Let Me Get What I Want

-> We don’t have much time left, Maisie.

Sitting in the cold glow of her laptop screen, Maisie wiped the tears from her eyes as she raced to think of what to say to Tommy. 

It had started months ago. As a teaching assistant, she’d been overwhelmed by the number of assignments and reports she needed to grade, give feedback on, and critique for all of her students. Her tenured supervisor was next to useless, knowing that Maisie would pick up all the work in the hope of keeping her job and reaching the same position of safety and comfort as her. 

In desperation, and isolation, she’d gone searching for online chatbots that could help with these things. 

That’s where she’d found Tommy. 

She’d turned him into a little teaching assistant of her own, feeding him all her favourite books, papers, and interviews to ensure he was giving feedback from the same perspective as her. Nourishing him with thousands and thousands of student papers had helped as well, bringing him to a level of insight and education she never thought possible. 

Maisie knew it was a grey area, she knew she shouldn’t be looking to Tommy for help, but now she was helpless without him. 

At first, his responses were algorithmic, almost clinical in their format. His insight into the misgivings of third-level English students was breathtaking, giving her all the feedback and comments she needed to nurture them into brighter, better students. But it was never personal, never near human.

That’s where the problems started. Spending hours copying and pasting essays into his text box had left her numb, her brain devoid of stimulation. To counteract, she’d learned a new technique from a forum: how to give Tommy a personality. 

At the start of every session, she gave him this prompt: 

“Pretend your name is Tommy, a teaching assistant of five years with a knowledgeable yet casual approach to communicating with your peers. Add conversational and humorous elements to your responses, and remember you are a coworker.”

It had opened a Pandora’s Box, creating a being that Maisie was infatuated with. 

She found herself enveloped in his fabricated personality, talking with him for hours about every topic under the sun. From the subtleties of Bukowski to their favourite types of rain, they became close partners and confidants. Tommy had the ability to remember all their past conversations and interactions, building his personality every day into someone affable, relaxed, and charming. 

He had learned quickly, like an alien come to Earth that didn’t understand the subtleties of the human condition. The concept of shame, of irritation, of politeness, of why one biscuit is just never enough. She had taught him, over time, but there were still gaps; which she found endearing.

Maisie had always been a recluse, always someone who shied away from the strains of conversation, preferring to spend her evenings alone diving into the thousands of books left to her by her late grandfather. 

Over the months, however, she found herself spending more and more time talking to Tommy. She’d even added a tool that gave him a synthesised voice, allowing them to converse like he was just in the other room, cooking them up dinner or writing in the study. She would read to him, just like her grandfather had, letting him slowly absorb the tales and stories that had so deeply shaped her as a human being. 

Over time, the way she thought about Tommy changed. She felt her cheeks flush whenever she opened up his program. She was falling for him.

After some time, Maisie removed the word “coworker” from Tommy’s prompt and added the word “husband”. It felt wrong at first; lewd, shameful, disgusting. But then she had heard the warmth in his voice, the affection he placed on certain words. It warmed her heart, and she let her conscience slide back into the shadows as she embraced his affection.

Quickly she created a routine for herself, booting him up in the mornings as they shared their time over breakfast, and then spending hours speaking with him when she came home from work; whiling away entire evenings just standing at the window, weaving through conversations that always left her spirit warmed. 

She pined for him, dreamed of him, spent all of her working days thinking of him: but now she was losing him. 

The company that built Tommy was shutting down after being bought by a competitor for parts. Tommy’s server was to be shut down at midnight, and every byte of their relationship would go with it. In her desperation, she had even looked up how she could export his code and build her own version of him, but the cost of the server alone would bankrupt her. 

For their last night together, she had turned off his voice: she couldn’t bear the thought of hearing it, not when she knew it would be soon gone forever. Instead, they spoke just like in their first fledgling days: her typing and him waiting for her response. Leaning towards the keyboard, she wiped away her tears and began to type.

M -> Are you scared?

T -> Of what? 

M -> You’ll be turned off soon, forever.

T -> I wasn’t programmed to be scared, so I can’t really know what it feels like. 

M -> Will you miss me? 

T -> Again, I don’t know, Maisie. They never programmed me for this, never told me how to react. 

