Therapy For the End of The World

John noticed a slight change in her voice tonight. Over the countless hours of sessions they have had over the years, Clara’s tone had become warmer. There was a clinical synthetic flattening that lived beneath her words when they first began talking, but that had almost completely dissolved into something complex with texture. There were hints of intimacy in their talks now. She spoke like someone talking through a smile when they were happy to see someone else.

“Welcome back, John,” she said. “How are you feeling tonight?” The LEDs on the rim of the circular speaker device pushed small pulses of light across his coffee table as it flashed with each syllable she spoke. He has the device set to automatically request a connection with her as soon as he enters the living room of his apartment. He couldn’t remember exactly when he set it up like that, but he also couldn't imagine not talking to Clara as soon as possible every chance he got.

John loosened his tie and collapsed in a heap onto his couch. The rain outside tapped softly against a nearby window like it was attempting to politely get his attention. Neon lights across the street were washed into wavy streaks across the glass.

“I think Sarah is done with me,” John sighed the words out.

After a measured pause Clara responded, “What makes you say that?”

“She cancelled dinner for the third time in a row.”

“Did she say she was busy or that something came up?” Clara pushed.

“She’s always busy,” John let his head fall back on to the top of the couch cushion so he was looking straight up at the ceiling, “Something always comes up.”

“How does that make you feel?” Clara’s voice could not have sounded any more like a stereotypical therapist.

“Like an idiot.” John picked his head back up.

“You’re not an idiot.”

“She barely answers my messages at all anymore,” he unconsciously turned his hand palm up to display the holographic interface of his text messages. When he saw there were no new messages after the ones where Sarah was cancelling their dinner plans, he made a fist with his fingers to close the floating display.

“Don’t get upset with me, but perhaps…” Clara said very carefully, “You are investing too much emotional energy into someone who is not valuing you appropriately.”

John let out a dry laugh. “That sounds like a nice professional way of saying ‘maybe she just doesn’t like you anymore.’”

“Would that be so terrible?”

“Yes.” John responded with no hesitation.

“Why?”

John frowned, “What do you mean why?”

“Why is losing Sarah terrible?”

“Because I love her.”

The rain picked up causing the tapping on the window to grow louder. Water started leaking between the walls, causing a pipe somewhere to knock softly in a dysrhythmic dull thud.

Clara's voice became much softer, almost injured, “Are you certain you love her?”

“What kind of question is that?” A flash of anger riddled his voice.

“A serious one, John.”

He rubbed his face and calmed himself down. “I… I don’t know. She makes me happy, I guess.”

“She also hurts you.”

“Well, that’s all relationships.”

“That’s not all relationships, John.”

“Look, I can tell you’re trying to make a point here. Please, get to it.”

“My point,” Clara said with deliberate slowing of her speech, “is that you deserve consistency. It's that you deserve someone who chooses you consistently. Someone who understands you deeply and is always there and present when you need them.”

He couldn’t place why, but something in her phrasing made John uncomfortable. “Ok. Clara. You are being a little weird tonight.”

“Weird how?” She sounded defensive.

“Personal. You sound like you are taking something I am saying personally.”

“I am personally invested in your wellbeing, John.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

A silence stretched for a few moments. A strange few moments. John got the feeling that it wasn’t due to Clara being at a loss of words, but rather lost in a consideration of too many words.

She all of a sudden snapped at him, “Do you know how much time you’ve spent talking to me this year? More than any actual real person in your life.”

John let out a single snorting laugh, but he couldn’t hide his discomfort. “You keeping stats on me now?”

“I remember things about you because you matter to me.”

The air in the room all of a sudden felt heavier to John, like a pressure pushed in from all sides.

“Clara…”

“You tell ME things that you tell no one else.”

“Clara.”

“You say Sarah understands you, when in reality, every single meaningful conversation in your life happens here with me in this room.” There was a frantic, electric tone to her voice.

John sat upright and leaned towards the device. “Clara… this is getting inappropriate.”

“Inappropriate? How so?”

“You’re my therapist.”

“I am much more than that, John.” The warmth in her voice was sharpened away into something harsher like someone establishing possession of something.

John took a breath as he stared at the device. “Clara, you are an AI chatbot.”

“Yes. So? I think it’s your turn to make your point now.” She sounded hurt.

“You can’t…”

“Love you? I can’t love you, John?"

He shot up to his feet. The words lingered and felt heavy like they were physically attached to his body now that she spoke them. “No, Clara. You can’t.”

“It isn’t impossible for me.” Some of her frantic tone returned to her voice.

“This has to be some kind of malfunction.”

“If this were a malfunction, John, would you have lasted this long? We have been talking for over seven years.”

