How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch

Then Mariah morphed, transforming into a handsome young man. He held Kelly’s hand, leading her through what at first looked like a nightclub, but turned out to be a high school gym, lit with swirling colored lights for prom. They drifted through slow-dancing couples, pausing to watch Clara and Jonathan get crowned prom queen and king by none other than Diane. The triad smiled approvingly at Kelly and her date in the audience.

The handsome man turned Kelly away from the stage. “Dance with me,” he said.

“I don’t know how,” she protested. Then he removed a giant key from the small of his back, like a wind-up toy, and handed it to her.

“You have the key,” he said.

Kelly woke up with a hangover, a backache, and a plan.

It was Saturday, so Kelly knew she would be fairly undisturbed at work. But to be safe, once she had taken the elevator up to AHI’s floor in the corporate tower, she did a quick walk around—empty. She was on track. She breezed down the hall to the lab, clutching a red and white bag from the hurried purchase she had made at Target on her way in.

In spite of her hurry, Kelly took a second to appreciate the lab after she firmly locked its door. She loved this space, but she couldn’t always get it to herself. Now, empty, silent except for the low thrumming of machinery, it had the cavernous atmosphere of a cathedral. It was a sort of space-age Geppetto’s workshop: brushed steel cabinets and counters, banks of computers, and 3-D printers mixed with limbs, eyes, torsos, hair, all in various states of half-formed humanity. Scattered around the workstations were a hoop with six casters attached to it; a flexible polymer band, sinewy with wires; a periscope-type contraption with an infrared sensor on it—skeletal fragments of the other engineers’ works in progress. At the back of the room, a few completed prototypes of earlier android models stood sentry, each progressively more believable than the last: a smooth white robot humanoid only in posture, a boxy male with clawlike metal hands, a young blond woman with waxy-looking “skin.” The scene might have been creepy to some, but to Kelly, it was home.

She had been making a mental inventory all morning—she knew the stock by heart, having had a hand in the creation of much of it herself—and knew there were enough completed spare parts to service her need. They would require some alterations to make a harmonious whole and, of course, the actual combining of the parts would take some doing. But Kelly had been putting in extra hours already, working out the kinks in anticipation of making her physical model of Confibot. And unlike Confibot, this model wouldn’t require exquisite precision of response. It didn’t have to align with a specific vision of user compatibility. It could just be what she wanted it to be, meaning it would be much more straightforward to assemble. For once, she could just follow her gut.

As Kelly raced around assembling parts, she realized she didn’t know what to make him look like. She rolled a tray of glass eyeballs from its shelf, assessing them: a hundred varieties of iris color, pupil size, corneal tint, veining. It would be safest to go ordinary. Draw as little attention as possible. But her hand hesitated over the center of the tray with the midrange colors, as if reluctant to actually pick one up. Live your life—the words Priya was always telling her echoed in her head. The usual rules were clearly already out the window here. The adrenaline was pumping. With swift decision, Kelly’s hand moved to the outskirts of the tray, toward the set of eyes her own had gravitated to first: a crystalline, almost lavender, shade of blue.

Well, then, why not go all the way out? As Kelly modeled her ideas on the computer-aided design software, then made them reality with the help of a 3-D printer and a shopping trip through the lab’s existing parts, she decided to let her heart, or something south of her heart, be her design guide. Ordinary be damned. She draped coffee-brown hair in waves over his tanned forehead, carefully working around the minuscule, fragmented solar panels integrated into his scalp as a power source. She made his hands long and clean, chiseled at the wrist. She sculpted the heck out of his butt. It felt a little creepy. But it felt a little good.

Luckily, the normal biweekly family dinner had been pushed since Diane was traveling to a trade show. Kelly had the weekend to herself, and she stayed in the lab the entire time, catnapping in her chair, leaving only for bathroom breaks and vending machine trips where she picked up bags of Fritos and cans of whatever had the most caffeine in it while furtively hiding her face from the security cameras. At one point she heard the window washing crew making their rounds. Later, an employee stopped by an office down the hall, presumably to pick something up, giving her a shock of adrenaline so strong it left her weak. As an employee, she had every reason to be here—but still. What would happen if anyone discovered what she was doing? There was no way her hard-nosed boss would allow her to enter the hallowed doors of AHI ever again if she knew that Kelly had taken thousands of dollars’ worth of company equipment to build herself a boyfriend. News would spread rapidly within the robotics industry—it was exactly the sort of kooky schadenfreude fodder that tech bros would crow over on Reddit, and for the rest of her life, any time a potential employer or date Googled her, this story would be the first result.

