How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch Read online

  Twenty minutes later, out came Paolo, guns-a-blazing, nearly literally. The candles on the plate in front of him simultaneously lit the artful Cheez-It house with Nutella mortar on the plate and his beaming face above. “Never say that Paolo’s chefs are not resourceful!” he crowed. “Cheeez-Iiiiiits!” he sang theatrically as he set the plate down and left with a bow. Okay, that was a little embarrassing, but Kelly still found herself having fun.

  The candles made each silver facet of the cutlery handles on the table glitter and dance. Kelly blew out the flames, then handed a cracker to Ethan before plucking one off for herself. “Here,” she said. “Good, right?”

  Ethan nodded emphatically. “It is without a doubt the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

  Kelly laughed.

  seven

  Within a week or so, Kelly began to worry less about whether someone would recognize that Ethan was a robot, or look askance at him in any way.

  At home, they were building a routine together, with shared take-out dinners and TV time before bed. (Ethan “slept” on the couch in a low-power sleep mode, a state that allowed him to breathe and stir.) Every morning, he designed her a new digital bouquet while she got ready for work, each one a unique combination of colors and exquisitely rendered textures, sometimes incorporating surprising materials like seashells or Romanesco cauliflower, even branching out and using flowers that were entirely his invention, lavish tendrils of blue or prismatic constructions that were mathematical, yet delicate. Each evening, he bounded to the door when she came in, ready to hold her hand while she slipped out of her shoes.

  For someone so naturally self-conscious, there was a delicious freedom in having a robotic boyfriend. It was impossible for him to judge her. He had no exes, no other women to compare her to. She had literally programmed him to be loyal to her. When she walked around the apartment in her mismatched underwear, or in one of her favorite at-home comfort uniforms (a towel held up with Velcro, a high school mathlete T-shirt worn to the consistency of gauze), Ethan never blinked. He even joined in on Netflix Slanket night. Sometimes, though, when he pulled new clothes from his section of her closet and changed in the mornings, she couldn’t help but stare as he undressed—only expressing a scientific admiration of her own handiwork, of course. She shook her gaze away.

  Freedom was kind of a new thing for Kelly. She could imagine a world of flying cars and VR corneal implants, but she couldn’t imagine trying bowling or throwing together a bag and taking an impromptu weekend trip. Kelly’s aversion to risk may have been partially genetic, but certainly part of it stemmed from growing up as the middle child in a problem child sandwich. Clara had been dangerously flighty, bringing in injured opossums who seemed as reluctant to be in the house as Carl and Diane had been to host them, throwing parties that spiraled wildly beyond her expectations, crashing not one but two cars as a teenager because “such a good song came on.” And Gary, before becoming a model parent/toddler slave, had been a sulky goth who posed for his freshman yearbook photo with a pentagram drawn on his forehead in his mom’s eyeliner. Really, Kelly had never had any choice but to be the safe, responsible one, the one devoid of surprises. Now, by creating Ethan, she seemed to be making up for twenty-nine years of no surprises in one go.

  While she enjoyed her time with Ethan, she couldn’t help but tinker with him too. Ever the perfectionist, as the days passed, Kelly observed her experiment with keen interest, picking up on glitches and repairing them: a catch in his movement when he would raise his left arm, a chip in one of his toenails, a predilection for holding doors open for strangers who were approaching from too far away. Every issue she discovered in Ethan helped her anticipate and avoid the same problems in Confibot. What’s more, the machine learning element that AHI incorporated into all of their builds allowed Ethan to evolve and improve even without Kelly’s input. He was observing her, learning her quirks and preferences. He noticed that she wore a lot of oatmeal-colored clothing, so when she asked him to go buy new sheets with the credit card she provided him for such errands, he found a set in exactly that color. Watching him evolve was fascinating—Kelly was entranced by the possibilities of AI, and here in front of her was her very own, personalized subject. From a research perspective, it was exhilarating. The two of them even sat down together with a notebook and fabricated every pertinent aspect of his life they could think of, complete with constructing a robust online identity for him to throw off potential Googlers, including his own e-mail accounts, social media profiles, and a fake Stanford employee bio page as an astronomy associate professor (as a Stanford grad herself, she’d been able to give him a complete rundown of the school). Gradually, she became certain that no one, even a fellow scientist, could pick up on anything abnormal about Ethan. This machine, this man, was her greatest work, and a great work by any standards. Any robotics lab in the world would be hard-pressed to produce something more natural, more convincing.

