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He — whatever body he may wear in future, man or woman or both or neither, he will always be irreducibly male in spirit — sits in the comfortable old armchair beside the open window that looks out over their house's small garden, one leg folded gracefully under him, reading a leather-bound copy of Homer's Odyssey and sipping a large cup of milky chai tea that has had a few unorthodox extras blended in. He likes paper books, he once said, because they provide an experience so different from instantly scanning a text: The interface is tactile, olfactory, visual… in a word, sensual, all engaged at the same time by one thick volume of printed words.
Is that why you compare me to the encyclopedia on a regular basis? Jack had quipped back, glancing up from where he was reading the daily newspaper over a late cup of coffee and three slices of buttered toast with crabapple jelly, and flashing a teasing grin.
A sleek catlike curve of thin lips and an incline of that finely pointed chin had served as acknowledgement of the joke. Make me that special tea I enjoy so much, darling, and don't ask silly questions. I think I feel a relaxing interlude of reading coming on...
Jack had shaken his head, and laughed, and folded up the newspaper and done as he was bidden.
Later, when all books were safely sleeping on their shelves, Jack slept too: sweetly sated in every dimension, guarded through the long watches of the night by devotion far more than merely mortal.
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There have been precious few afternoons like this in Jack's long and eventful life: the last one he can remember (a different face, female, had been bent intently over the book, which had been Fitzgerald, and the cup of tea, which had been black) had taken place in late spring of 1928, when the lilac bushes of Chicago had just been beginning to bloom. That too had been a rainy day, a day of pleasantly shadowed rooms and the soft whisper of water on glass, but this time it is early autumn of 2009 and this time the face his gaze keeps returning to dwell upon will never age and never decay. The thought fills his chest with warmth, a pulse of inner light brighter than the midsummer sun, a fierce silent joy that wakens parts of him he'd put to sleep long ago in the face of death's inevitability — for everybody but him.
Now, for the first time, he knows he doesn't necessarily have to face eternity alone.
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I thought you said you'd read all these a long time ago, Jack had remarked, idly glancing through the pile of old books his lover had picked up at a charity sale and deposited on the kitchen table while he hung up his coat: Dickens, Homer, Poe, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky. Beyond the window, snow fell on the quiet roar of Queen Street traffic and sunset reddened the chilly sky.
Not like this, the android had purred, and laid a sly knowing hand on Jack's forearm, and drawn him to bed with nothing more than the fragile unbreakable tether of its gaze.
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One day, six months from now or a hundred years from now or a hundred thousand years from now, it will rain again like this: the hum of the kettle, the patter of tiny droplets on the roof, the quiet ticking of a clock. The sky may not be the sky of Earth — if Jack can help it, they'll have seen so many worlds by then, all the wonder and the glory of the galaxies — but they will still be centred beneath it, together, and that will be enough to transform wherever they are from merely here into transcendent home.
Bedmates uncounted will have passed through Jack's arms, each one cherished for themselves, each one remembered — but in this creature's embrace, for the first and possibly the last time in his life, love will remain when all mortal flesh has failed.
He brings a fresh hot cup of tea, infused with the spices of gardens never seen on Earth, and when KITT glances up and smiles at him he can see the future writ clear, shining in eyes as black as the endless depths between the stars.
THE END