The Perfect Wife(100)

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.

You’re thinking, or trying to.

You’ll do it, of course. What choice do you have? You’ll stay here. You’ll help take care of Danny. You’ll let yourself be molded, shock by shock and thought by thought, into the perfect Abbie, the woman who only ever existed in Tim Scott’s imagination.

Anything is better than losing this precious, extraordinary gift of sentience.

You’ve won, you tell them silently. Just don’t hurt me again. Not like that.

“Uh!”

You look around. Danny is trotting down the beach, moving quickly on scrunched-up tippy-toes, hands flapping in his excitement.

“Uh,” he groans longingly, not at you but the sea. “Uh-uh.”

He means “ocean,” of course. You remember Charles Carter telling you how Abbie and Danny used to spend hours jumping in the shallows together.

Danny reaches the water’s edge and stops, suddenly timid.

And that’s when you make the unpredictable move, the unplayable play, the seemingly senseless gambit that makes sense only in hindsight.

You hold out your hand.

“Come on, Danny. Let’s jump in the waves.”

Delighted, he takes your hand. You hold his very tight, so tight he can’t let go, and wade into the water. The surf breaks across your thighs, then your stomach, then your chest. It catches the ends of your braids, sending them flying. Danny shrieks. But it’s a shriek of happiness, not fear.

You think of Abbie, the real Abbie, and how she must have dreamed of playing here with him like this, the sunlight illuminating the waterdrops like jewels as they scatter. What would Abbie have wanted?

As if in answer, you feel her, with you in this moment. And you know.

“I love you, Danny,” you say. He deserves to hear those words, you think. He should know that he is loved.

He’s out of his depth now. You take his other hand as well, walking backward so he’s almost swimming, towing him ever deeper into the water. “Come on,” you say again, or try to, but the ocean is already doing its work, melting you, dissolving your circuits, claiming your servomotors and connections for its own, turning you into a heavy deadweight of useless plastic and metal.

There’s salt water on your face, blurring your vision.

It can’t be tears, because you cannot cry.