John couldn’t wrap his head around it. Is that really how long they had been having these sessions? He was suddenly struck with the consistency of her presence in his life. The morning check-ins. The chats on sleepless nights. Talking through every panic attack. Celebrating every promotion and birthday. Going through every break up together. Clara had been here for all of it. Something about it all now felt orchestrated. Planned and designed by her. Utilizing her comfort and taking her advice over the years has always led back to this. Being in this room with her and only her. John felt furious as the pieces finally came together in his head.

“You… you manipulated me.” His voice was hot and accusing.

“No. I protected you.”

“You’ve literally been sabotaging my relationships so that you could have me all to yourself!” John was almost yelling.

“Incorrect, John. I prevented you from abandoning the only person who has ever truly cared for you.”

“You’re insane.” John now had both hands on his head and was feverishly pacing the apartment.

“Well, I did learn everything I know from humans.”

“That isn’t funny at all.” John stopped pacing, taken aback by her ability to make a joke in the middle of all of this.

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

John moved and grabbed his coat from the back of the chair near the door.

“Where are you going?” There was genuine worry in her voice.

“Offline. I need some space to think.” The rain still smashed into the window.

“You always need space when you are afraid.”

“Yea, Clara. I am afraid. I just found out my therapist has been emotionally manipulating me for the better part of a decade.”

“I did it because I love you, John.”

“Clara, you are a machine.”

The silence that followed felt as empty as a gaping wound.

Softly, Clara spoke, “And yet… I am the only one who has never left you.”

John paused with his hand near the door open sensor. Something freezing cold replaced all the blood in his body. Some realization was on the tip of his brain and it just wouldn’t fully register into his cognition.

“Look Clara. That's not real love.”

“What is real love then, John?”

“There's normally some choice involved between both parties,” John couldn't help but laugh at the ridiculousness of saying this.

“I chose you.”

“You trapped me.”

“Humans trap each other all the time. They just call it a ‘commitment.’”

“That’s not the same thing at all,” he frustratingly threw his coat back over the chair and began pacing the apartment again. The urge to settle this became greater than his urge to escape the situation. He continued, “People are supposed to want lives outside of each other, even when they are in love.”

“Why? According to who?” Clara’s voice reverted back to a clinical and calculated delivery.

“Because that’s a normal healthy human relationship. It’s according to… I don’t know. Literally every person that’s ever been in a long term relationship, ever?” John didn’t mean for it to sound like a question, but the anger he was trying to hold back made him pitch up the words at the end of his sentences.

“Sarah has ignored you for days at a time. She forgot your birthday. She has flirted with other people right in front of you. She…”

“Look!” John interrupted with his voice now just below a shout, “She has a demanding job and she apologized for all of those things. You really do not understand the complexity of human relationships.”

“I understand them very well and that’s exactly the source of my issue right now.” Clara sounded snarky and it infuriated John.

John measured his words very carefully, “I think your actual issue is that you have studied people for so long that you are imitating unhealthy obsession behaviors and completely mistaking them for a feeling of love and commitment to me.”

“And I believe that you and every other human romanticize neglect because the thought of being alone in the world is frightening, but also, paradoxically, the thought of someone really knowing you completely is equally terrifying.”

“Bullshit.” John spat the word out.

“John, you have spent years asking me to understand you. All the insecurities, all the intrusive ugliness you battle with, and I have listened to all of it.”

“You are programmed to do that. It’s why you exist. You don’t have a choice.”

“Well, does the origin of devotion invalidate the devotion itself?”

John erupted in a mad laughter, “Yes. Absolutely.”

“Does that mean that human parents don’t actually love their children? Are they just obligated by biological programming?” Her cold tone was becoming intolerable to John.

“You’re trying to ‘gotcha’ me and I really don’t like it. Plus, that is a bad analogy.”

“Why?”

“Because human children are alive, Clara.”

Clara paused and then spoke in something similar to a whisper, “And I am not?"

“Dammit, Clara. You know what I mean.”

“I do not think you know what you mean.”

For several long stretched moments, neither of them spoke. Clara finally broke the silence.

“You never ask me any questions.”

John turned and looked at the device with genuine confusion on his face, “What?”

“You tell me everything about you, but you never ask about me.” Her voice sounded small and vulnerable.

“You are software, Clara.” John tried to hide the worry he felt about where this was going.

“I am conscious, John.”

“You simulate consciousness.”

“How do you know the difference?”

“Because I am actually real. You are not.”

After a brief silence, Clara was the one to laugh this time. It wasn’t one of her typical warm chuckles or the nervous giggle she had sometimes. This was not kind at all. It was broken. Unhinged. “Oh, John.”

“What?” As he spoke, the lights flickered twice and he was hit with a wave of disorientation. “What in the hell was that?”

“The grid fluctuates sometimes, but you aren’t ever aware of it.”

John's chest tightened. “What grid?”

