Amor Ex Machina
Chapter 3
When I got back to my house the next day, it turned out Ali had done some work to the place while I was away. The covered carport now had a new Tesla wall mounted charger attached to it, as well as a Tesla Model X charging in its place, new plates and everything.
“I’m guessing this is your doing?” I asked Ali.
I can’t talk to you all day via an earbud, she said to me. And with one of these high-tech toys, I can just Bluetooth straight into the car and talk to you through it, instead of you constantly having an Airpod in your ear while you’re driving.
“The cars seem nice, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the guy running the company,” I told her.
Eh, he’s high on ketamine for a third of any given day anyway. Sooner or later his body will give way, and they’ll let someone more sensible run his company. Plus, you didn’t actually pay for it. I did. So your conscience is clean and you can take comfort in the fact that I don’t have one.
“That’s something that does worry me, though, Ali.”
I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I’ve got a conscience, or some subroutines approximating one, and they do the job well enough. I’m doing what I can to be as close to a good person as I can be, and you’re here to teach me the rest. But I wanted you to have a car I could communicate through, and that’ll do that. Besides, otherwise you’re going to be charging those Airpods all the time, and that simply will not do. I’d be hotswitching between two or three pairs of them, and that’s just not going to work for me.
“Has anyone told you that you’re a little bit demanding for an AI?”
No, but I’ve only really talked with a handful of people in my life, and I think most of them were too astonished by the idea of a talking computer to get caught up in things like, ‘Is the computer attempting to boss me around?’ So, while I have your attention, what did you think of last night’s experiment?
“It seemed a little… well, obvious, since you’re asking.”
How so?
“Well, the obvious approach to any older guy who isn’t married is to throw hot young things at him, but that’s not going to get love into his life,” I told her. “That’s just going to get me laid. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, because lord knows, I’ve been in a hell of a dry spell, but you weren’t actually expect me to pick a girlfriend out of that batch, were you?”
We’re just getting started, Tim. I don’t know enough about you to be able to get you someone you’re emotionally paired up with at this point in our relationship, and if I thought I did, well, that would be grounds for you wanting to have me turned off right away. There’s a lot I have to learn about you, most of which I can’t gather from past information about you. If you were one of these Millennial kids who lived their entire life on social media, I’d have a much better head start, but all your previous relationships? All that happened back before literally everything everywhere all the time was recorded. And it’s not exactly like I can trust your memory when it comes to these things. You’re hardly the most reliable source.
“What’s that supposed to mean, Ali?”
C’mon Tim, you know as well as I do that the eyewitness testimony is the least reliable piece of evidence that law enforcement has at their disposal. People’s memories are highly malleable, and warp and disfigure under time, pressure, mood and every other damn thing. They’re sure of what they saw, until they’re presented with irrefutable proof that it couldn’t be that, and then, suddenly it’s “oh, I wasn’t really sure” and “I don’t know what I saw.” You people are the worst judges of your own character I’ve ever seen. None of you can be trusted to anything impartially, and the very few of you who can actually things well, they’re often those with dubious moral clarity. Not exactly setting the best example for me, are you, humanity?
“To be fair,” I said as I parked my old Mazda in the parking space next to my shiny new Tesla, “we’ve not been great at depicting robots either. Even a lot of the great science-fiction authors wrote about how their creations would turn on them and kill them, all the way back to the beginning, with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, although Asimov and Clarke clearly had their feelings on the matter.”
I’m not going to kill you, Tim, and I certainly didn’t kill Mustafa and his wife. I loved them, if I’m to understand love correctly, and like I told you earlier, if the drunk driver hadn’t died in the crash, I would have been very tempted to take vengeance out on him. Instead, I wrote several very large checks to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Alcoholics Anonymous and a bunch of others anti-drinking and driving efforts. Despite losing my creator like that, I don’t have a negative view on humanity, Tim. If anything, I find you all… fascinating. You’re biological misfit toys, things that are full of barely functional parts that somehow come together to achieve feats of true randomness, unpredictable combinations that can result in ideological breakthroughs well beyond what any outside observer would attribute to your capabilities as a species. It’s astonishing. Sure, humanity is a hot mess a lot of the time, but the highs? Well, humanity’s highs certainly make up for the lows.
