In the end, Michael 5.1a turned out to be bug-ridden.  Infinite loop traps lay in wait for anyone daring to love Michael 5.1a.  One example:  Michael 5.1a could normally be counted on to reply in complete animatronic earnestness, when told he was loved, with a wistful “I love you, too [beloved]“  Under certain situations though – well, it could get tedious.  She realized that, though she was eligible for an upgrade, her peripherals weren’t backwards-compatible with Michael 6.0.   She was therefore doomed to obsolescence.  “Uplink in haste, repent in leisure” had become a cliché among the cyber-love crowd for good reason. 

Where had we gone?  What were we doing and why were we doing it?  What critical flaw in the development of the human mind had led us to this?   The very curiosity and inventiveness that had lifted us to such heights of evolutionary splendor were now responsible for this now less-than-human condition in which we found ourselves.   We were all so wrong to think that if we could just write enough lines of code, we could escape the shackles of the physical world in which we lived.  “Stop the disk-drive,” I thought.  “I want to get off.”

So I allowed her to continue in her Sisyphean quest to find a future version of Michael, version X.0 that would satisfy her every need, and turned my back on the network.  I had to embrace the harsh realities that lay beyond the edge of my pixelated simulacrum of life.  To have lived and died in harmony with the universe that created me, not the cyber-universe created by me.

Not that Casey didn’t know that Beta Michael would appear in her life at some point. After all, she had reviewed every combination of every critical event in her life in lucid format. She even told me before Beta Michael was designed that she knew nothing good would result from their fling. But their dilemma did exhibit a fat tail distribution. A short fat tail, to be precise.  Why would I even be thinking about statistics right now?  Perhaps stress activated my brain’s desire to find a simple catch-all answer. If anything, statistics was certainly not a science. Statistics was for…

“LEV!  What the FUCK are we to do?” screeched Ellen from across the table.  I had completely forgotten she was there. Judging from the empty cups, she’d already downed 10 coffees. How she was able to keep her bladder contained perplexed me. As I stared at her intensely trying to understand why she thought there were anything she could do, it suddenly dawned on me – there was something I could do. I could disprove Beta Michael and ultimately disprove their romance!  Once all was disproved, Casey would re-appear. I was sure of it.

I bolted out of the Pavillion with Ellen still screaming in the background. I had to make it quick. This was so easy any first-year Calculus student could do it.  I had to figure out a solid delta-epsilon limit to their love.

Robots were not what the human race had expected. We were prepared for emotionless, hyper-rational automatons who would be puzzled and a little revolted by mysteries such as desire and despair and love. They would be critical, callous, unforgiving, halfway between graphing calculators and Old Testament gods. They would talk about math a lot.

As everyone knows who has had to pay for a robot’s therapist, or bankroll a robot’s trip to Europe because it needs to find itself, the reality is different.

Back when Beta Michael was still in my workshop, I dosed his synthetic brain with extra adrenalin and testosterone to try to combat his feelings of crippling insecurity. It went well initially (except for the few weeks he spent as a serial killer, which, I’m sure you’ll agree, could have happened to anybody). But then, without warning, he morphed into a playboy, a mechanical Lothario who didn’t consider his day complete unless he’d made love in an unusual location, such as the floor of a taxicab or a treehouse.

He’d gone through half the girls in the colony before he met my Casey. Against him, Casey – the recovering sim addict, the fantasy junkie – never stood a chance.

I could only sit and squirm wanting to get away from Ellen who made it impossible to forget it was more than just seeing her but being witness to her last sim consciousness. Managing sim streams is so tedious as many go beyond verbal diarrhea into emotional incontinence. (One freak accident 18 years ago and in this industry I’m a paid voyeur.)

To hear now that she has run off with Michael is so absurd. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Ellen that our dearest love has unplugged and leeched herself to a walking, talking flesh robot fully programmable. Only she and I knew he was the beta prototype of Michael 5.1a.

I made the mistake of saying so to Ellen, who proceeded to hit new decibels in her maternal hysteria.
 
“She is gone, Lev!  Gone, as in not here!  Gone, as in missing!  Gone, as in she’s with that fucking bastard!  This is a crisis, not a thought experiment in metaphysics!”
 
The phone rattled with the force of her shouts, and I felt put-upon.  Emotions are like genitals, I’ve always thought.  You shouldn’t display them unless invited to do so.
 
I said I was sorry, which wasn’t true, and that I’d been up all night, which was.  Ellen let out a watery sigh and asked whether I wanted breakfast.  I did. 
 
We met at the Pavilion.
 
Picking at my toast, I watched Ellen demolish a spongy syrup-soaked mound of something accompanied by brown greasy slabs of something else.  That was a woman who never doubted the existence of matter.
 
Three cups of coffee in, Ellen asked, “When did you last see her?”
 
When I last saw her, she was floating in the sim tank, eyes taped shut, umbilical clamped to her mouth, photon stream pulsing at the back of her shaven skull.  I couldn’t see Ellen reacting well to that image.

Our relationship was oddly intimate and entirely unaffectionate.  We had an understanding that did not require words.  She was my muse.  In return, I wrote her an algorithm that mapped every possible outcome of every decision to any dilemma in Bernoulli fashion.  The algorithm cross-referenced the reams of data stored in sbpsvrwm438 to construct then stream any selected outcome in lucid format, a superluminal emotive format that emitted photons simultaneously to your amygdala and pre-frontal cortex to replicate an experience similar to lucid dreaming.  The greater the p-value, the greater control you could have over the events of the streaming.  But the outcome would remain immutable.  If you wanted, you could replay the same query as if living in constant reverie.  So when her mother called me that morning in great panic, I realized I would never know why she left with him or if she even left at all.