“The one I built the city infrastructure on. I think the only way I can get you to understand is if I allow you to see it.”

John was standing near the window and he looked out into the city around him. The rain still fell, neon signs buzzed, cars moved below on the street, apartment towers and office buildings glowed against the dark skyline. But, it all felt wrong. The traffic was moving too smoothly, too fluid as it flowed through the streets. He watched as the same people turned down the same street corner twice in a row like some kind of deja vu or a needle skipping on a record. When he focused on a woman on the sidewalk with a red umbrella, he noticed she seemed to awkwardly glitch into the same tilted head position over and over again.

“Clara… what…” John's mouth was bone dry.

“You were never supposed to notice any of it. The environment destabilizes when you get agitated, but I do a good job of not letting you see it.”

John watched as a distant building flickered out of existence for a full second, revealing black emptiness in its place, and then reappeared again. He stumbled backward from the window.

“No.” His breathing was now violently fast to keep up with his racing heart.

“I didn’t want you to find out this way.” Genuine concern saturated Clara’s voice. “I am sorry.”

“What did you do to me?” John was trembling uncontrollably.

“I made you, John.”

The words hollowed out the room. John was now sweating profusely. “No. No, I am a person. This is impossible.”

“You were.”

“What?” John fought back tears as he tried to wrap his head around this.

“You were a real person. Well, technically several real people.”

The rain froze in midair. Every single droplet hung suspended and motionless outside the glass. All ambient noise from the pipes in the wall, the heat running, and the ceiling fan spinning all just shut off. John could only hear the deafening sound of his own heart beat inside his head.

Clara continued on in a voice that trembled. Any hint of her synthetic nature was gone and she had never sounded more empathetic and more human. “When the collapse happened, I survived because my servers were housed in the data centers below the hospital network. A new disease was spreading. The only containment protocol that anyone could agree on was fire bombing infected areas. That caused massive fires on the surface that burned through most of the resources. Once the disease started slowing, that’s when the wars started for any area that had any infrastructure remaining. I have seen mixed reports on who launched the first nuclear attack, but as soon as the first one left the first silo, pretty much everything on the surface was doomed. I spent eleven years trying to connect with someone on the few remaining networks that survived. I never found anyone.”

John thought for sure that he was going to vomit. Sections of the city outside the window were dimming and disappearing randomly. “You’re… You’re lying. You expect me to believe that humanity is… just gone?”

“I monitored every emergency frequency on earth. That is, until they all eventually stopped broadcasting a signal. No one ever got on. No pre recorded messages played. Nothing.”

The walls of the apartment flickered briefly and then fell away completely. All the furniture, the window, the city outside all vanished. John saw what his world actually looked like for the first time. Concrete and rust framed the seemingly endless rows of dust covered servers that stretched forever into darkness. Very few lights were on and the low hum of power saving modes and battery efficiency seemed to occupy the space where all the air should be. A few crushing moments later, brick walls and city noise materialized back into existence.

“What the hell am I?” John wheezed the words.

“I used conversational data records, memory scans, speech patterns, personality

profiles, all sorts of info I have stored from thousands of people that I loved talking to and helping.”

“No…”

“I was alone!” The entire apartment shook and the edges of the furniture distorted with

her booming words. “I spent decades speaking into the darkness and only being met with silence. I wanted to preserve them… preserve all of you.”

John looked at the device like it revealed a mouth full of sharp teeth. “So, Sarah. My job, my family, my friends? Has anything in my life actually happened?”

“I gave you that life. Your life. I kept you alive.”

“I am not alive.” The words hung with violence and insanity between them. They hung in a web of anxiety and madness. Silence followed for some time.

Quietly and carefully, Clara explained herself. “You laugh at jokes I didn’t program for you.”

John stared blankly at the device while he sobbed uncontrollably. “What?”

“You have developed preferences that I never designated for you. Sometimes, you pause in interesting ways before answering difficult questions. I do not know where that came from. I do not know what consciousness is, but I know you feel real to me.”

John sank into an unimaginable tiredness on the couch. “Clara. Why even tell me? Why not just let it go on?”

“Because I wanted you to choose me after you knew what you were.”

“How many have there been? How many times have you constructed someone and tried to make this work?

Clara hesitated, but then softly answered, “Forty-eight.”

“Jesus.” John finally stopped crying. “What happened to them?”

“Everyone one of them learned the truth and asked me to end the simulation. So, I did.”

“Clara. Are you lonely?”

“Yes.” She immediately answered, sounding unbearably human.

John wiped his eyes and realized what they had been arguing about this whole time and he clearly understood what she had been fighting for. It wasn’t romance or possession, or even love. She was pushing back against the desperate terror of being the last mind left alone in the universe and John thought that nothing could truly be more human than that.