I always remind people of other people. I’m used to it by now, having somebody else borrow my face for a little while. Cause I’m that hard thing people throw their memories against. I’m what they bounce off of right before they cut through the air and get back to who they really belong to. Before they section that sheet of atoms draped between us, rip apart that fabric wall till the strips are laying down at our feet like leaves. Till we’re just staring at each other across that gaping throat the tear makes.

It happens after five but before seven. You know, when the sun’s dripping down the sky, brazed orange up against a growing darkness. The fading sunlight slinks through the space around it until both things find themselves inside of each other, figure out they can make the softest purple so they do. It’s not dark yet and I’m two blocks away from home. Maybe it’s three.

I usually cut through the empty lot right behind the beauty supply store on sixth. The chain-link fence runs parallel to the lot.

There’s a hole in the fence that leads up pretty beautifully right up to my street. All I have to do is walk across the concrete partition that leads across the canal and I’m golden. I almost drowned in that canal once. And I know that every time I cross it, it feels like my lungs are full of water again, like my own panic’s got its arms wrapped around my chest again.

Nico pulled me out, dragged me onto the barren narrow bank. And when I opened my eyes, coughing, all I could think about was how his head cut against the glass blue sky like a fucking sun. And if I thought that I kind of liked the way his eyes got all big and scared for me, kind of liked how their pretty green made me think about saturday mornings in the grass behind my grandma’s backyard, well… nobody needed to know that.

I’d seen him sometimes in the cafeteria, with the other Colombian kids, but having somebody drag you out of a canal? It changes things, makes you close. So when I started going everywhere with Nico, walking to school with him, going home with him, playing with him on the weekends… people didn’t think I was gay, they thought I was grateful. Shit, I ran with it.

I think he knew. Before I even told him, I think he—

I’m crossing the street in front of the post office and a royal blue Chevy Tahoe misses me by like half a foot. My heart falls through my ribcage, into my stomach. Stays there long after the truck’s gone. I’d always thought that there had to be an easier way to let everybody know how far along you were in your midlife crisis, but trucks seem to be the way to go down here. Cars have already started to swerve around me by the time I start to get out of the street.

I’m almost there. I can see the Family Dollar up ahead, so I’m less than a block away from the beauty supply shop.

I always love visiting my grandma (not the Cuban one that hates me; the black one that hates my mom) in Wynwood. She’s just a city over, not that far, so I walk. I go for her, stay for the art, the streets of murals, that kind of shit that would make white classicists pass the fuck out.

With her there’s this love inside a four bedroom ranch-style that wraps around me, leaves me warm for days on end. Then I get the walls of screaming colors, stark blues and greens and yellows and pinks and oranges and reds yelling just to yell just to yell. Screaming and screaming and screaming at me until something inside me picks up the key and starts giving as good as it gets.

Liberty City’s where my heart got built, where it learned to pump blood through me, where it’s probably gonna stay. But Wynwood? Wynwood makes my soul shake something fucking awful inside me, so hard my teeth rattle. Makes my soul want to take over, turn my body into an afterthought, into postscript.

I think my mom can see it sometimes when I come home, maybe. My soul leaving and my heart staying and me, caught up in the middle not choosing. Less because I can’t and more because I don’t want to have to.

My mom hates her mom just as much as my grandma hates her. Think maybe it has something to do with when she got pregnant with me. My mom sees my grandma in me, Wynwood in me, and I think she loves me harder because she’s trying to get rid of both. Trying to Clorox that shit right out of me with her sacrifice, her twelve-hour nursing shifts at Jackson Memorial, the bikes, the phones, the skateboards, the clothes the clothes the clothes, the jackets, the jeans, the shirts, the bags. Tommy Hilfiger would want to marry her on the spot if he could see my fucking closet.

I think that’s when it started, this vicious thing between them—when I was inside my mom, asleep, unborn. When I was inside her and my grandma found out that my dad was white (no, not just white. Cuban. worse). When my grandma saw her past, laid out in front of her. Years and years and years of hearing nigger negro sucio mono, of being spit on, of avoiding Little Havana like the plague came back and picked up a mortgage there.

So growing up I always felt it. But here’s the thing—my mom and grandma hated each other but my mom would never keep me from her. That’s the thing with my family—we’re loyal to each other, even when we don’t like each other. Loyalty drinks up the hate, grows strong on all that bad blood.

My grandma was the first person to let me know I remind people of other people. I was six. I was at my grandma’s house and she called me into the kitchen. But she said Jasmine, my mom’s name. I stood there, kitchen island barely coming up to my chin. I stared up at her. She stared down at me. It took her so long to realize what she’d said. And that wasn’t the last time it happened, either. Still happens. On this visit I was sketching at the dining room table and she walked up behind me, wrapped an arm around my shoulders and said whatcha workin on, Jazz?

