The Perfect Wife Read online

  “They’re all like me,” you realize. “All…” What was his word? “Cobots.”

  “They’re cobots, yes. But not like you. You’re unique, even here.” He glances around a little furtively, his hand on your elbow increasing its pressure, urging you to go faster. You sense there’s something he’s still not telling you; that he isn’t supposed to be whisking you away like this.

  “Is this a hospital?”

  “No. It’s where I work. My company.” His other hand pushes insistently in the small of your back. “Come on. I’ve got a car waiting.”

  You can’t walk any faster—it’s as if you’re on stilts, your knees refusing to bend. But even as you think that—your knees—it gets a little easier.

  “Tim!” a voice behind you calls urgently. “Tim, wait up.”

  Relieved at the chance to pause, you turn to look. A man about Tim’s age, but more thickset, with long, straggly hair, is hurrying after you.

  “Not now, Mike,” Tim says warningly.

  The man stops. “You’re taking her away? Already? Is that a good idea?”

  “She’ll be happier at home.”

  The man’s eyes travel over you anxiously. His security pass, dangling around his neck, says DR. MIKE AUSTIN. “She should be checked out by my psych team, at least.”

  “She’s fine,” Tim says firmly. He opens a door into what looks like a large open-plan office area. About forty people are sitting at long communal desks. No one is pretending to work. They’re all staring at you. One, a young Asian-looking woman, raises her hands and, tentatively, applauds. Tim glares at her and she quickly looks down at her screen.

  He guides you straight through the office toward a small reception lobby. On the wall behind the front desk is a colorful street-art mural framing the words IDEALISM IS SIMPLY LONG-RANGE REALISM! Something about it seems familiar. You want to stop, to look more closely, but Tim is urging you on.

  Outside, it’s even brighter. You gasp and shield your eyes as he steers you past a polished steel sign saying SCOTT ROBOTICS, the initial S and R like two upended infinity symbols, toward a waiting Prius. “The city,” Tim tells the driver, while you struggle to fold your unresponsive limbs into the back. “Dolores Street.”

  Once you’re both in and the Prius is moving off, his hand reaches for yours. “I’ve waited so long for this day, Abbie. I’m so happy you’re finally here. That we’re together again, at last.”

  You catch the driver looking curiously at you in his rearview mirror. As you leave the parking lot he glances up at the sign, then back at you again, and something dawns in his expression.

  Understanding. And something else as well. Disgust.

  ONE

  The very first we knew of Tim’s plan to hire an artist-in-residence was when we heard him talking to Mike about it. That was typical of Tim. He might exhort all of us to work more collaboratively and openly, but the same directive blatantly didn’t apply to him. Mike was one of the few people he would sometimes actually listen to, on account of them starting Scott Robotics together in Mike’s garage, almost a decade ago. But still: It might have been Mike’s garage, but it was Tim’s name on the company. That told you pretty much all you needed to know about their relationship.

  So, regarding the artist-in-residence proposal, it wasn’t as if Tim was discussing it with Mike so much as telling him. But it was also typical of Tim that his announcement had to be prefaced by a loud, passionate tirade about what was so stupid and wrong and screwed up about the way we currently did things, even though we were only doing them the way he’d argued equally passionately for the last time he made us change everything.

  “We need to wake the fuck up, Mike,” he was saying in his rasping British accent. “We need to get more creative. Look at these people”—and here his gesture took in all of us, working away in Scott Robotics’ open-plan HQ—“and tell me they’re thinking outside the paradigm. They need to be stimulated. They need to be excited. And we’re not going to do that with free bagels and Pilates.”

  Tim once told a reporter that having an idea about what the future would look like and then waiting for it to happen was like being permanently stuck in traffic. He’s not a patient man. But he is the closest thing to a genius most of us have ever worked with.

  “Which is why we’re hiring an artist,” he added. “Her name’s Abbie Cullen. She’s smart—she works with tech. She excites me. We’re giving her six months.”

