But before she could do either, a black luxury car double-parked next to her car and Billy got out of the backseat. He was grinning, holding a bouquet of Gerber daisies and trailing a duffel bag.
“You won’t believe it,” he said. The black car drifted away.
She felt cold. It was cool out, Seattle in September, sure, but she was wearing jeans and a blouse. She shouldn’t have been shivering. “The credit cards.”
His grin slipped a bit. “You saw. Okay. That was going to be a surprise. Paid off. All of them.”
“Jesus, Billy,” she said. “Did you sell your soul to the devil?”
He bounded up the steps, dropped the duffel bag at her feet, handed her the flowers, and then pulled her in for a kiss, his breath sour from six hours in the air. “Nah. Not the devil. Just Shawn Eagle. Part of the deal.”
TWELVE
* * *
NDA
She followed him into the apartment—he whistled at the boxes from the Eagle Technology Store—and then he walked her through the agreement and logged in to their checking account to show her the balance.
“And we’re going to live there?”
“For the winter. Hopefully not longer. I think I have an idea of what the pinch point is, and I might be able to unravel the problem pretty quickly. He’s mucking around with something he doesn’t understand, but Nellie’s my baby. Always was. It doesn’t matter how many lines of code they’ve added, at her core, she’s mine. Shawn’s good at user experience and interface, good at managing, and, clearly, amazing at selling stuff, but there’s no way he or his engineers were thinking about it the right way. You’ll see. This is going to change everything. Everything.”
“Why does it have to be there and not at their offices?”
“Come on. You’re talking about it like we’re going to be living in the cabin again. It’s not like that. It’s a luxurious vacation home. Actually, scrap that. It’s a luxury home perched on top of a frickin’ mansion,” Billy said. “And we can’t do it at their offices. There’s no way to do something like this on the Eagle Technology campus without the news getting out. You know how it is with projects for these kinds of companies. Everything’s top secret. We’ll both have to sign NDAs.” She looked at him blankly. “Nondisclosure agreements. Basically, we can get sued if we talk about the work.” What he didn’t say was that Shawn was trying to run this whole thing blind of the board of the corporation, that he was paying for it out of his own private fortune. Corporate boards are risk averse by nature, and he couldn’t imagine they’d be excited to hear that Billy Stafford was coming on board, that Shawn had reopened a chapter of his past that seemed, as far as the company was concerned, better off left closed.
“Can’t you just, I don’t know, rent an office here in Seattle? Won’t the program run as well on a laptop?”
They were sitting on the couch. Emily had her feet drawn up and tucked underneath her. She was hugging a pillow to her chest. When they’d rented the place, it was advertised as a one-bedroom apartment, but even in this neighborhood, they couldn’t afford a true one-bedroom. The bedroom was in a separate room, as was the bathroom, but the apartment was an efficiency: the kitchen, living room, and dining room were all the same thing. The light under the range hood was on, barely making a dent in the dimness of the room. He reached over the back of the couch and snagged one of the phones off the top of the pile.
“You’re thinking of Nellie like she’s just another version of Eagle Logic, but it’s something entirely different. I don’t even know how to explain it to somebody who’s not an engineer. You wouldn’t understand.”
She tossed the pillow at him. It was gentle. Showing her the balance in their checking account had bought him that much. “That’s what you always say. Try to explain it so I can understand,” she said. “Or you’ll have to understand sleeping on the couch.”
He picked at the heat-sealed plastic around the phone packaging. “Okay, so you know how Eagle Logic is essentially—”
She laughed. “Really? You’ve never let me buy an Eagle Technology phone, Billy. You smashed a plate against the wall the one time I even mentioned the idea. I don’t know how Eagle Logic anything. My iPhone is like five years old. All I can tell you about Eagle Technology is what I know from their commercials and from what everybody else says. I’ve never used anything from them.”
He handed her the pillow back. “You’re never going to let any of that go, are you? I’ve been clean for almost two years. Haven’t touched anything in nearly two years”—another gin and tonic on the plane—“but that doesn’t matter; I’m always smashing plates in your memory,” he said. “I said I was sorry, I said I would never . . .”
He trailed off, and they were both quiet for a few moments, until she looked away from him, first at the pile of packages and then out the front window. “Sorry,” she said.
He nodded. He knew he’d sounded excited before, but now his voice seemed hollow to him, deflated. “Okay. So you’ve got an iPhone now. Remember when Apple first came out with Siri?”
“Sure. You’d ask her to do something and she wouldn’t understand it and then you’d just do it yourself.”
He laughed. “They ironed it out pretty quickly, but on some level, what Google and Apple were marketing as a glorified administrative assistant—look, you can ask your phone to do something, and it does it!—wasn’t much more than a dog and pony show. Sometimes it was quicker than tapping out multiple steps yourself, but mostly, Siri was just a shortcut to things that the phones could already do. She couldn’t do anything of her own volition. It’s different now, though. The truth, and Shawn might argue with me if he heard me say it, is that Google and Apple and Amazon have caught up to Eagle Logic when it comes to a personal-assistant function. What they have now is every bit as good as anything from Eagle Technology despite the head start, but at the time, when Shawn first got things going, Eagle Logic had a lot more agency than anything the other guys were putting out, and it felt revolutionary. The ‘Logic’ part of the name came from the decision to rethink the way logic gates function and to reroute deep core—”
“English.”
