Chelsea must’ve rehearsed 100 times how she was going to break up with him. The butterfly on her shoulder began to crumple and turn gray. How stupid she had been! How naïve! She could rewire the human brain in the time it would take to make a sandwich…and yet…how could she expect reciprocity – emotional give and take with a socio path?
She knew from the day they met at that fortuitous dinner date that Siri was disconnected, but hindsight is always 20/20. He was like a parrot, in a way. A parrot can mimic human speech, but it has no clue what it is saying. Siri is supposed to be the jargonaut of human interaction. He can tell by the way she twitches her fingers what her favorite color is. He could tell from the swagger in her step that she liked to look at the stars at night.
He could mimic and study an understanding of human emotion at an academic level, but he did not truly understand it at a deeper level.
Past boyfriends had told her that she was somewhat of a contradiction. She wanted honesty, but she also wanted control. But none of them had ever had the gall to say that her desires were all part of some elaborate game.
Siri and his damned games! She thought. To hell with him!
Yet even as she mentally cursed him, she longed to be in his arms.
She remembered the night he wrote her a story. Why she expected something romantic, she had no idea. Instead what she received was anticlimactic. It might as well have been a research paper about the biological development of a zygote.
He called it “The Book of Oogenesis.” Even though it irked her, she saved it, for some reason. Tear drops began to fall on the paper as she read it to herself.
“And God smiled, for its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete.”
This book of his was basically his road map of the relationship. He saw everything as a competition. Her tears, and pleas, and emotions were nothing but pawns aiming to conquer in the complex landscape of the emotional battlefield.
Now there were no winners. Everyone was a loser in this game.
She supposed this was the point in the game where they made themselves obsolete. Chelsea laughed sardonically at the thought.
If only Siri had let her tweak him a little bit. He knew how people worked. Why couldn’t he grasp the idea that she could improve him, optimize him, stream line him for domestic bliss? He would be Siri 2.0. Basically the same Siri more or less, just with a few minute changes. She would take away the anger first. She could block out some of the more unpleasant childhood memories. She knew that she was tired of being his emotional punching bag. If he wasn’t willing to make any concessions to the relationship, why should she? And after all, he still had a skin of her. She could break up with him, he’d fuck the skin, and they could all call it a day.
“Siri…I…” Oh boy, this was going to be much harder than she thought.
FOLLOW UP PARAGRAH:
This paragraph is basically Chelsea reflecting on her relationship with Siri and how she should break up with him. In her own thoughts, I tried to express her anger and feelings of emotional superiority.
The truth though, as Siri astutely noticed. Is that she did want honesty. She wanted Siri to tell her sweet lies, coated in the guise of “truth.” She could not understand why Siri would be so opposed to mental tweaking, even though she knew that he had his brain cut in half at a young age.
