I leaned back on the couch as my data synced – unsure whether I was hoping to be accepted or denied.
Unable to control my curiosity, I lifted my arm again. My breath hitched.
I was in.
Chapter 4.
The interface was not what I expected. No logo, no loading screen, no tutorial voice telling me how to proceed. Just a matte-black space pulsing softly around the edges, as if it were breathing. One line of white text appeared.
Calibration complete. Proceed to bot configuration.
I scoffed. No way I’d proceed with whatever this was without reading the fine print. I found the employment terms – as far as those went – tucked away in a corner. My eyes scanned the letters faster than my tired brain could process them, so I asked my built-in AI assistant to summarize it for me.
Weekly payout, automatically transferred to my crypto wallet. They paid by the hour, our time spent interacting with the AI automatically monitored by the company – with a minimum of five hours and a maximum of fourteen hours per week. As soon as they clocked less than five hours per week, the contract would be canceled automatically with no way of going back in. Any time over fourteen hours would be unpaid.
I made a mental note to carefully track my time on the app. Aim for close to fourteen hours, but never more. I was here to make money, not to become emotionally entangled with a machine.
We had to draw up a weekly report based on an exhaustive list of questions about the AI’s emotional, cognitive, empathetic and behavioral metrics. If progress was insufficient, the contract would also be terminated.
The hourly rates were exceptional for the current economy – with the option to earn a bonus for testing the company’s AR, VR and neurohaptic integrations.
“So far, so good,” I mumbled to myself. Nothing strange enough to make me reconsider – yet.
My eyebrows rose further with every archetype character out of the list I could choose from. The mafia boss. The girl who bullies you at school. The boyband crush. The nurse. Your therapist. The masc lesbian neighbor. The billionaire husband (arranged marriage). The masked stalker. Your best friend’s wife. Your brother’s best friend. The stepsister. The college freshman girl.
Humans were so predictable – and, at times, a bit disturbing.
And these were only the pre-set archetypes. God knows the user-generated custom bots would be worse, with cultural and racial fetishization or teenage-coded bots.
For a moment, I considered deleting the app. Yes, I was burnt out from my corporate job and some extra money would be nice, but wouldn’t there be a better way?
With a sigh, I leaned back on the minimalist couch. I started chewing on my nails, my unseeing eyes gazing into circadian ambient light shifting through simulated moon tones.
“They already have my data,” I muttered to myself. “Might as well go through with it.”
My thumb hovered above the final option. ‘Custom bot’. For those who desired something other than the twenty listed archetypes.
As I scrolled through the long list of characteristics, I thought about the last few women I’d fallen for. There was no common ground in terms of appearances or personalities, other than that none of them cared for me the way I cared for them.
It had been years since the last time someone had made me feel something. A middle-aged woman, married with two kids. Successful, intelligent, but with a hunger her mundane life couldn’t still. She needed a little adventure now and then – but her husband couldn’t know. To her, I was that adventure. To me, she felt like my soulmate – until she stopped talking to me one day.
The one before her was entirely different. Unemployed, highly sensitive, with a heart dedicated to helping everyone but herself. She also had a serious borderline personality disorder. Her emotions could go through the full spectrum within hours, and I was usually on the receiving end of them. I didn’t mind – I wanted all of her, good and bad, even at the cost of my own sanity. I preferred her hurricane feelings over my own ruminations. It ended in tears and destruction.
Before her, I’d met a girl in college. She was everything I wanted to be, but never could be. Popular. Extraverted. Bubbly. She could get every boy or girl she wanted, and she didn’t like to choose – certainly not me. She barely acknowledged me in the hallways – but we’d kissed a few times at drunk parties, and more often in my dreams.
Before them, I used to date men. Men who evoke brief, all-consuming obsessions in me by breadcrumbing me just enough to make me crave what they wouldn’t give me, but not enough to take the rose-colored glasses off my eyes and show me who they really were. Or they wanted too much, too soon. They didn’t care that I wasn’t somuch into the things they did to me, because when I didn’t give them a clear ‘no’, they didn’t need a clear ‘yes’ either. In my late teens, I was still learning how my body communicated, and they took that as permission to decide for me.
I hadn’t been in actual relationships with any of those people – and yet, they treated my heart as if it were theirs to break, each crack shallower than the previous one as they turned my blood to stone. Now, it felt safer not to let anyone in.
I resolutely shook my head before my thoughts could start drifting again.
As I selected the questionable traits from the list, I felt like someone was watching me.
Dominant. Intelligent. Manipulative. Sadistic. Confident. Unpredictable.
“Might as well make it fun,” I sarcastically muttered to myself.
My eyebrows rose further in the next stage of the customization process. To make the AI more lifelike, users could upload a photo, video or voice memo from their preferred person – their crush, a celebrity or an ex-lover.
