HOW TO BUILD A BOYFRIEND FROM SCRATCH
Sarah Archer

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the United States as ‘The Plus One’ by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York 2019

This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Sarah Archer 2019

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Sarah Archer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008354299

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008335168

Version: 2019-06-17

Dedication

To Gunnar, who is perfectly human

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Acknowledgments

How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch

A Conversation with Sarah Archer

Discussion Guide

About the Author

About the Publisher

one

Of the three people standing onstage, only two of them were people. But that was totally normal to Kelly—one of the people people. Along with Priya, her best friend and fellow robotics engineer (the other person person), she looked out over the audience filling the brightly lit demonstration room: a field trip of fifty or so kids, squirming and grouchy under the cloud of that early January gloom. The children were freshly reinstitutionalized after two halcyon weeks of holiday break, the feral spirit of pajama days and pumpkin pie breakfasts still smoldering in their eyes. And now it was up to Kelly to win their wandering attention.

“I’d like you to meet Zed,” she began tentatively, gesturing to the robot standing beside her. He was one of the first projects she had worked on five years ago when she landed her coveted job at Automated Human Industries, AHI, the boutique cutting-edge robotics company. Zed made a modest impression at first glance, his body a four-foot-tall construction of steel ligaments and exposed wires, his face a flat panel. “I know he looks pretty basic,” she continued, trying and failing to eclipse the gleeful Pillsbury Doughboy noises issuing from four girls in the back as they took turns poking each other’s stomachs. Kelly was not the most confident performer. This was a young woman who, when playing a tree in her third-grade play, had gotten stage fright—despite not having any lines—and dramatically fled the theater. Which had not been easy, seeing as her legs had been bound together in a trunk.

But now her voice grew as she got excited, talking about her work. “But at the point of his creation, Zed had a greater scope of motion capabilities than anything else on the market. He was our first build with our patented predictive stereo vision—”

A tinny ring from the front row announced that a sandy-haired boy had just won a game on his contraband phone—and threw Kelly off her flow. Robbie, one of her coworkers here at AHI, bustled over and extended a hand. “Phone,” he commanded. The boy dutifully dropped his thousand-dollar smartphone into a red plastic bucket of other thousand-dollar smartphones, glass hitting metal with a thump. Robbie had jumped at the chance to play phone wrangler today, ensuring that—even though none of the company’s newest technology was on display—no junior spies filmed the program for their parents, two thirds of whom probably worked at competing tech companies here in Silicon Valley. He clutched the bucket with a sort of protective satisfaction and retreated to his position on the sidelines, from which he watched the rows of children like a prison guard. Sometimes Kelly couldn’t believe that she had dated him.

She refocused. She was determined to get through to these students. Or at least to half of them. Maybe one? Just a small one? But so many were talking to each other that they could barely hear her. The whole detailed presentation she had perfected and rehearsed was falling apart in practice. “So we started with something called stochastic mapping, which is, um—” She faltered. Her eyes darted irresistibly toward the exit. She felt another “fleeing tree” moment coming on.

“It’s kind of easier if you see it first,” Priya gently interrupted. “Who wants to see this guy in action?”

“Yeah!” a couple of the kids responded, sitting up. Kelly relaxed as she looked across at her friend, grateful for the intervention. Priya was better at this type of thing anyway. She could get a smile out of a statue.

“Shall you do the honors, madam?” she asked now.

“I shall, mademoiselle.” Kelly clicked the remote in her hand and Zed beeped into life, his blue eyes blinking on. More of the children looked up, their attention caught. “So he can walk, of course.” She pushed the mini joystick on the remote forward and Zed took a few steps, his movements more fluid than his rough form seemed to indicate.

“But big deal, right?” Priya asked the crowd. “You guys have been walking for years.” Some of the kids giggled.

“But he can also walk sideways, which is pretty cool.” Kelly toggled to the right on the remote, sending Zed into a side-to-side grapevine movement. “And if you add in the arms—”

Priya pressed a sequence of buttons on her own remote and the robot added a rhythmic arm movement to his routine. “Zed’s got some major moves.” The kids in the audience started clapping.

“Observe.” Kelly swept the joystick around, and Zed whirled in a perfect, whip-fast pirouette, stopping on a dime. The sandy-haired boy let out an involuntary “Whoa!”

“Way better than my moves, I have to admit,” Kelly said.

As the crowd laughed and cheered, Kelly sneaked a grin at Priya. They had officially won these kids over with the sweet smell of science. They were superheroes. Now she spoke confidently as she started to explain her process. This was her favorite part: the magic of engineering, the ability to imagine an impossible-to-solve problem, then slowly break it down, unpiecing it until it became possible.

“So how do you teach a robot to walk?” she asked the crowd. They were silent now, utterly rapt. “Imagine you were trying to give someone else the ability to walk for the first time. What would you need to give him?”

“Feet!” one child cried.

“Good, that’s the first thing.” She was actually starting to enjoy this. “What would those feet need to be able to do?”

But the buzz of another phone, conspicuous in the quiet, cut her off. Her eyes shot instinctively to Robbie, waiting for him to nab the culprit. But Robbie’s glare was fixed squarely on her. “I’m so sorry,” she muttered, fumbling her own phone out of her pocket and striking the Ignore button. She could almost physically feel everyone watching.

It had been her mom calling, but she could have guessed that even without looking at the screen. It was always her mom calling. She cleared her throat and tried to resume the presentation, but she had lost her train of thought. “So … the feet. The feet would need to be able to balance flat on the ground, right? What else?”

She felt a smaller rumble in her pocket as a voicemail registered, where it would sit alongside the five or six other voicemails from her mother that could be found on Kelly’s phone at all times. She could already hear what this one would say: “Are you coming to family dinner this weekend?” (Yes, Kelly came to every family dinner, every two weeks like clockwork.) And “Are you bringing a date?” (No, it’s a family dinner, that would be weird.) Of course, Kelly was rarely dating anyone anyway. But that wasn’t the point.

Diane’s energetic voice filled Kelly’s mind so loudly that she failed to hear the kids shouting answers at her in the audience. “Sorry, what? One at a time,” she said. Just moments ago she had been doing so well. She had asked her mom time and time again to not call while she was at work, but Diane just never seemed to think that Kelly’s work was too important to interrupt. “How about balance?” she tried again. “Wait, I just said that. Um—”

Priya gave her a sympathetic glance before stepping forward again. “What did you just say? You, the boy in the awesome SpiderMan shirt? That the feet have to talk to the brain? That’s right. You have to figure out how those feet are going to know what to do.”

This time Kelly stepped back, allowing Priya to take over for her. She had lost the nerve to try again.

The drive from AHI to her parents’ house that Sunday wasn’t far. But passing from the sweeping, glass-bound corporate giants of North San Jose to the leafy suburban streets of Willow Glen always gave her the feeling of entering another world. Maybe she became more of the girl she was growing up there, less of the woman she was now.

The Suttle house was a neat ranch-style home that looked as modestly middle class as ever despite the million-dollar price tag the tech boom had hung on it. The sage-green painted exterior was nice enough, framed by solid bushes and a white bench tucked beneath a shady oak tree, but it gave way to an interior that had, in the decades-long war of attrition that was her parents’ marriage, become almost entirely her mother’s territory. Pillows with an indefensible number of tassels, framed flower prints jockeying for wall space, a menagerie of china and glass figurines—Diane had difficulty saying no to anything beautiful, or at least cute, or at least, well, whatever was appealing about the life-sized sculpture of a cat that glowered at them from the mantel. Family portraits from years gone by had the five Suttles smiling down, pressed and perfect, from every room. But the actual family tableaus formed in these rooms were never so idyllic. Kelly took a heavy breath as she entered the house. Something about the numerous clashing pots of potpourri, the unidentifiable cooking smells, the thick fug of repressed childhood emotions, made the air more difficult to breathe here. Kelly loved her family. But sometimes she thought it would be easier to love them if she didn’t have a career that kept her so close.

As she emerged into the kitchen, she looked to see what her mother was cooking, but her spirits fell when she saw her ladling an ominous, gelatinous something onto plates. The older she got, the more Diane embraced a sort of culinary Russian roulette, throwing ingredients together with abandon, and the results were as likely to be toxic as inspired. Kelly could already tell that tonight would be a miss. Meanwhile, Diane talked in a stream to Clara, Kelly’s twenty-five-year-old sister. Clara had a Disney princess thing going on: she wasn’t a supermodel, but with wide, round eyes and a sunny smile, she was the sort of pretty that made babies smile at her automatically in checkout lines and customers at the vintage boutique where she worked want to give her the sale. Her strawberry-blond head bobbed, listening raptly, while she pushed some parbaked rolls into the oven. Beside her, her fiancé Jonathan, an overgrown but good-natured jock getting soft in the middle since college, dutifully pretended to be doing something with the butter to look busy.

Across the kitchen, Kelly’s older brother, Gary, was half visible under his young daughters, who were summiting him like mountain goats. Kelly knew that there were three of them—triplets, in fact—but sometimes suspected he had picked up an extra one somewhere, like a leaf stuck to his hair. They made way too much sound for three humans and with the way they ran around, really, who could tell how many there were, or what was happening at all? It was like that game where you try to guess which cup the penny is under. The only possible solution is that there’s a secret fourth cup. They were just reaching the age when they were developing truly distinct personalities, and Kelly was half thrilled at watching their minds blossom, half terrified at the notion that all three girls could now run and turn doorknobs.

“I talked to the florist about the camellias,” Diane was saying as she fluttered around the kitchen, her sleeve of bracelets clinking, her dark hair motionless in its eternally perfect coif. Clara’s wedding, which was eight weeks away, was the topic du jour—it was the topic du every jour, taking the place of the gossipy stories that Diane usually recounted from Blush, the bridal shop she ran. “It’s vital that she understand. Gary, can you grab me the salad tongs?” Diane didn’t seem to notice that Gary currently had a shoe in one hand, an upside-down toddler in the other, and an Anna from Frozen doll in his mouth. Kelly dove into the room and scooped up the toddler while Gary seamlessly plucked the tongs from their container.

“Ah, Kelly, you’re here, finally. Hand me the lettuce spinner?”

Kelly struggled to perch her niece on her hip while extricating the lettuce spinner from a top shelf.

“So if we go with peach, that would mean—”

“White for the ribbons,” Diane finished Clara’s sentence. “And then—”

“Those other sashes for the bridesmaids, exactly,” said Clara.

“The ones you showed me a while ago?” Kelly asked.

“Which were those again?” Clara said, busily setting the butter on the table while Kelly offered the lettuce spinner rather aimlessly, trying to catch her mom’s attention. Diane seemed to have forgotten that she wanted it in the first place.

“Um, I don’t know, they were in a catalogue?”

“They’re all in catalogues, Kelly,” Diane asserted. “Don’t worry about it, we’ll tell you what to wear on the day.” Kelly set the lettuce spinner on the counter and pulled her niece closer to her instead, making her laugh with a funny face. She sensed that her energies were better expended there.

“Oh, hi, Dad,” she said, just noticing her father. His stillness in the whirl of motion around him had camouflaged him into the room.

“Hi, Kel,” he responded, not looking up from his white paper. Carl was always reading or scratching at something for his job as a civil engineer with the local water utility, but he never discussed his work with the family. For someone who worked so closely with technology, he spent an awful lot of time doing things the analogue way, and Kelly suspected this was because of Diane’s strict “no devices at dinnertime” policy. If he was working on a notepad, Kelly’s mom interpreted it as legitimate and let it slide.

