All the Birds in the sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,114
they were perfectly entitled to do, but the bank wanted to make it more complicated and also throw up as many distractions as possible during the process, like a series of notices tailored to the customers offering them things like painless refi or free overdraft protection. Anything to sidetrack the customers and keep the capital from flying away.
Maybe that was why the world was circling the drain. Maybe people’s short attention spans finally weren’t short enough.
At the end of a few weeks’ solitude, Laurence ran into Serafina, his ex-girlfriend, and got roped into going to dinner with her. At least she wouldn’t ask what happened in Denver. They went to a cavernous tapas place that was still hanging in there at 16th and Valencia, though its prices had gone way up.
Laurence drank too much sangria and looked into Serafina’s candle-lit face, her cheekbones thrown into relief, and he found himself saying, “You know, you’ll always be the one who got away.”
“You are so full of crap.” Serafina laughed, gnawing a rabbit’s leg. “The whole time we were together, you were looking for an excuse to dump me.”
“No! No, I wasn’t.”
“You would make stuff up, like that thing where I was putting you on ‘probation.’ Like you were trying to talk me into dumping you. You just didn’t want it to be your fault.”
This struck Laurence as massively revisionist history. But he couldn’t deny it fit all the facts. A mariachi group in matching little vests came around to try and serenade them. Including little children in teeny vests way past their bedtime. Laurence shooed them away, then felt guilty and ran after them and gave them a hundred bucks as they were leaving the restaurant. Shit. Little kids in teeny vests, out this late.
“I still don’t know what gave you the stones to dump me at last,” Serafina said when he got back. “Something happened, but I never knew what.”
Laurence thought of his grandmother’s ring and how Patricia had stolen it from him, and he choked up, right there at the dinner table. “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
He went off to the men’s room and splashed water on his face. His duck beard looked worse than slovenly—it looked like he was failing to start a trend. It would be gone as soon as he got home.
“So,” he said when he got back to the table. Change the subject change the subject. “What’s going on with your emotional robots?”
“We lost funding.” Serafina ate a baby octopus. “Just when we were on the verge of a breakthrough. There was no point anyway. We were trying to create robots that would be able to interact with people’s feelings in a visceral way. But we were focusing on the wrong thing. We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It’s how we justify killing each other.”
At that, Laurence had a sudden memory of Dorothea’s head bursting open, and he banished the image as fast as possible.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, Laurence decided: He was going to get a new girlfriend, because otherwise he was going to turn into a demented hermit.
Nobody put up personal ads or hit on strangers anymore—instead, everybody found romantic partners using Caddies, which were still working even after other devices had started to fail, and which had unreal battery life. Laurence wasn’t opposed to using a Caddy to get dates, he just wanted to wait until he had come up with an open-source Caddy OS, because he hated proprietary software. But thus far, Laurence could only manage to turn a Caddy into the equivalent of a crappy iPad from ten years ago, no matter what he tried. And meanwhile, his Caddy research was cutting into his day job of helping the bank to confuse people.
Laurence went out to the beach, where people were lighting bonfires and jumping up and down in their underwear. It smelled noxious, as though they were using the wrong kind of wood or just burning pieces of plastic along with the logs. A girl who looked barely eighteen ran up and kissed Laurence on the mouth, he could see all her ribs under her thin shirt, her saliva tasted like pomegranates. He just stood there and she ran away.
Laurence pulled out an un-jailbroken Caddy. It spiraled into life, iris taking shape. There was no signal out here,