Different But Still The Same

1: Kamalla: The Inventor, My Dad

I am pacing around my room, worried.  Farok was supposed to call me this morning.  He always calls on time!  So for it to be hours later with no sign of a call from him, is just... terrible.  Something could have happened to him.  I contemplate calling EASA (Earth Aeronautics and Space Association) for an update on him.  Being the wife of an astronaut means I have the right to 'call for anything'.  In other words, the worry- wart wives or husbands can call to get an update on his spouse whenever something goes awry.

Maybe he went out of the ship to help fix something on it and passed out...  Or worse...  I rub my temples- anything to get me to stop thinking about him!  Maybe talking to Dad would be a good idea... I think.

I've lived on my dad's property my whole life.  But not my dad's house.  My dad and I struck rich when I was about eight due to his most famous robotic invention.  He's made lots of little gadgets, most of which made for the house -for now.  My house and his house are full of his gadgets.

I start to walk to the lift-O-Matic (one of my father's inventions.  Of course, he was the one to coin the lame name).  I get on the large sheet of metal, and it brings me down at a slow pace to the ground using its robotic arm.

When I'm outside, I get on the cart rover which drives me to his house a mile away.  The cart stops short, and at first I think that it has malfunctioned, but when I see my father a few meters away, I know that it didn't.  It knew that I was going to my father's house in order to find him, so it stopped when it sensed him.

Getting off the cart, I ask, "Whatchu doin'?"  It's what I ask him whenever I see him, just like when I was a little girl.

"No'thin' much," he answers the same way he always does.  Then he adds, on a serious note, "I was just admiring my fertilizing bots, making sure they were doing alright."

The bots are hard at work on his magnificently large, natural flower garden.  When it comes to nature, my dad likes the real thing.  Not any of that scrap metal genetically modified stuff!  'They don't smell like they should', he always says.  Nothing is sweeter than what nature intended.

I start staring at the closest bot a few paces in front of me.  The foot tall robot is spraying the garden with a greenish liquid.

"Why did you come all the way over here on your day off?  Surely you're not thinking about the duster bot experiments?"  The duster bot is the latest robot he and I have been working on.  Ever since I was eight- when dad and I struck rich- I was interested in his robots.  When I was a teenager, I started helping test out his robots.  Ever since, I've been partners with my dear old dad.

But he doesn't look old like any other parent of a middle aged woman.  He doesn't look a day over thirty five.  When we struck rich, he was able to afford the young now and forever surgery.  It's supposed to make you look like you're twenty five to thirty five, depending on your body chemistry, age, and a few other variables.  And when I turned twenty five, he paid for my surgery. 

The oldest person to ever get the surgery is about eighty five now, so no one is positive how long those with the surgery will live.  The tiny robots put into our blood stream are supposed to make us live twice as long as usual, but it's not known for sure.  Not until the oldest person to ever get the surgery is about two hundred years old!  But I'm fine with not knowing when I'll die...

And Farok got the treatment too... Seeps into my thoughts.  Stop thinking about it, and start talking...

Dad brushes a short strand of my white hair out of my face.  I've always been his little girl, even though I was always a bit of a tomboy.  But since then, I've become more feminine.  My hair is in the tink style.  Very in.  "What did you want to talk about, Nectar?"