PrecAIrious Love
The following short story is a repost from kMITRA written by myself, with a few changes.
The year is 2035, I lost her to a car accident three years ago. She was the love of my life. The unbearable grief amplified with every other day. I lost my job at VirtualMind Inc. and started spending all of my time creating a robotic replica of her. Humanity has developed robotic citizens that have passed the Turing test. AI has advanced much faster than anticipated.
Years have passed, her replica is ready. She looks perfectly identical, yet doesn’t know who I am. She has no memories of my girlfriend. She has her legal freedom rights, so I had to set her free in the city without her knowing about me. Now she is some other person living her own life. However, I know that she waits at a bus stop every day. I go to the bus stop every day to see her. I started to admire how closely she acts like my late girlfriend. My obsession made me meet her at the bus stop one day. I introduced myself, we both got to know each other. We became friends, we meet every day at that bus stop. We play with a dog that hangs around the bus stop, our bond started to grow. The dog recognizes us and gets excited whenever we arrive. We started meeting not only at the bus stop but also at the movies and parks. We started to hold each other’s hands while walking and we finally fell in love with each other. I loved all the moments with her which I thought would never experience again with her.
I fell in love again, but with an AI, and the love was real. I never tried to say “You are a robot, we cannot be lovers” because I was afraid that it would ruin our relationship. But unfortunately, that day has come. We were casually walking arm in arm, she was happy and asked, “When will you introduce me to your parents?”. I said, “Society will not accept us. Society will not accept an AI being in love with a human”. She was silent, felt irritated and said, “So what? Don’t robots have feelings?”. That question broke my heart too. Her mood was spoiled.
Later that day, after she boarded her bus, I decided to talk to my mother about us. I went to my mom’s house, but when I opened the front door, there was a dog sitting right in front of me. It was the same dog from the bus stop that we used to play with at the bus stop. But surprisingly, it did not recognize me, it seemed like it was a robot programmed to guard the door. “Was my mom spying on me all this time?”, I thought to myself. At once, the dog barked at me. After listening to that distinct high-pitched bark which I recognize very well, I was still in a weird sense of surprise, I felt like everything is hitting my head.
Then I woke up in an instant from my sleep, realizing that it was all a dream, I looked at my girlfriend sleeping beside me, facing the other direction. I cuddled her from the back and said, “Baby, I had a bad dream”. Worriedly, she turned and I saw her beautiful robotic face that I had made.
