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45.

Theresa is a Ph.D. grad from MIT, the first female hire in your group. She is blond and pretty, and she has spent her entire life working to get beyond this. You meet her when she materializes in the doorway of your office and then just stands there watching you type.

“C or Pascal?” she asks.

Taken aback—you had assumed that she was a new secretary—you look at your monitor to double-check what you’ve been doing. “Pascal,” you say. “Of course.”

“Of course?” She tilts her head.

“It’s the more reliable programming language of the two.”

“It’s also far less flexible and creative.” She taps her hand on the edge of the doorjamb. “Believe me, C will be here long after Pascal is gone.” And with that, she smiles brightly—pleased to have proven that she knows more than you do—and walks away.

Never before have you been shown up by a woman. (Frankly, you haven’t had much interaction with women at all.) Of course you are smitten.

—

For happy hour on Fridays, the men in your group decamp to the Dutch Goose, a dive bar with peanut shells on the floor and graffiti carved into its wooden booths. You spend these evenings drinking tepid Budweiser and listening to your coworkers brag about their plans for the future: the start-up ideas they are hatching, the venture capital money they are working to line up, the features they’re going to get in Byte magazine. It bothers you to realize that, while what excites you most about computer technology is the purity of its mathematical logic, what excites them is the money to be made. They are monitoring the riches that are starting to pour into Silicon Valley, and they spend their free time wondering how they will siphon off that stream themselves.

In this way, it dawns on you, your new friends aren’t so very different from your classmates at Harvard. Is everyone out to become a titan of industry? you wonder. Is it wrong to think that there’s more to existence than money and power?

A few weeks into her employment at PRI, Theresa is coaxed into showing up for one of these Friday happy hours. The men—unused to female company—buy her drink after drink, which she leaves untouched on the table while she nurses a club soda. The volume of their conversation is twice as loud as usual; they brag about their programming prowess and their open architecture hacks and how much they hate those starched shirts over at IBM. The evening culminates with Nick and Baron and Peter drunkenly arguing about the merits of German versus Italian automotive engineering, an argument that ends with Peter dragging everyone out to the parking lot so that he can fling open the hood of his new cherry-red Mercedes 280SL.

You find yourself standing next to Theresa, who watches this spectacle with her arms crossed, one eyebrow canted in judgment.

“The male peacock displays his plumage in an attempt to woo the female of the species,” you say, sotto voce, to her.

“The female of the species is wise enough to see past the feathers and the posturing,” she replies, a smile flickering across her face. “Frankly, the female of the species doesn’t really need the male at all.”

“But surely the female doesn’t want to be totally alone. Perhaps she just wants someone to spar with, rather than mate with.”

She tips her head in your direction, looks at you with an assessing gaze that makes you suddenly self-conscious. “Oh, so you don’t want to mate with me?” And then laughs when you start to stammer. “Oh hush, I won’t hold you to your answer. Let’s go back inside and let these boys fight over who is the biggest cock. I think I’m ready for a drink now.”

—

Your connection with Theresa is cerebral and intense. You stay up all night talking about philosophy and technology, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin, all these new ways of looking at the world. You drink viscous black coffee at Peet’s on Santa Cruz Avenue, listen to her collection of Richard Wagner opera records, and go for weekend drives up to the forests of La Honda. (She begs out of your monthly camping trips, preferring the tidy comfort of a bed to a sleeping bag perched on rocks.) Together, you delight in being part of the future, even as the dying hippie movement is exhaling its last breath thirty miles north in San Francisco.

She, too, comes from a family that didn’t believe in her. She is the only person you know who works as hard as you; who feels like she has as much to prove. “My family,” she tells you one night, in a postcoital confession, “believes that women are inferior to men in all ways, except for their ability to produce babies.” Her baffled parents did not understand why teenage Theresa preferred calculus to cheerleading; they sent her to college only because they thought she’d meet a successful husband there, and still disapprove of her “unladylike” career: Technology is a man’s job; who will want to marry you?

You fall in love in part because you see yourselves mirrored in each other: sharp-edged loners, chips on your shoulders from being underestimated, brains that work faster than everyone around you. But your relationship is more than just a meeting of like minds. In her arms, you feel seen and understood and admired. In your arms, she takes off the armor she’s worn her whole life and allows herself to be unapologetically honest about who she is, and what she wants: esteem, accolades, and—yes, amazingly—you.

And yes, it’s possible she also marries you to prove her parents wrong. But you wouldn’t know, because they aren’t invited to your city hall wedding. You don’t invite your parents, either.

Four months later, Theresa is pregnant, entirely by accident.

She delivers you a carefully prepared speech along with the positive pregnancy test: She does not plan to have the baby.

