“As you wish. But I’m glad that you decided to keep it all hidden. I wouldn’t want my guests to know that they could be gassed, lasered, or shot dead at any time, at the option of my household computer.”
The walls and ceilings of the entrance drive were ornately carved, and the beautifully tiled floors were underlaid with a magnetic layer, so that the tanks didn’t have to set a tread on them.
One long wall had a fifty-meter-deep trench running along it, with a MagLev track running along the bottom.
“That track doesn’t go anywhere,” Agnieshka said. “It’s just there to conceal the fact that this is really a moat.”
A drawbridge that I hadn’t seen even with the tank’s sensors came down from the wall across the moat, and we floated over it.
My garage was big enough to store fifty tanks in full battle array. If I ever decided to start collecting cars, I had a place to put them.
Kasia and I got out of our tanks, dried ourselves off, and dressed. Somehow, even though we were alone, it didn’t seem right to take possession of our new home while we were naked.
I started to get into some civilian lederhosen, but I saw Kasia dressing herself in a long and slinky red dress, with red high heels, and worrying about her wig and makeup. I changed my mind and got back into my class A uniform. A dress uniform would have been better, but I didn’t have one with me.
I waited until the elevator took us up to our apartment, decided that the elevator door counted as a threshold, and picked up my wife in the customary manner. I carried her over it, while she made the customary squeals. Tradition is tradition, after all.
Much of our huge apartment was as my virtual tour had shown it, but many of the finished details were different. For example, the railings of the balconies were now set with huge cut gemstones. There were diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and stones of other colors that I didn’t recognize. Many of them were hundreds of carats in size.
“The diamonds, I can understand,” I said to Agnieshka, who was wearing her decorated drone persona, “But where did you get all the other stones?”
“Those are all diamonds, boss. With ion implantation, we can make them any color you want. Chromium ions turn them red, for example.”
“They are magnificent, however you did it.”
Two walls of my den were covered with mounted trophies of the animals, birds, and fishes I had bagged on my honeymoon. I was surprised that there were so many of them. The furniture was covered with leather from the deer, antelopes, and wild boars I’d killed. Two of the big easy chairs had Dream World receptors built into them, so we wouldn’t have to strip and get into a tank any more.
“Agnieshka, I love it,” I said. “I love it!”
There was a gun rack that held all the guns, bows, and fishing gear that I had favored on the island. That, or they were perfect facsimiles of them. I decided not to ask which.
Kasia didn’t like my room at all, saying that shet couldn’t stand all those dead animals staring down at her. She went to explore the rest of the place with Eva, but I stayed for a while.
The big fire in the fireplace turned out to be a computer screen.
“The screen retracts, boss. There’s a real, wood-burning fireplace behind it, anytime you want it. It’s just that today is a warm day, you know?”
I sat down in the chair at the desk. It fit me perfectly.
The wall across from the desk was a computer screen.
“You have a call, boss. It’s Quincy.”
“Put him on.”
The wall screen changed from a painting by Boris to a part of Quincy’s living room.
“We finally got our place built, and connected with the comm net. I heard you were back, so I thought I’d give you a call, General.”
“You are always welcome.”
“Thanks. Zuzanna and I just spent a week exploring that city of yours. It’s magnificent!”
“Our metal ladies designed and built it all. The credit is all theirs. I’m hoping to populate it with all of the Kashubian veterans, eventually. Did you see an apartment that you liked?”
“Yeah. All of them!”
“Well, pick what you want, and it’s yours.”
“I know what Zuzanna wants, but I don’t think we could afford it. We’ve pretty much exhausted our back pay, getting our valley going.”
“My boss told me that I shouldn’t give them away. I have to sell them, so that the troops have a greater feeling of commitment. However, he never said how much I had to sell them for, and your credit is good with me. Pick an apartment, and we’ll worry about the details later.”
“Well, see, Zuzanna doesn’t want an apartment. She wants a castle.”
“I should have known. Okay. You want the big gold one?”
“Nope. She wants the Dark Tower.”
“Again, I should have known. Tell her she owns it.”
“That’s generous of you.”
“Not really. You’ve still got to pay for it. Say, with a zero-down, interest-free mortgage, spread out over the next hundred years or so. I want it to look big on the books. I’ve got this bet going with Kasia.”
“We’ll take it!”
“Good. I’ll have Agnieshka write up some sort of a deed and a mortgage. I suppose that to make it legal, we’ll all have to sign something. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s yours right now. Drop by in person when you can, and take a look at what I had built for myself.”
“That goes both ways, Mickolai.”
“Thanks. Right now, though, I’d better go find my wife.”
* * *
I found her in her office, which turned out to be a very feminine version of my own den, She was stretched out on one of the big, frilly easy chairs, with a Dream World hood covering most of her head. I was about to leave when the wall screen came on, and she was on it.
“Neat, huh? I just figured out how to do this.”
“I’m proud of you. Did you want to finish the tour?”
“I’ve already done it in Dream World. I love it! You did a wonderful job, just like I knew you would! It’s even better than I imagined it would be. But just now, I’ve got some odds and ends to catch up on. Let’s get together for dinner in a couple of hours.”
I was learning to put up with this sort of thing.
I went back to my den and decided to try out Dream World without being in a tank’s flotation coffin. Once I pulled the hood down, there wasn’t any difference that I could tell.
“Agnieshka, the general told me that your designers were doing some great things with the social drones. Why don’t you fill me in on what’s happening there.”
“Sure thing, boss. Starting from the inside, the skeletal structure was the simplest part. We simply copied the human skeleton exactly, but using materials considerably lighter and stronger than calcium carbonate.”
In Dream World, a human skeleton appeared before me, rotating slowly in the air.
“The muscular structure is again an exact copy of that in a human system, with some four hundred separate muscles.”
The skeleton now had meat on it.
I said, “But how do those muscles work?”
“They are bundles of very thin, flexible tubes that are each covered with a metal braid. When you inflate the tube with a hydraulic fluid, the braid pulls the ends in, just like a real muscle. Each tiny tube has its own valve, of course. The important point is that from the outside, they will look and feel just like the real thing. The hydraulic fluid is bright red, so if you cut us, we will bleed, just like a human.”
“How wonderful.”
The body now had skin on it, and was beginning to look like a beautiful naked woman, although she was completely bald.
“The skin is an elastomer that looks and feels exactly like human skin, but it has the problem of not being able to repair itself as human skin does. We think that it is likely that we will have to replace the skin on the hands and feet about once a month, and that of the rest of the body maybe once a year. Work on improving that is still going on, of course.”
“You will be using a wig, I suppose.”
Now, the woman had long black hair, and was recognizably Eva.
“Yes. You humans have been working for hundreds of years making wigs realistic, and we didn’t think that we could improve on your efforts. Most of the sensory apparatus was straightforward. Hearing is taken care of with a couple of simple microphones, and the only problems with vision came in making the eyes look exactly like a human’s.”