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.