About a month after they started dating, Serafina took Laurence into her sanctum. She had to sign him in, and he had to surrender his ID to the man at the desk, who printed a badge with Laurence’s fresh photo on it. She led him down an elevator, along a sloping hallway, through two keypad-secured doors, and on into the lab. Inside, eyes watched Laurence from every wall and flat surface. Two of them belonged to bearded humans, who said “Yo,” and then looked back down at their workstations, but the rest all belonged to robots in various states of assembly. Serafina barely introduced Laurence to the two humans but took her time showing him the robots, who were animatronic cartoon characters or animals or a few mannequin heads. “This is Frank, he laughs a lot. Watch out for Barbara, she flirts but she’s got a mean streak.” The robots seemed to like Laurence, especially Donald the Cactus.

By now, they’d been dating five months. And lately, every time Serafina looked at her phone while they were hanging out, or stared into space, or bit her thick lower lip in the middle of a conversation, Laurence braced himself. This was it. She was going to dump him. Then the moment would pass. Laurence was sure she was just waiting for the right moment, or the ideal pretext. Every time he woke up next to her, he wondered if this was the last time her breath would warm the back of his neck and her breasts would graze either side of his spine.

He was not going to lose her. He had aced bigger challenges than this. He was going to think of something, take extreme measures, even deploy the Nuclear Option early if he had to. He was going to find a way to hold on to this amazing girl.

*   *   *

LAURENCE’S FACE BEAMED from the front of Anya’s Caddy as he prepared to jump out of the autocopter, onto the roof deck 172 feet below. That same image of Laurence would be leering from computers all over town right now, thanks to a big article about him in Computron Newsly, which had just gone live twenty minutes ago and was now being aggregated and repackaged by every other Silicon Valley outlet. Between MeeYu and Caddies and all the CySpec-wearing geeks, Laurence’s shit-eating grin would be on everybody’s retinas. The gist of the article was “Laurence Armstead, Wunderkind,” and it was all about his awesome quest to Save the World, and how he had harnessed Milton Dirth’s unlimited cash to gather the world’s smartest people (people like Anya, in fact). The text of the article could be “lorem ipsum” as far as Laurence was concerned; the main point was harnessing the echo chamber in his favor, at the exact moment that he was about to abseil down to that roof deck.