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He takes you by the shoulders. “Why, Abbie?” he says urgently. “What are these thoughts you’ve been having?” His energy is overwhelming, sucking the truth out of you, the way the slipstream of an express train pulls leaves into its wake.
You open your mouth to tell him. That before you died, you might have been having an affair. That something feels wrong about the manner of your death. That you were lying to him about working on a new art project—
“It was nothing specific,” you hear yourself say. “Just a moment where I remembered diving into the pool. But I’ll tell you if there are any more.”
NINE
Next morning, Abbie’s wasn’t the only vehicle in the parking lot with a surfboard strapped to the roof. Alongside her beat-up Volvo was a Volkswagen SUV with a blue-and-yellow foamie strapped to the top—a beginner’s board.
“It’s Tim’s,” Morag confirmed. “He’s taking lessons.”
The thought of Tim trying to act like some laid-back surfer dude was almost comical. But it made sense that if he was, he’d be having lessons. Once Tim set his mind to something, he always achieved it. He once gave himself the challenge of learning Hindi in six months, although to the best of our knowledge he’d never visited India to use it.
Later Darren overheard Abbie and Rajesh in the kitchen area, discussing the shopbots. Abbie was dissing them, and Rajesh—well, Rajesh wasn’t exactly making much of a case in their defense.
“Of all the things robots could potentially do,” she was saying, “is selling people shit they don’t need really the best you could come up with?”
Rajesh’s reply wasn’t audible to Darren—he was soft-spoken and gentle. But neither was it long. And whatever it was, it clearly didn’t convince Abbie.
“Oh sure. And people like innovation, I get that. I’m just saying—wouldn’t it be better if all this tech was actually doing something useful?”
And then Darren heard Tim’s voice. That’s right: Tim was in the kitchen, too, unseen by either Rajesh or Abbie, listening.
“You think shopbots are the end goal?” he interrupted disbelievingly, in his quick, piercing voice. “You think this is the destination? Commerce isn’t the objective—commerce is the means. What do you think the world will look like a generation from now, if current trends continue? We already have eight hundred million people living in hunger—and population is growing by eighty million a year. Over a billion people are in poverty—and present industrial strategies are making them poorer, not richer. The percentage of old people will double by 2050—and already there aren’t enough young people to care for them. Cancer rates are projected to increase by seventy percent in the next fifteen years. Within two decades our oceans will contain more microplastics than fish. Fossil fuels will run out before the end of the century. Do you have an answer to those problems? Because I do. Robot farmers will increase food production twentyfold. Robot carers will give our seniors a dignified old age. Robot divers will clear up the mess humans have made of our seas. And so on, and so on—but every single step has to be costed and paid for by the profits of the last.”
He paused for breath, then went on, “My vision is a society where autonomous, intelligent bots are as commonplace as computers are now. Think about that—how different our world could be. A world where disease, hunger, manufacturing, design, are all taken care of by AI. That’s the revolution we’re shooting for. The shopbots get us to the next level, that’s all. And you know what? This is not some binary choice between idealism or realism, because for some of us idealism is just long-range realism. This shit has to happen. And you need to ask yourself, do you want to be part of that change? Or do you want to stand on the sidelines and bitch about the details?”
We had all heard this speech, or some version of it, either in our job interviews, or at company events, or in passionate late-night tirades. And on every single one of us it had had a deep and transformative effect. Most of us had come to Silicon Valley back in those heady days when it seemed a new generation finally had the tools and the intelligence to change the world. The hippies had tried and failed; the yuppies and bankers had had their turn. Now it was down to us techies. We were fired up, we were zealous, we felt the nobility of our calling…only to discover that the general public, and our backers along with them, were more interested in 140 characters, fitness trackers, and Grumpy Cat videos. The greatest, most powerful deep-learning computers in humanity’s existence were inside Google and Facebook—and all humanity had to show for it were adwords, sponsored links, and teenagers hooked on sending one another pictures of their genitals.
Alone of the tech titans, only Tim Scott still kept the faith. He offered us more than a job. He gave us a cause, a calling that rekindled the burning flames of our youth.
This was why we loved him. This was why we bore the Tim-lashings, the impossible hours, the sudden mercurial changes of direction. We saw the shining path, and we knew we needed a prophet to lead us down it.
And that was why, years later, when he was accused on social media and beyond of so many terrible things—of which murder may have been the most serious, but was not the only one with the potential to stain his reputation—we stood by him. When all was said and done, we knew the man, and his accusers did not. We knew that, deep down, he was moral.
There was a long silence, Darren said, as the two of them, Abbie and Tim, stared at each other. Darren had maneuvered himself so that he could see both their faces by now. It was as if Abbie was fascinated, he reported.
Mesmerized, even.
Then she said, “Okay, I get that.”
She said it a little distractedly, Darren told us, her eyes wide, as if a part of her mind was still gazing out over the endless, wheat-filled, well-irrigated future of Tim’s imagination.
* * *
—
There were three things, we agreed later, that came out of that conversation. The first was that, toward the end of the day, Abbie went up to Tim and said casually, “So you surf now?”
He shrugged. “Just started. What you guys call a barney, I guess.”
“I’m heading over to Mavericks this weekend with some friends. Titans is on. Want to come along?”
Now, Titans of Mavericks was this semi-legendary surf competition over at Half Moon Bay that only took place when certain very specific conditions whipped the waves up into breaks the height of four-story houses. Even to be on the email list so you knew when it was happening marked you out as a real surf insider.
“Okay,” Tim said. “Why not?”
The second was that, a few weeks later, Rajesh got a really good job at another company. No one ever knew quite how or why, but people said a headhunter had called him up out of the blue and offered him a massive stock option in this hot new start-up, but only if he was available to interview immediately.
And the third was that Abbie painted the mural behind reception, the street-art-style one that says IDEALISM IS SIMPLY LONG-RANGE REALISM! Which we took to be both a thank-you to Scott Robotics, for having her stay, and a peace offering to its founder.
28
ABC7’s studios are by Pier 15, between the financial district and North Beach. The interviewer is a woman called Judy Hersch. You’ve seen her on TV: immaculately coiffed blond hair, perfect white teeth, flawless skin. But you have no sense of what she’s like, whether she’ll be kind or not. She cried on air recently while doing an item about a puppy rescued from a collapsed building. So perhaps she’ll be sympathetic.
She usually presents along with a co-anchor, an older man named Greg Kulvernan. But this is for an occasional series called Judy Asks…, which she presents from a sofa, rather than from behind her usual desk. Katrina thinks this is good. Less formal, more woman-to-woman.
You’re whisked straight into hair and makeup. Two assistants work on you, applying layer after layer of foundations and creams. One of them is standing in front of you, blocking your view of the mirror, and it’s only when they’re done and she takes a step back that you finally see yourself. You look dreadful—as bad as that first day at Tim’s office. You protest you could have done it much better on your own.
“Take it off,” you say angrily. “All of it, and we’ll start again. I’ll tell you what to do this time.”
They look astonished. “But you look great!” one cries, offended. “Doesn’t she, Trish?”
