So this is how Tim saw her, you think. This was the canker eating away at their marriage. You understand now why he was able to say with a straight face that sex with you would be betraying Abbie, when he’d screwed the nanny without a moment’s thought. Women like Sian, women who wanted it, were just sluts. Abbie was the revered mother of his child.

Just for a moment you feel another unfamiliar emotion. You feel superior. When all’s said and done, humanity’s a joke.

You push the thought aside. Abbie isn’t the one facing extinction on some laboratory workbench. She isn’t the one Tim only created as a means to an end.

The issue here isn’t whether you’re superior to her. It’s whether you can convince Tim you are. And Overcoming Infatuation, you realize, may be a very good guide to doing exactly that.

* * *

—

   As you put the book down, you remember the burner phone. You’re going to have to hide it somewhere. You decide to take a leaf out of Abbie’s book—literally.

Pulling a hardback from the bookshelves, you rip the cover off and toss away the contents. The phone fits neatly between the empty covers, the perfect hiding place.

It occurs to you that you can finally communicate with the mysterious Friend now. You already put the SIM card back in your iPhone. Now you send a blank text in reply to Friend’s last message, as per the instructions.

Nothing.

You’d been half expecting that. It still seems to you that Friend is most likely either a journalist, or one of the many trolls and ill-wishers who pestered Tim after the trial.

Then, with a ping, there’s a message. Not a text this time, but in Facebook Messenger. It’s headed Secret Conversation and has a big padlock logo to show it’s encrypted.

The message reads:

Open this app on your new phone.

Again, you follow the instruction. On the new phone, you immediately get another message. Again, the sender is Friend.

Store this contact.

You type back: Why? Who are you?

The answer is instant.

You tell me.

And then, a little later:

When you’ve figured it out, we’ll talk.

NINETEEN

   Abbie’s nine months’ extended employment now had only a few weeks left to run. People were starting to ask her what she was going to do afterward. A few even wondered if she was thinking of staying on.

“Well, I’d love to,” she’d say. “But it can’t really work like that. Then you stop being an artist-in-residence and become a regular employee. And the art world wouldn’t take you seriously anymore.”

Privately, we speculated whether the relationship with Tim would survive her departure. After all, his first love was the company. When Abbie was at the office, front of mind and there in beautiful person, we could just about see how it worked. A regular domestic boyfriend–girlfriend thing? That would be a whole lot different.

It was noteworthy, too, that the A-bot project had stalled, or at any rate reached its natural limitations. Tim had created a simple AI for it, so you could ask it any question and it would reply, not just with words or phrases Abbie had used in the past, but recombining phrases to make new sentences. That was pretty cool. For a while the A-bot traveled around trade shows with the shopbots. It even got interviewed by a few journalists. But really, there were only so many conversations you could have with it. Most times, you’d ask it a question and it would reply with something frustratingly random.

        Person: Hi, A-bot, how are you today?

 A-bot: I am good, thank you.

 Person: What are you thinking?

 A-bot: Why are you interested in what are you thinking?

 Person: Well, I want to judge how intelligent you are.

 A-bot: What makes you think that I am not intelligent?

 Person: [Pause] I’m trying to come up with a question that will prove how smart you are.

 A-bot: What is the difficulty here?

It was, someone remarked, a bit like having a session with a very stoned therapist. Or, Darren added sadly, like being on a date with a beautiful girl who’s messaging three other guys on Tinder at the same time.

One of the developers, a quiet but brilliant Russian called Grigory, wrote an interesting blog about the A-bot, saying it exposed the flaws in our current approach to the shopbots. He suggested that if we wanted to make a bot that really talked like a human, we should have it learn from conversations in which the other party didn’t know it was a bot. Since you could assume that the longer the conversation lasted, the more successful it was, the bot could train itself to become increasingly authentic. He even sketched out some details of the kind of code that would allow that to happen, via a new type of deep-learning engine called a convolutional neural network.

We could see his point, but no one was eager to spend their limited free time pursuing such a theoretical subject.

   Then Tim took Abbie to India on vacation, and she came back with a big smile on her face and a giant diamond on her finger. Soon the A-bot joined the other prototypes and betas in the workshop, all but forgotten, while we started speculating about which of us would be invited to the wedding.

56

   When Tim gets home, there are candles on the table and a dish of butter chicken on the stove. Danny’s already been fed and is watching Thomas videos.

“What’s this?” Tim says, coming into the kitchen.

“I wanted to make something special,” you tell him. “Something to remind us of India. Ready in ten?”

“Sure. I’ll take a shower.”

By the time he comes down, everything’s on the table and you’ve opened some wine.

“Can I ask you something?” you say as you hand him a glass.

“Of course.”

You fetch a bowl from the kitchen counter. “I found a gap in my knowledge today. What are these?”

“These?” He takes the bowl from you gently. “These are eggs. At least, that’s what people call them, but that’s actually imprecise. Specifically, they’re hen’s eggs.”

Within five minutes he’s explained all the marvelous properties of an egg. He’s shown you how it’s impossible to break one by squeezing, no matter how hard you try, whereas a sharp tap shatters it at once. He’s demonstrated how the unique ellipsoid shape means an egg can’t roll away on gentle slopes. And he’s told you how for thousands of years humankind has been asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. “Which sounds like kind of a dumb question, because of course there were egg-laying mammals long before chickens appeared on the scene. But it’s more complex than it appears. It turns out the formation of the egg is only possible because of a specific protein, ovocledidin-17, in the hen’s ovaries.”