by Delaney, JP
“But nothing in writing. Or in front of witnesses.”
He shakes his head.
“That’s not true,” you say slowly.
They all look at you.
“Our wedding vows. I give myself to you for all eternity. Remember?”
“Very moving,” Maines says. “But sadly, wedding vows have no actual weight in law. I don’t suppose anything was mentioned in the prenup?”
Tim shakes his head.
“Well, that does bring us to another point. Who actually owns this remarkable creation?” Maines gestures casually at you with the same hand that’s counting off points.
You stare at him, shocked. Tim flinches. “Owns? She’s not property, for Christ’s sake.”
“You may not like to think of her that way, but the courts will view it differently. She was constructed by Scott Robotics, I take it? Have you purchased her from the company? Or is she still the company’s asset?”
Tim bangs a fist on the table. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s my company.”
“It’s the shareholders’ company. Remind me who the majority investors are?”
“As of yesterday,” Mike answers quietly, “John Renton.”
Maines whistles. “Well, the good news is, it’ll be the company, rather than you personally, that bears the costs of fighting this.” He pauses. “Or makes some kind of settlement.”
“We’re not settling,” Tim says through gritted teeth. You can tell it’s costing him an effort not to explode.
“You should really hear me out before you make that call.” Maines holds up his hand again, the thumb extended. “The fifth and final point relates to moral rights. And that’s the one I think we’re going to find hardest to win.”
Elijah frowns. “Moral rights? What are those?”
“The rights of an artist to control their creation. California’s the only state to recognize them.”
“I don’t understand,” you say. “How am I Abbie’s creation?” Too late you realize you’ve just said Abbie instead of my. You’ll need to be careful about that. But no one else appears to have noticed.
It’s Tim who answers. “The very first version of you—the beta, if you like. It was your idea.”
SEVENTEEN
“I’d love to make a robot of you.”
Later several of us would swear we’d heard Tim say those words, or some variation on them, to Abbie as they walked through reception. (Since she’d gotten back from rehab they’d started coming in together again, hand in hand, their other hands clasping matching lattes from Urban Beans.) And while it was, on the face of it, an unusual thing to say, we all got it. We were roboticists, after all. We had long ago stopped thinking of robots as something freaky or weird.
What Abbie said in reply was the subject of greater debate. Some of us thought she laughed and said, “Sure.” As in, “Sure you would, but that isn’t going to happen.” Others thought she might have said “Sure”—as in “Sure, why not?” And many of us thought she said “Sure?” As in, “Really? Because I’m up for it, if you are.”
What was not in dispute, because Tim said it as they stood by the open door of his office, a few minutes later, was that he also told her, “I could teach anyone basic coding in about two weeks.”
“Not me.” Abbie shook her head. “Love tech, terrible at math.”
“Coding isn’t math. You cook, don’t you? Coding is like writing down a recipe. Or giving someone directions to your house. Just in a very unambiguous way.”
What happened after that was almost inevitable. Tim canceled his meetings. Within an hour he’d taught Abbie to write her first line of code, and a simple program by lunchtime. Before the end of the day, she’d sent him the following—
int main( ) {
while(1) {
doesLove(you);
}
{
doesLove(String str {
printf(“I love %s!”, str);
}
—which, while it might not look like much of a love poem, had the effect of printing the words I Love you on his computer screen, over and over again. She also sent him a program in ASCII that caused his printer to spew out:
But, since the printer was actually by someone else’s desk, he missed it.
By the end of the second day, they were working on HelloWorld programs. And at the end of two weeks, we were introduced to the first bot version of Abbie. All the components were at hand, after all. The 3-D full-body scan she’d used to make DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) just needed to be reprinted in a new, hard-setting material. The mechanics, sensors, and motors of the shopbots were all ready to be incorporated, along with a simple voice function. Of course, it was slung together—what developers call a quick-and-dirty. But it was good enough for Bot Abbie to go around our desks with a plate of cookies, offering them to each of us by name, while Tim and the real Abbie stood back watching, like proud parents.
“That is so incredible,” Abbie said. She looked better, we thought. More energized. Excited, even.
“Really, it’s just the beginning,” Tim told her. “I’ve already thought of some improvements.”
47
You get home from the lawyer’s despondent. It’s become apparent that, even though you have your own thoughts and personality, where the law’s concerned you’re nothing more than a machine that can be switched off or transferred to a new owner at any time.
You still haven’t told anyone else about Abbie being alive. As far as you can see, it just makes your own situation more precarious. Pete Maines’s strategy depends on convincing a judge that your sentience, as he calls it, is so unique it shouldn’t be destroyed until questions of ownership have been resolved beyond all possibility of appeal. If you reveal that, far from being a unique backup of a dead woman’s mind, you’re actually a kind of distorted, partial clone of someone still living, you suspect your own life expectancy will be very short indeed.
Besides, you still can’t bring yourself to tell Tim that his beloved wife faked her own death.
