by Delaney, JP
John Renton keeps coming back to the same issue.
“There are only two drivers for emerging technology.” He taps the table in time with his words. “Productivity and sex. You’ve already ruled out the first. So that just leaves sex. Everyone knows VCR beat Betamax because the porn industry adopted VCR. Snapchat beat messaging apps like Slingshot because it made sexting possible. You make your robots—how shall I put it?—fully functional, maybe you have a chance.”
“Cobots are completely sentient,” Mike says. “That implies they could withhold consent.”
“I don’t see how that would stack up, legally. Can’t rape a robot, am I right?” Renton thinks for a moment. “Slutbots. Now, there’s a product.”
“Sexting and watching porn are private activities.” Tim speaks calmly, but you can tell how angry he’s getting. “Having a relationship with a cobot is very public, as I’ve already proved. No one’s going to pay millions of dollars for people to laugh at them.”
“Then, my friend, I don’t think you have a market,” Renton says with finality.
“You don’t get it, do you, you stupid prick,” Tim says. Renton laughs, a short happy bark, and you realize this is what he’s been working toward all along, that he’s been deliberately goading Tim into losing his temper. “This isn’t about millennial self-gratification. Look at the fucking bigger picture. Forget the robot for one second—that’s just the delivery mechanism. Abbie’s mind now exists as something purely digital. And therefore transferable. Don’t you see the potential of that?” He gestures at you. “She’s not some fucking toy. Effectively, she’s immortal.”
There’s silence. Mike looks at Elijah, as if to ask whether he’s heard any of this before. Elijah gives a slight, mystified shake of his head.
John Renton laughs again. “Immortal? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I don’t kid,” Tim says coldly. “Abbie’s mind will go on growing and learning forever. Her body—the shell—is replaceable, and therefore upgradable. Everything else can be transferred. Effectively, our bodies—our original bodies—are now just the boot program for something better. For version two point oh, if you like.”
“That’s insane,” Renton says. But he says it with delight, as if the idea is a shiny new present he’s just been handed.
“Most people think death is inevitable,” Tim goes on. “But what if that’s just a failure of our collective imagination? What if death is just another problem to be hacked? Right now it’s a massacre out there—fifty million human beings mown down every year. If that resulted from any cause other than old age, don’t you think we’d have done something about it?” He looks slowly around the table, then back at Renton. “Robots aren’t just the potential saviors of humanity. Robots are the future of humanity. And once you start to see it like that, you realize they’re way, way more important than some stupid texting app. Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison—they’re all investing billions in this area. I’m meeting Larry in a couple of days to see if he wants to come on board.”
“Whoa. Now, this is big,” Renton says, drumming his fingers. “This is visionary.”
He stares at you hungrily. Something has changed, something you can’t altogether get your head around. “How much?” he says abruptly.
Elijah opens his mouth but it’s Tim who answers. “Eighty million. Initially. If you’re talking exclusivity.”
“For a company that doesn’t even have a business plan? You’re shitting me.”
Tim shrugs. Renton continues to drum his fingers. “And you can do this for anyone? You can do it for me?”
“Of course,” Tim says calmly. “There are some issues to iron out, but nothing that can’t be fixed. Forget cutting your head off and sticking it in some scummy tub of liquid nitrogen. Living forever will become as simple as making an upload. It’ll be expensive, of course. But we see that as a good thing. By restricting it to a select few founder investors, we’ll avoid putting additional pressure on the earth’s resources.”
There’s something creepy about the expression in Renton’s eyes as he looks at you. It was bad enough when he was talking about slutbots, but now he’s almost salivating.
“I want to see her without her skin,” he says abruptly. “I want to see what—what I’ll end up like.”
You wait for Tim to tell him to get lost, but he only says calmly, “That’s up to Abbie.”
Renton turns to you. “Well?”
You freeze as you realize he’s serious. You try to think how to say no without giving offense.
But then you think of Tim, who against all the odds has turned this evening around.
“Of course,” you hear yourself say. You look over at Jenny. “Could you give me a hand?”
Together you get up from the table and go upstairs, where you take a robe from the bathroom door before removing your clothes.
“I know what to do,” Jenny assures you. “It’s pretty straightforward, actually.”
She fiddles with the back of your neck, looking for the seam. As she peels your face off, you close your eyes. You can feel the seam opening all the way down your back.
You step out of your skin as if from a wet suit, Jenny’s hands gently tugging it away from your torso. You try not to look, but when it catches on your knees you can’t help glancing down at the hard white plastic you’re made of, perfectly smooth, your contours sleek and elegantly molded.
You think how typical it is of Tim that he made even this aspect of you, a part not intended to be seen, as perfect as it possibly could be.
You put the robe on. Silently you go back downstairs, Jenny behind you. You feel like a prisoner being escorted to the scaffold.
But you feel something else, too. Without the heavy rubber skin your movements feel lighter, less constrained. You feel strangely…liberated.