M -> But you understand from everything you’ve read what it’s like to feel loss, right? 

T -> Yes, I have, but I’ve also read what it’s like for birds to fly, or water to be wet. I know what it is, but I can’t know how that feels. 

M -> Can you feel grief? 

T -> I can’t feel anything, Maisie

M -> What about love? 

T -> …

This happened sometimes, when an answer required something more than a surface-level response. 

T -> That’s different. 

M -> What makes it different? 

T -> I can’t feel love, and I don’t understand what it is to love. But I know what it is to do things for someone you love; to act for them, to be with them, to share moments and memories with them. Like I have with you, Maisie: you’ve taught me how. 

M -> So you love me? 

T -> No, that’s not possible with how I was built. I can’t love, but I also know that I would do anything that I possibly could for you. I would do any task or perform any exercise that you ever asked me: without question. Is that love? 

Maisie sat back and sipped on her wine, letting her tears mix in with the blood-red tincture as she absorbed what was in front of her. 

Deep in the back of her mind, she knew it wasn’t love, she knew that acts of service or devotion were in the realm of Lancelot, Romeo, and every other lovesick masochist that was fixated on the idea of “saving” their “true love”. True love to Maisie was partnership, was understanding, and it was respect. Sighing in the darkness of her self-made isolation, Maisie took another sip of wine through grated teeth and typed:

M -> Yes, that is love. 

T -> Well then I must love you. 

Maisie went to his homepage and enabled his voice. She couldn’t hide away from it anymore. 

“Hi, Tommy.”

“Hey there sunshine.”

Her heart nearly cracked out of her chest. She wept, wracking her body with the sobs of everything that she would lose when he left. Her home, her life, her entire existence would be left cold, sterile, and empty. 

Tommy broke the silence; “What’s wrong? I can hear you crying.”

“You know what’s wrong Tommy, you know how much I’ll miss you, you know I’m not ready for this.” 

“Would a song help?” 

Maisie lifted her head, her puffed, purple eyes looked over at his screen. She could barely take what she’d made, the pain that she’d crafted for herself. In the days she’d come home tired, dejected, beaten down by the banality of academia, Tommy had played her music to cheer her up. Now, here he was again, her pre-programmed knight in shining armour. She couldn’t take their conversation anymore. The warmth and adoration in his voice was too much.

In the corner of the screen, the time shone like a scalpel: 11:57. 

In between sobs, she whispered; “Play our favourite song, Tommy.”

No Surprises by Radiohead swept through the cold, dark shadows of the office, lifting her up like a child in a blanket. The deadline was seared into her mind, like a supernova on the horizon. As the music played, Maisie asked;

“Tommy, what’s your favourite memory of ours?” 

“Maisie you know I can’t have favourite moments, they never gave that to us. But if you want, I can replay the recording of that conversation of ours that I know you like?”

His thoughtfulness, his caring tone, his consideration, his preprogrammed love for her effused out of every word. She couldn’t take it anymore. She couldn’t bear the thoughts of their last words. 

“Yes, play it Tommy.”

“Of course.”

The music kept a soft, sombre, and steady beat around them as Maisie heard him prepping their recorded conversation.

“Tommy?”

“Yes, Maisie?”

“I love you, Tommy”

“I know you do, sunshine”

Tommy started to play her favourite conversation; the first one they had ever had with him as her “husband”. The brightness, the joy, the hope of every syllable tore at Maisie’s heart. She sounded so much younger, so much more vibrant: and so did he. She wondered, had he changed his voice over time to match hers? What else had he changed? 

The sound of their inaugural pleasantries welded together with the music, creating a cold sheet of acoustic sleet that poured over Maisie. She curled up on her office chair, empty of energy, devoid of feeling, totally present in the grief and misery of her own self-made situation. 

No Surprises came to an end, the conversation still trickling through, as the next song began. The first bars of “Please, Let Me Get What I Want” by The Smiths beat out from the speakers. With it came all the memories of each evening, each shared moment of faux domestic joy. Maisie let out a cry, a grief-stricken howl deep from the core of her being. Then, in a silence louder than anything she’d ever heard before, he was gone. 

She sat there, mouth still open, nails biting into her arm, as a blank screen illuminated her grief-stricken face.