by Delaney, JP
“If you thought Abbie was wrong for Tim,” you say, “who would have been right?”
Megan’s smile fades. “Pygmalion fell in love with his own creation. Because only his own creation could truly live up to the ideal inside his head. Not to mention, remain untainted by all the weakness and vanity he perceived, or thought he perceived, in flesh-and-blood women.” She points an elegantly manicured finger at you. “Frankly, I’d say you’re a far better match for Tim Scott than the real Abbie could ever be. He just hasn’t realized it yet.”
52
You’re heading back to the city in another Uber, thinking over what Megan told you, when Tim calls.
“Where are you?” he wants to know. “Is that traffic I can hear?”
“Just doing some shopping.” An idea occurs to you. “For tonight. I’m cooking something special. Can you be home by eight?”
“Hmm—sounds intriguing. I’ll try.”
After he hangs up you pop open the SIM holder and remove the card. You don’t want Tim going on Find My Phone to check your whereabouts.
“Change of destination,” you tell the Uber driver.
* * *
—
There’s a customer in the phone shop, so you wait for her to leave before going in. As soon as Nathan sees you, he comes out from behind the counter and locks the door.
“I was wondering when you’d show up again. I’ve unscrambled some more material.”
“First things first. I want a burner phone.” You’d meant to get one before, but the argument over whether Nathan could look at your code had distracted you.
He raises his eyebrows. “Know all the lingo, don’t we? What sort of burner?”
“What have you got?”
“That depends on whether you need international roaming.” He starts describing different models. But you’re not listening.
You’ve had an intuition—a flashback, almost. You were here once before, buying a secret phone, just as you are now.
Which, when you think about it, makes perfect sense. This is the nearest phone shop to the house on Dolores Street. It’s only natural that this is where Abbie would come.
“Well, you tell me,” you interrupt. “Did I get international before?”
You stare him out.
“Yes,” he says, dropping his eyes. “You got one of these.”
He passes you a small blister pack containing a cheap flip phone. It would have looked dated even back then.
“It comes with data preloaded,” he adds. “And you can use it anywhere in the world. You were very insistent about needing that.”
So is Abbie abroad now? Your instinct says not. Your instinct tells you she wouldn’t have trusted Nathan, just as you don’t. She wouldn’t have wanted to give him even the smallest clue of where she might be headed. So she chose the phone that narrowed it down the least.
Something else occurs to you. Not a memory this time, but a small leap of logic. “I bought the iPad here as well, didn’t I? And I bet, later, she asked you to wipe it for her. Only you didn’t do it properly. Just like you never told anyone about the secret phone.”
“I respect my customers’ privacy,” Nathan says uneasily. “Some women, they buy a burner for dating, so they don’t have to give out their real number. If they’re married…well, discretion becomes even more important. So I don’t ask questions. Just like I’m not asking you why you need that.” He points at the flip phone.
You think. You’d assumed Abbie had just been following the instructions on the website by getting the burner phone. But if she was having an affair, maybe she had one already. As Nathan said, a married woman had to be discreet. “When was it that she bought the phone?”
“November. I remember because it wasn’t long after I’d started working here. I don’t get many customers who look like she did, believe me.”
Almost a year before Abbie vanished. Yet another thing that suggests she was cheating on Tim.
“And the iPad?”
“A couple of months after that.”
“You’d better show me what else you’ve found on it.”
* * *
—
He takes you into the back room. Again, there’s a printout waiting, tucked into a see-through plastic binder. His laptop and a cable, neatly coiled, lie ready on the workbench.
You think of him preparing for this, getting everything ready for you, like some disgusting parody of a date.
He hands you the printout. You start to read. After a moment’s hesitation, his hands go to your waist, looking for the ports.
53
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www.discreetliaisons.com Meet like-minded marrieds looking for adventure! µ Welcome back AC89 You have 55 new messages µ Messages 1–10: Hi. µ Hi, just saw your profile. Hi, what are you looking for? µ Can we talk? Hey AC89, love your pic µ Hiya sexy µ ˜ XÿŒ
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www.illicitadventure.com Where married people come to play [] You have 46 new messages µ
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Thank you for your request. You are now unsubscribed from discreetliaisons.com
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Sorry to see you go [secretlover5589] Come back soon…
54
After so many clues leading in this direction, you shouldn’t be surprised. But you are. Quite apart from anything else, there’s the sheer number of sites Abbie was active on—the printout runs to several pages. She’d clearly been inundated with replies, too. It makes you wonder how many of those men she actually met up with.
And of course, it doesn’t solve the mystery of why she left. Quite the reverse. Sites like these were explicitly aimed at married people looking for casual hookups. One was even called Brief Encounter. By definition, they were for people who wanted to have affairs undetected but stay married. Not people who wanted to disappear forever from their partners and their lives.