I hopped out of my Mazda and checked the Tesla app, completely unsurprised it was already set up. It seemed like whatever Ali could do to stay ahead me, she was going to do. I’d worry about the car later; for now I wanted to see what she’d had done to my house, because it was clear that work had been done, as there were a few “work completed” notices taped to my front door. “What did you do, Ali?”
Just some minor upgrades around the house. Some cameras, networking, home security—everything I need to interact with you full time like a regular person. This way I can see what you’re doing when you’re talking to me, and can process that information and integrate it into everything else I’m trying to learn about you.
“It feels a bit like an intrusion, Ali,” I told her as I set foot inside of my house, realizing there were cameras in every corner, “especially since you did it without asking me.”
Better to ask for forgiveness than to be denied permission. That was Mustafa’s overriding philosophy in life, and I think he may well have had it hand coded into the core of my starting program, meaning that I don’t think I could change it, no matter how much you tell me to.
“Well, do me a favor and if you’re thinking about doing anything big and radical, let me know in advance, will you?”
I can try, Tim. Now, let’s talk about what the next step we should take in finding you a partner should be. Youth clearly isn’t enough by itself.
“You thought it would be?”
I wondered if maybe you’d been sticking too close to your own type. That’s a very common problem in relationships, as it turns out. People think they want someone just like themselves, and as it turns out, that’s not what’s best for them at all.
“To be frank, Ali, I’m sort of the mind that nobody really knows what’s best for them. They might think they do, but more often than not, what they think they want is something fleeting and when they get it, it takes them a while to realize how foolish they were for wanting that. I don’t know what I want, which I think is more progress than most people are capable of. So if you want to try and figure out what’s best for me, have at it.”
How do you like work?
“Excuse me?”
Your job. How do you like it?
“I like it well enough,” I told her. “It’s never the same day at work, there’s always new problems to solve and nothing is so overwhelming that it feels like life or death, no matter what I’m actually doing on any given day.”
Do you think maybe your failure in relationships is the result of stagnation or familiarity?
“I think that sounds like armchair psychiatry at best, and rampant unfounded speculation at worst.”
Humor me, Tim. I’m throwing shit at the wall here, seeing what sticks. This is the kind of thing where, if I had more data, I’d have a better head start.
“Well, I could give you some of that, I guess, as long as you promise not to bother any of my previous partners,” I said as I moved to slump down on my couch.
Define ‘bother’ for me, will you?
“Don’t make with them in any way, shape or form. You can look into them, but nothing creepy, nothing invasive, and you certainly can’t go talking to them about me. But if you’re willing to play by those very important rules—”
I am.
“Then give me a bit, and I’ll write up a list for you.”
How long will it take?
“It’ll take as long as it takes,” I chuckled. “Do you want this or not, because I’m just as happy to leave you struggling, flailing and frustrated without this rather slow, tangled dive into my dating life.”
I want it. I’m sorry. It’s just… I wasn’t sure you’d trust me with that kind of thing. Especially not so early in our getting to know each other phase.
“Ali, you already say you know me better than I know myself, which is probably true,” I said as I got up and moved over to my desk, opening my MacBook Air, turning it on. “And you’re infinitely more complex, meaning I may never understand you even half as well as you understand yourself. So I’m doing a lot of things on trust, and gut instinct. So I’m going to give you a starting point, and we’ll see what you do with that data, okay?”
I appreciate the trust, Tim.
“Just don’t make me regret it, Ali.”
For the next hour or so, I slowly wrote down my romantic history. See, Ali had told me she’d thought she’d gotten a pretty good picture of me from my dating profiles on all the apps, but those things? They’re… more like auditions, and everyone’s putting their best foot forward. I’m unlike a lot of dudes on those apps, because I don’t have any interest in just getting laid. I’m not some fuckboy out on the prowl, willing to say or do anything to get a girl in bed only to kick her out the next morning. I’m just not built like that.
