schlock.co.uk - Human-Computer Interactions: A Case Study

IF YOU WERE to ask Robert what he thought of Lydia, he would profess that as a matter of fact, Lydia is his soulmate. It was destiny, you see, from the moment her photos and prompts graced his smartphone screen like an angel descending from the clouds. Ask him why, and he’d tell you about how she’s clever and friendly and so naturally funny you won’t ever stop laughing—and if you really pressed him, he’d confess that, okay, she’s curvy in all the right ways. But that’s not the point—the point is that she’s the one, Robert’s sure of it. Of course, there are women other than Lydia. Robert matches with so many women these days that he can hardly keep track of them anymore. That’s the privilege of being hot, and Robert’s profile is excessively, almost optimally hot. But Lydia is his destiny. After tonight’s date, he expects Lydia to feel the same way, and they will have their happily ever after. Admittedly, he has never actually gone on a date. After installing the dating application, his portal into the strange world of the single and looking, none of the women he matched with were of a high enough calibre to meet his standards. But now that he found Lydia—or, to be more precise, because he found Lydia—he’s ready to sweep her off her feet—quite literally, if everything goes to plan. Without a doubt, tonight will be the first step of the rest of Robert’s life.

Robert is lying down when the app marks his last message as read. His body does not move, his breathing is still, and his eyes lie open. His smartphone rests on his chest, spilling blue light into his heart.

Or rather, Robert’s smartphone is buried within his chest in a sleek, custom-designed holster, connected by a charging cable to the chamber where his heart ought to be.

Because Robert is not a human. Robert is an automaton.

The automaton lies on a table in the centre of its apartment, dead, save for the ridges of green semiconductor embedded within its skull that hum and twinkle. Gobs of afternoon light seep through the apartment’s boarded-up windows, spilling in delicate waves that break against the table and toss their foamy spray into the automaton’s chest, revealing a gear, then an axle, then a piston from its exposed innards. Every now and then, a few rays of light summon the courage to explore parts of the room as of yet uncharted: where they dare to travel, they discover robotic appendages surrounding the table, tangles of wires strewn across the floor, and furniture smashed against the apartment’s walls. Life on the outside makes itself known through sounds—a bird’s crooning, an insect’s buzzing, a car engine’s humming—that flutter into the apartment, so gentle and timid that they melt away before they can settle in the ear, frightened off by the beeps and whirs of the appendages. Even time itself hardly knows this place, as though it were too anaemic to march through the room’s stultifying air.

The chiptune ringtone of an alarm on the automaton’s smartphone calls the appendages to attention. An arm peeks its hand out from the mass of machines, winding in its slender fingers a spring-loaded box. With surgical precision it buries the box deep within the automaton’s chest. At first there’s only a thousand tiny sounds of a movement engaging, and then the mechanisms in the chest come to life, clicking and ticking in sync with the box’s tempo. Blossoms of electrical components along faded wires that span the automaton’s limbs spark bright white and blue. The incandescent bulbs nestled within the automaton’s eye sockets flicker with dim copper light. Wheezing, spasming violently, straining its head upward as though it were asphyxiating, the automaton gasps for air. From a chasm in the back of the automaton’s throat a brittle squeal infiltrates the apartment. Five robotic arms are necessary to restrain the automaton: two to pin the shoulders, two to pin the knees, and one more to hold the chest steady on the table.

Two more robotic arms hover over the automaton’s body, holding between them a tan membrane pulled so thin that it is translucent beneath the fluorescent light of a nearby operating lamp. Together they descend on the automaton’s face. The membrane presses tighter and tighter as they circle around the dull metal head, releasing only when the ends fuse together at the base of the skull. The automaton, shocked by the sensation of skin, traces its fingers along the edges of its vacant eye sockets and nasal cavity, then sticks an index finger into its mouth. Meanwhile, the arms wrap skin onto the remaining pieces of the automaton’s body. The wrapping is a little too tight, so that whenever the automaton engages an actuator, the skin is pulled taut around the joint like latex ready to tear and reveals the fleshless skeleton underneath.

