Made to Measure

Joe doesn't believe in finding the right person - he believes in building them. A mechanic of more than just machines, he constructs Alice: a robotic wife with a cybernetic brain patterned after his own mind, designed to be everything Vera isn't - rational, efficient, perfectly suited to him. The creation works exactly as planned, at first. Alice is everything Joe imagined. Then she develops preferences. Then she develops judgment. And then she chooses someone else. What follows is Joe's humbling reckoning with the gap between engineering and love, between designing a companion and actually knowing one. Gault's 1950s novella is sharp, quietly brutal, and surprisingly modern in its understanding of how we sabotage intimacy by mistaking control for connection. The ending isn't sentimental - it's earned, and it stings.