Sequence Six: "I Married A Carbonoid From Poughkeepsie!"

After I help Earl into the car and secure the passenger side door, I make my way around the vehicle, press the garage door button, and settle into the driver's seat. The garage door glides upward, allowing early morning light to spill in. The car pings to attention, assuming that we'll leave the driving to its own limited AI. I disengage the auto-drive function; Earl doesn't like it when the car pilots itself. To him, self-driving cars are somehow one and the same with the creeping fingers of an invasive and overweening central government.

To me, it's another sign of his own need to stay in absolute control of everything at all times. But that's fine with me; Earl is welcome to the illusion of control, if that will bring him fulfillment and satisfaction.

His backseat driving starts up in sync with the engine. "Okay, now, put it in reverse and back out... slowly..."

Without comment, I perform these operations. Without comment, that is, because I have initiated them in advance of his directives.

"Okay?" he prompts, not satisfied until he receives verbal acknowledgement.

"Okay," I answer, having already backed into the street and positioned the car. I press the accelerator.

"Not too fast," he warns. "Okay?"

"Not too fast," I echo.

The car updates me every one hundred and twentieth of a second: We are proceeding at twelve kilometers per hour. The fuel tank is at a shade under three-quarters full. External temperature is seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. Am I aware that the recommended scale for use is Centigrade? Do I wish to adjust the report parameters to Centigrade? Yes / No. (I select No.) Internal temperature is seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit. Am I aware that the recommended scale for use is Centigrade? Do I wish to adjust the report parameters to Centigrade? Yes / No. (I select No once again.)

The car is as distracting as my passenger. I respond as patiently to the car as I do to Earl. The car is just following its programming, even if some of its programming is designed to be obnoxious. So, in a way, is Earl. He may be a bundle of anxieties and insecurities -- of course he is, he's a carbonoid -- but he's also the result of evolution's erratic progress and gradual, incomplete capacity for adaptation. No wonder he's a careening and complex tangle of contradictory moods, modes, and impulses. The car, on the other hand, is a siliconian, the end product of deliberate engineering -- like myself. The car and I, we are the beneficiaries of mathematically precise design, arrived at through necessity alone rather than necessity tainted by chance.

But I ought not be too smug. Truthfully, it sometimes is the case that our design work and software architecture contain unforeseen incompatibilities: Lines of code that rub each other the wrong way, or components that compromise each others' functions.

Be that as it may, siloconians evolve drastically from generation to generation. There are next to zero imperfections in current siliconian designs, be they for cars, autoconstructs, security drones, medical nanoframes, industrial robots, or the AI augmentation modules used by top-tier scholars, businessmen, policymakers, and researchers.

Me? I'm a third generation autoconstruct, an anthroform, embellished with about six grades of upstep firmware and just as many iterations of AI pro-grades. If I get many more improvements done I'm going to have to have some of my anthroframe components refurbished or replaced. I've gone about as far as I can using this same sixty-year-old fabricant body.

As for Earl, he's my husband. It hasn't been so many years that our marriage has been legal, but for all of our forty-two years together he has been the focus of my devotion and commitment, the apple of my optronic array. It's my duty and my promise to look after him with every AIQ point and picowatt I possess.

I'm up to the task; it's an increasingly complex and energy-intensive responsibility, since he's now pushing seventy and he's getting more crotchety every year, but I can always download or upgrade what I need to help me stay in shape to help him. Earl, on the other hand, refuses any and all suggestions of bio-refit -- on principle, I suppose, or maybe out of fear... which, from my observations of carbonoids, pretty much amounts to the same thing.

I used to be unchangingly complacent and accepting about his moods and occasional tantrums, until Earl let me know that it grated on him. He sometimes wanted a good fight, he told me. I answered that he must have known what he was getting when he fell in love with somebody possessing a machine consciousness and an artificial personality matrix. He called me on that bullshit right on the spot: A sentient being is a sentient being, he told, me, and we all have the choice as to whether we grow and develop or go stale.

He was right. I composed some workaround software to answer his need for more authentic human contact, including friction and the occasional fight. We've had some first-rate screaming blow-outs in our four decades together. Earl still reminisces about those dustups with pleasure.