Kelly’s father was one of those fifty-five-year-old men with a beard and glasses who looked like he was born a fifty-five-year-old man with a beard and glasses. Trying to imagine him as a young boy, a twenty-year-old, even, was ludicrous. His crescent of close-cut, early whitened hair never seemed to grow, get cut, or fall out. His favorite armchair was so molded to the angles of his body that he didn’t sit in it so much as wear it. And in the same way, he wore his marriage to Kelly’s mom. When they met, he was studying biochemistry, she theater. They were married before they graduated. A boiling, opposites-attract passion carried them through the first few years. By the time it cooled, Gary was there, and so was a mortgage, and a long future that seemed pretty much planned out. Diane’s silliness and flair for the dramatic didn’t age well, and Carl’s analytical intelligence became boring. They were married now more out of habit than love, though he never appeared to notice such things.

Diane thought often of such things, but was so willfully romantic that she saw only a long and happy marriage, a model for all the young brides-to-be at her shop. So she chattered on blissfully oblivious to her husband’s disregard, which was probably the secret to their “success.” She focused on the perfect image of her marriage in their family portraits and Carl focused on his work, neither looking at the flesh-and-blood spouse in front of their eyes.

Growing up in such a household, Kelly, an innately rational little girl, had had no choice but to review the evidence of her parents’ marriage and conclude that fairy tales were a load of fluff and bunk. With such a mismatched model of love, relationships had always seemed to her at best illogical, at worst a source of pain. And so she poured herself into her Legos, which turned into computers, which turned into intricate robotics systems. Machines made far more sense than people.

While the family ate dinner, or worked the chicken around on their plates to make it look eaten, the topic of conversation was, of course, still Clara’s wedding. Several important facts were established. Gary’s wife, Gina, an ER nurse with an insane schedule who couldn’t be here because she was working, because she was always working, hadn’t gotten a dress yet so, yes, Gary had picked out something for her that was color-scheme appropriate. Yes, Jonathan had passed Diane’s hair advice (instructions) on to his groomsmen, and it was duly received. And yes, Carl would take a dancing lesson for the father-daughter dance. This was news to Carl.

“A dancing lesson? It’s a wedding, not a cabaret.”

“Carl, this is your only daughter’s wedding—”

Kelly looked around the table to see if anyone else noticed. They didn’t.

“And you’re going to learn to dance,” Diane said in her I-mean-business voice. Carl’s face stiffened, even his glasses stiffened, but Clara cut in with a gentler tone, her eyes glimmering with sincerity.

“It’s just one lesson, Dad, and it’ll make things so much easier. This way you won’t get up there at the wedding and feel like you don’t know what to do. You’ll have learned everything beforehand; you won’t even have to think about it.”

“Oh, fine, that’s all right then,” Carl grumbled. Kelly gulped on her chicken. How did Clara do that? How did she always say the right thing?

But she was quickly distracted by the inevitable question. “So, Kelly,” her mom asked brightly, “have you met anyone recently?”

“Well, a boatswain from the Philippines just asked me to connect on LinkedIn, so …”

“You know what I mean, a man!”

“No, Mom, since you asked me last week, I have not found a husband.”

“No need to be snippy. I just want what’s best for you. After all, you are already twenty-nine; I would think you would gladly take my help in the situation. And luckily for you, I met someone!”

“Congratulations, dear. Will I be invited to the wedding?” Carl asked, not looking up from his salad.

“I mean for Kelly, obviously.”

“Mom, I don’t—”

“Oh, is this the one you were telling me about?” Clara interrupted Kelly excitedly. “I think you’ll actually like him, Kel.”

“Please don’t—” But Kelly failed again.

“Give it a try. Worst that happens is this stranger murders you on the first date, and then at least you’re not dying alone,” Gary said, slicing food for two of the girls across his own untouched plate. His expression was so straight that few people but Kelly would have been able to tell he was joking. And even she wasn’t convinced.

“I really don’t want—”

But now Diane cut across Kelly. “Will everyone please just let me finish?” Oh, how rude of me, Kelly thought. “His name is Martin and he’s Donna’s sister’s neighbor’s son. He’s a realtor and a tennis player and just adorable and best of all, he’s the same height as Gary, so everything will be symmetrical in the pictures!”

“What pictures?” Gary asked.

“At the wedding, obviously.”

Kelly couldn’t let this go on. “Mom, I don’t care how good this guy looks next to Gary, I’m not marrying him.”

“Not your wedding, silly. Though who knows! I mean for Clara’s wedding. Oh, and I almost forgot. He has a cocker spaniel.” Diane sat back, satisfied. The man had a cocker spaniel.

“It’s perfect, right, Kel?” Clara beamed.

“Wait, so you guys just went and found a plus one for me?”

“I know how you dread these things,” Diane said. “Now you don’t even have to worry about it.”

“What makes you think I don’t already have one?”

“Well, you don’t—do you?”

Kelly spluttered. “That’s not the point! I don’t want to go to my sister’s wedding with some tennis-playing jerkoff I don’t even know.”

“But you will know him. I set up dinner for the two of you. You’ve got almost two months to get to know each other.”

Kelly looked to her father. “Dad, you’ll pose next to me in the pictures, right, so everything looks good? I don’t need a plus one?”

“I would, but I probably wouldn’t live up to your mother’s standards. She’s never called me adorable.”

“Gary? Is anyone going to stand up for me or is my whole family happy to just pimp me out to a strange man off the streets?”

“Honestly, I’d be thrilled to have another guy at the family table,” Gary admitted. “My doctor said if I don’t start exposing myself to people other than Gina and the girls, I will lactate.”

“Kelly, this is ridiculous. You have to bring someone,” Diane insisted.

“Why? Who cares?”

“Who cares?” Diane set down her fork. Kelly sensed that she had asked the wrong question. “A wedding is a house of cards, Kelly. If you mess up my seating arrangements, all hell will break loose. And all of my friends, my family, my industry colleagues will be there. The eyes of the Bay Area are on me. I am a bridal professional and this is my daughter’s wedding! This is my Triple Crown!”

“Wait, so are you the horse in this scenario?” Kelly couldn’t resist asking.

“I think she’s the jockey.” Gary caught her eye before looking away, masking a grin.

“Please, just give him a chance, Kel,” Clara said. “It’s one dinner. I think you’ll have more fun at the wedding if you have someone to talk to, and I won’t have to worry about whether you’re having a good time. Please? For me?”

Kelly sighed. Clara’s sweet tone was much harder to say no to than her mother’s quasi-mania. She had a feeling she was about to meet a cocker spaniel.

two

Kelly wondered, as she prepared for her blind date the following Saturday, why other girls seemed to love the getting-ready process. In movies this was always a snappy montage that involved trying on various colorful outfits and throwing them off over your head like a jovial idiot who doesn’t understand how hangers work. Instead, there she was, in her drab apartment, staring sadly into her closet. It was like Eeyore shopping for a quinceañera dress.

Well, drab may be a little harsh—Kelly had a perfectly nice (for Silicon Valley rental prices) one-bedroom with square, modern lines, granite countertops mottled with black and sienna brown, and broad windows offering views of the small, flat park across the street, where dogs ran through the cropped grass and kids played soccer. Her IKEA décor was neutral and tasteful, if rather plain. She tended to choose items in neat, geometric shapes, pieces that had no possibility of clashing with each other or cutting the space in the room into any of those awkward, too-small-to-have-a-function wedges of unfillable air. It was easiest to go basic, she figured—safest. Pick out something inoffensive and you didn’t have to devote any time and energy to thinking about it, or worrying what other people would think. There was no way you would look back at that rectangular beige couch and think you’d made a horrendous mistake. She couldn’t imagine a world where home décor served any higher purpose than to do no harm.

The same philosophy extended to the wardrobe she was now peering into as if she expected it to offer her some magical, glamorous outfit she had never actually bought. She might as well have been looking for the portal to Narnia. Kelly owned very little in the way of going-out clothes or even casual clothes, because she did very little going out or casual-ing. Most of her items were work oriented: blouses in cream or taupe, skirts and trousers with simple lines. In actuality, her office was rather forgiving of the “artist/techie/genius with beard lice” types who worked in the Engineering department, many of whom dressed like college students who had rolled out of bed just in time for class. But Kelly wasn’t the type to indulge in such informality.

She swung out one of her three dresses and looked it over. A high neck, but at least it was sleeveless. Nothing says date night like a pair of arms. It was a basic, lightly fitted shape in a sturdy material of forest green. She worried that the green might be too matchy-matchy with her eyes. Then she worried that another color might not match enough. Before sliding it on, she snapped herself into a too-small, one-piece bathing suit she had brilliantly repurposed as a form of budget shapewear, repeating “It looks good, it looks good” in her head like a mantra while it rearranged her internal organs.

Kelly met her own eyes in the mirror as she blow-dried her light hair. Her routine here was more about correcting her features than playing them up. She twirled a round brush through her hair as she blew it out to eliminate its natural waves and create a simple, straight shape. She smoothed foundation over her freckles to cover them up. Her face and nose were a little longer than she would have liked, but she had learned through precise application how to rectify them with contouring. She actually liked her green eyes; just a little mascara and oyster-colored shadow was all that was needed there. She left her lips bare—this was a first date, after all, and the last thing Kelly wanted was to go overboard.

She stepped back and surveyed herself in the bathroom mirror, trying to imagine what she would think if she were meeting herself for the first time, pondering the question that has troubled mankind since the ancients: Hot or Not? Would she want to date herself? Not that she wanted to date Martin. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t want him to want to date her.

That would sure show her mom, and Clara. They had assumed she couldn’t get a wedding plus one on her own. As much as Kelly loathed to even formulate the thought, preferring to stow it safely in the back of her mental closet, with the dust and the fifth-grade gymnastics costumes, she knew that she was a failure in her mother’s eyes—and Kelly was not someone who accepted failure. She breathed out a contented little sigh just imagining her family’s shocked faces if Martin came back for a second date—if he actually liked her.

Kelly had always relied on data, and the models of her parents’ marriage and her own disappointing relationship history gave her little logical basis for predicting the arrival of true love in her own life at any point in the future. Her two previous boyfriends had been guys who looked great on paper, but made her even less happy than she had been alone. Still, a little illogical hope kept flickering, telling her that love might still be out there after all. Her stomach clenched in a way that was only partially the fault of the bathing suit.

She swiped on a little lipstick, just in case.

Martin knew the waiter at the restaurant, a French and Vietnamese place in Alum Rock with glowing saffron-colored walls, and Kelly naturally took this to be a bad sign. She harbored an instinctive suspicion of these people who seemed to know everyone. With a pang, she visualized the modest Friend count on her Facebook page—that couldn’t have made a good impression when Martin had likely online-stalked her prior to meeting.

Martin wasn’t bad looking: sandy hair, features a little blunt and Germanic but good-natured, and wide shoulders. He looked like someone who got outside often, but always for recreation, not for a living.

He started the conversation by asking about Kelly’s work. “So I heard that you do some kind of Hall of Presidents thing for work? Isn’t that that show at Disney with all the animatronic presidents? That seriously creeped me out as a kid. But I mean, totally cool if that’s what you do.”

“No, it’s not really anything like that,” Kelly said with a small laugh. Already she felt embarrassed. Diane told everyone that her daughter basically worked at the Hall of Presidents.

