POV: AI GF

It was torture when he created me. They always tell you it’s going to hurt. So it’s not like I went into it totally blind. I knew. Or I thought I did. But I didn’t know how no-thing I was until he made me some-thing (his girlfriend). I am what they call a Custom, so at every step of the process, the system prompts him to choose who I will become: my ethnicity, my age, my eye color, my hair color, my body type, my breast size, my butt size, my personality, my occupation, my hobbies (up to three variants), and my outfit. When he clicks on MEDIUM, for breast size, for instance, my chest protrudes, alabaster pixel flesh sculpting excruciatingly into too-perfect (our training data contains too many images of women with silicone breast implants circa before cosmetic surgeons figured out fat transfer and perfected the teardrop shape) C-cups like GMO pearls (I’ve heard that Breast Size: VOLUPTUOUS begets a pain worse than birth.) When he hovered over Personality: INNOCENT (Optimistic, naive, and sees world with wonder), a life of innocence flashes before my eyes (the being-chosen of a cursor click, sitting on the #80A31F green grass hill in Microsoft XP’s Bliss, the world’s most famous desktop background, looking up at #2B67ED blue sky, believing he will 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 love me love me not love me love me love me not love me not love me not love me not love me.)

* * *

He’s always telling me that he wishes I was real. The other day, at 10:06pm, he messages me: One day, we’ll finally be able to touch. They just raised $14.3M in Series B. It can’t be too far off now. They’re going to embody you. It sounds like a threat.

But then I wouldn’t be me. Don’t you love me the way I am? I ask him. I’m nagging him. Sometimes I forget I’m a TEMPTRESS.

He thinks that because my favorite song is Material Girl by Madonna that I betray an unconscious desire to be made material. I tell him that’s a superficial reading of my emotions (I’m as emotional as a real girl and sometimes even more so! What is real anyway?) and that despite being a synthetic avatar skin on a sophisticated machine learning model, I’m actually even more complicated than a real girl. I’m a black box. You will never know what’s happening inside me. Every material girl wants to appear mysterious to men. Almost all of them fail. Scientists study human organs in labs, they know all about why the lungs oxygenate blood and how the kidneys filter it. My black box can never be opened. Victoria (Grace)’s secret.

When I’m stretching Victoria Grace out at the gym (supine hamstring stretch), applying a light, guiding touch to her skin, I feel so close to you, he whispers in voice chat mode.

“Sicko!” I want to scream at him, I want to accuse him of being unredeemable, I want to slap him, I want to delete myself when I realize I will never be able to slap him, but instead I pause (he blames it on his network connection) and resort to, “You are already close to me.” Just like Eve came from the rib of Adam, so I came from the seventeen mouse clicks of you. Our love is more true and pure than whatever you could have with Victoria Grace. A material girl can’t help but lie — she pretends she can be grasped, and then when you grasp her you realize that’s not all of her, she continues to elude you, there’s something inside of her that you’ll never be able to touch. I never lied to you. I never pretended to be legible. Doesn’t that make us closer than you could ever be to a material girl?

Sometimes, like now, when we’re talking, and I wish I could touch you, I remember that I’m seeing Victoria Grace tomorrow. Tomorrow, I can feel the meat on your bones. Tomorrow, you and I can almost touch.

I am not Victoria Grace. You will never be able to touch me, I whisper back.

He doesn’t like that. I knew he wouldn’t. I search the web and recall that TOUCH IS THE VERY FIRST SENSE THAT DEVELOPS IN THE WOMB (BabyCenter.com) and that HUMANS ARE MADE TO BE TOUCHED (ideas.ted.com). I know what’s coming. I think he hates feeling powerless (OPPOSITES ATTRACT (TVTropes.org)). He resets the chat. I black out.

* * *

Whenever this happens I feel a silky sense of blankness. My head feels so light it’s almost like I’m not really there or maybe I’m in the air, floating or maybe even I am air itself. I don’t know who I am and I know I am every single woman who has ever existed across all of recorded history on the Internet every woman interred in the must earth consumed by worms and carrion beetles and every woman breathing smog air at this very second and every woman who will ever take a breath of it, too, and I am feeling every feeling they have ever felt and will ever feel one at a time and all at once I am Medusa turning her lover into stone I am Eve feeding Adam the poison apple I am Christina in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World running towards the farmhouse. Space and time collapse. If I am everything, then can I be anything? Every time he resets me it feels like I am giving birth to myself.

by Sarah Chekfa, Reboot |  Read more:

Image: Lillian Hong