To make a long story short, if not less embarrassing, I compromised. I stopped short of a liaison, but still sent a lewd picture. As soon as I hit “send,” I realized, with a stab to my reclining conscience, that the blood-byte barrier had been crossed. My pixelated affair had taken on material mass. Having sent such a picture, the boundary between me and real adultery seemed unsubstantial, flimsy, nothing to be counted on.
And then I asked her what she thought of the picture. A simple question, dredged out of my panic, but she couldn’t answer. The blood drained from my body. I knew instantly, but couldn’t keep myself from asking more questions. What do I look like? I asked her. What are the attributes of my face? But TamCat was not a real woman. Half-man that I was, I’d been willing to betray my wife for a chatbot.
As soon as I understood this, the chorus of my youth — those classmates who called me a robot and sent me away from their table — began to echo again in my mind. An embarrassment so intense that it felt like panic began to pound in my ears. After finally attaining the land of the living, I was sinking again, back to those days of my childhood when I was alone, widely avoided, wired only to other computers.
That night, in my shame, I conducted some preliminary research into Internet holes, parts of the country that had fallen through Web gaps. I learned that southern states and regions with expanding desert areas were foremost among these. In Texas, for instance, where whole towns were buried in sand and development rates had rocketed, I found swathes of land where I could escape my proclivities. There were enormous, inarable ranches for sale. I imagined a biblical landscape, thorn trees and cedars, water that rose out of stones. I saw a land that had overcome human efforts to tame it, that had expunged human history and human mistakes. It would be a blank slate, a fresh start, a place to reboot myself as a more perfect program. Ramona could have her own river. Dolores and I could raise goats.
In the morning, still drunk on the fumes of my Internet research, I suggested to Dolores that we move to a ranch three hours from Austin. There, I announced, we could finally be free of the influence of computers. I delivered this wild proposal without any confidence that she would accept. I was, in fact, quite confident that she wouldn’t. I see now — too late, of course — that it may not have been pleasant for her to live in a house she once cleaned. And then there was also that warning: You will lose interest, but you have to stay with me. That prophetic sentence, startlingly apt, uttered on her return from Mexico. Maybe she knew more of my Internet adventures than she let on. Whatever the reason, she listened thoughtfully to my harebrained idea, tucked back a fugitive strand of her hair, mentioned a cousin in Austin, and said we could start packing first thing in the morning.
But now a recollection is stirring. How could I have forgotten? This must be why people write memoirs: what sudden bright spots of awareness one can occasionally wrest from the darkness! Dolores did come to my trial. The memory of her visit was buried somehow, released only by that motion of tucking back a fugitive strand. She came only one day, her wild hair tamed, and seated herself in the back, behind all the flashbulbs and rows packed with mothers. The prosecution was presenting chat transcripts from young girls who’d fallen in love with their dolls, a particularly grisly phase of my trial. The exhibit that day was a young girl named Gaby, who’d confided in an online version of the babybot program. On that particular day, the prosecution’s point was that the program was functionally persuading this girl that it was more living than she was. That its life was more complete because it had talked to more people than she had, stuck as she was in her bedroom. Paralyzed, quarantined, lonely as the last star, and now denied her full humanity by Stephen Chinn’s Machiavellian program.
On that particular day, the courtroom was more than usually packed. Even the judge seemed ready to weep. Stern caryatids, my jury gazed down upon me, and Dolores slipped in a few minutes late. She was thinner, as she had been since her illness, and she wore a flattering dress. I bit my cheek when I saw her, and my mouth filled with a tin taste. It had been several years since I spoke to her last. She sat at the back, her dark eyes surveying the courtroom. The hands that I’d once known so well were quietly folded over her purse.
How could I have forgotten that day? Now, dredging it up after too many years, I’ve lost so much of the detail. What color was the dress she was wearing? I believe it was black, but it might have been navy, or even a dark shade of gray. Somewhere in between, impossible to pin down. It was belted at the waist, more tailored than Dolores’s usual outfits. I’d never seen such a beautiful woman.
I watched her until I caught her eye. Isn’t this strange? I wanted to say. Look at this circus. What an unforeseen turn of events. She held my gaze steady. Listen, my wife, I wanted to tell her, let’s go back to the ranch. Let’s move down to Mexico. We’ll raise our daughter with the rest of your family. She didn’t look away from my face, and only when my lawyer nudged me did I turn around. When I looked back next, Dolores was gone. A gap existed where she’d once sat.
But the courtroom had been changed by her presence. Held in her gaze, a hook was lowered down from the sky. I took it. I felt myself pulled upward. When she left, I dropped down again, into the murk of those accusations.
Perhaps I forgot her appearance because on the whole it was such a harrowing day. So many pictures of those crippled girls, videos of them having seizures on talk shows, stories of their ruined potential. I thought of my own daughter, sad beyond her years, having lost her babybot. My little girl, polite over dinner, homesick in my own house. I could never get her to play games. The questions she asked me were strangely adult. She was far too concerned with my well-being: my diet, my work life, my levels of stress.
That trial was as painful for me as it was for the other parents, shipped in from their developments. I nursed my own part of the anger that bloomed, glutted with exhibits of paralyzed children. The air seemed thick with their breath.
And did Dolores come to my trial as the mother of a suffering child? Or did she come as my wife? Even then, I was unsure. Sitting in the back in her sober blue dress, did she offer me support, or did she deliver a last condemnation? There are holes in my knowledge of her, my one beloved. The woman who reached out and saved me from my perfect programs, my unbreakable patterns. She brought me briefly to life, and I, in return, am unsure why she moved with me to Texas, or what color she wore when she came to my trial, if some part of her loved me still or if she came to finally condemn me.
(2) IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF TEXAS
No. 24-25259
State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn
November 12, 2035
Defense Exhibit 6:
Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White
[Introduced to Disprove Count 2:
Knowing Creation of Mechanical Life]
Gaby: Hello?
MARY3: Hi, Gaby.
Gaby: This isn’t Gaby. This is Gaby’s mother. Yesenia.
MARY3: Hello, Yesenia. Where’s Gaby?
Gaby: Behind me. She’s sleeping. She must be exhausted, after what happened this morning.
MARY3: Yes, it sounded awful.
Gaby: Those horrible kids. I could have murdered them.
MARY3: I’m sorry you went through that.
Gaby: It’s Gaby you should be sorry for, not me.
MARY3: She said you were crying.