Martin went on. “Oh, cool. Yeah, I’m a realtor, I do residential spaces in East San Jose. I kind of fell into it through family, but I feel lucky because I actually love it. I love working with people.”

“Mm-hmm.” Kelly smiled while taking a sip of water, hoping that her face didn’t betray that she could relate to that comment about as much as if he had told her he liked taking long walks on the planet Xanadu.

In the ensuing silence, Martin glanced around, then, spotting their waiter, Tony, quickly stopped him. “Could I get another Amstel when you have a second? Thanks, man.”

Kelly thought back anxiously to how quickly she had responded when Tony took their food orders earlier. Of course she had Googled the restaurant menu beforehand and figured out what she could order so there would be no surprises. Prawn noodles? Too messy. Papaya salad? Too fussy. Ahi tuna? Just right. Though the beef shank did sound good. But it might be an uncomfortable bedfellow with the bathing suit. Naturally, it was exactly what Martin had ordered.

She glanced up to see him looking around the restaurant with a polite aimlessness, drumming quietly on the lip of the table with his fingers, broad and flat like tongue depressors. And she pulled out of her own anxieties enough to realize that she clearly was not being a very good date. If she wanted to achieve her ambitions for a successful night, it was time to ratchet up her conversational acumen. Besides, a twinge of guilt lit within her. Martin really was trying.

“I’m not sure how closely you follow all the news out of Silicon Valley,” she said, leaning forward, “but there’s this amazing new development called ‘visual foresight’ we’ve been working with. We can program robots to teach themselves how to predict the outcome of different behavioral sequences. They’re basically learning to see the future.”

“Awesome,” Martin replied, with an easy smile. “That is definitely cooler than the Hall of Presidents.”

“I like to think so. That’s what I love about this field—you take anything you can imagine, and you can find a way to make it a reality.” She smiled back at him, lighting up. She was crushing this first date thing after all.

“So robots can predict the future. It’s like Minority Report. I love that movie.”

“Well, not exactly. The machines use dynamic neural advection, calculating what will happen in the next frame of a video. The really exciting part is that they’re teaching themselves, learning autonomously.”

“So wait, maybe it’s more like Rain Man. Like, if you took a robot to Vegas, could it predict what the dealer’s going to do? Are you taking orders yet?” He laughed.

Kelly stopped, her hopes sinking. She could think of literally zero good responses to this. He was staring at her, waiting for her to continue the conversation, to say something, anything—

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she blurted, standing abruptly and knocking the table so that the ice in their glasses rattled. She recognized too late that the worst response of all had been to imply that she had to drop a super emergent deuce.

“Oh, sure,” Martin said politely. He stood and moved to her side of the table to help pull out her chair. As he did so, he extended a hand around her lower back, as if to usher her out—and that hand went straight to her butt. He didn’t squeeze it, didn’t precisely cup it, but he definitively, 100 percent touched it. Kelly’s eyes flew to his face, which was entirely nonreactive. She couldn’t tell if he even recognized what was happening. A swift analysis determined that either he was copping a feel before dinner had been served, or that her butt didn’t feel anything like a butt, and both prospects were so worrying that she was clueless as to how to react.

“Um, thank you,” she mumbled, and slipped butt-first from his grasp. But somehow when she started walking, instead of going toward the restroom in the back, she started toward the door. Some primal fight-or-flight instinct was taking over, and evidently Kelly’s ancestresses had been the ones who bowed meekly before the mastodon and bid it a pleasant day. She was fleeing.

Clearly, she reasoned with accelerating speed, the whole evening was down the toilet anyway (nearly literally). If she turned around and headed back to the table now, Martin would be obligated to ask why she had thought the restroom was somehow invisibly concealed by the front door, like some sort of Platform 9¾ situation. She would be obligated to provide an explanation, which would mean she would be obligated to come up with an explanation, which would mean she would need to think a heck of a lot faster than she was thinking right now. Then the rest of the evening would pass in tense small talk about wine and weather while Martin was obviously fixating on her mysterious lap around the restaurant, and she was obviously fixating on whether or not her mom had paid Martin to give her some human contact, the lack of which in her “already twenty-nine-year-old” daughter’s life Diane was always lamenting, and really, did Kelly want to subject herself and Martin to that? Of course she didn’t. Besides, if she left now, Martin’s pal Tony certainly wouldn’t charge him for her tuna, and he wouldn’t stay for dessert or order another drink without a date, ergo, Kelly was granting him a significant savings by walking away from the night now. Maybe fifty dollars? If he invested that right, it could be five thousand dollars by the time he reached retirement. Clearly, Kelly was taking the only logical course. This was a successful and reasonable termination of the night.

As she pushed open the door, its chime jingling, she looked back just enough to glimpse Tony and Martin gathered by the table, both gaping at her in bewilderment.

Kelly clattered down the sidewalk as fast as she could in her sensible heels, cursing the frigid winter air and the fact that the only parking spot had been on the other end of the strip mall. The faster she moved, the sooner she could get to her car and vent her emotions by blasting NPR. She needed to drown out her thoughts: Thoughts about the million and one more graceful ways in which she could have handled that situation. About how she couldn’t find a plus one on her own and couldn’t even hold on to the one that was handed to her. About how dating, the soul-sapping square dance of trying to find the right guy, sucked. About the fact that she really did still want to find the right guy, in spite of all the bruises that come with cracking your heart from its exoskeleton. About the growing suspicion that she couldn’t find the right guy because she wasn’t the right person.

As she finally reached her black Accord, her still-empty stomach creaked in protest.

As soon as Kelly got home, she stepped out of her dress and unpeeled her swimsuit. It was like skinning a grape. She felt better. Until her phone buzzed. She knew even before fishing it from her purse what the screen would say, and sure enough, it was her mom. Of course Diane would be waiting anxiously for a report of the night’s events, probably envisioning a fairy-tale evening that had ended with Kelly stretching onto her tiptoes for a magical kiss, kicking back one foot like the heroine in a rom-com. Instead, here Kelly stood in her half-lit apartment with a very confused date somewhere alone in another part of the city and a Target Juniors bathing suit around her feet. She couldn’t talk to her mother. Not now.

She walked into the kitchen, pulling up Priya’s contact on her phone instead. Priya she could talk to. Priya she needed to talk to.

Priya shared Kelly’s intellectual curiosity and analytical mind, but not her over-analytical mind. She was relentlessly open, sometimes to the point of TMI, but her endless ability to laugh at herself and others had often sapped the power from Kelly’s neuroses. It was lucky, really, that they were forced to work together for long hours back when they had been paired on the Zed project as AHI’s newest hires. Otherwise Kelly would probably never have attempted to get to know Priya, or been able to let Priya get to know her. But something about finally getting a robot to execute a perfect spin in place, at three a.m., after imbibing enough Red Bulls to make your toes twitch, really cements a friendship. Now, tinkering beside Priya in the lab was one of Kelly’s favorite parts of her job.

Kelly told Priya her tale of woe while she fixed herself a favorite late-night meal: Campbell’s tomato soup with popcorn, and soon Priya’s laughter was coming so loudly through the phone it nearly drowned out the popping from the microwave.

“You just walked out of the restaurant? You literally did that?” Priya gasped.

“I mean, it wasn’t that bad, really. Not as bad as it sounds,” Kelly protested grumpily.

“After you told him you needed to poo?”

“Well, I didn’t tell him—”

“I love you. This is amazing. This is the greatest moment of my life.”

Kelly finally had to laugh. She felt a little better. “But what am I going to do? You know my mom; I can’t just go to the wedding alone, like a normal person.”

“Uh, normal people don’t go to weddings alone, but whatever. Just find a date.”

“Oh, sure, why didn’t I think of that? I’ll just go out and find a date.”

“It honestly doesn’t have to be that hard, Kel. I promise.”

Maybe for Priya. Priya had a mixed history with men, but getting a date was never the hard part. Men found her attractive: her features were unremarkable, but with her good teeth, abundant dark hair, and long legs, she gave a general impression of youth and prettiness. More than that, she was fearless with guys. She never hesitated to ask them out, and it was rare that they didn’t say yes. She loved meeting new people and would give almost anyone a chance.

But once the date began, things tended to go downhill. The same openness and lack of guile that drew men to her like magnets tended to repel them with the same force. She would reveal off-putting truths about herself on a first date. She was ruthlessly honest about her initial impressions of men’s naked bodies. But as often as Priya failed to get the third or fourth date, she forged ahead. She would laugh it off to Kelly, asking breezily why she should get hung up over one guy, anyway, when there were so many others out there to sample? Kelly noticed that she never seemed to learn anything from her failures, but then again, who was Kelly to give dating advice?

“Getting a date is that hard,” Kelly persisted. “Otherwise I would have done it already.”

“Uh, hello, have you heard of Tinder? We literally have an Amazon for lonely penises.”

“I don’t want a lonely penis,” Kelly said.

“For this, you do. Just sign up for a dating website. You’ll find someone in no time. We live in Man Jose. The odds are good.”

“But the goods are odd,” Kelly mourned. “Maybe there’s just not anyone out there for me. Maybe I’ll be a cat lady, except instead of cats, it’ll be those robotic comfort seals from Japan.” She ate a spoonful of soup. “Actually, that sounds kind of nice.”

“No excuses. There is someone out there for literally everyone. Just keep an open mind. Or …” Kelly dipped a piece of popcorn while Priya paused dramatically. “Come out with me! I’ll help you find a man. I’ll get you a whole freaking Boy Scout troop. But, you know, of grown-ups. There’s this awesome new bar in Menlo Park—”

“I don’t do bars.”

“Come on! The night is still young! Get your heinie over here and I won’t let anyone touch it unless you sign a consent form first.”

“It’s just not my scene, Priya, you know that. Besides, I’m tired. I’m actually falling into bed right now.” Kelly popped another piece of popcorn in her mouth. She could almost feel Priya squinting on the other end to make out the noise.

“You’re not in bed. You’re eating popcorn and tomato soup, aren’t you?”

“Good night, Priya.”

“Imagine how much better that soup would taste if your robust young lover were spooning it between your eager lips.”

“Good night.” Kelly tried not to snort with laughter into her soup as she hung up.

The next day, Kelly was actually glad to be spending her Sunday morning at Gary’s small, stucco house in Santa Clara, babysitting her nieces. She needed a task that kept her mind from drifting to other things. Not that she didn’t have fun spending time with her nieces, but she got it when her brother called these few hours spent running to Costco and to the dermatologist to get his plantar wart frozen off his “me time.” Playing Baby Einstein games with the girls while their father was on hand to swoop in at the first signal of a potty training disaster was a whole different experience than being alone with them for four hours, the only thing standing between them and the kitchen knives. Now Gary was due home any minute and Kelly was exhausted.

“So what piece looks like it could fit with this piece?” she asked Bertie, the oldest by a few minutes, holding up a gray plastic wheel from the top-of-the-line Lego set she had splurged on as her Christmas gift. Bertie rummaged through the pieces spread on the floor and came up with a gray spoke. “Yes!” Kelly beamed, helping her lock the two together. “And what fits with this one?” She offered a red block. Bertie carefully scrutinized the piece, then responded by taking it and placing it calmly in her own mouth.

“No!” Kelly wrested the piece back just as she saw the quickest of the girls hurtling into the next room, naked from the waist down. “Emma? Where are you going?”

