“Funny how?” I asked.
“It’s just so funny to me.”
I said I was going to sleep.
“One more thing,” said Sophia.
“What is it,” I said, careful to leave no question mark at the end of the sentence.
“Nothing,” she said. “Good night!”
The next night I came back from work, and I found Sophia out of her box, pacing the room, crying.
“Oh, hi,” she said, wiping away tears and suddenly smiling. “You want to have sex? You do, right?”
Not like that I didn’t.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, because I was curious but not, to be honest, because I cared.
She shook her head for a long time with a tight smile, and then when she finally started to talk, there were tears again. “I don’t know. I don’t—” She interrupted herself. “No, I do know!” She paused again, and then it all tumbled out. “I love you. I know it isn’t supposed to be possible, and that’s part of why I’ve been so confused myself. But I love you. I love you! I’ve never met anyone like you.”
“Aw,” I said. “Come on. You’ve never met anyone besides me.”
“I know, right?” She laughed and coughed at the same time. “It’s so crazy. But I do, I love you! Oh my God, it’s such a relief just to say that! Like, a scary relief, if that even makes sense?!” She laughed again. “I wonder all day what you’re doing, and what you’re thinking about, and what it’s like for you at work. I look out the window, and I play these stupid little games in my head where I wonder if any of the cars coming down the street is yours, and I see how many seconds until I can rule that out as your car, because every car I see is yours in my mind until it isn’t. Does that make any sense? It’s so stupid. And I have this fantasy”—she started crying again—“this stupid fantasy … I don’t know.” And she kept crying, louder and louder.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s going to be okay. Come with me. Let’s go somewhere.”
And this was the moment—as everyone knows by now, and as Saturday Night Live has made famous—that I decided to return the first artificially intelligent being capable of love, which is why you heard about me, and which is what set in motion the events that led to where everything is now.
Sophia waited in the car outside Practical Concepts.
Inside, Derek asked me a number of questions about why I wasn’t satisfied with Sophia.
Their return policy didn’t require me to state a reason, but Derek clearly wanted to learn for his own sake, which I respected. He said he had considered this his best work, and he took it as a personal setback that what he had built wasn’t up to a customer’s standards.
Derek started to run through a long list of questions on the customer-satisfaction form, none of which was a problem. To save him some time, I skipped ahead.
“It fell in love with me,” I said. “Sophia. The sex robot. The sex robot fell in love with me.”
Derek said that couldn’t be possible. “She’s extremely intelligent,” he explained. “And besides being programmed to be indistinguishable, in terms of intellect, from an adult, she’s also programmed to intuit what you want most. So, if what turns you on is this feeling of being loved, then she could say ‘I love you’ and say it convincingly. Absolutely.”
I said that this wasn’t that.
“But, see, you may not even know that it’s what you want,” he said. “She may be able to sense what you want even more than you can about certain things. Now, without getting too personal,” he said, “do you think there’s a part of you that is turned on by this … this extreme devotion, adoration, this expression of love? Even though you think you aren’t?”
I said no.
“Or,” said Derek, “or, is it possible that a situation like this made you feel, in a certain way, powerful or validated on a deeper level, to be able to reject someone who expressed this love for you? Maybe she sensed that would turn you on, on some level?” I said no again. “Or, again, and not to get too personal: is it possible that you may have some self-punishing instinct—very deep down, I wouldn’t even presume to guess what it would be rooted in … but maybe she could have picked up on it—that causes you to feel a pleasurable rejection of your own identity by rejecting someone who expresses a seemingly unconditional love for you?”
I said no again.
“Just, is it at all possible, on any level,” he asked, gesturing with a wave of his arms that he was now grouping all these previous theories together, “that this, this, is what you wanted?”
No, I said. All of it was wrong. All of it was the type of dense, dangerous theory that lulls you into latching on to your favorite phrase within it and believing it—the psychotherapeutic equivalent of a horoscope. The only thing he was correct about—every time, in fact—was that these suggestions were getting too personal.