The Perfect Wife - JP Delaney Page 0,52

eagerly.

You shake your head. “I’m just worried about how my bouillabaisse will turn out.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, I do feel a certain amount of monachopsis.”

Renton frowns. “Monachopsis?”

“It’s a persistent feeling of being out of place.”

His eyes widen. “Monachopsis. I never even heard of that.” He turns to Tim. “Impressive.”

Tim rolls his eyes. He clearly thinks that someone who’s impressed by your use of a long word to describe a feeling—as opposed to the fact you can have a feeling in the first place—has missed the point of you completely.

“I’ll get the wine,” you say hastily.

Half an hour later, you’re opening a second bottle, and Renton’s in full flow.

“I gotta tell you, Tim, when I first heard about this I thought you were nuts. I mean, feelings? Feelings are what made my wife my ex-wife, for chrissake. Sure, I can see some possibilities. Healthcare, maybe. The sex industry.” I see Tim wince. “But fundamentally, there’s an acceptability issue. People don’t want their robots to have feelings. Because if machines feel like humans, pretty soon some bleeding heart will decide we should treat them like humans. And then the whole economic argument for AI vanishes. Instead of being mechanical servants, tilling our fields and toiling in our sweatshops, suddenly they’re indistinguishable from people. But making people is cheap, right? It’s running them that’s expensive. With AI, it should be the other way around. We start giving robots the same rights, the same consideration, maybe even the same pay, then where’s the viability in that?”

“If you prick us, do we not bleed,” Mike says, nodding.

“Bleed?” Renton repeats, clearly puzzled.

“The Merchant of Venice. I forget how it goes on.”

“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” you say. “If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

There’s a silence. “My point exactly,” Renton says. “You’re not ticklish, right?”

You shake your head.

“The Shylock question is an interesting one, actually,” Jenny says thoughtfully. “If the capacity to feel emotion means experiencing pain as well as pleasure, by what right do we inflict that on other intelligences?”

Tim’s eyes flash. “You’re both missing the point. Cobots aren’t slaves or pets. They’re people. Just in another form.”

“Whatever they are, they’re an expensive luxury item,” Renton says dismissively. “An economic dead end. Your problem, Tim, is that you’ve invented this thing but you have no real vision for what to do with it.”

You stand up. “I’ll get the bouillabaisse.”

The debate—which is not quite an argument, but at times so fierce it almost sounds like one—only pauses when you bring the soup to the table. You sit back and watch as they lift the first spoonful to their mouths.

Tim frowns. But it’s Renton who speaks first.

“Whoa!” he says, staring at his bowl. “What happened here?”

Mike sniffs his spoonful. “That’s rank,” he says quietly.

“What’s wrong?” you ask anxiously.

“I think some of your fish may have been off,” Jenny says nervously.

“That’s not possible—” you begin, but then you remember. The employee who couldn’t understand why you wanted fish bones. Who only agreed to add them when he thought they were for your cat. Clearly, he’d simply tossed a bag from the trash in with the order, assuming your pet would sort out the edible ones.

Your stock—your beautiful, elaborate, saffron-infused fumet—was poisoned from the start.

“I’m so sorry—” you say helplessly.

Tim pulls out his phone. “Basilico can have pizza here in thirty minutes. That good for everyone?”

Numbly, you collect the full bowls and carry them back to the kitchen. Jenny gets up to help.

“I feel like such an idiot,” you say miserably when you’re alone.

“It isn’t your fault.”

“I’ve let Tim down. John Renton came here convinced I’m an expensive white elephant and I’ve just proved him right. Of course I can’t smell anything. I’m a robot.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily assume that’s Renton’s view,” Jenny says cautiously. “He wouldn’t be here if it was. He’s just sparring. He’s like that. All those tech guys are.”

You glance at her. “Mike’s not, though.”

“Mike’s not,” she agrees. “Or not so much. Which is why I married him.” She gives you a sideways look. “Why do you say, of course you can’t smell?”

“I can’t, can I?”

She shrugs. “The food industry already uses artificial taste buds. The deep learning for an artificial nose has existed for years.”

“So why…” You stop, thinking through the implications. “He wanted to build me as quickly as he could,” you realize. “To get me back. Even if it meant having to