Earnest, still kind of goggle-eyed, said something about the world being a work in progress.
“Milton really thinks we’re going to need a new planet, maybe soon,” Laurence continued. “We’ve got to get off this rock. All our models suggest a decent likelihood of a catastrophic combination of natural disasters and destructive war, within one or two generations. Look at Seoul. Look at Haiti.” Laurence reached for one of those beers as well. “As far as we know, we’re the only intelligent, technological civilization ever to develop, in the entire universe. There’s complex life all over the place, but we’re still basically unique. We have a fucking duty to preserve that. At all costs.”
Laurence started to explain about how he’d dreamed of nothing, since he was a little kid, but leaving this planet. But Earnest had to run to the executive washroom to dry-heave. Laurence squirreled all the signed paperwork into his breast pocket of his nice black suit and then looked up at the gothy waitress for the first time. It was Patricia.
“Whoa,” Laurence said. “What are you doing here?” He had a panic attack that she was spying on him or stalking him, for a second.
“What does it look like?” she said. “I’m waitressing. My roommate Deedee hooked me up with this job.”
Laurence looked at her crisp white blouse and black knee-length skirt, silhouetted against the pale blue sky. Her dark hair was pinned back but still caught the bay wind. Her eyes looked leaf green. Her slender lips were pursed.
“Are you serious? I thought you were like…”—he lowered his voice—“… a witch now. You went to that special school, right?”
“I have other jobs besides this one, sure,” Patricia said. “But I don’t get paid for those. I need to pay rent in this city, which is a lot, even with two roommates.”
“Oh.”
Somehow, Laurence had imagined Patricia just snapping her fingers and causing money to appear. Or living rent-free in a fancy Victorian house full of magical objects, like a mirror that tells you what shoes go with your outfit. Not so much slinging macaroons to venture capitalists for minimum wage.
“So did you mean all the stuff you said to this guy?” Patricia said. “About our planet being doomed, and the human race being the only part of it worth saving?”
“Well. No. I don’t think we’re the only thing worth saving.” Laurence felt a weird shame that was the flip side of his cockiness from a moment ago. “I hope we can save all of it. But I do worry. We may be past the point of no return here. And it just makes sense not to pin all our hopes on just one planet.”
“Sure.” Patricia had her puffy-sleeved arms folded. “But this planet is not just some ‘rock.’ It’s not just some kind of chrysalis we can shed, either. You know? It’s, it’s more than that. It’s us. And this isn’t just our story. As someone who’s spoken to lots of other kinds of creatures, I kinda think they might want a vote.”
“Yeah.” Laurence felt like crap, just at the moment he ought to be feeling bulletproof. This sucked. But as he replayed his conversation with Mather, he could see how it would sound kind of heinous to Patricia. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest that anybody ought to write anything off. Nobody is going to do that.”
“Sure. I guess.”
Some tipsy VCs needed to come up and get their picture taken with Laurence, who was still wearing his harness over his Armani suit, and get some spring rolls from Patricia. And Laurence had to go get these papers notarized or spindled, or whatever you did when you bought a company. Plus Milton kept texting him. He muttered to Patricia that he would see her later, and she barely said, “Sure,” in between pouring drinks and answering nut-allergy questions.
*
ONE DAY THE Singularity would elevate humans to cybernetic superbeings, and maybe then people would say what they meant.
Probably not, though.
*
SERAFINA WAS LATE for dinner because her emotional robots had been having a nervous breakdown. All of them. “It took me the whole day to figure out what was bothering them. They just kept wigging out and giving us the hairy eyeball. We looked at everything that had changed in the lab, trying to eliminate every possible factor that could have upset them. Like, was the music different? Did we update their code recently?”