The Perfect Wife(45)

“I always behave,” Tim says, bristling.

“Just not always well,” Elijah mutters.

As if on cue, John Renton arrives. To your surprise, given their descriptions of him, he’s much younger than Tim and Mike. But his manner is of someone older—brash, confident, dominating the room. You see Tim stiffen as Renton slaps him on the shoulder, and know instantly that your husband dislikes this man.

When Renton’s introduced to Alicia he interrogates her about who else she’s worked with. Each person she names, he tells her about his own last interaction with them—“You PR for Shaun? He called me the other day, trying to get me to invest in that lame app he’s building.” “Oh, Catherine? Smart lady. We just shared a platform at TED.” You see her responding to his attention, how her body moves just a little more sensuously, how she touches her hair when he speaks. He has the opposite of good looks or charm—indeed, he’s almost ugly—but you can see how some women might be charmed by him.

At last he turns to you. “So this is her!” he exclaims, holding out his hand.

You shake it. “Pleased to meet you.”

He laughs delightedly. “An AI with feelings. Get that! What are you feeling right now?”

You think. “Happy. And a little nervous.”

“Do I make you nervous?” he says eagerly.

You shake your head. “I’m just worried about how my bouillabaisse will turn out.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, I do feel a certain amount of monachopsis.”

Renton frowns. “Monachopsis?”

“It’s a persistent feeling of being out of place.”

His eyes widen. “Monachopsis. I never even heard of that.” He turns to Tim. “Impressive.”

Tim rolls his eyes. He clearly thinks that someone who’s impressed by your use of a long word to describe a feeling—as opposed to the fact you can have a feeling in the first place—has missed the point of you completely.

“I’ll get the wine,” you say hastily.

Half an hour later, you’re opening a second bottle, and Renton’s in full flow.

“I gotta tell you, Tim, when I first heard about this I thought you were nuts. I mean, feelings? Feelings are what made my wife my ex-wife, for chrissake. Sure, I can see some possibilities. Healthcare, maybe. The sex industry.” I see Tim wince. “But fundamentally, there’s an acceptability issue. People don’t want their robots to have feelings. Because if machines feel like humans, pretty soon some bleeding heart will decide we should treat them like humans. And then the whole economic argument for AI vanishes. Instead of being mechanical servants, tilling our fields and toiling in our sweatshops, suddenly they’re indistinguishable from people. But making people is cheap, right? It’s running them that’s expensive. With AI, it should be the other way around. We start giving robots the same rights, the same consideration, maybe even the same pay, then where’s the viability in that?”

“If you prick us, do we not bleed,” Mike says, nodding.

“Bleed?” Renton repeats, clearly puzzled.

“The Merchant of Venice. I forget how it goes on.”

“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” you say. “If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

There’s a silence. “My point exactly,” Renton says. “You’re not ticklish, right?”

You shake your head.

“The Shylock question is an interesting one, actually,” Jenny says thoughtfully. “If the capacity to feel emotion means experiencing pain as well as pleasure, by what right do we inflict that on other intelligences?”

Tim’s eyes flash. “You’re both missing the point. Cobots aren’t slaves or pets. They’re people. Just in another form.”

“Whatever they are, they’re an expensive luxury item,” Renton says dismissively. “An economic dead end. Your problem, Tim, is that you’ve invented this thing but you have no real vision for what to do with it.”

You stand up. “I’ll get the bouillabaisse.”

The debate—which is not quite an argument, but at times so fierce it almost sounds like one—only pauses when you bring the soup to the table. You sit back and watch as they lift the first spoonful to their mouths.

Tim frowns. But it’s Renton who speaks first.

“Whoa!” he says, staring at his bowl. “What happened here?”

Mike sniffs his spoonful. “That’s rank,” he says quietly.

“What’s wrong?” you ask anxiously.

“I think some of your fish may have been off,” Jenny says nervously.

“That’s not possible—” you begin, but then you remember. The employee who couldn’t understand why you wanted fish bones. Who only agreed to add them when he thought they were for your cat. Clearly, he’d simply tossed a bag from the trash in with the order, assuming your pet would sort out the edible ones.

Your stock—your beautiful, elaborate, saffron-infused fumet—was poisoned from the start.

“I’m so sorry—” you say helplessly.

Tim pulls out his phone. “Basilico can have pizza here in thirty minutes. That good for everyone?”