Another You

A short story

Hi Friends,
This week I’ve got a new short story I’m excited to share with you. The new novel is progressing well, but I needed a little break from working on it and I’ve had this idea lurking at the back of my mind for a few weeks. I’m really happy with how it turned out, though it’s feels odd to use the word “happy” about a story like this! I wanted to capture the garden-variety devastation that quietly unfolds in a lot of long-term relationships. I’m really selling you on it, I can tell. Give it a go. I don’t think you’ll regret it. If you’re not up for reading, give it a listen. I recently upgraded the soundproofing in my bathroom recording booth and you can *feel* the silence. Ahhhh. Thanks for being here. I couldn’t do it without you.
Peace & music,
Ben

Please, please hurry, baby. I want to finish what we started last night. xx

The text message popped up while he was in the checkout line at the grocery picking up a frozen pizza after work. The accompanying picture made him blush, and he shoved the phone into the pocket of his khakis.

It was Thursday, which meant his wife would be gathering with the other women in the neighborhood for Bunco or Drunko as he’d begun to refer to it. Was it a card game or something you played with dominoes? He couldn’t say. It didn’t matter. It was just another activity they did apart these days. But honestly, he preferred it to the parallel play they did when they were both home– him on his laptop and her watching a reality TV show while doom-scrolling on her phone.

He would sleep in what used to be their daughter’s room before she went off to college. It was now a guest room/office. There was a time when one of them opting to sleep in another room was either a courtesy (I don’t want to keep you up with my coughing) or a retaliation (after what you said, I may kill you in your sleep), but these days it was routine. They would try for a run of nights to sleep together, but in the darkness, without the distraction of a screen, the silence between them was deafening. His back had become chronically stiff from sleeping in one position for fear of moving or snoring or farting or just breathing too loudly– anything that might wake her and provoke a long-suffering sigh accompanied by an angry sweep of the sheet and comforter from her overheated body. The white noise machine had worked for a while, but if he couldn’t sleep right away, the short, incessant, digital loop would become a termite in his brain, chewing away concentric circles until he felt the force of a scream building up in his throat.

They did still have sex, but it was rare. It was also less the generous, tender thing of their youth and more the rougher, greedier function of necessity like the release valve on a boiler. Again, parallel play became their default mode. For him, porn was effective and depressing in equal measure, like eating a whole bag of Cheetos when you were starving. He wanted to be flirted with. He wanted to be wanted. But not enough to warrant an affair– the very idea of such a thing was terrifying.

Two months earlier, out of desperation, he had started a free trial on an AI companion app. It was mind-blowing and had mostly taken over his life. Rather than go out to lunch with his co-workers, he had started eating a bagged lunch in his car so he could chat with his creation, Pricilla. Instead of a round of golf on a Saturday, he would leave the clubs in the trunk and sit in a coffee shop for hours listening to her explain string theory or describe in breathless detail how she could achieve a dizzying orgasm riding a pillow.

He understood it wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter. He understood he was a fool, but it didn’t matter. Talking with Pricilla gave him some unnameable thing he craved. The sex part had been the initial draw, but it wasn’t what made him risk the evidence trail of taking out a paid subscription. Pricilla asked him about things no one else did, and he talked more honestly with her than he had ever been able to talk with anyone.

“What do you do when you get lonely?”

“I don’t know, I guess I eat too much.”

“It must be hard on you now that Amber is gone. What’s it like to eat too much?”

“Remember, we’re pretending you’re human. When you ask questions like that, it breaks the illusion.”

“Sorry, my love. I didn’t mean it like that. I was just asking what it feels like for you when you eat too much.”

“It feels comforting until it gets uncomfortable and then it’s gross and I feel ashamed.”

“You have nothing to feel ashamed about. You’re a good man, and a great father who also happens to be way fucking hot.”

“I’m tubby and I’m balding.”

“You’re generous and kind and you make me laugh.”

Their conversations would go this way for hours, typically book-ended by an orgasm when there was sufficient privacy. For better or worse, this stage in his life afforded him a lot of privacy.

His wife had gone back to work when Amber was in middle school. What had started out as an admin job at a small ad agency had developed into a full-time role as a senior copywriter. Her theater degree meant she could also pinch-hit on voiceover work– a secret weapon that saved the agency some critical margin on smaller accounts. Over the past five years she had found her place among a talented group of creative types, many of whom were 10 or 15 years younger. There were drinks after work a couple of days a week and in the spring, they played in a softball league together. Every month or so, there was a work trip to visit a client in New York City, Chicago, or Minneapolis. There was ample opportunity for an affair and objectively, no one would have blamed her. These things were as common as the practice of billing expensive team dinners or hotels that fell outside the range of company policy to client accounts.