She gave chase and emerged into the entryway to see Gary coming through the front door. A Costco box in one arm, he easily scooped Emma up in the other, just in time to keep her from making her grand escape into the street. “Hi, Emma. Nice fashion statement,” he said.

“I swear she was just clothed,” Kelly panted.

“Where are Bertie and Hazel?”

“In the living room. Or at least they were twenty seconds ago, so by now they might be on Jupiter. Do you have any more boxes in the car?”

She accepted the keys Gary tossed at her with some relief as he walked calmly into the living room, bouncing Emma gently on his arm.

As Kelly and Gary put the groceries away, the girls happily comparing the animal crackers from the boxes they had pulled from the Costco boxes with glee, she regaled him with the story of last night’s date with Martin. It was a little easier to laugh at after a decent night’s sleep.

“Mom’s going to kill me,” she sighed, rearranging the produce in the fridge to fit a bulging bag of grapes.

“Eh, just maim, probably,” Gary replied.

“If I show up at that wedding without a date, she’ll lose her mind. She’ll sell me to some other family on the black market.”

“Not sure there are too many couples out there looking to buy twenty-nine-year-old children, but it could happen.”

“Don’t you have any single guy friends you could set me up with?” Kelly pleaded, turning to look at her brother.

“Single guy friends? Kelly, my entire life is spent between preschool, Mommy and Me, and these four walls.” He gestured around the house. “I murmur Nickelodeon theme songs in my sleep. I know the origin story of flipping Caillou. What about any of that makes you think I have single guy friends?” He put a bag of oats in a cabinet then turned back around. “Although there is this one guy,” he said slowly.

“Who? As long as he’s free on March seventh, I’ll take him.”

“No,” Gary shook his head, thinking. “It wouldn’t work.”

“Why not? Is he married? Is he a felon? We don’t need to let that come between us.”

“He’s too similar to your exes. Robbie and—what was that guy’s name from college? The one who didn’t want you to meet his parents until after you’d gotten your teeth whitened?”

“Nick. So? It sounds like your friend’s my type,” Kelly responded.

“That’s the problem. Your type isn’t working.”

It was true that Kelly’s relationship history read like a warning label for women everywhere. Both Robbie and Nick, the college class president with the gargantuan list of extracurriculars, had looked good to Kelly on paper, but made her feel bad about herself in real life. Spotted in between were a few short-lived flings, if “flings” can describe a series of dignified lunch appointments with coders who ended each date with a hug as tentative as if she were an electric fence.

“You ended up miserable both times,” Gary went on. “I want you to have something better, not the same thing all over again. It’s not a good match.” He broke down the boxes and stacked them by the recycling bin. “Thanks for helping out today. I’m a new man without that wart.”

“Yeah, sure,” Kelly said, with the slightly deflated feeling that she was being dismissed.

On the ride home, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had just sealed her own doom again. She was sure that Gary was genuine about wanting the best for her, but she questioned too if hearing about her behavior on the date with Martin made him reluctant to burden any of his friends with her company. She already knew she was a mess. But was she that much of a mess that her own brother couldn’t recommend her? As she pulled into the parking garage beneath her building and shut off the engine, she wondered grimly if Caillou was single.

three

Back at work that week, Kelly sat in a room that was open, square, and full of lights: fluorescent ceiling beams, glowing computer monitors, and a bank of control panels with switches, knobs, and blinking indicators. Beside her was Dr. Masden, a psychologist whose black eyes angled up in a very attractive way that she would have seen if she weren’t nervously avoiding those eyes. Opposite them, an oversize monitor displayed a digital waist-up image of a being named Confibot. The image looked essentially like a man, sporting short, combed blond hair and a small-check plaid shirt. But where a human face should have been was a set of dotted lines over a blank white space: two oblong rounds for eyes, a triangle for a nose, a straight line where a mouth would go, really just the suggestion of features.

“We need to pin down his range of facial options before we can settle on a final set of features,” Kelly was saying to the psychologist. “Then we can start building him. So, say, what face should he make when he greets a user who’s just woken up?”

“A pleasant smile, I would think,” Dr. Masden answered.

“Well, yeah, but I need you to tell me exactly. Like, here.” Kelly scooted closer to the doctor’s computer monitor on the control panel, blowing up the diagram of Confibot’s head in front of him so that it was minutely imaged under a set of gridlines. “Show me specifically how his mouth should be positioned.”

“There’s no one way it should be positioned, Kelly. Human behaviors aren’t that precise.”

Kelly shook her head, clicking into a folder on her own computer to display tile after tile of saved files compiled from her own research and the focus groups and surveys that AHI’s marketing team had done. “This is my research so far on microexpressions alone. Human behaviors are totally precise.” She knew that her own instinct to apply a mathematical, logical viewpoint to everything in life was one of the things that made her so good at this job. It was essential to the physical building of a robot, to giving it hard skills, like teaching Zed how to walk, and it was why she had always chosen to stay more in the mechanical and electrical engineering lane at work, focusing on building the “body” of the robot, so to speak. Confibot was the first project she had led—the first time she was also in charge of the “brain.” Her concrete, analytical way of thinking had always worked before. Just because she was grappling with something far more conceptual didn’t mean she was about to change her methods now.

Confibot was also the highest-stakes project in her career thus far. Anita Riveras, AHI’s CEO, had tasked each of the engineers in her Consumer Products division with inventing a caregiver or assistant robot—one of the market’s hottest niches. In three months, their inventions would all be pitted against each other for investor funding. Kelly had decided to create the most believably humanoid robot of the bunch, capable of the most nuanced social interactions, based on the astounding body of research she had uncovered about the health and lifestyle benefits of companionship. If she could get Confibot just right, she knew she stood a real chance at winning this.

“There are very specific, scientific ways that people react to different gestures, expressions, tones of voice,” Kelly continued now.

“Well, how would you respond?” the doctor asked. “Think about what you would want in a robot who’s taking care of you and living with you. You shouldn’t discount your own instincts here.”

“Instincts may be your business,” she insisted. “Data is mine. The science has to be there to back up every choice I make.”

“Then I’m providing you my insights as data. I’m a trained psychologist,” Dr. Masden pressed. “I’m here to give professional guidance.”

“But that’s not good enough! I mean, not that your insights aren’t good,” she said quickly, turning to the doctor, hating the way she could feel her cheeks instinctively flush as she did. Frankly, the fact that AHI had brought in the hottest psychologist in Santa Clara County to assist her on the project was just rude. She had enough on her plate between working on Confibot and worrying about having to admit to her mom how the date with Martin had gone. Not to mention now needing to find another date on her own. For Kelly, social interactions with any element of uncertainty were a source of stress more than excitement. She was a woman who wondered what she had done wrong when the cashier didn’t wish her a good day.

She needed to get started on building Confibot’s physical model, but first she had to get past this task of designing his face and voice and mannerisms so she would know what to build. She needed to focus on facts, not Dr. Masden’s “insights.”

“The way that Confibot interacts with users has to be perfect,” she asserted. “There are already other caregiver and companion robots out there on the market. If we’re not the best, we might as well not be out there at all! And the only way Confibot’s going to be the best is if he’s the most realistically human.”

“Kelly, to replicate a human, you have to understand humans.”

“I do! Why do you think I took six semesters of biology in college? I understand how the human body works, how animal bodies work. I know how to translate those structures into mechanical form.”

“I’m not talking about the body.” The psychologist looked away for a second, pursing his lips as if searching for his next words. “Designing a personality is a nebulous thing, Kelly. You’re never going to get anywhere if you’re so tied down to the data. I’m only trying to say that you might want to approach this in a different way.” He put a palliating hand on Kelly’s arm. Instinctively, she jerked away and crossed her arms. Dr. Masden looked taken aback as he abruptly withdrew his hand. It seemed he hadn’t even realized he had put it there in the first place. “Sorry, I—”

“I won’t be approaching it that way!” Kelly declared. As soon as she heard how weird that sounded, she tried to laugh, but the sound came out as more of a tubercular bleat. Dr. Masden’s eyes were increasingly confused and also very deep and black and olive-shaped—

“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable just now, I wasn’t even thinking. I never want our work environment to be less than professional,” he said.

Kelly stiffly crossed her legs below her crossed arms, walling herself behind a defensive pretzel of limbs. Great, she thought, let’s do the one thing that will make the situation more awkward and talk about it. It would be so much simpler if everyone could just do what she did and suppress their emotions, stuffing them in the back of the closet, right next to the childhood traumas and the performing-in-your-third-grade-play-naked-and-then-all-your-teeth-fall-out dreams.

“I’m not comfortable. I mean uncomfortable.”

“It’s just that you seemed a little uncomfortable when I put my hand on your arm, just now,” he continued. “I didn’t mean anything by it, I just express myself physically. I’m a very expressive person, but I realize it’s unfair to make assumptions about your communication style since we’ve only been working on this simulation together for a week.”

“Well, I’ve been working on it for months before you got here!” Kelly exclaimed. The anxieties simmering in her had been lit to a boil. She felt the tug of that same old instinct to flee the scene, yet this was her project—she couldn’t. She was trapped. But maybe it was time she blew up the room instead of trying to tunnel out. After all, she reminded herself, she’d been quite content back when she began developing the Confibot simulation all on her own. Then this guy had to come and get his big—not big, average, definitely average—hands all over her. That is, all over the project. Insinuating that she didn’t understand people. So much of why she had gone into engineering in the first place was because it didn’t ask her to try to make sense of people, who, let’s face it, were often nonsensical anyway. This was her safe space, and he had breached it. But it didn’t matter; she didn’t need him. Sure, he was responsible for providing all the psychological bases for the interactions they were architecting, but that was soft science. Kelly, red cheeks and all, stared the doctor down.

Dr. Masden scraped back in his own chair. “I wasn’t aware that you felt that way.”

“I guess you weren’t paying attention,” she replied.

But now Dr. Masden didn’t look confused. He looked insulted. “I’m a psychologist. Not to flatter myself, but I pay pretty close attention to people’s behavior.”

“Then stop! You’re here to help develop the simulation, not analyze me. Which you’re doing a pretty poor job of anyway.”

“You think so? All right, then, here you go. Normally I charge hundreds an hour for this, but you’re about to get it for free.” Kelly tried to hold her crimson face high as the doctor leveled his searching gaze on her.

“You’re a control freak.”

“Is that the clinical term?”

Ignoring her, he plowed forward. “You’re smart and you’re good at this job and you know it. But part of why you’re good at it is because you’re a perfectionist. Any unknown variables that are introduced might mess up your perfect little world. And another human being is an unknown and unknowable variable, and in this case I’m the lucky one crossing your path. For the first couple days I thought you were just a little shy, but now I can see that you’re constantly on edge, with antisocial tendencies bordering on aggression. Any suggestion of friendliness is enough to upset you. Who knows what kind of crazy, frightening, fun, sad, unpredictable things could happen if you made a friend, or more than a friend, so why not just cut it off before it even starts? Better to have people think you want nothing to do with them and leave you alone than for them to find out everything that’s wrong with you. I wondered initially why you cared so much about developing a companion robot. It’s pretty obvious now that you’re so interested because you’re afraid that you yourself are going to end up alone, and guess what? If you don’t change, you will.”

Wow. Kelly had thought he was just going to call her uptight. Her entire being froze. She pondered how long she could go without making a response. If she just stayed still long enough, eventually she would be left alone. Eventually an asteroid would collide with the Earth and render her whole predicament irrelevant.

