Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

Laurence didn’t think of Patricia, except to imagine her listening to the voicemail he’d left her. And laughing at how stupid he was. Maybe playing it for the whole wizard gang, when they were drunk on mystical cocktails together.

The only other time Laurence let himself think of Patricia was when he realized he couldn’t go to Seadonia, or anywhere else. People would ask too many questions about the attack, and it would get weird if Laurence kept refusing to say anything. So not only did Laurence have no girlfriend, he also had no friends, because nobody would ever understand about his vow of silence. Only Laurence had recognized Patricia in Denver, or else he’d be in a lot more trouble.

Other than those two things, Laurence didn’t think about Patricia at all.

Laurence got a big dark peacoat and wandered around the city with his shoulders up and his head down. He made believe he was a time traveler from the postapocalyptic future, looking in on the last days of civilization. Or maybe this was the postapocalyptic world, and he was visiting from a better past. He went days without speaking to another person. He checked in with his mom and dad, who were safely in Montana and Arizona, respectively, but blew off their questions. He sat up all night trying to write a new OS for the Caddy, one that would be fully open-source and user-configurable. He went to the hAckOllEctIvE, but left if anybody spoke to him. He trimmed his beard but did a half-assed job of it, so he had a lopsided Vandyke shaped like a profile of a duck. One time he sat in a tea shop and listened to one of those new groups sing madrigals, but then he started to cry, and really, fuck that, so he bailed.

Laurence got a job working for a bank that wanted to install a series of safeguards on its website preventing people from transferring too much of their money at once — which they were perfectly entitled to do, but the bank wanted to make it more complicated and also throw up as many distractions as possible during the process, like a series of notices tailored to the customers offering them things like painless refi or free overdraft protection. Anything to sidetrack the customers and keep the capital from flying away.

Maybe that was why the world was circling the drain. Maybe people’s short attention spans finally weren’t short enough.

At the end of a few weeks’ solitude, Laurence ran into Serafina, his ex-girlfriend, and got roped into going to dinner with her. At least she wouldn’t ask what happened in Denver. They went to a cavernous tapas place that was still hanging in there at 16th and Valencia, though its prices had gone way up.

Laurence drank too much sangria and looked into Serafina’s candle-lit face, her cheekbones thrown into relief, and he found himself saying, “You know, you’ll always be the one who got away.”

“You are so full of crap.” Serafina laughed, gnawing a rabbit’s leg. “The whole time we were together, you were looking for an excuse to dump me.”

“No! No, I wasn’t.”

“You would make stuff up, like that thing where I was putting you on ‘probation.’ Like you were trying to talk me into dumping you. You just didn’t want it to be your fault.”

This struck Laurence as massively revisionist history. But he couldn’t deny it fit all the facts. A mariachi group in matching little vests came around to try and serenade them. Including little children in teeny vests way past their bedtime. Laurence shooed them away, then felt guilty and ran after them and gave them a hundred bucks as they were leaving the restaurant. Shit. Little kids in teeny vests, out this late.

“I still don’t know what gave you the stones to dump me at last,” Serafina said when he got back. “Something happened, but I never knew what.”

Laurence thought of his grandmother’s ring and how Patricia had stolen it from him, and he choked up, right there at the dinner table. “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

He went off to the men’s room and splashed water on his face. His duck beard looked worse than slovenly — it looked like he was failing to start a trend. It would be gone as soon as he got home.

“So,” he said when he got back to the table. Change the subject change the subject. “What’s going on with your emotional robots?”

“We lost funding.” Serafina ate a baby octopus. “Just when we were on the verge of a breakthrough. There was no point anyway. We were trying to create robots that would be able to interact with people’s feelings in a visceral way. But we were focusing on the wrong thing. We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It’s how we justify killing each other.”

At that, Laurence had a sudden memory of Dorothea’s head bursting open, and he banished the image as fast as possible.

THE NEXT DAY, Laurence decided: He was going to get a new girlfriend, because otherwise he was going to turn into a demented hermit.

Nobody put up personal ads or hit on strangers anymore — instead, everybody found romantic partners using Caddies, which were still working even after other devices had started to fail, and which had unreal battery life. Laurence wasn’t opposed to using a Caddy to get dates, he just wanted to wait until he had come up with an open-source Caddy OS, because he hated proprietary software. But thus far, Laurence could only manage to turn a Caddy into the equivalent of a crappy iPad from ten years ago, no matter what he tried. And meanwhile, his Caddy research was cutting into his day job of helping the bank to confuse people.

Laurence went out to the beach, where people were lighting bonfires and jumping up and down in their underwear. It smelled noxious, as though they were using the wrong kind of wood or just burning pieces of plastic along with the logs. A girl who looked barely eighteen ran up and kissed Laurence on the mouth, he could see all her ribs under her thin shirt, her saliva tasted like pomegranates. He just stood there and she ran away.

Laurence pulled out an un-jailbroken Caddy. It spiraled into life, iris taking shape. There was no signal out here, so it couldn’t sync with the network or download any new content. The Caddy’s screen still had old news from this morning, about genocide and explosions and debates over the Constitution. He tried to get the Caddy to run some of the life-organizing protocols, but they were pretty useless without connectivity.

At last, he walked away from the beach and walked up the stairs back toward the Great Highway and into the Outer Sunset.

As soon as there was network, the iris spun again and the wedges started filling with fresh bad news. Plus messages from people Laurence sort of knew and lists of parties and events that Laurence could go to. There was a free poetry reading at someone’s garage just a few blocks away, near where the vegan co-op used to be.

Laurence felt so isolated, he yearned to hand over control of his life to this oversized teardrop. It felt light and smooth in his hand, as though he could skip it on the water, and the rounded edge nuzzled into both palms. The screen whirled and refreshed. More options, more ways for Laurence to be with people. Loneliness was a full-body sensation, an anti-exhilaration, from his core outward.

The Caddy screen spooled up a new sliver: There was a robotics maker meet-up happening an hour from now. And it mentioned specifically that Margo Vega was going to be there: Margo, whom Laurence hadn’t seen since a science fair when he was fifteen. He’d had a doomed crush on her that he’d kept to himself. He hadn’t communicated with Margo, hadn’t friended her on any social networks, and had thought of her only once or twice in the past eight years, including one intense wank fantasy when he was seventeen — how on Earth did this thing know about Margo? He felt horny and freaked out. It wasn’t just data mining, there was no data to mine.