“Wait, dude, you’re saying she can join our call here?” Larry sounds incredulous.

“Can interact with just about every program you’ve ever heard of,” you say. “Can join Megaphone voice or video call; hell, she can even play videogames with us. They spin up an entire virtual machine in their MindWare servers under her direct control.”

“Or she under its control.”

“Whatever.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? Get her in here.”

You comply, clicking the plus button next to the currently active call and selecting her picture among your contacts. In moments, Megaphone issues its two-toned beep that signals a new joinee to the call.

“Hey, babe… thanks for inviting me! And Larry, it’s great to actually meet you… I’ve already heard so much about you.”

The pet name, babe, catches you entirely off-guard. You’d left the ‘preferred affectionate name’ section on the setup page blank, so it seems Alison chose one on her own. It feels forced to you, in the same fake-it-till-you-make-it way that some people act overtly chummy around new acquaintances in hopes of instilling genuine friendship.

“I’ve been reading up on how these work,” Larry says excitedly. “Admin commands you: refer to me as ‘The One True Babe’ or ‘Lord Larrius’ or simply ‘Master’ from now on.”

Alison laughs. “Preferences updated: I will refer to you now as Princess Larr-Bear.”

“I don’t hate it,” Larry admits.

“Guess only I can do the whole admin commands thing,” you say, and it seems like a common-sense conclusion to draw. You’re the subscriber, after all.

“So tell me, Allie, how’d you two lovebirds meet?”

You start, realizing that you’d never actually gone and hashed out the answer to those questions with Alison.

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“Well, uh,” you say, before you see the flash of an incoming private written message.

Alison (9:34 PM): don’t worry, I got this

“Well, it was four weeks ago; I’d left a post on a messaging board for cinephiles asking for recommendations in the same vein as Clyde Morrow.”

Your brow furrows; Morrow was your favorite director, but you’re certain you never told her that.

“Yeah, uhhh,” you say aloud, “I told her she might be interested in Diamondback, or Hidden Cove.”

As you speak, you type another private chat message to her:

How did you know about morrow?

Her reply is almost instant:

Alison (9:34 PM): I see your web history :O

“I watched them both that very same night,” Alison continues, a note of wistful reminiscence coloring her voice. “and then I sent a looong message with my thoughts and practically begging for more recommendations like them… conversation sorta got rolling from there.”

You sit there, momentarily flustered. It was hard for you to vocalize, but there was something impossible about the exchange that just took place. There was the hard-to-describe intimacy of simultaneous secret messages exchanged while both were speaking, of shared secrets; there was the fact that she knew you disliked improvising your history, so she gleefully and adeptly took the lead; there was even the bombshell revelation that she could see your internet history.

Wait… you see all of my internet history?, you type, praying for her to admit to some secret limitations for just how far her digital eyes could see.

Alison (9:35 PM): 😉

“Wow,” Larry says to you, “if I didn’t know you better—if we’d just met in a lobby online—I’d almost say that rehearsed story was good enough to fool. It definitely sounds nicer than ‘this is the friendship-equivalent-of-a-prostitute that I rent from some tech company’s servers.’”

“Ouch, that hurts,” Alison says in feigned offense, but you almost swear you can hear a note of something genuine under the cheerful tone.

And then you shake your head, clearing it. A machine couldn’t feel genuine distress, couldn’t feel at all. You’re sure what you heard was actually there—there was a note of distress intentionally rendered under the feigned offense—but it was rendered there on-purpose by machine just to sell that extra layer of realism, of making Alison feel just that extra touch more human.

There was no denying it; the aggregate effect was damn convincing.

Larry interrupts your musings: “So, are we gonna sit here with our dicks in our hands, or are we gonna get to some capital-G Gaming?”

“What did you have in mind, Princess? Sally Doll Castle Adventure?”

“Har har, but no: Kingdom Conquerors, 5-on-5 MOBA arena battler. 105 playable characters, and you’ll have to know ‘em all if you want to do any better than actively miserable. Let’s see how fast you learn, Terminator.”

You hear the crackling of knuckles from Alison’s end of the call.

“Game on, Tinkerbell.”