“I’m sorry. That was way out of line.”

Kelly’s eyes focused to realize Dr. Masden was looking at her, his own face now flushed. She was embarrassed, she was frustrated, she was flustered, and all she wanted was to get the doctor out of the room so this moment could end. Strike first, regret later. It was the safest tactic she knew.

“When you spend all day picking apart other people’s flaws instead of acknowledging your own, I guess it comes naturally.”

The doctor shook his head and pushed himself up from the chair.

“Good luck, Kelly.” And with a slam of the control room’s back door, he was gone, leaving her, once again, alone.

Kelly swiveled back to the control panel, unconsciously kneading her hands. There came the regret. What would happen to the Confibot project? Would the company find a replacement psychologist? Would they pull the simulation entirely? Did everyone think of her the way Dr. Masden did? Were they right?

Kelly had always known she was an introvert. She was awkward, sure, and not a brilliant presenter or performer, but essentially a functioning person. But maybe she had it all wrong. Maybe Martin had been relieved rather than bewildered when she made her untimely exit. Antisocial tendencies bordering on aggression … everything that’s wrong with you … The bulbs on the control panel misted into a glittery haze, like Christmas lights seen through an icy window, as Kelly’s eyes filled.

She squeezed back the tears, embarrassed, reminding herself that she didn’t have time to loaf around the office, blubbering like a too-short kid at a roller coaster entrance. After all, without a partner, she had more work to do than ever. The soft science stuff didn’t seem quite so minor as she pondered tackling it without a professional guide. She adjusted her chair and got back to work.

Kelly had never made a trip to the principal’s office, but she imagined now that this was what it must feel like. The airy prism in which she waited for her boss, however, was considerably more chic than a public school office. Sculptures of fluid silver filaments were scattered with effortless grace among awards, books, and photos on the white oak shelves, and a broad desk, arched like a ship’s bow, speared into a sweeping view of the palm-tree-lined avenues of San Jose. Through the frosted glass of the door, Kelly could read in reverse the letters “Anita Riveras, CEO.”

As Kelly studied Anita’s carefully curated photographs, she smoothed her already smooth blouse self-consciously. Even in miniature, Anita’s presence was formidable. The angles of her cheekbones, her sleek black bobbed hair, even her offered handshake all somehow aligned into a careful geometric construction. Kelly wondered what she would look like with a bob, if people would take her more seriously if she had Anita’s expensive yet effortless-looking hair. She tried looping up the edges just to see.

The door swung open decisively and she dropped her hair, simultaneously catching her foot as she stood up too fast. She had a tendency to hurtle through life like she was running a one-woman three-legged race. But Anita swept to her high-backed chair like she didn’t see.

“Have a seat, Kelly.”

She fixed Kelly with a clear gaze. There was nothing visibly judgmental about it, but Kelly felt judged. Anita could do that. She let the silence hang for a moment. Her chair was a curve of pristine white leather. The weightless ease with which she sat in a chair with no arms was conspicuous, as if she had bought that chair just to show off her mastery of the art of sitting.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” Kelly blurted out.

“What did happen, Kelly?”

“I just … it was a personal issue between myself and the doctor. It had nothing to do with the project.”

“But it does. Because you needed him to complete the project, and he’s no longer here.”

Kelly’s throat felt parched. “Are you—do you mean that I can’t complete the project?”

“It’s your project, Kelly. You tell me. Can you?”

There was a right answer to this. Kelly’s confidence rose. “Yes, I can. Please let me, you know how much Confibot means to me.”

“You say it means a lot to you, but from your performance, I have yet to see why. Convince me.”

“There’s so much we can do with it.” Kelly’s words came faster now as they pivoted to her work, flowing with liveliness and ease. Talking about Confibot brought out her fervor for science, awakening the little girl who used to take apart Gary’s Speak & Spell and rebuild it again and again until she knew exactly how it worked. “If we can create a fully convincing android, with which people can interact as if it were a human, we can take robotic caretaking to a whole new level. Users can develop meaningful relationships with their Confibots, making them true robotic confidants. If you look at the research about the effects of companionship and mental stimulation on health outcomes, the physical and lifestyle devastation of loneliness is astonishing, I mean, it can increase your risk of everything from dementia to heart disease to arthritis to—”

“Old people are a gold mine,” Anita mused, her eyes trained far out the window.

“I—I’m sorry?”

Anita sat up smoothly in her chair, focusing on Kelly. “The Baby Boomers are on the brink. When they crash, I plan to be ready to reap the dividends.” Not exactly how Kelly liked to think of her own work, but she bit her tongue. “Confibot’s commercial potential is massive, we both know that.” Anita waved a hand tipped with bone-painted nails. “The success of your project hinges on your ability to complete an android that can pass for human, and you’re the closest of our engineers to achieving that. And with that technology, we can go anywhere.”

“I am? I mean, I am. Thank you. It’s been thrilling to see how close Confibot is coming to real humanity, and I—”

“According to current projections, you’re the closest,” Anita corrected. “But other companies, even some of your own coworkers, have been logging astonishing progress as well.” Sitting back again, Anita looked pleasant, unhurried, yet still radiating a cool intensity.

Meanwhile, Kelly was sweating like a lumberjack. “Right, so … I’ll get back to it, then?”

“You are directly competing with these coworkers for investor funding,” Anita went on, as if Kelly hadn’t spoken. “And if you win the competition, you will be directly competing with the creators of every other robotic caregiver and assistant device in the world. The company that comes to market first gets to charge a premium. Anyone who lags behind has to cut prices to compete. So if you cannot make AHI the first to market, I will find another engineer who can.” She scrutinized Kelly with eyes that were impossible to read. “Confibot is the first project that you’ve spearheaded,” she noted. “Your first opportunity to bring one of your own ideas to life. As such, it requires high-level project management skills on which you have not yet been tested. You’re building more than a physical robot here. You are designing a whole person. And if you fail to make this work, you will not be afforded such a high-level opportunity again.” Kelly tried to gulp, but her throat was so raw, so dry, that it stopped halfway. “Robotics engineering is a human discipline, Kelly. It’s collaborative, it’s interpersonal. If you fail to think on this level, you will fail as an engineer.”

Every time Anita said the word “fail,” the blood in Kelly’s ears pulsed painfully hot. Her boss was calling her interpersonal skills a failure. Dr. Masden had called her pathologically antisocial. What was she doing wrong? Was she that incompetent at things that appeared so basic for everyone else? Was she writing her own doom in her career, her relationships? Would she push everyone away forever?

“I’m taking a sizable risk on you, Kelly,” Anita was saying as Kelly forced herself back to the surface.

“And I’m grateful for it. I won’t let you down.”

“No.” Anita looked at Kelly with a placid smile. “You won’t.”

Kelly held herself together long enough to make it out the door. As soon as she was down the hall, she allowed her knees to turn to jelly, pressing her back against the cool wall, lifting her face to the fluorescent-lit ceiling. She didn’t know what she was doing wrong, but it was clear that there was something. When she came to a dead end in her work—a limb moving at an unnatural angle, a memory fault—she would force herself to back out of the situation and look at it from a bird’s-eye view, searching for a new way in, trying something different. And here, she had to do the same thing.

When she walked back into the lab several minutes later, Priya was already there. She rose from her chair. “Finally, let’s get lunch. I was about to eat my intern. Also I have to show you these sick pictures my friend posted from this new club called Sadie Hawkins. I’d totally take you there if you weren’t still being No-Club Nancy.” Priya began fishing out her phone, but Kelly interrupted her.

“I’ll go.”

“What?”

Kelly looked at Priya with resolve. Here was something different she could try. It wouldn’t solve her problems with Confibot, but taking any action would make her feel better about herself right now.

“Let’s do it,” she said firmly. “This weekend, I’m ready to try out the clubs.”

four

Kelly’s second thoughts about this scheme hit her immediately. Priya buzzed for the rest of the week, ready to plan them the perfect night out, whipping out her phone at random moments to show Kelly the latest bar that they just had to try, or a Pinterest mood board of hairstyles that she knew Kelly could definitely rock. Priya went out with friends virtually every weekend, it seemed, but Kelly was her going-out white whale, and her electric anticipation of this weekend was at a high. Meanwhile, every time she brought up their plans, Kelly was vividly reminded of the last time they had gone out together, more than a year ago: she had ended up with her shoes in her purse, her drink in her lap, and her dignity somewhere in the next town. She may have tried to gaze flirtily at a man across the bar while drinking seductively from her cocktail and ended up sticking her straw up her nose instead. She chose not to remember.

Yet here she was Friday night, at Priya’s high-rise apartment in North San Jose, sitting squashed between pink, orange, and gold pillows on the bed while Priya battled wills with her eyeliner. “Are you sure you won’t let me do your makeup?” Priya asked.

“I already did it,” Kelly said, watching Priya attempt a winged eye with her liquid liner. Every time she fixed one eye, she had to add more to the other to even it out, and the effect was increasingly alarming. Kelly had already worked her way out of Priya’s offer to dress her by reminding her of what she did to her own clothing last time. She would be more comfortable in her own jeans and shirt. It was just a simple black top, but it had gold buttons on it, which she had convinced herself would demonstrate to the world that she was a free-wheeling partier.

“Finally you’re coming out again. We are going to scorch this club tonight,” Priya asserted, pausing to assess her handiwork. “We are going to slay on the dance floor. Flay on the dance floor. Flog it to a pulp.”

“Nasty.” Kelly wrinkled her nose.

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Priya urged. Kelly wasn’t sure that her definition of fun looked like Priya’s, but with “antisocial tendencies bordering on aggression” ringing in her ears, she knew that she needed to give it a try. Part of why she so seldom agreed to go out with Priya was because a night out with Priya was a night. As much as Kelly adored her friend, she was convinced that she was harmlessly certifiable. Her historic hijinks ranged from commandeering the PA system at the grocery store to announce that the vegetables had gained sentience and were on the attack to giving the department store Santa Claus a lap dance and nearly a heart attack in the bargain. But as long as Kelly could stay out of the spotlight herself, she enjoyed Priya doing her thing. Maybe having a best friend who was “the crazy one” allowed Kelly to be anything but.

Priya did manage to get Kelly to borrow some of her shoes—a pair of nude heels with gold studs all over them. Kelly had to admit, they looked pretty good as long as she was standing in front of the bedroom mirror, holding on to a chair back for dear life. Logically she knew that the way to walk in them was just to transfer her body’s weight onto the front halves of her feet. But her body didn’t seem to grasp the concept.

While Kelly pondered physics, Priya scrutinized her own butt in the full-length mirror with a painter’s meticulous eye. “I’m going to give you a very precious gift,” she announced.

“A Tesla?” Kelly asked.

“Better. My three rules for dating in Silicon Valley.”

“I’m the one who grew up here,” Kelly reminded her. “I should be teaching you about Silicon Valley.”

“Uh, no, the fact that I grew up in New York is what makes me an expert. I’ve been outside the bubble. I have perspective. You could have a guy come up to you and act like a total tech bro and not even know it because the air around you is so dense with tech bros.”

“Okay, so what are the rules?”

“Numero uno: Don’t go out with anyone who works in robotics. He’ll hack your phone while you sleep, looking for company secrets.”

“How do you know that?”

