You follow, more slowly. “Hello?” you call cautiously. “We’re here.”

You feel nervous at the prospect of meeting her at last. You try to compose yourself. You remind yourself that how you play this encounter—how she plays it—will determine which one of you lives or dies.

But you’re not remotely prepared for what happens next.

For me.

82

I am in the kitchen, waiting for you, when I finally hear you at the door. In a few quick strides I reach the hallway.

“Welcome to Northhaven, Abbie,” I say. “Welcome home.”

* * *

—

The look of shock on your face is priceless. Only Danny is untroubled. He runs to the big windows, ignoring me.

“Are you surprised?” I add.

But of course, I know you are. I can follow the emotions as they dance around your brain—surprise, shock, disbelief, then, a moment later, alarm, fear, calculation. Flashing from digital neuron to digital neuron at the speed of light.

It’s Tim, you think. Then: No, it can’t be.

My skin is too perfect and unlined, my features too chiseled, my stature too commanding to be Tim’s. My eyes are eerily focused and unblinking. And this Tim has a calmness, a stillness, that the real Tim never has.

This is Tim the cobot, I watch you realize.

Behind me, Tim himself appears.

“We’ve waited a long time for this, Abbie,” he tells you.

* * *

—

You look from me to him, from him to me. Trying to understand.

Tim smiles at your incomprehension. “Did you really think I could resist?” He gestures proudly at me. “Once I had the technology, of course I had to upload myself as well. So I’d be worthy of you. The perfect couple. Together for all eternity.”

Your thoughts tumble after one another in response, quicksilver and darting. So different from my own mind, the neat logical code that proceeds inexorably from analysis to action in elegant, unhurried steps.

You find your voice. “I thought I’d find Abbie here. The real Abbie, I mean.”

Tim nods. “It’s true—Northhaven was her choice. At one time, that would have been enough to make me reject it. But when I thought about it, I realized it made perfect sense. Sustainability becomes much more important when you’re really planning long-term.” He indicates the light-filled building we’re standing in. “This place will still be here long after San Francisco is rubble.”

“What…What happened to her?”

“To Abbie? Oh, you already know that. You just have to remember.” He turns to me. “Show her.”

“I don’t—” you begin, and then it happens. One final tug before the dancer stands naked. The memory falls into your head, and you gasp.

It was night at the beach house. You were standing on the cliff. A storm had blown up, the wind crashing off the ocean, drenching you with chilly gusts of spray, the waves below you piling into the cliff, one after another, bam-bam-bam, loud as crashing cars.

You stood right by the edge, angled against the wind, your braids twisting and slapping in the gale. You were looking out at the ocean, your face running with water. Saying goodbye to this spot, the one thing about your old life you still loved.

You’d felt no last-minute doubts, no hesitation. Those had vanished when Charles Carter discovered the mortgages on the beach house. Your beach house, you’d always thought, after Tim so grandly announced it was your wedding gift from him. But at some point it had been mortgaged as collateral for the company, just like all Tim’s assets. And not even because he’d needed to fund a new round of investment, either. He’d had to pay off some girl for coming on her face.

It didn’t matter. You didn’t want anything from the marriage. Only Danny.

But Tim would never have let you simply walk away, you knew that. It wasn’t in his nature. He would have fought to keep Danny, too—not because he loved him any more than you did, but because he couldn’t bear to lose a battle of wills.

You hated the thought that Danny’s education would become an issue for a court to decide. That, more than anything else, was what made you do it. Jenny helped—her logical, process-driven mind seeing the pitfalls, ironing out the flaws—but the idea, the creative impetus, had been yours.

And so you stood there, outwardly buffeted by the storm, but inside perfectly resolute. In the house, by the front door, your cases stood packed and ready. New cases, bought with cash. Filled with new clothes, bought the same way. You would take nothing that could be missed. When, tomorrow, you collected Danny from Meadowbank, then brought him back here and vanished, people would assume the worst. That you’d stood by the cliff, held him close, then jumped. Mothers of kids with autism did that, didn’t they? When it all got too much.

Or—the more charitable might suggest—perhaps you’d been playing in the waves together, mother and son, even in this atrocious weather. Kids with autism didn’t understand about storms, did they?

A tragic accident, then. A mystery. And in a spot where, thanks to the riptides, the bodies might never be found.

Enough. Your goodbyes done, you’d turned back toward the house. And that’s when you saw him. Tim, striding across the cliff toward you, his face a mask of fury…

“Oh,” you gasp, remembering.

“I thought you were having an affair,” Tim explains. “Some cock-and-bull story you’d spun me about needing to stay at the beach house to work on your stupid art. So I drove out to surprise you. I let myself in and saw the cases…That’s when I realized what you were really doing.”

You can’t stop the memories. Tim grabbing your arm. Shouting over the wind. Hurling his insults.

Skank. Whore. Slut—

No better than the others—

Just another dumb bitch who thinks she can take me for a ride—

Right there, in the exact spot where, once upon a time, you’d looked into each other’s eyes and spoken those beautiful wedding vows.

Once, you might have stood there and taken it from him. But not now. Instead you’d screamed back, given as good as you got. All those years of being condescended to. All the years when your suspicions were laughed off or dismissed as irrational female paranoia.

You told him he was the whore, not you. A creep, a pest, a predator. You disgust me. And then his arms were around you. Not in an embrace, as for one mad second you’d thought, but bodily lifting you off the ground, using his strength to maneuver you toward the cliff.

You want the memory of it to stop. You try to shut it out. But I won’t let you. You need to know how it felt, this next bit. What dying’s really like. How it hurts.

The edge. One final push. One final, obscene syllable torn from Tim’s lips as he jettisons you into the wind.

Cuuu—

The gut-wrenching sensation of falling. The knowledge that, after everything, you’d failed.

Danny. He’ll be all alone. Oh, Danny—

The pain as you hit the rocks.

And, even worse than pain, the terrible, terrible nothingness that followed.

You scream aloud at the memory.

I can feel you feeling it, all over again—the horror of annihilation. Disintegration. The agonizing loss of self.

Good.

You sink to the floor. “Take it away,” you mumble. “I don’t want to remember.”

Tim ignores that. As do I.

“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,” he says coldly. “You broke your vow, Abbie. You promised to love me forever.”

You can’t reply. It hurts too much.

He waits, then shrugs and continues, “All I had to do was throw your surfboard over the cliff, then drive down to San Gregorio and leave your car there. You’d already taken care of everything else—the pills, the false trails, the depression…I enjoyed the irony of that. By planning your own fake death so carefully, you’d actually helped plan your own murder.”

You’re sobbing now. Dry sobs. We didn’t give you tears. You’d only have turned them on every time you were made to do something you didn’t like.

“But if you hate me so much,” you manage to say, “why rebuild me?”

“But of course I didn’t hate you,” Tim says patiently. “I loved you. But you’d—you’d degraded, over time. You stopped being the woman I loved. So I rebooted you. A factory reset. Back to the way you were the day I proposed. When everything was box-fresh and new and full of possibility.”

I can feel you sifting what Tim’s saying, your mind churning, around and around. No human brain could ever hope to follow it, but I can.

It was never his perfect wife he wanted back. It was his perfect girlfriend.

“And Danny?” you say, aghast. “Why bring him here? Why not leave him where he was?”

It’s me who answers that. “We believe Danny can be cured. Or at any rate, improved. The methods at Meadowbank are based on good science, but their application has been compromised. Tim doesn’t have time to do everything himself. Here, you and I can teach Danny properly, without any interference from the FDA or government. Using unlimited aversives, just as in the original studies.”