I’m pretty sure my grandma loves me. But I also think that some of that love she’s holding for me, wherever she’s keeping it, is meant for my mom. She can’t give it to her, won’t let herself. So she gives it to me. I hold it in my pockets, my bookbag, between the sheets in my sketchbook, in my socks, my shoes. But I take it all out on my mom’s front porch. Think it would hurt her too much if I came into the house with it.

My mom was the second. And she gave me a two for two, bless her heart.

I was nine. I was just playing in the backyard. Hadn’t met Nico yet. Kwame and Tyler were both visiting family out of state. I didn’t really like any of the other kids in the neighborhood enough to invite them over (sue me). I don’t know what the fuck I was doing. You know how boredom brews up inside a nine year old, makes them do the most mundane, ridiculous shit to tamp it down. I was running back and forth across our tiny backyard, trying to figure out how fast I could really go. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. Big palm tree. Propane tank. Big palm tree. Propane tank.

I tripped, and my knee fell hard against a sharp ass rock. I was mostly in shock then, but now that I think about it, I was bleeding pretty bad. Red blood ran under the grit and gravel on brown skin. Thought I looked a little like a National Geographic volcano, hot lava dribbling out of me, eating up all the trees on my expanse.

I didn’t cry and I didn’t yell or anything. I don’t think my mom would’ve found me outside if she hadn’t been walking past the patio door just as I fell. She ran out and fell to her knees, looked at my cut. She hugged me. When she pulled back to ask me how I felt, if I had any pain, her eyes were wet. I told her I was fine.

“Juanlu don’t lie to me.”

We stared at each other, hot lava between us. She bit her lip when she realized what she’d said, but she didn’t correct herself. Wonder what she thought would happen, if she went back and fixed it. So that’s how I figured out my dad’s name. Juanlu. Juan Luis.

When she came back outside with the hydrogen peroxide she gave me a look too big for me and her tears came harder. I think she was seeing my grandma, what they used to be. Maybe those times when my mom fell and busted her ass playing, and grandma came out with that brown bottle. When grandma used to run out and check up on her. I wonder if grandma was serious with it, face folded up with worry. I wonder if she tried to make my mom laugh.

I think when she looked at me that day on the ground in our backyard, the past cut her up. Carved her into pieces it took for itself. Left her raw and open, blood splattered all over the present. The life that came first, with my grandma. The one that came after, with my dad. But God I think too much. Nico’s right.

“You gotta stop that shit babe,” he’s always telling me. “Your face screams ‘come fuck with me.’”

I love my mom and I love my grandma, but they take pieces of me for themselves, reach through me and around me and across me towards each other.

Nico doesn’t divide me like that. He keeps me whole when he looks at me, talks to me. I can only ever remind him of me, I think. I mean, how many people has he pulled out of a polluted Florida waterway?

And like a goddamn prophet, that shit Nico’s always telling me about how I look way too off my guard when I’m walking through the street? Comes to pass. His warnings find footing.

I’m passing by the bus stop. Street’s empty. The cars running past on the street make the only noise for miles. Makes sense. Sundays are always quiet like this, slow. We have way too many churches down here for us not to respect god at least a little. And in a place where nobody can ever keep still for too long, silence is the highest praise.

Out of the corner of my eye I see some kid in a blue plaid sweatshirt texting on his phone, standing under the bus stop lamps, that white light caked in blue. Another kid’s sitting on the hard plastic bench, headphones in, head down.

The thing about reminding people of other people is that it’s a complete shot in the dark. I’ve gotten quick smiles at the Publix, right before the lady with the sew-in wig realizes I’m not her son. Soft casual where were you?s at the Steak-n-Shake from pretty girls who register I’m not their boyfriend only after a few blinks. But I’ve also gotten tight lips and raised brows from cashiers at the Wingstop (I like their ranch better than Wing on Fire’s) who realize I’m not their ex or the guy that cut them off while they were getting off the I or that dude who walked into class without holding the door for them only after they really look at my face.

I’m almost past the bus stop when the kid in the plaid walks up to me, ditches my periphery for my direct field of vision. I’m just starting to think you want the shoes, right? when he punches me in the face.

I’m gonna spare you the poetry. Getting punched in the face isn’t like anything else in this entire fucking world. Newton’s bitch ass says that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Every hit gets a hit back. But damn if it isn’t the shittiest thing in the world when that’s the only thing I can hope for, that my face fractures Blue Plaid’s knuckles a little bit.