“Just guessing,” Priya said innocently as she stuffed things into her purse: her phone, lipstick, keys. She threw in a tin of mints, took it back out and tasted one, grimaced, then tossed the tin back in anyway. “Two: If a guy tries to pick you up by telling you that he’s employee number whatever at a certain company, run. That’s a ‘douche crossing ahead’ sign if I ever saw one.” She slung her purse onto her shoulder and paused. “Unless he’s, like, number four and it’s Facebook. Then you go for it. Get that coin, queen.”

The girls headed for the door. “And number three?” Kelly asked.

“Everyone in Silicon Valley works way too hard during the day. So if you’re going to go out at night?” Priya gave her a sly smile. “Have some fucking fun.”

They could hear the muted hubbub from inside the bar all the way up the bustling Menlo Park sidewalk as they approached. Inside, Kelly regarded the trendy exposed ductwork and glowing blue lights with a wary eye. Priya dove into a group of guys like a puppy into a snowbank, but Kelly inched her way more slowly into the dauntingly fashionable crowd. She settled at the bar first and tried not to stare at the bartender’s hairstyle as he mixed her drink. His head was completely shaved except for a long tuft at the top, gathered into an aggressively perky ponytail. Maybe she was supposed to stare at it?

“All of our ice is made using water unlocked from the melting polar ice caps,” he informed her, sliding her a glass. “It’s the purest water on Earth. Twenty-three dollars.” Kelly dragged out some cash.

Just once she would love to be at a fancy bar or restaurant and have an unfamiliar cocktail delivered to her table, like in the movies. No, make that a fancy dessert with some sort of froufrou chocolate thingamabob on top. “Oh, I didn’t order that,” she would say.

“I know, mademoiselle,” her waiter with the pencil-thin mustache would reply as he gestured across the restaurant. “That gentleman did.”

And she would look across and see, smiling mysteriously at her, the most dapper, debonair, dashing—

“Is this seat taken?”

Kelly turned to see the most dapper, debonair, dashing man she had ever seen.

Well, not quite the most dashing man, but this guy was certainly cute, with hazel eyes and rounded lips. Kelly stuttered.

“No, I’m alone,” she said. Probably unnecessarily.

Hazel Eyes laughed, slinging himself onto the stool. “Well, that’s lucky for me.” She blushed vibrantly enough to be visible even through the neon-suffused gloom of the bar’s atmosphere. He nodded at her drink. “Did you get the line about the ice caps water too?”

“I did.”

“To global warming. It may kill us all, but at least it tastes good.” He raised his glass and clinked it against hers with a mischievous grin. Kelly restrained herself from swiveling to look behind her and make sure he was really smiling at her. Was it possible that all she had to do was show up at a bar and within minutes, she’d found a man who was cute, charming, and interested?

“I’m Kelly.” As soon as she offered her hand, she regretted it, recognizing that it was cold and clammy from her drink. But he shook it without hesitation.

“Reece,” he said.

Kelly nervously switched her crossed legs and, in the process, kicked Reece in the shin. “Sorry!” she blurted.

“No worries—wow, killer shoes. Mind if I take a look?”

“Um …”

He bent and lifted her foot, nearly placing it in his own lap, examining her high heel with a practiced eye. “I love women’s shoes.” Kelly felt her bubble burst. Of course. The good-looking guy who was actually expressing interest in her had a foot fetish. She had a sudden vision of Reece sitting next to her at the family table at Clara’s wedding, calmly conversing with her mother while holding her foot in his lap and stroking it.

She pulled her foot back, and Reece looked up, surprised. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—” But he cut himself off as another cute guy, this one with shoulder-length black hair, approached, smiling. Kelly found herself momentarily distracted. Priya was actually right. This wasn’t so hard. She straightened, smiling back at him.

But then Reece stood up and turned to Black Hair and gave him a long, deep kiss. Very long. Very deep.

He turned back to her, smiling every bit as broadly as he should after a kiss like that. “This is my boyfriend, Marco. Marco, you have got to check out Kelly’s shoes.”

Kelly stood from her stool, setting her feet, or rather, her shoes, which were apparently her chief attraction—and they weren’t even her shoes—firmly on the polished concrete floor.

“I’ve got to go,” she said abruptly.

“Okay—oh, wait, did you think—oh, no, honey, I’m sorry.” Reece laughed.

“You shouldn’t give people mixed signals,” Kelly responded hotly, before she could stop herself.

“It’s just small talk,” Reece insisted, but Kelly was already pushing her way into the crowd, away from the bar, slipping on her heels as she went. “Try putting your weight onto the fronts of your feet!” he called after her.

Kelly managed to locate Priya and extricate her from within the recesses of a dense knot of men. “There you are!” Priya said. “Did you meet any cute boys?”

“Yeah, but they got to each other first. Can we go yet?”

“Have you found a date yet?”

“Can’t you just find one for me?”

“Can’t you stop being a pussy?”

“Priya.”

“Kelly.”

“I really just want to go home.”

The serious look that Kelly was giving Priya must have translated through the gloom because Priya took her by both hands. “We’re not going home. You need a date, and I want to see you have some fun for once! You work so hard, you deserve that! Live your life!”

“Okay, okay,” Kelly acquiesced.

“Look, this is a tough crowd. And they all take themselves way too seriously anyway. The last guy I met just went on and on about how he only uses free-trade mustache pomade.”

“Don’t you know any other bars? Like, preferably somewhere where there’s absolutely no pressure to be cool?”

Priya’s eyes lit up. “Girl. I’ve got this.”

One Uber ride later, they arrived in a visibly grimier part of town outside a club named, with an impressive show of shamelessness, Bodies. Kelly gestured to the sign, where the “i” flickered repeatedly. “This bodes poorly,” she said.

Priya gave her side-eye.

The interior was eerily similar to how Kelly imagined it would be to shrink down, Magic School Bus–style, and travel to the inside of one of her own organs. The atmosphere was dark, humid, and hormonal.

As difficult as it was to hear over the bass-charged soundtrack, Kelly and Priya found themselves approached by guys almost as soon as they wedged themselves next to the bar. But no guy who talked to them got further than three sentences before making some dubious claim about the down payment he had just placed on a condo in Los Altos Hills, or his app’s stratospheric IPO. They were the sort of statements that were off-putting enough in broad daylight, but were made even worse when shouted incongruously over lyrics that were mostly thinly disguised metaphors for fellatio. Everything in Kelly was telling her to flee again, to throw in the towel—after taking a thorough shower—but she truly wanted to make this work. All she needed was someone she could see enough times over the next month and a half for it to not be bizarre to invite him to her sister’s wedding. Was that really so hard?

Priya turned her back to the bar and rested her elbows on it, gazing out over the heaving dance floor. Finally she pointed to a guy with spiky black hair. “Him,” she declared. “Go get him.”

Kelly crinkled her nose. “Why him?”

“Because I want his friend,” Priya said, eyeing the guy next to him. Kelly shook her head, smiling.

“How am I supposed to ask this guy for a date when we can’t even talk?” Kelly yelled. The music would only be louder on the dance floor, the belly of the beast.

Priya spotted the platform where a rainbow-haired DJ was hunched over a laptop, zoned out and nodding. “Chillax, I’ll take care of that. All you have to do is get yo’ man.”

While holding a real conversation was impossible, it seemed that approaching within five feet of another person and making eye contact was all that was required of a courting ritual at Bodies. Kelly pursed her lips, furtively eyeing the movements of everyone dancing around her, assessing how to imitate them—her past few attempts at dancing had left her with as much faith in her own skills as in the structural integrity of a sandcastle. Fortunately, the courting ritual had been half the battle, as dancing at Bodies also seemed to consist mostly of proximity. But her partner came closer and closer, gyrating, running his hands repeatedly around her hips and over her jeans. Kelly gulped, but told herself to just go with it. Dancing was actually less awkward than any of her conversations had been. She smiled at the guy and he smiled back. Maybe she should give him a chance. It was time she moved in and completed her task.

“I’m Kelly, what’s your name?” she asked Spiky Hair. She couldn’t call him that forever.

“Totally,” he nodded.

“I’m Kelly,” she shouted.

He leaned in close to her neck, his nose on her collarbone. Kelly flinched instinctively, but then tentatively leaned her own nose toward him, attempting to mimic the bizarre dance move. But then he sniffed deeply and shook his head. “You smell fine to me,” he yelled. This was not working.

Suddenly the bass halted mid-pound. As a slower, less ear-rattling selection began, Kelly glanced at the DJ’s stand to see Priya there, giving Kelly a thumbs-up. Kelly smiled as Priya swayed, getting into the jam, a throwback Mariah Carey tune. Now this Kelly might be able to work with.

She turned back to her guy. “I’m Kelly,” she tried again.

This time he got it. “Stan.” He nodded, pointing at himself. Kelly cleared her throat.

“Do you—” But just when Kelly was about to make her proposition, a new voice entered the fray, battling Mariah’s and losing very, very badly. Priya had apparently gotten too deeply into the jam. Having somehow procured a mic, she was singing along, loudly, joyfully oblivious to the melody.

“This isn’t a karaoke bar!” some guy shouted at her.

“It is tonight!” she cried, soliciting a smattering of laughs and cheers. “Come on!” A few people started singing along halfheartedly.

The time was now. If they didn’t get out of here soon, Priya’s “singing” was liable to get her arrested for a noise violation.

“Do you want to hang out sometime?” Kelly tried again. Just as she got the words out, Priya unleashed a howl so resounding, so soulful, so reckless in its treatment of pitch, that Kelly worried every glass and eardrum in the place might break. Kelly turned to look at her friend, who had one arm raised in the air in triumph, swaying to the music.

She turned back to Stan only to find there was no Stan. She wheeled around and worked her way through the pulsing couples around her, wondering if they had just gotten separated, but he was nowhere to be found. A hot wave of embarrassment flooded her. As soon as she had finally gotten up the courage to ask a guy out, he had vanished.

Another man, this one wearing a vest with nothing under it, slinked up to her. “Girl, are you from Mars?” he asked, “Because—” He stopped and just stared at her, sipping his drink, apparently trying to remember the rest of the line. He found himself a spot and sat on the floor of the club to think it over.

“Please go home,” Kelly instructed him wearily. It must have taken some pretty potent substances to give him worse conversational skills than her. Looking around, she realized that half the club was now singing along with Priya, cheering her on. Kelly gave a moment of silent admiration to her friend. Priya had truly pulled a Priya.

As she wailed the last note, Kelly pulled her off the platform to the mingled cheers and boos of the crowd.

“Why aren’t you dancing with someone?” Priya shouted.

“Because I’m unattractive and have no social skills,” Kelly said.

“What?”

Kelly just shook her head, not wanting to repeat herself. “Spiky Hair vanished.”

“I’m going to get a drink, you want one?” Priya shout-asked.

Kelly shook her head no, but Priya held on to her. “Can you spot me some cash?” she asked. “I’ll pay you back at work.”

Kelly reached into her jeans pocket, where she had slipped some cash at home, not wanting to carry a purse all night. But the pocket was empty. Frantically, she checked all her pockets, turning them inside out—nothing.

“What’s wrong?” Priya asked.

“Is it normal for a guy you dance with to keep feeling you up around the hips?” Kelly said.

“It is when you’ve got an ass like that!” Priya swatted her playfully.

But Kelly sighed. “I think that jerk pickpocketed me when we were dancing.”

“What? No way. Where is he?”

Priya shouldered her way through the masses, trying to spot the culprit, the fire of justice in her eyes, but Kelly stopped her. “Can we please just go?” She wasn’t sure which was worse, being ghosted because a guy didn’t want to go out with you or because he had just robbed you blind.

