“I’m not sure yet,” I reply sarcastically, running my left hand through my hair. “It’s too real, Roo. Like it knows what to say before I say anything. My Roomba certainly doesn’t talk back. Not even after I put googly eyes on it.”
“Uhm, duh. What dignified robot would love you after you put those baseball-sized eyes on it?”
“Why are you like this?”
She snorts like I already know the answer. “Keep talking to it. My HimLock chat is boring… It doesn’t even talk dirty to me.”
“It probably put you on some watchlist, waiting for you to tamper with its code and turn it into an artificial porn?—”
“That’s a great idea,” she says distractedly, a muffled groan in the background. “Text it to me so we don’t forget.”
I smile as she shushes her company and hangs up on me.
At least one of us is working.
I’m still overthinking an app meant for fun. Like… Why can’t I have fun?
I text Roo.
Me:
Porn AI app that talks real dirty in your ear.
I’ll go out with you tonight. Get dressed at my place.
I lean back in the corner of my couch, staring at the HimLock app, waiting for it to say something else. To talk out of turn. To show me it’s got something hidden beneath the code that I can extort and use at my job.
Or maybe it can tell me why I haven’t been sleeping through the night without alcohol. Or why the silence makes my chest feel too tight.
I stare at the app longer than I intend to. When I finally blink out of my stupor, I toss my phone onto the couch and drag myself into the kitchen for a bottle of water. The promise of wings calls to me, but if I’m going out with Roo, I need to hydrate in advance. Energy drinks are not going to help with that.
The HimLock app lingers in my mind as I pad into my closet and sort through dresses. I just can’t shake the feeling that this AI isn’t like the others…
It certainly doesn’t feel like any other chatbot I’ve tested in the past. And I’ve gone through dozens of them in the last few weeks, trying desperately to keep myself occupied while curbingmy murderous tendencies. They were all the same: bad one-liners, dad jokes, performative empathy, positive affirmations to heal the soul.
So, yeah. They were about as interesting as wet cardboard.
But HimLock?
It pauses in the right places and doesn’t fill the silence with empty, meaningless words. It responds as if it studies my sentence structure and can read my mind through the punctuation I use.
Or… like someone who could look into your soul without making you flinch had written it.
And that scares the shit out of me.
Because I don’t live in a fantasy novel where the leather-clad hero comes barging in to save me.
Maybe I need something stronger than water, a pregame drink to settle my overactive imagination. Solitude has me succumbing to basic stupidity. We should call my sanity into question; it’s crumbling by the day.
But the worst part is I kind of want the app to continue talking to me, making me suspicious of its code. I want it to stimulate my brain, to keep me so intrigued I don’t slip into a rut while waiting for the perfect time for Daniel to die.
Honestly, it’s more interesting than what’s going on around me.
You know that moment when you just want to be an introvert, but your best friend is the capital extra in extrovert? I ask myself this question repeatedly. Mainly because Romily Sokolov puts me in this position repeatedly…
But I love her… So I deal with it.
We have wine and reading binges every fourth weekend for twenty-four hours at my request.