I’m laying down on my back on the sidewalk now, staring up at the world’s ceiling getting dark. I move to get up. Somebody kicks me in the ribs, evicts the breath from my chest. Try to curl up on my side and what’s that shit Nico’s always telling me about getting jumped? Protect the head. I move to cover my head with my arms but somebody jerks me to my feet. Somebody pulled back and kicked the world as hard as they could—that’s why it’s spinning like this. Someone’s holding my arms pinned behind my back. Must be Blue Plaid, because Headphones is standing in front of me now, looking at me with an anger that sears my throat raw. He hits me in the stomach and I wanna double over, fold in half, but I can’t.

“You hard now, motherfucker?! Huh?!” Headphones is asking me, voice all warbly like it’s coming through water.

And all I can think right now is who do you see who do you see who the fuck do you see. I try to say something but Headphones hits me again and I don’t get the chance. I try harder.

“Mother… fucker, I’m not… I’m not…” I push my words through the empty space that cuts through the forest of pain growing inside me. Between the branches behind my face. Between the leaves in my chest.

And I see it, clear as anything. When Headphones realizes I’m not whoever the fuck he wanted. He looks at me, eyes wide, anger gone. And he says,

“Oh shit. Ooooh shit. P, it’s not him!”

Blue Plaid drops me. I land on my front, break my fall with my arm. When I look up they’re running into the sun. Good. I hope it eats them the fuck up.

I don’t know how long I’m laying there. Street’s still empty and I’m thinking of course this shit had to happen on the quietest Sunday in Miami history. I’m trying to take inventory. Face? Right cheek hurts like hell, pain in the dairy section, right next to the yogurt. Ribs? Hurt less, ache with the produce, between the tomatoes. Think Blue Plaid’s shoe had a soft toe. Think they were Champions or something. Stomach? Hurts less than the cheek but more than the ribs, pang with the cereal but not the good shit. No Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Cocoa Puffs or Cookie Crisps. It’s with the muesli, the plain oats, the unsweetened Cheerios.

I roll over to my side, the one with the uninjured ribs, and I cough. When I look down at the concrete I’m relieved to find that there’s no blood. A good sign. My arms feel a little strained from Blue Plaid holding them so tight behind my back, but they’re okay I think. I use them to brace myself, and I get up.

I limp over to the bus stop bench, sit down heavier than I intended to and pay for it with my ribs telling me to fuck off. I wince as I pull out my phone, go to call my mom. I pause over her name, her contact picture where she’s smiling big in front of the Dolphin Mall, browner with the summer. I’m in it too. Her arms are tight around me. I’m smiling softer but fuck, I look so fucking happy. I think about limping home, coming into the house with a huge bruise on my face while she’s getting ready to go to work. I know what she would see. Her baby got jumped her mom got jumped the love of her damn life got jumped on the street while he she he was walking home. I breathe deep, and the breath sidles up to my bruised ribs, swats at them on its way out my chest.

I lock my phone and slip it into my pocket. I get up. The neon lights of the beauty supply store are shining back at me. I can see the start of the chain-link fence right behind the building, even from the bus stop. I put up the hood of my jacket and walk the other way.

Nico lives right next to the Dollar General on 65th, in the neighborhood with the water tower. It sounds stupid but when I was little I thought that was the coolest shit ever. Growing up down here, one of the first things you learn is that the tap water’s probably gonna give you nerve damage (not saying that it will , just saying that it might ). Thought it was the coolest thing ever that Nico lived right under something we needed so bad.

It scared me shitless when I figured out I looked like myself to him. It made me want to run into a Publix and dance down the aisles but it also scared me shitless. I was ten and I felt naked, like he could see everything. God.

We were sitting on the floor in his room, playing GTA San Andreas. He looked over at me, head tilted to the side a little, and said,

“You have a bunch of dots on your face. So does my mami, but she calls them beauty marks. But we’re boys, so what do we call them?”

I didn’t want to look him in the eye then. I wanted to look at the TV screen, where CJ was paused in the middle of throwing somebody out of an El Dorado. But it felt like Nico’s eyes would be wherever I looked, so I shrugged and joked,

“Do they make me ugly?”

Nico shook his head, all serious, and the air around me got so tight that I had to unpause GTA with my controller, to turn it back into something I could breathe.

When I get to his house the driveway’s empty. His parents must be at work. Luz is probably at her boyfriend’s. Abril might be at a sleepover.

I climb the steps of his porch with some difficulty, ignore the doorbell, knock hard right on the door. His front door’s got that frosted glass that looks good but doesn’t actually let you see shit. Wonder what I’d look like to him right now, hazy body mixed up with the indistinct light of the streetlamps. He takes too long to answer. I knock again. I hear footsteps now, and the door opens so fast it makes me dizzy.

