Katie Williams: The Happiness Machine

“Thank you?”

“You’re very welcome. Look. This little guy likes you”—he’d indicated the Apricity 320 in prime position on his desk—“and that means I like you, too.”

That interview had been nine years and sixteen Apricity models ago. Since then Pearl had suffered dozens more of her boss’s vaguely insulting metaphors and had, more importantly, seen the Apricity system prove itself hundreds—no, thousands of times. While other tech companies shriveled into obsolescence or swelled into capitalistic behemoths, the Apricity Corporation, guided by its CEO and founder, Bradley Skrull, had stayed true to its mission. Happiness is Apricity. Yes, Pearl was a believer.

However, she was not so naïve as to expect that everyone else must share her belief. While Pearl’s next appointment of the day went nearly as smoothly as Mr. Waxler’s—the man barely blinked at the recommendation that he divorce his wife and hire a series of reputable sex workers to fulfill his carnal needs—the appointment after that went unexpectedly poorly. The subject was a middle-aged web designer, and though Apricity’s recommendation seemed a minor one, to adopt a religious practice, and though Pearl pointed out that this could be interpreted as anything from Catholicism to Wicca, the woman stormed out of the room, shouting that Pearl wanted her to become weak minded, and that this would suit her employer’s purposes quite well, wouldn’t it, now? Pearl sent a request to HR to schedule a follow-up appointment for the next day. Usually these situations righted themselves after the subject had had time to contemplate. Sometimes Apricity confronted people with their secret selves, and, as Pearl had tried to explain to the shouting woman, such a passionate reaction, even if negative, was surely a sign of just this.

Still, Pearl arrived home deflated—the metaphorical blanket over her head feeling a bit threadbare—to find her apartment empty. Surprisingly, stunningly empty. She made a circuit of the rooms twice before acknowledging that Rhett had, for the first time since he’d come back from the clinic, left the house of his own volition. A shiver ran through her and gathered, buzzing, beneath each of her fingernails. She fumbled with her screen, pulling it from the depths of her pocket and unfolding it.

“Just got home,” she spoke into it.

k , came the eventual reply.

“You’re not here,” she said. What she wanted to say: Where the hell are you?

fnshd hw wnt out came back.

“Be home in time for dinner.”

The alert that her message had been sent and received sounded like her screen had heaved a deep mechanical sigh.

Her apartment was in the outer avenues of the city’s Richmond District. You could walk to the ocean, could see a corner of it even, gray and tumbling, if you pressed your cheek against the bathroom window and peered left. Pearl pictured Rhett alone on the beach, walking into the surf. But no, she shouldn’t think that way. Rhett’s absence from the apartment was a good thing. It was possible—wasn’t it?—that he’d gone out with friends from his old school. Maybe one of them had thought of him and decided to call him up. Maybe Josiah, who’d seemed the best of the bunch. He’d been the last of them to stop visiting, had written Rhett at the clinic, had once pointed to one of the dark bruises that had patterned Rhett’s limbs and said, Ouch , so sadly and sweetly it was as if the bruise were on his own arm, the blood pooling under the surface of his own unmarked skin.

Pearl said it now, out loud, in her empty apartment.

“Ouch.”

Speaking the word brought no pain.

To pass the hour until dinner, Pearl got out her latest modeling kit. The kits had been on Apricity’s contentment plan for Pearl. She was nearly done with her latest, a trilobite from the Devonian period. She fitted together the last plates of the skeleton, using a tiny screwdriver to turn the tinier screws hidden beneath each synthetic bone. This completed, she brushed a pebbled leathery material with a thin coat of glue and fitted the fabric snugly over the exoskeleton. She paused and assessed. Yes. The trilobite was shaping up nicely.

When it came to her models, Pearl didn’t skimp or rush. She ordered high-end kits, the hard parts produced with exactitude by a 3-D printer, the soft parts grown in a brew of artfully spliced DNA. Once again, Apricity had been correct in its assessment. Pearl felt near enough to happiness in that moment when she sliced open the cellophane of a new kit and inhaled the sharp smell of its artifice.

Before the trilobite, she’d made a Protea cynaroides , common name king protea, the model of a plant that, as Rhett was quick to point out, wasn’t actually extinct. She could have grown a real king protea in the kitchen window box, the one that got weak light from the alley. But Pearl didn’t want a real king protea. Rather, she didn’t want to grow a king protea. She wanted to build the plant piece by piece. She wanted to shape it with her own hands. She wanted to feel something grand and biblical: See what I wrought? The king protea had bloomed among the dinosaurs. Think of that! This blossom crushed under their ancient feet.

The Home Management System interrupted Pearl’s focus, its soft librarian tones alerting her that Rhett had just entered the lobby. Pearl gathered her modeling materials—the miniature brushes, the tweezers with ends as fine as the hairs they placed, and the amber bottles of shellac and glue—so that all would be put away before Rhett reached the apartment door. She didn’t want Rhett to catch her at her hobby because she knew he’d smirk and needle her. Dr. Frankenstein? he’d announce in his flat tone, curiously like a PA system even when he wasn’t imitating one. Paging Dr. Frankenstein. Monster in critical condition. Monster code blue! Code blue! Stat! And while Rhett’s jibes didn’t bother Pearl, she also didn’t think it was especially good for him to be given opportunities to act unpleasant. He didn’t need opportunities anyway. Her son was a self-starter when it came to unpleasantness. No, she hadn’t thought that.

The sound of the front door, and a moment later, there Rhett was, each of the precious ninety-four pounds of his sixteen-year-old self. It had been cold outside, and she could smell the spring air coming off him, metallic, galvanized. Pearl looked for a flush in his cheeks like the one she’d seen in Mr. Waxler’s, but Rhett’s skin remained sallow; his visible cheekbones were a hard truth. Had he been losing weight again? She wouldn’t ask. After all, Rhett had arrived in the kitchen without prompting, presumably to say hello. She wouldn’t annoy him by asking him where he’d been or, to Rhett’s mind the worst question of them all, the one word: Hungry?

Instead, Pearl pulled out a chair and was rewarded for her restraint when Rhett sat in it with a truculent dip of the head, as if acknowledging she’d scored a point on him. He pulled off his knit cap, his hair a fluff in its wake. Pearl resisted the impulse to brush it down with her hand, not because she needed him to be tidy but because she longed to touch him. Oh how he’d flinch if she reached anywhere near his head!

She got up to search the cupboards, announcing, “I had a horrible day.”

She hadn’t. It’d been, at worst, mildly taxing, but Rhett seemed relieved when Pearl complained about work, eager to hear about the secret strangeness of the people Apricity assessed. The company had a strict client confidentiality policy, authored by Bradley Skrull himself. So technically, contractually, Pearl wasn’t supposed to talk about her Apricity sessions outside of the office, and certainly many of them weren’t appropriate conversation for a teenage boy and his mother. However, Pearl had dismissed all such objections the moment she’d realized that other people’s sadness was a balm for her son’s own powerful and inexplicable misery. So she told Rhett about the man, earlier that day, who’d been unruffled by the suggestion that he exchange his wife for prostitutes, and she told him about the woman who’d shouted at her over the simple suggestion of exploring a religion. She didn’t, however, tell him about Mr. Waxler’s amputated finger, worried that Rhett would take to the idea of cutting off bits of himself. A finger weighed, what, at least a few ounces?