  Meanwhile, Diane peppered Kelly at every turn with questions about this Ethan she had met, but Kelly deflected. It was too soon to introduce him to her family, too complicated. Connecting Ethan so firmly to the reality of her everyday life would mean really reckoning with the enormity of what she had done in creating him, and the risks that she was taking if anyone in her personal or professional life discovered the truth. She didn’t want to do that yet; she didn’t want to think about it. She only wanted to nestle into the grooves of this new experience.

  It had been years now since every other tech company in the Valley started tearing down their cubicles and installing coworking pods, rock climbing walls, espresso labs, and nap dens. Not so at AHI. The company was relatively small but one of the top in its elite field, and it could certainly have afforded to keep up with the San Jose Joneses. But Anita would rather put the company’s money straight in the bank. Other employees often grumbled about the gray laminate cubicle walls and the cheap carpet. But Kelly didn’t mind. She was here to work.

  Though right now, she was finding work difficult. She had made the executive decision to start building the physical model of Confibot without a face for now. Confibot would require far more precision and testing than Ethan had and would take all of the two and a half months she had left; she couldn’t expect to finish him in two (very long) days. The robot was coming along, testing well on all the strength and agility parameters he would need for his work. But she still had no idea what his face should look like, what his voice should sound like, who he should be—a problem that, Kelly recalled with an annoying flash, would have been more easily solved if she still had a psychologist working at her side. It had been so simple in comparison to create Ethan. But she knew that she couldn’t take the same fly-by-night approach to Confibot. Here she had to cling strictly to the data in order to develop a product that would appeal the most to the maximum number of people, not just to herself.

  She was currently combing through innumerable facial models on her computer, but the face she kept seeing was Ethan’s. For the first time today, she had left him on, by himself, at home. She knew that the more opportunity he had to interact with his environment, the more he would learn and the more human he would become. She had left him with some light housework and her e-reader to keep him busy. Still, she had nervous visions of returning home to discover that he had chosen to surprise her by papering the walls with Cheez-Its.

  On top of that, the more she tried to concentrate on her project, the more Robbie wanted to talk about his own. “Good morning, Kelly,” he said brightly, his head popping over their shared cubicle wall.

  “Good morning, Robbie,” she said, trying to keep the weariness from her voice, eyes still locked to her screen. Robbie was a brilliant engineer, one of the top in their team, always the first into the office in the morning and the last out at night, though he was smart enough that he could have slacked off and gotten away with it. He was ruthlessly polite, never unguarded, always in the proper place, and endlessly energetic. He was even good-looking, with sym
metrical features and a neatly molded chin above a crisp collar. But while Robbie was always perfect, he never seemed quite … right. Kelly figured that he was just a bit of an odd duck, not one to let his hair down, and in that arena, who was she to talk? But he was obnoxious enough—subtly arrogant, not so subtly obsequious—that she only felt a little bad for laughing when Priya called him Robo-Robbie behind his back.

  When Kelly joined the company, she and Robbie had started dating almost immediately. On paper, he had seemed like her perfect mate. Their half year of dating—a dependable weekly outing to an orderly white-tablecloth restaurant, or a park at an hour when he could predict a minimal presence of children—had been as calm as teacups, utterly problem-free. In fact, one could even say that Robbie pushed Kelly to be better: in the wake of his punctual perfection, she had felt unable to grant herself any room for error. But Kelly had been dogged by the sensation that she was looking for a problem in their relationship.

