During the dinner, Isobel talked more about her career transition, from rockets to Milton’s Ten Percent Project. “I used to dream about rockets.” Isobel scooped a corn chip into the communal pico de gallo. “Every single night, for months and months. After we pulled the plug on Nimble Aerospace. I had these weird dreams that there was a rocket launch going up any minute, and we’d misplaced the final telemetry. Or we were sending up a rocket, and it looked beautiful and proud shooting up into the air, and then it collided with a jumbo jet. Or worst of all was the dreams where nothing went wrong, rockets just soared for hours, and I sat on the ground watching with tears in my eyes.”

“Wow.” Laurence touched Isobel on the wrist. “I had no idea.”

“So how did you stop dreaming about rockets?” Patricia asked.

“I think I just got bored with it,” Isobel said. “Boredom is the mind’s scar tissue.”

*   *   *

LAURENCE AND SERAFINA went to an organic burger place, locally sourced, etc., and Serafina talked about her emotional robots. “You won’t believe the heuristics. They recognize faces, but also they recognize each face’s habitual emotional states. They are getting the concept of moods. They are having moods. Moods are weird—it’s not just manifesting an emotion, or even sustaining an emotion, it’s like a disease state. Like the way we say you nurse a grudge.”

Serafina seemed to be letting go of the idea that Laurence was on probation. He’d gotten her a nice scarf, that matched her outfit by some fluke. He was practicing active listening. They’d had brilliant, sunburst-in-your-face sex a few times. Laurence did not talk about himself too much. He kept thinking about the Nuclear Option. He tried to judge when would be the optimal time to unleash it: These things work better if you build up to them, rather than as a desperation play. Laurence remembered his Grandma Jools, one of the last times he saw her alive, slipping the ring box into his ski-jacket pocket when nobody else was looking, and whispering in his ear, “Give this to whoever you end up marrying, OK?” And Laurence, still a little kid, realizing this was a solemn request, whispering back that he would do that.

Laurence had a conviction, in his loins, that he deserved to be dumped. Because he took Serafina for granted, while he was working fourteen-hour days on the Project, or because she was too excellent for him. But the whole point of being a grown-up and an uber-hacker is that you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you can get.

After burgers and shakes, he and Serafina went to see the new Tornado Surfer movie, and Patricia phoned just as they were debating what snacks to get from the concession stand. Patricia asked if this was a bad time, and Laurence said sort of.