The Perfect Wife

You’re both silent. “Tim, we need to talk about Sian,” you say at last.

“Yes.” Even though you’re indoors, he reaches for a baseball cap and pulls it firmly onto his head, bending the visor with both hands to get the shape just right. He takes a deep breath. “It was a mistake—a terrible mistake. I know that. It started a couple of years ago, when I was going through…it was a difficult time. I thought she understood that it was simply a physical thing, a couple of quick hookups that meant nothing. But I—well, I guess it became a habit. A habit I was too weak to break. And I was working so hard. Once you were on the scene, I assumed she’d realize that she and I were done. But instead she seemed almost jealous of you.”

You think back to last night—the strained atmosphere at the dinner table. And then there’d been that jibe about the salt, and how there were still some things a robot couldn’t do as well as a human. She’d been flirting with him, you realize.

And Tim—you recall the dark look he gave the TV when the reporter talked about you being creepy. Had he been having doubts about you? Was that why he didn’t say no to Sian more firmly?

“This is so new, isn’t it?” you say softly. “No one’s ever been in this position before. No one in all of history. We’re going to have to figure it out as we go along.”

“Thank you for being so reasonable. I don’t deserve it—”

“But the fact is, you do. You’re not even middle-aged yet. You can’t plan on being celibate for the rest of your life.” You hesitate. “Isn’t there anything we can do to make a physical relationship possible?”

He scowls. “You heard that bitch this afternoon. It’s the narrative people will always want to believe—that cobots are just million-dollar sex toys. Electronic Stepford Wives. I won’t let that happen. I can’t. I built you this way for a reason. So people couldn’t ever say my love for you is anything but pure. So they’d understand that you’re a person. Not some pathetic pleasure machine.”

“Okay. I get that. But if you need…If there are times when it gets too much…” You stop, not quite believing you’re actually saying these words out loud, that it’s come to this. “Just be discreet, all right? Don’t do it so I’ll know.”

“You’re what I need, Abbie. I love you just the way you are.”

But you notice he stops short of saying he’ll never need more.

30

Soon after, Tim goes up to bed. Before you follow him, you check the news channels to see how the interview went down. It isn’t good. The slap might have happened during the commercial break, but the cameras were still recording. The cropping is slightly off—you’re both standing, your heads out of shot—but you can clearly see your arm whip up and Judy Hersch recoiling, especially when they play it in slow motion. AGGRESSIVE ROBOT ASSAULTS REPORTER, the caption says. You turn to another channel, but the same words are scrolling along the bottom of the screen.

And suddenly there’s Lisa, your sister, talking to a journalist’s microphone. You turn the sound up.

“…Nothing will bring Abbie back, but this is making an already painful situation even more difficult,” she’s saying. “We will be challenging Tim Scott to prove he gained my sister’s specific consent to have her data and personality used in this way.” The crawl at the bottom now reads CULLEN FAMILY: WE’LL FIGHT “COBOT.”

You feel sick. Somehow this has all gone hopelessly wrong. You turn the TV off and toss the remote onto the sofa. It’s a fair bet the news vans will be back outside the house tomorrow.

You go upstairs and lie down, but there are too many thoughts churning through your head to relax. Judy Hersch’s words come back to you. How do you feel about replacing the real Abbie Cullen-Scott?

But I haven’t, you think miserably. Nobody treats you the way they did before. And despite what Tim says, how can this be a real marriage if you can’t make love? You get that he doesn’t want people to look at him and think he’s having sex with a machine, but why hasn’t he considered your emotional needs in all this?

Something else occurs to you. Tim effectively said Sian came onto him last night. But if that was the case, wouldn’t she have gone to his room? When you heard the two of them, they were in hers.

Meaning it was much more likely that he went to her.

Even Tim, you think, for all that he keeps saying he adores you—is it really you he loves? Or is it the idea of you—his creation, this amazing achievement? This extraordinary monument to his pure, enduring love?

If you were better off dead, would he let you go?

And you shiver in the darkness, because you’re fairly sure the answer to that is No.

TEN

Of course, we were all eager to find out how the date at Mavericks had gone. “I am agog,” Alexis declared, first thing Monday morning. “I am literally agog,” and she was not alone.

In the end it was one of the girls who asked Abbie, then reported back to us. “Oh, it was nice,” Abbie had replied. “But it wasn’t really a date. We just hung out and watched the surfing with my friends, then we all went to Jersey Joe’s for some beers.

“Where we had this, like, massive disagreement,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “Someone was talking about how homeopathy had cured their dermatitis, and Tim was kind of dismissive, so—just so my friends didn’t think I was with a total dickhead—I said, ‘But there’s got to be something in it, right?’?” She sighed. “And then Tim started listing all these scientific studies that proved homeopathy was a waste of time. And I told him he was being boring.”

Our admiration for Abbie—which, if we were honest, had taken a knock when she asked Tim out on a date: It seemed a bit obvious somehow, a bit conventional, that she too should be so smitten with our charismatic leader—was instantly restored. She had told him he was boring! She was fearless as well as cool!

No one dared ask Tim for his side of the story, of course. But Tim spoke to Mike, and Mike spoke to Jenny, who reported back that Tim had had a great time.

“She’s amazing,” he’d told Mike, apparently. “Smart, stimulating, and she likes to debate. She won’t let me get away with anything. And she’s drop-dead gorgeous, too. What’s not to like?”

“He’s asked me to go skydiving with him next week,” Abbie told us later. “I’ve always wanted to skydive.”

Someone remembered that, a few years back, one of the psychology journals had published the results of a study into dating: what kind of activity you should schedule for a second and third date and so on. Something physically dangerous is ideal for a second date, apparently, because adrenaline boosts feelings of sexual attraction. The third date should be something like a salsa class—getting close and physical in a nonthreatening environment. The fourth should be something intimate and nurturing, like feeding baby animals at the children’s zoo. That was the best time for the relationship to become sexual, the study suggested—when both parties still had the excitement of novelty, but had acquired the safety of the familiar.

Yes, Tim had researched optimal dating methodology with the same rigor he applied to every other aspect of his life.

He didn’t merely take Abbie skydiving for their next date, we discovered later. He booked a private flight with the Zero-G Corporation on their specially converted Boeing. During the three-hour flight he and Abbie did fifteen parabolas out of the earth’s atmosphere, experiencing weightlessness each time. Pictures on Abbie’s Facebook page showed them turning head over heels in the cabin, catching globules of champagne in their mouths. Then, when the plane was on its way back to base, they stepped out the door for a parachute descent to earth.

Chartering the entire jumbo for a private trip like that cost around two hundred thousand dollars, we noted on Zero-G’s website.

Rather than a salsa class, the up-close-and-physical date was at House of Air, the giant trampoline center near Golden Gate Park. Again, Tim rented out the whole place.

We waited with bated breath for the fourth date. It wasn’t long in coming—just two weeks after that first outing to Mavericks. The next day we scrutinized their faces for any signs as to how the sex had gone.

Nothing.

Tim had taken her to feed the ducks at Stow Lake, Abbie reported. He’d pulled out a loaf of bread and started tearing it into small pellets when she’d stopped him.

“You do know that’ll kill them, right?”

He’d blinked, astonished. “But everyone feeds bread to ducks.”

“Everyone except smart people.”