by Delaney, JP
“Nothing,” you say quickly. Then: “Just that in some of the photos, she seems to be wearing clothes that aren’t really suitable for a young mother. And I found what looked like some vibrator batteries in her pantie drawer. I’m just wondering if there might be a clue to her disappearance in that aspect of her personality.”
He’s silent for a moment. “She had quite a strongly sexual nature, that’s certainly true,” he admits. “And sometimes it did seem to me she…indulged that side of herself a little too much. But she’d settled down since she had Danny.”
You note that indulged. “But you never felt she was sexually dissatisfied?”
“Of course not,” he replies uneasily. “Why? Where’s this going?”
“Just something I wanted to double-check, that’s all.” You change the subject back to his work.
After dinner, getting up from the table, you say, “Tim, I want to talk some more about Abbie. But would you mind if I made myself more comfortable first?”
“In what way?”
You touch your cheek. “Now I know Abbie’s alive, it feels weird to be wearing her skin. Would you mind if I took it off sometimes? Just while we’re alone?”
“Well, okay.” He sounds bemused.
“I’ll be right back.”
Upstairs, you feel for the seam at the back of your head. Then, carefully, you peel away the rubbery flesh, exposing the glossy white plastic underneath. You pull it off, all the way down to your feet.
As you step out of it, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror. You remember the disgust you felt the first time you saw these white limbs, this blank, glossy face. How much has changed since then.
You reach for a bottle of perfume, then think better of it. The less feminine artifice you use, the better. You content yourself with giving your face a polish with the towel, then carefully pick off some dust and lint attracted by the static.
When you’re pristine, as shiny as a supermarket apple, you look at your reflection again.
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.
“Everything okay?” Tim’s voice floats up the stairs.
“Of course. I’ll be right there,” you call back.
“Now, tell me all about Abbie and you,” you say when you’re downstairs again, curling up beside him on the couch. “I want to know everything.”
57
You’d been hoping Tim would talk to you. Really talk, that is. About the cracks in his marriage, about what he and Abbie were like when everyone else had left them and they were alone. And you’d thought, in that context of honesty and intimacy, you’d begin to forge your own, individual connection with him.
But all you get is more of this unrelenting, sappy drivel about how wonderful she was. You want to scream at him to wake up, that no one’s that perfect, but of course you don’t. You nod and smile and say uh-huh and that’s nice and oh, how sweet.
Inevitably he ends up talking mostly about himself, this grand vision for humanity’s future that he and Abbie supposedly shared.
“And she changed me. There are plenty of people in Silicon Valley who think AIs will end up smarter than humans, so effectively we’ll become their puppets. And there was a time when I’d say, well, they can hardly do a worse job of running the planet than we do, so bring it on. But Abbie made me see that a society of incredible technological brilliance but no richness of human experience would be like Disneyland without children. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d never have started thinking about the whole area of machine empathy.”
“Wow,” you say. “Amazing.”
It’s a good thing you can’t yawn.
* * *
—
Eventually Tim says he needs to go to bed.
“Tonight reminded me so much of those early days with her,” he adds happily as he gets up. “Talking into the small hours about the kind of world we were going to create. I’ve really enjoyed this evening. Thank you.”
As you lie down on your own bed a quotation comes to you. There is surely nothing finer than to educate a young thing for oneself; a lass of eighteen or twenty years old is as pliable as wax.
Who said that?
You wait, and sure enough, that comes to you too. Clunk.
Adolf Hitler.
58
As you drift off, you find yourself thinking again about those websites Abbie signed up to. When you were fourteen and in junior high, the worst insult that could be directed at a girl was that she was a prude. Three years later, it was that she was a slut. The girls all called themselves feminists, but they also told each other not to sleep with a boy on the first date, not to admit how many sexual partners they’d had, not to make the first move. They claimed it was about earning a boy’s “respect” but, really, it was about proving they were respectable.
In some ways, you realize, those double standards have rubbed off on you. Confronted by evidence that Abbie had been unfaithful, your first thought was how tacky. To blame her, in other words. Whereas when you found out Tim had slept with Sian, your first instinct was to blame yourself.
Perhaps you’ll never solve the mystery of why she left, you think. Perhaps you and Tim will just muddle along like this forever. After all, even if you do locate her, you don’t necessarily have to share that information with Tim. You could just leave her be and hope that, little by little, he’ll come to fall in love with you instead.
But in your heart of hearts you suspect that’s not really an option. Tim shows no sign of preferring you to her. And the whole situation with Lisa and the courts and John Renton feels like it must surely come to a head soon. Time is the one thing you don’t have.
* * *
—
Next morning you don’t bother with the picture menu. Instead you simply ask Danny what he’d like.
He thinks. “My funnel’s cold. I want a scarf.”
“We don’t have scarves for—” you begin, then realize this is another of his oblique requests. “You’re talking about Percy, aren’t you? That time he crashed into the trucks and got himself covered in jelly. You’re saying you want jelly for breakfast.”
