His Robot Girlfriend Read Online Free Page A

time Mike unpacked the lunchbox.
There was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, an apple cut into
slices and bagged, a small container of a white semi-gelatinous
substance that turned out to be vanilla pudding, a single large
sugar cookie, and a diet Pepsi with a chemical cold-pack wrapped
around it.
    “ That’s a nice lunch,” said
Miss Treewise from across the table.
    “ Mm-hmm,” Mike
nodded.
    “ Somebody must like you,”
said Mrs. Cartwright.
    Mike shrugged.
    When he got home, Mike found Patience waiting
at the door. She looked pretty and pleasant and on impulse, he
leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.
    “ That was a nice kiss,
Mike. Is that the kind of kiss you would like me to greet you with
often?”
    “ Wow. I almost forgot for a
moment that you were a robot.” He looked down. “Hey, you’re wearing
shoes.”
    Patience lifted one up behind her, taking a
kind of Betty Boop pose. On her feet were black shoes with large
white bows just above the open toe. They had a half-inch thick
platform soul in the front and a four inch square heel in the
back.
    “ Do you like them? They’re
called Peeptoe Platforms.”
    “ Yes, they’re fine. But
where did you get them?”
    “ After I dropped lunch off
to you I went to the store.”
    “ You walked to the store?
That’s too far, especially in bare feet. And the ground is
hot.”
    “ I did not mind,” she
smiled. “Would you like a shoulder rub, Mike?”
    “ Sure.”
    She guided him to a chair that she had
apparently brought in from the dining room and set along the west
wall of the living room, in front of the window. Once he had sat
down, she stepped behind him and began rubbing his shoulders.
    “ How did you pay for them…
the shoes, I mean?” he asked.
    “ I took the cash card out
of your wallet this morning before you left for school.”
    “ They’re not supposed to
let you use that unless it’s yours. And besides, you should have
asked first.”
    “ The stores never check,
and I did ask. You said that I should select and purchase my own
wardrobe.”
    “ Yes, but I’m not sure I
can afford that right now. I don’t get paid until the tenth. I’m
not sure how much money I have in my accounts right
now.”
    “ We have $2261.43 in
account 116211130782-2 checking, $31021.69 in account
116211130782-1 savings, and $422.11 in the payNEtime
account.”
    “ Wow. That’s more than I
thought I had… I mean we had.”
    She turned him back around and began rubbing
his shoulders again. “I have ordered my own cash card, in any
case.”
    “ You did? Wait. How did you
know all that?”
    “ Last night I accessed all
your financial data.”
    “ You what?” He turned back
around to look at her.
    “ It is part of the
secondary setup procedure.”
    “ What else did you do?” he
wondered.
    “ I accessed your vueTee and
browser files, read all of the books and magazines on your texTee,
and all of your paper books too. I looked through your photo
albums, ran your credit report, and googled you.”
    “ Is that all part of the
secondary setup procedure?” he frowned.
    She nodded with an innocent look on her face
and turned him back around to continue with the shoulder rub. When
she was done, he moved to his recliner and flipped on the vueTee,
while Patience brought him a diet Pepsi. Although he usually drank
them from the can, she had poured it into a tall glass over
ice.
    “ Did you buy ice at the
store too?”
    “ No, Mike. I made it in the
freezer.”
    “ You can do
that?”
    She nodded. “Did you want to talk about your
day at work, Mike?”
    “ Not really,” he said. “If
you don’t mind, I’d just like to watch vueTee for a
while.”
    “ That’s fine, Mike. The
Star Trek episode ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield’ is on channel
twenty-seven.”
    “ Is that the one where
Frank Gorshin is black on the left side and white on the right
side?”
    “ He is black on the right
side,” said Patience. “All of his people are black on the