The Perfect Wife

“Why don’t I remember this?” you say, panicked.

“Creating memories takes a lot of processing power. I had to be selective. The gaps will fill themselves, eventually.”

A garbage truck passes in the opposite direction, noisily crunching a plastic bottle under its tire. That’s what you’ll do, you decide. You’ll wait a few days, then throw yourself under a truck. Death would surely be preferable to this repulsive travesty of existence.

But even as you think it, you wonder if you’re really brave enough to do that. And if you were, would Tim’s technicians simply gather you up and put you back together again, like Humpty Dumpty?

Again…You realize you still have no idea what happened to you.

“How did I die?” you hear yourself ask.

He looks across at you, his face tense. “We’ll talk about that. I promise. But not yet. It might be too much, right now.”

The Prius pulls up at some electric gates. Behind them you recognize your house, a handsome white clapboard mansion. Despite the astronomical prices in central San Francisco, you could have lived somewhere even grander if you’d wanted to. Tim’s wealth was vast, even by tech standards. But ostentation was never his style. You wonder if the garage still contains the same beat-up Volkswagen.

“Welcome home,” he says softly.

The front door lock sticks, and it takes him a few moments to get it open. For some reason that, too—the way he’s hunched, patiently working the key—is familiar. You look around and see a small security camera over the door. Another upload.

Inside, there’s familiarity but also strangeness, like visiting a house you lived in as a child.

“I’ll show you around,” he says reassuringly. “Fill in any gaps.”

The kitchen first. Flooded with sunlight, comfortable, but with a professional gas range. Mauviel pans jangle gently overhead like some massive copper wind chime. You open a cupboard at random. Inside are spices—not ground, but whole, in precise rows of glass jars, each neatly labeled in your own handwriting.

“You love to cook,” Tim explains.

Do you? You try to think of anything you’ve ever cooked, and fail. But then—clunk—it comes to you. All those Instagram pictures, hundreds upon hundreds of them. You even had followers, eagerly copying whatever you made.

You point at a bowl of spherical objects on the counter, so vibrant they hurt your eyes. “What are those?”

“These?” He picks one up and hands it to you. “These are oranges.”

The word makes no sense. “Orange is a color.”

“Yes. A color named after a fruit.” He’s watching you carefully. “Like lime. And peach.”

“But they aren’t orange, are they?” You examine the one you’re holding, turning it over curiously in your hands. “At least, not as orange as a carrot. And in hot countries, oranges are green.” Something else strikes you. “My hair is this color, too. But people call it red. Or ginger. Not orange.”

“That’s right. But ginger isn’t a color. Or a fruit.”

“No—it’s a root. Once associated with a fiery temperament.” Clunk. You stop, confused. “Did I remember all that, or just guess it?”

“Neither.” A smile pushes the exhaustion from Tim’s eyes. “It’s called Deep Machine Learning. Without you even being aware of it, your brain just compared millions of examples in the cloud and came up with a rule for colors and fruits. And the insane thing is, even I couldn’t tell you how you did it. That is, I could plug in a screen and see the math happening, but I couldn’t necessarily follow it. I tell my employees: The A in AI doesn’t stand for ‘artificial’ anymore. It stands for ‘autonomous.’?”

You can tell from the way he says all this how incredibly proud he is. You breakthrough, you.

A part of you wants to bask in his approval. But you can’t. All you hear is, You freak.

“How can you possibly love me like this?” you say desperately.

For a moment there’s a flash of something fierce, almost angry, in his expression. Then it softens. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,” he quotes. “Sonnet one sixteen, remember? We read it at our wedding. Four lines each, in turn. Then the final couplet together.”

You shake your head. You don’t remember that, no.

“It’ll come back to you.” You wonder if he means the memory, or the sentiment. “My point is, those weren’t just empty words to us. You were always unique, Abbie. Irreplaceable. A perfect wife. A perfect mother. The love of my life. Everyone says that, don’t they? But I really meant it. After I lost you, plenty of people told me I should move on, find someone else to spend my life with. But I knew that was never going to happen. So I did this instead. Was I right to? I don’t know. But I had to try. And even just talking to you now, for these few minutes—seeing you here, in our house, hearing you speak—makes all the years I put into this worthwhile. I love you, Abs. I will always love you. Forever, just like we promised each other on our wedding day.”

He stops, waiting.

You know you should say I love you back. Because you do love him, of course you do. But it’s still too raw, too shocking. And right in this moment, telling Tim you love him would feel tantamount to saying, Yes, this is fine. You did the right thing, my husband. I’m glad you turned me into this freakish, disgusting lump of plastic. It’s worth it, to be here with you.

I, too, love and worship thee more than life itself….

“Shall we continue?” he says after a moment, when you don’t say anything.

5

He leads the way upstairs. You have to hold on to the rail, your legs stamping cautiously on each step.

“Those were all yours,” he says as you pass a huge floor-to-ceiling bookcase. “You loved books, remember? And that’s Danny’s room.”

The bedroom he indicates, the first one off the landing, doesn’t look much like a child’s room. There are no curtains, no carpet, no comics or pictures or toys of any kind. Apart from the bed, the only furniture is a small TV and a shelf of DVDs. To anyone else it might seem Spartan, but to a child like Danny, you know, it’s relaxing. Or at least, less stressful.

“How’s he doing?” you ask.

“Making progress. It’s slow, of course, but…” Tim leaves the sentence unfinished.

“Will he recognize me?”

Tim shakes his head. “I doubt it. I’m sorry.”

You feel a stab of sadness. But then, even a normal child might forget their mother after five years. Let alone a child like Danny.

Danny has childhood disintegrative disorder, also known as Heller’s syndrome. It’s so rare, most pediatricians have never seen a case. Instead they’d tell you patronizingly that children simply don’t reach the age of four and then get struck down by profound autism over the course of a few terrifying weeks. That they don’t suddenly regress from whole sentences to talking in squeaks and groans and little snippets of dialogue from TV shows. That they don’t start urinating on carpets and drinking from toilet bowls. That they don’t pull out their own hair for no reason, or bite their arms until they bleed.

When a child dies, the world recognizes it as a tragedy. The parents grieve, but there’s also the possibility of grief lessening, one day. But CDD takes your child away and swaps him for a stranger—a drooling, broken zombie who inhabits your child’s body. In some ways it’s worse than a death. Because you go on loving this beautiful stranger even while you’re grieving the sweet little person you lost.

“Where is he now?” you ask.

“He goes to a great special-ed school across town. Sian—she was one of the teaching assistants there, until I hired her as a live-in nanny—takes him every morning, then comes back to work with him on his therapy program afterward. It’s not close, but it’s the best place for kids like him in the whole state.”

You’ve missed so much, you think. Danny’s at school. A school you didn’t even know existed.

Tim opens another door. “And this is the master bedroom.”

You step inside. It’s a large room, dominated by the painting, a self-portrait, on one wall. The woman in the painting is red-haired, her mid-length braids—dreadlocks, almost—casually piled on top of her head. Her left ear, the one turned to the viewer, has three large studs in it. She’s wearing a striped shirt, the lower part of which is covered in colored smears, as if she’s simply wiped her paintbrush on it as she worked. She looks cheerful: an optimistic, sunny-natured person. On her neck a tattoo, an elaborate Celtic pattern, disappears under the shirt collar and emerges from one sleeve.

You look down at the flesh-toned rubber of your own arm.

“We can’t do tattoos,” Tim explains. “It would compromise the skin material.” He gestures at the picture. “Other than that, it’s pretty accurate, wouldn’t you say?”