"To the mall?" Tanya repeated. "Absolutely. You need a wardrobe. The mall here is okay, but there's a better one about an hour away, twice as big."
"Oh, yes, please!" Emel enthused. "After you." She gestured towards the bathroom door.
"Let's just go in together," Tanya suggested.
"In that case I'll help you get really clean," Emel said, scanning the bottles arrayed on the shelf in the shower. "Do you have any more body wash anywhere here? The bottle in there is almost empty."
"Yeah, should be in here," Tanya searched a closet, withdrawing a clear bottle with a square bottom tapering to a smaller round top and some unpronouncable French label.
"Ooh, that's expensive," Emel commented, peering over Tanya's shoulder.
"Well, I'm not exactly poor here. All the same, I would kind of like to stick to a spending limit for the day," Tanya warned, taking the bottle to the shower.
"How much?" Emel asked, following Tanya in.
"Oh, how about five hundred dollars..." Tanya began.
A slight disappointment crossed Emel's face. She had no exact knowledge of Tanya's wealth, but Emel knew how much she herself cost, and was able to make a ballpark estimate of the house's value. Five hundred seemed a little low for what Emel thought was going to be an all-out full new wardrobe shopping spree.
"...per store," Tanya finished. "Ha, thought I was being cheap, did you?"
"Just for a second," Emel admitted.
"How long exactly?" Tanya pressed.
"1.42 seconds," Emel answered.
"There you go. You don't have to hide what you are from me," Tanya chided, turning on the water.
"And what am I?" Emel asked.
"A calculator," Tanya said, squeezing some soap onto a sponge and lathering it up. "A very, very beautiful calculator."
"I'm a little more than just a calculator," Emel said, taking the sponge and working it into Tanya's back.
"I never said you were just a calculator. You're a person who is several things at once, with the capacity to become a bunch more. But if I wanted to ask you the natural logarithm of one thousand..."
"Six point nine zero eight," Emel replied.
"Why only three decimal places?" Tanya wondered.
"Because I felt like it," Emel answered, mashing her luscious bosom into Tanya's back as she scrubbed her owner's butt and thighs. "Do you seriously want me to babble about everything to twenty decimal places? I mean, I certainly can,, but I think you would find it annoying."
"And that is what reminds me that you're not just a machine," Tanya said, turning around. "I keep thinking about those two at the lab, Jim and Sharon. I can tell from looking at them, that's true love, if they're still looking at each other like that after a few years. And if she really thought she was human for the first thirty years of her life, then..."
"Yes?" Emel asked, drawing closer.
"Then, seeing that you're even more advanced than her, there's no reason that can't happen to us." Tanya pulled Emel in for a passionate kiss.
"If this keeps going, when the eighteen months are up..." Emel thought aloud.
"What?"
"I might not notice anything happening at all," she finished, a huge smile on her face.
Tanya thought about that for a moment. "If we don't get clean we'll never make it out to go shopping."
Several minutes later Tanya and Emel emerged from the shower and dried off.
Emel began putting on the T-shirt and jeans she had worn yesterday. Though she was a machine, her advanced cooling systems included the ability to sweat, releasing a small amount of her water-based coolant through her skin pores. It would begin to smell a bit funny if Emel wore the same clothes for long, but so far the odor was barely noticeable. The outfit she had would do fine until she got done shopping.
Tanya threw on a clean pair of shorts and a T-shirt of her own, scarfed down a bagel, and soon they were on their way to the next town, approaching the mall.
Emel insisted she wasn't really going to be hungry until at least lunchtime.
Eventually, they made it to the mall and entered.
Thu Aug 13 02:02:14 2009