Marlow raised her elbows above her head and stretched her fingertips down toward the dress’s zipper. She worked it far enough south to slide her arms out of the fabric, but then it got stuck between her shoulder blades. She tugged and twisted the dress, trying to pull the zipper to where she could see it, near her rib cage, and had just succeeded in exposing her torso when the curtain slid aside and the saleswoman bot stepped in.
“Just a second—” Marlow threw her forearm across her breasts.
“How are we doing in here?” the bot said. It was trim and vaguely Asian. Marlow could tell that its curves had been filed down to look less sexual—it had probably once been a companion bot, neutered and repurposed for the dress shop. “That looks gorgeous on you,” the bot gushed. Marlow saw that its filmy eyes were darting between Marlow’s forehead and the spot where Floss slumped, trying to figure out which pocket of body heat belonged to the person with the spending power. Marlow dropped her arm from her chest, reminding herself: there were no cameras in the dressing room, and there was no reason for modesty in front of a machine, no matter how much it looked like a person. This bot—Kendra, its name tag said—was the kind they called client-facing, with a fine mist of body hair and its own human tics. It was subtly chewing on its inner cheek as it waited for someone to speak. But under the algorithm-driven authenticity, Kendra was no different than the ones they called back-office. Marlow had caught an eerie glimpse of one of those earlier, when Kendra went into the storeroom to retrieve her dress. The upright figure Marlow saw as the door swung wide had hands that looked just like her own—tapered fingers, soft palms, even dull fingernails. The hands plunged into a swath of white satin, drew a flashing needle out, and pushed it in again. But from the wrists up, the bot was all chrome and wires, shining steel limbs. Where Marlow had a face, it had a blank, black-glassed lens.
“Seriously. Gorgeous.” Kendra’s voice broke the silence. It cocked its head to one side, the mechanical whisper that went with the motion giving its nature away. “Have we found the dress?” it sang giddily.
Marlow was thinking that she would rather wear the yellow dress every day of her life than stand here topless with this perky bot for one more moment. She was thinking that all that stretched in front of her was doing things she didn’t want to do. What difference did it make what she wore?
“We’ve found the dress,” she said to the man-made girl. “You can go ring it up.”
* * *
The three women left the gown, smothering in its garment bag, in Floss’s car. Then they walked across the wildflower-flanked artery of the shopping center, toward the café. Ellis was waiting outside, the sole of one sneaker braced against the wall as he stared into nothing. His mouth puckered open and closed. Marlow knew that look: he was dictating something. An email, or, she thought with bitterness, a grocery list full of things to hide from her. Though it was entirely unnecessary to do so—and though Marlow had expressed repeatedly that it sort of repelled her, the fish-lipped habit, like chewing food with your gums flapping open—Ellis always mouthed the words he intuited to his device.
Bridget hated it, too—it was the one thing she and Marlow agreed on. As the women approached Ellis, Bridget tried to catch her son’s eye with her disapproving own, clucking. “Well,” she sighed, as Ellis ignored her, “it’s better than the alternative, I suppose.” Marlow knew what she meant. People her parents’ age often spoke of the way things were when the old phones were still around: whole waiting rooms, whole planes, whole parties full of people with their heads bent chin to chest, staring at oblongs of blue light, as still and as oblivious to their surroundings as if a gas leak had put them to sleep. Bridget spoke of this phenomenon with distaste; Floss always talked about it wistfully.
Marlow had trouble picturing it at all. She had missed the era of the so-called smartphone by a few years. The Spill had killed those, too. In the chaos, in the aftermath that seemed like it would never end, doctors first mistook the alarming symptom cropping up in middle-aged patients—sudden, fierce forgetfulness—as a