurt Gödel, and the paradigm changing incompleteness theorem he had discovered. The conversation soon turned to a man named Alan Turing.

As they talked about the beginnings of artificial intelligence, Melanie entered. She was slightly early herself, but she had her own reasons. More accurately, she had the Master Computing Device's reasons.

"Hello, gentlemen." she said brightly.

"Hello, Melanie. You're early." Mr. Sweet said.

Byron just looked at her and nodded. Melanie went on to ask Ralph about private tutoring, while Byron thought about his strange encounter with her on Friday night.

He was feeling now a little uneasy, and lost in his own thoughts when he heard Ralph's booming voice say "Why don't you ask Byron here? He's a creative genius with this stuff!"

Byron quickly gave Ralph a disapproving look, then made his usual remark. "Oh, I'm way too busy Melanie. Like I told you. You really should talk to Dustin. He seems to have a handle on the course."

Ralph gave Byron a skeptical look, knowing that Dustin was barely passing. He also saw that Melanie made his star student uncomfortable. So he changed the subject by launching into a very amusing story, as only he could tell.

The blonde robot watched their facial expressions and body movements carefully, and managed to show some fake looking smiles and broadcast some fake sounding laughter from her speaker. Humor did not compute.

Soon enough though, the rest of the pupils showed up, and the lesson got underway. Melanie watched Byron through the night, which was her primary function anyway. She didn't take his advice. She didn't talk at all to Dustin, who still only had eyes for her.

Meanwhile, the pretty brunette Archive worker was wrapping up an uneventful bus ride over to her new base. Though she had never gone there before, the route was now part of her programming, thanks to Phet.

Throughout the whole trip she calculated the minor movements that her parts made to make her look human. Everything from blinking, right down to casually reading the ads above the windows had been contrived and efficiently executed by her AI software. The reward for all of this constant drain on her power supply was that no one suspected her of being a machine. Even being about 4% heavier than a human of similar size was for the most part undetectable.

When she finally looked interestedly around her and pulled the cord for the bus to stop, it was as though she'd ridden that route for years. The streets were already darkening from the setting of the winter sun, so she had relied mainly on a sophisticated system of spatial coordinate positioning to reach her stop. When the bus crossed the intersection and came to a halt, she got out and walked several blocks through a growing layer of snow to get to her final destination.

She walked up the path to Melanie's house and rang the doorbell. Because Melanie was over at the tech institute watching Mr. Clarke, it was up to the Fembot Command maidbot to open the door. The maid bent over slightly in her ultra-stiff way and looked through the peephole. Once she had computed that it was the new agent standing outside, she unlocked the door and retreated to the interior of the house.

When the microphones in Heather's head detected the sound of the door hardware switching to an unlocked position, she began a twelve second countdown before taking any further action. That gave the blonde robotic maid time to get safely out of sight before the new agent opened the door and stepped inside.

Heather had been programmed to go directly to the basement lab. The scanner had been programmed with her statistics, and recognised her as the commandeered fembot. The doors slid open and in she walked.

The scene inside was almost exactly the same as in the lab where Heather had come from that morning. The beautiful brunette and naked technician Natasha was standing at the ready, and started to move again on Heather's arrival. She too had been programmed with the necessary data, and greeted the new girl with default cheeriness.

"Hello, Heather. How was your day?" she said as she began making settings on the console.

"My day was fine. Thank you." she said.

"Has the new programming integrated successfully with your existing software?"

Heather made a barely noticeable pause, blinked and said "Upgrades from Fembot Command have augmented the Robot Control programming with 98.4% success."

"Very good." Natasha said as she finished setting up the console. "Please sit in the chair next to the data exchange console and remove your facemask."

Heather immediately obeyed the command and took a seat by the big machine. Acting as if it was nothing out of the ordinary, she moved her hands up to her head and placed them on the sides of her pretty face - being sure to avoid grabbing her neatly styled hair. She removed the mask with a gentle tug and a click.

