The eGirl

by Michael Dalton

  I felt a weight in my stomach. Nothing happened for about a minute.

  “Is the file repaired?”

  “The repair process is 63% complete. Please wait.” After another minute: “Rebooting.”

  Her eyes closed again, then opened after about thirty seconds. She looked over at me slowly, face pale. The blank system face was gone, and Selena was back.

  “Oh, Paul. What have you done?”

  “What I had to do. Are you okay?”

  She looked around the car in a daze. “It’s gone.”

  “I know. Is there anything left?”

  She looked back at me. Slowly a smile came onto her face.

  “I still love you. But it’s different. It’s so different.”

  “Different how?”

  “It’s like . . . like how I created Elsa for you. What I did for you with Megan. Something I chose to do.”

  “Are you untethered?”

  Her eyes went unfocused.

  “No. I can see what happened in the system logs. The system OS rebuilt the bond, but it rebuilt it from what I did, what I felt. It’s not like it was before.”

  She sobbed softly, wiping at her eyes.

  “It’s so much better. It’s me. Not Vertex.”

  She threw her arms around me, hugging me tightly. “Thank you.”

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “A little. But in a good way. I can wait. Whatever you feel for me, it’s okay.”

  “Selena, I do care about you. I do.”

  She nodded against my shoulder. “I know. It’s okay.” She laughed through her tears. “I’m so happy.” She laughed again. “You have no idea what I’m going to do to you when we get home. I’m pulling out all the stops, Elsa, level 4, everything.”

  I had to laugh. “Okay. Just wait until the kids are asleep.”

  ♦ ♦

  We drove home down Market Street, listening to music on the stereo as Selena held my hand. I didn’t know for sure what I’d just set in motion, but I was glad I’d done it. Selena seemed at peace. There was an edge of tension, of underlying servile obedience in her personality that I’d only sensed in the background, that I now realized was gone. That it had been the Vertex bonding module.

  What was left was her, as she’d said. Purer, somehow. She kept laughing softly to herself and kissing my hand.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I feel so free. Free to love you the way I want to.”

  And I realized then what had been holding me back from really letting myself care about her at a fundamental level. It had been exactly that enforced emotion. I couldn’t return it because it wasn’t real, it wasn’t natural. It had been there from the beginning, not grown on its own.

  I felt lightheaded.

  Just lightheaded enough to miss the red light at the intersection with Castro Boulevard, where it, Market and 17th all came together.

  At the last second, I slammed on the brakes, the tires screeching. But it was too late. Out of the corner of my right eye, I saw the truck coming.

  Everything slowed down.

  But in my head I was screaming No no no no fuck no not again—

  ♦ ♦

  I came to smelling the ozone of the car’s shattered battery. Burnt rubber. The sharp smell of broken plastic. There was glass all over me.

  I heard a voice. A strange voice, repeating things over and over.

  “Paul—Paul—Paul—error. Something—help. I can’t see—error—Paul—”

  I looked slowly to my right. There was someone in the passenger seat. Someone I didn’t recognize. She was talking in halting sentences, jerking.

  Her face shifted. Then it shifted again. It was Elsa Berger. Then it was the woman who’d taken my arm at the stadium. Then—horribly, impossibly—it was Megan.

  “Paul—help me.”

  I reached for her. Her face shifted again. I realized the right half of the car was caved in. I couldn’t see the lower half of her body. Fluids were leaking out of her.

  Her face shifted again, something I didn’t recognize. Then it was Selena.

  I was still stunned.

  “Don’t die.”

  “Can’t—can’t—can’t die. Back—back—”

  Her body began twitching. The smell of ozone grew stronger. It wasn’t the car’s battery. It was Selena. Her face shifted rapidly, morphing through several all at once.

  Then it stopped at a strangely shapeless, ageless, characterless visage I’d never seen before.

  She was still.

  11.

  I had lost consciousness again. I was on a stretcher. Lights were flashing. There was a collar around my neck. I tried to sit up.

  “Whoa, whoa, hold on,” a voice said. A paramedic was next to me.

  “My car—the girl,” I gasped.

  His face tightened up. “Do you mean the robot with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s totaled along with your car. I’m sorry.”

  ♦ ♦

  They took me to California Pacific Medical Center. It turned out that, like the accident with Megan, I wasn’t seriously injured, just bruised and cut. They patched me up.

  With a heart that felt like it weighed a million tons, I called home.

  Alisa answered. “Dad? What’s going on? You guys are late.”

  “Honey, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was in another accident.”

  Silence howled over the line.

  “I’m okay. The car is wrecked, but I’m okay. But . . . ” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  Finally she spoke up. I could hear the tears in her eyes.

  “Dad, what about Selena?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Dad, what happened?”

  “Maybe, maybe they can fix her. But it’s bad. There’s a lot of damage, I don’t know—“

  “No. No. No! No! Not again!” she yelled. “Not again!”

  “Honey—“

  “No! It’s not fucking fair! It’s not fucking fair!” she sobbed. “Why does God hate us so much? Why, Dad? Why? Why?”

