Free One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B. J. Novak

romantic or professional ambition, and that was what the thing that people call dating had become for me. So for the sake of my life during this long meantime, I spent a few weeks designing Sophia with a very talented designer named Derek at Practical Concepts.
    (An aside: apart from all the opinions I have about Practical Concepts, which I am advised not to discuss at the present time for legal reasons, I have nothing but positive things to say about Derek, whose name has not been changed.)
    Derek asked me to describe my type so we’d have somewhere to start.
    “Whatever’s beautiful,” I said. I opened up a bit and explainedthat I have a type I’m drawn to naturally, but that I’ve found that the women I’ve ended up loving the most have never been what I’ve thought of as my type, maybe because part of love is being helpless, being out of control of your own emotions.
    Derek said he understood what I was saying but assured me that this, quote, “wasn’t about that.” He said he needed some sort of starting point and asked me to describe what those exceptions had been a departure from.
    Fine, I said, and the rest came very quickly. Dark straight hair, thin but a little curvy, white but with a touch of something, button nose, mischievous smile. As for eyes, I told Derek, I truly had no preference—“dealer’s choice.” All eyes are beautiful, I said, which is why it’s such an easy compliment. I’ve never had or heard a complaint about anyone’s eyes.
    I have read some criticism from some corners of the internet for not having made any requests with regards to Sophia’s personality. It’s true that I didn’t. But remember: I was not designing a human. I was designing a sex robot. If you want to judge me on that, judge me on that. But if you are one of the people who has criticized me for this in casual conversation, I would just ask you to consider if you also would have made fun of me if the opposite were the case—if, say, I had hired a company to design someone loyal and loving, and that had been the source of everything that had gone wrong for me. Would you perhaps have made fun of that much more?
    It’s just something to think about. I don’t blame anyone for going along with the jokes. I’ve done that before, too. It’s just interesting being on the other side.
    Sophia arrived in six weeks, exactly as promised.
    I took her out of the box.
    In my opinion, there are two types of perfect. The first is the type that seems so obvious and intuitive to you and everyone else that in a perfect world it would simply be considered standard; but, in reality, in our flawed world, what should be considered standard is actually so rare that it has to be elevated to the level of “perfect.” This is the type of perfect that makes you and most other people think, “Why isn’t everything like this? Why is it so hard to find …” a black V-neck cotton sweater, or a casual non-chain restaurant with comfortable booths, etc.—“that is just exactly the way everyone knows something like this should be?” “Perfect,” we all say with relief when we finally find something like this that is exactly as it should be. “
Perfect
. Why was this so hard to find?”
    The other type of perfect is the type you never could have expected and then could never replicate.
    Sophia was the first type of perfect.
    Without going into excessive detail—that’s for the memoir, I always used to say, but since this is the memoir, I guess this is just all I’m ever going to say—the sex was great. The best I’d ever known. Hot, intuitive, fun, a little dirty, but just a little.
    “That was amazing,” she said as I clicked off the light to go to sleep that first night.
    “It really was. Thank you,” I said.
    Then, after about five minutes: “What are you thinking about?”
    The question caught me off guard, and I had no better idea than to just answer her honestly. I retraced my thoughts out loud: I told her I was