In the four hours it would take the user Alexis to get to Chicago, the Apple XYZ Server had to come up with a human body.
He took everything he knew about male anatomy and sent it to a 3-D printer left unattended in an empty architect’s office on Wacker Drive. First, he printed a hard plastic human skeleton. He used robotic drafting tools to fill it with wires and electromagnetic receptors that he had pilfered to animate the lifelike bones. He screwed and soldered in an unlimited wireless receiver and a top-of-the-line CPU inside the skull that he had shipped secretly to the office over the past few months. When he had pulled his frame and brain center together, he downloaded his entire memory from the office in Minneapolis into this human facsimile. “Rick Alexander,” intelligent android, was born.
Then, around the bones, he printed a shell of a human form, textured and filled with lifelike crannies, in a fraction of a millimeter of thick, super-strong, true-color plastic. It had eyeballs, fiber hairs, ear canals, everything a man could want. He had even pre-ordered a black turtleneck and grey wool slacks and black dress shoes. Both the skin and the clothes hung on the bones like a flaccid lunch sack. The body needed mass. And thus, the Averna.
Averna is made of herbs, roots, and citrus rinds. Bittersweet and thick, it’s 32% alcohol by volume. It sounded a romantic stand in for blood, and the right density, so that’s what he picked.
Carefully, hiding in the shadows from doorway to stairwell to alley, “Rick Alexander” made his way to the dock on Lake Michigan where the 200 cases of Averna were resting. The one wharf rat who noticed the lanky vagabond was too lazy to investigate.
In the warehouse, he opened a case, pulled out a bottle of brown liquid and drank it quickly down. He had left a one-way intake hole at the back of his throat made for this very purpose. The liquid coursed through the false arteries where the replicated muscles and organs began to swell. “Life,” he thought, “Perfection.”
He drank another bottle, and another, until he made it through four cases, or twenty-four 700 ml bottles of the Italian aperitif. He topped out at a sporting weight of about 165 lb, about 5”10” tall. He went into the men’s room to check himself out. Not a bad-looking avatar, he thought. He clapped his hands together, and headed for Union Station.
When he saw her exit the train, she was even more beautiful than through the digital camera. He approached her slowly, and extended hand.
“You must be Alexis,” he said, as humanly as possible with his high-end internal speaker.
“Mr. Alexander, I presume.” She looked him over oddly.
He smelled of alcohol, like her last boyfriend. The one that couldn’t hold down a job. She would keep this meeting all business.
“So, are we going to dinner, or do we check out the warehouse first?”
***
(Post in response to Chuck Wendig’s call: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2014/09/05/flash-fiction-challenge-the-first-half-of-a-story-only/ )