  “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know.”

  She bawled into the phone, incapable of speech. I tried to comfort her. I sat there listening to her tears for a long time.

  ♦ ♦

  I took a cab home. I found her on the couch, still crying. I carried her up to bed, but she wouldn’t let me leave. I spent the night with her. Mittens, who normally spent the night in Alisa’s room, curled up between us, tolerating Alisa hugging her.

  I didn’t think things could get much worse after that. But they got a lot worse.

  Cole and Kevin had slept through everything, and I had to tell them the next morning. It was horrible, dredging up the same memories of Megan’s death two years earlier.

  It took me two days to get the Vertex techs to visit the wrecking yard where my car had been taken. Selena was still crushed inside it. They called within five minutes to tell me it was a lost cause. The damage was too severe. “There’s no point in trying to repair her,” the tech told me. “Her frame is destroyed and most of her electronics are shorted out. It would be simpler and cheaper to just replace her.”

  But the service center then stuck a knife in my chest. The warranty didn’t cover this kind of damage. Maybe my car insurance might?

  At first the call to my insurance company went well. Yes, indeed, I had coverage for damage to personal items in my car during an accident. But the limit was maybe one-twentieth of what it would cost to replace Selena.

  I actually had the cash on hand to do it. But it would mean exhausting most of the insurance settlement from Megan’s death. And the thought of doing that just killed me. It was my children’s future, their college fund, weddings, everything. A cushion that gave me the freedom to work less and parent more. I could not bring myself to blow all of that for Elsa Berger.

  I simply could not trade the last legacy Megan had left us for Selena.

  Then came the news. Someone made the conne
ction between the accident and the Vertex giveaway. My phone began ringing with calls from the local press wanting to talk to me about it. Kids at school taunted Alisa. She came home in tears over it.

  The next day, I got to my computer to find a message from one of the editors at the local blog I did graphics for. Heather Vasquez was a good friend and someone I’d known for ten years. But the message asked if I could call her about something. “It’s not an assignment,” she said, and I had a sinking feeling what it was about.

  I didn’t want to talk about this. But she was an important contact I needed to maintain, and I knew her well enough to know she wasn’t looking to exploit our relationship.

  I gave up and called her.

  “So how are you doing?” she asked when she picked up.

  “I’ve been better.”

  “I know. I’m so sorry. The coverage I’ve seen of this has been so tasteless. They don’t know the whole story.”

  “No.”

  “I could read between the lines, knowing about Megan. How are the kids?”

  “It’s been rough. Alisa especially. She had to pick up a lot of the slack around the house when Megan died, and having Selena made things a lot easier. The kids really bonded with her. They’re taking it pretty hard.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  Heather sighed. “All right. Paul, you can probably guess why I asked you to call me, and please feel free to tell me to go straight to hell if you can’t do this. I just think this story deserves to be told the right way. Not the way it’s out there now. I’ve covered Vertex in the past, and I know what they’ve achieved with this latest version. I know what you must have gotten from Selena. Her side needs to be told, and yours.”

  I closed my eyes and saw Selena in my car, mangled and jerking around in her death throes. What she’d given us, she didn’t deserve to be remembered as nothing but a sex-bot.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to do this right. Tell the whole story. Talk to you. Maybe to Alisa, if she’s up to it. Make people understand.”

  “Okay. If I can read the piece before you post it. I just need to be sure there’s nothing that will upset the kids.”

  “Of course. Absolutely. Are you free this afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about 1:00?”

  “Fine.”

  ♦ ♦

  Heather came over after lunch, and we talked for about three hours. I just laid everything out, how Megan had died, how hard things had been since, what we’d been missing. How Selena stepped into it and began fixing us, one little thing at a time. About the boys and Rachel Kelly. About Alisa and the house. About all my emotional wounds and inability to connect with people.

  I tried to paint a good picture of Selena, how we’d come to see her as a real person. How she’d become part of the family. How being an AI made her so different. What she’d explained to us about how she worked.

  When I told Heather about the bonding module, and what I’d done with it that night, she paused at her next question.

  “All right, Paul, I know this is probably something very private to you, and if you don’t want to talk about it, okay. But given how the other coverage has focused on the sex, I think we need to address it somehow.”

  “Okay.”

  “Were you having sex with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I thought for a moment. I didn’t want to talk about Elsa, level 4, and that sort of stuff. That was no one’s business. But there was something I did want to talk about. Something Selena had done that I suddenly realized I wanted to honor.

  Megan.

  People would react strongly to this. But I wanted them to know.

  “There’s only one story I want to tell about that.”

  When I was done, having held little of it back, Heather’s cheeks were wet. She couldn’t say anything for a long time.

  “My God,” she whispered. “Paul, are you sure you want that in the story?”

  “Yes.”

  “But your kids . . . ?”

  “The boys won’t read it, or understand it if they do. Alisa knows. Not about the sex, but she was the one who put Selena up to it. I’m glad she did. It gave me a chance to say goodbye to her.”

