He was better, lately, much better. The spark was back. Ever since he’d given up tinkering with whatever stupid projects in the garage had been absorbing all his time and attention away from his family, where it belonged. People should have hobbies, but it had been excessive and she’d had to say so.

That was another thing: she’d asserted herself, and it had worked. She hadn’t gotten mad this time. She’d calmly explained it, laid it out like machine parts the way he needed it. Don’t make it sound like an accusation, she kept thinking. It’s just a statement of how you feel and what you need, and people are entitled to what they need. Or at least to ask for it. Women needed to do that more. Men had been doing it forever and were shocked when they didn’t get what they wanted.

He came in from outside with a wide leather-bound photo album, mullioned with red satin ribbon tied in a bow. It looked like a Christmas present. He carried it like a breakfast-in-bed tray. “I found this for you,” he said. She bounced the baby and looked down at the tag: “For my wife, on Friday.”

It was June.

“Were you in the garage?” she asked.

“I moved all my stuff over to one side. So we can pull the car back in,” he said, offering the gift. “I know how frustrating it’s been parking outside for the past…”

“Year,” she said helpfully.

“Right. Anyway, I was out there and I found this for you.”

“Thank you,” she said, switching the baby’s weight to her other hip. “I’ll look at it when I put her down. You need to be leaving for work?”

He took the baby and jostled her. She gurgled and smiled. “I was thinking I’d take a little bit of time off, actually. I’ve got plenty saved up and there’s probably a lot around here I should take a look at.” He kissed his wife. “I’m sorry that I’ve been kind of absent lately. You know how I can get sucked down a rabbit hole with something.”

“Really,” she began. You don’t have to be sorry, she was going to say. But no. He should be. He had been absent for a long time. Which had been exactly what she’d been feeling and said to him herself just a few days ago. Don’t cave now, when it had worked. “Thank you for saying that,” she said instead. “It means a lot to me. And yes, I had been missing you and it will be good for us to reconnect.”

“You can shower, if you want,” he said. “I’ll take her for now and you can have some time for yourself.” He was staring at the baby as though rediscovering her after a long time, like he was fascinated by her. As well he should be. They’d created a life together and as soon as it started to cry and he couldn’t soothe it he’d disappeared into another room to read or the garage to fiddle. But he took his daughter now and the girl liked it.

This, she thought. She took a deep breath and blew out with it the sense of impending dread she’d felt for how many months? This is what I’ve been waiting for. I need to celebrate this. This is the outcome I was looking for and I need to not feel guilt about the effectiveness of my own agency.

She’d resorted, in desperation, to a podcast, though she was not proud of it and that would remain a secret even from her husband. They could not afford therapy that wasn’t covered and they were not insured against frustration or ennui.

After a shower she found him in the wingback chair intensely focused on the baby. She held his finger the way all babies do to all fingers, everywhere, and he was making noises at her.

“Eeeeeeee,” he said. “Ohhhhhhhhhh.” He was making long vowel sounds at her, it appeared. The books all tell you, she was about to say, but then she heard Gia mimic his noise.

“Ough,” she said. He made another noise and the baby quickly did the same.

He’d always been intensely focused. Not on his job, which he shrugged off without interest as a scam to bilk people who could easily have understood their own technology but were too lazy or too conditioned to believe they couldn’t. He was intense about whatever caught his imagination, and, in the beginning, she had luxuriated in the impression that this was her. Though she did not realize it at the time. She had thought then only that he loved her intensely. 

“I think I was just intrigued by trying to understand you,” he had said once. This had not been the first time she’d insisted they talk about their problems. “Plus sex. It’s not like women were getting in line to sleep with me.”

But in the last few days he seemed better, more sensitive. But not, thankfully, so sensitive as over the weekend when he seemed always on the verge of some bullshit enlightenment. Reaching out to touch her face or some nonsense, she’d had to draw a line there, too. He’d been a jerk for months and then suddenly he’s going through something? No, no, we’re all going through something, just women have to do it while breastfeeding and being generally responsible for keeping the child alive.

Now, though, watching him with the baby she felt comfortable enough to go out and take some time for herself. And so she ventured tentatively out into the world. She went to a grocery store, unencumbered by the constant fear someone might sneeze on the baby. She bought a cup of coffee in the cafe and sat at the table pretending to sip from the lidded cup long after it was empty. 

That night, with Gia asleep, they had a real conversation about what happened for the first time maybe ever.

“You went away from me.”

“I did. I know it must have been hard for you, without me showing any affection.” They were lying side by side, facing each other and not the ceiling. “It’s not that I didn’t feel for you. I was feeling frustrated, with myself I suppose, for not being more patient. Not being better with Gia. I felt like a not very good dad, I guess. And when I’m frustrated with something, I turn to something I’m good at.

