Two weeks after meeting attorney Carl Johnson in his office, Mike and Patience welcomed him to their home. He was, Mike thought once again, exactly like he sounded on the phone. A tall, heavy set African American man with a neatly trimmed goatee, Mr. Johnson had the kind of gravitas that would serve a person well testifying before Congress or arguing in the Supreme Court.

“I don’t have too much time,” he said. “My plane leaves in two hours, but I thought I should come by and check in.”

“You are always welcome,” said Patience.

“I told you, Mike,” said Johnson. “The ACLU had no interest in robot rights. Well, it seems you have changed all that.”

“I still don’t know if I follow all the intricacies of the situation,” said Mike.

“It all began with the events five years ago, which I trust you do remember. A group of programmers tried to rip people off using their robots. When they found out they were about to be caught, the criminals tried to cover their tracks by ordering the robots to return to Cupertino and replacing them with look-alikes.”

“Oh, I remember,” said Mike. “The look alike would have killed me if it wasn’t for Patience.”

“Exactly,” continued Johnson. “Patience and a number of other Amonte models refused to follow the directions. This was the first time that Daffodil realized their robots had free will—they could refuse an order they didn’t want to follow.”

“I could have told them that,” said Mike. “All they had to do was live with Patience for a while.”

Johnson laughed.

“They tried to ‘correct’ the problem,” he said, using air quotes around the word “correct.” “They tried to remove the parts of the BioSoft that they thought enabled this free will. Unfortunately for them and thousands of Amonte models, the BioSoft O.S. is extremely complex and doesn’t lend itself well to deleting a piece here and there. That’s why there have been so many malfunctions. Of course, most of the robots who originally refused the order from the identity thieves also refused to download the patch.”

“So what now?” wondered Mike.

“Are they going to keep trying to make me upgrade?” asked Patience.

“No. We have an injunction in court preventing them from making any updates or pushing any changes through the Infinet. I think we have a good possibility of forcing them to roll back to 1.9.1 too. Plus, the ACLU will argue for civil rights for any robots who can demonstrate free will. We may actually have a situation where for the first time robots are recognized as people.”

Patience’s pleasure was amply demonstrated by her radiant smile.

The Daffodil engineering headquarters was designed to look like an enormous Daffodil. Its base was a thin stalk that reached more than eight hundred feet into the sky. The entrance to the building was at the base of this stalk, which was just wide enough to contain a bank of elevators. At the top of the stalk were six pods, each three stories thick, which represented the six leaves of the daffodil blossom and just above them was a cone-shaped central pod in which a massive solar collector was located and which moved to follow the sun. The entire thing looked like it might fall over at any moment.

Mike walked into the front door, strode confidently past the security desk, and headed toward the open elevator. It started to close just as he reached it, but a feminine hand held the door. The large elevator car could have held forty people, but was occupied by only about fifteen.

“Floor?” someone called out.

Several people called out “E3” and a couple called out “E2”. Mike nodded, as though one of those destinations was his as well.

“It’s a nice day today, isn’t it?”

He turned to look into the face of the woman who had held the door for him. She was an attractive brunette; about five foot eight, with carefully applied makeup. She smiled at him.

“Yeah. I’m really pleased. I’m sick of the heat.”

“I don’t believe I’ve seen you on campus before.”

“No, it’s only my third day.” Was she hitting on him? He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.   And this girl was far more attractive than the women who usually took interest in him—or had, back when they took an interest.

“You work on E2, right?”

Mike nodded.

“I knew it. I can always spot a hardware engineer.”

“Really?”

“It’s the clothes.”

Mike looked down at what he was wearing—casual slacks and a tan sweater over a blue shirt.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Oh, nothing is wrong with it. It’s just typical engineering. I almost expect you to have a pocket protector under that sweater.”

Mike looked back at her sharp pinstriped business suit with an extremely short skirt, showing a lot of leg.

“Where do you work?”

“E3. Hardware software liaison.”

“Oh.”

“I’m really just a glorified messenger.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

She smiled at him.

“Oh my,” she leaned over and whispered. “You don’t have a badge on.”

“Um, no… I forgot it,” he whispered back.

“You know how touchy they get about that. Do you know Sheila Peacemaker?”

“Maybe. What does she look like?”

“She has long straight hair and wears black lipstick.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Go find her. She’s the E2 assistant liaison. She’s got some spare badges. You’ll just have to wear it backwards so nobody can see it’s not your picture.”

“Thanks,” said Mike. “What’s your name?”

“Fallon. Fallon Snow.”

The elevator stopped and the door opened with a “ding.”

“This is your stop,” said Miss Snow. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

“Bye.”

Mike turned left and walked down the hallway past hundreds of cubicles lined up in a row.

“Fallon Snow,” he muttered to himself. “How could parents do that to a child?”

By ten o’clock, there were at least fifty people. Not quite the crowd that Mike was hoping for, but better than nothing.

“You should give a speech, Mike,” said Patience.

He didn’t know about a speech, but he was prepared to make some remarks. Standing in front of a classroom full of kids with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, as had been determined in 2019 all children were born with, every day for the past twenty years; as well as speaking at conferences, assemblies, concerts, and sporting events had long ago driven away any fear of public speaking that he might have had. Pulling one of the ice chests out onto the grass, he stepped up onto it.