He nodded. “Okay. Eagle Logic processes incomplete information better. The analogy is that if you told those Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft assistants that you like Diet Coke, they would have—maybe—bought a case of soda and left it on the counter, but Eagle Logic knows you like Diet Coke and will hand you a fizzing glass full of ice and make sure the fridge is stocked with cans so you’ve got cold ones ready for later.”
“I guess.”
“You guess because you don’t think about it anymore.” He tore open the plastic and opened the box. The phone was nestled in a black tray. The gold-infused titanium seemed to glow, even in the dim light they were sitting in. “The best technology turns invisible almost as soon as you use it. You learn to trust it. A few years ago people would look at you like you were crazy when you told them about self-driving cars, and now you can’t find a manned taxicab if your life depends on it. And Nellie is going to be like that. She’s going to make all this stuff we have look like banging two rocks together.” He pulled out the phone and handed it to her.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, this is a lot nicer than my old iPhone.”
“I wouldn’t let you buy an Eagle phone because I was still angry at Shawn, not because they’re shitty. The guy was never as good a coder as me, and . . . He was never as good a coder as me, but he really understands design and has that incredible gut feel for what people want, what feels intuitive. Between that and Eagle Logic, there’s a reason the company is worth a bazillion dollars.”
“Oh. A bazillion dollars? Is that more or less than a bazoonka-load?” She smiled at him and turned the phone over in her hand. “And if we do this, if we go out to this house of Shawn’s and you fix his program, he’s just going to give you part of the company?”
“It’s not his progr
am,” Billy snapped. His voice was too loud, and Emily was now leaning back into the couch, her smile turned into a thin line. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to raise my voice.”
“You shouldn’t have gone out there, Billy. You should have left it alone.”
He stared at her. Gaped at her, really. “Are you kidding? Our credit cards are paid off. There’s fifty thousand dollars in our checking account. Another fifty thousand coming October one.”
“Is it worth it, though? How much did it cost you to finally break free from your past with Shawn? Our past?”
“And fifty thousand more dollars in November, December, January, every single month from now through June. Damn right it’s worth it,” he said, angry, though he knew that’s not what she meant.
She handed back the phone. “And if you make this program work, if you figure out how to make Shawn’s phones a little bit better, you get rich. You get your recognition as a genius right alongside Shawn. Rewrite the history books.”
“We get rich, Emily. We.” He held up the phone. “And it’s not just for phones. Nellie will be in everything, and it’s not making things a little bit better. She’s completely intuitive. She’s designed to make the user happy. She takes feedback and writes new decision trees. She rewrites herself in real time. Basically, she learns; the more she interacts with you, the more she can make you happy. But it also means that she can be more than a glorified personal assistant, like the other programs. She’s a constant presence. She’s the answer to what it feels like to be alone. Having Nellie is like having somebody to keep you company.”
“Like a robot?”
“No. I told you that you wouldn’t understand.”
She didn’t say anything, and he just watched her.
He had the feeling that he needed to stay quiet. She was like a deer watching a dog. If he made any noise, if he moved at all, she’d bolt. She’d flee from him. Go to Chicago to live with her sister and leave him behind, and this time he wouldn’t be able to get her back.
God, those months that she’d been gone had been the worst. There were great, hungry blank spots, days and weeks he couldn’t remember, scars on his arms that must have come during that time. What he remembered was the way that he’d crawled down a hole he didn’t have any business escaping from. He’d been trying to kill himself, really. For years he’d been juggling the booze and the drugs and how angry he was all the time. He’d get a job at one tech company or another, working his way down the food chain until the last job he’d been fired from—for a third time he’d passed out from drinking and vomited in his cubicle, and then when he’d been shaken awake he’d beaten his manager hard enough to send the poor guy to the hospital—had been the last computing job he could get. She’d forgiven him all of it, even the sexual harassment accusations from that bitch at XNerdant, but that last day at that very last computing job, he’d left with his meager box of crap, still drunk, his knuckles bleeding. He’d stopped at a dive bar for a couple of drinks and bought two lines of coke with the last of his cash, and when he finally got home, he had to see the disappointment on her face at the cardboard box of stuff from his desk. He hated the way she looked at him.
He couldn’t help himself. He had just wanted her to look away.
It was an accident.
He didn’t mean to do it.
He acted without thinking. He was messed up from the coke and the booze.
He never meant to hurt her.
She was gone for three months after that incident, and yet, somehow, he didn’t die. Emily’s sister and brother-in-law paid for rehab—he always wondered how much she told Beth—and after he finished, Emily came back to him.
He didn’t think he could live through that again. He didn’t think he could live without Emily.
He stayed as still as he could, almost too afraid to breathe.
