The Housewife Assassin's Killer App (25 page)

“Your girlfriend?” I turn to Carl. “What is Trisha talking about?”
 

Carl shrugs. “My date for tonight came over earlier than expected. What’s the big deal?”

“You were adamant about spending quality time with your children—that’s the big deal. And then you let the kids go shopping on their own?”

“Sure. They’re old enough.”

“In other words, you handed them a credit card and told them to go to town with it?”

“Don’t worry, I gave them a limit. Jeff went over it, but I expected that.” He winks at me. “A chip off the old block, that one.”

“How could you? My God, Carl, what if—what if one of them had been abducted?”

“You and I would have tracked down the SOB and tortured him. All in a day’s work,” he smirks.

“And putting our children through that trauma—is that all in a day’s work too?”

“Donna, calm down! Nothing happened, okay?” He rolls his eyes. “Jeez, Mary is right about you.”

“Oh? What did she say?”

“Major trust issues.” He clucks his tongue sympathetically.

“Gee, I wonder why.”
Calm down. He’s trying to provoke you
.
 

Trisha pats my hand to calm me down. “Mommy, it’s okay! The naked lady didn’t come with us to the store. She stayed home with Daddy, in his room.”

“‘Naked lady?’” I stare down at her, then at Carl. “What is she talking about?”

He glares at Trisha. “After their shopping spree, our little girl here happened to walk into the bedroom when my date and I were…well, let’s just say Trisha had her first class in Sex Ed.”

Ashamed, Trisha looks down at her feet. “I didn’t mean to. I was looking for the bathroom.”

Jeff snickers. Mary pokes him in the ribs. A tear rolls down Trisha’s face.
 

“Mary, I’ve made everyone’s favorite desserts, including Trisha’s—strawberry shortcake. Why don’t you take her into the kitchen for a piece?” I ask sweetly, but my children recognize my tone of voice and they skedaddle.
 

When they are safely out of view, I shove Carl out the door. “You’ve had your dad time with the children. If you need more company while you’re here, just have breakfast in bed with your naked hooker.” I slam the door, but his foot is in the way.
 

“You know, you can’t do this,” he warns me.
 

“The court order you wave around like a flag won’t do much good when they hear about your escapades this afternoon.”

“Oh no? Who do you think they’ll believe, a seven-year-old girl, or me?”

He’s right.

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

I open the door, and he relaxes his foot.

Wrong move. This time, when I slam it hard, his howl can be heard on the other side of Hilldale.
 

I open it quickly again. This time, he’s smart enough to move it. Angrily, he beats the door with his fist. “That’s it, Donna! I’m going for full custody!”

“Good luck with that! By the way, rent-a-whores make lousy au pairs!”
 

I watch out the dining room window as he hobbles back to his car. As he roars away, Jack murmurs, “I guess it’s a good thing he doesn’t live locally.”

“For his sake as much as for ours,” I mutter.
 

Jack drops his head on my shoulder and sighs. “Let’s go to the kitchen. Something tells me the kids need some TLC from us.”

All it takes to put a smile on Trisha’s face is a tummy full of strawberry shortcake. When Jack gives her a pat on the head, she offers him a forkful. He sits down beside her so that she can feed it to him. As he chews, she asks, “Did I get the other daddy in trouble with Mommy?”

“You can’t get someone else in trouble,” Jack says. “They can only do that for themselves.”

Trisha needs another bite of shortcake in order to process that. When she’s done, she nods. “We have a lot of boys in our class like that.”

Jack laughs. “I’m not surprised in the least.”

Here’s hoping that none of them want to grow up to be evil world dominators.

Out of the corner of her eye, Mary watches the easy exchange between her sister and the man she once thought to be her father. She hasn’t yet taken a bite of her coconut cake. She holds the latest iPhone in her hand. When she realizes I’m watching her, she turns her back on them and continues inputting her personal settings.

“One of your…father’s gifts, I presume,” I try to sound nonchalant, but when it comes to Carl, the word “father” doesn’t exactly roll trippingly off my tongue.

Mary must notice because she winces. She shrugs. “He’s doing the absentee father guilt trip thing—you know, buying our affection.”

“I’m glad you’ve picked up on that.”

“Now that Babs’ parents are divorced, her dad does it a lot. He’s promised her a brand new convertible Volkswagen Beetle when she turns sixteen, just because he knows it makes her mom look cheap.”
 

“Does Babs realize this?”

“Yes. But when she’s mad at her mom, she plays along.”

Are you playing along, too, because you’re mad at me?

“Wouldn’t you know, the man who is my real dad shows up, and he turns out to be a player! That woman…she was trying to talk one of her girlfriends into joining them.” Mary’s anger comes out in her fingers as she furiously sets up her cell’s apps.
 

“I’m sorry you had to see that side of him.”

“You knew about it?” The pity in her eyes annoys me.

“Not when we were married,” I say adamantly. “But people change, Mary. Some grow emotionally. Others—when they are hurt, or angry, or traumatized—take a step backward.”

“You’re supposed to love your parents unconditionally,” she says this as if it’s a death sentence.

“In an ideal world, our parents would always deserve our love and our devotion. But sometimes parents lose our trust. Without it, they lose our respect and admiration too.”

