Thin Skin

Thin Skin

By M. Luke McDonell

When the small fire started exactly in the right place, when the sprinklers failed to activate, when the entire robot manufacturing facility in Fremont burned to the ground–Talia would be the prime suspect.

After all, she’d been very publicly humiliated.

In one dreadful day, Andrew forced her out of the company she’d built, signed a contract with the Department of Defense to repurpose her diminutive robots for use as paratroopers instead of paramedics, served her with divorce papers, and moved in with Natasha, a shifty-eyed UX designer.

A surreal version of her ruined life emerged in the lurid prose of the Silicon Valley gossip blogs in the following weeks. She moved into her sister’s spare room to avoid reporters, and though she promised Beth she wouldn’t read “that trash,” she did. Andrew–the handsome venture capitalist with an incredible knack for picking winners. Talia–his wife, a sweet nerd with a good idea and no business sense. Not the youngest person to earn two simultaneous PhDs from Stanford. Not the author of over a hundred articles and white papers. Not an engineer, a founder, a CTO. Not the inventor of the sensor skin that allowed Brigid robots to safely interact with humans. The photos weren’t of her working in the lab, but getting married in an unflattering white dress, literally standing in Andrew’s shadow as the sun set into the Caribbean Sea.

Her title wasn’t Dr.–it was Mrs.

“Andrew didn’t fall in love with me,” she called to her sister, who was moving clothes from the washer to the drier in the laundry room off the kitchen. “He fell in love with my robot.”

Beth leaned back into the doorway. “Ya think? Tal, that guy is a snake. No one wanted to say anything because you were happy but–ick.” She gave an exaggerated shudder.

Talia nudged baby Joey away from the cat food bowl with her foot. Her nephew just learned to crawl and the house was his salad bar.

The blogs and tabloids were partially right. She might be brilliant but she certainly wasn’t very smart. Andrew’s power grab caught her completely off guard. Though he did “shatter her world,” and leave her “lost and devastated,” it wasn’t because their “fairytale romance” was over. He wanted to turn their robot progeny into killers.

Talia wouldn’t let this happen. But what could she do? She owned a number of key patents, but she’d licensed them to the company and lost the lawsuit to stop production. Andrew, a lawyer as well as an MBA, had obviously been planning this for years, and, knowing her quiet temper, made it clear that if the company was hacked, the tires on his new BMW slashed, the headquarters destroyed by a meteorite–he’d make sure Talia was the prime suspect.

She propped her ipod against the fruit bowl to get it off the petri dish that was the kitchen counter and swiped through stories of herself as a spurned wife and childless woman in her early 40’s, discarded for someone younger. The scientist in her raged against the erroneous thesis…then, suddenly, the cliché narrative broke apart into bits of data. Data she could use to tell not their story, but her own.  

What would this pitiful ex-wife do next?

Based on movies she’d half-watched with her sister, there were only two paths. In one, she went off the rails and extracted revenge. Houses broken into. Pets murdered. Natasha stabbed. In the other, she moped around for a while, weepy and penitent, wondering where things went wrong. Eventually, she’d realize she’d let herself go. She wasn’t as pretty or thin as she used to be. Then, she’d pull herself together. Work out. Style her hair. Buy new clothes. Plan for the day she’d “accidently” run into Andrew. His jaw would drop as she sashayed past on Louboutin stilettos to embrace her soul mate–a man richer, taller, and better-looking than he. Cue the upbeat indie-pop song. Roll credits.

Happily ever after–not jail. That’s the ending she wanted.

Cold, calculating Dr. Talia Akerman was the stabby option, the one the reporters couldn’t know existed. Mrs. Andrew Stern, option two, was the personality they’d invested in. She’d be too preoccupied with dieting and finding another man and to even think of revenge, and she’d lay a breadcrumb trail on social media to prove it.

Was she willing to sacrifice a year to do this? That’s when the first Brigid military robots would go into production, and the minimum amount of time a spurned wife would need to travel from devastation to true love.

Talia grinned as she opened the grocery delivery app on the iPad and ordered a dozen pints of chocolate ice cream, then queued up Hope Floats on Netflix.

“Beth, I gotta go. See you…soon.”

She dropped a Cheerio on the floor for baby Joey and headed home.

#

The Menlo Park Sheriff’s department and the FBI arrived right on schedule. 11 months after the divorce, and 48 hours after the factory burned and Andrew lost the government contract.

Talia was utterly transformed. A beautiful, impossible creature–the living embodiment of women’s magazine’s top 10 lists of how to get over your ex-husband and get on with your life.

She answered the door wearing a confident smile, black yoga pants and purple sports bra. No need to hide her body–she worked out three times a week with a personal trainer. She’d lost ten pounds and gained a flat tummy and jiggle-free arms. Her hair, longer than it had ever been, was newly blonde with whimsical pink streaks. She’d gotten Lasik to correct her vision and thrown away her trademark tortoise-shell-framed glasses months ago.