Priya would be sympathetic, but she would still think that Kelly had lost it when she heard of her plan. They would never work together again and, probably, they would drift apart. And Kelly would basically be handing her family, who already thought she was so inept that she could never find a plus one on her own, a certificate—signed, framed, and embossed in gold—confirming that exact fact. More than ever, she would be the odd one out, the slightly dotty, slightly desperate girl. As Kelly thought about it, she stopped working, her hands clenching over her screwdriver. She stood to lose everything.

But then she looked at the work in front of her and almost jumped. She had been so focused on racing through the details that she hadn’t stopped to look at the big picture. And while the picture was still being painted, it was already incredible. This was far and away the most complete, the most convincing, the most beautiful android she had ever made. Even with his torso still an uncovered collection of plates and wires, he looked … human. She knew that this was possible, of course; it was exactly what she had been aiming for in all her months of preparatory work on Confibot. But to see it actually happening was thrilling. In fact, she realized, this might be the very thing to help her with Confibot. What better way to perfect her creation before the presentation than to have another model prebuilt to observe? The research gains she stood to acquire more than outweighed the extra time she would need to put in to rebuild the Confibot parts she had scavenged this weekend for Ethan.

Still, Kelly needed something more concrete to control the risk. She needed a deadline. She grabbed her phone and tapped open her calendar. In bold, red letters, she set an appointment for March eighth titled “You Know What.” She would take Ethan apart the morning after Clara’s wedding. Having a plan, structuring some order into the chaos, allowed her to breathe a bit more freely. She just had to keep Ethan’s origins a secret for six weeks, then she would return all of the parts to the lab. No harm, no foul. She wouldn’t lose anything, and she stood to gain so much. She steadied herself and dove back in.

Eventually she turned off the 3-D printer, connected up the last wires, and dressed her robot. He even made the cheap slacks and button-down she had picked up at Target look tony rather than plain. But the thing of beauty was still just a thing. The shapely jaw was slack, the bright eyes dull. It was time to Frankenstein him.

Kelly knew the software was all essentially in place, most of it designed by herself. But it was still in the testing stage and hadn’t been fully run yet. Her focus had been on conducting the social research necessary to determine how an android should interact with users, not yet on programming in those interactions and traits. She would have to make some tweaks and improvise as she went, but even then, it might not work. She feared she could very well end up with a Swahili-speaking pedophile with Tourette’s.

Kelly ran some simulations on one of the lab’s computers, making minor changes, gaining a cautious confidence as she went. It wasn’t until it was time to make her programming selections that she realized that she had the opportunity to create her ideal man. She had already made him physically perfect, so why not do the same cognitively? But defining perfection in terms of mind, of heart, of personality was a much trickier proposition.

Then inspiration struck, and she almost laughed aloud—of course, she had already designed her ideal mate. She accessed her list of requirements from the dating site and went to work, elaborating and fleshing out the profile as she programmed. A man should know how to tie a tie, change a tire, and train a dog. He needed to speak English, of course, and let’s throw in Italian, and Mandarin is important … oh, what the heck. She didn’t have all day. She gave him access to all of Google. She knew she was taking a risk in making this man so extraordinary, but she didn’t have time to cherry-pick, and frankly, she didn’t want to. The more Kelly programmed, the less she was making a man, a breathing biped who could stand next to her in photos, and the more she was making her man.

She imported the rudimentary responses to social cues she had been developing, but worried there were holes there … she’d been responding to social cues for twenty-nine years and still hadn’t figured it out. She brushed the thought aside: this would have to do. She’d rely on his machine-learning capabilities to fill in the gaps as they went.

The essential thing was to ensure he was entirely under her control. Give herself the ability to reprogram him, to turn him off and on, to mitigate as much as possible the crazy factor of what she was doing. She ensured that she could access his system from her own laptop so that she could make changes as necessary at home. And as an analogue backup, she fitted a panel in his lower back with a set of switches—fundamentals, like on, off, and sleep mode—just in case. With everything that could go wrong with this plan, it was reassuring to feel that physical manifestation of control under her fingers.