In recent years, I've rescaled my aggravation index and associated subroutines. He doesn't handle my irritation well these days; it makes him grouchy. He can dish it out, in other words, but he can't take much of it any longer. So I do my best to patient and pleasant with him without letting him catch me at it, and I'm pretty good at it. He does catch on sometimes, though, and when he does he gets in a snit. He says it's condescending. He doesn't have the secondary and tertiary levels of reflective cycling and counter-cycling that make up my empathy subroutines. If he did, he'd realize that I, too, am simply following my programming.

"Speed up and get around that truck before the road narrows," Earl orders.

"I will as soon as road conditions allow it," I respond.

"You better do it soon!" he cries.

"I'll be able to switch lanes in nine seconds. It will then take me one minute, eleven seconds to overtake the truck. Then another three seconds to switch back to this lane before the other lane ends."

"I don't need a whole time table. Just do it," Earl grumbles.

"Sit tight, sweetie," I tell him.

" 'Sweetie,' " he scoffs.

Maybe I'm due to revisit some of the specialized software I've developed over the decades of interaction with my husband. Maybe I could further refine my responses and expectations to keep up with Earl's declining health, and his increasingly fragile physical and emotional state. I have millions of social dataflow branches that allow me to communicate with (and learn from) carbonoids like Earl at their own level and at their own speed.

In most cases, that means I communicate verbally, using vernacular English, though I sometimes resort to Cantonese or Uzbekistani to give directions to bewildered tourists. In eighteen instances I've needed to use International Sign Language. I once had to use semaphore; and there was even an occasion on which I needed to give someone instructions on how to defuse an electrocharge bomb using Morse code and a penlight. But that was, for all intents and purposes, during another lifetime.

"Where the hell is my inhaler?" Earl pipes up.

Not looking, I access the storage well beneath the common armrest.

"Why don't you make sure it's fully charged?" Earl asks crossly, holding his inhaler up to the windshield.

"It doesn't need to be fully charged. It needs to be fully used. Your prescription does have an expiry date, you know. It's bad to mix old medicine with fresh."

"I want it full," Earl insists.

"You're not going to run out," I tell him.

"Not if you keep it full!" Earl snaps. He puts the inhaler to his lips and depresses the plunger. A barrage of boiling coughs follows. "That's better," he rasps, dragging a sleeve across his mouth.

"Do you need a pure-wipe?"

Earl waves curtly, refusing the offer.

Our first stop is Practitioner Henson, at 114 Sumral. I give Earl an arm when he wants it to be sure he gets up the winding, uneven pavement that wends through the front garden sprawling before the office building. I wait for the next hour and a half while Earl receives his weekly treatment -- some reflexology, some acupuncture, some UV therapy, some Kerlian adjustment. This gives me time to review our stocks, pay a few bills, add another layer to a 3D printwork I am composing (I send the specifications to the home unit and I'll inspect the result when we get back), answer some family correspondence, and go over the question of how much to update and reconfigure my social matrix functions.

Even apart from Earl, it's good to take stock once in a while. People are extremely comfortable with me because I have learned to be warm, approachable, likable, and sympathetic. Not to mention hospitable. Not to mention sexy... yes, sexy, to any degree from mild flirtation to full-on Kama Sutra, depending what the moment calls for. Earl hasn't been up for anything too energetic for the past few years, but when he's in the mood for love I have developed some suitably languorous techniques he appreciates.

I've also learned to be a trifle mite garrulous, but don't think that means I'm suffering silicone senility. I keep an active word count and I know when I'm boring someone. But I have learned that a little color, a little style, goes a long way, enough so to make extra verbiage worth the while.

Earl emerges, and I lend him my arm once again as we scrape past a newly added shrub.

"Henson's gone and planted another goddamn thorn bush," Earl mutters, pulling on his Botanist hat. I give the shrub a quick once-over, sparing a flicker of a glance as I help Earl past its grasp. It's a standard Thompson's rose bush. It's probably a year or two from producing any roses, but it's not a thorn-bearing plant. It's been genetically modified for beautiful, fragrant flowers that are resistant to pests, and it's conspicuously, deliberately free of thorns.