  “To do what?” Mike asked.

  “Whatever the hell she likes. That’s the whole point. She’s an artist. Not yet another time-serving worker-drone.”

  If any of us were offended by that description—among our number we counted quite a few millionaires, veterans of some of Silicon Valley’s most notable start-ups—none of us showed it, although we were already wondering how long the free bagels would continue now.

  Mike nodded. “Great. Let’s get her in.”

  We waited for the cry of Listen up, people! that usually prefaced Tim’s announcements. But none came. He’d already gone back into his glass-walled cubicle.

  Many of us, of course, were already typing Abbie Cullen artist into our search engine of choice. (When you actually work in tech, using Google or Bing would be a bit like a craft brewer drinking Budweiser.) So pretty much instantly we knew the bare facts about her: that she had recently exhibited at SXSW and Burning Man; that she was originally from the South; that she was twenty-four years old, a redhead, tall and striking and a surfer; and that her website said, simply, “I build artifacts from the future.”

  We had also found, and circulated, some video clips of her work. Seven Veils was a circle of electric fans, pointing inward at one another to create a vortex in which thin strips of colored silk tumbled and twirled perpetually. Earth, Wind, Fire was a cyclone of flame, bouncing like a roly-poly toy atop a gas burner as it battled competing blasts of air. Most spectacular of all was Pixels, a grid of dozens of what looked like Ping-Pong balls that floated as if on a cushion of air, but also interacted with the gallery visitor. Sometimes the balls seemed to flicker, like a shoal of fish; sometimes they pulsed lazily, like water streaming behind a boat, or formed almost recognizable shapes: a head, a hand, a heart. In one clip a child visiting the exhibit clapped her hands, causing the globes to drop abruptly to the floor before warily creeping back up, the way a herd of heifers noses up to a hiker. They were beautiful and strange and playful, and although they had no meaning or message you could easily take away, they also had a kind of purpose; they expressed something, even if what that something was couldn’t be put into words.

  What had they to do with us? We were engineers, mathematicians, coders, developing intelligent mannequins for high-end fashion stores—shopbots, Tim’s big idea, the idea that had pulled in nearly eighty million dollars in start-up funding over the last three years. What did we need with an artist? We didn’t know. But we had long ago learned not to question Tim’s decisions.

  He was a visionary, a wunderkind, the whole reason each one of us was at that company in the first place. What Gates was to personal computers, Jobs was to smartphones, or Musk was to electric cars, Tim Scott was to AI; or would be, very soon. We idolized him, we feared him, but even those who could not keep up and had to be let go respected him. And there were many of the latter. Scott Robotics was not just a business. It was a mission, a first-to-market blitzkrieg in a war to mold the future of humanity, and Tim was not so much a CEO as a battlefield commander, charging from the front, our very own Alexander the Great. His gangling physique, rock-star cheekbones, and goofy giggle failed to mask his iron determination, a determination he demanded from each of us in turn. Twenty-hour days were so common they were barely worth remarking on. The postdocs fresh out of Stanford who were his usual hires felt empowered, rather than exploited, by the insane work ethic. (On which subject, his interview technique was legendary. You w
ere ushered into his cubicle, where he would be working on emails, and waited patiently for him to say—without looking up—“Go.” That was your cue to pitch why you wanted to work at his company. Assuming you passed, next came what was known as The Timbreaker. Sometimes it was a computational question: “How many square feet of pizza are eaten in the US each year?” More often it was philosophical: “What’s the worst thing about humanity?”—or practical: “Why are manhole covers round?” But mostly, it was to do with code. Such as: “How would you program an artificial politician?” And the answer you were required to give was not just theoretical: Tim expected you to come up with actual lines of working code, one after another, without the use of pen and paper, let alone a computer. If you did well, it was signaled by a single word, delivered in the direction of the emails he was still working on: “Cool.” If he said quietly, “That’s pretty lame,” you were out.)