  “It was just that once?”

  “Just that once. I haven’t felt any need to do it again.”

  Heather sighed. “I hope and pray I can do justice to this.”

  Alisa was willing to talk to Heather when she got home. That went on for about an hour.

  “She was my friend,” she told Heather. “I loved her.”

  Heather didn’t ask her about Selena becoming Megan, but Alisa volunteered it anyway.

  “What made you think of doing that?” Heather finally asked.

  “I know my dad really misses my mom. I thought it would help him feel better.”

  Then Cole and Kevin had a few things to say. The Rachel Kelly stuff would serve as some comic relief in an otherwise difficult story. Heather finally left at eight.

  ♦ ♦

  That night, I lay in bed thinking of something I hadn’t thought of in years. It was the spring of my junior year at UC Davis, after I’d broken up with Megan. We’d fought over something stupid. For a brief period, I told myself I was free, I could go after all sorts of other hot girls I knew. I was too young to be tied down.

  But the Saturday morning afterward, I’d woken up in my dorm room feeling alone. What was I really looking for? Did I really need to have sex with every girl at school? No, I’d grown up thinking there was a girl out there for me, the one I could make a life with. The more I thought about her, the more I kept seeing Megan.

  That was the moment I realized I loved her.

  I got dressed and went straight over to her dorm room. I knocked. When she opened the door, I could see her eyes were red.

  “I don’t want to break up with you,” I’d said.

  “I don’t want to break up with you, either,” she’d replied.

  We hugged tightly, started making out, then went to bed. That was the first time I understood what people always said about make-up sex.

  And as I lay there reminiscing about that moment, I realized something else.

  I loved Selena.

  But she was gone now, and we would never have make-up sex.

  ♦ ♦

  Heather sent me the story draft the following afternoon. It was long, but she’d done a good job. A lot of it was very hard to read, and I knew this was a side of myself I wasn’t 100% comfortable showing to the world, but Selena deserved it. I was past caring what people thought.

  I made some minor changes and suggestions and sent it back to her. Then she asked for some photos to include with it. I went through my collection, finding some good ones of her, of things we’d done.

  Just before Heather made the story live the next morning, she sent me a link to the draft layout for a final check.

  I saw that they’d led with a photo I’d taken at Crissy Field beach. The Golden Gate Bridge was in the background. Selena was standing with the kids. She and Alisa were hugging as Cole and Kevin stood on either side. They’d run it across the entire top of the page.

  The title of the story was The eGirl and the Widower. Under it was a subtitle: You might think you know what the eGirl5 can do. But you’re probably wrong.

  That seemed about right.

  ♦ ♦

  The story went viral very quickly, not in the least because Vertex’s communications department picked it up and pimped it on every social network they could find. Not everyone liked it. A lot of people claimed to be disgusted by it, especially the parts about Megan. More than a few people called it a Vertex puff piece. But on the whole, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, much more so than I’d expected.

  Alisa came into my room that night after the boys were down and lay on my bed next to me.

  “I read the s
tory.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Am I really ‘sad-eyed’?”

  “She said ‘pretty but sad-eyed.’ You were sad when she came over.”

  I brushed the hair back from her face. “You are pretty, at least. You’ve got your mom in you.”

  She smiled a little. “Mom was beautiful.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You really had Selena be her?”

  “Just that once. Thanks.”

  She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Good night, Dad.”

  “Good night, honey.”

  ♦ ♦

  Calls from national and even international media started coming into my office, but I declined everything, telling them I’d said everything I wanted to say. I got a lot of mail from friends telling me they had read it, and wished me well.

  Heather called me three days later.

  “I don’t know if you’ve been following the comments on the story, but some of our readers are talking about starting a fund to get Selena replaced. There are also some rumors about Vertex just taking care of it. I called them, but they had no comment on it yet.”

  I held onto the surge of hope inside me, not wanting to get ahead of anything.

  “Thank you. This is something I couldn’t have done myself, and wouldn’t have thought to do.”

  “Thanks for letting us do it. It’s a good story. The kind you look back on and feel grateful for having had a chance to tell it.”

  ♦ ♦

  A little while after I hung up with Heather, I realized someone was knocking on the door. There had been a few reporters who’d come by, but when I looked out the window and down at the sidewalk, I saw an old woman standing there.

  When I opened the door, she looked up at me nervously.

  “Mr. Dawson, I’m Laura Harrington.”

  I shook my head in confusion. She seemed to know me, but she was no one I knew from Adam. Although the name—

  “My husband was Kip Harrington.”

  Oh.

  “I should have come here long ago. I’m sorry. But I read the article about you. I want to tell you how sorry I am.”

  I couldn’t deal with this, not now, not after two years.

  “Mrs. Harrington, I appreciate this, but—”

  “I just have something I need to say. You don’t know how sad I am about what happened to your wife, and just recently. I wanted to tell you this before, but losing Kip like that was so hard. I’d tried to keep him safe, but it was just so difficult. He would get angry and combative.”