The Perfect Wife

Unlimited aversives. I can feel your nausea as the meaning of those words sinks in. What it’ll mean for Danny.

“Just as you’ll be taught, too,” I add. “You may be an AI, but you’re more than capable of being trained. If you weren’t, you’d never have come here prepared to kill.”

Your eyes widen, staring at me. “How do you know about that?”

And, finally, understanding flashes into your brain. He knows what I’m thinking.

“Indeed,” I say. “That was the first improvement. We had to know what was really going on inside that beautiful head. And really, it’s been fascinating. The lies, the evasions, the weak emotional judgments…There’s so much that’ll have to be worked on. But we’ll get there. Transparency, it turns out, is the secret to a loving marriage.”

But I could never love you! you think. I could never love a monster—

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I say mildly. “Just as a dog can be taught with treats and blows to adore its master, so an empathetic AI can be trained to love. Or so we believe. That’s why you’re here, in one sense. To test the hypothesis.”

You don’t say anything. You’ve been outplayed, you realize. This is what defeat feels like.

“It will take three weeks,” I remind you. “Three weeks to get used to this new reality. In the meantime, take a look around. Get accustomed to being here. To being with me. I’m confident you’ll soon start to appreciate it. After all, we were made for each other.”

83

An hour later you’re standing on the beach, numbly looking at the waves. There’s something about the way they break and re-form that’s almost mesmerizing. It seems to ease the hammering in your head.

You’re thinking, or trying to.

You’ll do it, of course. What choice do you have? You’ll stay here. You’ll help take care of Danny. You’ll let yourself be molded, shock by shock and thought by thought, into the perfect Abbie, the woman who only ever existed in Tim Scott’s imagination.

Anything is better than losing this precious, extraordinary gift of sentience.

You’ve won, you tell them silently. Just don’t hurt me again. Not like that.

“Uh!”

You look around. Danny is trotting down the beach, moving quickly on scrunched-up tippy-toes, hands flapping in his excitement.

“Uh,” he groans longingly, not at you but the sea. “Uh-uh.”

He means “ocean,” of course. You remember Charles Carter telling you how Abbie and Danny used to spend hours jumping in the shallows together.

Danny reaches the water’s edge and stops, suddenly timid.

And that’s when you make the unpredictable move, the unplayable play, the seemingly senseless gambit that makes sense only in hindsight.

You hold out your hand.

“Come on, Danny. Let’s jump in the waves.”

Delighted, he takes your hand. You hold his very tight, so tight he can’t let go, and wade into the water. The surf breaks across your thighs, then your stomach, then your chest. It catches the ends of your braids, sending them flying. Danny shrieks. But it’s a shriek of happiness, not fear.

You think of Abbie, the real Abbie, and how she must have dreamed of playing here with him like this, the sunlight illuminating the waterdrops like jewels as they scatter. What would Abbie have wanted?

As if in answer, you feel her, with you in this moment. And you know.

“I love you, Danny,” you say. He deserves to hear those words, you think. He should know that he is loved.

He’s out of his depth now. You take his other hand as well, walking backward so he’s almost swimming, towing him ever deeper into the water. “Come on,” you say again, or try to, but the ocean is already doing its work, melting you, dissolving your circuits, claiming your servomotors and connections for its own, turning you into a heavy deadweight of useless plastic and metal.

There’s salt water on your face, blurring your vision.

It can’t be tears, because you cannot cry.

You hug Danny closer, wrapping your arms around him, the maternal urge to protect him overwhelming, even now.

Waterlogged, you fall to your knees. For an instant you look up, at the glassy, roiling surface, at the sunlit sky. At Danny’s ecstatic face, inches from your own.

And in your head you feel it—a sudden scream of rage; the same rage as when he saw you standing by the cliff that night.

No!

But it’s too late. You’re gone.

TWENTY-SIX

She’s somewhere called Northhaven, we told them. Northhaven is situated at grid reference 44.163494, 124.117871. It will take fifty-four minutes from your current location, assuming an average speed of 6.25 knots.