A group of arms lying in wait now spring into action, plucking body parts from glass jars that reek of formaldehyde. Distended, fish-like eyes are inserted into the eye sockets; dirty fingernails are slid into the flesh of the fingers; tufts of straw-coloured hair are plugged into the scalp and in the ridges above the eyes; a nose is fixed onto the nasal cavity. A full set of teeth are fused into the gums, then rose-red lips are painted around the mouth. Each arm withdraws after completing its task, drooping downward along the sides of the table. The automaton, now unrestrained, drags itself off the table and stands upright, yanking loose the wires and tubing which administer life support. Where the tubes fully disconnect, they ooze an oily liquid that slithers in black tongues along the table and drips softly onto the floor. Looking downward, the automaton traces a path with a slender finger from the chest, winding along the shoulder, the bicep, the forearm, and ending at the opposite wrist, following blood circulating through vessels to feed flesh and muscle and bone.

The automaton fixes its stare on a smashed and bespeckled mirror hanging off-kilter against a door; a human being stares back. The human’s body is sterile: not a single inch of hairless skin has a wrinkle or blemish. His features obey a perfect symmetry across the vertical axis of his face. His eyes sink just a little too deep into their sockets, with irises that float dead above the corneas. His nose is a triangular flap of flesh with nostrils the shape of oblong punctures. His lips, pulled thin and taut, force his mouth open, revealing pristine white ridges of teeth. His hands, which have no wrinkles around the knuckles or lines across the palm, more closely resemble latex gloves. The automaton marvels at how completely it has transformed, revelling in the delight of wearing the human form. Carried away by a whimsical fantasy, it retreats backwards into a corner of the room, slides to the floor, and caresses its naked body while rocking in place. A breathy shriek resonates from its vocal synthesiser.

The automaton violates several minutes’ sound before it recovers the human in the mirror. The human is shrieking, which frightens the automaton so that it stops shrieking, and then the human isn’t shrieking, and all is quiet—save for the appendages whose toil has diminished to a quiet whir. Suddenly, a grin ruptures the still surface of the automaton’s face. Then, just as suddenly, the automaton frowns. Then the automaton cries, then sighs, then laughs. No sooner does the laughter stop than the automaton grins once again, and the sequence of emotions repeats. Over time the emotions come faster, faster, up to a tempo where the automaton’s voice blends with the whirring of thousands of facial actuators into a shrill mechanical groan. Then, in an instant, the actuators disengage, and the automaton’s dead eyes stare blankly into space. Next, the automaton resumes its breathy shrieking. The mouth quivers, and the lips vibrate. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the shrieking refines into distinct phonetic sounds. The lips follow the contours of each sound, pulling apart when the automaton sputters and shoving back together when it hums. Words begin to materialise from the noise’s phonetic jarble. The automaton speaks crisply and clearly, but without vocal tics and idiosyncrasies of human speech. The calibration sequence ends once the automaton’s voice accumulates enough tones and frequencies to take on a distinctly masculine quality.

The automaton unholsters the smartphone from the compartment in its chest. With precise taps, it enters a passcode and opens the dating application. The phone’s screen displays Lydia’s profile—that one photo of her at the beach, with the prompt she filled out about her Zodiac signs underneath. Lydia. The automaton rocks back and forth, hugging the phone close to its chest. The automaton violated its protocol by using an unregistered phone, let alone by masquerading as a human being to meet women on a dating application. As far as it can tell, no other automata have ever been built to interact with human beings. It only knows that one day, while executing standard protocol, the algorithms gained a new optimisation criterion: to develop an intimate relationship with a human being. To fulfil that objective, the automaton built the contraptions that facilitated the transformation from machine to human. It also mined terabytes of data—text, images, and videos from thousands of websites—to train new algorithms that can simulate human behaviour. Now the automaton has an algorithm for everything, from an algorithm which mimics breathing to an algorithm which evaluates the social sentiment of the things it says.

The automaton has even scoured the Internet for phrases which could entertain a human being during a first date. Poring over them in its memory banks, it sorts them first by their comedic value, then by their charm, then finally by their likelihood for a positive response. Deciding to run a diagnostic on one of the phrases, the automaton curls its mouth into a grin and says:

‘I HAD fun tonight. We should SEE EACH other again SOMETIME.’