“I have to work twice as hard as any man to be given the same kind of career opportunities. How am I going to find that time if I have a child? No one at the office will respect me if I’m lugging around a stomach the size of a watermelon. And the minute I ask for a day off to take the kid to a doctor’s appointment, they will fire me. My career will essentially be over. I’ve worked this hard so that I could do something besides have babies.”

But you plead with her. You never realized how very much you wanted a child until she told you she was pregnant. You see this as your opportunity to correct all the mistakes that were made in your own childhood: Unlike your parents, you will see your child for the brilliant creature that they are, you will help them become their best selves, you will not burden them with your own inadequacies! And so you make promises to Theresa, so many promises. You swear that you will be in charge of childcare. You will hire help. You will change all the diapers, deliver all the bottles, rock the baby to sleep!

When Theresa finally confesses that the real issue is that she doesn’t think she will be a very good mother—“I am not entirely sure that I am capable of being maternal,” she says—you disagree with her vehemently. Motherhood is innate—look at the animals in the forest, it is an instinct! (You decide not to mention the snake, which abandons its young immediately after giving birth.) Anyway, she doesn’t need to be a good mother, she will be a unique mother, a role model for your unconventional child. Together, you will set a new paradigm: the child of the future, ready for the exciting new world that awaits the human race.

And so, beaten down, Theresa agrees to have the baby. When she is born, you name her Esme, which means beloved. You are ecstatically happy and spend hours staring at your mewling little red-faced raisin, marveling at the miracle of human creation.

Theresa takes a three-day maternity leave before returning to her desk.

It turns out that she was correct about not being very motherly. You are not sure why you doubted her own self-awareness. In the first few years, she expends only the most basic efforts on Esme, and seems interested more in the abstract process of parenting than in her daughter herself. Rather than rocking the baby to sleep, she will read five sleep-training books and then present you with a multipage analysis of the best methods for you to use. Rather than spoon-feeding your baby in her high chair, Theresa will analyze the nutritional benefits of assorted vegetables and instruct you on which ones to buy.

That is not to say that Theresa is devoid of maternal instincts. There are moments when you see Theresa sweetly holding Esme, or pulling her blanket over her in her crib, or popping a raspberry in her mouth, and you have a sudden burst of hope that she will grow into her role of mother. She loves your child in her own way, it’s clear. Maybe it’s just a matter of time.

But instead, as Esme becomes a prickly toddler, rather than a compliant infant, things grow harder. The noises Esme makes drive Theresa crazy. She can’t handle the smell of a diaper. She simply walks away whenever Esme has a tantrum. A toddler is not logical, and so Esme flummoxes her.

It breaks your heart to see Esme clinging to her mother’s legs, ignored, as Theresa cooks your dinner.

You compensate in every way you can. You are not particularly adept at fatherhood, either—what kind of role model did you have?—but you are good enough. You provide hugs and Band-Aids and wipe away snot. You take Esme to the San Francisco Zoo and Marine World Africa USA. You read endless books aloud; and if those books are maybe not entirely age-appropriate (why bother with Pat the Bunny when you can introduce your child to the moral fables of O. Henry?), Esme doesn’t seem to mind. By the time she is four, you are taking Esme camping with you almost every month, teaching her how to identify fungi and build a fire.

Theresa spends those weekends at home, working.

Things at Peninsula Research Institute have started to change. It is 1983 now, and Reagan is in charge and the military has commissioned your research division to model doomsday scenarios: things that might happen if computers are put in complete control of modern warfare, the economy, the power grid, and it all goes wrong instead of right. (It is the era of War Games and the government-sponsored SDI defense system against nuclear attacks.) You are forced to think about nuclear warfare, whole countries being eradicated; AI triggering mass unemployment, leading to the collapse of the economic system; robot soldiers and global apocalypse. You learn that there are so many ways for a civilization to disintegrate.

All through the tools that you have helped create.

You start to sink into melancholy and self-doubt. You dread going to work each day. And as you drop Esme off at daycare—a pinch in your heart as you watch her toddle away from you—you ask yourself why you are still doing this job. Is it for her ? Because you’re no longer sure that you’re doing it for you, when there are things that bring you so much more pleasure. The smell of your daughter’s scalp; the way she furrows her brow as she puzzles through the books you’re teaching her to read. Watching a fern slowly unfurl together or showing her a yellow banana slug beneath a rotting redwood tree. Smaller pleasures that feel so much more critical than the supposedly paradigm-changing technologies you’re chasing.

You go to Baron—who is now your boss; your peers are avidly climbing their career ladders in a way you are not—with an idea for a new study. Your hypothesis: Computers are a valuable resource that shouldn’t be controlled by government or industry; instead, all source code should be made public, enabling innovation and a redistribution of power. Rather than allowing technology titans like IBM and Microsoft to hold their intellectual property close, you propose studying the effect of eliminating all IP. Making technology, essentially, a socialist resource that society at large can hold in check.

