The Perfect Wife(39)
Eventually Tim takes your place, saying Danny’s more used to him now. It does seem to help, a little. Even so, it’s another hour before Danny calms down.
Tim comes downstairs, his face tired and drawn. “That was the worst in a while.”
“What caused it, do you think?”
He grimaces. “We used to think it was stomach pains, but we had all the tests and there was nothing conclusive. More likely it was some tiny, random thing—a fly, or a car alarm going off somewhere.”
“Perhaps he picked up some stress from Sian. Or me, for that matter.”
“Possibly. But I doubt it. People with autism have very low empathy—they find it hard even to identify emotions, much less understand them.”
You’re struck by something. “It’s odd, isn’t it, how what Danny suffers from is the exact opposite of what you’ve achieved with me. He’s a human with impaired empathy, and I’m—well, I’m an empathetic machine.”
“Yes.” He glances at you. “But it’s not entirely coincidence. It was thinking about Danny’s brain—wanting to understand him—that got me thinking about emotional intelligence. I thought…” His voice trails off. “I thought, maybe if I could get an artificial brain to become more empathetic, I might get some insights into how to help him.”
“And did you?”
Tim shakes his head. “The autistic brain simply doesn’t have the same capacity to learn that an AI does. With autism you have to use much more simplistic teaching methods.”
“Like the ABA program.”
“Like the ABA,” he agrees.
You’re both silent. “Tim, we need to talk about Sian,” you say at last.
“Yes.” Even though you’re indoors, he reaches for a baseball cap and pulls it firmly onto his head, bending the visor with both hands to get the shape just right. He takes a deep breath. “It was a mistake—a terrible mistake. I know that. It started a couple of years ago, when I was going through…it was a difficult time. I thought she understood that it was simply a physical thing, a couple of quick hookups that meant nothing. But I—well, I guess it became a habit. A habit I was too weak to break. And I was working so hard. Once you were on the scene, I assumed she’d realize that she and I were done. But instead she seemed almost jealous of you.”
You think back to last night—the strained atmosphere at the dinner table. And then there’d been that jibe about the salt, and how there were still some things a robot couldn’t do as well as a human. She’d been flirting with him, you realize.
And Tim—you recall the dark look he gave the TV when the reporter talked about you being creepy. Had he been having doubts about you? Was that why he didn’t say no to Sian more firmly?
“This is so new, isn’t it?” you say softly. “No one’s ever been in this position before. No one in all of history. We’re going to have to figure it out as we go along.”
“Thank you for being so reasonable. I don’t deserve it—”
“But the fact is, you do. You’re not even middle-aged yet. You can’t plan on being celibate for the rest of your life.” You hesitate. “Isn’t there anything we can do to make a physical relationship possible?”
He scowls. “You heard that bitch this afternoon. It’s the narrative people will always want to believe—that cobots are just million-dollar sex toys. Electronic Stepford Wives. I won’t let that happen. I can’t. I built you this way for a reason. So people couldn’t ever say my love for you is anything but pure. So they’d understand that you’re a person. Not some pathetic pleasure machine.”
“Okay. I get that. But if you need…If there are times when it gets too much…” You stop, not quite believing you’re actually saying these words out loud, that it’s come to this. “Just be discreet, all right? Don’t do it so I’ll know.”
“You’re what I need, Abbie. I love you just the way you are.”
But you notice he stops short of saying he’ll never need more.
30
Soon after, Tim goes up to bed. Before you follow him, you check the news channels to see how the interview went down. It isn’t good. The slap might have happened during the commercial break, but the cameras were still recording. The cropping is slightly off—you’re both standing, your heads out of shot—but you can clearly see your arm whip up and Judy Hersch recoiling, especially when they play it in slow motion. AGGRESSIVE ROBOT ASSAULTS REPORTER, the caption says. You turn to another channel, but the same words are scrolling along the bottom of the screen.
And suddenly there’s Lisa, your sister, talking to a journalist’s microphone. You turn the sound up.
“…Nothing will bring Abbie back, but this is making an already painful situation even more difficult,” she’s saying. “We will be challenging Tim Scott to prove he gained my sister’s specific consent to have her data and personality used in this way.” The crawl at the bottom now reads CULLEN FAMILY: WE’LL FIGHT “COBOT.”
You feel sick. Somehow this has all gone hopelessly wrong. You turn the TV off and toss the remote onto the sofa. It’s a fair bet the news vans will be back outside the house tomorrow.