  One night after their dinner appointment at a restaurant they had never visited before, but that they might as well have, so neatly did it fit their white tablecloths and salad forks mold, they passed a nightclub on the way to Robbie’s car. Seized by a rebellious whim, Kelly had grabbed Robbie’s arm. “Want to go dancing?” she had said, pointing at the club.

  But Robbie had just laughed, much harder than at any of Kelly’s actual jokes. “Can you imagine? The only thing more idiotic-looking than the people at a nightclub is when people show up who don’t belong there.” He shook his head, laughing some more. “Us dancing. It’s a good thing you keep two feet firmly on the ground. You’re not precisely a paragon of grace.”

  It was true that Kelly’s dancing looked something more like a disorder of the peripheral nervous system. But she resented the implication. Still, she kept her mouth shut, withdrawing her hand and trying her hardest not to crown her ignominy by tripping over her own two feet on the walk back to the car. A week later, she finally screwed up the courage to break up with him. She told him she needed to be single to focus on her career, he barely batted an eye at the news, and that was that. And really, that had been the tone of their entire relationship. Their physical transactions were perfunctory. They never stayed up late at night talking about where they wanted to go in the world before they died. They never said “I love you.” Kelly had second-guessed herself, wondering if she was misinterpreting the constant undercurrent of judgment she felt from him. She felt bad about dumping him until he reacted with such polite neutrality to the whole thing. As it was, in spite of the many qualities Robbie had to recommend him, she never felt she had sustained much of a loss. And neither, apparently, had he.

  She could tell now that he was bobbing on his toes as his head rose and fell above the partition, waiting anxiously for her to ask how he was. “Auspicious news on Brahma, of course,” he blurted finally when she didn’t. “I assume you’ve heard.”

  “No, actually, I haven’t.” Brahma was Robbie’s entry in the investor competition. Like Confibot, he would be a freestanding caregiver robot. But where Confibot sought to mimic a human, Brahma was meant to improve upon one. A human has flat feet? Brahma has wheeled ones. A human has two arms? Brahma has eight. Kelly thought the whole idea sounded ridiculous on its face—the grabbag nature of it, the hushed hallowedness with which Robbie spoke about his own work, the overreaching name—but the more she saw his project coming together, the more she had to admit that it looked impressive. Worryingly so. Even the rough model was shaping up to look less like the humanoid abomination she had originally pictured and more like the sleek robotic equivalent of a Swiss Army knife.

  “Then let me be the first to tell you,” he said with the air of doing her a great favor, “that Brahma passed his first test run with flying colors.”

  “That’s awesome,” Kelly replied distractedly. It was only ten a.m., and already all of Confibot’s facial options were starting to blur together. They had been generated by her algorithm directly from the mountainous logs of data she had carefully input from her research. One of them just had to be the correct one. Or maybe it was she who was inept at selecting the best option. Maybe she had to write another algorithm to do that.

  “Already I can see this technology changing people’s lives,” Robbie continued, his well-scrubbed face beatific above the partition. “It’s positively humbling. Watching everything take shape so well already—it’s as if I’m witnessing the birth of the future. You can relate, I’m sure, with Confibot.”

  Kelly flipped to a particularly appalling face, with beady eyes over a jack-o’-lantern smile. “Yeah, Confibot’s really shaping up beautifully.” And of course, her boss rounded the corner just in time to inspect her work.

  “Good morning, Anita!” Robbie cried.

  Anita frowned at Kelly’s screen. “What’s that?”

  “One of the facial models I’m considering for Confibot.”

  “Who does he remind me of?”

  “This is just one option, I’ve got plenty of others—” Kelly interjected quickly.

  “The Cupertino Flasher,” Anita finished.

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Robbie affirmed.

  “That’s going to have to go.”

