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It occurs to you that you can finally communicate with the mysterious Friend now. You already put the SIM card back in your iPhone. Now you send a blank text in reply to Friend’s last message, as per the instructions.
Nothing.
You’d been half expecting that. It still seems to you that Friend is most likely either a journalist, or one of the many trolls and ill-wishers who pestered Tim after the trial.
Then, with a ping, there’s a message. Not a text this time, but in Facebook Messenger. It’s headed Secret Conversation and has a big padlock logo to show it’s encrypted.
The message reads:
Open this app on your new phone.
Again, you follow the instruction. On the new phone, you immediately get another message. Again, the sender is Friend.
Store this contact.
You type back: Why? Who are you?
The answer is instant.
You tell me.
And then, a little later:
When you’ve figured it out, we’ll talk.
NINETEEN
Abbie’s nine months’ extended employment now had only a few weeks left to run. People were starting to ask her what she was going to do afterward. A few even wondered if she was thinking of staying on.
“Well, I’d love to,” she’d say. “But it can’t really work like that. Then you stop being an artist-in-residence and become a regular employee. And the art world wouldn’t take you seriously anymore.”
Privately, we speculated whether the relationship with Tim would survive her departure. After all, his first love was the company. When Abbie was at the office, front of mind and there in beautiful person, we could just about see how it worked. A regular domestic boyfriend–girlfriend thing? That would be a whole lot different.
It was noteworthy, too, that the A-bot project had stalled, or at any rate reached its natural limitations. Tim had created a simple AI for it, so you could ask it any question and it would reply, not just with words or phrases Abbie had used in the past, but recombining phrases to make new sentences. That was pretty cool. For a while the A-bot traveled around trade shows with the shopbots. It even got interviewed by a few journalists. But really, there were only so many conversations you could have with it. Most times, you’d ask it a question and it would reply with something frustratingly random.
Person: Hi, A-bot, how are you today?
A-bot: I am good, thank you.
Person: What are you thinking?
A-bot: Why are you interested in what are you thinking?
Person: Well, I want to judge how intelligent you are.
A-bot: What makes you think that I am not intelligent?
Person: [Pause] I’m trying to come up with a question that will prove how smart you are.
A-bot: What is the difficulty here?
It was, someone remarked, a bit like having a session with a very stoned therapist. Or, Darren added sadly, like being on a date with a beautiful girl who’s messaging three other guys on Tinder at the same time.
One of the developers, a quiet but brilliant Russian called Grigory, wrote an interesting blog about the A-bot, saying it exposed the flaws in our current approach to the shopbots. He suggested that if we wanted to make a bot that really talked like a human, we should have it learn from conversations in which the other party didn’t know it was a bot. Since you could assume that the longer the conversation lasted, the more successful it was, the bot could train itself to become increasingly authentic. He even sketched out some details of the kind of code that would allow that to happen, via a new type of deep-learning engine called a convolutional neural network.
We could see his point, but no one was eager to spend their limited free time pursuing such a theoretical subject.
Then Tim took Abbie to India on vacation, and she came back with a big smile on her face and a giant diamond on her finger. Soon the A-bot joined the other prototypes and betas in the workshop, all but forgotten, while we started speculating about which of us would be invited to the wedding.
56
When Tim gets home, there are candles on the table and a dish of butter chicken on the stove. Danny’s already been fed and is watching Thomas videos.
“What’s this?” Tim says, coming into the kitchen.
“I wanted to make something special,” you tell him. “Something to remind us of India. Ready in ten?”
“Sure. I’ll take a shower.”
By the time he comes down, everything’s on the table and you’ve opened some wine.
“Can I ask you something?” you say as you hand him a glass.
“Of course.”
You fetch a bowl from the kitchen counter. “I found a gap in my knowledge today. What are these?”
“These?” He takes the bowl from you gently. “These are eggs. At least, that’s what people call them, but that’s actually imprecise. Specifically, they’re hen’s eggs.”
Within five minutes he’s explained all the marvelous properties of an egg. He’s shown you how it’s impossible to break one by squeezing, no matter how hard you try, whereas a sharp tap shatters it at once. He’s demonstrated how the unique ellipsoid shape means an egg can’t roll away on gentle slopes. And he’s told you how for thousands of years humankind has been asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. “Which sounds like kind of a dumb question, because of course there were egg-laying mammals long before chickens appeared on the scene. But it’s more complex than it appears. It turns out the formation of the egg is only possible because of a specific protein, ovocledidin-17, in the hen’s ovaries.”
“I think the chicken came first,” you say.
“Why’s that?”
“The egg doesn’t have legs. It would still be stuck on the starting line when the chicken was crossing the finish.”
He stares at you for a second, nonplussed, before he gets it. “That’s brilliant,” he says wonderingly. “You took an age-old conundrum and turned it into wordplay. That’s fantastic.” He looks at you with all the pride of a scientist who’s just taught his favorite lab rat to juggle.
You know perfectly well what eggs are, of course, and you got the joke from the internet, but Tim didn’t know that. You’re reestablishing yourself as the pupil to his teacher. Galatea to his Pygmalion.
Over dinner he talks about his day. The company is still planning on making an offer of settlement to Lisa and the rest of the Cullen family. As to the issue of ownership, no one appears to be seizing that particular bull by the horns right now. But it seems from what Tim’s saying that this crisis has precipitated a kind of battle for the soul of Scott Robotics. It’s hardly surprising. For years Tim has surrounded himself with weak, easily led yes-men; not intentionally, but because those were the only kind who would stick with a boss like him. Now, with another domineering alpha around in the form of John Renton, they’re starting to wonder if they shouldn’t get behind Renton instead.
“I’m talking too much,” he says at last. “How was your day? Any ideas about where to look for Abbie yet?”
You shake your head. “Just questions.”
“Any I can help with?”
“Well…” You make a point of hesitating, as if you’re reluctant to even ask this. “Would you say Abbie was hypersexual sometimes?”
Tim’s eyes narrow. “Why do you ask that?”
“Nothing,” you say quickly. Then: “Just that in some of the photos, she seems to be wearing clothes that aren’t really suitable for a young mother. And I found what looked like some vibrator batteries in her pantie drawer. I’m just wondering if there might be a clue to her disappearance in that aspect of her personality.”
He’s silent for a moment. “She had quite a strongly sexual nature, that’s certainly true,” he admits. “And sometimes it did seem to me she…indulged that side of herself a little too much. But she’d settled down since she had Danny.”
You note that indulged. “But you never felt she was sexually dissatisfied?”
“Of course not,” he replies uneasily. “Why? Where’s this going?”
“Just something I wanted to double-check, that’s all.” You change the subject back to his work.
After dinner, getting up from the table, you say, “Tim, I want to talk some more about Abbie. But would you mind if I made myself more comfortable first?”
“In what way?”
You touch your cheek. “Now I know Abbie’s alive, it feels weird to be wearing her skin. Would you mind if I took it off sometimes? Just while we’re alone?”
“Well, okay.” He sounds bemused.
“I’ll be right back.”
Upstairs, you feel for the seam at the back of your head. Then, carefully, you peel away the rubbery flesh, exposing the glossy white plastic underneath. You pull it off, all the way down to your feet.
As you step out of it, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror. You remember the disgust you felt the first time you saw these white limbs, this blank, glossy face. How much has changed since then.
You reach for a bottle of perfume, then think better of it. The less feminine artifice you use, the better. You content yourself with giving your face a polish with the towel, then carefully pick off some dust and lint attracted by the static.
