The Perfect Wife

“What, then?” You force yourself to sound casual. “You think I just upped and left?”

He shakes his head. “God, no. Something must have happened during those last few days, when you were at the beach house on your own—something catastrophic. We didn’t communicate much during that time. That was deliberate on my part; I was trying to give you space to work. But what if you were going through some kind of crisis? What if you had a breakdown? I’ve imagined so many different scenarios. Maybe you were abducted. You were—are—a beautiful woman, and I left you there on your own, without any kind of protection. I’ve tortured myself over that. There’s that lawyer who lives down at the beach—Charles Carter. I always got the impression he had a thing for you. What if he’s got you locked up in a basement somewhere? But the police refused to even consider it. They followed the evidence, they said, and there was no sign of a break-in or a struggle that would implicate anyone, let alone Carter. It was sheer laziness on their part. How could they follow the evidence if they never got off their backsides and went looking for any?”

He has no idea, you realize. You feel relieved and sad at the same time. Because you know one day Tim will have to learn the truth about how his wife abandoned him, and this time you think it’ll crush him completely.

“Of course, it didn’t stop me grieving for you,” he adds. “In some ways it made it even harder. I kept seesawing between hope and despair—one day convinced you were dead, the next expecting you to walk through that door as if nothing had happened. I even prepared a little speech, telling you how sorry I was if I’d neglected you, how much I loved and needed you. And when the judge confirmed what we all knew—that my arrest had been a travesty—but the cops still refused to investigate any other possibilities, I realized it was up to me now. That was when I saw the potential of making something that could train itself to become self-aware. To become you.”

“But it hasn’t worked, has it?” you say sadly. “When all’s said and done, I’m no replacement for the woman you loved. You just said so—you still grieve for her, obsess about finding her…”

“I never thought you’d be a replacement for the real Abbie,” he interrupts. “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. But that wasn’t the reason I created you, not at all.”

“What, then?” you say, confused.

“Do you remember what an algorithm is?”

“Of course.” You could hardly be married to Tim Scott and not know what an algorithm is. “It’s a kind of equation. A formula for working something out.”

“That’s right. Like when you did long multiplication at school. It’s just a tool, really. A process to bring about a certain result.”

“But what does that have to do with me?”

He says calmly, “You see, you’re a kind of algorithm, too. An algorithm to help me find her.”

49

“I don’t get it,” you say, bewildered. “You told me I was a cobot—a companion—”

“I said you were special,” he cuts in. “I just didn’t tell you why.”

“But how can I find her? If the police couldn’t—”

“The police didn’t try. Like I said, I realized it was up to me now. But I didn’t have the right tools.” He gestures at you with both hands. Voilà. “I had to build the right tools. That was the first step. Then I had to let you acclimatize. If I’d told you all this right at the beginning, it would have been way too much for you to handle.”

It still is, you think numbly. “But I still don’t see what makes you think I can succeed in finding her. Given that no one else has.”

Tim begins to pace the width of the kitchen, his face dark with concentration. “You remember we talked about how deep-learning machines may be capable of intuition? How they can see things even their programmers can’t? That’s what I’m hoping for here. That you’ll be able to…walk in her footsteps, as it were. Make the same decisions she’d have made. And then make the leap to working out where she is.”

You’re shocked. Hurt, too. So this is the reason he breathed life into you. Okay, it’s because he loves you so very much. It’s just that he wants the real you. The original. Her. Not this hideous plastic-and-electronic simulacrum.

The one thing that’s been keeping your self-loathing at bay is the fact that Tim adores you now, in electronic form, just as much as he ever did. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

But it was all a lie.

Of course he doesn’t love you. Who could? You disgust him.

You feel numb. And more: You feel betrayed. Screwing Sian was nothing compared with the way he’s been manipulating you.

“And what if you do find her?” you hear yourself say. “What if you find her and she doesn’t want to come back? Have you thought of that?”

“I can’t believe that would be the case. But if it is, at least I’ll have done everything I could. And if worse comes to worst—”

He stops. But you know exactly what he was going to say. Call it your deep-learning intuition.

If worse comes to worst, I’ll still have you.

I’ll still have this pathetic, second-best version of my wife I threw together in my company’s workshop.

Just for a moment, you experience an unfamiliar emotion.

Just for a moment, you hate them both.

You hate Abbie Cullen-Scott, the object of Tim’s devotion. And you hate him for worshipping her.

You open your mouth to tell him everything. About what his adored Abbie was really like. About the hidden iPad. About the artwork she never made, the pills she never took, the website advising her to fake depression as a prelude to faking her own death.

But you don’t.

Once you give him that information, you can’t take it back. And from what you know of Tim, it still may not be enough. He’s so willing to think the best of her, he’ll probably convince himself there’s some perfectly innocent explanation for why she ran away.

No: better to say nothing, at least for now. You need to think this through.

Because there’s a part of you that’s already hoping Abbie isn’t alive after all. Or that Tim never finds her.

Because if he does find her, and she wants to come back, what’s going to happen to you?

EIGHTEEN

Seeing Tim and Abbie collaborate on the evolution of the A-bot, as we soon dubbed it, illuminated for us just how their relationship really functioned. Superficially so different—one hyperlogical, strategic, impatient; the other cool, impassioned, creative—they were, at heart, just two geeks. There was something almost childlike in the way they took to the task. If you glanced into Tim’s office, you’d see the two of them cross-legged on the floor, on either side of the A-bot’s disassembled frame: Tim with his laptop, frowning intently at some code, Abbie filing away at some old shopbot part. (Despite what he’d said about teaching her to code, pretty soon they reverted to their existing skill sets. As Kenneth explained loftily to Caitlin, “That’s why there are so few top-rank female mathematicians. It’s Darwinian. Men are housebuilders, women are homemakers.” Jenny, who happened to be standing nearby, merely rolled her eyes.) We heard laughter—Abbie’s musical chuckle, Tim’s goofy giggle. Often, they’d be there when we arrived in the morning, and still be at it when we left for the night. The pool table, on which Abbie had so memorably beaten Rajesh her first day, was now only used to hold late-night pizza deliveries from Zume. Sometimes the boxes were still there next morning, unopened: a Veggie Zupreme for him, a low-fat Chick-en-Chill for her, forgotten in the fascination of their enterprise.

Right from the start, it was clear they had ambitions for the A-bot that went far beyond what the shopbots were capable of. When all was said and done, the shopbots were chatbots in a fancy animatronic shell. They could walk, stand on escalators, do a rudimentary dance, and identify clothing, but that was about it. They worked a script, without much in the way of genuine personality or character. The A-bot was a chance to try a whole bunch of different experiments that moved the concept on. Potentially, it might even open up new revenue streams for the company—but we all knew that wasn’t why Tim and Abbie were doing it.