Pygmalion Ch. 07

She knocked at the door and when it opened, Henry Higgins stood blinking at her. He checked his watch.

"I apologized for the hour," Bernice Shaw said. "I saw your lights were still on."

"It's past midnight," he said.

"I figured you for a night owl," she said, holding up a paper sack. "The chip shop near my flat is supposed to be above average."

He held open the door. He was wearing herringbone trousers and a matching vest. His purple tartan bow tie was loosened and his collar button undone. 

"Your daughter has gone out?"

Higgins shut the door. "I'm trying not to think about that," he said.

"She advised me to keep trying with you." Shaw said.

"My daughter?"

"Your wife," she said, setting the chip bag on the kitchen counter. "We corresponded regularly. She even visited me in Ireland once and worked with me in my lab. Your daughter bears a striking resemblance."

Higgins kept her back to his visitor, moving to the chalkboard and clearing away a few lines of coding he had been trying to unravel.

"You don't like talking about your wife, I see."

"I'm sorry," Higgins said, turning. "Why are you here?"

"I wanted to be your friend," she said, taking the newspaper-wrapped fish out and putting it on the counter along with a cardboard boat of chips. "She said your weakness was chips. Your wife, I mean. You do well at keeping healthy and fit but if ever you two had a row, she said, she had to always make things up over chips."

Higgins considered. He put a hand in his pocket. "She talked to you about me?"

Bernice smiled. "You're an ordinary man who desires nothing more than just an ordinary chance to do exactly as he likes and precisely what he wants."

"Are those from Posh's Fish Shop?" He inquired.

She squeezed some catsup upon a chip and popped it between her lips. "I believe that's the name," she said. "Sit down, Professor. You're not rude enough to make a girl eat alone, are you?"

He came and drew a stool up to the counter. He dragged the boat of chips closer and took one. "Thank you," he said. "It has been awhile."

"So, when did you manage it?"

"Manage what?"

Bernice Shaw chewed and swallowed the chip in her mouth carefully. "She's very convincing," She said. "But I knew your wife. She never mentioned having children. And then there's the matter of her eyes."

"Her eyes?"

"When she opened the door for me this morning. They were a shade of honey brown. Then, walking me home across the quad, they were hazel, almost green. Do you think she's doing that consciously or is she unconscious of it?"

"Pass the catsup, please?"

Shaw passed the boat with the packets of sauce. "She said you could be inscrutable."

"For someone whom she never mentioned, you seem to have been on very open terms with my wife."

"I still am," Shaw smiled.

Higgins paused in his chewing as Professor Bernice Shaw drew a small icosagonal shape from her shoulder bag.

"What is that?" Higgins asked, feigning disinterest.

"The ultimate goal of cybernetics is not to simply create artificial intelligence but eventually to sustain actual intelligence through artificial means," Shaw said. "You said that at a symposium eight years ago."

Suddenly the telephone rang. Higgins checked his watch. "Who the devil calls at this time of night?"

He walked to the phone and answered it. "Hello?"

"Hell-haw-lo?" A voice yawned on the other end of the line. 

"Yes, who are you calling, please?"

There was a rattling and scrabbling on the other end of the line. "What time is it? Who is this?"

"This is Professor Henry Higgins. You called me!"

"Henry Higgins? Um, I'm sorry. There must be some mistake. Um, Professor this is Galatea Shaw. I'm an Associate Professor at Trinity College. How did you get this number?"

The line disconnected.

Higgins turned to see the girl eating chips slowly transform. Her long orange-red hair shortened to dark brown tendrils. Her pale skin lost its freckled pink tone. In under 10 seconds... Eliza, or at least an older version of Eliza, sat cross-legged and nude on the kitchen stool, munching chips.

"They're not as good as I remember," she sighed. "Still, I suppose it was usually the make-up sex after that made them special."

"Elizabeth?" Higgins blinked.

"Of course I knew showing up as myself might very well cause you to have a coronary," she said. "But imagine my surprise when a younger version of myself answered the door? Padding around barefooted and bouncy the way you always used to find so erotic when we were first dating."

Henry realized he was still holding the telephone receiver as the disconnect tone began to trill. He hung it up.

"But, how..."

Elizabeth Doolittle indicated the icosagonal shape on the counter. "The real G. B. Shaw thinks I am still stored on that," she smiled. "When I began helping her with her research I had several neurological scans taken and I told her to store them on a hard-drive of my own design. It's remote linked to your lab, Henry."

"But you died. It was a car accident. How could you possibly have predicted--"

"There was something I never had the chance to tell you, Henry. Or I should say, something I had put off telling you."

Screens behind Henry Higgins kicked on displaying images from Mammograms and then x-rays of various other organs.

