Your vows. I give myself to you for all eternity…Yes, you really had said those words to each other. You hadn’t meant them literally, of course.

But even in the dream, you realize Tim did. That’s why you’re here.

And finally, reading Sonnet 116 together:

    Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

 But bears it out even to the edge of doom…

That was doom in the old sense of the word, you remember telling Tim the first time you read the poem to him. Judgment Day. Eternity. Not the moment in a horror movie when someone meets the baddie.

In your dream you can even smell everything. The rich, savory aroma of warm hay. The sweet drifting scent of the patchouli sticks you’d placed on the tables. The salty tang of the ocean. The occasional whiff of weed from behind the house, where some of your artist friends had slipped away for a spliff—

Then, abruptly, you’re going back; back to a few days before the wedding, and your last-minute jitters. The more you thought about it—really thought about it—the more you loathed the whole idea of marriage. What a brilliant way, historically, of controlling women! The woman gave herself to the man—or was given by her father—as his personal property. Her rights and feelings remained subservient to his, while at the same time power over reproduction—the only thing naturally controlled by her—got transferred to her husband as well. That’s the reason they called it wedlock! How could any woman who called herself a feminist agree to such a Neanderthal setup?

You phoned Tim at work and spilled your worries. He waited patiently until you were done, then said, “Fine. Let’s not get married then, Abs. Let’s just make our vows to each other someplace quiet, and go on as we are.”

   “I don’t think I want that, either.”

“Well, whatever you do want is fine by me. Give me a minute,” you heard him say to someone at the other end.

“It’s just marriage itself, I think—the whole institution. I feel better now we’ve talked it through. I know our marriage isn’t going to be like that.”

“Good. Speaking of which, how’s my wedding gift coming along?”

“Nearly finished. How’s mine?”

He laughed. “Also nearly finished.”

“When are you going to tell me what it is?” He’d been teasing you with this gift for months.

“When you see it on our wedding day.”

“Will I get to unwrap it?”

“Hmm—might be a bit large for that. Gotta go now, Abs. There are people standing outside my office.”

“Let them stand.”

“I already did. You wouldn’t want me to be a tyrannical boss, would you?”

“They know you’re not, really.”

He laughed again. “I sincerely hope they don’t.”

“Oh, and Tim—”

24

   You open your eyes. The memory has stalled, somehow, the images frozen in your head. You search for the reason. And then—clunk!—it comes to you.

Not enough bandwidth.

You wait, hoping the connection might resume, but nothing happens. It must be that dodgy internet Tim mentioned.

You unplug yourself and swing your legs onto the floor. You’ll go downstairs and find something else to do until the connection improves.

Quietly, so as not to wake anyone, you pad along the landing. There are sounds coming from Sian’s bedroom—grunts and moans. With a flash of surprise, mixed with amusement, you realize she’s watching porn. Not such a prim little thing after all.

And then you remember that broken internet connection and realize she can’t be. The thought has barely formed in your mind before the truth falls there instead, so stark and horrible that you gasp out loud.

   You turn and look down the landing. The door to Tim’s room is open. You can see inside. The bed is empty.

“Yes!” Sian groans. “Yes!”

“Yes,” Tim agrees.

The door to her room is ajar. You don’t want to look but you can’t help yourself. She’s astride him, her back to you. There’s something repulsively triumphant about the way she grinds herself into him, luxuriating in her own pleasure, sweeping her hair back with one hand, then immediately leaning forward again so it curtains her face, resting her palms on his chest like someone doing CPR—

“Yes,” she moans again.

Yes, you think, pain and anguish battering you, toppling you off-balance so that you actually have to put one hand to the wall to stop yourself falling. Yes, of course. Of course something like this would happen.

“Yes,” Sian groans.

No.

No. No. No.

EIGHT

   For a couple of weeks after the firebot, things pretty much went back to the way they’d been before. We thought about new and exciting ways to make the shopbots sell people stuff. (“Like, how awesome would it be if they could spot when you were wearing last year’s fashions, and call you out?” “Pretty awesome, actually.”) Abbie turned up in the mornings with her braids still wet and her surfboard strapped to the roof of her old Volvo. Tim, we thought, seemed unusually quiet—“Dormant. Like Vesuvius,” someone commented. He was often closeted in meetings with the money guys. Apparently our backers thought the shopbots were turning out too expensive. That made some of us worry about cost cutting, which might mean layoffs.

Then one day Megan Meyer turned up in her convertible Jaguar, closely followed by a couple of employees in a white van. From the back of the van they—the employees, anyway—unloaded a rack of clothes. Men’s clothes, we noticed as they wheeled it behind Megan’s elegant kitten heels to Tim’s office: sports jackets, merino knitwear, tan slacks.

   So we gathered that Tim was having a style consult. That was something Megan regularly did for her clients. It wasn’t just about finding them dates: In Silicon Valley, where some of the wealthiest individuals were also the most socially dysfunctional, it was about teaching them how to date.

Later, after Megan had gone, Tim came out of his office. He was wearing a navy-blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt, chinos, and brogues. No one said anything, of course. But for those of us who’d never seen him in anything except black jeans, a gray T-shirt, and a white baseball cap, the effect was strange; almost startling.

We noted that by the end of the day, he’d put the baseball cap back on.

The following morning, he came into work wearing black jeans and a gray T-shirt again. We breathed a collective sigh of relief.