The Perfect Wife(49)

We spent a bit of time analyzing video of real models on runways, and Darren turned the distinctive hand-on-hip stride into code. Eventually he was ready to demonstrate his handiwork. He activated a shopbot, which sashayed up and down the demonstration area. It looked impressive—exactly like a model at a Victoria’s Secret show.

“Great!” Tim said. “Now show me what it’s like with more!”

Darren looked confused. “More?”

“There should be half a dozen, all parading at once,” Tim said. “That’s the whole point. That’s what makes it cool.”

Darren nodded, which was his first big mistake. Well, actually his second—his first mistake was that he’d neglected to think through what would happen when half a dozen shopbots paraded up and down a narrow runway at once. Being a geek, he’d never actually been to a fashion show. But whatever the reason, he should have immediately told Tim he hadn’t gotten around to that part yet, instead of trying to wing it.

He activated another shopbot, then another, then two more. For a moment it looked amazing—five identical robotic mannequins, tall, elegant, and impeccably engineered, striding up and down an imaginary runway in a variety of imaginary outfits.

“They do it to music, too,” Darren said proudly, and turned on a speaker. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Snow (Hey Oh)” blasted around the room and, without breaking stride, the shopbots started swaying their shoulders and heads in time to the beat. One of them even twirled her hand. (Yes, her hand—it was impossible to think of the shopbot as it when it was dancing like that.) People around the office started clapping along and whooping—Abbie, too; her face lit up as she hollered and whistled. (She had a hell of a whistle, we learned; the full two-finger Texan cattle-whistle.) For a brief moment our office felt like a party.

Then the inevitable happened. The twirling-hand shopbot reached the end of the runway and turned—straight into the shopbot immediately behind. Both crashed to the floor. A third tripped over them. Within seconds the parade had turned into a pile of mechatronic limbs, still attempting to stride but succeeding only in kicking one another. They looked like something from a war zone, a pile of white plastic bodies twitching in exaggerated death throes.

“Jesus,” Tim muttered under his breath. “We can’t even copy the dumbest humans on the planet.”

Someone turned the music off. The sudden silence was deafening.

“That’s solvable,” Mike said nervously. “We just need to port in some driverless car sensors, so they swerve around each other. It would look pretty neat, actually.”

“Exactly,” Tim said. “Solvable. And therefore predictable.”

We all waited for the inevitable Tim-lashing that would follow. Darren’s head drooped, like a dog that knows it’s about to get whipped.

Then Tim looked across at Abbie. “Still, not bad, huh?” he said with a smile. “For a first attempt.”



* * *



—

A few days after that, someone glanced into Tim’s office and said, “Wow.”

Abbie was in there. She was wearing a wet suit. On every limb were small green stickers—for motion capture, someone said. Tim was videoing her. She was sashaying up and down like a model.

Clearly, Tim was refining the runway tech, and Abbie had offered to help out. In her figure-hugging wet suit, she looked incredible. But some of us felt uneasy. Abbie had been employed as an artist, yet here she was doing a task that could not, by any stretch, be considered art. It was blurring the lines, somehow.

On the other hand, someone pointed out, maybe Tim didn’t want to ask one of his female employees to parade up and down in a wet suit for him.

There was a long silence as we thought about that. The person who made the comment was new, and didn’t understand the ramifications.

But it was great to see Tim so happy, we agreed. Abbie was really good for him. It was a story old as time: Hard-ass falls in love, stops being such a hard-ass.



* * *



—

At one of the boring investment functions, Abbie and John Renton’s ex-wife got drunk and danced on a table. Some of the men gathered around them, whooping, and tucked hundred-dollar bills into their shoes, like they were strippers.

Tim watched this with a strange expression on his face, Elijah reported. It was as if he was half proud of Abbie, half worried she was going too far.

Elijah heard him say to her later, as they were walking out to the parking desk, “I know you’re not a slut. It’s just that none of them know that.”

She linked her arm through his. “And every single one of them was jealous of you,” she teased. “Thinking you might have a slutty girlfriend.

“Which I am most definitely not, by the way,” she added.

“I know,” Tim said. “It’s one of the things I love about you.” And he laughed, that high goofy giggle that always seemed so unlikely coming from his mouth.

The next day, someone glimpsed a PowerPoint Tim was working on in his office. It was titled, Why Polyamory Is Dumb.



* * *



—

Someone who went to Maker Faire saw Abbie’s name on the exhibitors’ list and went to see what she was showing. It was a sculpture made out of six pairs of shopbot legs, walking on a treadmill. It wasn’t her best work, he reported. It was basically just the runway incident, rehashed.