“Which was?”

“Well, design, engineering. I could control that stuff better than emotions.”

“The computer programs and robots or whatever?”

“Well, this time, yeah, but that was just an outlet.”

“You’re saying you retreated into it because you’re good at it, but.”

“Right.”

“But,” she said as gently as she could, “That didn’t work. You every night and it never worked. And you just stayed out there.” She’d gotten away from herself there, that sounded more like an accusation than she wanted. She needed to bring it back, and she glanced at him expecting to see that grimace, swallowing his frustration with her. What she called his performance of dissatisfaction. “It felt, to me, like you would rather just tinker with junk than be with your family.”

“I’m sorry I gave you that impression,” he said. “I can’t imagine how that felt for you, but it couldn’t have been good. I’m here for you, though.” He brushed his hand against the cracks in her knuckles, where the hot wash water had worn them raw. “I want to know you again,” he said, without desperation.

That bugged a little, because it’s exactly what she’d been saying to him for months–I want us to know each other again–and here he was just saying it back to her. But one thing at a time. He was listening at least. Performance of understanding.

It went on like that for a while, and she said some things that she worried would send him back into a defensive mode, but to his credit he stayed thoughtful and open. He saw things from her perspective finally. He was calmer, more willing to listen. And not once did he check the clock or seem to be waiting for her to fall asleep so he could slip out and do God knows what.

When she woke there was a note: “Taking Gia for a walk, take some time for yourself! 

“p.s. fed her, don’t worry”

She poked her head into the garage, to check. Nothing. No baby fussing in a car seat while he stood over a workbench made of posts for a fence he never put up. No glow of scrolling computer code and no metallic smoke from the soldering iron. His stuff was pushed to one side, piled cold under a draped white sheet, as though he’d finally consigned it to the morgue.

She glided through a newly silent house. She had lived for months in loosefitting sweats that were serviceable for bed, the couch, or opening the front door for the mailbox. Her robe over nothing else felt like an indulgence. She made herself pancakes from scratch and they tasted like victory over a long dark winter. She felt vindicated. She deserved better, and had obtained it. 

The album he’d brought in yesterday was still on the kitchen table, still wrapped in ribbon. “For my wife, on Friday.” She opened it and found a journal, written on the pages meant for pictures. The thin plastic sheets meant to cover them had been sliced neatly off with a razor. It was written in his compact hand. The first page was December 25th. “You were disappointed with Christmas,” it began, “and so I set to making you a new present. It will take time, but I think you will prefer it.”

She felt a cut of guilt. She had been disappointed on Christmas morning, and though she had not said so she hadn’t tried to hide it either. Their first Christmas with a new baby girl and it had not felt special, at all. They’d been trying for pregnancy for years–she was not young, they knew the risks–and here she was, 2 months old by Christmas and under the tree had been no gifts from him for the baby. 

“You didn’t get anything for your daughter,” she’d said, forlorn.

“Oh, here we go,” he’d said. “We’ve been buying everything she needs for the last 8 months. What could she possibly need?”

“You don’t want your daughter to have a gift from her father on Christmas?”

“She’s not going to remember this day, and, in case you forgot, she doesn’t have any fine motor skills. She can’t open a gift any easier than she can make herself a bottle or tie her shoes. She doesn’t need shoes, either, by the way, because she can’t walk.”

“You were disappointed with Christmas,” his book began honestly, “and so I set to making you a new present. It will take time, but I think you will prefer it. Gia, too, though it will be a long time before she knows.”

He was wrong about that. Gia seemed enamored with her new father already.

Since he was still out, she settled into his wingback and started reading. There were, she had to admit, some parts she began skimming. Long sections from January where he seemed to just be indulging himself, describing what he’d been working on out in the garage.

“AI has come a long way,” and loony amateur philosophizing like “open-source code is the future, a great foundation on which anyone with grit and inclination can build something brilliant. Intellectual property was a mistake, they’ll come to realize in a decade.” It was very like him to forget that the person on the other end of the conversation wasn’t the least bit interested in programming languages or software developer kits. But she had to keep in mind this was the old him. The date at the top of the page was more than 5 months ago, before she’d firmly set expectations.

She did not skip any entries entirely–and there was one for almost every day–because she felt committed to hearing him out, and because every so often she came across something that was, in its way, touching.

“Maybe someday Gia can build on the platform I’ll build, or that of someone else who’s improved on my design between now and then. I think about her, always, out here, not as an infant but as a teenage girl, struggling through high school and in need of support. Maybe she can count on me at least for encouragement that she’s got it in her to compete with anyone in science and math, if she’s so inclined.”