For his part, he’s come back from the meeting furious, his anger now directed at his lawyer. That’s how Tim drives people. If he can, he’ll inspire them, but if he can’t, he’ll beat them down through sheer determination. He’d demanded to know why Pete Maines didn’t have a strategy, why he couldn’t guarantee he could make this go away, why he was such a dumb waste of time and money.
“I can’t rewrite the law,” Maines had answered patiently. “All I can do is put together the strongest case possible. And advise you what to do when it’s a weak one.”
Basically, he recommends that Scott Robotics pay Lisa and the rest of Abbie’s family whatever it takes to withdraw their suit. That was the course of action everyone was agreed on as the meeting broke up. But you know at best it will only buy you a little time. Lisa isn’t motivated by money.
Who actually owns this remarkable creation?
Just because you feel like you, think like you, it’s been so easy to forget that you’re actually nothing more than an assembly of processors and logic boards. Just intellectual property and patents, to be fought over by competing parties like a valuable car in a divorce battle.
At least Tim still loves you. Tim will protect you. A wave of relief and love for him washes over you as you realize that, yes, Tim will make this all right. Just like he always has. He’s a fighter. And he’s in your corner.
“I’m going to bed,” he says now. “I need to be up early, get on top of this thing before those bastards come up with any more ways to fuck us over.”
He bends to kiss the top of your forehead, just as he always does before he goes to bed. Tonight, though, you lift your head so his lips land on yours. It feels so good, so right, that you find yourself kissing him more deeply. You put your hands around his head, pulling him
to you. And then you’re pressing yourself against him, desperate for his touch, running your hands down his back—
“Whoa,” he says, pulling away. “What’s this, Abs?”
“I want to sleep with you,” you say urgently. You feel a desperate need to be held. But more than that. You need reassurance that you’re alive, not just some irrelevant mechatronic construction. You need, very badly, to feel his desire for you, to be wanted. “To make love. I want you—”
“You know that’s not possible,” he says gently. “Physically, I mean. You’re just not built that way.”
“We’ll figure something out. Even if I can’t feel anything myself, it would give me pleasure to give you pleasure. That’s what love is, when it comes right down to it, isn’t it? Wanting the other person to be happy. And I need us to be intimate. To have a physical relationship. Otherwise, how am I even your wife?”
He’s silent a moment. “I’d like that, too, Abbie. Very much.”
“Then let’s—”
“But it would be wrong,” he interrupts. “I’m sorry. I just can’t get around that.”
“But why?” you plead. “Why would it be so terrible to have a sexual relationship with me?”
“Because it would feel as if I were being unfaithful,” he answers quietly. “You see, in my heart of hearts, I know you didn’t die.”
48
You stare at him.
So he’s known all along. About what’s on the iPad. What Abbie did. You take a deep breath to say something—
“I can’t put my finger on it,” he adds. “And I don’t have any proof. I just know you weren’t the sort to leave me and Danny all alone.”
“What, then?” You force yourself to sound casual. “You think I just upped and left?”
He shakes his head. “God, no. Something must have happened during those last few days, when you were at the beach house on your own—something catastrophic. We didn’t communicate much during that time. That was deliberate on my part; I was trying to give you space to work. But what if you were going through some kind of crisis? What if you had a breakdown? I’ve imagined so many different scenarios. Maybe you were abducted. You were—are—a beautiful woman, and I left you there on your own, without any kind of protection. I’ve tortured myself over that. There’s that lawyer who lives down at the beach—Charles Carter. I always got the impression he had a thing for you. What if he’s got you locked up in a basement somewhere? But the police refused to even consider it. They followed the evidence, they said, and there was no sign of a break-in or a struggle that would implicate anyone, let alone Carter. It was sheer laziness on their part. How could they follow the evidence if they never got off their backsides and went looking for any?”
He has no idea, you realize. You feel relieved and sad at the same time. Because you know one day Tim will have to learn the truth about how his wife abandoned him, and this time you think it’ll crush him completely.
“Of course, it didn’t stop me grieving for you,” he adds. “In some ways it made it even harder. I kept seesawing between hope and despair—one day convinced you were dead, the next expecting you to walk through that door as if nothing had happened. I even prepared a little speech, telling you how sorry I was if I’d neglected you, how much I loved and needed you. And when the judge confirmed what we all knew—that my arrest had been a travesty—but the cops still refused to investigate any other possibilities, I realized it was up to me now. That was when I saw the potential of making something that could train itself to become self-aware. To become you.”
“But it hasn’t worked, has it?” you say sadly. “When all’s said and done, I’m no replacement for the woman you loved. You just said so—you still grieve for her, obsess about finding her…”
“I never thought you’d be a replacement for the real Abbie,” he interrupts. “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. But that wasn’t the reason I created you, not at all.”
“What, then?” you say, confused.
“Do you remember what an algorithm is?”