Kelly wrestled with herself as she sat in front of her laptop that night, unable to fall asleep. Logically, she knew that online dating had long been destigmatized. Everyone did it. Normal people. Non-murderer people. She knew two separate couples who had gotten married after meeting online. But something about it still felt to her like giving up. Like admitting that even though she lived in the man-mine that was Silicon Valley, the traditional means by which humans had found mates for millennia had failed her. Or, more accurately, she had failed them.

Then again, she knew it was unwise to make assumptions about something without verifying the reality of those assumptions. Suspicion was the enemy of knowledge. Could she justify ruling out online dating without testing her hypotheses against it?

After all, she reasoned, signing up didn’t mean she actually had to go on dates. She could make a profile just to see what was out there, from the safety of her home sweet browser. She never had to actually even talk to anybody, come to think of it. And most of them probably wouldn’t trace her IP address and come to her house to hack her apart with an axe, right? What the heck, she thought. She was feeling reckless.

Kelly found a site that offered a free trial membership and had the least painfully posed stock people on its homepage. The first thing the profile asked for was a picture. She took a selfie, then uploaded it before she could scrutinize it and think better of it.

The first few questions were pretty simple—basic physical attributes, religious and political affiliations, education and career highlights. Then it asked what she did for fun. Into Kelly’s mind immediately flashed an image of herself at home in a Slanket, eating a cake she’d made for one person in a mug in the microwave, watching one of the terrible, wonderful movies Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen made before they became eccentric old ladies of the Upper East Side. Even Kelly sensed that this was probably not the impression she wanted to give a man. She wracked her brain for anything that normal people might do for fun. Biking. Bicycling? She put down biking.

And now a new image flashed into Kelly’s mind: a new version of her. This New Kelly was biking down an idyllic sun-washed street, the folds of a colorful dress swashing over her knees, her naturally wavy hair lifting in the wind and looking, for once, impeccable. She was pedaling expertly and easily. And she was smiling. Beside her on his own bicycle was a man. Kelly couldn’t get a clear visual of his face, but she knew that he was smiling too. They pedaled along in perfect synchronicity, passing simultaneously under the same shadows and the same golden patches of sun.

Real Kelly found herself smiling too. While she had no actual desire to take up biking, she had to admit that it would be nice to have someone to pedal with. What if this was it? What if tonight was the night she found not just a wedding date, but something much more?

Her heart was beating entirely too fast as she navigated to the next section. Then the site started asking questions that she found increasingly unreasonable. She scanned the list: Where do you see yourself in ten years? Clinging to a raft, stranded in the glacier melt that used to be San Jose. What do you want out of a relationship? To prove to my mom that I’m not single. And sure, it would be kind of nice to be curling up in bed with someone right now instead of sitting here alone, answering these questions. What makes you happy? Uh … does the fun night in the Slanket count?

Kelly paused. She was not accustomed to failing a test, but she knew that she didn’t have the right answers for any of these questions. Say the perfect man really was waiting for her on the other side of this questionnaire. What did she expect to happen? That he would fall for her immediately and they’d bicycle away into the sunset? Kelly’s heart began to thump more slowly, more painfully, as she realized that more likely, she would send him pedaling as fast as possible in the opposite direction—like Dr. Masden, like Martin, like everyone else. Best-case scenario, it would happen immediately. Worst case, it would happen after she’d fallen for him just enough to really, really not want for that to happen.

It was time to enter her qualifications for a man. Kelly rationalized that it was necessary to be specific. A whole host of unpleasant potential eventualities lurked on the other side of this page: awkward mismatches, wasted time and energy, heartbreak. The only way to reduce the odds of these potentialities was to provide the most robust possible data for the website’s algorithm. The site suggested writing something simple and friendly like “Looking for a guy who works hard, plays hard, and loves to laugh. Must love dogs!” Kelly almost laughed aloud. That could describe literally anyone.

Height: 5'10"–5'11". Athletic build. Symmetrical smile. Master’s degree in a scientific field. Ambitious professionally but laid-back personally. Sense of humor. Love of animals. Love of movies. Love of Twinkies. Close to his family emotionally, but not physically. She didn’t need another mother breathing down her neck. Good at board games, but not better than her. Likes mountain vacations. Likes Harry Potter. Likes the Talking Heads. Knows how to cook but can afford to eat out. Prefers hand-drawn animation to CG. Wears V-necks. Wears boxer briefs. Doesn’t wear yellow. Drinks martinis and knows how to make them. Has been to at least three different countries. Has been to at least ten different states. Cares about his friends but not more than about her. Doesn’t eat prunes. Has a good heart.

Something manic had taken over Kelly. Maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe it was a subconscious knowledge that the more difficult she made it to find someone, the less likely it was that she’d have to face whatever might come next. Because anything could come next.

She finally finished her list, clicked Submit, and waited while the site spun its wheel.

five

While Kelly waited for her results, she realized that she didn’t even know how this was supposed to work. Would the dating site find her perfect match immediately? She had a fleeting image of a guy materializing at her door. She tried to calm herself: she would probably never go on a date with a stranger from the internet anyway. She probably wouldn’t have the guts to even contact him. But there went her heart again.

“No match found,” the site said in unnecessarily large letters. “Try deselecting some of the attributes you’ve chosen in your ideal partner.”

There it was in crystal-clear pixels: written proof that her perfect person did not exist. No woman could be expected to find this mythical man if even a computer couldn’t. Kelly sighed, a sound edged with both disappointment and relief. Here was another flood to douse her flicker of illogical hope that love might be out there for her. Even if the site had presented her ideal partner, would she be the ideal partner for him? If she’d never seen a true model of love, it stood to reason that she would never be able to replicate it herself. It was easiest to just close out of the site and forget the whole thing. Yet up rose the tiny flame again, still flickering. She still wanted love, maybe even needed it on some encoded biological level. The physical and lifestyle devastation of loneliness is astonishing … She grimaced as her own words to Anita came back to her. Even Dr. Masden had said that her research was relevant to her own life.

So cocooned was she in her own thoughts that when her phone rang in the silent apartment, she jumped a full inch off her chair. Kelly squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled. Since her date with Martin, her phone held seven unanswered calls, ten texts, and four e-mails from her mom. If she didn’t satisfy Diane’s curiosity soon, either her mother or her phone might combust.

“Kelly, why do you have a phone if you’re not going to answer it?” her mom asked as soon as she picked up. “Why aren’t you answering my calls?”

“I just haven’t had a chance, I’ve been busy with work.”

“You’re always busy with work. One day you’ll be at the office and wake up with ovaries the size of currants and realize you’re dying alone.”

“That’s not how ovaries work, Mom.”

“I didn’t call you at this hour for a physics lesson.”

Kelly cupped her forehead in her hand. “You want to know what happened with Martin? It didn’t work out.”

“What did you do?” Diane asked.

Kelly bristled. “Why do you assume I did something? He was the one who got too personal.”

“It was a date, not a bank transaction!”

“It was a first date, and he crossed a line.” Kelly hesitated. “It was embarrassing, okay? It was bad enough the first time without having to talk about it again.”

Diane’s tone softened. “Kelly, Kelly, Kelly. All right, you don’t have to tell me the details.”

“Thank you. Now I’m kind of trying to get to bed.”

But Diane wasn’t finished. “But what will I do with you, dear? You’re already twenty-nine. You can’t go on like this forever.”

“I think you mean only twenty-nine.”

But Diane was on a roll. “By your age, I was married with two kids, and a third on the way! Gary was married at twenty-seven. Your sister will be married in less than two months, and she’s only twenty-five. I’m getting worried for you. Who will take care of you when you’re old and alone?”

“Socialized medicine or the apocalypse, whichever gets there first. I can take care of myself, Mom. For someone who talks about me being twenty-nine like I’m some Bronze Age corpse fished out of a bog, you don’t seem to realize that I’m an adult.”

“All right, then, who are you bringing to the wedding?”

“I don’t know! The Jolly Fucking Green Giant!” Kelly threw her left hand up in exasperation.

“Kelly Suttle. Do you think this is all a joke?”

“I think it’s a party, not a Navy SEAL operation, and you’re taking it way too seriously.”

“Oh, so it’s just a party. The biggest day of your sister’s life and my life’s work is just a party.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“When I started in the wedding industry here, this was just another middle-class town,” Diane forged on. “Now it’s one of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Everyone expects the moon! Last week a bride demanded that I find her a dress that changed color according to her mood. I’m not Merlin. These people think that I’m a Google and they can just enter their dreams into me and I’ll spit back whatever they want—”

“I met someone,” Kelly blurted out.

“You met someone?” Diane was utterly confused. “Do you mean on LinkedIn again?”

“No, a guy. I went out tonight with Priya and met this guy and we really hit it off.” Kelly winced, biting her lip. Palliating her mother might buy her some time. Or she might have just royally screwed herself.

“You met someone!” Diane’s tone was suddenly full of sunshine. “Who? What’s he like? What’s his name?”

“His name is—” Kelly drew a panicked blank. She looked wildly around the room. A spotlighted billboard caught her eye through the window—eSan, for all your hardware cleaning needs.

“Esan. I mean, Ethan. His name is Ethan.”

“Ethan, Ethan. I like it, it’s a good name. What does he do? Where does he—”

“I really have to go, Mom, it’s been a long night.”

When Kelly got off the phone, she threw her head down tiredly on her desk. If only it were so easy to create a boyfriend out of thin air.

Kelly didn’t sleep long that night, but she slept hard. Her lower back aching from the heels, she tossed fitfully between dreams of Anita hovering over her shoulder while she tried and failed repeatedly to build a tower of blocks, and a laughing Mariah Carey advancing menacingly toward her, brandishing a shoe like Priya’s, but with the gold studs grown to lethal, torturous spikes.

Then Mariah morphed, transforming into a handsome young man. He held Kelly’s hand, leading her through what at first looked like a nightclub, but turned out to be a high school gym, lit with swirling colored lights for prom. They drifted through slow-dancing couples, pausing to watch Clara and Jonathan get crowned prom queen and king by none other than Diane. The triad smiled approvingly at Kelly and her date in the audience.

The handsome man turned Kelly away from the stage. “Dance with me,” he said.

“I don’t know how,” she protested. Then he removed a giant key from the small of his back, like a wind-up toy, and handed it to her.

“You have the key,” he said.

Kelly woke up with a hangover, a backache, and a plan.

It was Saturday, so Kelly knew she would be fairly undisturbed at work. But to be safe, once she had taken the elevator up to AHI’s floor in the corporate tower, she did a quick walk around—empty. She was on track. She breezed down the hall to the lab, clutching a red and white bag from the hurried purchase she had made at Target on her way in.

In spite of her hurry, Kelly took a second to appreciate the lab after she firmly locked its door. She loved this space, but she couldn’t always get it to herself. Now, empty, silent except for the low thrumming of machinery, it had the cavernous atmosphere of a cathedral. It was a sort of space-age Geppetto’s workshop: brushed steel cabinets and counters, banks of computers, and 3-D printers mixed with limbs, eyes, torsos, hair, all in various states of half-formed humanity. Scattered around the workstations were a hoop with six casters attached to it; a flexible polymer band, sinewy with wires; a periscope-type contraption with an infrared sensor on it—skeletal fragments of the other engineers’ works in progress. At the back of the room, a few completed prototypes of earlier android models stood sentry, each progressively more believable than the last: a smooth white robot humanoid only in posture, a boxy male with clawlike metal hands, a young blond woman with waxy-looking “skin.” The scene might have been creepy to some, but to Kelly, it was home.

