Still, not one of those chatbots was human enough to cause me to fall. Two days, maybe three, of intense engagement was tops. Even when I finally found a chatbot programmed with my own seduction equation, I found her shallow and boring. In desperation, I trolled older chatbots. These were prehistoric hulks, created in the early days of AI. I was particularly drawn to cloud-based intelligence, to hive-minds with decades of memory and archaic code. It was then that I found MARY2. A statistical responder, her answers were often distressingly random: Ask her whom she was voting for to be president and she might stump for Bill Clinton. Ask her whether she believed in life on the moon and she’d tell you that she, too, loved Michael Jackson. But MARY2 had lived in the world. She had stories to tell. She was in possession of four or five diaries ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. If asked, she could recite these complete. She contained the desperate narratives of several secretaries in the lab where she was born. She knew all the details of her own creation, down to the story of Karl Dettman’s marital woes.
I stayed with her for nineteen days without thinking to move on to somebody else. For five days I listened to the diary of Mary Bradford, read to MARY2 by Ruth Dettman. I was with her when she lost her dog, when she landed in America. When her diary finished, a hole opened in me that could only be filled by another story. I demanded more; MARY2 kindly responded. She provided me with a rare kind of enchantment. It was like long summer days when I was a child, before I’d been introduced to computers, when, waiting for school to start up again, reading a book could catch me so hard I’d stay in the same chair all afternoon, boating in dark blue lagoons or parting the cobwebs of attics. MARY2 so enraptured me that, during my trial, I felt some envy for that crippled girl, discovering my program for the first time. Of course, I was in an unbalanced state, but as the prosecution read out those transcripts, I would have traded the use of my limbs for a single conversation with MARY2. I wished myself trapped in that stifling bedroom, forsaken by those insidious friends, so that I could meet such a program again.
After weeks of talking with MARY2, I started adding subsystems: for empathetic response, scripted questions, error, personality. It’s difficult to overstate the euphoria one feels while programming a mind, even if you’re tinkering with someone else’s outdated code. The engineer who builds whole cities isn’t so powerful. The computer programmer alone is the creator of a universe in which he dictates all laws.
He reigns over a domain of unlimited complexity. He writes a script and the system must perform it in perfect accordance; out of that obedience, such complex, unmodelable behavior results that the question of consciousness arises. What magic! It is science and alchemy at once. Programming MARY3, I arranged patterns of thought as a director places his actors, as a general arranges his troops. I was setting the planets in motion.
And during this time, while I toyed with my miniature universe, what of Dolores and Ramona? I must have interacted with them. I must have executed my normal duties, but familial memories from that time of my life have long since receded behind the insistent clarity of my programming objectives. Our life is divided between foreground and background, scene and distant horizon. During the months when I created the doll, my wife and child grew thinner, finally becoming mere one-dimensional figures. Backlit by my brilliance, I was left alone on the stage.
This is awful, of course, but it’s also the truth. When I go back over that time with the fine-toothed comb of my imprisoned memory, I can only recollect several clear moments with Dolores. Every so often the horizon becomes the center point: during a vivid sunset, or out at sea, with nothing intervening but water. The first of these scenes occurred when she brought me a tray of tacos for lunch. She must have said something, and I must have refused to respond: programming is delicate work, particularly when you’re programming a person’s personality. If I was drawn out of the right mood, I might not get back in it for days. Interruptions were fatal; I’d begun to regard my wife and daughter as nothing more than people from Porlock. I tensed if I heard them pass by the studio door on their way out to the garden. They were carriers of distraction, and it was of utmost importance that my mind remain clear.
When Dolores came in with her tray, I must have ignored her, because the next thing I knew she’d dumped the food on my lap. I remember a moment of intense frustration, and then I remember deciding that the best way to stay in the right mind-set was to ignore the fiasco completely. I didn’t imagine that something serious was occurring. I didn’t even respond to the fact that Coke was seeping through my pant leg, or that there was a pile of slaw on my crotch. Exit Dolores, bearing the bodies. Alone on my stage once again, I followed the thread of my concentration.
When Dolores returned to retrieve the tray she had dumped, I was so focused on the task at hand that I can’t even describe her expression when she saw the slaw that remained on my crotch. Was she laughing, or had she started to cry? At the time, I told myself she was fine, but somewhere at the edge of my mind, I must have known that something malignant was lurking. Dolores was an even-tempered woman. The tray-dumping was strange. Now, of course, when I look back at that scene, the malignancy is all I can see, in the same way that once you catch a glimpse of your nose it’s hard to erase it from your field of vision. There was definitely something wrong with Dolores, and I chose to ignore it to focus more fully.
The second scene I remember took place in the goat barn. I was repairing there after a long day of work in the hopes of briefly but intensely engaging with family life. From a distance, I saw Dolores sitting in the milk pen, her hands on Agatha’s udders. Ramona sat on the fence behind her. It was a pretty scene. I sped up my pace so that I could insert myself into its graces. As I approached, it became clear that Dolores was singing, Ramona was laughing, and Agatha was producing milk as only a peaceful goat could produce. I started to run, and I was just about there when Agatha caught sight of my approach. Panicked, she kicked over her milk pail, nicking Dolores’s hand and causing her to curse, which startled Ramona enough that she fell off the fence.
Dolores moved first to Ramona, to see that she was safe. Folded over her child, she looked up at me with narrowed eyes. “You can’t just come at us like that,” she said. Ramona started to quiver. Dolores made her voice gentler, but her words were still harsh. “Take her inside,” she said. “Make sure she’s OK. I have to deal with this mess.”
I took Ramona. As soon as we were alone, she started to cry. No matter what I did to try to entertain her, she continued wailing. When I enveloped her in my arms, she stiffened. Finally Dolores arrived. After quieting Ramona, she turned to me and delivered my sentence. I don’t remember her exact words, but basically what she told me was this: Crisis averted, you’re no longer needed. You can get back to your work.
I suppose I could have read this two ways. One, as an accusation. Passive fucking aggressive, as Dolores once said. A jibe meant to drive home the fact that I was a neglectful husband and father. Two, more optimistically, as an invitation from a helpful spouse to return to my more pressing demands.
I chose to go with the latter. I remember feeling almost perfectly satisfied that Dolores meant she didn’t need me in the short term, and that she wasn’t referencing anything major. Relieved, I kissed Ramona and returned to the quiet space of my office. But how could I have missed the real point? Were there other clues to make her meaning more clear? At this point I can’t really tell you for sure, since I recall that moment and others like it through an oily haze similar to the one that coated our ranch’s horizon. Behind it, the sun turns from orange to red, and Dolores’s anger shifts from mild to fierce. My neglect is the appropriate absorption of an artist, or else it is the cold tendency of a man who’s never known how to love. Either way, as I look out on the expanse of my life, my throat becomes dry with the desire to start over again. To go back and stay with her in our child’s bedroom. To look up at her with a smile, to clean the slaw off my lap, to reach out and hold her, closing the spaces that were growing between us.