His Robot Girlfriend by Wesley Allison

the
outside. We can stay in. You don’t even need to go out of your room
to go swimming.”
    Mike fell asleep entwined with Patience, but
he woke up alone. He got up, shaved, and showered, and was met at
the bathroom door, as he expected, by his beautiful robot, toast
and juice in hand, and a towel, warm from the drier, over her arm.
He ate and got dressed and found Patience once again in the living
room. She had already prepared the house for their four day
absence, and packed the car with everything they needed. She had
also driven to the filling station, fueled up the car, and checked
all the fluids and systems. Mike put his hands on Patience’s
shoulders and looked into her eyes. He kissed her gently on the
lips.
    “ I am still unsure why you
wish to go to Las Vegas,” said Patience.
    “ There are a lot of things
to see there, you know.”
    “ Yes, I know. They have
casinos, an indoor amusement park, a water park, a museum devoted
to Liberace…”
    “ And the all new Star Trek
Experience,” said Mike.
    “ The Star Trek Experience
at the Las Vegas Hilton was closed almost twenty four years ago.
That hotel isn’t even there now.”
    “ They’ve built a new one,”
explained Mike. “A new Star Trek, not a new Hilton. It’s part of
the remodeling of the Tangiers. I can’t believe you didn’t know
that.”
    “ I can’t believe it
either,” said Patience.
    I-15 was a long road through the desert. It
wouldn’t be fair to call it a lonely road, because it was almost as
packed with cars as any single section of the Los Angeles freeway.
It zoomed down one long, slow incline to the desert floor and then
zoomed up one long, slow climb to cross the mountains, only to do
the same thing again on the other side. And again. And again. The
highway was so busy that there was a great deal of concentration
involved in negotiating one’s path through the slower vehicles.
That so many California drivers apparently did not understand that
the left lane was supposed to be for passing only made it more so.
By the time they had reached Barstow, Mike wished that they had
booked passage on the mag-lev train that ran along beside the
highway.
    Mike drove with his left hand on the steering
wheel and his right hand resting on the back of Patience’s neck.
She was reading “Fodor’s Guide to Having Fun in Las Vegas ’32
Edition”, at a rate of about a seven pages per minute, which meant
that she was studying it quite carefully. Mike was amused, watching
her flip through the screens of her texTee, because he had never
seen her read a book before, what with her having been apparently
imbued with a seemingly endless store of information about every
topic which she had approached. Whoever supplied that information,
apparently hadn’t anticipated a trip to Vegas. Patience was more
than capable of filling that void herself though.
    Mike stopped to fill the tank in Baker.
Nearby were half a dozen fast food restaurants, so he steered into
the drive-through of Arby’s and purchased a Western Garden Salad
and a diet Pepsi for himself, and a bottle of water for Patience.
She quickly drank her water, then knelt sideways on the seat, and
fed him his salad as he continued on to Vegas. She carefully
inserted a fork full of lettuce, tomato, chicken, or apples each
time he opened his mouth, with a large beautiful smile each time
she managed to get it in without vinaigrette running down his chin,
and a cute little pout when she didn’t.
    It was 3:30 in the afternoon when they topped
the final hill and looked down over the vast stretches of Las Vegas
below. It wasn’t so much that it was a huge city, though it was
much larger than it had been when Mike was there last. It was that
you could see the whole thing at once, which was true of so very
few cities. It seemed like quite a drive down the hill and into the
valley, because Mike could drive the entire distance and never lose
sight of his destination, but it actually only took about