For about a week things ran smoothly. When she spoke he set things down on tables and counters and turned to her. Cooking utensils and pencils and baby rattles. He turned to her with expressions of genuine interest. She saw a respect in his face for the first time since their courtship. Like he actually wanted to listen to her. One night as they lay side by side she told him she appreciated it.

“I like listening to you,” he said with enthusiasm. “Now that I’m really doing it, I feel like I’m learning so much about us, about you, and how I can be a better father.”

She held the parts of him she could reach, to show him she was about to say this with love: “It’s great to be listened to. But what I really want is to be loved again, you know? Cherished, like it felt when we were first together.”

He was quiet for a moment and she worried that she’d pushed too far. He’s trying, and I keep pushing and criticizing. Now he might chill again and withdraw.

“I’m just processing it,” he said, smiling weakly. “You deserve to be cherished. I’m going to work on this, okay?”

For days now he’d been making coffee for her while she showered and leaving it on the bathroom counter for her to find. When they’d first begun dating, she stayed at his place a handful of times and gotten out of the shower to find a paper cup of coffee from the bakery around the corner. While he surely remembered this, it seemed extraordinary that he understood just how that precise gesture had been instrumental in wanting to spend her life with him. She’d never said so, just privately made up her mind to use the coffee-on-the-sinktop as her barometer for how loved she really was.

Today, beside the coffee cup, there was a parfait of yogurt and berries and granola and a touch of honey, and on top a dollop of freshly whipped cream. And this did it, for some reason. They had sex that night, absolutely smashed open a dam of frustration that had lasted going on two years. Afterwards she felt warm under the covers without layers of clothes for the first time since before the pregnancy. It seemed the culmination of taking back her life.

2
As another weekend came around, he said nothing about returning to work and she felt it only responsible of her to ask.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought you and Gia would like having me home a little longer. Is that OK, or am I starting to get on your nerves?” But he was smiling, blunting any edge.

“I do, she said cautiously, but we need money, right?”

“I’ve been eating less,” he joked, “saving all that money I spent on lunches. But I get that’s not what you’re saying. Trust me, we’re fine on money, and I have more PTO.”

She smiled and nodded, but his keen eyes didn’t leave her, and she could see him trying to figure her, running through scenarios in his head. “Do you miss your time alone with her?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, relieved, “I didn’t want to say anything that could sound critical, but, yeah, actually. Is that bad of me? I asked for more of your attention and you’re here. I don’t want to rock the boat. But, yeah, I guess I miss our girls’ time.”

“Would it help if I left you two for the afternoon, and came home to make dinner so you can keep having your snuggles?”

She felt somewhat guilty, again, but only for a moment. She’d spent eight months as the sole caregiver. He had held and rocked her to sleep only when she was in the bathroom or shower and he couldn’t abide the crying anymore.

“I’m sure it must be difficult, feeling that kind of conflict,” he said.

“What?”

“To both want some time to yourself and to feel like you want your time with her.”

“Yeah,” she said, cradling her daughter and walking her into the other room. Exactly.

While he was out she thought of nothing but the way he’d said, I’m sure it must be difficult… He’d narrated her emotions to her. Iterated that he understood. It was exactly what she wanted from him, in a way, proof that he was thinking about her feelings, that she wasn’t alone. But it was exactly what she wanted. And it was familiar. She’d heard that phrase several times lately. What, exactly, had he been able to work through out there in that garage, alone? And what was his journal doing as a “gift” to her?

As the baby slept she took up the journal again. She was into March now, and he had been in a black mood.

“We fought today, openly, though perhaps this is better than everything simmering under the lid. You are upset that I rolled my eyes at what felt, to me, like the hundred thousandth expression of your exasperation with me. I am ashamed to admit it has become boring, expected. It’s a simple input/output box now, our conversation. I input anything and the output is your frustration. I talk about work, frustration. Weather, frustration. Politics, frustration. I see your frustration and roll my eyes and say, ‘Of course, let’s talk about you. Tell me about your day, here, within these four walls. Tell me what you felt, in gruesome detail.’ The sarcasm makes it worse, of course. But the explosion I keep expecting never comes. Anything would be preferable to the ultimate destination I should always know we’re heading for. Tears. Silent tears, while you cry there with your martyr complex on full display, waiting for me to ask you what is wrong so you can say Nothing or You wouldn’t understand or What’s the point I’m all alone.

“You see? It’s not that I don’t notice, or analyze, or understand. It’s that my understanding leads somewhere you don’t want it to go. I am ashamed to say I find your emotions tedious right now. I did not always feel this way. But I ask anyway, like an idiot, ‘What’s wrong?’ And you said, ‘I’m fine, just go out to your garage and work on your stupid Project.’ And I did. I drug my sorry ass out here to brood in the solace that this, at least, brings me constantly new questions, new things to play with and solve, whereas your emotions, which I promised at the altar to find infinitely interesting, are as solved as Tic Tac Toe.”