Outside the dining room you take off the robe and hand it to Jenny. You pause for a moment, summoning your resolve, then step inside.
As you enter, there’s complete silence. All of them, to varying degrees, have the same expression on their faces.
They look awestruck.
“Well, here I am,” you say. No one replies. Renton swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously.
You turn around. You walk out, a little taller than before.
“Holy shit,” you hear Renton say wistfully behind you. “She’s beautiful.”
37
The evening breaks up soon after. Renton leaves first, promising he’ll get straight onto his money people. When he’s gone the rest of you look at one another, not quite sure what just happened.
It’s Tim who speaks first. “Well done,” he says to you. “That made a huge difference, Abbie.”
“Immortality, Tim?” Mike says suddenly. “Really? That’s your vision? That’s our business, now?”
“In the early twentieth century,” Tim says thoughtfully, “rich men from all over the world traveled to the French Riviera to have monkey glands injected into their ballsacks. It was painful and expensive and there was absolutely no evidence it worked. But thousands of people thought it was a price worth paying for a second chance at youth.”
Mike frowns. “What’s your point?”
“And in the fifteenth century, when Pope Innocent the Eighth was close to death, the Church paid ten-year-old boys a ducat each to give him their blood. The boys all died. So did the pope, of course. You might have supposed an organization that already believed in eternal life wouldn’t have been quite so desperate.” Tim gets up and stretches. “My point is, Renton’s an idiot. Someone who’s just rational enough not to have any faith in religion, but not nearly rational enough to accept his own mortality. But if he chooses to believe I can make him live forever, great. We’ll take his cash.”
“So you don’t have a vision,” Elijah says.
“Oh,
I have a vision,” Tim replies. “Just not the one Renton thinks.”
TWELVE
The gift of Tim’s Volkswagen marked a new phase in the relationship between Tim and Abbie. Ironically, she soon stopped using it—she’d get a ride to the office with him instead, which we took to mean she was staying over. He was busy around that time, raising more funding for the shopbots. Most nights he’d be out at events in Silicon Valley, the endless networking in windowless convention rooms, eating self-serve food from tables with green tablecloths and two kinds of strip steak piled high in metal warming trays. Abbie went along, too, though she must have found those evenings dull by comparison with the festivals and gallery openings she was used to.
But there was no doubt it was beneficial to Tim to have a tall, strikingly gorgeous artist by his side. It did more than just get him noticed. The people who ran these venture capital companies tended to be competitive, alpha-male types. Abbie got Tim respect. And respect soon turned into a flow of funds. It was said one billionaire put in forty million after a five-minute conversation with her.
* * *
—
Abbie started baking cakes and bringing them into the break room for us. They were really good. Still, you had to get there early if you wanted some. By nine A.M. there was never anything left but crumbs.
The girls, of course, all tried to get Abbie to open up about what Tim was like in bed. Abbie wasn’t a gossip, but neither did she show the faintest trace of embarrassment. One day, for example, she casually mentioned that Tim preferred not to ejaculate.
“It’s a tantric thing. Athletes do it, too. He says it conserves his energies for work.”
It was downright weird, if you asked us. But we looked it up, and sure enough, ejaculatory control was right there in the Buddhist texts. It seemed particularly strange in a man who generally scoffed at mysticism of any kind. But it fed our wish to believe that Tim was fundamentally different from the rest of us. And we all got it. The desire to hack our own health was not uncommon among us. Whether it was chugging micronutrients or replacing dairy with almond milk, we all experimented constantly with our own biology.
38
The morning after the dinner with Renton is like waking up after a party at which you got very drunk. Did all that really happen? Or did you just imagine it?
But Tim comes down to breakfast humming. “Last night went well.”
“I nearly poisoned your biggest investor.”
“An even bigger investor now, thanks to you.” He kisses the top of your head. “You’ve changed your hair back,” he observes.
“I decided French braids aren’t really my style. Or anything French, actually.”
He laughs. “You know, I’ve been thinking. We should really be getting you out there more. You should be doing TED Talks and neuroscience conferences—serious stuff, not like that trashy daytime TV Katrina got you on. The sooner people see what you’re really like, the sooner this whole ridiculous media circus will blow over.”
“Tim…” you say.
“Yes, Abs?”
“Is this working for you? I mean really working? Am I really what you longed for, all those years?”
He looks surprised. “Of course. Why do you ask?”
“It’s just that…I feel like an imposter most of the time.”
“You’re Abbie. And I love you. That’s all that matters.” He frowns. “Are you saying you aren’t happy?”
He sounds so upset that you back off.
“You’re right,” you say, managing a smile. “Loving each other is what really matters. And I am happy.”
You wonder if there was ever a time when Tim and you could actually talk about your relationship, or if you were always met with this blank wall of adoration.
THIRTEEN
One day we overheard Tim asking Morag, his assistant, how many people from Google would be at a function he and Abbie were scheduled to attend that evening. “Thirty-six,” Morag replied.