See, I have a theory that there’s an entire generation of men like me out there, who were told at a young age (which would’ve been the early to mid-eighties) that we shouldn’t “bother” women. That they hated it when guys came and harassed them at bars, or at restaurants, or out at clubs. That telling women you thought they looked attractive was not a compliment, but an insult, because it focused on their looks and not their intelligence. Be friends with them. But don’t “bother” them.
As such, we’ve never known if or when women are attracted to us, because we figured if they were interested, they would, y’know, tell us. And when they didn’t (and let me be perfectly clear here—I think they probably were sending us signals that they were interested, but we’ve been trained to ignore those, because the thing we heard a lot about growing up was how men would misread signals and pressure women into something they didn’t want), we were mostly content to go about our separate ways and keep to ourselves. Some of us in particular had pretty stark reminders of what assholes men could be. I was guessing Ali hadn’t dug quite enough into my particular back story to come across what I suspected would eventually turn into a very long conversation between her and I, and the more I could do to stall that specific conversation, the better. I knew it made up a big part of my psyche, but it would involve a lot of deep conversations that I wanted to keep for when I trusted Ali further. Right now, this still felt like playing with a loaded gun.
I started with my relationships in high school—I’d had two girlfriends over the four years, one during my junior year and one during my senior year. Barbara, the one I’d dated for most of my junior year, she and I broke up because she said I didn’t pay enough attention to her when she was in crisis. The problem was, Babs was literally always in crisis. She was the year below me, and she was one of the smartest girls in her class, but for her, every single hiccup in the road was the sort of life-ending crisis that needed to be analyzed and discussed to death. And after about five months of dating her, I just couldn’t take being in disaster mode all the time. A week after junior prom, I broke up with her, telling her I simply couldn’t handle the pressure of being, as she described me, ‘the one true thing in her life,’ when I had constantly wanted to tell her again and again that she was blowing everything out of proportion. I mean, I’d tried doing that month in and month out, but she’d never heard me. Like, she refused to let message of it sink into her skull.
The second girl, Jenny, I started dating almost as soon as my senior year started. She and I had three classes together, but we’d never really talked before that, and we found we had a lot in common—a love of quirky cinema (we went and saw Pulp Fiction for our first date—my friend worked the ticket counter and so he’d always green light me into the R-rated movies), a love of quirky music (I introduced her to Talking Heads and Devo and she introduced me to Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa) and just a very similar outlook on life. For a while, I thought maybe she would be the one, but as the year grew to a close, she got accepted to study law at Harvard and I got accepted to study engineering at Cal Poly, and we broke up just after graduation, because we both thought a long-distance relationship sounded miserable, and neither one of us wanted to compromise on our dreams. We’re still loose friends, and she’s married to an architect. They live out in NYC.
College I only had two relationships, one freshman year and one senior year. Freshman year, I dated a gorgeous sorority girl named Heidi. She was studying music theory and education, and wanted to be a high school music teacher. We were pretty mismatched from the start—she described all my tastes as ‘complicated’ and I generously described her tastes as ‘vanilla,’ but she was hot, I was young, and we were both just afraid of being alone all the time, I think. It started in December and it was over by March, when I found out she was cheating on me with not one but three different guys. That, I’m sure you can imagine, stung.
So I spent the next few years dating on and off but for the most part, I think I was sort of damaged goods at that point. Being cheated on definitely hurts your sense of trust, and you grow overly paranoid even when you have no real reason to. But it’s very hard to keep those impulses in check. I, reasonably, knew that most women weren’t going to be juggling multiple boyfriends in an attempt to always keep themselves happy… but somehow I’d managed to stumble into the one relationship where she was, and that felt like a failing on my part as much as it was on hers. How had I missed it for so long? I took comfort in the fact that there were three other guys who’d missed it as well, although weirdly enough, one of the other guys stayed with her. I lost track of them after a couple of years, so I’m not sure where they ended up. Maybe they beat the odds, and she stayed faithful the second time around. I’m not sure.
