The gift of Tim’s Volkswagen marked a new phase in the relationship between Tim and Abbie. Ironically, she soon stopped using it—she’d get a ride to the office with him instead, which we took to mean she was staying over. He was busy around that time, raising more funding for the shopbots. Most nights he’d be out at events in Silicon Valley, the endless networking in windowless convention rooms, eating self-serve food from tables with green tablecloths and two kinds of strip steak piled high in metal warming trays. Abbie went along, too, though she must have found those evenings dull by comparison with the festivals and gallery openings she was used to.

But there was no doubt it was beneficial to Tim to have a tall, strikingly gorgeous artist by his side. It did more than just get him noticed. The people who ran these venture capital companies tended to be competitive, alpha-male types. Abbie got Tim respect. And respect soon turned into a flow of funds. It was said one billionaire put in forty million after a five-minute conversation with her.

* * *

—

Abbie started baking cakes and bringing them into the break room for us. They were really good. Still, you had to get there early if you wanted some. By nine A.M. there was never anything left but crumbs.

The girls, of course, all tried to get Abbie to open up about what Tim was like in bed. Abbie wasn’t a gossip, but neither did she show the faintest trace of embarrassment. One day, for example, she casually mentioned that Tim preferred not to ejaculate.

“It’s a tantric thing. Athletes do it, too. He says it conserves his energies for work.”

It was downright weird, if you asked us. But we looked it up, and sure enough, ejaculatory control was right there in the Buddhist texts. It seemed particularly strange in a man who generally scoffed at mysticism of any kind. But it fed our wish to believe that Tim was fundamentally different from the rest of us. And we all got it. The desire to hack our own health was not uncommon among us. Whether it was chugging micronutrients or replacing dairy with almond milk, we all experimented constantly with our own biology.

38

The morning after the dinner with Renton is like waking up after a party at which you got very drunk. Did all that really happen? Or did you just imagine it?

But Tim comes down to breakfast humming. “Last night went well.”

“I nearly poisoned your biggest investor.”

“An even bigger investor now, thanks to you.” He kisses the top of your head. “You’ve changed your hair back,” he observes.

“I decided French braids aren’t really my style. Or anything French, actually.”

He laughs. “You know, I’ve been thinking. We should really be getting you out there more. You should be doing TED Talks and neuroscience conferences—serious stuff, not like that trashy daytime TV Katrina got you on. The sooner people see what you’re really like, the sooner this whole ridiculous media circus will blow over.”

“Tim…” you say.

“Yes, Abs?”

“Is this working for you? I mean really working? Am I really what you longed for, all those years?”

He looks surprised. “Of course. Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that…I feel like an imposter most of the time.”

“You’re Abbie. And I love you. That’s all that matters.” He frowns. “Are you saying you aren’t happy?”

He sounds so upset that you back off.

“You’re right,” you say, managing a smile. “Loving each other is what really matters. And I am happy.”

You wonder if there was ever a time when Tim and you could actually talk about your relationship, or if you were always met with this blank wall of adoration.

THIRTEEN

One day we overheard Tim asking Morag, his assistant, how many people from Google would be at a function he and Abbie were scheduled to attend that evening. “Thirty-six,” Morag replied.

“Thirty-six?” Abbie interjected happily. “But there were thirty-seven last year!”

Tim looked at her, clearly confused. “Harry Potter,” she explained, as if it were obvious. “Dudley Dursley wasn’t happy with thirty-six presents, remember?”

“I never read those books,” he said dismissively.

“You never read Harry Potter?” She sounded amazed. “But you’ve seen the movies, right?”

“I don’t really go to movies. They’re too long. I watched South Park as a kid.”

“Jesus,” she said disbelievingly. “I’ll get the first book delivered.”

So then Tim was observed to be reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone between meetings. Being Tim, he finished it in two days, then immediately ordered the next one.

Abbie got up the Pottermore website, and they did the Sorting Hat quiz together.

“That’s amazing,” Abbie was heard to say. “We’re both Hufflepuff!”

Now, of course, the whole point of the Sorting Hat was that it could see things about you that you didn’t even know yourself. But Hufflepuff? House of kindness and loyalty? Tim? Really?

We guessed he’d gone online and found a site that told you what answers to give to get sorted into different Houses. It was endearing, in a way—that even a multimillionaire like him felt the need to impress a girl. But still. Nerds that we were, we all knew you should never, ever try to get yourself put into the wrong house at Hogwarts.

The time we realized this relationship was really serious, though, was when Darren screwed up the runway walking. Human salesclerks spent a lot of time standing around waiting for customers—that was one of the things we didn’t like about them, we agreed, the way when you walked into a store they’d suddenly scent a commission and rush over to ask how you were doing today or what size you were. Tim decided it would be cool if, instead of hanging by the register, when you walked into the store the shopbots were already walking up and down like models on a runway, showing off the store’s new lines. Then one would peel off to come and talk to you.

We spent a bit of time analyzing video of real models on runways, and Darren turned the distinctive hand-on-hip stride into code. Eventually he was ready to demonstrate his handiwork. He activated a shopbot, which sashayed up and down the demonstration area. It looked impressive—exactly like a model at a Victoria’s Secret show.

“Great!” Tim said. “Now show me what it’s like with more!”

Darren looked confused. “More?”

“There should be half a dozen, all parading at once,” Tim said. “That’s the whole point. That’s what makes it cool.”

Darren nodded, which was his first big mistake. Well, actually his second—his first mistake was that he’d neglected to think through what would happen when half a dozen shopbots paraded up and down a narrow runway at once. Being a geek, he’d never actually been to a fashion show. But whatever the reason, he should have immediately told Tim he hadn’t gotten around to that part yet, instead of trying to wing it.

He activated another shopbot, then another, then two more. For a moment it looked amazing—five identical robotic mannequins, tall, elegant, and impeccably engineered, striding up and down an imaginary runway in a variety of imaginary outfits.

“They do it to music, too,” Darren said proudly, and turned on a speaker. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Snow (Hey Oh)” blasted around the room and, without breaking stride, the shopbots started swaying their shoulders and heads in time to the beat. One of them even twirled her hand. (Yes, her hand—it was impossible to think of the shopbot as it when it was dancing like that.) People around the office started clapping along and whooping—Abbie, too; her face lit up as she hollered and whistled. (She had a hell of a whistle, we learned; the full two-finger Texan cattle-whistle.) For a brief moment our office felt like a party.

Then the inevitable happened. The twirling-hand shopbot reached the end of the runway and turned—straight into the shopbot immediately behind. Both crashed to the floor. A third tripped over them. Within seconds the parade had turned into a pile of mechatronic limbs, still attempting to stride but succeeding only in kicking one another. They looked like something from a war zone, a pile of white plastic bodies twitching in exaggerated death throes.

“Jesus,” Tim muttered under his breath. “We can’t even copy the dumbest humans on the planet.”

Someone turned the music off. The sudden silence was deafening.

“That’s solvable,” Mike said nervously. “We just need to port in some driverless car sensors, so they swerve around each other. It would look pretty neat, actually.”

“Exactly,” Tim said. “Solvable. And therefore predictable.”

We all waited for the inevitable Tim-lashing that would follow. Darren’s head drooped, like a dog that knows it’s about to get whipped.

Then Tim looked across at Abbie. “Still, not bad, huh?” he said with a smile. “For a first attempt.”

* * *

—