Patricia wanted to protest—she was being surgical here, she had trained a decade for this—but there was no point. She should be glad she was having this conversation with Kawashima instead of Ernesto.
“You, of all people, should understand the need for great care,” Kawashima said, because of course he was going to bring that incident up. It would follow her around for the rest of her life. No matter how much she did to atone.
“Okay,” Patricia said. “I’ll be more careful.” She left it vague on purpose.
“Good enough,” Kawashima said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an early-morning brunch date with five Abercrombie models tomorrow.” He saluted and got into his Lexus, which glided down the hill toward Dolores Park. Patricia watched it shrink into the night and marveled at the internal contradiction of telling someone that the most powerful magicians in town are watching her every move, but she shouldn’t get a swelled head. But she was too exhausted to dwell on that, and all of the day’s minor miracles were catching up with her at once. She slipped inside the apartment, where her roommates had fallen asleep watching TV again. She tucked them in.
17
LAURENCE FIRST MET his girlfriend, Serafina, at a robot fashion show, with robots modeling human clothing and human models wearing robot fashions, like mechanical lingerie. The event happened at a garagey artspace somewhere south of South of Market, with a gunmetal trough full of artisanal vodka. Laurence had come this close to mistaking Serafina for one of the models—her cheekbones and oval face, her lustrous skin and shiny red/black hair were that amazing—but he’d realized just in time that she was one of the robot makers instead. Serafina’s “model” was a steel sylph, with ball-and-socket joints that let it strike a pose, pivot, talk with its delicate hands. Laurence had helped to build battle bots in college, but never artificial supermodels, and he’d managed to say something witty enough about the difference between the two that Serafina had friended him on MeeYu.
They met for coffee a few days after that, and the coffee date morphed into a dinner date, and the third time they hung out it was tacitly a sleepover; Serafina had a toothbrush and condoms in a pouch of her vinyl shoulder bag, which was Twiki from Buck Rogers. Pro tip: Do not think of “beedi beedi beedi” while you’re having sex for the first time with the most beautiful woman alive, or you will have some explaining to do (even if your motion, rocking the bed frame, does have a sort of “beedi beedi” rhythm). After that, they hung out every other day, held hands on the street, skipped through traffic, whispered in each other’s ears in public, clung together skin to skin every moment in private, swapped gene prints, traded odd little gifts, and wondered how soon was too soon to say “I love you.”
Laurence had soon found that letting people know he was part of Milton Dirth’s Ten Percent Project was a superfast ticket to getting laid. Among the crowd who worshiped Milton, Laurence was a rock star. About fucking time, really. And yet there was still no way he was in Serafina’s league. She was perfect. He was damaged goods. He never forgot this disparity for a second.
About a month after they started dating, Serafina took Laurence into her sanctum. She had to sign him in, and he had to surrender his ID to the man at the desk, who printed a badge with Laurence’s fresh photo on it. She led him down an elevator, along a sloping hallway, through two keypad-secured doors, and on into the lab. Inside, eyes watched Laurence from every wall and flat surface. Two of them belonged to bearded humans, who said “Yo,” and then looked back down at their workstations, but the rest all belonged to robots in various states of assembly. Serafina barely introduced Laurence to the two humans but took her time showing him the robots, who were animatronic cartoon characters or animals or a few mannequin heads. “This is Frank, he laughs a lot. Watch out for Barbara, she flirts but she’s got a mean streak.” The robots seemed to like Laurence, especially Donald the Cactus.
By now, they’d been dating five months. And lately, every time Serafina looked at her phone while they were hanging out, or stared into space, or bit her thick lower lip in the middle of a conversation, Laurence braced himself. This was it. She was going to dump him. Then the moment would pass. Laurence was sure she was just waiting for the right moment, or the ideal pretext. Every time he woke up next to her, he wondered if this was the last time her breath would warm the back of his neck and her breasts would graze either side of his spine.
He was not going to lose her. He had aced bigger challenges than this. He was going to think of something, take extreme measures, even deploy the Nuclear Option early if he had to. He was going to find a way to hold on to this amazing girl.