“Whoa. Now, this is big,” Renton says, drumming his fingers. “This is visionary.”

He stares at you hungrily. Something has changed, something you can’t altogether get your head around. “How much?” he says abruptly.

Elijah opens his mouth but it’s Tim who answers. “Eighty million. Initially. If you’re talking exclusivity.”

“For a company that doesn’t even have a business plan? You’re shitting me.”

Tim shrugs. Renton continues to drum his fingers. “And you can do this for anyone? You can do it for me?”

“Of course,” Tim says calmly. “There are some issues to iron out, but nothing that can’t be fixed. Forget cutting your head off and sticking it in some scummy tub of liquid nitrogen. Living forever will become as simple as making an upload. It’ll be expensive, of course. But we see that as a good thing. By restricting it to a select few founder investors, we’ll avoid putting additional pressure on the earth’s resources.”

There’s something creepy about the expression in Renton’s eyes as he looks at you. It was bad enough when he was talking about slutbots, but now he’s almost salivating.

“I want to see her without her skin,” he says abruptly. “I want to see what—what I’ll end up like.”

You wait for Tim to tell him to get lost, but he only says calmly, “That’s up to Abbie.”

Renton turns to you. “Well?”

   You freeze as you realize he’s serious. You try to think how to say no without giving offense.

But then you think of Tim, who against all the odds has turned this evening around.

“Of course,” you hear yourself say. You look over at Jenny. “Could you give me a hand?”

Together you get up from the table and go upstairs, where you take a robe from the bathroom door before removing your clothes.

“I know what to do,” Jenny assures you. “It’s pretty straightforward, actually.”

She fiddles with the back of your neck, looking for the seam. As she peels your face off, you close your eyes. You can feel the seam opening all the way down your back.

You step out of your skin as if from a wet suit, Jenny’s hands gently tugging it away from your torso. You try not to look, but when it catches on your knees you can’t help glancing down at the hard white plastic you’re made of, perfectly smooth, your contours sleek and elegantly molded.

You think how typical it is of Tim that he made even this aspect of you, a part not intended to be seen, as perfect as it possibly could be.

You put the robe on. Silently you go back downstairs, Jenny behind you. You feel like a prisoner being escorted to the scaffold.

But you feel something else, too. Without the heavy rubber skin your movements feel lighter, less constrained. You feel strangely…liberated.

Outside the dining room you take off the robe and hand it to Jenny. You pause for a moment, summoning your resolve, then step inside.

As you enter, there’s complete silence. All of them, to varying degrees, have the same expression on their faces.

They look awestruck.

   “Well, here I am,” you say. No one replies. Renton swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously.

You turn around. You walk out, a little taller than before.

“Holy shit,” you hear Renton say wistfully behind you. “She’s beautiful.”

37

   The evening breaks up soon after. Renton leaves first, promising he’ll get straight onto his money people. When he’s gone the rest of you look at one another, not quite sure what just happened.

It’s Tim who speaks first. “Well done,” he says to you. “That made a huge difference, Abbie.”

“Immortality, Tim?” Mike says suddenly. “Really? That’s your vision? That’s our business, now?”

“In the early twentieth century,” Tim says thoughtfully, “rich men from all over the world traveled to the French Riviera to have monkey glands injected into their ballsacks. It was painful and expensive and there was absolutely no evidence it worked. But thousands of people thought it was a price worth paying for a second chance at youth.”

Mike frowns. “What’s your point?”

“And in the fifteenth century, when Pope Innocent the Eighth was close to death, the Church paid ten-year-old boys a ducat each to give him their blood. The boys all died. So did the pope, of course. You might have supposed an organization that already believed in eternal life wouldn’t have been quite so desperate.” Tim gets up and stretches. “My point is, Renton’s an idiot. Someone who’s just rational enough not to have any faith in religion, but not nearly rational enough to accept his own mortality. But if he chooses to believe I can make him live forever, great. We’ll take his cash.”

   “So you don’t have a vision,” Elijah says.

“Oh, I have a vision,” Tim replies. “Just not the one Renton thinks.”

TWELVE

   The gift of Tim’s Volkswagen marked a new phase in the relationship between Tim and Abbie. Ironically, she soon stopped using it—she’d get a ride to the office with him instead, which we took to mean she was staying over. He was busy around that time, raising more funding for the shopbots. Most nights he’d be out at events in Silicon Valley, the endless networking in windowless convention rooms, eating self-serve food from tables with green tablecloths and two kinds of strip steak piled high in metal warming trays. Abbie went along, too, though she must have found those evenings dull by comparison with the festivals and gallery openings she was used to.

But there was no doubt it was beneficial to Tim to have a tall, strikingly gorgeous artist by his side. It did more than just get him noticed. The people who ran these venture capital companies tended to be competitive, alpha-male types. Abbie got Tim respect. And respect soon turned into a flow of funds. It was said one billionaire put in forty million after a five-minute conversation with her.

* * *

—

   Abbie started baking cakes and bringing them into the break room for us. They were really good. Still, you had to get there early if you wanted some. By nine A.M. there was never anything left but crumbs.

The girls, of course, all tried to get Abbie to open up about what Tim was like in bed. Abbie wasn’t a gossip, but neither did she show the faintest trace of embarrassment. One day, for example, she casually mentioned that Tim preferred not to ejaculate.

“It’s a tantric thing. Athletes do it, too. He says it conserves his energies for work.”