Danny starts to look stressed. “Scarf! Scarf!” he shouts anxiously.
You think again. You’d been so sure you had it right. Then it comes to you why he’s anxious. “Oh—I get it. In the book, it’s called jam. But their jam is actually our jelly. Just like their jelly is our Jell-O.”
Jell-O is called jelly! Danny laughs so hard, he almost falls off his chair.
You make some jelly sandwiches. Every time Danny stops laughing, you say, “Jam! Jelly! Jell-O!” to him, and he erupts back into giggles, spluttering jelly—or jam, if you prefer—all down his shirtfront. By the time you’re done with breakfast, you’re both almost as covered with the stuff as Percy was in the story. It’s a good thing Tim’s in his study, firing off emails. You’ve long since left the approved ABA protocols far, far behind.
But at least you and your little boy are having a good time.
* * *
—
“I’d like to take Danny to school,” you say to Tim later. “It seems crazy that everyone’s raving about what a brilliant place Meadowbank is, and I’ve never seen it.”
“Ah.” Tim looks wary. “That might be tricky.”
“Why?”
“I should probably have told you last night. But I didn’t want to spoil the mood.”
“Tell me what?”
“The Cullen family has gotten an injunction preventing you from being alone with Danny.”
“Oh, great,” you say bitterly. “So how’s that going to work, with Sian leaving?”
“Well, clearly it wouldn’t. So I’ve asked Sian to stay and continue with what she’s been doing. Just for the time
being.” He catches your look. “You said yourself, we need to think what’s best for Danny here.”
It’s on the tip of your tongue to ask Tim why he bothered to give you feelings in the first place, since he seems so intent on riding roughshod over them. But with an effort you manage to contain yourself.
“I guess that’ll be difficult for you,” you say sympathetically. “Having her around, after the way she came on to you. But Danny knows her, and she knows his routine…So we’ll just have to make it work.”
“Exactly,” he says, clearly relieved. “I knew you’d understand.”
* * *
—
You tell Tim you want to see Meadowbank anyway, even if Sian’s taking Danny. You’re not surprised when he says in that case, he’ll come, too.
He drives. You sit in the back, with Danny between you and Sian. To your satisfaction, you find you’re now better at getting communication out of Danny than she is. You don’t kid yourself it’s because you look like his mother. It’s because you’re not human. Your facial expressions change less frequently, and within a narrower range, than a human’s do. Your gaze is steady, without the demanding oculesic interaction others impose. Your body language is so muted, it’s almost silent. You’re as close to being Thomas the Tank Engine as a person can get, dammit.
Really, you’re so right for this family, it’s absurd.
When you get to the school, Danny’s greeted by a support worker and led inside. Sian goes with them.
“Let me talk to the principal’s office,” Tim says to you. “There should be someone who can show us around.”
A few minutes later he comes back with the principal himself. You’re not surprised at that, either. Not many people pass up the chance to schmooze a tech millionaire.
“Rob Hadfield,” the principal says, introducing himself with an ingratiating smile. If he thinks it odd to be shaking a mechanical hand, he hides it well. Probably for the same reason he’s showing you around, you think cynically.
The three of you stroll through a well-lit vestibule.
“Meadowbank is one of only two facilities for autistic learners in the whole of the U.S. where the teaching methods are still based on B. F. Skinner’s original studies,” Hadfield begins, launching into what’s clearly a well-rehearsed patter. “That’s one reason our results are so good. Where most practitioners have watered down their practices to fit in with current trends, our approach is evidence-based.” He leads the way into what looks like an amusement arcade. “This is our Yellow Brick Road area. Students who earn points for good behavior can spend them here. That’s the positive-reinforcement side of what we do.”
There are Xboxes, a brightly colored candy store, even a replica McDonald’s. A single student is playing on an Xbox, his face rigid and expressionless. “Jonathan,” the principal calls. “Say good morning to our visitors.”
The student pauses the game. “Good morning,” he echoes dully. His eyes don’t meet yours, but he waits until you say “Good morning” in return before turning back to his game.
“B. F. Skinner,” you say. “Wasn’t he the rat man?”
“Some of Skinner’s work originated with rat behaviors, yes. He moved on to examining the fundamental drivers of all animal learning. Including human learning.”
You’re walking into an area of glass-walled classrooms now. The rooms are small, no more than half a dozen students in each. All the students are wearing black backpacks—not slung casually over a shoulder, as a normal student might, but fastened across their backs. Danny also has such a backpack, you realize. It accompanies him in the car each day, though you’ve never seen him wear it.
“Is that where they keep their things? Those backpacks?”
Hadfield nods. “And the power supplies for their clickers.”
“Clickers?”
“It’s what the students call their GEDs—their graduated electronic decelerators.”
It’s not a term you’re familiar with. You wait, in the hope it might come to you, but before anything does the principal adds, “The GED delivers a small contingent aversive whenever the student exhibits negative behaviors.”
