The Perfect Wife

“Well, that does bring us to another point. Who actually owns this remarkable creation?” Maines gestures casually at you with the same hand that’s counting off points.

You stare at him, shocked. Tim flinches. “Owns? She’s not property, for Christ’s sake.”

“You may not like to think of her that way, but the courts will view it differently. She was constructed by Scott Robotics, I take it? Have you purchased her from the company? Or is she still the company’s asset?”

Tim bangs a fist on the table. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s my company.”

“It’s the shareholders’ company. Remind me who the majority investors are?”

“As of yesterday,” Mike answers quietly, “John Renton.”

Maines whistles. “Well, the good news is, it’ll be the company, rather than you personally, that bears the costs of fighting this.” He pauses. “Or makes some kind of settlement.”

“We’re not settling,” Tim says through gritted teeth. You can tell it’s costing him an effort not to explode.

“You should really hear me out before you make that call.” Maines holds up his hand again, the thumb extended. “The fifth and final point relates to moral rights. And that’s the one I think we’re going to find hardest to win.”

Elijah frowns. “Moral rights? What are those?”

“The rights of an artist to control their creation. California’s the only state to recognize them.”

“I don’t understand,” you say. “How am I Abbie’s creation?” Too late you realize you’ve just said Abbie instead of my. You’ll need to be careful about that. But no one else appears to have noticed.

It’s Tim who answers. “The very first version of you—the beta, if you like. It was your idea.”

SEVENTEEN

“I’d love to make a robot of you.”

Later several of us would swear we’d heard Tim say those words, or some variation on them, to Abbie as they walked through reception. (Since she’d gotten back from rehab they’d started coming in together again, hand in hand, their other hands clasping matching lattes from Urban Beans.) And while it was, on the face of it, an unusual thing to say, we all got it. We were roboticists, after all. We had long ago stopped thinking of robots as something freaky or weird.

What Abbie said in reply was the subject of greater debate. Some of us thought she laughed and said, “Sure.” As in, “Sure you would, but that isn’t going to happen.” Others thought she might have said “Sure”—as in “Sure, why not?” And many of us thought she said “Sure?” As in, “Really? Because I’m up for it, if you are.”

What was not in dispute, because Tim said it as they stood by the open door of his office, a few minutes later, was that he also told her, “I could teach anyone basic coding in about two weeks.”

“Not me.” Abbie shook her head. “Love tech, terrible at math.”

“Coding isn’t math. You cook, don’t you? Coding is like writing down a recipe. Or giving someone directions to your house. Just in a very unambiguous way.”

What happened after that was almost inevitable. Tim canceled his meetings. Within an hour he’d taught Abbie to write her first line of code, and a simple program by lunchtime. Before the end of the day, she’d sent him the following— int main( ) {

while(1) {

doesLove(you);

}

{

doesLove(String str {

printf(“I love %s!”, str);

}

—which, while it might not look like much of a love poem, had the effect of printing the words I Love you on his computer screen, over and over again. She also sent him a program in ASCII that caused his printer to spew out:

But, since the printer was actually by someone else’s desk, he missed it.

By the end of the second day, they were working on HelloWorld programs. And at the end of two weeks, we were introduced to the first bot version of Abbie. All the components were at hand, after all. The 3-D full-body scan she’d used to make DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) just needed to be reprinted in a new, hard-setting material. The mechanics, sensors, and motors of the shopbots were all ready to be incorporated, along with a simple voice function. Of course, it was slung together—what developers call a quick-and-dirty. But it was good enough for Bot Abbie to go around our desks with a plate of cookies, offering them to each of us by name, while Tim and the real Abbie stood back watching, like proud parents.

“That is so incredible,” Abbie said. She looked better, we thought. More energized. Excited, even.

“Really, it’s just the beginning,” Tim told her. “I’ve already thought of some improvements.”

47

You get home from the lawyer’s despondent. It’s become apparent that, even though you have your own thoughts and personality, where the law’s concerned you’re nothing more than a machine that can be switched off or transferred to a new owner at any time.

You still haven’t told anyone else about Abbie being alive. As far as you can see, it just makes your own situation more precarious. Pete Maines’s strategy depends on convincing a judge that your sentience, as he calls it, is so unique it shouldn’t be destroyed until questions of ownership have been resolved beyond all possibility of appeal. If you reveal that, far from being a unique backup of a dead woman’s mind, you’re actually a kind of distorted, partial clone of someone still living, you suspect your own life expectancy will be very short indeed.

Besides, you still can’t bring yourself to tell Tim that his beloved wife faked her own death.

For his part, he’s come back from the meeting furious, his anger now directed at his lawyer. That’s how Tim drives people. If he can, he’ll inspire them, but if he can’t, he’ll beat them down through sheer determination. He’d demanded to know why Pete Maines didn’t have a strategy, why he couldn’t guarantee he could make this go away, why he was such a dumb waste of time and money.

“I can’t rewrite the law,” Maines had answered patiently. “All I can do is put together the strongest case possible. And advise you what to do when it’s a weak one.”

Basically, he recommends that Scott Robotics pay Lisa and the rest of Abbie’s family whatever it takes to withdraw their suit. That was the course of action everyone was agreed on as the meeting broke up. But you know at best it will only buy you a little time. Lisa isn’t motivated by money.

Who actually owns this remarkable creation?

Just because you feel like you, think like you, it’s been so easy to forget that you’re actually nothing more than an assembly of processors and logic boards. Just intellectual property and patents, to be fought over by competing parties like a valuable car in a divorce battle.

At least Tim still loves you. Tim will protect you. A wave of relief and love for him washes over you as you realize that, yes, Tim will make this all right. Just like he always has. He’s a fighter. And he’s in your corner.

“I’m going to bed,” he says now. “I need to be up early, get on top of this thing before those bastards come up with any more ways to fuck us over.”

He bends to kiss the top of your forehead, just as he always does before he goes to bed. Tonight, though, you lift your head so his lips land on yours. It feels so good, so right, that you find yourself kissing him more deeply. You put your hands around his head, pulling him to you. And then you’re pressing yourself against him, desperate for his touch, running your hands down his back—

“Whoa,” he says, pulling away. “What’s this, Abs?”

“I want to sleep with you,” you say urgently. You feel a desperate need to be held. But more than that. You need reassurance that you’re alive, not just some irrelevant mechatronic construction. You need, very badly, to feel his desire for you, to be wanted. “To make love. I want you—”

“You know that’s not possible,” he says gently. “Physically, I mean. You’re just not built that way.”

“We’ll figure something out. Even if I can’t feel anything myself, it would give me pleasure to give you pleasure. That’s what love is, when it comes right down to it, isn’t it? Wanting the other person to be happy. And I need us to be intimate. To have a physical relationship. Otherwise, how am I even your wife?”

He’s silent a moment. “I’d like that, too, Abbie. Very much.”

“Then let’s—”

“But it would be wrong,” he interrupts. “I’m sorry. I just can’t get around that.”

“But why?” you plead. “Why would it be so terrible to have a sexual relationship with me?”

“Because it would feel as if I were being unfaithful,” he answers quietly. “You see, in my heart of hearts, I know you didn’t die.”

48

You stare at him.

So he’s known all along. About what’s on the iPad. What Abbie did. You take a deep breath to say something—

“I can’t put my finger on it,” he adds. “And I don’t have any proof. I just know you weren’t the sort to leave me and Danny all alone.”