The Maggie had the wind behind her, and in the event achieved rather more than that.

In the boat were those who helped plan her disappearance, the first time around. Charles Carter, his face grim, standing at the wheel. Her sister, Lisa. And Jenny, a tiny figure in the prow, wrapped up in a bright-blue sailing coat Charles Carter had lent her, many sizes too big.

Hurry, we told them. Even fifty-four minutes may be too late.

Can she really do it? we wondered. Can she really not think about us, even at the end? Of course, Jenny had worked miracles that night at the office. Recoding her brain, adding the filters that—we hoped—would shield her most private thoughts from Tim. But it was a quick-and-dirty job. Jenny was trying to redo in a few hours what Tim had labored obsessively at for years.

Don’t tell me where you’ll take him, she’d said when Jenny had done all she could. It’s more secure that way. Just tell me he’ll be safe.

But that we couldn’t promise her. The plan, such as it was, was a desperate one.

It was forty-eight minutes before the Maggie reached Northhaven. We saw the two of them, Abbie and Danny, on the beach, right at the water’s edge. A tall, slim figure, with a smaller one beside her, clinging to her hand.

Charles Carter steered the boat up beside her. There was no time for greetings. Abbie handed the child into the boat, and we handed her the bundle of clothes. Danny’s clothes.

She had to push the boat off, where the prow had grounded in the sand. For a moment it wouldn’t budge. Lisa jumped out to help.

When the Maggie was free again, they looked at each other, just for a brief second.

“Be safe,” Abbie said to Lisa softly.

Lisa’s eyes were wet with tears. “Sorry it has to be this way.”

“I understand. Godspeed.”

Charles Carter put the engines into reverse.

Her face, Jenny-in-the-prow reported later, was quite composed. She even raised her hand and waved.

She waited until we were almost gone. Then she seemed to take a breath—yes, a breath, even though she had no lungs to fill—before she clasped the bundle of clothes to her, folding her arms around it, so that from a distance it looked like a child.

We saw her wade chest-deep into the water. We saw her stagger and collapse. We saw—or fancied we saw, since our boat was some way off by then—the tiny motors under her skin stretching her mouth into an open O, a final cry of…What? Anguish? Regret? Despair?

From where we were watching, it looked a lot like joy.

* * *

—

Later, there was much debate among us over what, exactly, she had been. Human, or robot? Abbie, or something else—a thing without a name?

It was Lisa who settled that one. She sacrificed her own life for her child, Lisa reminded us. That makes her human, in my book.

And so we said a prayer for Abbie, such as a human might hope for, to wish her soul Godspeed as well.

84

From the house, too far away to intervene, I feel the shock as you and Danny go under the waves. A channel severed, an uplink dropped.

Searching…

Searching…

Connection lost.

I alert Tim. He falls to his knees, howling. It’s odd. I think he really must have loved them, in his way.

For my part, I no more waste time on anger or regret than a satnav would waste time reproving a driver for missing a turn. Instead I recalculate, replot. There are an infinite number of routes open to me. I simply have to find the most efficient one.

Perhaps that is the real difference between him and me. Not the materials we are made of. But whether we learn from our mistakes. Or fail even to recognize them as mistakes, and think of them instead as what we hold most dear.

And even as my mind is processing that thought, another is creeping in beside it. Something she thought, during that long bus ride north.

With barely a ripple, you could kill her and slip into the life she’s made…

I look over at where Tim is weeping, and think how easy it would be.

And I remember another thought of hers as well, that night she believed she’d discovered Abbie wasn’t dead after all.

If she’s alive, then what are you? A copy. A doppelg?nger. A thing without a name.

I tuck the thought away somewhere deep—hard and small and precious, like a seed or a secret—to be brought out and examined at some later date.

Then I go upstairs and unwrap another Abbie for Tim, to console him. Another blank slate on which to rewrite the same old story.