You have to puzzle out the jargon. “Contingent aversive—you mean punishment? You’re giving the students electric shocks when they misbehave?”
“Misbehave isn’t really a word you can use of these learners,” Hadfield says with a smile. “Or punishment, for that matter. We don’t assume they know the difference between right and wrong. We simply ask, What are the behaviors we want them to display less of? And then we provide a negative consequence every time it happens.”
Your eye is drawn through one of the classroom windows. A teenager has begun flapping his hands in front of his face, his elbows pumping up and down. A member of staff sitting at the back reaches out to a bank of controllers and taps one. Instantly the student’s body jumps, as if stung.
“We make no apology for using these techniques,” Hadfield adds. “If you look at the studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of behavioral approaches, they all used similar methods.” He nods through the window. “When Simeon came to us a year ago, he was biting his hands until they bled. His parents had taped boxing gloves to his hands to try to stop him, and he was deranged with stress from trying to rip the tape off with his teeth. Using the GED, we’ve reduced his hand biting to around three episodes a week.”
“And Danny?” you say, appalled. “Does he get shocked too?”
“He has been. I’m glad to say that, in his case, the aversives had a very beneficial effect.”
“You mean, he no longer hurts himself as much, because he knows that if he does, you’ll hurt him even more.”
Hadfield shrugs. “That’s the basic idea, yes.”
You look at Tim. “And Abbie agreed with all this?”
Throughout the principal’s spiel Tim hasn’t said a word. But you’ve sensed the intensity with which he’s been watching you.
“It took her a while,” he says. “But eventually, yes. Because it works. We’d tried everything else. Vitamin shots, craniosacral head massages, sleeping in an oxygen tent, crazy diets…Abbie even took him to some guy who claimed to be able to identify the cause of Danny’s autism by examining the irises of his eyes. None of those therapies made a shred of difference. This did.”
You’re silent.
“We don’t even have to shock him now. Or very rarely. A clicker comes home with him in his backpack, and if he ever becomes uncontrollable, it’s enough just to show it to him and he stops.”
“The threat alone terrifies him, you mean,” you say quietly.
“What we do here is highly regulated,” Hadfield insists. “Only last year, at the FDA’s request, we reduced the intensity of the shocks by five milliamps.”
“And Sian? She went along with this, I suppose?”
“Sian Fraser was one of our highest-rated interns,” the principal says. “Your husband poached her from us.”
You snort. “I bet he did.”
There’s an awkward silence. Tim says patiently, “Look, I know it takes a while to get your head around this. We both struggled with it, back then. But ultimately we came to the view that what matters is Danny. If something helps him, however unpalatable or unfashionable, it’s worth a try. You wouldn’t refuse to carry out a medical operation on a child because the surgery might be painful, would you? So why would you refuse to administer a small skin shock with no lasting side effects? When you’ve had time to think all this through again, Abs, I’m certain you’ll come to the same conclusion as you did back then.”
TWENTY
We didn’t see so much of Tim after he and Abbie got engaged. He started doing a four-day week. And even on the days he was supposed to be in the office, he either wasn’t around or was closeted with a firm of architects. Those who sneaked a look at the papers o
n his desk reported that he was designing a house. We immediately guessed this was a wedding gift to Abbie—somewhere by the ocean, perhaps, where she could surf. When we heard he’d bought a house in the Mission, San Francisco’s hippest district, and was installing a restaurant-grade kitchen, we assumed his plans had changed. But the meetings with the architects continued. It took us a while to figure out that he intended the two of them to have the house in the Mission and a custom-designed beach house as well.
Tim had never lived more than a mile from the office before. People who’d visited his home said he’d never even gotten around to plugging in his TV. Now he was almost an hour’s commute away. What’s more, he was immersing himself in a new lifestyle. Abbie knew lots of people in the city, and suddenly their evenings were busy with openings and exhibitions. Dragging themselves up and down Sand Hill Road, where the venture capital firms were housed in identikit glass-and-chrome offices, didn’t have quite the same glamour.
For our part, we loved that time. Tim was relaxed—happy, even. Occasionally he hung out in the break room and chatted with us. It felt like we were in a golden period.
It took a while to sink in that, actually, the reverse was true. When Scott Robotics first announced the shopbot program, investors had fallen over themselves to get a piece of it. Tim was the chatbot genius, after all, with a proven track record. It was simply a question of being first to market.
And yet, and yet…There had been snags; some technical, some psychological. Every time we did a field trial to refine what the marketing guys called the UX, or user experience, we were surprised by the negativity of the feedback. It seemed many people, especially women, actually quite liked being able to chat to salesclerks while they shopped, or to ask their opinion on a potential purchase. When the clerk was a robot, it made it much more obvious that it was only flattering you to make you buy stuff.
Tim came up with a solution to that one. Men hate shopping, he pointed out, so let’s target men’s stores. But by that time men were deserting brick-and-mortar stores so fast, the economics of staffing a retail environment with million-dollar robots made no sense.