The Perfect Wife

   His impatience—which was also legendary—was somehow another aspect of his charisma: proof that the mission was time-critical, that every second was precious. He even peed quickly, one employee reported after standing next to him at the urinals. (The employee, meanwhile, was afflicted with pee-shyness.) His speech was even faster—curt, precise, bombarding you with instructions or, occasionally, invective. Senior managers, or those who very badly wanted to be senior managers, were often noted to have picked up a trace of the same clipped London accent, so different from the languid, questioning inflections of Northern California. It was as if he were a force field that buckled those around him. If Tim looked you in the eye and said, “I need you to go to Mumbai tonight,” you felt exhilarated, because you alone had been given a chance to prove yourself. If Tim said, “I’m taking over your assignment,” you were crushed.

   It was sometimes cultish. Not for nothing were we known in Silicon Valley as the Scottbots. The mission could be refined, but it could not be challenged. The leader might have his foibles, but he could not be wrong. At costume parties—paradoxically, Tim loved costume parties—where most people went as characters from Star Wars or The Matrix, he went as the Sun King, complete with buckled shoes, frock coat, outsized wig, and crown.

His background was another part of the legend. The impoverished childhood; the bullying that made him leave school at eleven to self-educate. The growing interest in chatbots, just at the time when people were starting to interact with e-commerce sites on their smartphones. The creation of Otto, a customer-service bot that, instead of being robotically polite and frustratingly obtuse, was efficient, smart, geeky, and cool—not unlike Tim himself, as many commentators remarked. Otto didn’t always spell correctly or use capital letters. He peppered his responses with emojis and witty allusions to nerd culture—quotes from South Park, catchphrases from sci-fi films. When you encountered Otto, you were convinced you’d just been put through to some wizard-level teen genius who would fix your problem for the sheer thrill of it. No one was surprised when Google bought Otto for sixty million dollars.

Then, at the age of twenty-three, Tim walked out of Google to found Scott Robotics, taking Mike with him. Their first success—put together in the aforementioned garage—was Voyce, a telephone helpline bot that was consistently ranked higher than human operators. More successes followed. Tim was obsessed by the idea that AI interactions should be lifelike. “One day the keyboard and mouse will seem as outdated as punch cards and floppy disks do now” was his mantra, along with “You don’t change the future without changing the rules.” The shopbots were a daring progression. Nothing like this had been attempted before—an AI that interacted with people physically, in person, without the medium of a screen or phone. But it made good, even brilliant, business sense. High-end retail mannequins already cost tens of thousands of dollars; salesclerks, too, were expensive, given that they often stood around doing nothing, and personal shoppers with a good eye and an exhaustive knowledge of a store’s inventory were time-consuming to train. Combining the three was a no-brainer. It was a sector ripe for disruption, and Scott Robotics—our tiny band—was going to be the first to disrupt it.

   And now we were to have an artist to help us. Had we known, of course, where it would lead—had one of our expert futurologists been able to predict how things would turn out—we might not have been so sanguine about that. But even if we had known, would we have said anything? Frankly, it was unlikely. It was not the kind of company where you debated the direction of travel.

4



   Tim’s silent on the way home. He was never one for small talk, but this is different. He seems almost exhausted.

This is what he was like after a big presentation to the investors, you remember. After weeks of living in the office, sweating every detail, he’d simply collapse, so drained of energy he could barely speak.

For your part, the sense of shock returns. The driver’s disgust is nothing to the revulsion and self-loathing you feel.

“It was what you’d have wanted,” Tim says at last. “Please believe that, Abs. I know it must feel strange right now, but you’ll get used to it. You were always the bravest person I knew.”

Were you brave? Memories flicker around the edges of your brain. Surfing a big wave at Linda Mar. Welding an artwork, the fiery sparks spitting into the blue lenses of your goggles. But then there’s nothing. Just fog.

You turn and look out the window, avoiding with a shudder the faint glimmer of your own reflection. San Francisco looks both familiar and new, like a foreign country you’re returning to after many years. An exile you don’t even remember. The buildings are mostly the same. It’s the details that have changed—the smartphones in people’s hands that have become larger instead of smaller, the electric bicycles everywhere, the white Priuses that have all but replaced yellow cabs. And the Mission has become even more gentrified, artisanal coffee shops on every block.

   Then the driver makes a turn, and suddenly you don’t recognize anything. One moment everything is familiar. The next, fog has taken it away.

“Why don’t I remember this?” you say, panicked.

“Creating memories takes a lot of processing power. I had to be selective. The gaps will fill themselves, eventually.”

A garbage truck passes in the opposite direction, noisily crunching a plastic bottle under its tire. That’s what you’ll do, you decide. You’ll wait a few days, then throw yourself under a truck. Death would surely be preferable to this repulsive travesty of existence.

But even as you think it, you wonder if you’re really brave enough to do that. And if you were, would Tim’s technicians simply gather you up and put you back together again, like Humpty Dumpty?

Again…You realize you still have no idea what happened to you.

“How did I die?” you hear yourself ask.

He looks across at you, his face tense. “We’ll talk about that. I promise. But not yet. It might be too much, right now.”

The Prius pulls up at some electric gates. Behind them you recognize your house, a handsome white clapboard mansion. Despite the astronomical prices in central San Francisco, you could have lived somewhere even grander if you’d wanted to. Tim’s wealth was vast, even by tech standards. But ostentation was never his style. You wonder if the garage still contains the same beat-up Volkswagen.

“Welcome home,” he says softly.

The front door lock sticks, and it takes him a few moments to get it open. For some reason that, too—the way he’s hunched, patiently working the key—is familiar. You look around and see a small security camera over the door. Another upload.

   Inside, there’s familiarity but also strangeness, like visiting a house you lived in as a child.