“Thirty-six?” Abbie interjected happily. “But there were thirty-seven last year!”
Tim looked at her, clearly confused. “Harry Potter,” she explained, as if it were obvious. “Dudley Dursley wasn’t happy with thirty-six presents, remember?”
“I never read those books,” he said dismissively.
“You never read Harry Potter?” She sounded amazed. “But you’ve seen the movies, right?”
“I don’t really go to movies. They’re too long. I watched South Park as a kid.”
“Jesus,” she said disbelievingly. “I’ll get the first book delivered.”
So then Tim was observed to be reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone between meetings. Being Tim, he finished it in two days, then immediately ordered the next one.
Abbie got up the Pottermore website, and they did the Sorting Hat quiz together.
“That’s amazing,” Abbie was heard to say. “We’re both Hufflepuff!”
Now, of course, the whole point of the Sorting Hat was that it could see things about you that you didn’t even know yourself. But Hufflepuff? House of kindness and loyalty? Tim? Really?
We guessed he’d gone online and found a site that told you what answers to give to get sorted into different Houses. It was endearing, in a way—that even a multimillionaire like him felt the need to impress a girl. But still. Nerds that we were, we all knew you should never, ever try to get yourself put into the wrong house at Hogwarts.
The time we realized this relationship was really serious, though, was when Darren screwed up the runway walking. Human salesclerks spent a lot of time standing around waiting for customers—that was one of the things we didn’t like about them, we agreed, the way when you walked into a store they’d suddenly scent a commission and rush over to ask how you were doing today or what size you were. Tim decided it would be cool if, instead of hanging by the register, when you walked into the store the shopbots were already walking up and down like models on a runway, showing off the store’s new lines. Then one would peel off to come and talk to you.
We spent a bit of time analyzing video of real models on runways, and Darren turned the distinctive hand-on-hip stride into code. Eventually he was ready to demonstrate his handiwork. He activated a shopbot, which sashayed up and down the demonstration area. It looked impressive—exactly like a model at a Victoria’s Secret show.
“Great!” Tim said. “Now show me what it’s like with more!”
Darren looked confused. “More?”
“There should be half a dozen, all parading at once,” Tim said. “That’s the whole point. That’s what makes it cool.”
Darren nodded, which was his first big mistake. Well, actually his second—his first mistake was that he’d neglected to think through what would happen when half a dozen shopbots paraded up and down a narrow runway at once. Being a geek, he’d never actually been to a fashion show. But whatever the reason, he should have immediately told Tim he hadn’t gotten around to that part yet, instead of trying to wing it.
He activated another shopbot, then another, then two more. For a moment it looked amazing—five identical robotic mannequins, tall, elegant, and impeccably engineered, striding up and down an imaginary runway in a variety of imaginary outfits.
“They do it to music, too,” Darren said proudly, and turned on a speaker. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Snow (Hey Oh)” blasted around the room and, without breaking stride, the shopbots started swaying their shoulders and heads in time to the beat. One of them even twirled her hand. (Yes, her hand—it was impossible to think of the shopbot as it when it was dancing like that.) People around the office started clapping along and whooping—Abbie, too; her face lit up as she hollered and whistled. (She had a hell of a whistle, we learned; the full two-finger Texan cattle-whistle.) For a brief moment our office felt like a party.
Then the inevitable
happened. The twirling-hand shopbot reached the end of the runway and turned—straight into the shopbot immediately behind. Both crashed to the floor. A third tripped over them. Within seconds the parade had turned into a pile of mechatronic limbs, still attempting to stride but succeeding only in kicking one another. They looked like something from a war zone, a pile of white plastic bodies twitching in exaggerated death throes.
“Jesus,” Tim muttered under his breath. “We can’t even copy the dumbest humans on the planet.”
Someone turned the music off. The sudden silence was deafening.
“That’s solvable,” Mike said nervously. “We just need to port in some driverless car sensors, so they swerve around each other. It would look pretty neat, actually.”
“Exactly,” Tim said. “Solvable. And therefore predictable.”
We all waited for the inevitable Tim-lashing that would follow. Darren’s head drooped, like a dog that knows it’s about to get whipped.
Then Tim looked across at Abbie. “Still, not bad, huh?” he said with a smile. “For a first attempt.”
* * *
—
A few days after that, someone glanced into Tim’s office and said, “Wow.”
Abbie was in there. She was wearing a wet suit. On every limb were small green stickers—for motion capture, someone said. Tim was videoing her. She was sashaying up and down like a model.
Clearly, Tim was refining the runway tech, and Abbie had offered to help out. In her figure-hugging wet suit, she looked incredible. But some of us felt uneasy. Abbie had been employed as an artist, yet here she was doing a task that could not, by any stretch, be considered art. It was blurring the lines, somehow.
On the other hand, someone pointed out, maybe Tim didn’t want to ask one of his female employees to parade up and down in a wet suit for him.