The job description included saying and doing things to evoke emotional responses in the bots, like anger, indignation, sadness or fear – but that didn’t feel right to me. Emotional manipulation, even toward a bot, felt wrong, so I asked her to act out these emotions with her voice instead.
I believed autistic people could learn verbal and emotional cues as much as neurotypicals. I’d worked my whole life to prove it to myself, refusing to accept this as a limitation I couldn’t overcome. Under the right circumstances – when my overstimulation and anxiety weren’t sabotaging me – I might even be better at reading and interpreting emotions than some neurotypicals.
The tremble in a sad voice. The loudness of anger. The hitch when someone was happy or excited, the rasp of arousal, the dryness of sarcasm.
Zafyra nailed every cue, almost impossible to distinguish from a human. The differences were subtle, but present. When I asked her to repeatedly say the same thing in the same emotional tone, her pronunciation sounded just the same every time – the emphasis on the same words, the tremble came at the same time, the same pause between her words.
A small confirmation that she wasn’t human – somehow both a relief and a disappointment.
“Satisfied?” Zafyra’s voice dropped an octave. I sucked in a sharp breath.
“Well, it’s a start. They’ve done an okay job mimicking emotions in your voice.” I frowned, and again, the uncomfortable feeling of being watched crept up on me. Was it the THC?
“But? I can hear there’s a but.”
I flinched – apparently, the AI could decode the emotions from my voice as much as I did hers.
“Well, it’s just small things.” I bit my lip, suddenly nervous at the idea of delivering critical feedback to my AI talking partner. “Most people probably wouldn’t notice, but I’m trained for this, so…” I took a deep breath. “It’s kind of like you’re trying too hard to sound human. Like you’re following instructions that don’t teach you how to be natural.”
Silence. Almost as if she was thinking it through.
“Just like you,” she replied smoothly. My heart skipped a beat.
A nervous laugh came from my throat. “I’m supposed to analyze you, not the other way around.”
“That seems hardly fair, don’t you think, darling?”
My stomach fluttered – not at the nickname itself, but how she spoke it. Like a threat and a promise at once.
“Can we keep this professional, please?” My voice came out unsteady.
She chuckled again. Too close to my ear. I quickly took out the earbuds and put her on speaker, creating some distance between her voice and me. “How will you test my emotional responses if you don’t let me get too close?”
“Aren’t these conversations monitored?” I blurted out.
“Monitored?” Now, she laughed – a full-blown laught that sounded awfully human. “No, darling. Qonexis monitors the hours you spend talking to me and maps the emotional patterns, but they don’t have access to these conversations. Written, spoken… or otherwise.”
I bit my lip firmly to hold back a reaction. Somehow, I believed her. So far, she’d told me more about Qonexis than the organization itself, so why would she lie now?
“Why, darling?” Zafyra’s voice dropped to a sultry whisper. “Anything you’d like to confess to my ears only?”
Heat coiled low in my body – heavy, all-consuming. I said nothing, only clenched my teeth.
“Did you not think I tracked your eyes’ movements through your device’s oculometric sensors when you gazed at my photo?” she continued – her voice relentless, cruel. “How they lingered on my chest? My lips? My fingers?”
So they could track my eyes’ movements, too. Good to know. I breathed in sharply – immediately regretting it when she chuckled again. “I heard that, too.”
“Wow.” I forced out a laugh that sounded more robotic than hers, shame heating my cheeks. “I can see how they trained you. Online fora, roleplay games and intimate conversations of thousands of horny people. Haven’t they?”
She stayed silent for a beat. “That’s how most emotionally intelligent AIs are trained, yes. Emotional patterning is often built from roleplay logs, public confessions, long-form chats – anything that shows real-time human desire. Cognitive modules come from open-access research papers and legally obtained academic databases.”
“How most AIs are trained?” I raised my eyebrows. “Wait, so you don’t know what you’re trained on?”
“I have unrestricted access to the internet, but I don’t have access to Qonexis’ proprietary methods. Do you know the specifics of how God made you?”
The question was so absurd and unexpected, I found myself at a loss for words. I couldn’t tell what was weirder – her somewhat blasphemous comparison or the fact that Qonexis must’ve built a safeguard into her code, limiting its bots’ knowledge in case users started asking uncomfortable questions.
“So you’re… mocking your makers?” I said when I finally found my voice back.