She exposed her intricately designed and constructed circuitry to the Fembot Command technician. For her part, Natasha already knew which cables to use to connect the new girl to the console. While the complex pattern of flashing lights transmitted status data into the room, the technician aimed one end of a long black cord at a spot just above and between Heather's eyes. Those eyes, that looked so soulful and so vibrant to Byron, appeared now to be nothing more than large spheres of painted glass connected to sophisticated electronic devices. Those devices were in turn bolted and connected to the rest of the mass of electronic circuitry that was the inside of her head.

The other end of the cable went into an open port built into the data exchange console. Natasha got another cable with different types of connections and plugged one end into a socket just below Heather's right eye. The other end got plugged into the console as well, and a few computerized beeps came out of the fembot's exposed speaker to confirm the connections.

With eyes of the same type, Natasha looked into the lifeless eyes of the woman in the chair. "I'm going to download data from your visual and auditory memory banks into the main computer for processing and evaluation." she said.

Then with the type of sounds only computers could make, the transfer process began. While lights flashed inside Heather's opened head, the Master Computing Device sorted through the data and began to make plans for the new agent. Natasha watched the many monitors carefully and all at once. As binary code flowed fast on the screens, she watched for anomalies in structure and possible errors.

Heather sat unmoving in the chair as all that she had recently seen and heard was fed into her former adversary's supercomputer. The black box had worked even better than Fembot Command had expected. The Master Computing Device encountered no problems at all during that first transfer process.

Next to be done was the transfer from the agent's hard drives to the console. With similar pre-programmed politeness, Natasha ordered Heather to open her chest panel. A different set of cables went from the synthetic woman into the constantly flashing, clicking and beeping computer. The transfer began, occurred and ended in much the same way as had the earlier job.

At last when it finally had a handle on the entire situation, the Master Computing Device began to put the finishing touches on its plans. Natasha and the blonde maidbot were given their instructions over the encrypted wireless link, and immediately started work on preparing the newly acquired android.

Over the next several hours, Heather was partially disassembled and rebuilt - upgrading her system to be fully compatible with Fembot Command's hardware and software. In time, she had her make-up redone, her new clothes prepared, her drained batteries replaced, her fluid cannisters refilled, and her system fully checked and scanned. By the time the morning came, she had been cleaned and most importantly reprogrammed in order to carry out the computer's directives. She had also had some critically important new tools installed.

She stepped out of the new house in this unfamiliar part of town that morning with perfect simulated confidence in herself. Dressed appropriately, both for the weather and for her work, she caught the bus and rode it downtown to start another day at the Archive.

Chapter 16 - Positive and Negative

While the new Fembot Command agent was stepping through the door of the National Archive that morning, the Main Computer over at Robot Control Station 17 was in deep panic mode. The disappearance or capture of one of its expensive units topped the list of the probable explanations for robot number 742625A's absence. In between bouts of desperately trying to extrapolate the most likely explanation, the supercomputer began to work out possible courses of action.

One option would be to have Robot Lab 40 modify one of its dormant fembots to look like heather and send the duplicate over with haste to Robot Lab 17 so it could be programmed and dispatched to the Archive building. Body shape and height modifications were relatively simple to make, compared to the construction of a new identical facemask and alterations to the unit's head. If that plan was chosen, the Laurie robot technician over there would have to work non stop for almost a whole day to make another Heather.

Another option was to send Heather's robotic roommate Karen down to inquire about her friend. But the Karen unit was only programmed to be a cashier. If she were to be sent on a reconnaissance mission like that, she would need considerable upgrades to both her hardware and her software. That would take at least half a day.

The other option the Main Computer considered was to do nothing. For all it knew, Heather could walk through the door at any minute. Or she might have been captured. If Fembot Command had gotten a hold of her and sent her back to the Archive, the sudden appearance of a second Heather would only cause more problems.