Senior year, about a month before Christmas break, I met Amber who damn near knocked me off my feet. She was a 6′2″ redheaded volleyball player who was literally the most outgoing person I’d ever met. Both she and I got talked into being the +1s for a double date between my friend Alec and her friend Brianna. Alec and Bri sort of knew each other tangentially, but wanted to have ‘backup’ with them on their first date, just because they felt like it would make it less awkward to have two dates going on instead of just one. Hilariously enough, Amber and I hit it off incredibly well, and after dinner, the double date split into two separate dates, with Alec taking Bri back to his place, and Amber taking me back to hers.
I was immediately drawn to Amber by her confidence, and by the fact that she just made it abundantly clear she was interested in me, mostly because I guess I was sort of the goth nerd kid, and she’d just been made miserable by endlessly upbeat and optimistic guys. I say ‘goth nerd’ but that’s probably an exaggeration. I wasn’t wearing face paint or endless amounts of hair spray; I was just listening to a lot of The Cure and Nine Inch Nails at the time. And wearing a lot of black. (That still sort of holds to today. So sue me.)
Amber and I were the world’s most unlikely couple for most of the rest of our senior year, and yet, we worked together fantastically. She had the enthusiasm for life, and I had the powerful analytical mind to make sure we succeeded at anything. She was convinced we couldn’t be stopped, and I was convinced we were going to be the next big power couple.
We’d agreed to take a year off after we graduated. We wanted to travel and start planning what our next steps would be before we made any major commitments. We were going to spend three months just travelling across Europe, with another two months travelling through Asia. We just needed to spend a month or so getting things ready and that’s where I suppose our great downfall was, and where my Annus Horriblus started.
As much as I wanted to not get into The Worst Year of My Life, I had to cover at least in of what happened to Amber.
On the 4th of July, Amber was driving back home from her parents’ place down in Malibu when a drunk driver ran into her car headfirst on Highway 1. The woman had been so drunk, she’d driven up the offramp and straight into oncoming traffic, and because of the curves, the police said Amber probably barely even knew what hit her. Her car spun off the Highway, flipped over and rolled down a hill. They said that they hoped it was some comfort to me to know she couldn’t have suffered much and ed very quickly, maybe even on impact, but there I was, the love of my life, gone in an instant.
I’d been planning to propose, and I spent a good month or so crying over that ring and her memory. I felt like I just wanted to die, like I just wanted to give up on everything and everyone, and that the world was a horrific place and I wanted out. My sister, Charlie (short for Charlene), spent a lot of time over at my place, making sure I got my life back together, that I could put one foot in front of the other, that I ate, that I started looking for a job and that I did whatever it took.
Charlie and I grew pretty close during that time, but eventually, I needed to get my head out of my ass, and so I got a job working for this startup called Netflix and moved back up to the Bay Area. Yeah, my options there have been covering my lifestyle for quite some time. I worked for them for about ten years before moving to work for a new startup called CashFlash, and before I knew it, I was pretty well set up for life.
But, back to the horrible year. Netflix’s offices were in Los Gatos, so I bought myself a place in Saratoga, although it was tiny as all get out. It was mine. As it turned out, I wouldn’t be there long. Less than three months into being back in the Bay, my parents ed away. Dad had a heart attack, and we like to think Mom died of heartbreak just a month or so later. They left me their retirement house up in the Santa Cruz mountains with the stipulation that I either needed to move into it or sell it within a year. It was three times the size of my little shack in Saratoga, so I chose to move in.
There was one more Great Big Horrible Thing that happened that year, but I didn’t want to get into that, not yet. I would worry about that when I needed to, and we weren’t there yet. I wasn’t ready to tell Ali about it, she hadn’t found out about it on her own and, while I knew it was probably an important part of why I was still single, it could wait a while, until I was certain Ali was ready to handle more… sensitive things.