And finally, it was done. Or rather, he. Tingling, exhilarated, Kelly flipped the On switch. And stirring into life in front of her was the most amazing man she’d ever seen. He looked around the room a little, gaining his surroundings, but when his eyes found Kelly, they stopped. He smiled. “Hi, Kelly,” he said.

six

On Monday morning, Kelly had difficulty getting out of bed when her alarm jackhammered its way into her consciousness. She had fallen asleep so deeply when she finally arrived home just a few hours earlier, that her brain was stubbornly refusing to follow her body into Awake People Land. She sat up, yawning, propping her arms over her bent knees. Through the fog, the memory of an odd dream resurfaced … she had a watery image of herself guiding a stranger into her car in the parking garage at work … leading him into her living room, pulling up his shirt, and pressing a button on his back. Coffee. She was going to need a soup-bowl-size cup of coffee.

When she trudged into the living room, she started. There, sitting on the couch, was the man. Definitely not a dream. Though he was dreamy, even in his vacant-eyed, lifeless state. Kelly felt a flutter of excitement. She had just built the most advanced creation of her career. It was time to see how he worked. Suddenly she didn’t need the coffee anymore. She located the button on his back and powered him on.

A thousand imperceptible motions started at once, but the effect was that he suddenly looked stunningly, palpably alive. Ethan turned and beamed at her. “Good morning, Kelly,” he said.

“Um, hi,” she replied.

With the morning light wafting through the window, picking up the glint of Ethan’s white teeth, the jewel-like facets of his irises, the copper notes mingled in the waves of his perfectly groomed hair, Kelly became very aware that she was standing there in the same rumpled clothes she’d had on since Saturday morning, with no makeup on and her hair probably doing a fair imitation of a tangled set of earbuds. But she shook herself straighter, reminding herself how illogical it was to be self-conscious. In the “Are intelligent robots beings with rights?” debate, Anita’s stance was a staunch no. They were machines meant to turn a profit, and she was adamant that her engineers think the same way. Kelly had been taught early not to anthropomorphize her creations. You could never maintain the rigor and objectivity of science if you developed an attachment to your work. But while that mind-set was Kelly’s accustomed pattern in the lab, here at home, stripped of the clinical accoutrements of steel and soldering irons, she was finding it took a conscious effort to maintain the same kind of distance. Especially when this creation was already so anthropomorphic.

She strode past Ethan into the kitchen and pulled down the makings of her favorite guilty pleasure breakfast: a box of Cheez-Its and a jar of Nutella. She dunked with vigor. Working herself blind all weekend had really worked up an appetite. “Come here,” she called to Ethan, and he dutifully approached the kitchen. “Want one?”

He accepted the Nutella-topped Cheez-It as if it were the greatest gift anyone had ever given him. Which, technically, it was. “Thank you, Kelly. This is so generous of you.”

“It’s a Cheez-It, not the Hope diamond,” Kelly responded. She watched with some anxiety as he chewed and swallowed, but he simply smiled back at her. She gave herself a little internal high five. This was the first time she had built a comprehensive food and drink consumption pathway, including programming Ethan to dispose of his own masticated food waste in the bathroom, and so far, everything was looking peachy. She crunched a Cheez-It with glee. “There’s nothing on this Earth I love more than Cheez-Its and Nutella,” she mused.

Kelly had an extra bounce in her step as she got ready for work, singing that annoyingly catchy new Taylor Swift song in the shower, flipping her hair back like a mermaid when she was done blow-drying it. When she walked back into the bedroom, she jumped again. There Ethan was, sitting at her computer, his face aglow with a sort of bright-eyed shyness. He leaped from the chair. “I hope you don’t mind me using your computer, Kelly,” he said. “I wanted to give you a little something.”

Peering at the monitor, Kelly saw that he had found his way to her design program. And on the screen was a bouquet of digital flowers, exquisitely drawn in a rainbow of pixels, yellow gladiolus flaring above a shimmer of violets, the colors more real than life. The image rotated slowly, showing fifty or more unique flowers bundled into the arrangement.

“Why did you do this?” Kelly asked, utterly baffled. She hadn’t commanded him to give her flowers, hadn’t programmed in anything of the sort. Immediately she was intrigued to understand this unforeseen behavior of her creation.

“I know that they’re not as nice as real ones,” Ethan responded anxiously. “But since I have no means to buy anything, I determined a drawing to be my best alternative—”

“But why flowers? Why give me anything at all?”

“To make you happy, of course. Do you not like them?”

Kelly stared at the bright image sweeping softly around the screen. She realized that she’d never been given flowers. “I do,” she said after a moment. “Thank you.”

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