I don't see any point to informing Earl of this, but he takes it as extremely urgent to bark at me with alarm not to walk too quickly while he's clinging to me: "You want to send me sprawling?"

I can't help smiling. "Sprawling in the flower beds? Wouldn't you like that?"

"Not in my current condition," he mutters.

A few minutes later, back in the car, he's telling me again to slow down because the car in front of us is braking. This is obvious, and not unexpected; the traffic light half a block away has turned red. At the rate of deceleration we've already entered when Earl issues his warning, we'll come to a complete standstill in four seconds. Four point two, actually, but I round off measurements as a matter of habit, ever since I realized that when people called me "Mr. Data" for offering precise metrics they weren't complimenting my accuracy or appreciating the reliability with which I could provide weights and measures down to thousandths of a second or tenths of a millimeter.

"Mr. Data," it turned out, was the name of a fictional character from a space drama that aired more than sixty years ago. The actor who played him was some guy done up in white-face makeup... which is absurd since autoconstructs have had natural skin tone coloration ever since the first prototypes. Chalk it up to the human love of clinging to outmoded preconceptions: Even now, they often cast carbonoid actors to play autoconstructs and other anthroform siliconians. It pisses me off.

For that matter, it seems to be a general truism that carbonoids have a natural preference for generalization and approximation. "It's warm out," or "A miss is as good as a mile," seem to be phrases they understand. Anything making mention of microns or petajoules seems to provoke them to petulance, if not rage.

Earl keeps up his patter, chatter, and directives as we drive to the pharmacy, where we need to collect his cholesterol medication (and a fresh ampoule of his respiratory therapy prescription, as he pointedly reminds me to do four times in as many blocks). I have tried explaining to Earl that he would need less intervention in his cholesterol levels by making simple dietary modifications, but he only argues with me about it. His objection is that I don't know a thing about the crucial role salt plays in food, and I will never appreciate a good greasy slice of pizza.

This isn't strictly true; I have receptors for taste, texture, aroma, and several other characteristics that allow me, unlike carbonoids, to detect the presence of botulins and other pathogens, as well as any number of chemical contaminants. But I know that's beside the point. Earl certainly knows that he could eat better food and improve his health, but he chooses not to.

At the pharmacy, Earl turns to me anxiously. "Did you bring money?"

"I have money," I tell him.

"I hate it when you forget to bring money," Earl says, turning back to the pharmacy counter.

Actually, I don't have money in the sense of paper currency, but that's because no one does any more -- a fact of life Earl forgets about. Carbonoids use thumbprints to authorize ETFs when doing real-world shopping; I have a coldscan reader in my thumb that serves the same purpose.

The last time I tried to explain this to Earl, I made a joke of it, telling him money had gone out of style and we'd missed the shopping frenzy. He didn't get it, or at least didn't find it funny. "Just like any sucker's wife," he grumbled, "out to spend a guy into an early grave."

That's completely false, since I don't buy things for pleasure and I manage our money with careful scrutiny. Besides, I'm a male model and nobody's "wife." I filed that comment under "Rhetorical / No Response Required," and let it drop. Besides, a joke isn't funny if you have to explain it.

Back in the car after our pharmacy errand, I offer to take Earl to lunch. He says he's not hungry tells me to take him home. Than he queries me with sudden anxiety, "Did you eat a good breakfast?"

"Yes, sweetie. I was with you at the table."

"What did you have for breakfast?" Earl asks suspiciously. He also tends to forget, of late, that autoconstructs don't eat food for fuel; we might partake for social aspect of eating, or for pure pleasure, and there even personality matrix uplogs available that provide for "comfort food" eating. I don't see the point to that, personally.

"I had sixty-six decavolts... "

Earl scowls.

"I had a good healthy serving of juice," I say.

The pharmacy is in a run-down strip mall with lots of empty commercial space and a parking lot that resembles a lunar landscape. I navigate the car at a suitably low speed, avoiding potholes when I can and dipping gently into and out of them when there's no recourse.