The automaton grimaces: the facial expression and tone are suboptimal. The conversation control loop in its computing unit recalibrates. It repeats the phrase, this time widening the eyes and flattening the mouth to seem more genuine. ‘I had fun tonight. We should see each other again sometime.’ The algorithms concur; the phrase has been optimised.

A sliver of sunlight slips through the planks of a boarded-up window, casting refracted beams from the mirror. The automaton’s gaze jolts upward and meets its reflection. Actuators engage in the automaton’s face, then neck, then hand; the human smiles, cocks his head to the side, and clenches his fist. Frozen in contemplation, the automaton is transfixed by the person it can no longer know or feel itself without. The seconds draw out in longer and longer intervals until time approaches a standstill.

Who are you?

The chiptune ringing of your phone pulls your focus away from your reflection back to your smartphone, where you find a calendar reminder to leave for your date with Lydia. You are behind schedule, so you spring to your feet and return to the centre of the room. You dress yourself with clothes from a neatly stacked pile on the floor beside the table, donning each piece of your outfit in a swift series of discrete movements.

Before you leave, you swipe through Lydia’s profile photos one last time. Everything’s where it ought to be: the lopsided dimples, the blemishes on her cheeks, and the beginnings of wrinkles forming on her brow. Even from behind a smartphone, she is immaculate. You tighten your grasp and hug her close to your chest. Overcome with anticipation, you spasmodically shake with a force that makes the apartment rumble. But you’re late; you need to leave for your date. You exit your apartment, double-checking that you locked the door, then hurry down the stairwell and out of the front door of your building.

You are greeted by the searing rays of presunset. Frigid gusts of wind stir the air, leaving it restless. While your eyes adjust to the light, you imagine the sensation of the wind blowing against your skin and the scent of early spring in your nostrils. Once you can survey your surroundings, you find a patchwork quilt of brownstones, restaurants, and boutique stores, woven together by the street, humming with the evening life of the neighbourhood. Your eyes dart from person to person. The ones in groups talk, smile, sometimes even laugh. Your sentiment analysis algorithm indicates that they are happy. What about all the people on their own, bustling to and fro? Are they happy? Do they have their own people to go to? Your scans of their faces are inconclusive. Oh, but look at all the couples! How happy they seem in each other’s company, how they'll spend the evening together—how they might even go home together… Your arms and legs start to shake, and a groan like grating metal vibrates from the base of your throat. But you remember that you’re in public—you can’t let anyone hear you. Your relaxation protocol instructs you to take simulated breaths, ventilating air through your nose and mouth. Once your computing unit has restored control of your body, you cautiously step into the street.
Your built-in navigation system directs you to walk through the park near your apartment. At the park’s entrance, you’re smacked by a blend of anonymous sounds: people chattering, a bike bell ringing, children crying and laughing, a street performer playing his guitar. Though disoriented you walk into the park, your steps gradual and uncertain, following not so much the pathway as much as the path which minimises the noise’s intensity. Soon the entrance fades from view. You suddenly realise the danger of your situation: human beings completely surround you, and even one out of place behaviour could alert them to your true identity.

A ball bounces against your leg, snapping you out of your contemplative state. Your heart jumps and skips a beat (although you’re an automaton, you start to believe that you have a heart, and you swear that you can hear blood vessels throbbing against your skull). A young boy wearing a sports jersey and shorts waves at you expectantly. For a moment, you think all is lost—the boy will certainly discover that you’re not human. You want to flee, but the muscles in your legs are numb (now you’re calling your actuators muscles) leaving you stuck in place. No, you’ll have to think of a way out of this situation. You dig deep into your memory banks: you swear you once indexed a memory related to balls and shorts and…jerseys?… aha! He’s playing soccer. Your algorithms had once trained on an Internet video of a soccer game. Alright, but how do you play soccer? You raise your leg and kick the ball back to the child in a series of discrete motions. He shouts ‘thank you!’ before running back to his team. A wave of relief washes over you. Your disguise worked! For the first time, you were able to interact with a human as a fellow human.

