would you?”
“They know you’re not, really.”
He laughed again. “I sincerely hope they don’t.”
“Oh, and Tim—”
24
You open your eyes. The memory has stalled, somehow, the images frozen in your head. You search for the reason. And then—clunk!—it comes to you.
Not enough bandwidth.
You wait, hoping the connection might resume, but nothing happens. It must be that dodgy internet Tim mentioned.
You unplug yourself and swing your legs onto the floor. You’ll go downstairs and find something else to do until the connection improves.
Quietly, so as not to wake anyone, you pad along the landing. There are sounds coming from Sian’s bedroom—grunts and moans. With a flash of surprise, mixed with amusement, you realize she’s watching porn. Not such a prim little thing after all.
And then you remember that broken internet connection and realize she can’t be. The thought has barely formed in your mind before the truth falls there instead, so stark and horrible that you gasp out loud.
You turn and look down the landing. The door to Tim’s room is open. You can see inside. The bed is empty.
“Yes!” Sian groans. “Yes!”
“Yes,” Tim agrees.
The door to her room is ajar. You don’t want to look but you can’t help yourself. She’s astride him, her back to you. There’s something repulsively triumphant about the way she grinds herself into him, luxuriating in her own pleasure, sweeping her hair back with one hand, then immediately leaning forward again so it curtains her face, resting her palms on his chest like someone doing CPR—
“Yes,” she moans again.
Yes, you think, pain and anguish battering you, toppling you off-balance so that you actually have to put one hand to the wall to stop yourself falling. Yes, of course. Of course something like this would happen.
“Yes,” Sian groans.
No.
No. No. No.
EIGHT
For a couple of weeks after the firebot, things pretty much went back to the way they’d been before. We thought about new and exciting ways to make the shopbots sell people stuff. (“Like, how awesome would it be if they could spot when you were wearing last year’s fashions, and call you out?” “Pretty awesome, actually.”) Abbie turned up in the mornings with her braids still wet and her surfboard strapped to the roof of her old Volvo. Tim, we thought, seemed unusually quiet—“Dormant. Like Vesuvius,” someone commented. He was often closeted in meetings with the money guys. Apparently our backers thought the shopbots were turning out too expensive. That made some of us worry about cost cutting, which might mean layoffs.
Then one day Megan Meyer turned up in her convertible Jaguar, closely followed by a couple of employees in a white van. From the back of the van they—the employees, anyway—unloaded a rack of clothes. Men’s clothes, we noticed as they wheeled it behind Megan’s elegant kitten heels to Tim’s office: sports jackets, merino knitwear, tan slacks.
So we gathered that Tim was having a style consult. That was something Megan regularly did for her clients. It wasn’t just about finding them dates: In Silicon Valley, where some of the wealthiest individuals were also the most socially dysfunctional, it was about teaching them how to date.
Later, after Megan had gone, Tim came out of his office. He was wearing a navy-blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt, chinos, and brogues. No one said anything, of course. But for those of us who’d never seen him in anything except black jeans, a gray T-shirt, and a white baseball cap, the effect was strange; almost startling.
We noted that by the end of the day, he’d put the baseball cap back on.
The following morning, he came into work wearing black jeans and a gray T-shirt again. We breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Mike, ever loyal, told us the style consult had been because Tim wanted to smarten himself up for an important meet-and-greet with some potential investors. Nobody really bought that, of course. But out of respect for Mike, we pretended we did.
That day Tim left the office at five o’clock. No one knew where he was. He’d stopped working early, Morag, his assistant, explained.
Again, we were confused. The whole idea that Tim might actually “stop working” was problematic. Tim sent us emails at three, four in the morning. He would call us on Sundays to yell at us for some tiny glitch he’d just spotted in our coding. He once famously phoned Gabriella Pisano while she was in the early stages of labor to locate a file he needed, having forgotten she was on maternity leave. Even when she told