“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Audrey takes a prim sip of her drink, but her cheeks are flushed, and her hand is still on my thigh—higher now, close enough to be dangerous.
“Leave them alone,” Layla says. “They just got FDA approval. They’re allowed to be disgusting.”
“Speaking of tech breakthroughs,” Bennett says. “Dominic was telling me about a new AI chatbot his team’s been testing. Apparently, it’s remarkably lifelike.”
“It wasn’t lifelike, it was a disaster,” I blurt. “The natural language processing was adequate at best, and the emotional modeling was completely off. She never would have responded that way to a direct explanation. I ran forty-seven different conversation simulations and none of them accurately predicted how she’d react to me telling her why I blocked the kiss, which was the whole point of building it in the first place, so really it was a failed experiment from a technical standpoint even if it did help me organize my thoughts about?—”
I stop. Suddenly realizing that everyone is staring at me and Dominic is making frantic cutting motions across his throat. But it’s too late. The word ‘chatbot’ triggered a cascade of panic responses in my nervous system, and my mouth moved before my brain caught up.
Shit.
“Wait. You’re talking about adifferentchatbot, aren’t you?”
A slow, cold horror dawns in the pit of my stomach. I look at Audrey, who is staring at me over the rim of her glass with an eyebrow quirked in a shape that, in my experience, signals imminent disaster.
“Logan,” she says, that perfectly neutral tone she uses before detonating something large in my general vicinity. “What chatbot?”
My mouth opens. Closes. I see Dominic mouthing,don’t say anything, don’t say anything,but my tongue is a traitor and is already in motion.
“The, uh. The one I coded when you were in Sweden.”
“Coded to do what, exactly?” she asks.
Caleb can’t hide his amusement. “Please tell me you didn’t build a sexbot version of Audrey.”
My jaw drops. “No! God—no. It was a conversational simulator.” I turn to Audrey. “Modeled on your speech patterns and personality metrics.” My eyes drop to my champagne and stay there. “So I could practice.”
“Practice what?”
“Talking to you. Explaining why I—” I gesture vaguely at my face. “Why I did what I did. The hand thing. I didn’t know how to explain it, and I couldn’t figure out the right words, so I thought if I could simulate the conversation first...”
“You built a chatbot version of me,” Audrey says. “To rehearse apologizing.”
“It sounds kind of shit when you say it like that.”
“How does it sound when you say it?”
“Like a reasonable application of technology to solve an interpersonal communication problem.”
Serena is staring at me with her mouth open. Caleb looks like he’s witnessing a car crash in slow motion. Layla has both hands pressed over her heart.
“That,” Audrey says, “is the most unhinged thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“I’m aware it crosses several boundaries?—”
“It does. But it’s also weirdly sweet.”
I blink. “It is?”
“You missed me so much you programmed a fake version of me just so you could practice saying sorry.” She shakes her head, a smile tugging at her lips. “That’s... incredibly you.”
“I don’t know if that’s a compliment.”
“It is.” She leans in, brushing her lips against my cheek. “You absolute disaster of a man. I can’t believe you built me a chatbot.”
“Technically, I builtmea chatbot. You were just the template.”
“That’s not better, Logan.”