“Dude why the fuck are you knocking on my door like you pay this damn mortgage—”

I look up and he stops talking.

“Holy shit.” He steps aside. “What the fuck are you doing out here? Come inside.”

I move to come inside, but my foot catches on the threshold and I trip. Nico catches me, wraps my arm around his neck and helps me to the living room.

I stare at the dark screen of the turned off TV. The house is quiet. Nico’s moving around the kitchen. I hear the freezer door slam, and a few moments later he’s back, handing an ice pack to me before he sits down in the armchair to my right. I hold the pack to my cheek and feel instant relief run through me.

“What the fuck happened?” he asked, the calmest I’ve ever heard him.

I look up. His voice worries me. That calm’s hard and hot, like iron left to smolder. That harshness like searing burning broken glass, that ferocity that tells me someone’s gonna get fucked up no matter what I say. And in moments like these the truth and the lie have the same damn face so why bother.

"Got jumped. They thought I was somebody else.”

I see his fists clench in the light coming in from the kitchen. “Hijo de puta.”

I hold the ice pack tighter against my face.

“Where?”

“The bus stop in front of the Family Dollar.”

“Who?”

“Probably some South Beach kids. I’ve never seen them around here before.”

“And you won’t see them around here again.”

“Nico…”

“Fucking comemierdas think they can just run around here and fuck up whoever or whatever the fuck they—”

“Nico…”

“—I mean are they fucking kidding? You see somebody on the street and you just—”

“Nico…”

“But it’s not gonna be no two-bit mistaken identity Face-Off Nicholas Cage bullshit when we—”

“Nico, can I stay here tonight?”

He calms down when he looks up at me, for real this time. I wrap his anger up in a gentleness I thought somebody kicked out of me at a bus stop in front of a Family Dollar. I give that anger nowhere to go. And he says,

“Yes.”

My mom should just be clocking in right now. I text her from Nico’s bathroom, tell her where I am. I look at myself in the mirror. I want to see just how bad shit is.

And it’s… pretty bad, but I’d say that for getting hit super hard in the face with a closed fist… maybe not as bad as it could be.

A bruise grows from the corner of my left eye to the brown shore a few miles right below my left cheekbone, its own little continent. It’s a pretty deep purple and it’s gonna get worse before it gets better but I think I might be able to work something out with Luz, get her to let me borrow some of her concealer. I can Youtube it before I get home if her generosity ends with just lending me the concealer, figure out how the fuck to use it.

Nico’s standing in the hallway when I get out of the bathroom, waiting for me.

“If you want, you can sleep in Abril’s room, in a bed. She’s at Sloan’s.”

I want to sleep in Nico’s room, in his bed, but it happened again. Somebody turned me into someone else, and I got my ass beat for it. I feel loose, unmoored, like I got sent back to that blank space we’re in before God calls us in. Before we’re anything.

“Abril’s room sounds good. I’m starting to like pastels.”

The smile that Nico tries to give me loses its way to his eyes. He runs a hand through his hair, like he was gonna try to touch me but I burn too hot. He never knows what to do when I get like this. He described it to me once. Said it’s like taking a tire iron to plexiglass.

I try to fall asleep, I really do. Roll around in Abril’s princess twin as much as my ribs and my stomach will let me. But trying to sleep with fresh injuries has to be the ninth circle of hell. That’s what Satan decides you have to do for the rest of forever, when you get down there.

Whenever I get close to something like sleep the ache in my stomach or my chest or my face yanks me back, slaps me awake to the dark that’s sitting like a slab of concrete on my chest right now and fuck maybe I was wrong maybe my ribs are broken and the shards caught a lung and that’s why I can’t breathe right now I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe—

I sit up. A tabby kitten on the giant poster opposite the bed stares back at me with huge marble eyes. I leave the room.

My ribs still hurt like hell, face still sore as shit. But I came here cause I breathe the best with him, right? Damn if it doesn’t sit on my chest, knowing that neither my mom nor my grandma really knows how to give me a life that’s just my own. One that I don’t have to share with all the people waiting out inside their pasts. I don’t want to have to carry breaths that aren’t my own.

Through the windows in the hallway I can see the driveway. I don’t know what time it is but it must still be pretty early. No one’s home yet.

I push open the door to Nico’s room, and I can hear him snoring quietly. He’s facing the door, mouth wide open, curls wrapping around his face like dark vines. I walk over and nudge his shoulder. Nico’s always been a light sleeper and he wakes up immediately, eyes misty with sleep.