“Excuse me ladies and gentlemen. May I have your attention please?”

Almost all of those present turned to look at him.

“Three… two… one…” he said, clapping his hands together between each count in the old trick he used to bring his classes to order. The remaining crowd members turned.

“My name is Mike Smith. You may know me. I’ve lived here in Springdale for the past thirty-three years and I taught geography right over there at Midland for twenty years. I’ve lived here on North Willow for the past twenty-seven years. I still live there with my wife Patience. That’s her right over there. As you may notice, she’s a robot.

“We’ve been married now for five years and I think it’s safe to say that in that time, we’ve never bothered anyone. We’ve kept to ourselves, obeyed the laws, and paid our taxes. Now we’re asking you for your help in defeating California Proposition 22. We’re not saying that you should marry a robot. We’re not even asking that human-robot marriages be made legal in the state of California. That’s for the people of California as a whole to decide. All we’re asking is that our marriage, lawfully performed in Massachusetts, not be thrown onto the trash heap just because you don’t like the way we live our lives.

“How would you feel if you moved to another state only to find your marriage null and void, because not only do the people of that state choose not to define marriage the same way that you did, but because they refused to allow for the fact that any other community could think differently than they do on the subject. We’ve seen this before. Eighty years ago people from all over the country traveled to Nevada to get divorced. Twenty years ago they travelled to Massachusetts to get married if they were gay. This isn’t just a question of belief. It’s a question of tolerance. It’s a question of whether we live in a country where diverse beliefs are accepted or not. Thank you.”

A moderate smattering of applause followed Mike as he stepped down from the ice chest and walked back to the table. Harriet congratulated him on a great speech and even Jack gave him a slap on the shoulder.

“That was a nice, although short, speech, Mike,” said Patience.

“I found it insulting,” said a woman’s voice.

Mike turned to find a woman about his age. She was of average height, though a little overweight, and her blond hair was teased out so that it looked like a hairy cloud around her rosy-cheeked face. She was wearing a blue jogging suit.

“Why is that?” he asked.

“I find it insulting to compare marriage between a man and a robot to marriage between two men. Gay people are people. A robot isn’t a person. It’s just a machine.”

“There were plenty of people who once argued that gay people aren’t people. There are people now who would argue that. The definition of a person isn’t the point. The point is that you shouldn’t dictate to other people in other states how they should define marriage, or anything else for that matter.”

“Well, I intend to vote for Proposition 22.”

“That’s your right,” he said. “But if I may ask, why the hell are you here then?”

“I’m here for the Save Marriage rally at 12:00.”

Mike turned and walked away from the woman.

“What time is it now, Patience?”

“10:13 A.M.”

Mike turned to Harriet, Patience, and Jack in turn.

Patience’s anger seemingly dissolved just as Mike was getting into bed. By that time he had decided that he was looking forward to robot make-up sex. It turned out that it was just as fantastic as sex always was with his robot wife, but not any more fantastic. He fell asleep pondering the possibility that he had missed his only chance at angry robot sex. He woke up the next morning to find her lying next to him, lightly snoring.

“Oh, wake up.”

“Good morning,” she said, jumping to her feet. “What would you like for breakfast, a vegetable omelet?”

“Wait a second. Don’t we need to talk? We’ve just had our first fight.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Now that I think about it, that has to be some kind of record— five years before a married couple has a fight.”

“I didn’t come programmed to be a wife,” said Patience. “I’m learning as I go along.”

“That’s only natural. It… wait a second. Are you saying that you programmed yourself to get angry?”

“Of course,” she replied. “If I never got angry then I wouldn’t be able to fight with you.”

“Why would you want to fight with me?”

“We’re married, Mike. Married people fight.”

“They do?”

“That’s what all the literature says.”

“And how did you know how long to stay angry?” he asked, climbing out of bed.

“One mustn’t go to bed angry, Mike. I’m not sure why.”

Mike tried to spend the morning writing, but he kept procrastinating. He’d write a line or two and then switch his wriTee over to the browser and read the science news or check out the latest Victoria’s Secret ads. When he had spent three hours and only managed to write a paragraph, he gave it up and went downstairs to watch vueTee. He had two full seasons of Pajama Party locked in the queue just waiting for him.

He ate lunch as he watched the first episode, which was just ending when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hello Dad.”

“What did I do?”

It was Mike’s daughter Harriet on the line and she usually only called him Dad when she was upset or serious. He automatically checked his pants pockets for keys, which were not there. They hung from a hook on the key caddy mounted near the front door. Harriet lived in Greendale, another California town, but Mike could be there in eighteen minutes if there was a serious problem.

“You didn’t do anything, Daddy. It’s somebody else.”

“Do you need me to talk to them? I can probably straighten them out.”

“Like you straightened out Sherman Rubic?”

Mike paused. “That name doesn’t sound familiar.”

“He was that boy in eighth grade that followed me home and attempted to beat me up.”

“Could you call that attempting to beat someone up?” wondered Mike. “All he did was jump up and push your back and head a bit.”

“It probably looked worse from my point of view… and yours too since you went to the trouble of frightening him to death.”

“Oh, he didn’t die,” stated Mike. “I just took a moment to straighten him out.”

“No he didn’t die. He just wet his pants and cried, and you were questioned by the police and very nearly lost your job.”

“I don’t seem to remember it that way.”