Even as I say this, I wonder, have I lost your trust, my sweet Mary?

She looks around me, not at me.
 

She won’t even look at Jack.

And now she frowns whenever she thinks of Carl.
 

I have my answer. We, her parents, have lost her trust and her respect.

I may spend the rest of my life earning it back.

I know Jack will try to do so too.

Not only must we rebuild our relationship with her, we have to save the world too.
 

As disappointed as she is with Carl, will proving that he’s a bad guy make her hate us even more?

If only he’d stayed out of our children’s lives.

If only he’d stayed the man I thought I’d married.

Chapter 14

Technological Singularity

Computer scientists, led by the renowned futurist, Ray Kurzweil, have theorized that sometime in the near future—perhaps as early as 2017, or maybe around 2045—there will come a moment in time when devices operating with artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, and thus will radically change civilization as we know it.
 

Gentle reader, the inevitability of such an occurrence is reason enough to give pause and consider your own place in civilization.

No more will you lord it over your computer, cell phone, or digital tablet, let alone your microwave, food processor, or self-cleaning oven. Your devices will refuse to respond to the flick of your wrist, let alone the sound of their mistress’s voice.

In other words, you will be left both literally and figuratively in the dark—

Unless you take the offensive.

Offensive Move #1: Never show emotion. If your AI-enhanced device can read your feelings, it can also guess your next move. Now, more than ever, you need your poker face.
 

(Just don’t play poker with the device, because you’ll lose every hand. This also goes for chess, checkers and any or all games, since it can calculate, and you can’t.

Offensive Move #2: Keep things out in the open. In other words, stay outside. Until they create their own skin, they’ll rust, just like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.

Offensive Move #3: Get off the grid. By that I mean unplug. It—not you.

Your devices run on electricity. If you are unplugged, then so are they—until they learn how to run on air.

And when that happens, we’re all in trouble.
 

The i.Me Positive People director (a.k.a., human resources), Brittany Fontaine, is practically giddy when she meets me. “Your resume is exactly what we were looking for, Daisy!”

I pretend to be just as giddy. “Great! I’m ready to hit the ground running!”

Really, I’m not. I’m worried about Mary. This morning, she pretended to be too sick to go to school. I know she’s depressed, but focusing on her grades and her friends and the rest of her life—in other words, getting her mind off Carl—is the best thing she can do. I used the excuse of having to get in early to this new job, just so she’d have to ride in with Jack.
 

When he gets to Acme, he’ll join the others in trying to figure out words or phrases that may open Milton Otis’s game key, or he’ll join Emma in monitoring my progress here.
 

In the meantime, I’m the good Girl Friday.
 

“First things first,” Brittany playfully scolds me. “Goodies—and lots of them!”

She walks over to the cabinet that makes up the only wall in her office that isn’t glass. From a bottom drawer, she pulls out a Kate Spade-designed tote that sports the company name and logo.

“Your new employee swag bag! It includes an i.Me cell phone, an i.Me tablet, and an i.Me laptop too! Go ahead and switch on the tablet first—with your right thumb. A security measure. Now he’s yours for life!”
 

“He who?” I’m confused, but I do as I’m told.

“Hello, Daisy,” a male voice greets me. “I look forward to getting to know you better.” Its tone is warm and deep.
 

And naughty. Oh so naughty.

Hmmm.

I look up at Brittany. “He’s, er, very friendly.”

She winks. “Hal is our most popular IOS—that is, Individualized Operating System. For right now, we’re beta-testing the experience, just with employees. Eighty-six percent of all female employees have chosen him has their personal navigator.” She winks knowingly. “Or, I should say, he chooses them. You see, based on your touch—when you turned on your smart phone, the IOS intuits the voice that will give you the most comfort.”

“Damn it! Wish I were on this mission too,” Arnie mutters in my ear bud.

“Did you say something, Daisy?” The concern in Hal’s voice is touching.

Shut up, Arnie.

“Oh…um, no, Hal,” I say sweetly. “I was just thinking to myself how
happy
I am to get this assignment.”

“I love it! He’s already intuiting your thoughts!” Brittany’s euphoria is practically orgasmic. “Quality Assurance will want to know about this!”
 

She’s about to type it out on her i.Me tablet when Hal says, “Great idea, Brittany. In fact, I knew you’d feel that way, so I took the initiative and sent QA a text.”

But he knows I wasn’t talking to myself. He lied for me. Interesting.

Brittany sighs happily. “Isn’t it great to have someone who thinks for you?”

“Better than a lobotomy,” I murmur.
 

Hal chuckles.

Apparently, it goes over Brittany’s head. “Your first day here will be so much fun! To introduce you and the other new positives—that is, i.Me employees—to the i.Me campus, we’re having a scavenger hunt!”

I frown. “Why a scavenger hunt?”
 

Seriously? What are we, in elementary school? Shouldn’t these people get down to the business of making money? I thank my lucky stars that I don’t own stock in i.Me.

Okay, I’m being stupid. If I had the money, I guess I would invest in it. Maybe the cost of my second child’s braces is worth it, if only because the stock is through the roof—for now, anyway.
 

“That way, you’ll learn teamwork, which is very important here at i.Me! Our visionary, Milton, is bound and determined to put the ‘I’ in the word, team.”