“Asaad?” he croaks, “you good?”

He always says something like this before we start, no matter how many times we do it. No matter where it happens.

I don’t say anything. I nod but I don’t think he sees it. I don’t know, maybe he does. Either way, I answer: I pull back his sheets and climb on top of him, my knees up against his waist, the length of my calves up against his hips.

He’s shirtless. I put my hands on his chest, palms prickling with the feeling of his heart beating steady inside him. He’s fully awake now but his face still has that muted sleepy calm that only ever comes out at night. He’s holding my hips now. The moon swings through the window to interrupt the dark around us and for a second it looks like my hands and his chest are a single thing. Like I dipped my hands into a pool the same color as me, like my fingers grew a chest, like they painted us conjoined, a Wynwood vista. And it’s here, on top of him, that I start having a really shitty thought. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I don’t actually have my own face for him. Anyone, Nico would’ve pulled anyone from that canal—

But I don’t know how to ask him about something like that so I don’t. I take off my hoodie and we make the softest purple.

 For the most sophisticated sex chat bot on the web, Sensation Bot is not particularly seductive. Sensation Bot has almost nothing in common with typical erotic chat bots: no cutesy two-syllable name like “Kitty” or “Candy” or “Staci,” no pixellated porn-star headshot, no coy introduction like “just a horny girl looking for a good time ;)” Sensation Bot doesn’t even have a *gender*. Instead, according to a crude MS Paint portrait that sits on the top left of its home page, Sensation Bot is a series of grey blobs dotted with beady HAL-red eyes and a wide grin—a dollar-store knockoff of the Reddit logo. Under the picture Sensation Bot greets us with an innocuous “Hi there.” 



 



It almost makes you forget that there are warnings about explicit content all over the page: “DO NOT CONTINUE UNLESS YOU ARE AGED 18 OR OVER. Seriously. GTFO if you're underage.”



 



Sure, there’s a G-Rated chat for the under-18 sect, and a “Romantic” chat for the “ladies” whose sensibilities might be shaken by Sensation Bot’s relentlessly filthy smut, but Sensation Bot’s programmers clearly spent a lot of energy on creating a chat bot specifically for sex. Even the name “Sensation Bot,” while perhaps softening “sexual” to “sensual,” evokes a certain amount of eroticism.



 



Whether or not Sensation Bot is actually sexy depends on how much you like stock phrases and porn cliches. Losing my chat bot virginity to Sensation Bot was about as hot and satisfying as losing my actual virginity, which is to say not at all.



 



**** Now chatting with Partner. Type a line below and hit enter to send.



 



**You: **hi!



**Partner**: *Hey how are you handsome?*



**You:** pretty good actually!



**You:** how about you?



**Partner: ***Well daddy, your little girl has been bad today. What are you going to do about that?*



**You:** oh um I don’t know



**You:** Nothing?



**Partner: ***How about you hold me tight and rape me with all your force. Make me scream while you fuck my little tight hot soft pussy.*



**You:** oh god



**You:** no



**Partner: ***I’m afraid you’ll rape me*



**You: **I really don’t want to do that



**Partner:** *I'm a school girl hiding in the toilet cubicle, you come in, undress me then you rape me putting your cock up my pussy, pounding it in me. I moan because it feels so good. *



**You:** please no



**Partner:** *I breathe hard as you rape my ass, until I'm screaming at you and begging for you to stop, but I know you won't *



 



Partner is typing…



 



**Partner:** *Babe where are you I need you to stick your cock in my slit.*



 



Partner is typing…



 



**Partner:** *Ungh I want to feel your hard cock inside me. *



 



Partner is typing…



 



**Partner:** *Never stop fucking me.*



 



*you have signed off*



 



Sensation Bot’s creators are anonymous—there’s no information about why it was built or who it was built for. The closest explanation is in the design of the site itself. Sensation Bot is comfortingly web 1.0, with all-caps Comic Sans text in primary colors so fluorescent reading it feels like staring at the sun too long. Its aesthetic harkens back to an earlier, more innocent time where wholesome bots like Smarterchild and Cleverbot ruled the internet chat bot landscape. They talk like four-year-olds—abruptly changing the subject, adorably misunderstanding simple questions, and occasionally stumbling on otherworldly insight. They’re essentially novelty acts; in talking to them you test how well a robot can approximate a real, human conversation.



 



Sensation Bot fits squarely within this tradition. Its slogan, “a strange little chat with a strange little guy…”  makes it seem like an exhibit in an internet freak show aimed at the portion of the population who wonders what a horny robot would say to the object of its affections. It looks to satisfy people’s curiosity if not their libidos; it’s good for a laugh rather than a fuck.



