Laurence didn’t rush her. Problem solving and troubleshooting were a source of pleasure for both of them, and narrating the process was the next best thing to doing it. The same neural pathways lit up when you talked your way through the maze as when you actually solved it. Except this time, you were bathed in the glow of having already unraveled the thing.
And yet Laurence was still uncomfortable. For one thing, because Serafina was late, they were stuck sitting at one of the sidewalk tables at the fancy pizza place, with nothing but a tiny heat lamp and three meatballs to insulate them from the fog, until the pizza arrived. For another, he was trying to be a good listener, because of his ongoing “not getting dumped” project, and active listening was hard work. And people were still giving him weird looks, a week after the MatherTec thing.
“We finally figured out that only one thing had changed,” Serafina said. She wore a camisole, but she’d put her bulky jacket back on when they were seated outdoors. The heat lamp made her skin look bronze. “Matt just got a Caddy, and he’d brought it to the office. As soon as we took the Caddy out of WiFi range, the robots calmed down. Somewhat. And before you ask, the Caddy did not have any weird apps installed on it. It was fresh from the store.”
“WiFi range. So they were getting something from the Caddy, on their wireless network, that upset them.” Laurence pulled out his own Caddy and glanced over it, as if he’d suddenly spot some brand-new feature. It still looked like a big guitar pick with a curved base, covered with aluminum. The Caddy was scanning for open networks, the same as always, but it wouldn’t link up with other machines on the same network without being instructed to do so. Unless …
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Laurence said, bisecting the third meatball so Serafina could have half. The meatball was their only protection against the cold, the last of their dwindling supplies until their pizza arrived. “So your emotional robots, they don’t have ‘emotions’ in the way that humans do, right? I mean, no offense.” Laurence was on thin ice here—and not the edge, but the dead middle of a lake, a hundred fragile paces in any direction. “The robots simulate emotional responses to some situations, and they try to pick up on what the people around them are feeling. Right?”
“You make it sound like we’re designing three-dimensional video-game avatars.” Serafina didn’t quite push her chair back, but she did seem a little farther away.
“I am well aware it’s a lot more involved than that,” Laurence said. “Both because of the Uncanny Valley and because the physical world is a lot more complicated.”
“But the real point is, how do you ever know your own emotions are spontaneous and genuine, and not just a programmed set of responses?”
“I don’t. I wonder about that all the time.” Laurence was conscious that it was probably a bad idea to confess to your girlfriend that you often wondered if your feelings were just an involuntary response. “I just wonder … assuming they have some reason for feeling a particular way, and they don’t just wake up on the wrong side of the bed. The Caddy had to be doing something that resembled an aggressive act, as defined in their response matrices. Right?”
“Yeah,” Serafina said. “They reacted as if they were being threatened.”
The pizza came at last, just when Laurence needed something to distract Serafina from what a mansplaining dick he was being, in spite of all his resolutions.
“There must be some other explanation,” Laurence said. “You’re talking about a Caddy, it’s not a black box. People have jailbroken and wiped them, they’ve installed Linux on them and also ported the Caddy OS over to cheap imitation tablets from Liberia. This is the most hacked device in history. If there was something weird about it, we’d know by now.”
“Hey,” said Serafina, chewing pizza. “Occam’s razor is not just an optional weapon in Street Warrior V. Already told you, we eliminated all other possibilities.”
The harder Laurence tried not to screw up, the worse he screwed up. He was not going to get dumped. That was not a possible outcome.
He thought about the Nuclear Option: his grandmother’s old ring, squirreled in the back of his sock drawer. He imagined getting on his knee and presenting it to Serafina. He could picture how it would look riding up her finger past the knuckle, the wrought silver wrapped around the gemstone. The look on her face as she blushed down at him.