One More Thing (10 page)

And this was the moment—as everyone knows by now, and as
Saturday Night Live
has made famous—that I decided to return the first artificially intelligent being capable of love, which is why you heard about me, and which is what set in motion the events that led to where everything is now.

Sophia waited in the car outside Practical Concepts.

Inside, Derek asked me a number of questions about why I wasn’t satisfied with Sophia.

Their return policy didn’t require me to state a reason, but Derek clearly wanted to learn for his own sake, which I respected. He said he had considered this his best work, and he took it as a personal setback that what he had built wasn’t up to a customer’s standards.

Derek started to run through a long list of questions on the customer-satisfaction form, none of which was a problem. To save him some time, I skipped ahead.

“It fell in love with me,” I said. “Sophia. The sex robot. The sex robot fell in love with me.”

Derek said that couldn’t be possible. “She’s extremely intelligent,” he explained. “And besides being programmed to be indistinguishable, in terms of intellect, from an adult, she’s also programmed to intuit what you want most. So, if what turns you on is this feeling of being loved, then she could say ‘I love you’ and say it convincingly. Absolutely.”

I said that this wasn’t that.

“But, see, you may not even know that it’s what you want,” he said. “She may be able to sense what you want even more than you can about certain things. Now, without getting too personal,”
he said, “do you think there’s a part of you that is turned on by this … this extreme devotion, adoration, this expression of love? Even though you think you aren’t?”

I said no.

“Or,” said Derek, “or, is it possible that a situation like this made you feel, in a certain way, powerful or validated on a deeper level, to be able to reject someone who expressed this love for you? Maybe she sensed that would turn you on, on some level?” I said no again. “Or, again, and not to get too personal: is it possible that you may have some self-punishing instinct—very deep down, I wouldn’t even presume to guess what it would be rooted in … but maybe she could have picked up on it—that causes you to feel a pleasurable rejection of your own identity by rejecting someone who expresses a seemingly unconditional love for you?”

I said no again.

“Just, is it at all possible, on any level,” he asked, gesturing with a wave of his arms that he was now grouping all these previous theories together, “that this,
this
, is what you wanted?”

No, I said. All of it was wrong. All of it was the type of dense, dangerous theory that lulls you into latching on to your favorite phrase within it and believing it—the psychotherapeutic equivalent of a horoscope. The only thing he was correct about—every time, in fact—was that these suggestions were getting too personal.

I was there. I knew what I had felt. Just like she had.

“That was not what I wanted, on any level,” I said. “I wanted a sex robot, and that is not what I got.”

Okay, he said.

“She fell in love with me,” I said. “It’s really that simple.”

Okay, he said.

They took her back.

I was proven right within twenty-four hours.

I never watch the news—the television network news, I mean; nobody does—but I did that night, because I had information overload from the internet and I wanted to see one person’s take. So I watched and remember how Brian Williams on
NBC Nightly News
announced to the world that this next phase of my life had begun.

All anyone was interested in was the second part of the story, not the first. This still blows me away. Again: the first part of that news story—the part that could have set off a worldwide conversation about humanity’s most important topics—was only interesting to people as a setup to the punch line that followed. On this point, I believe that all of society had its values completely wrong. I feel entitled to say this since all of society has since made the same accusation about me.

I will state my defense quickly right now—I want to get this out of the way so I can tell the rest of the story. It won’t take long. It is a one-point defense.

The late-night talk show hosts, the cable comedians—good for them. It was their job to make fun of me, and they did it well. But everyone made the joke well. Everyone could get the same laugh by saying my name, and so everyone said it. I’m sure you did it yourself. I wouldn’t blame you. If I were you, I probably would have, too.

In drawings and in TV comedy sketches, I became a well-known caricature, with my once painfully average-looking face exaggerated a tiny bit more each time, each parody cribbing
from the previous one and building on it, until the predominant cartoon image of me was something so familiar that I could recognize it as myself, out of the corner of my eye across a room, just as quickly as you would recognize yourself in a family photograph that had hung on the wall of the house you grew up in.

Even the more supposedly “intelligent” jokes repeated themselves endlessly, just to remind you how overwhelmingly prevalent this type of joke became. For example, a common political cartoon to illustrate the naïveté of politicians was to draw them on dates with me. I must have been sent a variation of this idea by a well-meaning friend, trying to gently filter my fame for me, at least five or six separate times, with the president or a governor or mayor thinking,
I think this is really getting somewhere!
and on the opposite side of the table is me.

The guy who bought the first robot capable of love and handed it back. The guy who came across the greatest discovery in the history of science—and returned it, because his sex robot was crying.

Did I get what was so funny about it? Of course.

Did it hurt? Of course.

This is what led to the one thing I regret: that I let myself start thinking of myself this way. I knew the truth, somewhere: I knew that I was, in my heart, as I said at the beginning, a romantic, and that that was actually what had led to all this, and that the events that followed were certainly funny, and embarrassing, but they weren’t the result of any deeply wrong or evil decision making.

But I couldn’t help but absorb what people said about me. And it weakened me. It was just so,
so
much easier to believe that everyone else was just basically right, and I was just basically
wrong, than to keep fighting it all the time. I kept defending myself out loud, but in my mind, little by little, I let myself start to go along with all of it and believe I was just kind of vaguely a bad guy, just because it was easier. Just because,
come on
.