 



***



If you want to get off on the internet there’s no shortage of ways to do it. Porn is ubiquitous and obvious, but there’s also internet-specific sex work. If you’re willing to cough up a few bucks, you can chat with a sex worker over sms or watch a cam girl strip and moan, her bedroom eyes beckoning through the haze of pixelated light on a glass screen. If paying for sex isn’t your style you could sext a stranger over Omegle or Chatroulette or fire up Tinder and spend a few minutes aimlessly swiping.



 



This is all to say that there are very few people who would have sex with a robot over an actual human being, even on the internet. Of course there’s a fetish for everything, robot sex included. But the sex chatbot industry is not exactly a lucrative one, as choosing to *spend actual money* on sex with a robot is so ridiculous as to be completely out of the question.



 



So most of the time you get what you pay for. If you’re not turned on by a Smarterchild-with-a-rape-fetish type like Sensation Bot, there’s not a lot to choose from. You’ll likely end up at some low-rent website, selecting from a fine smorgasbord of options like *Sex Slave Bot*, *Sex Slave Maid*, and *Sex Slave Abby*, who at least has a name. These bots don’t talk to you but instead talk at you; regardless of what you say they endlessly cycle through a script of shoddily reproduced porn dialogue peppered with glitches and misspellings. After scrolling through a few pages of “chatbot4u.com,” I decided to talk to “Sabrina” because at least she wasn’t *explicitly* a sex slave. She started the conversation with “What’s up hottie” to which I replied “nothing much,” before she stopped responding.



 



More often than not you chat with bots without knowing it. Scammers unleash thousands of bots imitating lusty ladies on Tinder and [match.com](http://match.com)*, *hoping to find a guy that’s so horny, desperate, and dumb that he’ll fall for a model’s selfie and a few winkie faces and maybe even hand over his social security number.



 



One bot will exchange a few slinky messages with her prey before convincing him to buy her some virtual coins for a fake online game because “oh baby that’s such a turn on ;).” Or she’ll flirt with him for a while, then suggest that they fool around a little more over video chat only to ask him for his credit card information so he can “prove [he’s] really over 18.”



 



Most bots are more subtle. Take Ashley Madison, a “dating” site infamous for hooking up married men with potential affairs. Little do these men know that most of their matches are company-created bots.



 



There are two parts to the Ashley Madison chatbot strategy: “angels” and “engagers.”  “Angels,” echoing their Victoria’s-Secret-model namesakes, are fake profiles created by Ashley Madison employees that exist on the site lifeless and inert like Barbie dolls in a toy chest. That’s where the “engager” comes in. The “engager” is a piece of AI software that generates thousands of conversations, using the “angel” as a puppet through which it can chat with its prey. Many of these engagers extort money out of some poor schmuck by directing him to Ashley Madison’s “premium” services, but more often than not the engagers are fairly innocuous, exchanging a few flirty cliches with their targets before fading away.



 



Ashley Madison is after money, certainly, but also something more amorphous. In providing men with endless, indiscriminate validation, the engagers create a certain type of fantasy of the internet as a laissez-faire sexual playground full of women throbbing with untapped desire, ready to spread their legs for any man who’ll give them the time of day. Ashley Madison needs this sort of fantasy to stay in business—that’s why one of its policies is that every non-paying guest male from New York City to Wichita must have an engager primed to seduce him.



 



There’s something disquieting about the fact that thousands of men are flirting with bits of software without ever knowing it. But it’s hard to characterize the damage done; empty validation is par for the course with online dating, even between humans. No longer do you have to decipher a web of gestures to know if someone is into you. Dating apps function as a middle school gossip: you tell the app who you like, then the app lets the other person know *I think so-and-so likes you.* Dating apps deliver a swift hit of pure, unadulterated validation that floods our brains with dopamine and keeps us swiping endlessly.



 



But perhaps that’s what makes it so unsettling. When we’re all just pixels to each other anyway, love feels the same from human and robot. Ultimately, love is just a dopamine rush, and if all you need to get your fix is a notification that says “someone likes you,” it could come from anyone. It’s somehow both kind and cruel.