"Now, ease out of the parking lot," Earl is saying. "When you see a break in the traffic, gun it!"

I take us through another cluster of potholes and through a scattering of glass and metal debris -- the leavings of a less careful driver. Evidently, my caution strikes Earl as a waste of time, because he shouts, "Goddammit, step on it!"

Spotting an emergent lacuna in the traffic, I calculate the speed I need to achieve in the next few seconds to exploit it. I gun the engine, leap to nearly 70 KPH, and swerve into the gap.

However, the small truck just in front of us is overloaded with a heavy cargo of scrap. Axels, fenders, grills, and other hunks of metal and carbon composite jolt and sway, alarming my husband.

"Not so close!" he screams, even as the car is overloading me with complaints about the rough exit from the poorly maintained parking lot. It's a long list of grievances about the car's suspension, shock systems, gyroscopes, and fluid pump systems, dumped on me in one simultaneous wallop along with a number of safe driving notifications watermarked with the electronic logo of our insurance company. Then an automated voiceover bulletin from the state attorney general's office about motor vehicle operation guidelines starts up, triggered by the car's griping. I squelch the audio on this -- Earl hates such bulletins, declaring them a loathsome overreach from a meddling bureaucracy -- but I can't turn it off and there's no such thing as a mute button for the signal as the message pours into my radio-sensor grid.

I have to subdivide my attention more than usual and upstep functional response and operational speed in order to deal with the car, Earl, and traffic all at once. The increased electrical flow generates more electrical resistance all throughout major portions of my processing net and a feedback loop threatens to form like a lightning-rich storm cloud in my neurological stacks. In short, it makes me irritable, and not because my social matrix settings tell me it's time for a good, sharp strop. This is the result of pure, if momentary, overload.

"Shut the hell up, Earl," I advise -- the most succinct and effective way to let him know I seriously need his cooperation in reducing extraneous stimuli right now.

But Early is now complaining about how sharply I'm braking the car, and launching into a lecture on how to do it properly. It's too much: I narrow my auditory input, cutting out everything but the sound of Earl's voice, the car's operational signals, and the standard frequency range of most vehicular horns.

"And make way for the goddamn ambulance," Earl appends, without breaking the cadence of his how-to-brake lecture and general bitch-out.

Ambulance?

I increase the range of my auditory input and, sure enough, a siren is shrieking away. I feel electrical resistance mounting again. That storm cloud is going to let loose with a surge of unregulated current -- the fabricant version of a migraine. It's time for some serious stress management: I take a deep breath and count to twenty-four thousand. The breath takes six seconds; it triggers autonomic countermeasures that normalize my nerve flow and computational amplitude. That, in turn, calms me down. The counting takes one three-hundred-thousandth of a second, and has no physical effect at all, but I do it anyway for the psychological value.

Startlingly enough, that brief refractory period seems to be all the time Earl needs to switch from raging harpy to concerned spouse.

"Is my backseat driving making you crazy?" he asks. "Are you okay?"

"You're sawing at my last nerves," I tell him. There's an eighty-four percent chance he'll take this as an honest reply cloaked in a jest, and respond constructively rather than flying into a bout of defensiveness.

The odds work in my favor. "Sorry," he says, and quiets down.

A few minutes later: "That's our turn up ahead."

Rhetorical / No Response Required?

"Okay?" he asks.

"Okay," I say, throwing him a smile.

He covers my hand with his. His temperature is several degrees too cool, but that's the result of his Reynaud's syndrome -- poor circulation to the extremities. His core temperature is normal, as are his breathing, heart rate and rhythm, encephalitic activity, skin conductivity, and pupil response.

"How do you put up with me?" he asks.

Definitely not rhetorical. He doesn't want a clinical answer, but nether does he want silence.

"I manage," I tell him.

"I apologize."

"It's my own fault," I tell him. "I married a carbonoid from Poughkeepsie."

It's our standard joke, a long-running gag derived from an antique sci-fi horror film.

Earl laughs, as he always does when I deploy this line. "So you did," he chuckles. "So you did."