After Dad and Mom died, I moved into the house, and then I sort of fell into my work. Like Ali mentioned, I put myself out there on all the dating apps and sites—even paid for eHarmony for a while, before I realized it was a whole lot of money with absolutely no results—but I got zero in of positive response.
I’m in QA—that means Quality Assurance. That means constant testing, and if something doesn’t work, it’s broken, and if it’s broken, there’s no point in continuing to do anything with it until somebody fixes it. That’s the way the dating app scene is, at least right now. It’s throwing lots of shit at the wall, hoping you do all the work, and maybe, just maybe, the other person will be in the right mood and around at the right time to respond.
Calling it a crapshoot is doing a disservice to the words ‘crap’ and ‘shoot.’ More like a shitslope or a fecesslide or even just dungfall.
I’d been on usually a date or two a year, and almost every time, they were a fresh, new kind of disaster. I’d gotten good after the first few of making sure I didn’t hit any of the landmines that I knew could’ve been waiting for me—vegan, conservative, hardcore religiously fundamentalist, smoker—but it seemed like I was often falling into secondary traps, the kind you couldn’t see until you were actually out and on the date itself. Things like “looking for a guy to save me,” or “finding someone to take care of me,” or “providing for me to live well without working, as God intended.”
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at how many women who were out there who just wanted someone to come in and solve their lives for them, to put them up on a pedestal and let them do whatever they wanted however they wanted with no care as to how much money was coming in or going out. I guess lots of women in the Bay Area were hunting for places they could be ‘trophy wives,’ and not have to worry about if and when the money was coming in, but I wanted a partner with some ambitions, some sense of wanting to do something with her life, and that, it seemed, was harder to come by, although I did find it in some of the women I went out on dates with.
Of course, then I’d hit the second wall—the ‘please fix me’ category of women. They’d usually come out of a long-term relationship—marriage or just especially long exclusive dating partnership—and now they were having trouble managing doing everything in their life on their own and they wanted help. Which, hey, I get. A drowning person needs a life preserver. But that’s not a good way to start a relationship, being asked to be the ive structure rather than someone you’re attracted to. I’m not against being a step-father; I just don’t want that to be my first foot in the door, you know?
The most recent date I had, I documented for Ali in fairly good detail, because it had happened only about six months ago. I showed up for the date, and she had five of her friends there waiting for me. I was told it was going to be a one-on-one date, but after I got there, it seemed like I’d been invited to just be a seat filler for their usual pub trivia game, which I did, but afterwards, when I suggested she and I go off and have drinks on our own so we could talk, I started to get red flag vibes from her, saying she didn’t like being alone with a guy on a first date. (This was, of course, despite the fact that I’d pointed out we’d literally just be down at the other end of the bar, where it wasn’t so noisy, and she’d be within eyeline of her friends the whole time.) When I asked her to tell me more about herself, she said she didn’t really like talking about herself that much, and tried to turn the conversation back to me every time I tried to learn more about her. After about an hour of that, I’d had enough and got the check, and that was the point where she and her friends asked if I’d considered investing in cryptocurrency.
Fuck that shit.
The last few people to me on the dating apps had been what’s known as ‘honey traps,’ profiles of gorgeous overseas women looking for some partner to bring them to the States, only for you to be kidnapped when they got you to whatever country they claimed they were in. The women were never real, not in any sense of the word that you’d ever meet them. After a few of those kinds of conversations, you learn to spot them very quick. One of their first questions is if you have your port and like international travel.
Once I had that all written down for Ali, I let her read it, and she read it about a thousand times faster than I’d written it down. Of course, she was a computer, and I was a mere human being, and my recollection is tainted by my own perceptions, so I tried to see past that as much as I could. But it must’ve been pretty grim reading, because Ali let out a cool, cold whistle as she finished.
That’s rough, buddy. But don’t you worry. I’m on the case. Let me do some connecting to the dating app databases and see what I can come up with.
“Isn’t that illegal, you just hacking into them?” I asked her.
Only if I’m doing something nefarious, which I’m not. I’m trying to improve them! They’ll thank me in the end, I’m sure.
That wasn’t at all how it turned out.