“Of course.” You could hardly be married to Tim Scott and not know what an algorithm is. “It’s a kind of equation. A formula for working something out.”
“That’s right. Like when you did long multiplication at school. It’s just a tool, really. A process to bring about a certain result.”
“But what does that have to do with me?”
He says calmly, “You see, you’re a kind of algorithm, too. An algorithm to help me find her.”
49
“I don’t get it,” you say, bewildered. “You told me I was a cobot—a companion—”
“I said you were special,” he cuts in. “I just didn’t tell you why.”
“But how can I find her? If the police couldn’t—”
“The police didn’t try. Like I said, I realized it was up to me now. But I didn’t have the right tools.” He gestures at you with both hands. Voilà. “I had to build the right tools. That was the first step. Then I had to let you acclimatize. If I’d told you all this right at the beginning, it would have been way too much for you to handle.”
It still is, you think numbly. “But I still don’t see what makes you think I can succeed in finding her. Given that no one else has.”
Tim begins to pace the width of the kitchen, his face dark with concentration. “You remember we talked about how deep-learning machines may be capable of intuition? How they can see things even their programmers can’t? That’s what I’m hoping for here. That you’ll be able to…walk in her footsteps, as it were. Make the same decisions she’d have made. And then make the leap to working out where she is.”
You’re shocked. Hurt, too. So this is the reason he breathed life into you. Okay, it’s because he loves you so very much. It’s just that he wants the real you. The original. Her. Not this hideous plastic-and-electronic simulacrum.
The one thing that’s been keeping your self-loathing at bay is the fact that Tim adores you now, in electronic form, just as much as he ever did. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
But it was all a lie.
Of course he doesn’t love you. Who could? You disgust him.
You feel numb. And more: You feel betrayed. Screwing Sian was nothing compared with the way he’s been manipulating you.
“And what if you do find her?” you hear yourself say. “What if you find her and she doesn’t want to come back? Have you thought of that?”
“I can’t believe that would be the case. But if it is, at least I’ll have done everything I could. And if worse comes to worst—”
He stops. But you know exactly what he was going to say. Call it your deep-learning intuition.
If worse comes to worst, I’ll still have you.
I’ll still have this pathetic, second-best version of my wife I threw together in my company’s workshop.
Just for a moment, you experience an unfamiliar emotion.
Just for a moment, you hate them both.
You hate Abbie Cullen-Scott, the object of Tim’s devotion. And you hate him for worshipping her.
You open your mouth to tell him everything. About what his adored Abbie was really like. About the hidden iPad. About the artwork she never made, the pills she never took, the website advising her to fake depression as a prelude to faking her own death.
But you don’t.
Once you give him that information, you can’t take it back. And from what you know of Tim, it still may not be enough. He’s so willing to think the best of her, he’ll probably convince himself there’s some perfectly innocent explanation for why she ran away.
No: better to say nothing, at least for now. You need to think this through.
Because there’s a part of you that’s already hoping Abbie isn’t alive after all. Or that Tim never finds her.
> Because if he does find her, and she wants to come back, what’s going to happen to you?
EIGHTEEN
Seeing Tim and Abbie collaborate on the evolution of the A-bot, as we soon dubbed it, illuminated for us just how their relationship really functioned. Superficially so different—one hyperlogical, strategic, impatient; the other cool, impassioned, creative—they were, at heart, just two geeks. There was something almost childlike in the way they took to the task. If you glanced into Tim’s office, you’d see the two of them cross-legged on the floor, on either side of the A-bot’s disassembled frame: Tim with his laptop, frowning intently at some code, Abbie filing away at some old shopbot part. (Despite what he’d said about teaching her to code, pretty soon they reverted to their existing skill sets. As Kenneth explained loftily to Caitlin, “That’s why there are so few top-rank female mathematicians. It’s Darwinian. Men are housebuilders, women are homemakers.” Jenny, who happened to be standing nearby, merely rolled her eyes.) We heard laughter—Abbie’s musical chuckle, Tim’s goofy giggle. Often, they’d be there when we arrived in the morning, and still be at it when we left for the night. The pool table, on which Abbie had so memorably beaten Rajesh her first day, was now only used to hold late-night pizza deliveries from Zume. Sometimes the boxes were still there next morning, unopened: a Veggie Zupreme for him, a low-fat Chick-en-Chill for her, forgotten in the fascination of their enterprise.
Right from the start, it was clear they had ambitions for the A-bot that went far beyond what the shopbots were capable of. When all was said and done, the shopbots were chatbots in a fancy animatronic shell. They could walk, stand on escalators, do a rudimentary dance, and identify clothing, but that was about it. They worked a script, without much in the way of genuine personality or character. The A-bot was a chance to try a whole bunch of different experiments that moved the concept on. Potentially, it might even open up new revenue streams for the company—but we all knew that wasn’t why Tim and Abbie were doing it.