Adventures of the Artificial Woman; A Novel

by Thomas Berger

• ISBN13: 9780743257404
• ISBN10: 0743257405
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-27
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

Fed up with the sarcastic, opinionated, and disrespectful women he comes across, Ellery Pierce decides his only choice is to build the perfect woman. A technician at an animatronics firm, Ellery has the experience and tools ready at his fingertips. Aft

Author Biography

Thomas Berger is the author of twenty-three novels. His previous novels include Best Friends, Meeting Evil, and The Feud, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His Little Big Man is known throughout the world.

Excerpts

Chapter One Never having found a real woman with whom he could sustain a more than temporary connection, Ellery Pierce, a technician at a firm that made animatronic creatures for movie studios and theme parks, decided to fabricate one from scratch.The artificial woman would naturally be able to perform every function, but sex was the least of what Pierce looked for in his made-to-order model. He had never had undue difficulty in finding live females to satisfy his erotic appetites. He was witty, considerate, and instinctively affectionate. Physically he was trim and fit, curly haired, clear-eyed; in his smile generosity and impudence were combined with a hint of reproach. The reproach was for the many women he had known who, having soon exhausted an early attraction, on longer acquaintance found him wanting.For years he had made a sincere effort to determine the reason for this state of affairs and, if the fault proved his own, to seek a personal change. But the fact was that no matter how hard he tried, he could not honestly blame himself. Obviously he bore no responsibility for having been reared by a single mother who adored and spoiled her only child, a child who was therefore led to expect much the same treatment from the other examples of the female sex he would encounter after leaving the nest.In which expectation he was proven wrong rather sooner than later. There were some women who immediately disliked or were indifferent to him, but they were easier to deal with than those who at the outset seemed to regard meeting him as at least a positive experience and sometimes even life-enhancing, to the degree that they might subsequently insist they were in love. In such cases he often responded in kind, and by the time he was thirty-three he had lived, respectively, with three such persons and had been married to two of them. Each of these associations had come to an unhappy end, and though he was first to admit to being imperfect, he believed his only major flaw was an inability to choose the right partner.It took forever to dawn on him that, anyway in his case, there were no right ones. Eventually the most amiable would turn sarcastic, make aspersions on his tastes, oppose his opinions, disrespect his judgments, and in general be an adversary instead of an ally. No doubt some men did not mind that sort of thing or, more likely, felt they had no alternative to making the best of the situation, but Pierce was not of their company. He suspected the solution might well be not, so to speak, human but rather technological.The materials by which artificial creatures could be made were available at his place of work, where one of the current projects was the construction of animatronic orangutans for a movie to be set in Borneo. Real animals would be used extensively in the picture, but however well trained, they were not altogether reliable in certain stunts involving actors. With their natural reluctance (though not, in apes, an inability) to distinguish make-believe from reality, live orangutans were, in the violent scenes, capable of mistaking the man who played the villain as the genuine article, maiming him if not worse. Pierce's special-effects company could produce imitation orangs so lifelike as to fool their living counterparts at as close as twenty paces, and who knows how far they might have gone had a female animatron been supplied with a sex organ sprayed with the scent from a real animal in heat?The firm had less experience with the simulation of human beings. In the movies robots and of course "cyborgs" are depicted by actors made up to resemble automata, not the other way around. In theme-park exhibits the animated mannequins make only limited, prescribed movements, and their voices, if any, are those of amplified electronic sound systems. To fabricate a woman who could be put to all the uses of a real one, and fool everyone but her creator, Pierce had his wor