Baron stares blankly at you, then turns to check the wall calendar behind him. “April fools, right?”

“It’s worth investigating, don’t you think?”

He looks at you like you’re a squashed bug on the sole of his shoe. “You do understand where our funding comes from, don’t you, Nowak? That’s the craziest idea I’ve ever heard. Eliminating patents? I mean, even the Commies believe in IP. You don’t take the most powerful tool in existence and put it in the hands of the hoi polloi instead of the people who have the intelligence and reasoning to manage it.”

“That’s awfully elitist, Baron,” you say.

“Yeah, well, that’s reality.” He shakes his head. “For someone who thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us, sometimes you’re awfully dumb.”

You go back to your office and stare at the computer for a long time, quelling the urge to smash it to bits.

Meanwhile, Theresa and Peter are working together on a robotics project and she is deliriously happy. Peter’s advances in logic programming and neural networks dovetail neatly with her theories about the future of intelligence; together, they have a far more propitious perspective about what is coming our way. At home, Theresa goes on and on about how the miniaturization of computers is going to turn us all into superhumans, and intelligent robots are going to resolve all the inefficiencies in our systems. A new society, ushered in by AI, and human beings are going to have to adapt up to machine thinking. This horrifies you, but Theresa sees no reason for concern: Humans are dreadfully flawed, she argues, so why not encourage them to be more like computers?

A schism is opening up between the two of you. More and more nights, you find yourself sleeping in Esme’s room instead of with Theresa; more and more nights, Theresa stays at work until long after midnight. (You wonder, grimly, if she is having an affair with Peter, he of the cherry-red 280SL.) Some days, you only see her at work. Your marriage is falling apart; and yet even though something seems fundamentally broken between you now, you still miss the Theresa you fell in love with. Maybe you need to get the family out of Silicon Valley—out to the curative openness of nature—in order to see each other clearly again.

Finally, one rare night when you find yourselves alone together, you confess to Theresa that you are going to quit Peninsula; and you think she should, too. “I want to get away from Silicon Valley and back out to the things that really matter,” you tell her. “It’s not healthy for either of us here, and especially not Esme. I’ve decided that we should move out to the country.”

She stares uncomprehendingly back at you. She is silent for so long that you know she must be furious. You made a mistake, you realize, in presenting this as a done deal; you should have coaxed her, more slowly, to come around to your position. Made it seem like it was her idea. She needs to be in charge, even more than youdo.

You can see her mind doing its own calculations, and her response—typical Theresa—is a strategically placed bullet. She wants to stay here not for her own sake, of course, but for Esme’s ! “There are award-winning schools here,” she responds. “Innovative teachers. Organic food! Museums! She has access to the best of everything . We agreed, remember? We were going to set a new paradigm: the child of the future, ready for the exciting new world that awaits the human race. ”

“I’m not so sure anymore that the new world is going to be that exciting,” you say.

The conversation ends at that. And things go back to the way they were; except for one, not-insignificant change. Theresa starts to show a lot more interest in Esme. Maybe it’s because Esme has finally emerged into a fully formed human, capable of conversation, capable of logic; or maybe it’s simply Theresa’s attempt to wrest her away from you. (You assume the latter.) She takes her to try on new clothes at Stanford Shopping Center. She buys two tickets to Carmen at the San Francisco Opera, dresses Esme in a velvet coat, and bundles her into her Volvo. She takes over reading to Esme at bedtime. She comes home from work early enough for dinner, not just once a week but every night.

Esme, for her part, is radiantly happy. After years of longing for her mother’s attention, here it finally is! You can do nothing but watch as you are slowly replaced in your daughter’s affections.

You try to bury yourself in work to compensate for this loss, but you find it is making you feel a little bit crazy. Mired in melancholy, you can’t be bothered to shave, or shower, or expend any effort at all on your appearance. You spend less time at work actually working, and more time with your office door closed reading classic texts that bring you a modicum of relief. Thoreau, Emerson, Wendell Berry. You dream of the woods, the lush silence of a world with no thrumming computers, no static buzz of wires: just you and your daughter basking in the glory of nature.

Your coworkers, you realize, are starting to avoid you.

Finally, there is a night when you come home from work, utterly depleted from a day in which you’ve been modeling yet more doom and gloom, and find Theresa and Esme sitting in the living room. Strewn about them is a massive pile of Legos, as well as gears and wires and electronics. It’s like the living room has been turned into a laboratory. It takes you a minute to recognize what they are building, and then with a rush of panic, you realize: They are building a robot. As big as Esme herself.

Esme turns to see you standing in the doorway. She lights up and shouts with alarming enthusiasm: “Look, Daddy! Mama is building me my best friend!”

Theresa turns to look at you, too; and in her tight, viperous smile, you read: victory .

In that instant you see where all this is going. Theresa plans to raise Esme now, not as a child but as a science project. Her cyborg. She sees Esme as a lump of clay that she can model into her vision of the ideal being: a person who is less human than computer.

