“That is so incredible,” Abbie said. She looked better, we thought. More energized. Excited, even.

“Really, it’s just the beginning,” Tim told her. “I’ve already thought of some improvements.”

47

   You get home from the lawyer’s despondent. It’s become apparent that, even though you have your own thoughts and personality, where the law’s concerned you’re nothing more than a machine that can be switched off or transferred to a new owner at any time.

You still haven’t told anyone else about Abbie being alive. As far as you can see, it just makes your own situation more precarious. Pete Maines’s strategy depends on convincing a judge that your sentience, as he calls it, is so unique it shouldn’t be destroyed until questions of ownership have been resolved beyond all possibility of appeal. If you reveal that, far from being a unique backup of a dead woman’s mind, you’re actually a kind of distorted, partial clone of someone still living, you suspect your own life expectancy will be very short indeed.

Besides, you still can’t bring yourself to tell Tim that his beloved wife faked her own death.

For his part, he’s come back from the meeting furious, his anger now directed at his lawyer. That’s how Tim drives people. If he can, he’ll inspire them, but if he can’t, he’ll beat them down through sheer determination. He’d demanded to know why Pete Maines didn’t have a strategy, why he couldn’t guarantee he could make this go away, why he was such a dumb waste of time and money.

   “I can’t rewrite the law,” Maines had answered patiently. “All I can do is put together the strongest case possible. And advise you what to do when it’s a weak one.”

Basically, he recommends that Scott Robotics pay Lisa and the rest of Abbie’s family whatever it takes to withdraw their suit. That was the course of action everyone was agreed on as the meeting broke up. But you know at best it will only buy you a little time. Lisa isn’t motivated by money.

Who actually owns this remarkable creation?

Just because you feel like you, think like you, it’s been so easy to forget that you’re actually nothing more than an assembly of processors and logic boards. Just intellectual property and patents, to be fought over by competing parties like a valuable car in a divorce battle.

At least Tim still loves you. Tim will protect you. A wave of relief and love for him washes over you as you realize that, yes, Tim will make this all right. Just like he always has. He’s a fighter. And he’s in your corner.

“I’m going to bed,” he says now. “I need to be up early, get on top of this thing before those bastards come up with any more ways to fuck us over.”

He bends to kiss the top of your forehead, just as he always does before he goes to bed. Tonight, though, you lift your head so his lips land on yours. It feels so good, so right, that you find yourself kissing him more deeply. You put your hands around his head, pulling him to you. And then you’re pressing yourself against him, desperate for his touch, running your hands down his back—

“Whoa,” he says, pulling away. “What’s this, Abs?”

“I want to sleep with you,” you say urgently. You feel a desperate need to be held. But more than that. You need reassurance that you’re alive, not just some irrelevant mechatronic construction. You need, very badly, to feel his desire for you, to be wanted. “To make love. I want you—”

   “You know that’s not possible,” he says gently. “Physically, I mean. You’re just not built that way.”

“We’ll figure something out. Even if I can’t feel anything myself, it would give me pleasure to give you pleasure. That’s what love is, when it comes right down to it, isn’t it? Wanting the other person to be happy. And I need us to be intimate. To have a physical relationship. Otherwise, how am I even your wife?”

He’s silent a moment. “I’d like that, too, Abbie. Very much.”

“Then let’s—”

“But it would be wrong,” he interrupts. “I’m sorry. I just can’t get around that.”

“But why?” you plead. “Why would it be so terrible to have a sexual relationship with me?”

“Because it would feel as if I were being unfaithful,” he answers quietly. “You see, in my heart of hearts, I know you didn’t die.”

48

   You stare at him.

So he’s known all along. About what’s on the iPad. What Abbie did. You take a deep breath to say something—

“I can’t put my finger on it,” he adds. “And I don’t have any proof. I just know you weren’t the sort to leave me and Danny all alone.”

“What, then?” You force yourself to sound casual. “You think I just upped and left?”

He shakes his head. “God, no. Something must have happened during those last few days, when you were at the beach house on your own—something catastrophic. We didn’t communicate much during that time. That was deliberate on my part; I was trying to give you space to work. But what if you were going through some kind of crisis? What if you had a breakdown? I’ve imagined so many different scenarios. Maybe you were abducted. You were—are—a beautiful woman, and I left you there on your own, without any kind of protection. I’ve tortured myself over that. There’s that lawyer who lives down at the beach—Charles Carter. I always got the impression he had a thing for you. What if he’s got you locked up in a basement somewhere? But the police refused to even consider it. They followed the evidence, they said, and there was no sign of a break-in or a struggle that would implicate anyone, let alone Carter. It was sheer laziness on their part. How could they follow the evidence if they never got off their backsides and went looking for any?”

   He has no idea, you realize. You feel relieved and sad at the same time. Because you know one day Tim will have to learn the truth about how his wife abandoned him, and this time you think it’ll crush him completely.

“Of course, it didn’t stop me grieving for you,” he adds. “In some ways it made it even harder. I kept seesawing between hope and despair—one day convinced you were dead, the next expecting you to walk through that door as if nothing had happened. I even prepared a little speech, telling you how sorry I was if I’d neglected you, how much I loved and needed you. And when the judge confirmed what we all knew—that my arrest had been a travesty—but the cops still refused to investigate any other possibilities, I realized it was up to me now. That was when I saw the potential of making something that could train itself to become self-aware. To become you.”