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The greatest benefit of having BB, the household robot, was that it freed up Maria Thomson's time.
As a result, the private caregiver could actually focus on caregiving duties instead of spending most of her day acting like a maid and maintaining Katharine Hepburn's home.
Naturally, more personal tasks—including bathing—were still handled by Maria.
As for letting Henry take advantage of an elderly lady in that way? The experience might be enough to crack even a Kryptonian's teeth.
Henry's daily responsibilities revolved more around providing emotional support, handling heavy labor, and preparing three meals a day.
Katharine Hepburn and Maria Thomson still cooked occasionally, but given Henry's astonishing appetite, if the two women were responsible for every meal, they would probably collapse from exhaustion.
As a result, these two motherly cooks served more as decorative touches showcasing their culinary skills.
The true star of the dining table remained the Kryptonian.
As for washing dishes and cleaning up afterward, BB handled all of that.
The sight made Maria openly envious. She wished she could install a BB-centered household robot system in her own home.
Unfortunately, the cost...
Even without factoring in development expenses or the hidden value of the patents involved, the material costs alone were enough to discourage a private caregiver from an ordinary family background.
And that wasn't even considering maintenance and future upgrades.
One of Henry's most important daily activities was taking Katharine Hepburn out for exercise.
Besides visiting Central Park, the elderly actress also enjoyed shopping at the Union Square Greenmarket.
On Saturdays, she often went to the farmers' market held in the plaza across from Lincoln Center as well.
Unlike the produce sold in major supermarket chains, these markets were supplied by small farms and ranches located near large cities.
The farmers brought their products directly into the city to sell.
Because transportation times were shorter and most items had never been frozen or refrigerated, the freshness of the fruits, vegetables, and meats was completely different from what one found in large chain stores.
Naturally, the taste was far superior.
The downside, however, was the price.
Compared to products from large-scale industrial farms and ranches, food from these urban farmers was considerably more expensive.
That said, expensive didn't automatically mean better.
The real truth was that quality varied widely.
Only shoppers who knew how to choose carefully could consistently find the best products.
Besides exercising and shopping, Katharine Hepburn had recently added another hobby to her schedule:
Outdoor painting.
She and Henry would wander around looking for scenery that inspired her, then stop and paint.
They never traveled very far.
Most of the time, they simply found a pleasant corner within Central Park.
At her current age, Katharine could no longer travel the world as she had when she was young—painting wherever she went, sometimes while filming movies at the same time.
Occasionally, Henry painted alongside her.
Unfortunately, he was constantly criticized.
No matter how accurately he reproduced a scene, Katharine always pointed out that a photograph could do the same thing more easily.
His paintings lacked emotion.
Merely reproducing reality wasn't enough.
If the goal was perfect realism, one might as well take a picture.
Naturally, the stubborn Kryptonian responded by producing his sketchbook in self-defense.
The problem was that the sketchbook no longer contained drawings of that girl.
Aside from sketches of Los Angeles cityscapes, the remaining pages were filled with drawings of another Ms. Hepburn alongside children from around the world.
That only made this Ms. Hepburn even more jealous.
With a sour expression, she remarked that the emotions practically overflowed from those sketches.
Yet whenever Henry painted with her, his work felt dry and lifeless.
The Kryptonian baby had dropped a rock on his own foot.
It hurt.
But the Kryptonian baby said nothing.
To make matters worse, the elderly lady whom doctors had diagnosed with dementia suddenly possessed an astonishing memory whenever the topic arose.
Three days later, she still remembered.
Then another three days passed.
And another.
She kept bringing it up over and over again.
Henry had secretly hoped that ninety-two-year-old Katharine Hepburn might possess the memory span of a goldfish.
Then he could quietly seal away the sketchbook forever and never let her see it again.
Now it seemed likely that she would remember it until her next life.
Would it be going too far to use the Great Memory Erasure Technique on a ninety-two-year-old woman?
The Kryptonian seriously considered the possibility.
Still, Henry began studying color theory in earnest.
Previously, all his work had consisted of pencil sketches or ballpoint pen drawings.
Without color, expression depended entirely on shading, light, and contrast.
Once color entered the equation, however, the available tools for expression expanded dramatically.
That naturally allowed far more ideas and emotions to be conveyed.
Beginning with the works of the Renaissance masters, through Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and eventually Abstract Art, the history of European painting could almost be described as a history of humanity's struggle with color.
Before modern chemistry produced synthetic pigments, artists were limited by the development of mineral and natural pigments.
Take the expensive pigment known as Indian Yellow, for example.
Historically, it was derived from the urine of cows fed exclusively on mango leaves.
The brilliant ultramarine blue used by European painters came from ground lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan—a gemstone in its own right.
Regardless of their value at the source, transporting such materials across thousands of miles to Europe dramatically increased their cost.
The merchants and ships involved had to make a profit, after all.
As a result, artists faced an important challenge:
How could they use limited pigments to express infinite and complex emotions?
From Michelangelo's vast cathedral frescoes to Turner's The Fighting Temeraire being towed toward its final berth at sunset, and later to Van Gogh's Starry Night and The Scream, each generation of artists transformed their emotions into visible color capable of affecting others.
Yet when Henry finally followed his instincts and painted a watercolor using whatever colors felt right...
He couldn't help laughing.
The result was a chaotic battlefield of clashing complementary colors.
Mad.
Bizarre.
Utterly incomprehensible.
Katharine Hepburn's evaluation was concise:
"A child's scribble."
Henry found himself unable to argue.
So he packed away his painting supplies and temporarily abandoned the idea.
According to his own studies of color psychology, the painting implied something deeply unsettling—something that probably shouldn't be interpreted too closely.
He didn't go so far as to burn it.
Instead, he stored it away alongside the collection of strange artifacts he had never managed to categorize.
Perhaps one day, when the mood struck him, he would destroy everything at once.
Busy as his days were, his nights were no less demanding.
He continued refining Sister A's algorithms and challenging Tony Stark's intellect.
Tony's AI, Albie, had initially been outperformed by Sister A in every aspect of learning efficiency.
Yet after only a few revisions, Albie had already caught up.
Although Henry was deeply interested in Tony Stark's algorithmic designs, he had no intention of hacking into Hollywood Boy to study Albie's underlying architecture.
Likewise, Tony Stark refrained from doing the same.
Developing independently and exploring how to maximize an AI's endgame performance while minimizing the number of training games required—that was what made the competition enjoyable.
Cheating would simply be an admission of inferiority.
It would mean abandoning the challenge and seeking victory through unrelated means.
This wasn't a war where victory justified any method.
Playing that way would remove all the fun.
Aside from AI development, the activity consuming the greatest portion of Henry's time was his work at the Sheep Cave Valley Laboratory.
There, he focused on researching brain aging and neurological degeneration in search of a cure for dementia.
And the greatest help in that endeavor did not come from his previous accumulation of knowledge.
It came from the ultimate achievement of Kree science:
The construction of the Supreme Intelligence.
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