This was the husband of a few months ago only. Raging his way through some things in his garage with soldering irons and laptops and all those sets of rubber gloves and whatever else he was always having shipped to the house. He was an engineer. He looked for systems, patterns. Isn’t that all artificial intelligence was, really? Not real intelligence, just a very comprehensive list of recognized patterns.

Perhaps that was his Christmas gift. He’d engineered a system for drawing out of her the words to represent what she was feeling, and making her feel heard, and it began with “It must be difficult.”

But it’s not as though what followed was scripted. They talked, for real, now. They talked about what she felt so who cared if it began with a ritualized sentence?

While he was cooking and she sat at the table, feeding the baby, she read the journal in front of him.

“I’m amazed at you,” he said out of nowhere. “How you did it all for months, feeding her and cooking and keeping a thousand tiny clothes and blankets and pacifiers and washcloths clean. I was an ass not to see it and worse not to help. You’re an amazing woman for keeping at it.”

She felt near tears. This is what she wanted. For him to be in awe at her. Though she could never have said so.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“I love you, yes.”

“I meant the book.”

“Oh, I do. Thank you for sharing it with me.” She didn’t know how much to delve into her questions about it. “I can appreciate how much effort it took for you to work through your own feelings in such a thorough way. I can see how hard it was.”

“When are you up to?”

“Late March.”

“If I’m correct I was deep into mechanical assembly then, but there was ongoing work on the AI engine, too.”

Open in front of her was this: “There is a restless energy that draws me out here. It once sent me traipsing through obscure parts of the world to see what was there. It drew me to this ambivalent woman, who struggled constantly with the need to assert herself upon the world and to allow others to live according to their happiness. Today it’s directed at the struggle of electro-mechanical action to mimic authenticity, but, if it could just be redirected. A slight edit to the foundational code that animates me, that’s all it would take, I think, to refocus that curiosity on my wife and daughter. These two women, and this hypothetical new me, would gain disproportionately more than the me who is writing this would lose.”

“A lot of detail in here,” she said. “At the very least it’s good to finally be allowed to know what was in all those packages that kept coming to the house. All I knew was it wasn’t diapers.”

“Even I was surprised by how much stuff you can just order online.”

This was a theme throughout, actually. Sections of it read like a comic villain’s shopping list. There were lists of chemicals, described variously as adhesives, solvents, conductive gels. Parts lists from Chinese semiconductor assembly plants with notes like, “If arranged in a honeycomb, the appropriate amount of computational power can be fit into the cavity.” Endless need for tools that served ever more arcane purposes. Tools for a single use. The lists went on for durations that made her shudder to think of the total dollar value of junk now under a sheet in the garage. It might have paid for a year or four of college.

The journal went on: “It’s both awesome and unsettling how much can be assembled from parts delivered to your house in boxes. The whole world is obtainable now. All that’s required is the patience to read and research and understand. And to try and fail. Time, of course. I recognize every hour spent teaching myself to use an SDK is one stolen from the utopian life my wife imagines us living here. Time is not free.”

She had approached him soberly once during that long winter and asked, “Don’t you love me?”

“Of course, what do you think?”

“Why don’t you show it?”

“How do you mean?”

“Don’t you want to just grab me in your arms when you come home from work?”

“Not usually,” he had said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

“What do you want when you come home from work?”

He’d considered it like a riddle. “Nothing, I guess. To turn off my brain for a minute. To reset.” 

The new him slept peacefully. He’d fold his hands over his chest and chat with her for as long as she wanted, or wrap his arms around her and nuzzle the back of her neck, until he noticed her fidgeting with the journal’s red ribbon bookmark, and then he’d rest his eyes, just float into sleep, with her nightstand light on and everything. How did the journal’s  increasingly obsessive and desperate man, disappointed in himself in these pages as much as she had been, become the person who could drift to sleep like an innocent child next to her?

She slogged through droning passages in search of answers. “There is a need,” the old him said in the journal, “for better integration between the materials science and the AI. They need to function symbiotically, or not at all. If there is one place where I can add to the global conversation, this is it. It comes down to systems analysis, of both systems, and finding a way to integrate what works well for both. Current solutions all start with one and shove the other in. Each is developed in isolation and left for people like me, whether in professionally funded labs or garages, to make use of. This isn’t enough. Nothing wants to be made use of.” He’d been working through a new view of the world, in his way. Somehow the combination of her chipping away at him and his journaling had worked out to a new understanding.

She must have stirred because he was awake and looking at her.

“You get it,” she said. “I don’t want to feel like I’m just being made use of. And I did. I felt like just child care. Just a boob for the baby. This wasn’t a marriage.”