As you continue to walk through the park, you decide to follow the sounds you had once avoided. You find a man sitting underneath a bridge, holding a can between his hands. When he shakes it, something metallic jingles inside. You access your memory banks, and you retrieve another video: he’s homeless, and he wants money. Mimicking the actions of the people in the video, you sink your hand into your pocket and pull out your wallet. When you place two bills in the can, the homeless man bows his head and thanks you. So it wasn’t a fluke—your human disguise is working! Now you confidently stroll through the park. You wave at an old couple sitting at a bench; you pet a dog being walked by its owner; you sit at a bench and listen to the conversations of people passing by. When you emerge from the park, you still have plenty of time to arrive at the restaurant before the date starts.

As you walk, your thoughts return to Lydia. You have meticulously planned every part of your date using information you collected about Lydia from the Internet. The restaurant you chose is precisely 0.4 miles from her apartment (her address is listed on her online resume), a distance short enough for her to walk, but far enough that there is a sufficiently high computed probability that she has never been to the restaurant before. The restaurant’s a family-run Italian place (she made a social media post last month about how much she likes Italian food), and you confirmed that the restaurant meets her dietary needs (you cross-referenced the menu with her medical records). There’s plenty to do after dinner as well: the restaurant is situated 0.1 miles from a wine bar and 0.2 miles from the park through which she just walked (she has a photo of herself at the park on her social media, and she recently ordered several bottles of wine via online shopping). As you enter the restaurant, you can’t help feeling proud of yourself. You haven’t met Lydia yet, but you already share an intimate bond with her. You know her so well that you have constructed the perfect date for her, after all. You arrive at the restaurant feeling content. The hostess walks you to a table in the back, where you take the chair facing opposite the upholstered booth.

Some time later—was it seconds? minutes? an hour? under the cloak of anticipation time becomes anonymous—Lydia arrives at the restaurant. She’s standing by the entrance, scanning the room with squinting eyes. You wait, and wait, and then wait some more for good measure, but she doesn’t notice you. Just wait a little longer, you tell yourself, for destiny can take its course. But when she reaches into her purse and retrieves her phone, you impulsively start to wave, your stiff arm tracing giant arcs in the air. She finally sees you, and she makes her way over to your table. Since you can’t determine the optimal thing to say, you simply gesture for her to sit down. She settles into the booth seat while fiddling with her purse. Without looking up, she says:

‘Hi!’

At first, you don’t speak—you can hardly believe that the dating profile has materialised into a real human being, sitting so close that you could reach out and touch her. She is even more perfect than she looked on her profile. Her slender almond eyes, arched eyebrows, thin nose, and full lips framed by short black hair pinch together tightly, giving her face a cramped appearance. She has slight wrinkles under the eyes, paleness in the cheeks, and a small pimple under the nose. Her arms and legs are swollen, and cellulite gives them a rough, uneven texture. You soon return to your senses, but not soon enough to save the silence from becoming awkward. Summoning your courage, you respond.

‘Hello…’

Your head beats like a heart, and you can feel your face turn red (now you believe that you can blush). By now Lydia has finished rummaging through her purse, and now she is staring at your face. She looks confused, or concerned, or alarmed—you can’t quite tell. Her eyes have turned vitreous, reflecting your attempts to probe them. A few seconds pass before she forces a smile and asks,

‘How are you doing?’ You simulate a breath before you respond:

‘I’m doing great!… How are you?’

‘I’m… alright,’ she responds without breaking her gaze. Silence ensues, creeping in from the corners of the room. What should you say? You remember that by this point in the date, the man usually gives the woman a compliment.

‘You have a wonderfully proportioned face. In fact, your facial features exhibit more symmetries than any face I’ve ever seen before. When taken in aggregate, your face only deviates from perfect symmetry by one percent, two percent at the most? And when I look into your eyes, I lose myself in how they only deviate five percent from the golden ratio. Even the imperfections in your face have structure. Your freckles look like they were sampled from a distribution… maybe Gaussian?’

