Brad was enjoying his little break from reality that night. He and Khaled played some pool and threw money into the jukebox to hear songs they could have heard on the radio for free. The alcohol had thinned out his blood and acted like an analgesic on his body and his mind. In his drunken haze, he found himself stealing longer and more frequent glances at that cute blonde barmaid.
She was dressed to enjoy the weather and to increase the amount of cash she got in tips. The shape of her figure lent itself quite well to that, but Brad knew it wouldn't be right to look too much at the curves she seemed all to eager to display. He was still a family man, technically still engaged to be married.
Back at the house, the machine he was to marry wasn't doing so well. She had begun to act quite strange to the children as she joined them for the rest of dinner. It seriously freaked the kids out when she got back to the table. Her eyes had reddened around the edges as part of her simulated crying routine, but she was acting friendly - happy, even.
Inside her chest, the number crunching that had brought her AI to this faulty behavioural result was in dire need of error correction. That would have to wait until tomorrow however. She recorded the reactions of the two children to her log files, along with the mathematical discrepancies she had encountered while trying to put her system back into working order.
Humans were never easy to deal with or straightforward enough for her software to fully comprehend. Now, under all the stress from events and circumstances she couldn't begin to fully compute, she fell back on standard AI functions. She was courteous and almost charming to Marcus and Jessica, not behaving at all like a parent would have. The kids saw that and instinctively knew something wasn't right inside her.
Jessica just stared while Marcus hurried his meal and got away from the android as fast as he could. Eventually his sister caught on and excused herself from the table before finishing. Pam just smiled brightly at them both. She looked empty and blank as the corners of her mouth lifted into that default pattern. She scanned the scene in front of her as her microphones recorded the sounds of two small humans retreating to the back of the house.
She sat there for a long time after that. She swallowed more than twice the amount of food she should have due to another error in calculation. Because it was so busy with other data, her AI didn't catch that mistake until she stood up to clear the table. As she hummed a song to herself and continued to sift through complex binary functions, the kids snuck off to bed as quietly as they could. Pam just ignored that activity. Any more interactions with unpredictable humans right now and she might just do something Fembot Command would regret.
In the fading light of the summer night she sat down on the sofa and tried to figure out why Brad had not returned home. She sat up with perfect posture, her legs crossed and her hands clasped ladylike on her knee. That same default, blank smile showed on her silicone face while the electronics behind her well-constructed breasts ploughed through some of the less complicated computations. As the sky around the house turned from blue to orange to black, she remained seated and still. Of all the probabilities she had calculated, the only strongly positive one was that things would be better after she returned from the lab at Marcia's house tomorrow.