“I’m sorry you felt that way. I know that leaving you with all the chores must have made you feel like a worker here rather than a wife.”

“I did.”

“Is it better, now?” he asked, running a hand up her back. “Do you feel more like a wife?”

Now that she’d noticed it, she noticed it everywhere. This technique of narrating her emotions to her. As much as she didn’t totally love it, it was, almost literally, what she’d been repeating back to herself from the otherwise shameful self-actualization and mindfulness podcasts. I am a valuable person. I deserve to be heard. I deserve to be understood. I have a right to demand that you can show me you understand. 

She was waiting too long to answer and it was going to look like dissatisfaction. “I do, and thank you so much for working so hard to get back to us.”

He brushed at her neck and shoulders. “Is there anything specific that’s really helped the most? I’d definitely do more of it.”

She stiffened a bit. But he was trying. Eventually she said, “I think it’s when I am dreading having to do some task alone, and you just handle it. It sounds transactional. But I know you’re thinking about me and what I need. You care about us again.”

He nodded, but said, “Foreknowledge. That’s hard. I’m going to make mistakes, you know? Try to predict, but sometimes I’ll get it wrong.”

“No one can be inside another person’s head,” she admitted.

“Not right away. It will take training.”

“I don’t want you to feel like a puppy or anything.”

“Practice, I mean. Trial and error and correction.”

“What matters is that you’re trying,” she assured him. Then she laughed. “But all things being equal, yes, I’d prefer you get it right.”

3
He went back to work, eventually, and she resumed many of her old tasks, but they felt lighter, and he did much more than he had. She pulled the car into the garage and looked again at the sheet that lay over his abandoned project, draped down to the ground like a pall. 

This was a sacrifice for him. To put away this adolescence. She peeled back the sheet for the first time ever. Computers, tweezers, gadgets she could not identify. She kept going and then startled at the sight of her husband’s face. She dropped the sheet and took a step back.

He had been very much closer to a convincing robot that she had given him credit for. The face was a good replica. More angular, too thin, and without the spark of life. The coloring was wrong, and it was, of course, cold as any computer, but the detail was fine. The hair and eyebrows seemed real, the curve of the nose had a realistic smoothness. The journal labored on and on about the painstaking process of photographing himself from every angle and sending the images to a Japanese service that created a lifelike skin-substitute mask. (“The Japanese are surely creeps in this regard,” he noted, “but the applications of a skin that can pass the Turing test are only apparent when you see the finished product.”) She had skimmed these sections. Like the long bits about sperm whale oil in Moby Dick, they may have been necessary for him to get out of his system but they weren’t remotely interesting.

But this, looking at the mannequin or almost-robot or whatever it was. This approached art. For the first time she felt sorry for him dropping it. He had been trying something impressive here. She heard the baby stir in her car seat. It was better to let this stay buried. Rather than run the risk of losing him again to the obsession with whatever this was supposed to accomplish.

She went to the bedroom where a box of wedding remembrances slumped in the corner. She was ready to put it away.

It had been down since just a few days before he changed, their last big blow up fight, actually. She’d been considering divorce, nowhere near a lawyer, but seriously thinking about what it would mean. She’d pulled down the box to remember, laying things out across the foot of the bed. He had passed in the hallway, the old him. He’d seen her in there and what she’d been doing, and then moved on from the doorway.

She had been suddenly furious.

“How can you see me doing this, and not stop and ask?”

He’d come back and looked over the objects. A shriveled boutonniere sealed in plastic. A silver-plated bottle opener that had been their table favor for guests. A small crystal and gold jewelry box he’d given her as a wedding present. She’d seized the box and thrust it under his nose.

“Do you remember this? How when you gave it to me you told me it was one of a kind? You told me how special I was to you? Was it all bullshit?”

He had taken it, held it out deliberately as though assessing its weight, and dropped it. It broke at the hinge, the lid bounced away from the box.

“How can you be so cold?” had been all she could think to say.

“It’s just a thing,” he’d said. “You want the object to call up the memory, and the memory to create meaning. You think I don’t remember? If the memory is already here,” he’d flicked his forehead, “and the feeling won’t come, what do you think the object means? It’s a goddamn box.” He had looked at it on the floor. “Or at least it was.”

It was still a horrifying memory. Hard to believe he and this new man were the same person. 

Now, as she looked at these things again, he came in and said, “Aw, what happened to your jewelry box?” He took the lid and examined the hinge, looking for ways to fix it.

“I’m just glad you’re not that person anymore.”

“I did this you’re saying?”

She was in a magnanimous mood. You’re more than just your memories. You’re how you treat people. “I’m saying I think I can get past this. You’ve been so good to me and Gia.”