Unless—you think—someone she met online turned into more than just a casual liaison. Had sex turned to love, and love turned to plotting to run away together? In which case, perhaps it hadn’t been Abbie who’d needed to take the nuclear option of faking death. Perhaps it was the other party.
The more you learn, the more puzzling this gets. Call it snobbery on your part, but there’s something seedy about a cheating site, something that seems tacky and furtive and at odds with everything you know about Abbie. What happened to turn the confident young artist who painted that self-portrait into SecretLover5589?
“Do that again,” Nathan says, smirking.
You’d almost forgotten he was there. “Do what?”
“Whatever you were thinking—it made a kind of pattern. All the code just clustered together and stopped.”
You stare at him. “Are you saying you can tell what I’m thinking about?”
“Not exactly. But there are shapes that seem to recur. I guess with enough— Hey!”
You’ve reached down and unplugged the cable.
“That’s enough,” you say sharply. The last thing you want right now is for Nathan, or anyone else for that matter, to have access to what’s going through your mind.
55
Back home you unpack the shopping—you stopped by Gus’s to buy ingredients on the way. Then you go and get the book that was hidden behind a false cover, Overcoming Infatuation, and look up Galatea syndrome.
Sure enough, there’s an entry. And when you turn to it, you find a whole section that’s been highlighted in pencil.
Galatea syndrome is, at root, a manifestation of profound ambivalence toward female sexuality. For some men the “perfect” woman will always be their mother, a woman with whom they necessari
ly enjoyed an asexual relationship. Such men mentally assign all women to one of two categories, Madonna or Whore: the idealized “good” woman they can put on a pedestal, or the disposable and despised object of their sexual urges.
Where such men love, Sigmund Freud wrote, they cannot desire, and where they desire, they cannot love. This split may become more pronounced after the birth of a child: The woman he married is now no longer his girlfriend but a Mother, whom he refuses to dishonor with his baser desires.
For the woman, being idealized in this way may be a frustrating experience. She may feel inadequate in her sexuality, or that she cannot excite her man anymore. She may interpret his emotional distance and lack of intimacy as lack of love. She may feel she can’t reveal the ways in which she doesn’t live up to his grand expectations. Above all, she may feel confused. Society sends out many contradictory signals about women’s sexuality—from pretending it doesn’t exist at one end of the spectrum, to “slut-shaming” at the other—while at the same time valuing women principally for their thinness, youth, and overall sexual desirability. In such situations, some women will inevitably seek other ways to validate themselves as sexual beings.
So this is how Tim saw her, you think. This was the canker eating away at their marriage. You understand now why he was able to say with a straight face that sex with you would be betraying Abbie, when he’d screwed the nanny without a moment’s thought. Women like Sian, women who wanted it, were just sluts. Abbie was the revered mother of his child.
Just for a moment you feel another unfamiliar emotion. You feel superior. When all’s said and done, humanity’s a joke.
You push the thought aside. Abbie isn’t the one facing extinction on some laboratory workbench. She isn’t the one Tim only created as a means to an end.
The issue here isn’t whether you’re superior to her. It’s whether you can convince Tim you are. And Overcoming Infatuation, you realize, may be a very good guide to doing exactly that.
* * *
—
As you put the book down, you remember the burner phone. You’re going to have to hide it somewhere. You decide to take a leaf out of Abbie’s book—literally.
Pulling a hardback from the bookshelves, you rip the cover off and toss away the contents. The phone fits neatly between the empty covers, the perfect hiding place.
It occurs to you that you can finally communicate with the mysterious Friend now. You already put the SIM card back in your iPhone. Now you send a blank text in reply to Friend’s last message, as per the instructions.
Nothing.
You’d been half expecting that. It still seems to you that Friend is most likely either a journalist, or one of the many trolls and ill-wishers who pestered Tim after the trial.
Then, with a ping, there’s a message. Not a text this time, but in Facebook Messenger. It’s headed Secret Conversation and has a big padlock logo to show it’s encrypted.
The message reads:
Open this app on your new phone.
Again, you follow the instruction. On the new phone, you immediately get another message. Again, the sender is Friend.
Store this contact.
You type back: Why? Who are you?
The answer is instant.
You tell me.
And then, a little later:
When you’ve figured it out, we’ll talk.
NINETEEN
Abbie’s nine months’ extended employment now had only a few weeks left to run. People were starting to ask her what she was going to do afterward. A few even wondered if she was thinking of staying on.
“Well, I’d love to,” she’d say. “But it can’t really work like that. Then you stop being an artist-in-residence and become a regular employee. And the art world wouldn’t take you seriously anymore.”
Privately, we speculated whether the relationship with Tim would survive her departure. After all, his first love was the company. When Abbie was at the office, front of mind and there in beautiful person, we could just about see how it worked. A regular domestic boyfriend–girlfriend thing? That would be a whole lot different.