She blinked. “And if you can’t get it to work, what then?”
“Her.”
“Her?”
“Not it. Her.”
“Fine. If you can’t get her to work, what then?”
“We walk away. We walk away with our credit cards paid off and money in the bank. We can make a fresh start of it, anywhere you want.” He slid the phone back into its nest in the box. “We can move to Chicago and be closer to your sister.” Emily grimaced. He knew it wasn’t about her sister and her nieces, but rather at the thought that Chicago was too close to Kansas City.
Billy continued, “Or we can do what you’ve always talked about. We’ll pick an island in the Caribbean or off South America. Costa Rica or Grand Cayman or Curaçao or somewhere else with warm water. Open up a coffee shop. We’ll snorkel in the mornings, sling coffee during the day, and eat dinner on the beach at night.”
She leaned forward, putting her hands on the couch. “Ooh. Keep going. I love it when you talk dirty.”
“We’ll sell cookies and muffins and we’ll give the place some sort of awful pun for a name, Coffee Cabana or Beans on the Beach or Espress-Yo!” She laughed and crawled forward, until she was almost on him. “And we can settle down.”
She stopped. “Settle down?”
He paused. Such a loaded term. Settle down. That meant only one thing to her, what it had always meant to her. Are we ready to settle down? Do you think it’s time to settle down? Will we ever settle down? She stopped asking the question when it was impossible to ignore how bad things had gotten with his drinking, but she’d been thinking about it again. He could feel the question bubbling up behind her lips, starting to almost become words since he’d passed the one-year mark of being sober, getting closer to the surface as he neared two years. Settle down.
Have kids.
“If it works, we’ll be rich. But if I can’t fix Nellie, if I can’t get her to work, we’ll walk away with no debt, with enough of a nest egg to see us on a tropical island somewhere. We can make coffee and grow old together and settle down.”
If. There was no if. He knew he could make Nellie work.
“I like the idea of settling down,” she said. “When do you think we can start trying to”—she leaned in a little more—“settle”—more—“down?”
Emily finished leaning in. She kissed him lightly, at first, her lips a whisper on his. The slight flick of her tongue touching his teeth. He touched his fingers to her face. She lifted her hand and slid it up and under his T-shirt.
“No time like the present.”
They stayed on the couch for another minute or two, tossing most of their clothing onto the pile of Eagle Technology boxes before moving to the bedroom.
THIRTEEN
* * *
CHICAGO
They’d sold the old car for scrap. It made Emily nostalgic to let it go. Purchasing the car had been the first thing they’d done with the buyout money when they left Whiskey Run and that cabin behind. At the time, it had seemed like a good decision to take Shawn’s offer: one hundred thousand dollars for Billy to walk away from what looked like a colossal failure, and a handshake deal that if Eagle Technology ever became a going concern, Shawn would cut Billy in. Billy had assured her that Shawn wasn’t going to be able to do anything with Eagle Logic without him, and anyway, bigger paydays were in his future. The car was an investment, he said. A way to get them out to Silicon Valley so that Billy could start something up on his own. The way he described it, he’d bang out some code, run through a couple of rounds of venture capital, and turn whatever he was doing into one of those unicorns that VC firms loved, returning their money a thousand times over. It hadn’t occurred to either her or Billy to ask where Shawn had come up with the buyout money, how a guy who’d been living in the same cabin as Billy, eating the same ramen, drinking the same shitty beer only a few months earlier, had scratched up a hundred thousand dollars to buy Billy out. Maybe if they had, they would have realized that in the months since she and Billy had moved out of the cabin and into her mildew-smelling basement apartment back in Cortaca, Shawn had found at least one person who be
lieved that something real could come out of Eagle Logic.
But that car. Buying the car had been a happy thing. They went to the dealership together. It was a bullet-gray BMW. A low-end model, but with heated leather seats and a dashboard that curved gently and reassuringly. Forty-four thousand dollars right there, but she wasn’t worried. They were young and in love, and Billy promised her that when they got out to California he could make them rich with his eyes closed. They loaded up their clothes and books and what little else they had and drove the car across the country, stopping for a night in Chicago and getting loaded with her sister and brother-in-law. This was before she realized what a problem Billy’s drinking was becoming, of course. And then on to Silicon Valley, where they rented a furnished two-thousand-dollar-a-month apartment that was barely bigger than the BMW. The first night in the new apartment Billy popped out to get more beer and put a dent in the trunk. Just a silly accident, he said. Nothing to do with the drinking. He wasn’t looking when he backed up in the parking lot and he hit a pole.
By the time they brought it to the scrap yard, it had suffered from any number of Billy’s “silly” accidents. Dents and scrapes turned to rust and holes. No money to fix the transmission, so every time she shifted there was a grinding sound and she worried the whole engine was going to just drop out. The brake pads were worn to metal, so the highway was out, and even if the brakes had been fine, the car shook if you took it over forty miles an hour. It would have been an embarrassment to try to sell it, and she was secretly relieved that the scrap yard had accepted it. It was more rust than metal.
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