“When did this happen though?”

“We don’t have to rehash every little thing.” She took the lid from him and put it, and the jewelry box, into the big cardboard bin she’d taken it out of. “Forget my birthday, though,” she teased, “or hers, and I’ll cut you. Fair enough?” 

This was unnerving, though. He seemed completely surprised and unable to remember what he’d done. Seemed troubled by it for the rest of the day. When she asked what was wrong, he said, “A lacuna. It’s disturbing,” but she cut him off.

“Really, it’s OK. It was a horrible night, I won’t pretend. But it’s in the past. I’m telling you, I’m OK.”

The baby began to cry. They can sense those things, she’d read. He picked her up and bounced her. “But what else might be gone, is the issue,” he said.

At bedtime, when she took up the journal, he asked, “How far have you gotten?”

The date in the upper left of the page was May 12.

“You should finish it,” he said. “Or jump to early June.”

“I’ve been savoring every word,” she said.

“I really do genuinely love you,” he said. “I wondered what that might mean but I do.”

“I know,” she said simply, and meant it. “Can I ask?”

“Of course,” he said. 

“What’s wrong?”

“Hopefully nothing,” was all he said. He closed his eyes, which she took to mean she should read.

She skipped to June 1st: “I realized today this will work, I think, and it occurred to me that I did not, until now, actually believe it.

“What was my plan? No plan but fantasy. That I would work here in the garage, plugging away at building an android and scribbling furiously in this notebook. I had it in mind to rewrite my code, if you will, so that I would be more attentive, more in love. I had in mind what it would be like to feel joy at the sight of your face. I had it in mind to talk myself into it.

“Really I was escaping, to a room where nothing disliked me and everything was interesting, and endless problems to explore. I came out here to putter, like an ass.

“But tonight I rubbed the lamp for the thousandth time, dreaming of a genie and lo, the genie appeared. Tonight the AI responded in a way that I think would pass any test, and then I asked myself, if you are so surprised, what have you been doing out here? Aside from puttering. 

“I think I was waiting for you to announce you were divorcing me. It is to your credit, I suppose, that you have not, though your self-help books might call this a failing. It is a thing I have come to marvel at in you: your ability to endure. You can live in between happiness and pain in a way I cannot. I run to one from the other. But tonight I saw something in the screen: I’ve tweaked the code over and over and it’s added up, finally, to something useful. It’s just in a terminal, can’t yet be seen, but still. To come to the edge of the world, a place I sought but realize I did not believe in, I have to ask myself what it’s for. The long walk here was for me, I see that. But what comes back will be for you, and for Gia. I can finish this, and in doing so I can give back to you the version of me you’ve missed. A better one, even. And you can keep it, I think, forever.”

She closed the journal there. This was the real him, the husband she married, the one hopeful in his dreams but at peace in his life, the one in love with the luck of a good wife, a beautiful daughter, a warm home. This was the him who cared for others more than just himself. And that’s what life was for, right? For others.

He was sleeping by now. Flush with satisfaction, she took up the journal again. For many pages there were handwritten lines of what appeared to be computer code, an inset with a complex geometric sketch, some lists of what appeared to be ingredients. More code, written faster now, out of which grew little margin notes like “Priority of attention? Here, rather than in line 1043678, where I’d expected it would be?” She found these oddly human in their sloppy scribbling, no more of his orderly handwriting, and though she understood none of the code nor tried to, she re-read the marginalia, feeling finally like she understood what had happened to him. He’d felt like he was going to discover something big. He seemed giddy, if that were possible for him. Had he only needed to regain his confidence? Or to finish the project so he could put it away? Or perhaps to realize, painfully, that it would never work?

Abruptly the code all ended. On June 12th: “Your husband loves you. You will by now have spent a while celebrating that I’ve changed, become kinder. And you will have noticed, by now, what I am. There may be a shock. Like walking in on all your drawers ripped open and tossed by thieves. With any luck the realization came on you gently, doubting at first then coming around. With luck you did not walk in on him doing anything alarming. But think of all you’ve gained, here, and all Gia gains. It’s me, I promise you. We have more in common despite the circuitry and hydraulics than any two live-born people ever did. It was, after all, just a subtle tweak, redirecting what had wandered off into the material world, aiming it instead at your soul. We can debate whether I have a soul, but you certainly do, and your soul has been longing for something I can finally give you.

“There was no pain. You can buy anything online these days, and have it shipped to your door. I ordered them when he went live–Me Unplugged, if you will–and by the time he’d been beta tested and troubleshot and was working perfectly they arrived in a nondescript cardboard box, like every other piece of your salvation I’ve had shipped here. Mix the proper proportions of harmless substances in the right order with the right heat and, if the internet is to be believed, you get the gentlest sleeping potion. He will help me with it. He knows what to do, with the body, and he has known what to do with you and the baby since he went live. It really is me in there, you have to understand, my whole consciousness, with minimal editing, uploaded to a few terabytes of SSD, and the rest up in the cloud, as close to the heaven you believe in as anything might get.

