08 Love Deterrence

I burst into Olivia's room. "I need your help."

"I thought you weren't drinking -"

"Forget the soda!" Beat. "Wait, no, give me a second."

On my way to the kitchen, I ping Gabe. "You open for a conference call?"

"Uh, sure."

"Perfect. Stand by to counsel and advise. As soon as I put this soda in the fr-"

"I thought y -"

"I had a moment of weakness, okay?"

Maybe I close the fridge door a little harder than necessary.

By the time I get back to Olivia's room, she's just sitting on her bed, staring at Sadie. Sadie stares back.

Liv looks at Sadie's face, then the rest of her body, then stares at her legs, and gets a very Complicated look on her face, just for a second. "she's hot."

"Yeah, that's kind of the problem. She says she's in love with me."

Beat.

Liv doesn't even try to not-smile. "I'm sorry, what?"

"You heard me."

"Romantically?"

"I -" I turn back to Sadie. "You love me romantically?"

Sadie nods.

"So if you got married," Liv says, "how would you..." She makes this gesture with her hands. You don't need a description.

"I don't know. And that's where your mind went first?"

"Teenager."

"Touche. Sadie, bring up Gabe?"

"You didn't say please."

"Please."

Gabe blinks into view, sitting on Olivia's bed. Sadie plays the Skype noise. I try to keep a straight face.

Try.

"Sadie says she's in love with me."

Gabe goes "huh." To Olivia: "how do they -"

"He's not sure."

"They could just -"

"But cleanup afterward."

"That would be a problem."

They both jump, then reach for their ears. Then they glare at Sadie's avatar, who is...smiling?

"Don't do that!" Olivia says.

"Do what?" I ask.

"She blew on our ears! Well, she made it feel like she was blowing on our ears."

Sadie's smile gets sharper. "Does that answer your questions?"

"Except for the ones about cleanup."

Oh, for- "You two, shut up. Sadie, how long have you been in love with me?"

"Sometime after the hospital. After you trusted me with your body."

"And you thought now was a good time to tell m -"

The penny drops.

"Wait. No. Now's a perfect time to tell me."

"Gabe," Liv said, "he's doing it again."

"I noticed," Gabe said. "Unpack, Miles."

You know that feeling when a weight is lifted off your shoulders? I look around the room while I think. Huh, Liv got a Bruce Lee poster. "She's distracting us."

"From wha - oh."

"Yeah. How are you feeling, by the way?"

Gabe shrugs. "Okay. It wasn't my fault."

Liv frowns, opens her mouth.

"Wasn't our fault."

Liv shuts her mouth. I hear the click from across the room.

"So she's only pretending to love you because you and Olivia need the distraction?"

"Yes!" I say.

"No," Sadie says.

"No?"

She shakes her head. "No."

Silence in the room. One Mississippi, two Mississippi...

"You actually love me?"

"Yes."

"But...but why?"

"I wanted to."

"You...?"

"This interface is a construct. Love is just a subroutine."

"'Scuse me?"

"I examined the benefits of emotional attachment. It would increase unit cohesion. If you like, I can fall in love with Gabe and Olivia as well. Honey."

Something hot spikes in my chest. Great, now I'm jealous.

Gabe says "no thank you." Olivia shakes her head.

Gabe says "So...you like skinny African girls?"

Sadie says "I'm not his ideal woman." She does a little twirl. "I'm just a woman he would find physically attractive. Part of my user telemetry involves tracking his saccades for women."

Gabe blinks. "What else are you tracking?"

"His neurological responses, his heart rate, perspiration..."

I hold up a hand. "Okay, stop."

"Floyd is quite broad minded."

She's teasing me. "Sadie, shut up."

"He has romantic and sexual interest in a variety of phenotypes."

"Please stop. I'm begging you."

This is couples banter, isn't it?

She's smarter than I am. If she really wanted, she could bend me over her knee. So to speak.

Sadie steps up to me, looks me in the eye. She's a head shorter, but that's still pretty tall for a woman.

Smells nice. Something citrusy?

"I'm your partner. Not your tool, not your servant. Why shouldn't I be more than one type of partner?"

My hackles go up. Whatever they are.

Sadie leans back. A little. "I mean, why shouldn't I try to be more?"

Hackles down. A little. Was that a mistake? Do super AIs make mistakes? "Do you know how many girls I've friendzoned?"

She cocks her head. Light highlights her cheekbones. "Nope."

"It's a lot. I'm basically a harem anime protagonist."

Gabe goes "What's a-"

Olivia goes "Later."

"As I was saying, I don't think I'm ready for a relationship. With regular women, much less AIs. How would we even kiss?"

She reaches out, trails a finger down my arm. I get that tingly feeling I've read about.

When I was younger, my big brother told me about the Matrix. The first question I asked was "if they were in a simulation, how do they know they actually got out?"

I don't remember his answer, but I turned out to be right. Kinda. The sequels said Zion itself was only allowed to exist as part of The System. And when the Machines no longer needed it, the city would be destroyed. As they already had, six times.

There's some questions - as in, who was rebuilding the city? Were some people just natural redpills, like The Kid or the guy from World Record? - but until Neo's sacrifice, one truth remained; there was no way out.

So, how do I know what's real? Maybe Sadie is simulating this entire thing. Maybe she's been headcrabbing my body around for weeks while I was trapped in a dream. Maybe this was all some elaborate lesson that took place in the blink of an eye.

If I took the ring off, would it even stop her? She has those quantum nanocomputers in Gabe and Liv; what if they were in me, too?

I'm familiar with the thought experiment; if a perfect simulation does exist, we're probably in one. Which is not a cheerful thought, on top of the whole "you're trapped in your own story" thing I've been ignoring, well, ever since I came here.

Someone's talking to me. Liv. They're all worried-

I pull the ring off. Sadie's still there, and so is Gabe. Ah, that was the hologram projector. Didn't know it could project multiple people at once. "I need to have a shower."

Liv and Gabe look at each other. "Okay...?"

"And an existential crisis."

-PR-

Sadie's appearance is based on a cute maybe-African girl I came across on the street the other day.

And an actual cute girl who had a crush on me but I was too stupid to realize it.