After her spat with Tim, Abbie sat at her borrowed desk, staring into space and frowning. Occasionally her lips twitched, like someone talking in their sleep. We knew what was happening—it happened to us all after a Tim-lashing: She was rerunning the conversation in her head, saying all the things she wished she’d come up with first time around.
Suddenly she sat up and typed something into a Web browser. Again, we knew why: She was checking out the studies on anger Tim had referenced, in the hope he’d gotten them wrong—how satisfying would that be! And again, we could have told her she was wasting her time; not just because Tim was almost never wrong, but because we’d already looked up the studies ourselves, as soon as he’d mentioned them. If anything, he’d understated the results.
After that she folded her arms across her chest and looked mutinous. And finally, with a sigh so loud you could hear it right across the office, she got up and strode outside to have a cigarette.
When she came back she was looking thoughtful. She went over to the printer and took some loose paper from the tray. Sitting down again, she quickly sketched something on the topmost page.
Someone asked her if she wanted a macchiato—they were about to do a Starbucks run. Abbie silently shook her head, then went back to her scribbling.
After a while she sat back and looked at what she’d done.
“Well, son of a gun,” she said out loud.
Getting up, she cracked her knuckles and stretched. (How we loved it when she stretched! There was something wholesome about it, something healthy: We liked the way she never tried to make herself insignificant or fade into the background.) Then she went over to Jenny.
“How would I set about getting ahold of some discarded robot parts?” she asked cheerfully.
20
Tim takes the 280 along the valley, past San Andreas Lake, before crossing over the reservoir and turning up into the hills. Within minutes you’ve left the congestion of San Mateo behind. Forests of oak and evergreen enclose you on every side, dark and silent, the road an endless switchback, winding through the woods, always pointing upward.
“We used to say, when driverless cars make this commute easier, we’d move out of the city for good,” he comments. He drives well, all his attention on the road, keeping his speed down between bends.
As you traverse the long, winding ridge toward the Pacific, you find yourself thinking about the day’s events. There’s something about the account of your disappearance in Tim’s slideshow that’s nagging at you, something you can’t quite put your finger on.
Once again, you find yourself curious about what’s on that iPad. Come back in a couple of days, the guy in the phone shop had said. That might be tricky now you’re leaving the city.
And then, like a fanfare, you’ve crossed the far side of the ridge and the view opens up. Below you, in the distance, the setting sun glints orange off the ocean, dazzling you.
“Not too long now,” Tim says, pulling down the visor.
You pass pumpkin farms and hiking trails on the winding road down, but mostly you just drive through empty coyote bush and eucalyptus. It seems incredible that, less than forty minutes away, the world’s most connected companies—Google, Apple, and the rest—are huddled together in one tiny, polluted patch of urban sprawl.
It’s getting dark by the time you reach Half Moon Bay. Even though it’s not all that late, the shops are mostly closed, and the bars and restaurants have a forlorn, just-about-hanging-on air. Tim doesn’t stop, heading south down the coastal highway.
A few miles farther, he pulls off at an unmarked metal gate. Reaching for his phone, he taps in a code and it swings open. Inside, the road forks. One branch leads down to what looks like a small cluster of houses. The other—newer and better maintained—goes left, along the cliff. A discreet sign says CULLEN-SCOTT RESIDENCE. An automatic barrier—thick pillars that look as if they could flip a vehicle over if they came up under it—sinks silently into the asphalt.
A minute later Tim pulls up by a long, low building. As he kills the engine and the headlights fade, the lights inside the house come up, as if in response. It’s mostly built of glass, with a few walls of brushed concrete and red-cedar paneling, its lines layered and angular. There’s no real yard, just some walkways and steps enclosing patches of the same scrubby wild grass that stretches away as far as your eyes can see in the light now spilling from the massive windows.
Below you, beyond the house and the cliff edge, the ocean is an endless, restless presence, silvery black as a piece of split coal.
“Wow,” you say, amazed. “It’s beautiful.”
He nods. “When I found this place, there was a decrepit old ranch house here. The architects knocked it down and constructed this in record time. I waited until they were three months from completion before I proposed to you.” He gestures toward the cliff. “And that was where we got married. Right there, with the ocean behind us and the house in front. That day was the first time you’d seen it…You should have seen the look on your face.”
Just for an instant, you can picture it—you, in your wedding dress, staring openmouthed at what he’d done for you.
“I’d like to remember that,” you say wistfully. “Our wedding, I mean.”
“Of course. We can upload the footage tonight.”
Inside, the house is just as beautiful as it is outside. There’s even more art here than in the city house—street art, vibrant and cartoonlike. It gives the interior, which might so easily have seemed soulless and grand, a youthful, art-student feel.
“What an incredible life we had,” you say, marveling. “Everything was so perfect for us, wasn’t it?”
Tim picks up a small sculpture—a child’s doll, cast in glass, with a lightbulb for a head—and gives it a half turn before replacing it on its plinth. “Perfect,” he repeats. “Because you made it that way. Which is another reason I had to bring you back. And don’t think, by the way, that just because we had a good life we didn’t engage with the world. You always used our wealth to try to make a difference. You never stopped caring about gender politics, the arts, the homeless…And special education for children like Danny.”
“Yes,” you say, nodding. “That was the one part of our life that wasn’t perfect, was it? Danny.”
“It was a shock, of course. And yes, it meant we had to reassess a few things. But you took it in your stride. Things happened for a reason, you said. If we’d been given Danny, it was because we were the best people to take care of him. Which we did.” He hesitates. “You did. We were lucky—we could afford help—but it was you who talked to every doctor on the West Coast, you who researched all the different therapies. You were amazing. Not that I was surprised. But what happened, and how you responded to it, just made me love you even more.”
“Thank you…But don’t underestimate what you’ve done, either. All those years bringing him up alone.”
“I love him,” Tim says simply. “Just as I love you. His problems will never change that.”
“I love you, too.” It’s the first time you’ve said those words to him properly since all this began, you realize. “Tim, I love you.”
You look around at this place where you got married, and imagine what you felt then—the optimism of two young people stepping out together on a journey, an adventure. You can almost remember it—how excited you were, how certain that, whatever problems you faced in life, you would overcome them together.
And you feel it now, too: a sense of possibility, an eagerness for the future. The journalists, the lingering self-disgust, the physical limitations—none of those really matter, not if you have each other.
I can do this, you think. I can live this life. So long as I have Tim’s love, we can make this work.
SEVEN
Abbie begged and borrowed from all of us. From Hamilton she got the frame of an old shopbot, the Mk II. From Rajesh she got a couple of Mk III arms. Kathryn gave her some wiring, and Darren—developer Darren, who worshipped her rather too obviously since she’d put herself between him and Tim’s tongue-lashing—wrote some code. We all wanted to know what it was for, of course, but Darren wasn’t telling.
“I promised her I’d keep it a secret,” he insisted. “You have to wait and see.”
The gas burners, pneumatic tubing, and welding tools were Abbie’s own, lugged from the back of her beat-up old Volvo.
This was another Abbie entirely, this slim, lanky figure in dark-blue overalls and even darker welding goggles who knelt in a corner of the parking lot, day after day, spraying sparks. And when she was finally done, it was to the parking lot she summoned us. Of course, we all went—even Tim and Mike. Nobody would have missed this.