Jenga!

[c_macaulay]

Bored to tears, Camilla had gone rummaging in the gift shop to find a game to play. She'd played so much solitaire she was beginning to develop an irrational dislike of some of the face cards. It was there that Mr. Wednesday found her again

Comments

[c_macaulay]

"The first bit's from Pinocchio, yes. But I know that poem," Camilla objected. "It's got nothing to do with the Blue Fairy, or with turning dolls into humans. It's quite the opposite -- it's by Yeats, it's a Celtic thing, and the gist of it is that they're trying to get a human to join the fairies. To join the fairy world. And those last two lines you said, 'The quest will be perilous / Yet the reward is beyond price', those aren't part of the poem at all."

Wednesday shook his head. "You could be talking about any number of wood nymphs, and none of them have a power like you've described. More like than not it's a ruse to lure the subject into drowning. Water spirits feed on that kind of thing." The comment lacked any judgement, either against the nymph or its prey; utterly neutral, matter-of-fact, this is the way the world is and has always been.

[callmewednesday]

There hadn't exactly been a rebellion. What the machine-gods thought they were doing was a long cry from what had actually been going on. But Wednesday wasn't about to go into the details of that little story with anyone here. Wouldn't it be fine if, one day, Mister World showed up in the terminal?

"I wouldn't say fondness is a concept that applies, nor its opposite. I'm what you might call old-school. Don't mistake me, I do appreciate modern conveniences." Outhouses were not a thing Wednesday cared to revisit unless necessary.

[cuppa_mecha]

"Well," the mecha said politely and with a hint of a smile, "I surely hope this won't affect our relationship. I am...an epitome of modern convenience, you could say. Though Camilla has been determined to drive me from this way of thinking."

Though he didn't say it with annoyance, it had admittedly been difficult for Joe to keep track of what he was or wasn't with Camilla around. Being free required much more work than it should have.

[callmewednesday]

"Camilla. She's an unusual woman, isn't she?" And that was a dynamic that very much interested Wednesday. She didn't seem at all the type to avail herself of the sort of commodity Joe considered himself to be; and if she were, she wouldn't be trying, as Joe said, to convince him he were otherwise.

Wednesday's eyes (eye, really, but the glass eye could track properly, under the membrane) wandered speculatively in the direction Camilla had gone.

[cuppa_mecha]

"Yes, she is." Joe replied.

This seemed obvious to him. It was obvious to Camilla as well. She knew she was gorgeous and unique. To Joe, this was a departure from the forlorn housewife who didn't feel she was deserved to be love by anyone but a robot. Thus, Joe didn't have any duty to Camilla. There was nothing he could offer the woman that she couldn't already provide for herself.

At this, Joe wondered why they'd even had as much relation as they did in that laundry room. Did Camilla desire to give him something? Why? Discretion more than hinted at by Camilla, Joe was not going to bring up the incident in their conversation.

[callmewednesday]

Aha. Limited output, answering specific questions, not elaborating. Wednesday understood he'd need to elicit detailed responses. "Are you a good friend of hers? Known each other long?" There'd been that odd contact, his hand on hers. Wednesday wasn't jealous, exactly, but he was damned curious, and if the machine had had some measure of success, he'd like to know the secret to it.

[cuppa_mecha]

He tilted his head at this. Friends? They'd shared conversation but Joe had no idea as to the extent of their relationship further than sex and Camilla's interest in his freedom.

"We are...acquaintances," he said, safely. "It hasn't been very long since we met but we've had very in depth conversations." Again, this was a safe answer, nothing given away that Camilla wouldn't have wanted given away.

"What about you? Are you and Camilla good friends?" He leaned on the table gracefully, careful of the still standing tower. Propping his head on his hand needlessly, he waited for Wednesday to answer taking time to admire the man's attire in his periphery.

[callmewednesday]

"I'd like to get to know her better," Wednesday answered thoughtfully. The Jenga tower ought to have said it for him, really. "She reminds me of the women I knew when I was younger. They don't make 'em like that nowadays, do they?" He chuckled. "Figure of speech." He didn't intend the mecha to take that remark about manufacture literally.

[cuppa_mecha]

"Mmm, they don't," Joe agreed. He recognized the figure of speech well. He was programmed for extensive conversation and so any cliché or common comment was more than understood

[callmewednesday]

A robot giving a god advice on women -- it was almost too rich. Wednesday would have laughed, except that it wouldn't have served his purposes, and besides, the robot might actually be able to tell him something about Camilla he didn't have another way of knowing.

"Well spoken," he told Joe. "I must congratulate you on your success. She's never gone so far as to confide such a thing in me. How did that come about, her telling you she knew she was beautiful?"

[cuppa_mecha]

"Oh, it wasn't very hard to figure out, Mr. Wednesday. Can you not see her face everytime someone compliments her? It's gracious, surely, but with the graciousness of someone telling her the answer to a simple mathematical problem she already knows. A thank you for telling me and perhaps you can share with me how to breathe oxygen next. But very graciously. And how she walks is like no other. It's humble and confident at the same time. Well, it isn't so much humble as it is slight. Delicate. I am a top of the line model, Mr. Wednesday. Nuances of human, especially female, nature are ingrained in who I am."

Joe took but a moment to pause before he thought of something else. "But don't let her interest in me deflect you. I assure you that I am purely intriguing to her. I don't hold any hopes of anything more. She doesn't need me. You'll be hard-pressed to find what she does, indeed, need."

He offered as smile.

[callmewednesday]

Wednesday did not snort at that profession of self-assurance. His attention had been caught by something else. "Not hard to deduce, no, but you didn't say you'd deduced it yourself. You said she'd admitted it to you. That's what interests me."

[cuppa_mecha]

"I had told her she was beautiful and that she knew it. And she asked me if it bothered me. She said it was refreshing that I wasn't bothered by her admission. I can't be intimidated by a woman. Perhaps she was impressed with this. I'm also not a real man, though she would argue, but it might still play a role in women also not being intimidated by me.

"I was actually excited by her assuredness in herself," he said as an afterthought. He smiled. "But that was--" he nearly said before he was broken but then he would have had to explain the laundry room scene so he easily diverted the sentence "--the old me. Programs have since...evolved to the current situation."

Joe was apparently learning how to mislead. He was just tiptoeing on a lie.

[callmewednesday]

While Wednesday was pretty sure Joe knew something he wasn't telling, his curiosity had been diverted into a new stream altogether by that last remark.

"The old you, was it? So there's a new you now. How'd that happen?"

[cuppa_mecha]

"I was framed for murder and I made myself new because I had too. And then I met David and I was new again because he saved my brains from destruction. After we met Dr. Know he saved me once more by amphibicopter. And after the last time I was saved mysteriously from my brain being destroyed I was made new again by being brought to this place. There's no position for a lover mecha in the airport. Now I can say that any imperatives of my programming have been pushed to such strain that they are no longer valid. I'm free," he said dispassionately. "Whatever that means."

He laughed.

[callmewednesday]

"That's a lot of luck you've used up," Wednesday noted. "Some people have it and some people don't. You are correct in your assessment that our little microcosm of society here has no apparent need for a 'lover mecha'. Could it be so simple as that? Your niche disappeared and you saw the need to reinvent yourself?"

It hadn't worked that way for the gods. Oh, they had to adapt, adapt or die. What happened to Thor -- what Thor had done to himself -- still stuck in Wednesday's craw. But at their heart, at the rocky core of themselves, they couldn't stop being what they were. What they'd always been.