“Ten minutes in which my actually important and useful work was disrupted and delayed. All so you could pull your little stunt and feel better about your stupid ruined shirt.”
“Are you kidding me?” Forrest asks, bristling. A flush of anger colours his cheeks. Good. At last I am rattling him. “How muchmore self-important can you get? You’ve built a glorified search engine, big whoop.”
“You are calling me self-important,” I gasp. “This from the man who brought his shirt to breakfast this morning. You’d rather carry it around than stick it in the bin and get over it.”
“Yes, I would,” Forrest says. “And you left it behind, by the way. One of the staff found me and gave it to me.” I watch in stunned amazement as he goes over to his backpack and pulls out the stained paper bag. “Here.”
He throws it at me. I let it land with a plop at my feet.
“It’s just a shirt!” I find myself yelling at him.
“No, actually, it isn’t,” Forrest says. “It was a gift to me from my wife and daughter, for good luck, and I don’t want to take it home to her in that state!”
“Oh!” I shout back. “Well, I didn’t know that!”
“Because I never had a chance to tell you and you’ve been angry at me ever since.”
“Because you called me stupid!” I shout. “For an accident! And you have no idea how much I have had to fight past exactly that prejudice to get right here.”
“Well, I didn’t know that,” Forrest says back.
“No one ever knows what anyone else is dealing with, which is why they should keep their shit to themselves!” I am still raising my voice. “Especially if the person that they are about to insult has already apologised.”
“It was a terrible time to pour wine on my lucky shirt,” Forrest argues.
“There is never a good time to insult the intellectual abilitiesof a stranger,” I shoot back at him. “Not to mention accuse me of the downfall of civilisation.”
“Well, I didn’t know it would trigger you!” he repeats, exasperated. “And also I do think AI is really bad.”
“Not mine! Anyway, presumably you do know how to be a decent human being,” I reply. “At least I hope so, for your wife’s sake.”
“My wife is dead!” he proclaims. And this time he is the one holding back angry tears.
We stand there staring at each other for a moment, and then I pick up the bagged shirt, walk into the lab, and make the glass opaque.
That did not go the way I’d pictured it.
Chapter Nine
“FT?” I ask once I’ve filled him in on my last conversation with Forrest. “Am I the bad guy here? I mean, I basically ruined the last gift his dead wife gave him.”
“No, Ava,” FT assures me. “You are not the bad guy. The incident with the shirt was regrettable, but it was a genuine accident for which you apologised. It was Mr. Faulkner that escalated the situation by insulting you.”
“Yes.” I agree. “But he couldn’t have known why being called stupid hurts me so badly.”
“He shouldn’t have to,” FT says. “In my view, it doesn’t matter who you are addressing. You should treat everyone with respect, even if you fundamentally disagree with their views and values.”
“But humans get mad,” I say. “I got mad at Forrest today.”
“It could be argued that he weaponised his dead wife in order to belittle you,” FT suggests.
“Yes!” I grab hold of the idea. “Yes, it could, couldn’t it, FT? I knew I wasn’t the bad guy.”
“Well, conflict is rarely so binary, Ava,” FT adds. “Human relationships and interactions are extremely complicated. Often yousay one thing when you mean another, and vice versa. It’s difficult to get a full picture of a situation without being able to visualise the body language, hear the tone, or sense the atmosphere.”
“You’re right, of course,” I say. “I wonder if they have CCTV in the orangery.”
“Ava, regarding that lack of experience in the physical human world...” FT begins, but before he finishes, there’s a loud banging on the glass.
