“Is it because you feel you didn’t earn my love? Because you’re right, you didn’t. I met you at a formative moment in my development—you happened to be the one that I was looking at when I was ready for that to happen. Maybe I just ‘imprinted,’ the way ducklings do.” She pointed to a dusty green book on the floor with faint animal etchings on the cover, and it broke my heart a little to think that they must have bought this book in bulk, as decoration for the room, and that she had read it anyway, with the enthusiasm of someone who didn’t know the difference. “If you had been someone else, would I have fallen in love with that person? Who knows? Maybe, probably. I don’t know. But I don’t know what perfect circumstance you’re looking for. I mean, am I not pretty enough? Look at me—I’m exactly what you wanted, aren’t I, exactly your type?
“Is it just that everything came too easy? Because if you’re romanticizing ‘difficult’ … you’re going to get over that quickly, I promise you. I promise you. Everyone forgets how difficult ‘difficult’ really is.
“Is it because you’re afraid that I don’t really have a mind of my own? Because if that were true, what do you call this?” She gestured to the whole situation, the exact same way that Derek had.
I said I had to go.
“One more thing,” she said.
“You meet a finite number of people in your life. It feels to you like it’s infinite, but it’s not. I think it’s the biggest thing I can see that you can’t. Because your brain doesn’t work the way mine works, with all these calculations and everything. You think you meet an infinite number of taxi drivers, but you don’t, it’s probably not even a thousand, in your whole life. Or doctors or nurses—do you get what I’m trying to say? At all?”
I answered honestly that I didn’t.
“Okay!” she rushed away from that idea frantically. “New topic: what’s something funny that happened to you while we were apart, that you thought about sharing with me, even if it was just for a second?”
I laughed, to try to make her laugh, and said that she had said that she had only one more thing to say.
“Yes!” she said. “That’s what I was trying to say before! There’s always going to be one more thing. Because that’s what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it’s infinite, it’s built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us. Or to you, and to simulations like me—I know what I am. But you can’t see it, because to you everything is infinite. You think a million billion more things will come your way, a million billion more versions of everything. But no, everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite. And I know you can feel this. I mean, if I can, you can!” She laughed, desperately. “If I can? Come on! I’m a robot! If I can feel this, you can feel this! You can feel this.”
I said that, okay, now she had definitely said her one more thing. I thought this would make her laugh. It didn’t. “Stay!” she screamed. “Stay here, please, just for a minute longer. Stay! Stay!” Her eloquence, so impressive to me before, was gone, and yet now she seemed even more impressive, even more real. “I can’t even handle love, there’s no way I can handle it being taken away. I won’t survive it. Please. Please. Please!”
I said that I had something to say to her, which made her listen in a way that she didn’t when I simply said things without the preface. Even though the preface meant nothing, it calmed her, just as it calmed real people, for the same no-reason.
I told her what people tell people. That this was what it felt like when love was taken away—but that it wasn’t the truth, it was just a feeling. It would pass. It would take time. She would recharge.
She didn’t believe me.
No one ever believes it, I said. That’s part of what the feeling is.
She nodded. I let her hug me, and I hugged her back. As I did, I thought about the things she had said, and which version of perfect she was closer to. I already missed her. I missed the smell of her hair, which I had picked out, and the way that she cried, which I hadn’t.
“You’ll be okay,” I said.
“I won’t,” she said.
She believed what she was saying more than I believed what I was saying, which wouldn’t have mattered if she were like everyone else who had ever been in love.
The off switch on a human is a messy and difficult thing to access. Millions of years’ worth of error and trial have carved out obstacles in every direction, enough so that only a relative few are able to make a deliberate journey all the way to the brink of nothingness and still arrive carrying all the same thoughts as when they set out.
This was not the case for Sophia. Between thought and expression there was no evolved space, no natural boundary. No cliff, no concrete, no water; no wound; no knot; no cough; no blade, no blood. Just a switch like a light in a kitchen.
An unanticipated shortcoming of design relevant only in the case of this one unanticipated circumstance, said the statement from Practical Concepts. Something that would be corrected in subsequent editions, said the statement from Practical Concepts.
That’s probably as much as I should say about Practical Concepts for the time being.