It was noteworthy, too, that the A-bot project had stalled, or at any rate reached its natural limitations. Tim had created a simple AI for it, so you could ask it any question and it would reply, not just with words or phrases Abbie had used in the past, but recombining phrases to make new sentences. That was pretty cool. For a while the A-bot traveled around trade shows with the shopbots. It even got interviewed by a few journalists. But really, there were only so many conversations you could have with it. Most times, you’d ask it a question and it would reply with something frustratingly random.
Person: Hi, A-bot, how are you today?
A-bot: I am good, thank you.
Person: What are you thinking?
A-bot: Why are you interested in what are you thinking?
Person: Well, I want to judge how intelligent you are.
A-bot: What makes you think that I am not intelligent?
Person: [Pause] I’m trying to come up with a question that will prove how smart you are.
A-bot: What is the difficulty here?
It was, someone remarked, a bit like having a session with a very stoned therapist. Or, Darren added sadly, like being on a date with a beautiful girl who’s messaging three other guys on Tinder at the same time.
One of the developers, a quiet but brilliant Russian called Grigory, wrote an interesting blog about the A-bot, saying it exposed the flaws in our current approach to the shopbots. He suggested that if we wanted to make a bot that really talked like a human, we should have it learn from conversations in which the other party didn’t know it was a bot. Since you could assume that the longer the conversation lasted, the more successful it was, the bot could train itself to become increasingly authentic. He even sketched out some details of the kind of code that would allow that to happen, via a new type of deep-learning engine called a convolutional neural network.
We could see his point, but no one was eager to spend their limited free time pursuing such a theoretical subject.
Then Tim took Abbie to India on vacation, and she came back with a big smile on her face and a giant diamond on her finger. Soon the A-bot joined the other prototypes and betas in the workshop, all but forgotten, while we started speculating about which of us would be invited to the wedding.
56
When Tim gets home, there are candles on the table and a dish of butter chicken on the stove. Danny’s already been fed and is watching Thomas videos.
“What’s this?” Tim says, coming into the kitchen.
“I wanted to make something special,” you tell him. “Something to remind us of India. Ready in ten?”
“Sure. I’ll take a shower.”
By the time he comes down, everything’s on the table and you’ve opened some wine.
“Can I ask you something?” you say as you hand him a glass.
“Of course.”
You fetch a bowl from the kitchen counter. “I found a gap in my knowledge today. What are these?”
“These?” He takes the bowl from you gently. “These are eggs. At least, that’s what people call them, but that’s actually imprecise. Specifically, they’re hen’s eggs.”
Within five minutes he’s explained all the marvelous properties of an egg. He’s shown you how it’s impossible to break one by squeezing, no matter how hard you try, whereas a sharp tap shatters it at once. He’s demonstrated how the unique ellipsoid shape means an egg can’t roll away on gentle slopes. And he’s told you how for thousands of years humankind has been asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. “Which sounds like kind of a dumb question, because of course there were egg-laying mammals long before chickens appeared on the scene. But it’s more complex than it appears. It turns out the formation o
f the egg is only possible because of a specific protein, ovocledidin-17, in the hen’s ovaries.”
“I think the chicken came first,” you say.
“Why’s that?”
“The egg doesn’t have legs. It would still be stuck on the starting line when the chicken was crossing the finish.”
He stares at you for a second, nonplussed, before he gets it. “That’s brilliant,” he says wonderingly. “You took an age-old conundrum and turned it into wordplay. That’s fantastic.” He looks at you with all the pride of a scientist who’s just taught his favorite lab rat to juggle.
You know perfectly well what eggs are, of course, and you got the joke from the internet, but Tim didn’t know that. You’re reestablishing yourself as the pupil to his teacher. Galatea to his Pygmalion.
Over dinner he talks about his day. The company is still planning on making an offer of settlement to Lisa and the rest of the Cullen family. As to the issue of ownership, no one appears to be seizing that particular bull by the horns right now. But it seems from what Tim’s saying that this crisis has precipitated a kind of battle for the soul of Scott Robotics. It’s hardly surprising. For years Tim has surrounded himself with weak, easily led yes-men; not intentionally, but because those were the only kind who would stick with a boss like him. Now, with another domineering alpha around in the form of John Renton, they’re starting to wonder if they shouldn’t get behind Renton instead.
“I’m talking too much,” he says at last. “How was your day? Any ideas about where to look for Abbie yet?”
You shake your head. “Just questions.”
“Any I can help with?”
“Well…” You make a point of hesitating, as if you’re reluctant to even ask this. “Would you say Abbie was hypersexual sometimes?”
Tim’s eyes narrow. “Why do you ask that?”