“Oh.” You think of your earlier self, the thousands of hours you spent on a board. That was why Tim built this house, after all—so you could be near your beloved ocean. And now even that’s off-limits.

“We might be able to address that, though, in time,” he adds. “And the hiking here is terrific. We should think about getting a dog—”

You shake your head. You don’t want a dog.

You make pasta. The four of you sit around the massive party-sized table on the sundeck to eat it, but conversation is fitful. You try to draw Sian out, but she seems to regard your questions as just some random computer-generated chitchat. Sometimes she ignores you altogether. Only when you ask her about Danny’s school does she become more animated. Meadowbank is, she says, exceptional, the only place in the whole state where kids like Danny get the consistency and intensity of support they need. The results there have been incredible.

You can’t help looking at Danny, who’s taking no part in the conversation, dreamily twirling a forkful of pasta tubes in front of his eyes before finally putting it in his mouth. Automatically, you smile at him—his fine, ethereal face is beautiful, whatever his condition—but incredible isn’t the word you’d have used.

“You should have seen him a few years ago,” Sian says defensively. “He was self-harming—headbanging, biting the backs of his hands, pulling out his hair…He’s made giant strides.”

“Of course,” you say quickly. “You’ve done a great job.”

Later, Tim and Sian clear the dishes while you stay with Danny. You’ve devised a simple game: You read one of his Thomas books out loud, but every now and then substitute a silly word for one of the originals—gorilla for train, say—or deliberately get Toby and Terence mixed up. Since Danny knows the text forward and backward, this is indescribably amusing to him. Sometimes he laughs so hard he can hardly make the thumbs-down sign, his way of saying Wrong.

   “Thomas, you are a really useful elephant…”

You pause for effect. From the kitchen, you hear Sian say conversationally, “It’s incredible how quickly you forget she isn’t real. For a while back there it was just like talking with an ordinary person.”

Outraged, you wait for Tim to slap her down. But his reply is brief and noncommittal, a low rumble you can’t quite catch.

“Well, maybe you could train her to add a bit less salt to the pasta,” Sian adds primly. “Still a couple of things a robot can’t do as well as a human, I guess.”

Danny taps your arm insistently to make you go on mangling the story, and you don’t hear the rest.

After dinner, thankfully, Sian retires to her room with her laptop. You watch TV with Tim while Danny goes on playing with his trains, lining them up against the baseboard in endless, exact permutations.

“I’m sorry about the salt,” you say eventually.

“What? Oh, that. Don’t worry about it.”

“Sian doesn’t seem too keen on me.”

Tim shrugs. “She’s worried you’ll replace her, that’s all. She’ll come around.”

You hadn’t thought of it like that. “Replace her? Why?”

“If you think about it, therapy work’s another sector that’s ripe for automation. The whole point is to be consistent and repetitive. There’s plenty of evidence a bot could do that side of it far more effectively than a human.”

“Well, of course I’m not going to replace her. She’s good for Danny. And he likes her.” Even so, you feel better.

The news comes on. You’re the second item. “Tech titan Tim Scott, who four years ago was controversially cleared of murdering his wife Abigail, has created an eerie robotic replica of the missing woman—” It’s illustrated with a long-lens shot of you closing the blinds.

   Abruptly, Tim raises the remote and the picture dies. “I’m going to bed,” he says with a sigh.

“We talked about uploading some wedding footage,” you remind him.

“Oh—so we did. We can set that up now.”

As you follow him upstairs you pass a painting on the landing. You stop to look at it more closely. It’s a portrait of Danny at a few months old, half asleep, one eye squinting lazily up at the viewer. It’s smaller than the other paintings around it, barely larger than a paperback. Even the brushstrokes are finer and more detailed, as if the painter’s whole world has shrunk to this tiny face, those dark eyes, the crinkle of soft, pouchy skin beneath each eyelid.

There is no way, you think, no way on God’s earth, that the woman who painted that portrait could have abandoned her son. No matter how trapped she felt, no matter what his diagnosis, she wouldn’t have left him.

You look up. Tim’s watching you intently.

“You feel it, don’t you?” he asks softly. “You feel what you felt when you were painting that.”

“I think anyone would. Any mother, anyway. It doesn’t mean I’m a mind reader.” Something makes you add, “Tim…those articles I read earlier. Were you checking my emails?”

“Of course not,” he says, clearly offended. “Why would I want to? We never had secrets from each other.”

You lie down in a bedroom and he hooks you up to a laptop. “It might take a while,” he warns. “The cable speeds out here are terrible.”

“That’s all right…And Tim?”

“Yes?”

“Would you kiss me before you go?”

   “Of course.” He bends down and, tenderly, plants a kiss on your forehead. “Good night, my love. Enjoy the upload.”

“ ’Night.”

You close your eyes and let the elixir of memory flood your system, like an addict’s fix of heroin.

23

   You dream it, and you don’t dream it. These uploaded memories are more vivid, and more painful, than any dream. For a few precious minutes you’re yourself again—seeing the world through your own eyes, thinking with your own mind. Complete, once more.

Your wedding was beautiful, but somewhat unconventional. That was one of the things you loved about Tim—he never did things a certain way just because everyone else did. This house, for example. It’s extraordinary—not just the location, but the building itself, surrounded by wild grass and rock in every direction, and screened from the highway by a gentle bluff. You could hardly believe it was his wedding gift to you.

For the day itself, the architects had built a wooden deck between the house and the edge of the cliff, and erected an open-sided marquee on it. Tim had let you plan everything except the venue. The tent was decorated with sprigs of wildflowers mixed with eagle feathers, and the guests sat on hay bales instead of chairs. Your dress was white and simple, like a Roman toga. Instead of a veil, you wore a diamond head-circlet from India, another gift from Tim, along with a crown of braided cornflowers. The whole ceremony was presided over by a humanist priestess.