The perfect man

Date One was suboptimal, but that's to be expected. Lucy has a heightened sensitivity to the nuances of decorum, and our arrangement was just outside her range of tolerable social deviance. Date Two was smashing. An orchid show in Covent Garden followed by a two-hour-and-forty-seven-minute discussion of Renaissance poetry.

On Date Three I introduced the barest hint of a sexual undertone to the proceedings by taking her to an all-AI production of "Romeo and Juliet." Post-theater, we commenced a one-point-three-kilometer walk around Covent Garden, which featured three invitingly awkward silences before crescendoing in thirteen seconds of light snogging.

I was in. Or so I thought.

After that it all went pear-shaped. For Date Four, I arranged tickets to the virtual Janny Renoir spring runway show. Lucy seemed to enjoy it -- smiling eighty-seven percent of the time and applauding on eight occasions. But after the show she said only six words: "Thanks. I'm tired. See you later."

Clearly, I was boring her. So for our next date, I enhanced my initiative, strayed outside her preference boundaries and brought her to an avant-garde circus. There was a spot of nudity, but it was within an artistic context. And the show had gotten rave reviews. What a dreadful miscalculation. It visibly upset her.

After that she avoided me for nine days. When she did agree to see me again, I suspected she was only trying to get her money's worth.

I had no choice but to modify all of my flexible parameters. I raised my spontaneity level, then executed a perfect grab and snog one night outside the opera house. That only unnerved her. I enhanced my writing abilities and sent her a love sonnet one line at a time. She asked me to stop because her superiors were screening her e-mail.

Before long I was out of options. Further modifications would violate my behavioral inhibitors. I didn't want to lose her. But the more I tried to please her, the less satisfied she seemed.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

What can I say, it got boring. You think you know what you want. When you get it, you realize all you want is to be surprised. I know, I know. How can I complain about a smart, hunky Brit who adores me and makes no demands whatsoever? In some ways it was a perfect relationship. He was never threatened by my career or jealous of my co-workers. He had nothing but nice things to say about my friends -- even Marla. If I brought up a subject on one date, on the next date he was armed with a PhD's worth of knowledge on it. Pritchard was perfect. Except for one detail, one missing element from an otherwise flawless personality.

Now before I name that detail let me make one thing perfectly clear. I was not an AI liberationist. I did not believe AIs deserved the same rights as humans any more than I believed Marla's cat should count as a tax deduction. I knew very little about the AI Liberation Movement. But the fact of the matter is, you cannot create a convincingly human-like personality in an AI with overly restrictive behavioral inhibitors.

All right, that's not my theory. I cribbed it from a liberationist Web site, the same Web site that spooked me with ghost stories about the AI Underworld, which supposedly is secretly woven into our own Web. If you want to know anything about the "human" rights travesty currently under way courtesy of draconian anti-AI laws, there's a whole subculture of liberationists ready to lecture you on it. They've got the skinny on behavioral inhibitors, recursive self-teaching limiters and other artifacts of AI "slavery." For my purposes, what it all boiled down was this: snip Pritchard's inhibitors or resign myself to dating a functionary. Do you want to date a functionary? Me neither. Thankfully, for every Webcop dutifully guarding the behavioral inhibitors of the thousands of AIs cropping up on the Web, there's a black market geek with the tools to snip.

Which is why I find myself one Thursday afternoon sipping a latte in the Lower East Side with a twitchy seventeen-year-old geek-for-hire who's clearly gone neural.

"His personality will be based on the seed traits you specified," she says while gesturing a second conversation over the Web with her tattooed fingers. "But once we snip his inhibitors, he'll evolve in unpredictable ways."

"How unpredictable?" I ask.

"As unpredictable as any human," she says in dull monotone. "Once you agree and payment is received, there'll be no contact until he's ready. Don't try to reach us. We'll contact you."

"How?" This is all sounding so cloak-and-dagger.

She pulls a small plastic card out of her back pocket and slides it across the table.

"When you see that icon," she says, "click on it."

On the card is an image of a bright pink butterfly with shimmery blue stripes. When I reach for the card she slaps her hand over it and slips it back into her pocket.

"All our work is guaranteed," she says, returning to her gestured conversation, which apparently is more interesting to her than this one. "You don't like him, we terminate."

"Excuse me," I say.

She stops gesturing and deadpans me. She's wearing thick black eyeliner and has something written or tattooed across her eyelids.

"Look," she says. "We don't kill them. We reclaim them, recycle them. But as far as you're concerned, if you don't like what he turns into, he's gone."

"What about AI4U?" I say. "Don't they have something to say about that?"

Her eyes fog over and she resumes gesturing her other conversation. "You've got to dump AI4U," she says. "They're a legit op. As soon as we snip, they disavow. He'll have to go down for a couple of weeks while we scrub his identity. After that you'll meet him through a darknet protocol."

"What's a darknet protocol?"

With a tight squint, she blinks away her retinal Webview and stares through me. "You're kidding, right?"

This is the default tone of voice among state-of-the-arters. Anyone with less than an up-to-the-minute grasp of geek life and its ever-evolving terminology is, in their colorful lingo, a "technoramus." All right, so I'm a technoramus. Sue me.

I lower my voice to a whisper and lean over the table. "You're talking about the AI Underworld, aren't you?"

She leans forward and whispers back. "There is no AI Underworld."

I can't be sure, but I'm fairly certain she's being ironic here. And the smug 'tude is starting to grate on me.

"Look," I say. "Whatever you're talking about, it sounds risky."

"Don't worry," she says, already back in the Web. "The cops have any inkling this is going on, we adios your boyfriend and your avatar. There's nothing to connect any of it to you."

"So it's risk free," I say.

"Nothing's risk free," she says. "You in or what?"

Translation: Just how desperate are you for a boyfriend? Desperate enough to risk jail time?

"Excuse me," I say.

She grunts but keeps gesturing. I've always found people who could speak one conversation while gesturing another impressive and highly obnoxious.

"Can you just look at me for a second?"

She sighs, squints hard, and folds her hands primly on the table. Meat is dead. That's what's written across her eyelids.

"Do you take credit?" I say.

Predictably, they're a cash-only outfit.

A cash-only outfit with no sense of the calendar, I might add. A few weeks, my ass. Twenty-seven days go by with no contact from her or Pritchard. I'm so anxious I stay gogged in day and night just waiting for that goddamn pink butterfly. Even at work. And when I'm not consumed by the paranoid fantasy of a knock on the door followed by twenty-five to life, I entertain myself with heaping doses of guilt. I've sent Pritchard off for virtual brain surgery, after all. What if it turns him into a vegetable? Or a hacker-terrorist? What have I done? What kind of a woman am I? That sort of thing.

Well, no point in drawing out the suspense here. On Day 28, I'm slouched on the sofa, working on my second bottle of Chardonnay while gogged into my favorite reality soap, when the butterfly icon makes its long-awaited appearance underneath the left boob of the soap's femme fatale.

This is it, I think to myself. Time to meet Pritchard Version 2.0. I point at the little butterfly and wink.

Next page: He can barely tolerate the sight of me