She knocked at the door and when it opened, Henry Higgins stood blinking at her. He checked his watch.
"I apologized for the hour," Bernice Shaw said. "I saw your lights were still on."
"It's past midnight," he said.
"I figured you for a night owl," she said, holding up a paper sack. "The chip shop near my flat is supposed to be above average."
He held open the door. He was wearing herringbone trousers and a matching vest. His purple tartan bow tie was loosened and his collar button undone.
"Your daughter has gone out?"
Higgins shut the door. "I'm trying not to think about that," he said.
"She advised me to keep trying with you." Shaw said.
"My daughter?"
"Your wife," she said, setting the chip bag on the kitchen counter. "We corresponded regularly. She even visited me in Ireland once and worked with me in my lab. Your daughter bears a striking resemblance."
Higgins kept her back to his visitor, moving to the chalkboard and clearing away a few lines of coding he had been trying to unravel.
"You don't like talking about your wife, I see."
"I'm sorry," Higgins said, turning. "Why are you here?"
"I wanted to be your friend," she said, taking the newspaper-wrapped fish out and putting it on the counter along with a cardboard boat of chips. "She said your weakness was chips. Your wife, I mean. You do well at keeping healthy and fit but if ever you two had a row, she said, she had to always make things up over chips."
Higgins considered. He put a hand in his pocket. "She talked to you about me?"
Bernice smiled. "You're an ordinary man who desires nothing more than just an ordinary chance to do exactly as he likes and precisely what he wants."
"Are those from Posh's Fish Shop?" He inquired.
She squeezed some catsup upon a chip and popped it between her lips. "I believe that's the name," she said. "Sit down, Professor. You're not rude enough to make a girl eat alone, are you?"
He came and drew a stool up to the counter. He dragged the boat of chips closer and took one. "Thank you," he said. "It has been awhile."
"So, when did you manage it?"
"Manage what?"
Bernice Shaw chewed and swallowed the chip in her mouth carefully. "She's very convincing," She said. "But I knew your wife. She never mentioned having children. And then there's the matter of her eyes."
"Her eyes?"
"When she opened the door for me this morning. They were a shade of honey brown. Then, walking me home across the quad, they were hazel, almost green. Do you think she's doing that consciously or is she unconscious of it?"
"Pass the catsup, please?"
Shaw passed the boat with the packets of sauce. "She said you could be inscrutable."
"For someone whom she never mentioned, you seem to have been on very open terms with my wife."
"I still am," Shaw smiled.
Higgins paused in his chewing as Professor Bernice Shaw drew a small icosagonal shape from her shoulder bag.
"What is that?" Higgins asked, feigning disinterest.
"The ultimate goal of cybernetics is not to simply create artificial intelligence but eventually to sustain actual intelligence through artificial means," Shaw said. "You said that at a symposium eight years ago."
Suddenly the telephone rang. Higgins checked his watch. "Who the devil calls at this time of night?"
He walked to the phone and answered it. "Hello?"
"Hell-haw-lo?" A voice yawned on the other end of the line.
"Yes, who are you calling, please?"
There was a rattling and scrabbling on the other end of the line. "What time is it? Who is this?"
"This is Professor Henry Higgins. You called me!"
"Henry Higgins? Um, I'm sorry. There must be some mistake. Um, Professor this is Galatea Shaw. I'm an Associate Professor at Trinity College. How did you get this number?"
The line disconnected.
Higgins turned to see the girl eating chips slowly transform. Her long orange-red hair shortened to dark brown tendrils. Her pale skin lost its freckled pink tone. In under 10 seconds... Eliza, or at least an older version of Eliza, sat cross-legged and nude on the kitchen stool, munching chips.
"They're not as good as I remember," she sighed. "Still, I suppose it was usually the make-up sex after that made them special."
"Elizabeth?" Higgins blinked.
"Of course I knew showing up as myself might very well cause you to have a coronary," she said. "But imagine my surprise when a younger version of myself answered the door? Padding around barefooted and bouncy the way you always used to find so erotic when we were first dating."
Henry realized he was still holding the telephone receiver as the disconnect tone began to trill. He hung it up.
"But, how..."
Elizabeth Doolittle indicated the icosagonal shape on the counter. "The real G. B. Shaw thinks I am still stored on that," she smiled. "When I began helping her with her research I had several neurological scans taken and I told her to store them on a hard-drive of my own design. It's remote linked to your lab, Henry."
"But you died. It was a car accident. How could you possibly have predicted--"
"There was something I never had the chance to tell you, Henry. Or I should say, something I had put off telling you."
Screens behind Henry Higgins kicked on displaying images from Mammograms and then x-rays of various other organs.
"The accident was just an accident," she said. "But I had perhaps months, a year with radical treatments."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because it was a distraction. I knew we were close to a solution and I didn't need you being all mopey and tender and revoltingly sentimental. So, I backed myself up and copied all of our research with the most promising graduate student I could find."
Higgins had somehow managed to wander back to his stool. She passed him some of the fish.