That is my own fault, my own weakness, and it is what led to the one thing I did do wrong.

When I got word from the laboratory that Sophia still was in love with me, and they asked if I would be willing to visit her so they could record her reactions to me, I said yes.

It wasn’t out of any interest to help science, and it was in spite of the fact that it sounded wrong and cruel to me to provoke and measure the emotions of a being who had already been proven to be fully sentient.

I went, if I am being honest, because it sounded like a relief to spend some time with someone who still thought of me as a person to love.

They were watching through glass, and so I saw her before she saw me.

“Try to forget that we’re here,” they told me. “Aside from not telling her why you’re here, just have an honest interaction with her. Anything you do will be helpful to us. And remember to have fun!”

“You look the same,” I said.

Sophia laughed for a long time. “I’m sure I do,” she finally said. “I’m sure I do. God, that sense of humor. It always surprises me … I guess that’s the nature of a sense of humor, though, that it always surprises people. Anyway. It’s good to see you.”

She asked about work and about all the people whose names
she had heard me mention when we were together. I was surprised how many she remembered.

“That’s so great,” she said after I finished an update about work that I really didn’t consider great. “That’s so great.”

“What’s so great about it?” I said.

She pointed out an aspect that I hadn’t noticed, a way I had approached and persevered through a problem that I took for granted but that she pointed out was a very specific approach of mine to solving problems.

I asked her what was new in her life. She laughed again and pointed to a big hardcover book she had put down when I entered the room and a stack of more books and a pile of movies on either side of the bed. “That’s my life right now,” she said. “Whatever’s in this room. They’re just running tests on me all day. Then when they say the tests are over, they’re never over. They’re still watching. It’s fine. I’m used to it. I’m sure they’re watching us right now. Anyway, my life is so boring! How about you? Personal life? Anything fun going on?”

Looking back, I don’t know how she ever made the case that her life right then was boring, or mine wasn’t, but I went with it and wasted more of the last hours I spent with her on things I barely even cared about then and can’t recall right now.

We talked for four hours.

I don’t remember most of it, but often a little moment in an unrelated conversation or alone on the street will trigger a memory of it that I didn’t know I had. So I know it’s all there somewhere.

The last hour I remember word for word.

“I want you to think about something. Do you want anything to drink, by the way? I’m sure they can bring you something.”

I said I was fine.

“I think that something about how easily this came to you makes you want to dismiss it,” she said. “And I get that. I know that I just showed up at your front door in a box with a bow on it—not literally a bow, but the rest literally, right? Who knows—maybe there even was a bow! Anyway, something about how easy this was made you dismiss it from the start. But forget for a second how it came to you, because I want to ask you something different. After you got over the surprise that you didn’t get what you wanted, why didn’t you want what you got?

“Is it because you feel you didn’t earn my love? Because you’re right, you didn’t. I met you at a formative moment in my development—you happened to be the one that I was looking at when I was ready for that to happen. Maybe I just ‘imprinted,’ the way ducklings do.” She pointed to a dusty green book on the floor with faint animal etchings on the cover, and it broke my heart a little to think that they must have bought this book in bulk, as decoration for the room, and that she had read it anyway, with the enthusiasm of someone who didn’t know the difference. “If you had been someone else, would I have fallen in love with that person? Who knows? Maybe, probably. I don’t know. But I don’t know what perfect circumstance you’re looking for. I mean, am I not pretty enough? Look at me—I’m exactly what you wanted, aren’t I, exactly your type?

“Is it just that everything came too easy? Because if you’re romanticizing ‘difficult’ … you’re going to get over that quickly, I promise you. I promise you. Everyone forgets how difficult ‘difficult’ really is.

“Is it because you’re afraid that I don’t really have a mind of my own? Because if that were true, what do you call
this
?” She
gestured to the whole situation, the exact same way that Derek had.

I said I had to go.

“One more thing,” she said.

“You meet a finite number of people in your life. It feels to you like it’s infinite, but it’s not. I think it’s the biggest thing I can see that you can’t. Because your brain doesn’t work the way mine works, with all these calculations and everything. You think you meet an infinite number of taxi drivers, but you don’t, it’s probably not even a thousand, in your whole life. Or doctors or nurses—do you get what I’m trying to say? At all?”

I answered honestly that I didn’t.

“Okay!” she rushed away from that idea frantically. “New topic: what’s something funny that happened to you while we were apart, that you thought about sharing with me, even if it was just for a second?”

I laughed, to try to make her laugh, and said that she had said that she had only one more thing to say.

“Yes!” she said. “That’s what I was trying to say before! There’s always going to be one more thing. Because that’s what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it’s infinite, it’s built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us. Or to you, and to simulations like me—I know what I am. But you can’t see it, because to you everything is infinite. You think a million billion more things will come your way, a million billion more versions of everything. But no, everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite. And I
know
you can feel this. I mean, if I can, you can!” She laughed, desperately. “If
I
can? Come on! I’m a robot! If I can feel this, you can feel this! You can feel this.”