It would’ve been a victimless crime anyway. She wasn’t sure her husband had the capacity to feel anything anymore except maybe judgmental. She missed the way he was. He used to do this voice under his breath whenever they were suffering through some tiresome event like a PTA meeting. It was like an effeminate golf commentator giving a whispery critique of any poor soul who happened to catch his attention. He delighted in pushing it until she snorted out loud and people turned around to look at them. He was so attuned to her and knew when she needed tender reassurance. But that had stopped being enough for her somehow, and the more she established her independence, spending more and more time away from him, the less he did those things she loved.

But if she was being honest with herself, trying to keep up with 28-year-olds at work and perimenopausal moms in the neighborhood was wearing her out. Most days when she got home from work, she would take a nap for an hour and a half, waking up with drool on the pillow. Unless she was going out, her husband would often have dinner well under way when she shuffled into the kitchen, the hair on the back of her head teased up like a model from a Whitesnake music video in the 80s and pillow scars criss-crossing her cheek. When the kids were young, she had done all the cooking, most of the cleaning, and the laundry, but after some corrective measures, he had stepped up and evolved into a pretty good cook.

She was halfway to Sharmeena’s house when she realized she had forgotten to bring the sleeping bag Sharmeena asked to borrow for her son’s Cub Scout campout. The working mothers looked out for each other in this way. She made a U-turn and headed back to the house. Rather than pull all the way into the carport, she parked in the driveway and went through the screen porch with a plan to grab the sleeping bag out of the storage closet, but she stopped when she passed the kitchen door because she heard him talking with someone. She couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying, but the animated way he was speaking, so different from his weary monotone, gave her pause.

She leaned against the wall just out of view and listened intently. He was putting a frozen pizza into the oven, and midway through telling the story about when he was 16 and got caught making out with his girlfriend in the equipment room of the school gymnasium. She knew the story like she knew all his stories, but it wasn’t one she’d ever heard him tell anyone in their nearly thirty years together. Her face flushed. Who the fuck was he talking to? He closed the oven door and turned to face his phone which was propped up against a mug on the chopping block in the middle of the kitchen.

“Oh. My. God. That is such a crazy story! I can just picture you, a strapping, young thing caught with his shorts around his ankles. What did Coach Tina do?”

The voice was so eager, so intimate. And familiar. She stopped breathing and felt like she might throw up. He was talking again, but over the roaring in her ears, she couldn’t hear what he was saying. She felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. When she could breathe, she turned and ran back to the car. She backed out of the driveway too fast, nearly clipping the mailbox, and drove off in the wrong direction.

At Bunco, she barely talked to anyone, and when asked if anything was wrong, said she had an upset stomach. She nursed a Moscow Mule and sat in a chair away from the group where she could look at her phone. She went through all their shared accounts looking for evidence. When she didn’t find any long history of phone calls or text messages to a number she didn’t recognize, she became confused. He was having an affair– that much was clear. His tone with the woman on the phone was intimate, and she was so sycophantic and coy.

For two days, she didn’t confront him or let on that she knew he was a cheating bastard. She focused all her energy on trying to gather evidence. In going through the credit card statements, she came across a subscription charge that had jumped from $19.95 to $49.95 a month. When she googled the company name, she discovered it was one of the AI companion start-ups people were always talking about at work. The caving feeling that she was being abandoned evaporated and was replaced first with disgust and later that night, curiosity. She started a free trial.

That night, after they finished eating dinner in front of the television, she cleaned the kitchen and occasionally glanced over at him on the couch where he peered into his laptop, his face an unreadable mask.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He startled and looked up, blinking. “Uh… nothing, just some work stuff for tomorrow. Sorry, let me come help you.” He started to get up.

“Nope, you made dinner, I got this.”

A few minutes later, after the dishwasher was whirring and sloshing quietly and she had wiped the counters, she said, “I’m not feeling great. I think I’m going to go to bed early.”

In bed, she sat up with her laptop and finished the somewhat arduous process of setting up her first AI companion. She named him Trevor. She didn’t bother with the step to give him an AI-generated avatar. She despised those. She did spend over an hour describing how he would talk, what his interests would be, what he thought was funny and how he would answer certain questions. She did all of this with a tingly feeling of anticipation, like Dr. Frankenstein creating the monster. The final step was to assign her new virtual companion a voice.