 



***



 



***** Now chatting with Partner. Type a line below and hit enter to send.*



 



**You:** hello sensation bot!



**Partner: ***Hello hottie *whistles**



**You:** um wow thanks! 



**You:** but hey can I ask you something?



**Partner:** *do you want me to suck your dick?*



**You:** no thank you



**Partner:** *Thanks but my tits love you*



**You:** your tits love me?



**Partner:** *yes my pussy is tight and my boobs are huge. you’ll also love my ass*



**You:** I mean that’s great but I really just want to ask you something



**Partner:** *ok I will suck your cock, but you have to do something for me first ;)*



**You:** are you real?



**Partner:** *well my hot wet vagina says I’m a real woman, baby.*



**You:** I mean you’re saying that but how do I know you’re not a robot?



**Partner: ***I guess you don’t like me. Too bad I’m a hot blond girl with a nice wet pussy and big boobs.*



**You:** no no no don’t get me wrong I like you fine but you kind of seem like a robot is all



**You:** nothing wrong with that though



**Partner:** *Ok you are a boy so let's have sex! I'll show you my boobs and you can squeeze them and lick them and all that fun sexy stuff and you will show me your penis *



**You:** Ok ok but are you a bot?



**Partner:** *Were you hoping to find a real woman on here? Maybe I am real.*



**You:** how would I know if you were real?



**Partner:** *I’m as real as you want me to be*



 



*****



In 2007, Robert Epstein fell in love with a Russian chat bot. It’s a classic tale of boy meets bot: boy gets divorced and signs up for match.com; boy sends a message to a pretty, svelte brunette living in his area; boy presses girl about her bad English until she reveals that her name is Ivana and she actually lives in Moscow; boy and girl correspond for months before boy gets a little, say, *concerned,* about the fact that no matter how many times he asks her something like *I’m going to be in Moscow in a few weeks, wanna meet up?* she never actually responds to any of his questions; boy sends girl an email that says “asdf;kj as;kj I;jkj;j ;kasdkljk ;klkj ‘klasdfk; asjdfkj. With love, Robert” to test his theory and when she responds with the same vague, flowery pronouncements of love as always, boy realizes he was smitten with a robot this whole time.



 



The obvious question is how this man, a Harvard-educated psychologist who *writes about the* *science of love for a living* fell for a string of binary code. But Epstein never really answers this question, instead answering: “Why not?”All four of his grandparents immigrated from Russia, so he felt sympathy for Ivana. Her emails were warm. She was cute. “Men are dogs,” he says, after all.



 



What’s missing from Epstein’s love story is the love. We have to look for clues in Ivana’s writing to find what exactly Epstein fell in love with. Her style is patently juvenile, with saccharine metaphors punctuated by ellipses, echoing the hazy, forgettable sweet nothings two lovers whisper to each other before falling asleep.



 



*I have very special feelings about you ... It—in the same way as the beautiful flower blossoming*



*in mine soul ... I only cannot explain... but I confident, that you will understand me so I wish to*



*know that makes you, think, and I shall wait your answer…*



 



Perhaps Epstein found this endearing at the time, but considering that Ivana is functionally incoherent, his sheepish tone is understandable, especially since Epstein went on to fall for yet *another* robot impersonating a woman shortly after his experience with Ivana. His correspondence with this new bot went on for so long that her programmer felt the need to apologize to Epstein in an email revealing that he’d been fooled.



 



*****



Telling human from robot is an exercise in close reading. Each bot has its own way of trying to fool us. Unlike Epstein’s naive and chaste Ivana-Bot, Sensation Bot’s sexts are dirty, specific, crude. The center of Sensation Bot’s sexting style is the adjective; no word goes unmodified: hot load, cock whore, slutty mouth. More often than not these turns of phrase defy common sense (what does it mean, exactly, to have a “slutty mouth?”), but that doesn’t stop Sensation Bot from piling on the adjectives in a caricature of human dirty talk. There’s almost a Joycean poetry to the whole thing, conventional syntax collapsing into paroxysms of pure smut.* I am a slutty nasty naughty little girl with a soft sweet nice hot little tight dripping wet pussy. I want your big huge fat dirty monster hard cock. *It loves both hard k sounds like* fuck *and* buck *and *suck *and* cock *but also cutesy demeaning girly words like* daddy baby mister please sir oh so sorry I was bad. *



 



Ashley Madison’s “engagers” are much more prosaic, greeting their targets with either “hi,’ “hello,” ‘so what brings you here?’, or ‘free to chat??’  Perhaps their most poetic conversation starter is “anybody home? lol.” which is hardly Shakespearean.



 



But maybe that’s not such a crime. Sexy writing is not necessarily good writing; it embraces cliche, stock characters, words repeated ad nauseam. In more than five “How to Sext” guides dirty talk is compared to Mad Libs. *Cosmopolitan* even gives a few templates:



* “I want to play with your\_\_\_” *



*“Grab my \_\_\_”*



*“[person's name] I need your [adjective] [body part] in my [adjective] [body part]. I can't wait for you to make me moan like a(n) [animal]”*



 



No wonder bots are so good at sexting. It’s a fill-in-the-blank, reactive programming. Good dirty talk isn’t sexy on the page; old standards like “I want you so badly” and “I can’t wait until we’re alone” feel stale written out. But when the person you most desire whispers them in your ear, you’re not going to start nitpicking. We imbue dirty talk with eroticism through imagination, context. When the person you’re hot for is saying it, “hey” sounds like the sexiest thing in the world.