She had been making a mental inventory all morning—she knew the stock by heart, having had a hand in the creation of much of it herself—and knew there were enough completed spare parts to service her need. They would require some alterations to make a harmonious whole and, of course, the actual combining of the parts would take some doing. But Kelly had been putting in extra hours already, working out the kinks in anticipation of making her physical model of Confibot. And unlike Confibot, this model wouldn’t require exquisite precision of response. It didn’t have to align with a specific vision of user compatibility. It could just be what she wanted it to be, meaning it would be much more straightforward to assemble. For once, she could just follow her gut.

As Kelly raced around assembling parts, she realized she didn’t know what to make him look like. She rolled a tray of glass eyeballs from its shelf, assessing them: a hundred varieties of iris color, pupil size, corneal tint, veining. It would be safest to go ordinary. Draw as little attention as possible. But her hand hesitated over the center of the tray with the midrange colors, as if reluctant to actually pick one up. Live your life—the words Priya was always telling her echoed in her head. The usual rules were clearly already out the window here. The adrenaline was pumping. With swift decision, Kelly’s hand moved to the outskirts of the tray, toward the set of eyes her own had gravitated to first: a crystalline, almost lavender, shade of blue.

Well, then, why not go all the way out? As Kelly modeled her ideas on the computer-aided design software, then made them reality with the help of a 3-D printer and a shopping trip through the lab’s existing parts, she decided to let her heart, or something south of her heart, be her design guide. Ordinary be damned. She draped coffee-brown hair in waves over his tanned forehead, carefully working around the minuscule, fragmented solar panels integrated into his scalp as a power source. She made his hands long and clean, chiseled at the wrist. She sculpted the heck out of his butt. It felt a little creepy. But it felt a little good.

Luckily, the normal biweekly family dinner had been pushed since Diane was traveling to a trade show. Kelly had the weekend to herself, and she stayed in the lab the entire time, catnapping in her chair, leaving only for bathroom breaks and vending machine trips where she picked up bags of Fritos and cans of whatever had the most caffeine in it while furtively hiding her face from the security cameras. At one point she heard the window washing crew making their rounds. Later, an employee stopped by an office down the hall, presumably to pick something up, giving her a shock of adrenaline so strong it left her weak. As an employee, she had every reason to be here—but still. What would happen if anyone discovered what she was doing? There was no way her hard-nosed boss would allow her to enter the hallowed doors of AHI ever again if she knew that Kelly had taken thousands of dollars’ worth of company equipment to build herself a boyfriend. News would spread rapidly within the robotics industry—it was exactly the sort of kooky schadenfreude fodder that tech bros would crow over on Reddit, and for the rest of her life, any time a potential employer or date Googled her, this story would be the first result.

Priya would be sympathetic, but she would still think that Kelly had lost it when she heard of her plan. They would never work together again and, probably, they would drift apart. And Kelly would basically be handing her family, who already thought she was so inept that she could never find a plus one on her own, a certificate—signed, framed, and embossed in gold—confirming that exact fact. More than ever, she would be the odd one out, the slightly dotty, slightly desperate girl. As Kelly thought about it, she stopped working, her hands clenching over her screwdriver. She stood to lose everything.

But then she looked at the work in front of her and almost jumped. She had been so focused on racing through the details that she hadn’t stopped to look at the big picture. And while the picture was still being painted, it was already incredible. This was far and away the most complete, the most convincing, the most beautiful android she had ever made. Even with his torso still an uncovered collection of plates and wires, he looked … human. She knew that this was possible, of course; it was exactly what she had been aiming for in all her months of preparatory work on Confibot. But to see it actually happening was thrilling. In fact, she realized, this might be the very thing to help her with Confibot. What better way to perfect her creation before the presentation than to have another model prebuilt to observe? The research gains she stood to acquire more than outweighed the extra time she would need to put in to rebuild the Confibot parts she had scavenged this weekend for Ethan.

Still, Kelly needed something more concrete to control the risk. She needed a deadline. She grabbed her phone and tapped open her calendar. In bold, red letters, she set an appointment for March eighth titled “You Know What.” She would take Ethan apart the morning after Clara’s wedding. Having a plan, structuring some order into the chaos, allowed her to breathe a bit more freely. She just had to keep Ethan’s origins a secret for six weeks, then she would return all of the parts to the lab. No harm, no foul. She wouldn’t lose anything, and she stood to gain so much. She steadied herself and dove back in.

Eventually she turned off the 3-D printer, connected up the last wires, and dressed her robot. He even made the cheap slacks and button-down she had picked up at Target look tony rather than plain. But the thing of beauty was still just a thing. The shapely jaw was slack, the bright eyes dull. It was time to Frankenstein him.

Kelly knew the software was all essentially in place, most of it designed by herself. But it was still in the testing stage and hadn’t been fully run yet. Her focus had been on conducting the social research necessary to determine how an android should interact with users, not yet on programming in those interactions and traits. She would have to make some tweaks and improvise as she went, but even then, it might not work. She feared she could very well end up with a Swahili-speaking pedophile with Tourette’s.

Kelly ran some simulations on one of the lab’s computers, making minor changes, gaining a cautious confidence as she went. It wasn’t until it was time to make her programming selections that she realized that she had the opportunity to create her ideal man. She had already made him physically perfect, so why not do the same cognitively? But defining perfection in terms of mind, of heart, of personality was a much trickier proposition.

Then inspiration struck, and she almost laughed aloud—of course, she had already designed her ideal mate. She accessed her list of requirements from the dating site and went to work, elaborating and fleshing out the profile as she programmed. A man should know how to tie a tie, change a tire, and train a dog. He needed to speak English, of course, and let’s throw in Italian, and Mandarin is important … oh, what the heck. She didn’t have all day. She gave him access to all of Google. She knew she was taking a risk in making this man so extraordinary, but she didn’t have time to cherry-pick, and frankly, she didn’t want to. The more Kelly programmed, the less she was making a man, a breathing biped who could stand next to her in photos, and the more she was making her man.

She imported the rudimentary responses to social cues she had been developing, but worried there were holes there … she’d been responding to social cues for twenty-nine years and still hadn’t figured it out. She brushed the thought aside: this would have to do. She’d rely on his machine-learning capabilities to fill in the gaps as they went.

The essential thing was to ensure he was entirely under her control. Give herself the ability to reprogram him, to turn him off and on, to mitigate as much as possible the crazy factor of what she was doing. She ensured that she could access his system from her own laptop so that she could make changes as necessary at home. And as an analogue backup, she fitted a panel in his lower back with a set of switches—fundamentals, like on, off, and sleep mode—just in case. With everything that could go wrong with this plan, it was reassuring to feel that physical manifestation of control under her fingers.

And finally, it was done. Or rather, he. Tingling, exhilarated, Kelly flipped the On switch. And stirring into life in front of her was the most amazing man she’d ever seen. He looked around the room a little, gaining his surroundings, but when his eyes found Kelly, they stopped. He smiled. “Hi, Kelly,” he said.

six

On Monday morning, Kelly had difficulty getting out of bed when her alarm jackhammered its way into her consciousness. She had fallen asleep so deeply when she finally arrived home just a few hours earlier, that her brain was stubbornly refusing to follow her body into Awake People Land. She sat up, yawning, propping her arms over her bent knees. Through the fog, the memory of an odd dream resurfaced … she had a watery image of herself guiding a stranger into her car in the parking garage at work … leading him into her living room, pulling up his shirt, and pressing a button on his back. Coffee. She was going to need a soup-bowl-size cup of coffee.

When she trudged into the living room, she started. There, sitting on the couch, was the man. Definitely not a dream. Though he was dreamy, even in his vacant-eyed, lifeless state. Kelly felt a flutter of excitement. She had just built the most advanced creation of her career. It was time to see how he worked. Suddenly she didn’t need the coffee anymore. She located the button on his back and powered him on.

A thousand imperceptible motions started at once, but the effect was that he suddenly looked stunningly, palpably alive. Ethan turned and beamed at her. “Good morning, Kelly,” he said.

“Um, hi,” she replied.

With the morning light wafting through the window, picking up the glint of Ethan’s white teeth, the jewel-like facets of his irises, the copper notes mingled in the waves of his perfectly groomed hair, Kelly became very aware that she was standing there in the same rumpled clothes she’d had on since Saturday morning, with no makeup on and her hair probably doing a fair imitation of a tangled set of earbuds. But she shook herself straighter, reminding herself how illogical it was to be self-conscious. In the “Are intelligent robots beings with rights?” debate, Anita’s stance was a staunch no. They were machines meant to turn a profit, and she was adamant that her engineers think the same way. Kelly had been taught early not to anthropomorphize her creations. You could never maintain the rigor and objectivity of science if you developed an attachment to your work. But while that mind-set was Kelly’s accustomed pattern in the lab, here at home, stripped of the clinical accoutrements of steel and soldering irons, she was finding it took a conscious effort to maintain the same kind of distance. Especially when this creation was already so anthropomorphic.

She strode past Ethan into the kitchen and pulled down the makings of her favorite guilty pleasure breakfast: a box of Cheez-Its and a jar of Nutella. She dunked with vigor. Working herself blind all weekend had really worked up an appetite. “Come here,” she called to Ethan, and he dutifully approached the kitchen. “Want one?”

He accepted the Nutella-topped Cheez-It as if it were the greatest gift anyone had ever given him. Which, technically, it was. “Thank you, Kelly. This is so generous of you.”

“It’s a Cheez-It, not the Hope diamond,” Kelly responded. She watched with some anxiety as he chewed and swallowed, but he simply smiled back at her. She gave herself a little internal high five. This was the first time she had built a comprehensive food and drink consumption pathway, including programming Ethan to dispose of his own masticated food waste in the bathroom, and so far, everything was looking peachy. She crunched a Cheez-It with glee. “There’s nothing on this Earth I love more than Cheez-Its and Nutella,” she mused.

Kelly had an extra bounce in her step as she got ready for work, singing that annoyingly catchy new Taylor Swift song in the shower, flipping her hair back like a mermaid when she was done blow-drying it. When she walked back into the bedroom, she jumped again. There Ethan was, sitting at her computer, his face aglow with a sort of bright-eyed shyness. He leaped from the chair. “I hope you don’t mind me using your computer, Kelly,” he said. “I wanted to give you a little something.”

Peering at the monitor, Kelly saw that he had found his way to her design program. And on the screen was a bouquet of digital flowers, exquisitely drawn in a rainbow of pixels, yellow gladiolus flaring above a shimmer of violets, the colors more real than life. The image rotated slowly, showing fifty or more unique flowers bundled into the arrangement.

“Why did you do this?” Kelly asked, utterly baffled. She hadn’t commanded him to give her flowers, hadn’t programmed in anything of the sort. Immediately she was intrigued to understand this unforeseen behavior of her creation.

“I know that they’re not as nice as real ones,” Ethan responded anxiously. “But since I have no means to buy anything, I determined a drawing to be my best alternative—”

“But why flowers? Why give me anything at all?”

“To make you happy, of course. Do you not like them?”

Kelly stared at the bright image sweeping softly around the screen. She realized that she’d never been given flowers. “I do,” she said after a moment. “Thank you.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.