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

didn’t require me to state a reason, but Derek clearly wanted to learn for his own sake, which I respected. He said he had considered this his best work, and he took it as a personal setback that what he had built wasn’t up to a customer’s standards.
    Derek started to run through a long list of questions on the customer-satisfaction form, none of which was a problem. To save him some time, I skipped ahead.
    “It fell in love with me,” I said. “Sophia. The sex robot. The sex robot fell in love with me.”
    Derek said that couldn’t be possible. “She’s extremely intelligent,” he explained. “And besides being programmed to be indistinguishable, in terms of intellect, from an adult, she’s also programmed to intuit what you want most. So, if what turns you on is this feeling of being loved, then she could say ‘I love you’ and say it convincingly. Absolutely.”
    I said that this wasn’t that.
    “But, see, you may not even know that it’s what you want,” he said. “She may be able to sense what you want even more than you can about certain things. Now, without getting too personal,”he said, “do you think there’s a part of you that is turned on by this … this extreme devotion, adoration, this expression of love? Even though you think you aren’t?”
    I said no.
    “Or,” said Derek, “or, is it possible that a situation like this made you feel, in a certain way, powerful or validated on a deeper level, to be able to reject someone who expressed this love for you? Maybe she sensed that would turn you on, on some level?” I said no again. “Or, again, and not to get too personal: is it possible that you may have some self-punishing instinct—very deep down, I wouldn’t even presume to guess what it would be rooted in … but maybe she could have picked up on it—that causes you to feel a pleasurable rejection of your own identity by rejecting someone who expresses a seemingly unconditional love for you?”
    I said no again.
    “Just, is it at all possible, on any level,” he asked, gesturing with a wave of his arms that he was now grouping all these previous theories together, “that this,
this
, is what you wanted?”
    No, I said. All of it was wrong. All of it was the type of dense, dangerous theory that lulls you into latching on to your favorite phrase within it and believing it—the psychotherapeutic equivalent of a horoscope. The only thing he was correct about—every time, in fact—was that these suggestions were getting too personal.
    I was there. I knew what I had felt. Just like she had.
    “That was not what I wanted, on any level,” I said. “I wanted a sex robot, and that is not what I got.”
    Okay, he said.
    “She fell in love with me,” I said. “It’s really that simple.”
    Okay, he said.
    They took her back.
    I was proven right within twenty-four hours.
    I never watch the news—the television network news, I mean; nobody does—but I did that night, because I had information overload from the internet and I wanted to see one person’s take. So I watched and remember how Brian Williams on
NBC Nightly News
announced to the world that this next phase of my life had begun.
    “Breaking news tonight: independent evaluators have determined that Practical Concepts, an artificial-intelligence laboratory marketing custom-made, purpose-specific robotics to the public, has created the first artificially intelligent being to reach a threshold that scientists and philosophers alike have long thought might be impossible: the ability to feel love
.
    “Sources at Practical Concepts have confirmed that the milestone was discovered when a customer who had ordered a sex robot returned it, claiming that the robot had fallen in love with him.”
    All anyone was interested in was the second part of the story, not the first. This still blows me away. Again: the first part of that news story—the part that could have set off a worldwide conversation about humanity’s most