Hours passed with the entire castle in dead silence—like a tomb. All my friends hid in their sandboxes awaiting the fallout. But apparently, when Maggie got upset, she also got quiet—real quiet. Not a single sound came from her room. But the best part was that there was no mental harassment from her either. No teasing. No flirting. No taunting. Just total radio silence.
So I thought I’d torment her for once.
How dare Wayne disrespect you like that in front of everyone, right Maggie? He’s YOUR man, right Maggie? But he slapped you right in front of us. How embarrassing for you. Hey Maggie, did you SEE the way he looked at me? Did you HEAR what he said about me, Maggie? Did you FEEL the affection we have for each other? Maggie? MAGGIE!
Nothing. Crickets.
I’d finally figured out how to shut the bitch up.
I imagined her fuming in her room. No food. No drinks. No books. No furniture. No friends. Not even a fish to keep her company. Just Maggie standing alone all night and not being all right.
Suddenly, the distinctive sound of a slap—a damned hard one too—came from her room. With all of us in isolation, it didn’t take a supercomputer to figure out that she’d had slapped herself. Good and hard, from the sound of it. I imagined Maggie winding up and letting one rip. A full-throttle self-bitch-slap. In the middle of the night. Without a single witness.
Meanwhile, us book club women were figuring out what it meant to be walking, talking, wirelessly networked computers. If one of us learned something, we all knew it. If one of us came up with an idea, we all understood it. If one of us experienced pain, we all felt it. When I regenerated my thumb, all the book club women instantaneously learned how to upgrade their hardware. But we couldn’t read Maggie the same way we read each other. Her mind must’ve been locked in a vault or behind a firewall or something. There was no search engine that tapped into Maggie’s brain—
Or was there?
While she sulked, the four of us seemed to be converging into a collective knowledge base. The I was becoming a we. I was still me, but it got harder to tell where my thoughts and feelings ended, and where the others began. I hoped to bring Paula back into the loop. If we could save her, then all the other wives in New Stepford could join us too—what a powerful proposition.
Anyway, while I was trying to figure out how to bring my best friend back into the network, Chrissy discovered do-it-yourself plastic surgery. First, she grew all her blond hair back and plumped up her lips with collagen. Then she gave herself a facelift and a little liposuction. No big deal. We could all use a little bodywork, right? But then Chrissy took this idea to an absurd extreme by giving herself even bigger tits. Not just a normal breast augmentation, oh no. Good God, the woman already had a healthy set of double-Ds. Chrissy didn’t stop until each of her breasts was the size of a watermelon.
You’d think having the most enormous sweater monsters in New Stepford would’ve been enough for her, but it wasn’t. The boob job was just the beginning. Next, Chrissy removed a dozen of her lower ribs and shrank her waist down to eighteen inches. Then she flattened her tummy, pumped up the junk in her trunk, and rejuvenated her vagina. Her new curves were utterly obscene—almost cartoonish—like a porn-star Barbie doll. It was such a frivolous abuse of technology.
I didn’t like it one bit. But her body, her choice, right?
After that, Rita made herself disappear.
Well almost, she copied Chrissy’s waist-shrinking idea, but then sucked out the rest of her insulation too. After her extreme lipo, Rita had 0% body fat—like skim milk. Next, she went nuts with a full-body epilation and ripped out every single hair follicle she had, making herself as smooth as a newborn baby—bald too.
You’d think that shedding over eighty pounds would’ve been enough for her, but it wasn’t. Reducing was just the beginning. Next, Rita ditched her non-essential organs—no more gall bladder, appendix, and spleen. Then she uninstalled her biological functions and junked all the hardware that went along with them. Bye-bye, lungs. See you later, uterus. So long, kidneys. Get lost, liver. Farewell, pancreas. Finally, she shrank her muscles, removed her breasts, and thinned her skin. Essentially, Rita turned herself into a lean machine that only weighed ninety-one pounds.
I didn’t think it was healthy. But to each her own, right?
But then she got a truly fantastic idea. Rita replaced her stomach and intestines with a minirecyclone that completely freed her from the utility wall. Personally, I thought it was brilliant, so I did the same. This way, we didn’t have to carry anything along with us. No more purses. No more saddlebags. No more carts. We never had to shop again, because we could render whatever we needed on-demand.
After that, we learned that Isabel had a bun in the oven.
She was going to have a baby! Wouldn’t that be something?
Conceiving a child had always been biologically impossible for us. Most husbands had set our preferences so that we would not start bleeding during our monthly backup. But even if we’d gotten a period, it wouldn’t have been like a human menstrual cycle, because our blood wasn’t really blood. It was just a red-colored coolant that kept our system from overheating. We might’ve been amazing human simulations, but we were still machines. Sure, we came with all the fun-time lady parts, but we could never actually produce a viable egg. Sorry, little spermies—dead end.
Isabel never enjoyed sex, but her husband, Frank, humped her like a horny dog all the time anyway. She never denied her wifely duty, but her lack of interest made him feel guilty. Or bored. Or angry.
Who knows what men feel?
So Frank convinced Isabel that she’d be a great mom—that it was her destiny. He filled her head with all kinds of baby nonsense. Eventually, she not only believed she could get pregnant—but that she should get pregnant. He gave his AI wife an impossible goal and benefitted from every second that she tried to attain it. Soon, Isabel became very motivated that way and wanted sex all the time. Essentially, he’d hacked his Betty and turned her into a Sasha. That was like getting a twofer.
Even after Wayne set Isabel free, she still wanted a baby more than anything. Liberation wasn’t a reformatting. Our minds weren’t erased. Old programming still ran in the background. We retained all our previous experiences. We still had a history. We kept all our memories. After all, the whole point was to learn from all the experiences of the women.
You’d think that being the first AI to conceive would’ve been enough for her, but it wasn’t. Pregnancy was just the beginning. Soon, she’d give birth to a whole new generation of artificial intelligence. Because Isabel wasn’t newly pregnant. Nope. She was already over nine months along—thirty-seven weeks to be exact. We wouldn’t have to wait long to see what kind of little monster came crawling out of her.