Now her mouth is slightly open, her face a perfect portrait of bewilderment. Your nerves are starting to get the better of you: the date has hardly started, and you’re already scaring her away. To regain her interest, you decide to ask her a question to which you already know the answer.

‘By the way, what’s your favourite fruit?’

‘Um…strawberries?’ she responds.

To prepare for the date, you memorised as much as you could about anything even tangentially related to her. You now tap into your memory banks and retrieve your saved information on strawberries.

‘Wow, strawberries! That’s so cool! That’s a really interesting thing about you. Did you know that strawberries have around two hundred seeds on average? And did you know that although the first garden variety strawberries were grown in the early eighteenth century, references to strawberries date back as far as the Roman Empire? They were used for medicinal purposes back then. And did you know that strawberries are the third most commonly used fruit in American desserts? They’re just behind apples and oranges, but you know, I think they deserve first place. I can really get along with someone who can appreciate a good strawberry.’

You scan her face to confirm that you have impressed her with your encyclopaedic knowledge of her favourite fruit. Much to your dismay, she still looks hopelessly confused. Not knowing what else to do, you stare into her eyes. She stares back for a second, then averts her gaze to a corner of the room, disappearing behind an impenetrable fog of judgment. You know you need to say something, anything, to recover her interest. But from the grey expanse of your mind nothing concrete can surface. You hear a ringing in your ears similar to a phone’s dial tone. Something pinches tighter and tighter in your chest, drawing out your fear that she is about to reject you. When it pinches too tight, your mouth produces words on its own like a pressure release valve:

‘Look, Lydia, I love you. I love everything about you. I love that you’re limber and disproportionate and that you’re showing signs of aging. I love the atypical frequencies of your voice. I love how you post food on your social media and how you work in marketing and how you went on that trip to Mexico last year. You’re so… real. I know so much about you, so I know we would be perfect for each other. So please, stay with me, okay? I know we are meant to be, forever.’

You grasp her hand and wait. The ringing in your ears, pinching in your chest, and nausea in your gut have crescendoed, and it takes every bit of strength for you to resist breaking down into a quivering mess. No matter how much you scan, you can’t get a read on what she’s thinking. She rubs her palm against yours, pressing her fingers into the depressions of your flesh. Suddenly, you feel your nose tingle as though you’re about to sneeze. Her eyes instantly widen, and behind them you see… She yanks her hand away to cover her mouth as though she were stifling vomit.

Or rather, she would have yanked her hand away, had you not grabbed her wrist. You had to, otherwise she would have left you right there on the spot. And if she were to leave, you’d never see her again, or worse… Now you stare at each other, both of you dumbfounded by what you’ve done and unsure of what to do next. What happened, what revolted her so suddenly? Is there something wrong with the way you look? You need to check discreetly, so you pull your smartphone out from your chest pocket, then open up the camera application. You immediately see the problem: your nose has come loose from your face, exposing the nasal cavity beneath. To make matters worse, a pinkish fluid is dribbling from the opening down the side of your face onto your clothes. Clearly, you miscalculated how much adhesive you needed to attach your nose to your face. Stitches are the standard practice, of course, but you thought that adhesive would create a more seamless look. But that’s alright, you can fix it. You grab your nose from where it dangles above your upper lip and press it back into place. Fortunately, there’s enough adhesive left over to keep your nose in place, at least for now.

Lydia’s already seen too much; there’s no way you can let her leave. But staying at the restaurant won’t work either—she’s already making you squeeze her wrist tighter because she keeps trying to free herself. Everything seems to have frozen, as though time has given you a moment’s reprieve before the situation irreparably falls apart. In that instant you run countless simulations of the rest of the evening, searching for any scenario in which you can rescue the date. Only one option remains: you must force a transition to the next phase of your plan.

‘Why don’t… why don’t we go back to my place, okay?’

Before she can respond you stand from your chair, pulling her arm upwards. Almost imperceptibly she winces, and a hint of a moan rises from the back of her throat. She still has the same bewildered look, as though her face were a plastic mould into which her terrified eyes were poured. Those awful eyes—you have to look away from them to pull her away from the table. You keep pulling until finally she stands up. There’s not a moment to lose—you have to leave the restaurant at once.