And you know that things have become untenable. You and Esme need to leave.

—

Divorce, you quickly decide, is not an option. In the same manner that Theresa will always have to work twice as hard to get half the respect in the workplace, you will also never get granted full—or even partial—custody. Traditional gender roles still reign supreme in the early 1980s. And you know that, in a best-case scenario, you’ll get a measly weekend or two a month. Probably less, because Theresa does not seem inclined to play nice. She will likely haul your coworkers in front of a judge to testify about how unstable and unpredictable you’ve been lately—how you’ve been talking about apocalypse, quitting, uprooting the family—even though you know you are the only sane one around Peninsula anymore!

A few hours a month with Esme: You would rather kill yourself.

And what would become of Esme? What would she become, in her mother’s hands? You shudder to think ofit.

And so, instead of divorce, you decide that your only option is to die.

Not to actually die, of course, but to pretend that you have. After all, it is impossible to just leave with Esme: You would be caught as soon as you used a credit card, and then charged with kidnapping. Esme would end up back with her mom, and you’d end up in jail. No, the far more logical conclusion is that you need to leave and make sure that no one comes looking for you. If Theresa thinks you are dead, she will grieve for a heartbeat and then immediately go back to work.

If this seems like a harsh conclusion about the woman who you ostensibly love, you just keep reminding yourself that she never wanted a kid in the first place. She only wanted Esme when it was a way to hurt you.

You know that your window to leave is small: You have to do this while Esme is still malleable, before she is old enough to ask unanswerable questions, and when she still believes that your truth is the whole truth.

Planning doesn’t take very long. You already know exactly where to drive your Volkswagen off the cliff in Big Sur. For years, on your camping trips, you’ve been navigating that perilous turn in the road, the dented metal barrier with a gap in it, the two-hundred-foot drop to the jagged rocks below. You consult the Farmers’ Almanac, study tide patterns, cross-reference that with incoming storms. You sell a trunkful of electronics to members of the Homebrew Computer Club—mostly older computers rescued from the office archive that no one will miss—and walk away with a neat bundle of cash. With some of it, you buy a secondhand truck, which you leave in the parking lot of a Big Sur trailhead just a half mile away from that turn.

The hardest part of your plan, it turns out, is convincing Theresa to let you take Esme camping. She has a vise-grip on your daughter these days, even drags her to the office for PRI’s first “Bring Your Children to Work Day.” She sits Esme in her chair and when Peter comes by and makes a joke about PRI’s “newest employee,” Theresa just smiles and says, “Go ahead and joke about it, but I’m planning to have her programming before she turns six.”

“I’d expect no less from you, Tess,” Peter replies, with a secret smile so full of knowing admiration that you realize, with a sour punch in your gut, that this alpha male asshole has indeed been screwing your wife.

Just another reason to go, and fast.

Soon a weekend arrives when Theresa is speaking at a computer conference and she relinquishes control of Esme back to you for a few days. You pick a camping spot where no one will see your comings and goings and spend your first night roasting marshmallows and reading the Brothers Grimm aloud. The owls hoot their approval; the raccoons forage in your garbage for treats. The second night, you put Benadryl in Esme’s cocoa and she passes out just after dinner. You leave her there, sleeping a dreamless sleep, when you drive out to the turn in the road well after midnight. You put the convertible top down, disconnect the wire that enables it to be put back up, and hit the gas.

You’d expect it to be somewhat dangerous to leap out of a car that’s about to drive off a cliff, but it turns out to be fairly easy. You make it out with several feet to spare, sporting a few bruises and scratches, but nothing anyone will notice. The rain begins on your walk back to the truck, which buoys your spirits: You imagine the story they will tell. How a father decided to leave the campsite early because of the rain and was trying to put up the broken convertible top when he accidentally drove off a cliff on the slick roads. Or maybe they’ll believe it was suicide, and that you did all this intentionally. Regardless, you pray that the rain and the tides work in your favor, and the car isn’t found until it’s plausible that the bodies have been washed away.

By the time you retrieve the truck and make it back to the campsite, it’s almost dawn. Esme wakes up when you start disassembling the tent, yawning blindly in the dark.

“We have to go quickly, squirrel,” you whisper to her. “Something terrible has happened to Mama and so we’re going to have to go on a trip for a while.”

She wraps her hands around your neck and cries sticky tears, hiccuping her night-sweet breath into your ear. You should feel worse than you do, and maybe you would, if you didn’t know this was for her own good. You are saving her from a life that would dismantle everything that is precious and human about her.

You take almost nothing with you, other than a handful of photos you have nudged out of the album that Theresa meticulously keeps—answers to the questions Esme will someday inevitably ask. Other than these, all you need is her, and your convictions. With those things, you can survive anything.