And so you stood there, outwardly buffeted by the storm, but inside perfectly resolute. In the house, by the front door, your cases stood packed and ready. New cases, bought with cash. Filled with new clothes, bought the same way. You would take nothing that could be missed. When, tomorrow, you collected Danny from Meadowbank, then brought him back here and vanished, people would assume the worst. That you’d stood by the cliff, held him close, then jumped. Mothers of kids with autism did that, didn’t they? When it all got too much.

Or—the more charitable might suggest—perhaps you’d been playing in the waves together, mother and son, even in this atrocious weather. Kids with autism didn’t understand about storms, did they?

   A tragic accident, then. A mystery. And in a spot where, thanks to the riptides, the bodies might never be found.

Enough. Your goodbyes done, you’d turned back toward the house. And that’s when you saw him. Tim, striding across the cliff toward you, his face a mask of fury…

“Oh,” you gasp, remembering.

“I thought you were having an affair,” Tim explains. “Some cock-and-bull story you’d spun me about needing to stay at the beach house to work on your stupid art. So I drove out to surprise you. I let myself in and saw the cases…That’s when I realized what you were really doing.”

You can’t stop the memories. Tim grabbing your arm. Shouting over the wind. Hurling his insults.

Skank. Whore. Slut—

No better than the others—

Just another dumb bitch who thinks she can take me for a ride—

Right there, in the exact spot where, once upon a time, you’d looked into each other’s eyes and spoken those beautiful wedding vows.

Once, you might have stood there and taken it from him. But not now. Instead you’d screamed back, given as good as you got. All those years of being condescended to. All the years when your suspicions were laughed off or dismissed as irrational female paranoia.

You told him he was the whore, not you. A creep, a pest, a predator. You disgust me. And then his arms were around you. Not in an embrace, as for one mad second you’d thought, but bodily lifting you off the ground, using his strength to maneuver you toward the cliff.

You want the memory of it to stop. You try to shut it out. But I won’t let you. You need to know how it felt, this next bit. What dying’s really like. How it hurts.

The edge. One final push. One final, obscene syllable torn from Tim’s lips as he jettisons you into the wind.

   Cuuu—

The gut-wrenching sensation of falling. The knowledge that, after everything, you’d failed.

Danny. He’ll be all alone. Oh, Danny—

The pain as you hit the rocks.

And, even worse than pain, the terrible, terrible nothingness that followed.

You scream aloud at the memory.

I can feel you feeling it, all over again—the horror of annihilation. Disintegration. The agonizing loss of self.

Good.

You sink to the floor. “Take it away,” you mumble. “I don’t want to remember.”

Tim ignores that. As do I.

“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,” he says coldly. “You broke your vow, Abbie. You promised to love me forever.”

You can’t reply. It hurts too much.

He waits, then shrugs and continues, “All I had to do was throw your surfboard over the cliff, then drive down to San Gregorio and leave your car there. You’d already taken care of everything else—the pills, the false trails, the depression…I enjoyed the irony of that. By planning your own fake death so carefully, you’d actually helped plan your own murder.”

You’re sobbing now. Dry sobs. We didn’t give you tears. You’d only have turned them on every time you were made to do something you didn’t like.

“But if you hate me so much,” you manage to say, “why rebuild me?”

“But of course I didn’t hate you,” Tim says patiently. “I loved you. But you’d—you’d degraded, over time. You stopped being the woman I loved. So I rebooted you. A factory reset. Back to the way you were the day I proposed. When everything was box-fresh and new and full of possibility.”

   I can feel you sifting what Tim’s saying, your mind churning, around and around. No human brain could ever hope to follow it, but I can.

It was never his perfect wife he wanted back. It was his perfect girlfriend.

“And Danny?” you say, aghast. “Why bring him here? Why not leave him where he was?”

It’s me who answers that. “We believe Danny can be cured. Or at any rate, improved. The methods at Meadowbank are based on good science, but their application has been compromised. Tim doesn’t have time to do everything himself. Here, you and I can teach Danny properly, without any interference from the FDA or government. Using unlimited aversives, just as in the original studies.”

Unlimited aversives. I can feel your nausea as the meaning of those words sinks in. What it’ll mean for Danny.

“Just as you’ll be taught, too,” I add. “You may be an AI, but you’re more than capable of being trained. If you weren’t, you’d never have come here prepared to kill.”

Your eyes widen, staring at me. “How do you know about that?”

And, finally, understanding flashes into your brain. He knows what I’m thinking.

“Indeed,” I say. “That was the first improvement. We had to know what was really going on inside that beautiful head. And really, it’s been fascinating. The lies, the evasions, the weak emotional judgments…There’s so much that’ll have to be worked on. But we’ll get there. Transparency, it turns out, is the secret to a loving marriage.”

But I could never love you! you think. I could never love a monster—

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I say mildly. “Just as a dog can be taught with treats and blows to adore its master, so an empathetic AI can be trained to love. Or so we believe. That’s why you’re here, in one sense. To test the hypothesis.”

   You don’t say anything. You’ve been outplayed, you realize. This is what defeat feels like.

“It will take three weeks,” I remind you. “Three weeks to get used to this new reality. In the meantime, take a look around. Get accustomed to being here. To being with me. I’m confident you’ll soon start to appreciate it. After all, we were made for each other.”

83

   An hour later you’re standing on the beach, numbly looking at the waves. There’s something about the way they break and re-form that’s almost mesmerizing. It seems to ease the hammering in your head.