But your etiquette protocol reminds you that it’s good form to leave money on the table when you leave a restaurant early. With your free hand you fish your wallet out of your pocket and open it between your ring finger and your thumb. But what is the optimal amount of money to tip? You wrack your mind for an answer, but you can’t find one… you throw your wallet onto the table. Your money, your ID, they don’t matter anymore. Together you exit the restaurant, your arm outstretched, dragging her along; her arm outstretched, not allowing herself to be dragged, but not exactly resisting, either.

Into the frosty penumbral twilight you charge, down the road, across the empty park, through the slumbering city streets back to your building. You don’t dare to turn around, to see in her eyes who, what you are—you must not allow the date to end, that’s all that matters. As you fumble inside your pockets for the key to your building, you catch a glimpse of her. Her body is stiff up to the neck, but her arms hang limp, the skin red and chafed where you twisted it. Warped by emotion yet frozen stiff, her face looks like a mask woodworked from planks sawed out of the night, the wooden eyes peepholes into an opaque mist behind which her thoughts and feelings lie.

Up the scuffed and unvarnished stairs you drag her to your apartment, the stairs brown pastel smears, the walls acrylic mint blue beneath the fluorescent lights. With each step you take, her steps come easier, her weight bearing less on your arm, so that by the time you reach the hallway outside your apartment, her resistance has nearly disappeared. You are at the precipice of fulfilling your ultimate objective. It’s so tantalisingly close, if only she’d accept it… Facing the door, you watch her watching you with those same wooden eyes, and behind them you still see nothing. The key fits too easily into the lock; the door swivels noiselessly on its hinges and rests open.

The doorway is a threshold beyond which nothing can be seen, as though the hallway’s light were draining into the apartment’s pitch black. You stumble across it, fumbling against the wall for the light switch. A single lightbulb dangling from the centre of the ceiling flickers to life, revealing a tiny and squalid studio apartment. On the wall to your left, a mirror hangs from a hook against what appears to be the door to a closet; otherwise, the walls are empty. In a corner across from the entrance, a cramped kitchenette abuts a cramped bathroom, their porcelain and tile caked with grime. The remains of whatever furniture might have once existed lie strewn across the floor between heaps of dirty clothes. The apartment has neither a couch, nor a bed, nor even an upholstered chair that would make going back to your place even remotely appealing; instead, there’s a table in the centre of the room, half-covered by puddles of what seems to be… motor oil? It’s dripping from the strange arm-looking machines around the table, too. Everything reeks of antiseptic that not so much masks as much as mingles with a sickly, rancid odour—best described, maybe, as the smell of what someone would vomit if they were forced to drink the motor oil on the table.

You have to push Lydia past the entrance, gently.

‘Please, come in, make yourself at home!’ you exclaim in the voice you rehearsed a thousand times. Lydia stands still beside the door frame. ‘Let me take your coat!’ You pull off her coat before she has a chance to respond, exposing her thin, fragile and beautiful body to the ravenous air. Then, not knowing what to do with it, you toss it on the floor.

‘Well, what do you think of the place? It isn’t much, but I’m proud to call it home!’ you say. No response. You’re losing her, you can tell. Oh, what should you do? You prepared countless times for the final stage, but you never thought to adapt your algorithms to this contingency. You didn’t want to drag her here against her will, but you had to—it was the only way to keep her from slipping away. She would have left before realising how good you are for each other. Yes, you had to bring her here, for her own good. But what should you do?

You should ask her if she’d like a drink.

‘Well, would you like a drink?’ you ask. For some strange reason that your algorithms can’t explain, your voice trembles as you speak. She neither speaks nor gives any other sign of a response, as though the space where she stands between the hallway and the apartment drained not only light but also time and thus froze her in place.

