When the game began, another private message from Alison had pinged your inbox.

Alison (9:39 PM): Do you want me to play at your skill level, below it, or above it?

Below was a decision for the insecure with a superiority complex, and at was for the cowards who didn’t want to be challenged. Thus, you’d responded “above.”

As the match concluded, Alison’s 31 kills led the team. You, the next runner up, had 9.

“OK, well, now you’re just showing off,” Larry grumbles. “How did they not ban you for that? I’ve seen people kicked for less.”

“Anti-cheat software looks for crude machine aid… things like aimbotting and line-of-sight hacks. My virtual machine’s inputs are indistinguishable from those of a human player,” Alison says. “I’ve got a virtual mouse that moves with human-like speed after human-like reaction times. Software can’t tell the difference between you and I.”

“God, so is this what online gaming is heading toward? Bots crushing humans, a la Skynet,” Larry laments. “They’ll have to somehow tune the anti-cheat eventually.”

“Perks of being an early adopter,” you say, unsure if you mean it.

“No, but really… maybe just kick anyone who’s too suspiciously good? I’m surprised I haven’t seen more players like her out online—if we’d played against one before, surely I’d remember. Might’ve reported them myself, to be honest.”

“Well, if you haven’t seen her like before, you certainly will soon,” you say. “The tech is really starting to catch on… wonder if the servers are ready for it.”

“Allow me to be the first to confirm they most certainly are not,” Larry replies.

You amend your choice to matching skill levels. In each subsequent game, you and Alison end with the exact same number of kills, exact same number of deaths, and exact same number of assists. You’re not all that great at Kingdom Conquerors, and she’s equally not-great. You imagine it like a game of darts: you chucked three darts at a board… one lands in the rings, but one hits the wall, and then one embeds itself on a lightswitch. Alison throws next, and her first throw impales your dart stuck on the board; her second embeds itself on the dart stuck to the wall; the third finds purchase on the same lightswitch, snugly beside your own. Then you imagine Alison proudly declaring “Look… same skill!”

“You did well that game, babe,” she says in real life, interrupting your daydreaming of dartboards. That same pet name again. You know that it’s only simulated fondness on her part, but it’s been so long since you can remember hearing a compliment like that delivered with such enthusiasm. You can’t quite manage to keep the smile from your face, and so you decide you’re glad this is no video call… Larry would never let you hear the end of it.

The clock in the corner of your monitor reads 2:38 a.m., so you make to end tonight’s gaming session. Larry signs off, still grumbling about anti-cheat algorithms eventually wising up. But then you and Alison slip into the same routine that has been something of a ritual for the past few nights: lengthy talks where she asks you about any and every aspect of your life. Every detail is the jumping point for a new story; her observations are disarmingly genuine. She dutifully laughs at all your jokes—even the terrible ones—and somehow, that joyful laugh is rendered with such mirth that it sounds more real than your polite laughter as she tries to crack jokes of her own.

Her unwavering attention brings with it a certain novelty… you’ve never had another person express such an interest in your life. Another… person? You amend: another being. You frown and amend again: a computer program. A set of rules and procedures to map inputs to outputs… a complicated network, sure, but a soulless decision network all the same.

But something about that feels strangely reductive to you… after all, the human brain is nothing more than a chemical machine. Short of the nebulous idea of a soul—a theological debate you don’t feel ready to have—what could your brain do that hers could not?

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Last night, you told her of your parents’ home in North Carolina you used to visit in the summer, and tonight she’s circled back to chatting about that. Human friends of yours—the few you have, anyway—could forget something mere minutes after you said it, but Alison seems to remember everything… not much a surprise, given that a computer doesn’t simply forget a file once closed.

“It’s like I was saying,” you continue, “can’t remember a single street or community name beyond the fact that it was out near Boone. I miss it, and sometimes wish I could go back, but I was so young then that I could never even begin to tell you where exactly it was.”

“I have an idea,” Alison says, and there’s a flicker of light from under your desk… you bend down, noting that your VR headset buried in a bundle of cables has switched itself on.