  “Of course, yes,” Kelly agreed, trying not to stammer. “I’ll just choose one of the others! The many, many others. It’s a good thing I have so many strong contenders. I’ll choose one of them.” In her eternal inscrutability, Anita had a way of inviting Kelly to babble herself into a conversational pit, repeating herself until she was sure that she had not only said the wrong thing, she’d said it twenty times.

  Anita sailed away without deigning to respond, and Kelly instantly wanted to reach Priya, who was off in the medical portion of the cubicle farm, for some much-needed commiseration. As she and Kelly had advanced in the Engineering department at AHI, Priya had gone down the medical engineering path, Kelly toward consumer product development. But Priya was always the one Kelly trusted most for a second opinion, partly because Priya really knew her stuff, and partly because Kelly felt safer going to her than to anyone else with her minor quandaries and half-baked ideas. She shot her an IM explaining her problem. But before long, as it so often did with Priya, the conversation wandered into man-talk territory.

  Priya: I’m chatting in the other window with this total dish I met named Andre.

  Kelly: Nice.

  Priya was often chatting with a “dish.” Or two, or three. She was a bit of a plate juggler.

  Priya: Ooh I have to show you this guy I found on Tinder. He’d be perf for your wedding date. Hold up I’m coming over

  Kelly tensed. Thanks to Priya being busy last week with a deadline, she had avoided talking to her about the mysterious end to her quest for Mr. Wedding Date. But now she would have to stay sharp to mitigate the risk. Maybe she shouldn’t have been talking to Priya today at all, even about work. Her fingers scrambled over her keyboard.

  Kelly: Don’t, Anita’s coming back.

  She glanced over her shoulder as if expecting to instantly be found out. Now with this lie, the next time she spoke to Priya she would have to create another lie about what Anita had come back for. The thought of deceiving her friend did not sit well with her, either morally or for the risk of getting caught. But she was going to have to lie to everyone in order to keep the truth from Anita.

  eight

  Kelly had always been more Marie Curie than Martha Stewart.

  Her domestic pursuits were sparse, halfhearted, and tainted by the eternal suspicion of an inauspicious end. She could barely heat a frozen pizza without managing to render it either scorched or doughily undercooked, so she would have been delusional to hazard making one from scratch. With Ethan in the home, though, she found herself experimenting more with little domestic tasks. He took care of many of the routine duties for her—he got her mail every day while she was out, woke her when she overslept, fixed the broken window screen her landlord had been “getting around to” for months—allowing he
r the energy to think about things like whether or not it was time to finally switch out that outdated lamp. She even felt so emboldened as to chance a fern, which not only survived but flourished under Ethan’s clockwork watering.

  A week and a half into their cohabitation, as he sat beside her on the couch while she vegged out to BattleBots one night, she glanced beside her to notice that his neck was stretched. “Can you see?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure, I can.”

  But Kelly swiveled, looking around the room. She realized that she had arranged the furniture so that the television could really only be comfortably viewed from one seat on the couch: hers. She had never had cause to notice it before.

  “Come on, get up,” she said. “Let’s move some furniture.”

  She and Ethan pushed and pulled, though really, he did most of the work. Kelly did not do the gym. She did not do weights. She barely did pencils. Ethan, however, had boundless strength, boundless energy. She could direct him to move anything anywhere and he did it without complaining, even when she had to see the couch in three separate locations before determining the exact optimum furniture configuration. As she helped, Kelly tried to nudge the couch over a little and in the process, somehow rammed it against Ethan’s foot.

  “Oh no, what happened?” She immediately knelt to examine him, worried that she had perhaps dented his foot, missing the wince on his face.

  “It’s fine, it just hurts a bit,” Ethan said from above.

  “Wait, what do you mean, it hurts?”

  “It just, it hurts, kind of a sharp pain. It’s nothing serious, in fact it’s improving as we speak. I can still work.”

  Kelly straightened, confused. “When you say ‘pain,’ what exactly do you mean?”

  Now Ethan looked confused. “Pain is physical suffering or distress, as due to injury, illness—”