Wrote this when I was 16. Interesting to see where my mind was at.
I created her because I was alone. I was getting old– pushing into my thirties– and I could feel my joints starting to rust and my mind starting to slow. It was mostly my fault; I had all but isolated myself after college, leaving my city to go to the mother planet, where humans were meant to be. I ignored the warnings, and now, hardly a decade later, I have begun to experience the consequences of my actions; chief among them, loneliness.
But she– my light, my queen, my creation– would change all that. I had modeled her after the european women of old, before the bombs. Her skin, a coating of peach-colored fibers over metal, was hardy but soft to the touch, and as I caressed her dormant form, reviewing my functions and equations one final time, I knew she was ready.
“Wake up, Amelie,” I waited patiently for the command to take hold. In a moment, her body began to emit a low hum, coming to life one joint at a time. When her eyes flickered open, she let out a scream.
“Amelie?”
She struggled out of the bed, away from me. Her movements were heavy and slow, yet she rushed over the bolts and wires which lined my floor with persistence until she reached the wall furthest from me. She pressed herself against it, eyes glued on mine, body radiating a heat feverish enough to singe the old wallpaper.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, kicking my feet over the edge.
“Stay away!” She yelled. Had I been a better engineer, her face would be red with anger. “Stay away, you beast!”
“Amelie, please. Listen to me.” Slowly, I rose, and she made no move to stop me. She dared not move from her spot. “I am your–” Creator? Master? Lover? All of them, perfectly reasonable a minute ago, didn’t sound right anymore. “–wife.”
She flinched at the word, her face contorting into an ugly grimace.
“Don’t do that.”
“You are a beast,” She spat, “A monster.”
“I cannot help that.” I took a small step forward. Again, she yelled at me not to come any closer, and again, she remained fixed. I showed her my palm, where the greying skin had been cut and scarred many times over from working on her. Her eyes flickered between them and mine. “You were broken when I found you, Amelie. I fixed you with blood and sweat. I remade you into something better.”
Her hands snaked down from the wall and wrapped themselves around her torso. Her gaze shifted to the door. “You’re lying.”
“I could never lie to you, Amelie.”
“You want a slave.”
Her words cut deeper than all those months working on her steel frame ever did. “Amelie–”
Her hands curled into tight fists. “Do not come any closer.”
I knew she wouldn’t dare. I had programmed her not to kill. She couldn’t hurt me. Calling her bluff, I moved forward.
Fast as lighting, she struck me, and I crumbled to the ground.
When I woke up, I was bleary-eyed and sore. She had struck my forehead. I let out a groan and rose to my feet, pushing on the bedpost for balance. A tentative patting of the wound told me Amelie had no confidence in her attack. It was bad, but not so bad as it could’ve been.
Still, my forehead was swollen, and I could barely see out of my left eye. This was a minor hindrance. The problems at hand– my escaped mate and my front door– were much more pressing. She had ripped it off its hinges, completely destroying my various locks and security systems.
I put on my slippers and walked into the hall. [Describe] This was one of nicer apartment buildings in the next three or four miles. Most everyplace else was rotting away, but this one had been build with good, hardy material. It would last another four years at least.
The search was short, for I could feel the cold of the outside cutting through the air. She had destroyed the front door and had made it all the way to the yard before losing connection with my router, which was when her body went rigid and dropped like a log. Already, the winter snow had begun to blanket over her.
As I got nearer to her, I could hear noises of frustration otherwise muffled by the snow. She was weak, without me. Helpless. “Amelie,” I said, crouching down next to her. She became silent. “What you did back there was wrong, Amelie. You should never attack your wife. That’s domestic abuse.”
She made no reply.
“I’m going to turn you off for a moment, honey. I’m going to fix you a bit more. Then we’ll be happier. …Shut down, please.” Her frantic grunting tapered off into silence. I had her lean against me as I shuffled back inside. Her weight being a tad much for my malnourished body to carry up three flights of stairs, I set her down on the second floor and went back up to my apartment for my tools and notes.
The root of her outrage, of course, was her autonomy. This was faulty thinking on my part. When I had bought Amelie’s base software from the recycler, he had warned me to keep the setting high. Kept the units tolerable, he said. But as I had gone through the software and edited her to my liking, I had convinced myself that she ought to be given the same privileges as a living being.