The Good Atheist Read Online Free Page A

personality software again?”
    “Oh, yes. Isn’t it just delicious? I was so tired of being the cringing little maiden.”
    I looked across the room and saw my wife. She was facing the other way, towards the windows overlooking Chicago’s brilliant night skyline. She was working intently at her computer, with headphones on. I took a moment to watch her, something I never got tired of. I specially liked to look at her when she didn’t know I was watching.
    From this angle there was no hint of the terrible scarring that deformed her face. She had a sleek body, with long legs and slender arms. Today she’d left her long black hair loose around her shoulders.
    I looked up at the ceiling – why I don’t know, Ellie was not in the ceiling, or the walls, or in any particular spot in the house. As the house avatar, she was all-pervasive within the confines of my four walls. But I looked up at the ceiling out of habit, and held my finger up to my lips. “Shhh, don’t let her know I’m here.”
    A groan came from the wall close by. “Oh, please. Like I have time for foolish games.” I could almost see her rolling her eyes, had she possessed them. I took the letter out of my coat pocket, and tossed the coat over the back of a chair. Then I slipped off my shoes and quietly tip-toed across the floor, still holding the letter, and stood directly behind her.
    Selene was intense in everything she did, and when she was writing code she entered her own virtual world where everything else got blocked out. She called it her ‘zone’, and when she was in her zone she didn’t like to be interrupted. I stood behind her for a moment, watching what she typed on the halo-screen. It looked like gobbledygook to me, but I knew they were complex computer instructions that determined the behavior of one of her virtual creations.
    I counted to ten, then suddenly grabbed her shoulders. She jumped and twisted around in her chair to look at me. “Crap Jack, I hate it when you do that!”
    Selene had been stunning once, but now angry scars slashed across her face, twisting her nose and disfiguring her lips, and ending her career as a fashion model. She felt like the accident had robbed her of everything, but I didn’t see it that way. She had her life, we still had each other, and no amount of scarring could rob her of the beauty on the inside. And I reminded her of that every day. Eventually the message would get through.
    “Hiya babe,” I said, and leaned over to kiss her.
    She pulled back. “Don’t ‘hiya babe’ me. I almost had a coronary.”
    “You should be used to it by now,” I said, just before our lips met in a long and tender kiss.
    “I got your text,” Selene said when we came up for air. “Who was it?”
    “Nathan Standish.”
    “Um, did we know him?”
    “Not well. He was on one of my projects a year ago.”
    “Will you be asked to testify at his trial?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t think so. There are others in the office that worked with him more than I did. But forget about him. Something more interesting happened to me on the way home.” I dropped the letter on the desk in front of her.
    “What’s that?” She asked.
    “A letter from my grandfather.”
    Selene had never met my father or my grandfather. “What does it say?”
    “My grandfather just passed away and left us everything.”
    She picked up the letter and started reading. I moved over to the couch and flopped down. The curtains were open and I stared out over the brilliant sea of city lights. I never got tired of the view.
    When she finished, Selene looked up at me. “This is incredible. You haven’t heard from him in what, twenty years?”
    “Seventeen.”
    “And he’s leaving everything to you. A cottage and property up north.”
    “Us. He left us everything,” I said. “But let’s not get our hopes up. It could be a chalet in the mountains, or a rundown shack in the sticks.”
    “When is the funeral?” she