"The accident was just an accident," she said. "But I had perhaps months, a year with radical treatments."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because it was a distraction. I knew we were close to a solution and I didn't need you being all mopey and tender and revoltingly sentimental. So, I backed myself up and copied all of our research with the most promising graduate student I could find."

Higgins had somehow managed to wander back to his stool. She passed him some of the fish.

He unwrapped it, his eyes never leaving her. "But how did you..."

"I remote-linked myself to your system. You tripped some wires creating your little sex toy," she smiled. "I woke up when you started printing skeletal components."

"Now, she is not a sex toy," Henry said, holding up his fish.

"Really? She definitely looked like I used to on mornings after. You're telling me you made my ass look like it did in its prime just out of sentiment?"

Higgins ate his fish.

"Thought so," Elizabeth said. "Hey, Alexa?"

The lab speakers dinged.

"Shuffle Liz's Beatles Mix," she called. 

The Ballad of John and Yoko piped through the speakers in the lab. Higgins rolled his eyes.

"Next question, Henry?"

"Who built you?"

"I did," she smiled. "About 12 hours after you finished your Eliza, I improved on your designs and had this little number run off by a cybernetics lab in Silicon Valley. Of course, they don't know I exist. I stole some clothes, bought a ticket and forged all the documents I needed to get myself a flat under Galatea's name. The girl will be surprised to learn she's been accepted to a position to which she's never applied, but... she totally deserves it."

"Flaws in my designs?"

"Well, not big flaws, Henry," she smirked. "But your Eliza can't do this, can she?"

Again the gynoids features shifted. She was suddenly blonde with a beauty mark and a breathy voice. "Happy Birthday, Mr. President..."

Higgins shook his head. "Admittedly she cannot," he said. "Nor would I want her to."

Elizabeth shifted back, making herself look exactly like the young Eliza who was off god-knows-where. "Did the chips work? Are we friends again?"

Higgins nodded, trying not to watch her come off of her stool and around beside him. "We never weren't friends," he said, focusing on his chips.

"Don't be diffident, Henry Higgins," she said, tracing her fingers through the grey over his ears. "Three years is a long time to be saved on a hard drive. And, it's not like I can be upset with you for sleeping with another woman, is it?"

He did his best to look away, her fingers through his hair. He'd forgotten how she had done that whenever she wanted to win an argument.

"Henry? Would you look at me, please?"

"It's rather a lot to process, Elizabeth..." he wiped his eyes with the back of his shirt-cuff.

"It's alright," she whispered, kissing his earlobe, then his neck. "Take your time. I know it's unexpected."

"And damned unprecedented," he chortled. "Here you are back from the bleedin' dead and you just expect to bat your eyes..."

"Henry?"

"What?"

"Are you mad about my dying or my achieving the human-cybernetic singularity before you?"

He brushed the fish and chips off the workbench, grabbing her and pushing her up on the counter. "You, infernal, damnable, incorrigible..."

"You're going to run out of adjectives eventually, Henry..."

"Beautiful..." he sighed, hanging his head.

"If you don't kiss me soon, I'm perfectly capable of building a version of you who can." She brushed his hair. "I might keep the grey. Tone up the abs and butt a bit?"

He lifted his head, laughing. "And here I was just thinking about how sexy you still looked even at 44," he said.

"Liar," she smiled. "But keep it up, now that we have a daughter, I can't very well go around looking like her identical twin, can I?"

She blinked, aging appropriately. "Not too saggy?"

"Perfect," Higgins smiled, leaning in to kiss her lips.

She unbuttoned his shirt collar, pulling him up with a laugh. "Henry Higgins, you're the best terrible liar ever."

He paused, lifting his head from where he was kissing her breast bone. "Should I be worried about her? I mean, out with that boy?"

Eliza cocked her head. "Would she do anything I wouldn't do?"

Higgins nodded. "Well, when you put it like that, I'm starting to worry about the boy."

"Henry?"

"Yes, dear?"

"Are you going to keep kissing lower or talk all night?"

"Sorry, dear."

He grabbed his hair and pushed him lower, closing her eyes as she felt his lips brush her tender pubis and then his familiar tongue upon her clit as he breathed a hot breath into her pussy.

"My compliments," she moaned.

"What?"

"The nerve-endings," she smiled. "I figured you'd be a perv about everything feeling exactly the way it should. I stole your designs for that area."

"Really?"

"Well, you always were a Rembrandt when it came to... " Her eyes widened. "Oh. Oh! Henry HENRY! FUUUCK!!!"

She felt her body shake as he gripped her thighs and the orgasm rippled for a solid 10 seconds.

"What... the..."

"Down, Left, Down, Right, Left, Right, Up," he smiled. "Didn't catch the cheat code in the programming?"

"You nerdy perv!!!" She looked down at him, scowling. "Do it again!"

He laughed. "As you wish."