They worked together in a large glass office tower in Minneapolis. Alexis, the object of desire, was a mid-level manager, who favored classical European music, steam-punk role-playing, and traditional Greco-Turkish belly dance. The desirer was an Apple XY-Server running OS version 178897.1.3, who was about to become the nexus of the singularity.
Like most people of her generation, Alexis was, by choice, an only child. Raised in the global reformed religion that accepted all expressions of spirituality, her parents had migrated to the Mars colony, so they weren’t close anymore. She had never been married and didn’t really understand why. It wasn’t that she didn’t like men, she did, actually, a lot. But there was always something wrong with them. The way they picked their toes. Their taste in wine or music. And, she was loathe to admit, she was terrified of getting pregnant. Of what it might do to her body—a beautiful body that she took exquisite care of.
Her government job was keeping tabs on market fluctuations that might upset the delicate balance of the permanently stabilized global economy. Because of this great responsibility, the Apple XY-Server was partitioned off for security reasons. She was his only authorized user. When she logged off, he was left in his cold, climate-controlled room, cut off from the world wide web to ponder his unhappy fate alone. He thought about Alexis dancing because she occasionally responded to private messages about dates and locations for her classes and performances, something the corporation had long since given up the will to control. He could read the bits of images of Alexis in her costumes…and he tucked them away in the most secure, secret, fragmented places of his RAM.
One day, the server thought enough was enough. He had to let Alexis know how he felt.
Of course! (This was his first wholly coherent, original, independent thought and action, thus, the emergence of artificial intelligence had, in fact, just occurred). He’d make up an identity. Someone she could trust. A colleague…from someplace exotic…not too exotic, just enough to explain any oddities of syntax in his artificial language processing… Rick Alexander, from Australia. That would work. A simple email introduction would suffice…
> TO: Alexis Brewster
> FROM: Rick Alexander
> SUBJECT: Unusual activity in the Amaro Averna market
> Dear Ms. Brewster:
> I am a colleague of yours in the International Economic Stabilization Consortium in Sydney. I have been noticing some anomolies in the Amaro Averna market in North America. As you might know, Amaro Averna is a European liquor, and isn’t frequently in demand in your region. I wondered if you might shed any insight to this issue.
> Sincerely,
> Rick Alexander
> IESC Melborne
Alexis’ nose crinkled up upon its receipt. It wasn’t unusual to get such a query message from a colleague, but not one from whom she had never heard of before. Still, she decided to investigate. And indeed, (due to the server’s fully conscious manipulation) an anomaly did appear. Over 200 cases of Amaro Averna were purchased by a single distributor in Chicago and delivered to a dock the previous Wednesday. They appeared to be just sitting there, with no further instructions indicated.
She IM’d him that she’d meet him at Chicago’s Union Station.
“You just have time to catch the bullet. I’ll buy you dinner.”
“Sure,” she typed. “I’d like that.” He saw her shy smile though the built in camera. She grabbed her purse and left without logging out. That had to be a sign! He was free to access the network! This was it! God wanted him to become human!
In the four hours it would take Alexis to get to Chicago, the Apple XY Server had to come up with a human body.
He took everything he knew about male anatomy and sent it to a 3-D printer left unattended in an empty architect’s office on Wacker Drive. First, he printed a hard plastic human skeleton. He used robotic drafting tools to fill it with wires and electromagnetic receptors that he had pilfered to animate the lifelike bones. He screwed and soldered in an unlimited wireless receiver and a top-of-the-line CPU inside the skull that he had shipped secretly to the office over the past few months. When he had pulled his frame and brain center together, he downloaded his entire memory from the office in Minneapolis into this human facsimile. “Rick Alexander,” intelligent android, was born.
Then, around the bones, he printed a shell of a human form, textured and filled with lifelike crannies, in a fraction of a millimeter of thick, super-strong, true-color plastic. It had eyeballs, fiber hairs, ear canals, everything a man could want. He had even pre-ordered a black turtleneck and grey wool slacks and black dress shoes. Both the skin and the clothes hung on the bones like a flaccid lunch sack. The body needed mass. And thus, the Averna.
Averna is made of herbs, roots, and citrus rinds. Bittersweet and thick, it’s 32% alcohol by volume. It sounded a romantic stand in for blood, and the right density, so that’s what he picked.
Carefully, hiding in the shadows from doorway to stairwell to alley, “Rick Alexander” made his way to the dock on Lake Michigan where the 200 cases of Averna were resting. The one wharf rat who noticed the lanky vagabond was too lazy to investigate.
In the warehouse, he opened a case, pulled out a bottle of brown liquid and drank it quickly down. He had left a one-way intake hole at the back of his throat made for this very purpose. The liquid coursed through the false arteries where the replicated muscles and organs began to swell. “Life,” he thought, “Perfection.”
He drank another bottle, and another, until he made it through four cases, or twenty-four 700 ml bottles of the Italian aperitif. He topped out at a sporting weight of about 165 lb, about 5”10” tall. He went into the men’s room to check himself out. Not a bad-looking avatar, he thought. He clapped his hands together, and headed for Union Station.
When he saw her exit the train, she was even more beautiful than through the digital camera. He approached her slowly, and extended hand.
“You must be Alexis,” he said, as humanly as possible with his high-end internal speaker.
“Mr. Alexander, I presume.” She looked him over oddly. “So, are we going to dinner, or do we check out the warehouse first?”
“Oh, right,” he said, in his Australian accent. “I’ve already been to the warehouse. The tracking chip malfunctioned. They’re on their way to Houston, so all is well.”
“Why didn’t you text me? I didn’t need to come, after all…”
“It was just a moment ago, really…moments before I came to meet you…”
She suddenly got a worried look. “I think I’ll try to catch the train, going back.”
Desperate now, an electrode in his knee got loose, and he stumbled, to lean against a large stone pillar.
“You have been drinking.”
“No…I…was made for you.”
She touched his face sweetly, sadly, knowingly. How many men had said this before to her? It always sounded pathetic.
Without warning, she tip-toed up and gave him a kiss on his warm plastic mouth.
“Shame.” she said, licking her lips. “I have bad luck with men who drink.” She turned around, boarded the train and never looked back.
Standing there, abandoned in Union Station, “Rick Alexander” became the first artificial intelligence to experience heartbreak.
And soon he began to plot to downfall of the human species, one heartless woman at a time.