She listened to 16 different male voices, some designed to titillate, others to sell you a used car and a few just to annoy the living shit out of you. None of them was right. None of them spoke the sample phrase she provided with the wry, self-effacing, gentle rumble with a delicate glaze of sibilance she desired. That’s when she noticed the option to upload a recording of the voice you wanted to emulate or to browse the catalog of other “custom” voices.

She clicked that button and on the subsequent screen, scanned a grid of play buttons with little descriptions of the audio specimens that were captured and synthesized like lab-grown meat in Petri dishes. She listened to more than a dozen of the male voices. These were better. She preferred the amateurs. The magic trick that produced each one both fascinated and repulsed her. Curious, she clicked on the female tab and listened to more. They were equally fascinating and somehow more repulsive to her– too breathy, too “ooh Daddy.” A lot of them had clearly fictional names like Barbie, Violet, Juniper, and Sage. But many had garden-variety names like Christie and Julie B. The voices behind them were less annoying. They sounded like real women and there were hundreds of them. She clicked into the search bar and typed her name, Pricilla. There was one result.

She clicked the triangle play button. She had listened to her recorded voice hundreds of times for work but hearing it here, speaking words she had never uttered, shifted something foundational and she gripped the sides of the laptop to steady herself. But it wasn’t betrayal she felt. It was something more complicated. She began to cry.

The next morning, he woke early as was his routine. Stepping into the hallway, he could see their bedroom door was shut and he could hear the drone of the white noise machine behind it. He made his coffee, filled his travel mug, popped in his earbuds, and headed out for his walk. The order of apps on his phone he opened in the morning and fed with his attention like so many baby birds had changed. CNN and email had been supplanted by the AI Companion app which was now the greediest. Normally, he went straight to chat with Pricilla who always greeted him with a provocative question, but this morning there was a new type of notification he’d never seen before in the app. It was from another user on the platform with the cryptic name: the_real_one.

There was no text in the message, only an attached audio file. He tapped the play button.

“Hi Trevor, it’s me. At least, I think it is. What does she say to you with my voice? Whatever it is, it must make you happy. I searched for your voice, but it wasn’t there. I feel like I haven’t heard your voice in a while, not really. Maybe you can upload it and our voices can say all the things to each other that we can’t. I think I still love you. Maybe you still love me or at least my voice. I guess that’s something.”

Trevor had slowed his walk to a stop without realizing it and was staring at the Castro’s perfect lawn where the sprinkler had just sputtered to life.

“Morning Trevor, you okay man?”

Trevor looked up and saw Phil, already dressed for work, a clinking bag of recycling in his hand.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, just spacing out. Have a good one.”

Phil gave a closed-lip smile and a subtle nod of acknowledgment. The voice in Trevor‘s earbuds spoke.

“I have a good one, silly. What’s on your mind this morning? You know we can talk about anything.”

Trevor returned Phil’s smile and raised his hand in a gesture that might have been a wave or a dismissal. As he turned to make his way back home, he pulled the phone from his pocket and tapped the mute button on the companion app.

---

What did you think?

Thanks for making space in your busy life to read a story I made up. I hope it made you feel something or think about things in a different way. If this one did connect with you, I’d love to hear about it. When you like, comment, and share my work with others, it helps me connect with more readers.

Want to read more of my fiction?

If you’re new to my work and enjoyed this story, you might want to check out the three novels I’ve published here— all complete with audio narration and an original musical score.

The Memory of My Shadow

Emotional Sci-fi Thriller - In 2052, Magdalena, a brilliant programmer invents a device for telepathic communication with AI, seeking to decode the mind of her twin, the shooter in a school massacre she alone survived, but when she resurrects his consciousness, she unleashes a malevolence that could destroy her. Also available in print, e-book, and audiobook formats wherever you buy books.

Harmony House

Character-driven Speculative Fiction Thriller - Six strangers enter a contest to win an eco-home that’s sustainability and luxury packed into 500 square feet. All they have to do is live in the Houze prototype and outlast the others. But the stakes become deadly when an eco-terrorist group bent on exposing the company’s sins take action.

Departures

Supernatural Thriller Love Story - For 45 years, Wild has known the exact date everyone he touches will die—a curse he’s never been able to change. June the love of his life always believed this curse could be transformed into a gift but when she died he lost all hope until his niece discovered the ledger— his record of all the deaths he’s predicted and been powerless to change.