  His impatience—which was also legendary—was somehow another aspect of his charisma: proof that the mission was time-critical, that every second was precious. He even peed quickly, one employee reported after standing next to him at the urinals. (The employee, meanwhile, was afflicted with pee-shyness.) His speech was even faster—curt, precise, bombarding you with instructions or, occasionally, invective. Senior managers, or those who very badly wanted to be senior managers, were often noted to have picked up a trace of the same clipped London accent, so different from the languid, questioning inflections of Northern California. It was as if he were a force field that buckled those around him. If Tim looked you in the eye and said, “I need you to go to Mumbai tonight,” you felt exhilarated, because you alone had been given a chance to prove yourself. If Tim said, “I’m taking over your assignment,” you were crushed.

  It was sometimes cultish. Not for nothing were we known in Silicon Valley as the Scottbots. The mission could be refined, but it could not be challenged. The leader might have his foibles, but he could not be wrong. At costume parties—paradoxically, Tim loved costume parties—where most people went as characters from Star Wars or The Matrix, he went as the Sun King, complete with buckled shoes, frock coat, outsized wig, and crown.

  His background was another part of the legend. The impoverished childhood; the bullying that made him leave school at eleven to self-educate. The growing interest in chatbots, just at the time when people were starting to interact with e-commerce sites on their smartphones. The creation of Otto, a customer-service bot that, instead of being robotically polite and frustratingly obtuse, was efficient, smart, geeky, and cool—not unlike Tim himself, as many commentators remarked. Otto didn’t always spell correctly or use capital letters. He peppered his responses with emojis and witty allusions to nerd culture—quotes from South Park, catchphrases from sci-fi films. When you encountered Otto, you were convinced you’d just been put through to some wizard-level teen genius who would fix your problem for the sheer thrill of it. No one was surprised when Google bought Otto for sixty million dollars.

  Then, at the age of twenty-three, Tim walked out of Google to found Scott Robotics, taking Mike with him. Their first success—put together in the aforementioned garage—was Voyce, a telephone helpline bot that was consistently ranked higher than human operators. More successes followed. Tim was obsessed by the idea that AI interactions should be lifelike. “One day the keyboard and mouse will seem as outdated as punch cards and floppy disks do now” was his mantra, along with “You don’t change the future without changing the rules.” The shopbots were a daring progression. Nothing like this had been attempted before—an AI that interacted with people physically, in person, without the medium of a screen or phone. But it made good, even brilliant, business sense. High-end retail mannequins already cost tens of thousands of dollars; salesclerks, too, were expensive, given that they often stood around doing nothing, and personal shoppers with a good eye and an exhaustive knowledge of a store’s inventory were time-consuming to train. Combining the three was a no-brainer. It was a sector ripe for disruption, and Scott Robotics—our tiny band—was going to be the first to disrupt it.

  And now we were to have an artist to help us. Had we known, of course, where it would lead—had one of our expert futurologists been able to predict how things would turn out—we might not have been so sanguine about that. But even if we had known, would we have said anything? Frankly, it was unlikely. It was not the kind of company where you debated the direction of travel.

  4

  Tim’s silent on the way home. He was never one for small talk, but this is different. He seems almost exhausted.

  This is what he was like after a big presentation to the investors, you remember. After weeks of living in the office, sweating every detail, he’d simply collapse, so drained of energy he could barely speak.

  For your part, the sense of shock returns. The driver’s disgust is nothing to the revulsion and self-loathing you feel.

  “It was what you’d have wanted,” Tim says at last. “Please believe that, Abs. I know it must feel strange right now, but you’ll get used to it. You were always the bravest person I knew.”

  Were you brave? Memories flicker around the edges of your brain. Surfing a big wave at Linda Mar. Welding an artwork, the fiery sparks spitting into the blue lenses of your goggles. But then there’s nothing. Just fog.

