Some tipsy VCs needed to come up and get their picture taken with Laurence, who was still wearing his harness over his Armani suit, and get some spring rolls from Patricia. And Laurence had to go get these papers notarized or spindled, or whatever you did when you bought a company. Plus Milton kept texting him. He muttered to Patricia that he would see her later, and she barely said, “Sure,” in between pouring drinks and answering nut-allergy questions.

*   *   *

ONE DAY THE Singularity would elevate humans to cybernetic superbeings, and maybe then people would say what they meant.

Probably not, though.

*   *   *

SERAFINA WAS LATE for dinner because her emotional robots had been having a nervous breakdown. All of them. “It took me the whole day to figure out what was bothering them. They just kept wigging out and giving us the hairy eyeball. We looked at everything that had changed in the lab, trying to eliminate every possible factor that could have upset them. Like, was the music different? Did we update their code recently?”

Laurence didn’t rush her. Problem solving and troubleshooting were a source of pleasure for both of them, and narrating the process was the next best thing to doing it. The same neural pathways lit up when you talked your way through the maze as when you actually solved it. Except this time, you were bathed in the glow of having already unraveled the thing.

And yet Laurence was still uncomfortable. For one thing, because Serafina was late, they were stuck sitting at one of the sidewalk tables at the fancy pizza place, with nothing but a tiny heat lamp and three meatballs to insulate them from the fog, until the pizza arrived. For another, he was trying to be a good listener, because of his ongoing “not getting dumped” project, and active listening was hard work. And people were still giving him weird looks, a week after the MatherTec thing.

“We finally figured out that only one thing had changed,” Serafina said. She wore a camisole, but she’d put her bulky jacket back on when they were seated outdoors. The heat lamp made her skin look bronze. “Matt just got a Caddy, and he’d brought it to the office. As soon as we took the Caddy out of WiFi range, the robots calmed down. Somewhat. And before you ask, the Caddy did not have any weird apps installed on it. It was fresh from the store.”

“WiFi range. So they were getting something from the Caddy, on their wireless network, that upset them.” Laurence pulled out his own Caddy and glanced over it, as if he’d suddenly spot some brand-new feature. It still looked like a big guitar pick with a curved base, covered with aluminum. The Caddy was scanning for open networks, the same as always, but it wouldn’t link up with other machines on the same network without being instructed to do so. Unless …