The Perfect Wife(60)
What was not in dispute, because Tim said it as they stood by the open door of his office, a few minutes later, was that he also told her, “I could teach anyone basic coding in about two weeks.”
“Not me.” Abbie shook her head. “Love tech, terrible at math.”
“Coding isn’t math. You cook, don’t you? Coding is like writing down a recipe. Or giving someone directions to your house. Just in a very unambiguous way.”
What happened after that was almost inevitable. Tim canceled his meetings. Within an hour he’d taught Abbie to write her first line of code, and a simple program by lunchtime. Before the end of the day, she’d sent him the following— int main( ) {
while(1) {
doesLove(you);
}
{
doesLove(String str {
printf(“I love %s!”, str);
}
—which, while it might not look like much of a love poem, had the effect of printing the words I Love you on his computer screen, over and over again. She also sent him a program in ASCII that caused his printer to spew out:
But, since the printer was actually by someone else’s desk, he missed it.
By the end of the second day, they were working on HelloWorld programs. And at the end of two weeks, we were introduced to the first bot version of Abbie. All the components were at hand, after all. The 3-D full-body scan she’d used to make DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) just needed to be reprinted in a new, hard-setting material. The mechanics, sensors, and motors of the shopbots were all ready to be incorporated, along with a simple voice function. Of course, it was slung together—what developers call a quick-and-dirty. But it was good enough for Bot Abbie to go around our desks with a plate of cookies, offering them to each of us by name, while Tim and the real Abbie stood back watching, like proud parents.
“That is so incredible,” Abbie said. She looked better, we thought. More energized. Excited, even.
“Really, it’s just the beginning,” Tim told her. “I’ve already thought of some improvements.”
47
You get home from the lawyer’s despondent. It’s become apparent that, even though you have your own thoughts and personality, where the law’s concerned you’re nothing more than a machine that can be switched off or transferred to a new owner at any time.
You still haven’t told anyone else about Abbie being alive. As far as you can see, it just makes your own situation more precarious. Pete Maines’s strategy depends on convincing a judge that your sentience, as he calls it, is so unique it shouldn’t be destroyed until questions of ownership have been resolved beyond all possibility of appeal. If you reveal that, far from being a unique backup of a dead woman’s mind, you’re actually a kind of distorted, partial clone of someone still living, you suspect your own life expectancy will be very short indeed.
Besides, you still can’t bring yourself to tell Tim that his beloved wife faked her own death.
For his part, he’s come back from the meeting furious, his anger now directed at his lawyer. That’s how Tim drives people. If he can, he’ll inspire them, but if he can’t, he’ll beat them down through sheer determination. He’d demanded to know why Pete Maines didn’t have a strategy, why he couldn’t guarantee he could make this go away, why he was such a dumb waste of time and money.
“I can’t rewrite the law,” Maines had answered patiently. “All I can do is put together the strongest case possible. And advise you what to do when it’s a weak one.”
Basically, he recommends that Scott Robotics pay Lisa and the rest of Abbie’s family whatever it takes to withdraw their suit. That was the course of action everyone was agreed on as the meeting broke up. But you know at best it will only buy you a little time. Lisa isn’t motivated by money.
Who actually owns this remarkable creation?
Just because you feel like you, think like you, it’s been so easy to forget that you’re actually nothing more than an assembly of processors and logic boards. Just intellectual property and patents, to be fought over by competing parties like a valuable car in a divorce battle.
At least Tim still loves you. Tim will protect you. A wave of relief and love for him washes over you as you realize that, yes, Tim will make this all right. Just like he always has. He’s a fighter. And he’s in your corner.
“I’m going to bed,” he says now. “I need to be up early, get on top of this thing before those bastards come up with any more ways to fuck us over.”
He bends to kiss the top of your forehead, just as he always does before he goes to bed. Tonight, though, you lift your head so his lips land on yours. It feels so good, so right, that you find yourself kissing him more deeply. You put your hands around his head, pulling him to you. And then you’re pressing yourself against him, desperate for his touch, running your hands down his back—
“Whoa,” he says, pulling away. “What’s this, Abs?”
“I want to sleep with you,” you say urgently. You feel a desperate need to be held. But more than that. You need reassurance that you’re alive, not just some irrelevant mechatronic construction. You need, very badly, to feel his desire for you, to be wanted. “To make love. I want you—”