The FBI agent, a young man with wavy black hair and a tie that hinted at an artistic side, glanced at the papers in his hand, then back at her, perplexed.

“Talia Stern?”

He studied a black and white photo of her, years out of date. She realized she looked almost feral back then, with long bangs and a growl that wasn’t quite a smile.

“It’s Akerman now, but yes, that’s me. Can I help you?”

“I’m Agent Endo. I have a warrant to search these premises, your automobile, your person, and to seize all electronic devices.”

Talia gave a mascara-lashed double blink. “Why?”

Agent Hido started to apologize, then stopped himself. “I can’t say.”

Talia examined the warrant. Everything appeared to be in order. “Is this something about the company? I’m not involved anymore.”

He shrugged, and one of the sheriffs, a woman she recognized from the gym, raised her eyebrows in a silent, “Sorry about this, I’m just doing my job.”

“Come on in then,” Talia said. “Pardon the mess.”

She had banana bread in the oven. Peels and flour littered the counter, and the whole house smelled heavenly.

She did her best to look properly distraught when they took her laptop, festooned with post-its helpfully supplying passwords to accounts on Gmail, Netflix, Instacart, Amazon, Facebook, OkCupid, and Instagram. Talia hadn’t believed people actually put passwords right on the computer until a visit to her sister’s chaotic house–and there they all were. Her sister, juggling Joey while trying to feed the three-year-old and keep the cats off the counter, had laughed. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached to my neck, she’d said.

When the investigators logged in, they’d read the story Talia had written. It began with an ice cream delivery and ended with a photo on Facebook of her finishing the Divas 5k in a pink tutu. 175 likes–and hearts from Joel, her new boyfriend.

As the investigators took her electronic toys, they also took good, long looks at her home –as well as a few surreptitious photos. Self, Elle Décor, Martha Stewart Living on the coffee table. A bed obviously shared by two people. Badly-constructed planter boxes in the backyard with strawberries planted too close together and ripe tomatoes dangling from metal cages.

No articles about flammable lithium ion batteries. She’d read those at a public library in Gilroy. No records of bitcoin payments to a manufacturer in China. Just an ordinary, happy home inhabited by a woman who was clearly not a robot-obsessed genius on a mission.

#

When the fire was blamed on a faulty electrical panel igniting the batteries (instead of the other way around) and not arson, and her electronic devices returned with apologies, Talia could go back to being her old self. She retrieved her welding equipment from her sister’s garage, unpacked the back issues of The New England Journal of Medicine and Robotics, cut her hair and dyed it brown.

Joel, to her surprise, wasn’t bothered by the changes. He laughed and said she looked like an elf, then took an issue of Robotics into the bathroom.

Also to her surprise, she found that some of the costume pieces of modern femininity she’d worn ironically actually fit. Her mother, a prickly defense attorney, raised Talia to believe that feminine traits signaled weakness to male colleagues. Talia took her words as gospel and used them, with the exception of that awful wedding dress, as a “how-to” manual for her life.

Now that she’d spent a year living her mother’s nightmare, there were things she wasn’t willing to give up. She enjoyed getting pedicures. Some dresses were comfortable. Yoga cleared her mind. And she cared about the garden, battling the slugs and snails that liked strawberries as much as she did. Though she hated to admit it, the top 10 lists worked. The smile she’d given the investigators had been genuine.

She lay in the hammock in the backyard in the August heat, jotting down design ideas for the next generation of Brigid paramedic robots. They’d have even more sensitive skin, thanks to a flash of insight she had after getting pricked nastily while trimming the rose bush. The skin needed to be thinner, not thicker. Easily damaged. That’s how’d the robots would learn to interact with humans. Carefully, logically, aware of their own limitations. And because of that, humans might trust them.

At the moment, no one trusted thick-skinned Andrew. He’d lost the investors millions. The blogs had turned on him. Natasha would move out once the money was gone. Maybe. Humans weren’t as logical as robots. Some idiot venture capitalist might fund him. If Andrew tried to rebuild, she’d be ready. She pulled up Facebook and posted a photo of her tan feet intertwined with the rope of the hammock, pink toenails sparkling. So happy was the caption. A minute later she had 47 likes.

The next time Andrew’s factory burned, she wouldn’t even be questioned.

M. Luke McDonell’s work has appeared in Shoreline of Infinity, The Overcast, The Arcanist, Perihelion, New Reader magazine and more. Additionally, she produces the SF in SF podcast, a monthly author reading event.

By day, she is a senior visual designer. By night she writes and helps run SomaFM internet radio. Follow her on X @Mlukemc and learn more at mlukemcdonell.wordpress.com

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