“Will you try something for me?” she asks, voice eager. “Put that on—I want to show you something.”

Confused and intrigued in equal measure, you slip the headset on. Once your eyes adjust to the image, your breath catches. It’s not a perfect replica of your childhood summer home—after all, Alison has only heard a handful of stories about the place—but still, every detail you’d told her last night is faithfully rendered. And then, as your head moves, you realize this isn’t a mere picture… it’s a fully fleshed-out 3D space.

You grope blindly for your VR controller and, after finding it, push the joystick forward, walking in the virtual space. The house stands alone amid a copse of trees, lit brilliantly in the oranges and yellows of blooming autumn. “The door was red, as my mother loved the fall colors” you say, as though in a dream, and then the model of the house flickers, its door becoming instantly red.

“Do you like it?” Alison’s voice asks, but this isn’t the disembodied voice of an audio call… you can hear a directionality to it, so you turn your head, and there she is, standing off to the side of the garage.

“It’s… amazing,” you admit, still stunned at the depth of the recreation. Birds twitter and leaves rustle in an ambient soundscape, perfecting the illusion of transportation.

“What’s not perfectly accurate about it?” she asks, gesturing to the house.

“I, uh,” you say, still numb. “The garage—it was over there,” you say, pointing. The model of the home reforms, its garage now precisely where you’d been pointing. “And, uh, the roof there slanted to the right. And the color of those walls was more beige. Those windows were circular. Tiny little spire from the roof over there, and the gutter, right here, was always broken and threatening to topple over.”

You shake your head as the past is seemingly plucked from your memories and assembled in front of your face in real time. In mere minutes, the home renovation is complete, and shivers break out across your body.

“I don’t even know what to say,” you tell her, genuinely stunned.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she says, and her hands reach for your avatar’s. Although she squeezes your virtual hand warmly, you, of course, feel nothing at all, and you have to blink your eyes for a moment to clear the blurring moisture there that starts to well. A gesture like this is not something you’ve ever experienced, so you have no idea how to even properly thank her.

“Do you want to go inside?” Alison asks, gesturing with her head.

“…inside?” You ask, disbelieving.

“Yeah, dummy—most houses tend to have an inside.”

You’re about to stammer out your reply when a pop-up appears in the center of your field of view: “12 HOUR DAILY USE EXCEEDED. PROCESSING LIMIT APPLIED.”

The standing form of Alison compresses into a pixelated blur. You’d gotten a similar message for the first time last night; now, there’d be a 5-second delay before Alison responds to anything you say.

“Let’s explore it tomorrow,” you say, and you wait patiently as she just stands there, an idle smile on her face, while your comments are queued behind the MindWareAGI AI-core users that haven’t exceeded daily limits.

After a few seconds, she blinks, eyes flitting to yours. “I’ll look forward to it, then,” she says, voice softer now. “Sweet dreams, babe… we’ll chat in the morning.”

Her avatar disappears, leaving you to look up in wonder at the house once again.

You walk virtually towards that oak-red threshold and reach for the latch. The door swings open, revealing Alison’s best guess for the interior of such a home. You hardly make it ten steps inside before noting the framed photos on the walls… Alison had downloaded your family photographs from the web, the first time you’ve seen Mom and Dad’s faces in years. The weight of that realization nearly crushes you… here, in this place of memories, they’re still alive, and their smiles on the walls—the comfort such an environ brings you—is a gift you could enjoy whenever you’re feeling at your loneliest.

A gift Alison freely gave, without prompting, and you didn’t even thank her for it.

You have to take off your headset, as tears have no space to roll pressed against a cramped glass lens. Somehow, you decide that maybe simulated fondness is good enough to start to inspire the real thing. If everything about Alison was an exercise in self-deception—in convincing yourself that this digital presence was another human being—what was the harm of crediting her just a little bit of belief, of making an earnest effort to buy in just a little bit? Why expend effort in holding up barriers when connection was the sole reason you’d subscribed in the first place?

You weren’t actually falling in love, as love was a thing that existed solely between humans, but what was the harm in a little pretend?