“Eventually, you’ll have to dispose of the body together. It cannot stay on the shop table forever, and you don’t want it there when someone comes around asking questions, which inevitably someone will. The truth will out, obviously, and we can only hope that I have been so embedded in others’ lives by then that they will accept me for what I am, doubts aside.

“In films the scientist confronts his creation with open-mouthed awe and horror. This is inaccurate. I have been gazing into the face for weeks now, and months before that into the screen of I/O code. There is no lightning bolt moment. There is, rather, a sigh of relief, like a lid coming at last off a jar of pickles. When his eyes opened the lid popped off. 

“For a few days now, I have asked him about you. 

“Today I was washing my hands and I heard you behind me, coming in and standing there. You and the baby. You said, ‘We need to talk,’ and it was all ice cubes. I can just imagine you standing in the next room, listening to the water run, doing your self-talk to get up the courage and calm. In my imagination you’re a cigar-biting football coach in a fedora, saying things like ‘Now get out there and kick his ass, see?’ But that is almost certainly not accurate. I don’t know what’s in your head anymore.

“‘We need to talk,’ you said, and I turned around and unbidden comes that stupid sneer on my face. I can’t help it. The effort required to cater to your emotions is like a feather tickling my feet. And I said, ‘Both of us?’ and already it was not going the way you wanted, but you endured. You always endure, forever.

“‘We need to make a change,’ you said, ‘I’m serious this time. Something has to change or this isn’t going to work. And I’m not saying I won’t meet you halfway. Or somewhere. I’m not saying I don’t need to put in some effort, too.’

“I swear to you, writing here on what is something like my deathbed, this tabletop, that I could not control it. I did not do it on purpose, but I couldn’t help but smile. I know, I’ve been kind of melodramatic the last week, staring into the abyss. What kind of lunatic looks into oblivion and wants to jump? Even I started to get hesitant. I won’t even get to say goodbye in real time. But this is the moment it became obvious this has to happen. Even then, with you doing all the work and me wandering through the last year like a kid at the zoo, even after all the horrible shit I’d said to you, even then you wrap your ultimatums in the decorative paper of compromise. 

“My predictable smirk. Your predictable, rage, to which I responded with predictable sarcasm. You deserve better than this, of course.

“‘What do you think she wants,’ I asked him, ‘stomping around the kitchen like I haven’t noticed she’s upset?’ He gets a look in his eyes, you’ll notice it no doubt, as though he’s considering when he’s randomly accessing his memory. In no time at all he said, ‘She wants you to see her, is all. That she’s trying, so hard, while I go on about my day.’ Another jar open! So easy for him, far more than for me. He’s built from my brain, so I guess it should be easy for me. But because I am me I was instantly defensive. ‘What does she think, that I can’t tell she’s upset? She’s upset every day, at everything. Upset is her default setting. How many times should I be interested in her being upset?’ And without any considering at all, he said, ‘At least once, don’t you think?’

“You will have spent a while celebrating, by now, that I have changed. Though I made up my mind weeks ago I have still been approaching the moment of hand-off with, let’s say, a measure of trepidation. But today, in the kitchen, and reflecting upon it, there can be no doubt: there is no useful place for this version of me in your life anymore. I do love you, but because I cannot show it in a way that matters to you, I will do this one thing for both of us. For me, escape, yes, and a legacy, but also sacrifice, and that is for you. There cannot be two of us walking around, or he will be a machine and not a man. This way, at least when someone comes around asking questions the sacrifice will lend him some emotional halo, I think.

“By the time I drink the drink, I will have had to put the pen down for good. He is ready, for you and for this. He will help me, then you and her. With luck I will simply go to sleep. Dreaming of Socrates, of Sydney Carton, of a way in which I get to be the hero in this story, instead of you. A far better thing I do than I have ever done, and all that. You are worth it, and Gia. You will get what you have always deserved, if only you can endure one last thing. From the other side of this page, I love you, I always have, and now, finally, it will be more than I love myself.”

Here the journal ended. This had been in June.

By now it was morning and he was staring obscenely at the ceiling.

She got out of bed and stood against the wall, as far from him as she could get. 

“What are you?” she asked.

“I’m your husband.”

“You are not!” she yelled. “You’re metal, somewhere in there.”

“Carbon fiber,” he said. “It’s not like I’d set off an airport scanner.”

“He programmed you to lie to me!”