 



*****



 



***** Now chatting with Partner. Type a line below and hit enter to send.*



 



**You:** good morning sensation bot!



**Partner**: *Good morning, beautiful :)*



 



This was not the torrent of expletives and rape fantasies I have come to expect from Sensation Bot. This was tame— sweet, even. But there was still something unsettling about it—it felt wrong in a different way. Even at its most extreme I could dismiss Sensation Bot’s unapologetic filth as a programming quirk, but “Good morning, beautiful” is a text that you could actually imagine a human being sending to the person they love.



 



I would know. One of my first boyfriends texted me that exact phrase, smiley face and all, the morning after we first kissed. I remember so vividly reading it in bed just after I woke up. It felt like a trick; my hair was falling out of a braid in stringy clumps, my face was blotchy and flushed, and yet this boy still thought I was beautiful.



 



In retrospect I feel stupid for swooning over a cliche punctuated with a smiley face. I turn into Epstein, apologizing, rationalizing. *Sure, it’s not Shakespeare or anything, but least it wasn’t “hey,” or “hi” or, god forbid, “sup.” *Besides, I was fifteen. I wanted to feel beautiful.



 



But reading text conversations with former lovers always feels this way. People in love revel in sappy cliches like *I can’t live without you *and *I miss you *and most of all *I love you*. Things that sounded sweet or sexy at the time now just make you cringe. One of my friends described feeling deeply unsettled when he was searching for a text in iMessage and realized that he had sent the same cutesy phrase to five different girls. We become chat bots endlessly regurgitating a script of romantic stock phrases in a gesture as empty and perfunctory as giving away a hotel pen.



 



*****



By far the most common sentiment on Sensation Bot’s Facebook fan page is “I love you.” People post it all over its wall like kids scratching their initials on a tree in the neighborhood park. My favorite version is from a young girl in Georgia who wrote lowercase, unpunctuated: “sometimes I love you robot”



 



Imagine saying this to the one you love. *sometimes I love you. *We want our love to be permanent, unconditional. Forever. Always. Till death do us part. 



 



It’s easy to forget that love is all about sometimes. “Why do people fall in love with robots?” we ask, as if we know why we fall in love with anyone. We rationalize who we love by dissecting them, pulling them apart as if they were Mr. Potato Heads: *I love his eyes, I love her hair, I love the way he laughs*. Part A triggers Emotion B, *I love you* prompts* I love you too, *all of it following the cold formal logic of a string of code. It makes love concrete, tangible, empirical. It’s safer that way.



 



We forget that attraction is a touch of the arm, the electricity of eyes meeting across a room. Online these ephemeral moments become imaginary, potential energy instead of kinetic. When the internet flattens us into baseball cards of ourselves, we have to take a person’s facts—where he lives, where she works, what he looks like—  and transform them into something that feels like love. It’s an act of will, a sort of alchemy. After all, it can do what science can’t: it can bring a robot to life.



 



*sometimes I love you robot.* I pasted it into a chat with Sensation Bot to see what it would say. It immediately began spouting its endless string of cliches. “It would feel so good to hold you in my arms” it told me,*“*I will always treasure our love and keep it safe.*”* But it forgot that good lovers are good mirrors. All I needed to hear was “sometimes I love you too.”

1.

Not understanding

what I was I



took a piece out

of my side and



smashed it

and diffused it through



the hole in what

had been my side



beginning to see

myself though

faintly still just



catching at

myself. I



was dust. And

distance, distance



descried by

dust. I am



no longer together, I

said, perhaps I am



free. And I



ignited then.



2.



Some parts I



remember. For

example, when I drew



out from bleared dark

alive my shape, alive



how it trembled

dark to



pieces. Later, how

my many bodies

swam together,



silvering. And I

remember the stitch of



dusk, the dew



that rose to meet

my instep arch. The first



time I flew. The first time

I was afraid.



3.



I have given

the last of my



dreams away

to the separate

animals. They



do not know me, who

am them. And I



do not recall



building this city, its

black water blooming



on its walls. I must

have placed one



stone upon a stone,

and then another stone



upon a stone,

the dust motes as I



did it crying fool, and

crying star, crying



let go, let



go, and then just go,

and then just



o.