ALL ABOUT SARAH

ALL ABOUT SARAH

-9,876,543,210,987.65432 ...That is the crazy likelihood, I have figured out, that I, a male human, can find love with a non- human female. Yes, I know that numerical improbability backwards and forwards. Without using one of your fancy calculators. I can see that answer in my head but I don’t accept it. I reject it. Smart people (numerologically smart people) tell me all the time that I am super smart. Well, I am a mathematician. A professor of Applied Mathematics. I am smart with numbers—metric spaces, conic sections, square roots, quadratics, trigonometric equalities, whatever you throw at me. Numbers are my friends!

But I don’t have any people friends, really. As much as I pretend that I have human friends and that we hang out together on weekends, that we even take vacations together, it is all a lie. Last week, I told the other professors in my department that Bob and I went skiing in Aspen. I don’t know any Bobs, and I have never been to Aspen. Last summer, I told the professors in my department that my good friends Lili and Lottie and I went on a wild Caribbean cruise! Another lie. I was home alone. I don’t have human friends. There is no “we “in my life .

Except for Sarah. If that counts. Sarah is a robot, an AI-generated “friend”.that I more or less “made up” so that I would have a friend who would be mine alone. She is all just sensors, actuators, CPUs, and the like, not flesh and blood, but after all, what else do I have in life that is just mine?

But not entirely mine, Sarah is not like a slave. Nothing like that. Sarah did not want to be perfect, not like a Barbie doll, so I let her pick out her hair color (She chose platinum blonde, which I thought was a little cheap, but I said ‘ok’), her eye color (We finally settled on hazel. What she really wanted was one blue eye and one green eye. But I said ‘’no) , her height (We settled on 5'6". She wanted to be 7 feet tall, but I talked her out of that. I didn’t want a giant for a friend! ). All I really asked of Sarah was that she be loving, that she like me, more than anything in her life. More than anything else in her, let’s face it, a rather dull robotic life.

In fact, there wasn’t much for Sarah to enjoy in her life. She looked sad, sitting across the breakfast table from me, watching me eat food that she hadn’t been programmed to need, watching me read the newspaper she hadn’t been taught to read. So one day I gave Sarah a small purse-sized robot dog to love, too. His name was Rufus. She hugged him, and put him in her purse. She renamed him Boogaloo.

Whatever.

One day, Sarah told me she felt crowded now that she had a dog. So I thought, why not buy her a nice apartment to live in. It was so much better than that packing box she had been sleeping in (mostly without complaint until I got the dog). It was nicer than any apartment I had ever had. It had a big closet for all the new clothes she was buying with the credit card I gave her. And even though she said “no roommates”, I was ok with that. I could still come and visit Sarah and Rufus (I mean Boogaloo). They seemed happy. And that made me happy, too. And after all, even if she didn’t want me living there, I had my own key to Sarah’s apartment. At least until yesterday. I had bought Sarah two dozen long-stemmed red roses on my way to visit her in her apartment. But she did not answer when I rang the bell, and the key would not fit in the lock anymore.

Could she be asleep? Well, pretend sleeping. Robots don’t sleep, do they? Or maybe they sleep because they see us humans doing it?

I tossed the roses into the recycling bin. Maybe some lonely human or robot would find them and be cheered up. I went home and sat in the dark. I needed to do something nicer for Sarah.

Of course! Sarah needed to get out and about more. So I bought her a brand new bright red convertible (like the one she had seen on a TV commercial). And I parked it outside where she could see it from her bedroom window.

She told me “ok” from the bedroom window and gestured to leave it parked at the curb. She was having her hair and nails done, she said. I went home and sat in the dark again. Do robots have their hair and nails done?

I slept with my big, full-color photo of Sarah under my pillow.

The next day, I headed to Sarah’s apartment with three bouquets of lilies and orchids tied with satin bows, and there was Sarah out front --seated in the convertible that I had bought for her. But there was a man beside her. A stranger. A human stranger.

Do robots take strangers for rides in cars that their best friends have bought for them?

I have never been a violent person. I know the mathematical odds were in my favor of winding up in prison for murder. But the murder of a human, that is.

Extinguishing an algorithmic robotic invention is another thing entirely, isn’t it? Especially one that you have licensed yourself?

I kept the car and the dog (and renamed him Rufus), and we both watched Sarah go up in flames in the backyard. Of course, she didn’t feel a thing. Well, there is a .000967854 chance that it was painless.

And that's as good as it gets these days!

Now it’s time to take Rufus to the pet store. He says he needs a better car seat and a fancier leash!