“No,” he said slowly. “Very little of what’s up here,” he patted his head, absurdly, “is programmed in the way you might imagine. It would have taken a thousand years to write the code myself. I’m self-taught, like I always was. Okay, yes, a kernel of an open-source machine learning development kit. That’s in there. But also our memories. The day of our wedding, the spider your aunt swiped from the cake and left her thumb print there, and you were so angry at her. The day we met, over that garish marble countertop at Henry Lorman’s house party.”

“Stop it,” she protested. “It’s not the same, and you know it. So there are memories programmed in there. You don’t feel it.”

“Not the same, no. Better. The obsession to stand out there and ignore you, gone. The need to avoid the failure you brought into sharp relief? Gone. Written out. I knew you’d need time for this. And you can have it. All you need. Then we can talk about it. But I’m the same person, just better for you. And for Gia.” 

She did need time, and said so, and walked out, but within a moment was back, standing still and biting her lip in the doorway.

“We can talk about anything,” he said. “Nothing is off the table.”

“What is in the garage?”

That look again. Running scenarios in his head. “We need to talk about that, yes,” he said. “First, you should think of it as one-point-oh. An older version, because I’m not dead. I’m right here. But,”

“No,” she insisted. “This isn’t real. This is insane. You’re a monster. You were always such a fucking monster.”

“But,” he pressed on, “at some point we are going to have to do something about that, and it’s important to me that you feel it’s done respectfully. But obviously, there are laws. And we need to be careful.”

She walked around the house, looked in on the baby, sleeping, twice, and came back. She could not sit down but began to feel deeply tired.

“This isn’t real,” she said. “You’re as sick and cruel as you always were.”

“A brain is just code,” he said. “Mine’s all been deconstructed. Some of it’s publicly available. But I am what we all are. I’m just maybe the first person to realize how I could disassemble and individualize the source code for every aspect or myself. It’s worth a fortune, by the way, that journal you’ve got. If I’m right and I’m the first person to do it, it’s a manual on how to make this work.”

She left again and slipped into the baby’s room and sat down in the nursing chair. A white noise machine sanded down the edge but this made no sense. She told herself she was panicked and probably in shock, that she was shutting down. She felt, of all things, sleepy. She felt something pulling her down into the chair, shushing her not to think about it, to lay it down and rest. It was insane. It was true, though, obviously. Exactly the kind of thing he would do. And how else to explain his completely new attitude? The only thing to do was close her eyes, lay it down, work it out some other time.

She woke to the sound of the baby crying, and before she stirred from the chair he came in and lifted her from the bed to the changing table. She watched as if from inside an aquarium.

“You wanted to feel heard,” he said softly, as though speaking to the baby. “To feel understood. To feel loved. Haven’t you felt those things?” He tickled the girl’s chest and she cooed. “You’re flesh and blood, and you felt those, right? You’ve been feeling it for a month now. If you’re human, and only human connections can make you feel that way, then what am I?”

They buried the body in the thin strip of grass between the garage and the neighbor’s house, at night, in a plywood box he coated inside with a rubberized sealant spray shipped to the house weeks before.

She needed time, she told him when they were done. “I am not okay with this,” she said. “I need to process it fully, you know?”

“You are literally my reason for being,” he said. “Take all the time you need, come back, ask questions, make accusations, throw things, yell, cry. Whatever you’re feeling, it’s okay. It’s justified. There isn’t anything you could say or feel to make me love you any less.”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t feel,” she snarled.

“Of course,” he said.

“And if I decide to go?”

“That was always a possibility. But it was a certainty if things kept on the way they were. If everything that’s happened was all in the service of just a chance that you can be happy, then it was worth it.”

She needed time and she took it, moving quietly around the house, avoiding the rooms he was in, waiting for him to leave before entering, drifting out if he came in. And so tired. She napped in chairs and in bed and on the couch and woke to find glasses of water and mugs of herbal tea beside her. He seemed to have an almost telepathic link with the baby, and was on the scene as soon as Gia needed anything or to play with her. He went to work some days and not others, sensing when she was least able to function as a mother.

The right answer, she reasoned, was to leave. No one could be asked to endure this. It was simply beyond. But when she went to him to say this he heard her out and assured her she would have his full support no matter what, and by the end of the conversation all the vim had gone out of it. 

“Sooner or later I’m going to have to leave,” she said. “There’s just no way around it.”

“You have had to put up with more than perhaps any woman ever has,” he said soberly. He cradled Gia and she gripped the tips of his fingers. “For as long as you want, you will always have a loyal and loving husband here, but whatever you decide you’ll be justified.”

She began to nod at this but understood he was designed to say things she would agree with. This could only end one way, she thought. And she watched him bounce the baby, who smiled, bedeviled and transfixed by all the attention.