  You turn and look out the window, avoiding with a shudder the faint glimmer of your own reflection. San Francisco looks both familiar and new, like a foreign country you’re returning to after many years. An exile you don’t even remember. The buildings are mostly the same. It’s the details that have changed—the smartphones in people’s hands that have become larger instead of smaller, the electric bicycles everywhere, the white Priuses that have all but replaced yellow cabs. And the Mission has become even more gentrified, artisanal coffee shops on every block.

  Then the driver makes a turn, and suddenly you don’t recognize anything. One moment everything is familiar. The next, fog has taken it away.

  “Why don’t I remember this?” you say, panicked.

  “Creating memories takes a lot of processing power. I had to be selective. The gaps will fill themselves, eventually.”

  A garbage truck passes in the opposite direction, noisily crunching a plastic bottle under its tire. That’s what you’ll do, you decide. You’ll wait a few days, then throw yourself under a truck. Death would surely be preferable to this repulsive travesty of existence.

  But even as you think it, you wonder if you’re really brave enough to do that. And if you were, would Tim’s technicians simply gather you up and put you back together again, like Humpty Dumpty?

  Again…You realize you still have no idea what happened to you.

  “How did I die?” you hear yourself ask.

  He looks across at you, his face tense. “We’ll talk about that. I promise. But not yet. It might be too much, right now.”

  The Prius pulls up at some electric gates. Behind them you recognize your house, a handsome white clapboard mansion. Despite the astronomical prices in central San Francisco, you could have lived somewhere even grander if you’d wanted to. Tim’s wealth was vast, even by tech standards. But ostentation was never his style. You wonder if the garage still contains the same beat-up Volkswagen.

  “Welcome home,” he says softly.

  The front door lock sticks, and it takes him a few moments to get it open. For some reason that, too—the way he’s hunched, patiently working the key—is familiar. You look around and see a small security camera over the door. Another upload.

  Inside, there’s familiarity but also strangeness, like visiting a house you lived in as a child.

  “I’ll show you around,” he says reassuringly. “Fill in any gaps.”

  The kitchen first. Flooded with sunlight, comfortable, but with a professional gas range. Mauviel pans jangle gently overhead like some massive copper wind chime. You open a cupboard at rando
m. Inside are spices—not ground, but whole, in precise rows of glass jars, each neatly labeled in your own handwriting.

  “You love to cook,” Tim explains.

  Do you? You try to think of anything you’ve ever cooked, and fail. But then—clunk—it comes to you. All those Instagram pictures, hundreds upon hundreds of them. You even had followers, eagerly copying whatever you made.

  You point at a bowl of spherical objects on the counter, so vibrant they hurt your eyes. “What are those?”

  “These?” He picks one up and hands it to you. “These are oranges.”

  The word makes no sense. “Orange is a color.”

  “Yes. A color named after a fruit.” He’s watching you carefully. “Like lime. And peach.”

  “But they aren’t orange, are they?” You examine the one you’re holding, turning it over curiously in your hands. “At least, not as orange as a carrot. And in hot countries, oranges are green.” Something else strikes you. “My hair is this color, too. But people call it red. Or ginger. Not orange.”

  “That’s right. But ginger isn’t a color. Or a fruit.”

  “No—it’s a root. Once associated with a fiery temperament.” Clunk. You stop, confused. “Did I remember all that, or just guess it?”

  “Neither.” A smile pushes the exhaustion from Tim’s eyes. “It’s called Deep Machine Learning. Without you even being aware of it, your brain just compared millions of examples in the cloud and came up with a rule for colors and fruits. And the insane thing is, even I couldn’t tell you how you did it. That is, I could plug in a screen and see the math happening, but I couldn’t necessarily follow it. I tell my employees: The A in AI doesn’t stand for ‘artificial’ anymore. It stands for ‘autonomous.’ ”