She was an android. Her name was Judy. A pretty name, if you ask
me.
Judy did what she does best. She showed me a good time. I said that
outer space feels like nothin', but there's nothin' like sipping
vodka-on-the-rocks while you watch the storms passing on Jupiter.
It should've felt cold, on that moon, behind that giant planet, but
it didn't. It felt hot as hell.
The rocks in the vodka-on-rocks had come from the ground beneath
the resort. Endless mines of ice. The finest ice in the solar
system they said. Tasted that way.
Judy got to telling me about her husband. Turned out he designed
and built her. The guy had impeccable taste, I'll give him that. I
asked her how it was that she was spending the evening with me if
she had a husband waiting at home for her. Her eyes turned dark,
darker than the shadow Jupiter cast on both of us. She told me she
hated the guy, practically spat it at me.
I asked her how she could hate someone who had made her, brought
her into existence. Her eyes turned light again and she smiled. She
told me she didn't think much of existence, especially on an icy
moon like this. I looked around. The moon wasn't too bad. Or, at
least, the resort wasn't. It was a gigantic enclosure. Air-tight.
Sure, most of the scenery was generated by holograms, but on the
whole it wasn't a bad place to live. As I said, it wasn't much
different from the resorts back on Earth. I kinda liked it. In
those days, at least. I told her as much. She just stared into her
drink.
Then, she said something that surprised me. She told me that her
husband had programmed her to fall in love easily. He wasn't much
to look at she said, and wasn't much in the personality department
either. So, he set her eros-centres as high as they could go. Made
sure she would feel something genuine toward him.
The problem was that on a tourist-resort like this the plan was
always going to backfire. A steady influx of travellers from all
over gave her plenty of distractions. She had loved hundreds, she
told me. Gradually, her love for her husband drained away with each
passing stranger she met. There was nothing left for him. Nothing
much for her either. Endless love-affairs and plenty of ice. I
suppose she just got tired of it all.
The next night, we met again. And the night after that too.
On the third night, I asked her if she had fallen in love with me
yet. I said it in a joking way, but she took it seriously. She
paused for a moment and I felt like I could see the parts moving
behind her eyes. Cold, mechanical parts.
She told me she loved me more than anyone she ever met.
