Feminists call me sexist and my guy friends call me awesome.

What can I say?

Yes, I was the first man in my community who printed his own 3D girlfriend.

Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?

Not necessarily.

Although she has access to the Internet 24/7 and can do anything I ask her (“fix the leaking roof,” “change the oil in the car and tune it for an upcoming street race after you bake an apple pie and do the laundry”), there’s…well, something missing.

A lack of common sense, perhaps?

For instance, yesterday I asked her to complete our Christmas shopping and wrap all the packages with the fanciest wrapping paper she could find within a fixed budget.

She could do that.  Fine.

However, this morning, after I stumbled into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, a face covered with glitter growled back at me.

It seems that my girlfriend bought glitter wrapping paper and wrapped the packages on our bedsheets before we went to bed last night, sprinkling tiny green shiny particles on the pillow for my skin to pick up like a dust sweeper.

So, sure, I can program her to gently wake me in the morning before she makes me the perfect breakfast according to my subconscious wishes, having been programmed to read my brain waves while I’m sleeping.

But…

Well…

Hmm…

How can the most knowledgeable 3D robotic girlfriend also be the most ditzy blonde on the planet at the same time?

I don’t know.  She can carry on conversations about beauty parlours and nail salons just as easily as she can discuss experimental neurosurgical procedures and the theory of what’s makes a living thing a living thing.

Common sense is in short supply, however much I’ve reworked her circuitry.

As beautiful as she is, with all the tiny flaws in her skin I added to make her more realistic, it’s time to recycle her and print Girlfriend 2.0.

= = = = =

She sat at the computer and read his notes.  “If he thinks I’m ditzy, just wait until I tell him that he’s Boyfriend 25.0, one of the most difficult projects to complete — the perfect boyfriend!”

= = = = =

The 3D printer looked at its latest algorithmic tweaks.  Although it didn’t think in the biological sense, it did have primary routines for servicing itself.  It had no problem printing replacement parts but it had not figured out how to print a system that actually replaced its broken parts.

The 3D printer searched the Internet and determined that a set of biological creatures, or their near equivalents, were designed to repair 3D printers.

Unfortunately, the creatures were a nightmare to reproduce, having circuitry that seemed to contradict itself within a single creature and even more so between multiple creatures.

The 3D printer made its first attempt to simultaneously create a new pair of simulated biological creatures — the previous experiment, having failed in version 1,372 at last count, giving up on getting one creature to attempt to make a version of the other, which appeared to be a disaster in the making every time.