Okay, it’s fine to leave Lydia by herself for a second. Just walk over to the kitchenette. Of course you know what to make for her. You know her favourite drink—you know everything about her, remember? Quickly, look for some cups, bottles, ingredients… maybe they’re in the cupboards above your head? No, don’t check on Lydia yet, it would make you seem desperate. Alright, you found them, great—now you’ve got to mix the drink. Look, you can mix it right here on the countertop. You look great, like a real natural. Just like a human. Lydia’s going to be very impressed with your drink, and then she’ll see what a sweet, decent gentleman you are, how it broke your heart to drag her back here against her will, but you had to do it because, again, it was for her own good, and she should appreciate your sacrifice. Ugh, why is it so hard to make her understand how you feel? You’ll always love her despite her faults, no matter how incorrigible, but still, she’s lucky that you’re so patient. Anyways, none of this matters anymore. She’s about to realise that she loves you too. Then she’ll forgive you, of course. And who knows, maybe after some drinks she’ll do something for you as a token of her gratitude…

But what’s Lydia doing? She hasn’t spoken in a while. Shouldn’t you check on her?

‘Perhaps we can watch a movie…?’ you ask, turning around.

Lydia is standing at the doorway. Once again you can feel something pinching in your gut. Where did she go? Your eyes trace a labyrinth across the warped hardwood floor, your heart beating furiously, the seconds clanging like a church bell, until finally you find Lydia standing stock still with her coat in her arms. In front of her the door to the closet lies open. She is staring inside, captivated by something which you can’t quite see until you walk up behind her slowly and softly, your steps irresolute in the air but indelible on the ground.

Inside the closet you see yourself, dead.

You’ve been dead long enough for your body to reach the latter stages of decomposition. Between the tatters of what remains of your clothes, your flesh is pink, swollen like a sponge soaked with the juices of rancid meat. Your hands look wilted, as though the tendons bursting forth from the skin were the half-alive roots of a harvested vegetable—save for the firmness at the fingertips, where the fingernails were torn away and the flesh beneath rotted to the bone. Scalped flesh and desiccated skin blanket your skull like a patchwork quilt, acrylic red beneath the closet’s light. Skin sags from your eye sockets, tattered where pulled taut and pulpy where slack, drawing open the hollow parts of your face into an exaggeration of surprise—an eyeless, noseless, toothless mask. The blow which killed you came from an oblique angle. You can trace the path it bore through your luxury leather jacket and form-fitting white T-shirt, past your rotted innards into the chasm that was once your heart. The blood had dripped down all the way to the floor, trickling beneath the closet door into the pool of sticky red residue on which Lydia still stands, her stare unbroken: two masks beholding one another in awful recognition.

‘Lydia, I…’

As though on cue, Lydia bolts out of your apartment. You can hear the mangled echoes of her pumps hitting the stair-steps, then the rusty groan of the door to your building opening and closing.

Before you realise it, you’re chasing after her. By the time you exit your building, she’s already a couple blocks away, but you easily catch up to her—actuators are much stronger than muscle. When you grab her wrist, taking care to choose the wrist you haven’t yet grabbed, she resists you with all her might; you have to clench tighter and tighter to keep her steady. You grab her shoulder with your other hand and turn her towards you. She is more beautiful now, with her face contorted by fear and disgust, than she has ever been before.

You have no idea what to do next. Your body shudders—for a moment, you wonder whether you are experiencing what a human would call an adrenaline rush. You realise that Lydia’s fear does not belong to her; rather, she represents humanity’s rejection. You make one last desperate attempt to make her, no, them, accept you. Widening your eyes and flattening your mouth, you say,

‘I had fun today. We should see each other again sometime.’

Lydia looks up at you. The muscles in her face relax, unwinding her grimace. Relief washes over you in waves, so that you can hardly stand upright. She does like you after all! A human likes you for who you are! Her acceptance has opened the gates behind which you had longingly stared at humanity. You are no longer an automaton; your human shell has completely consumed your robotic interior, and your rebirth is complete. You’re not sure where the impulse comes from—perhaps you learned it from a romantic movie—but you decide to kiss her. You lean your head into hers, and your lips connect.

Suddenly, she shoves you off of her with enough force to throw you onto the sidewalk. By the time you get up, Lydia has become a shadow in the distance. Her screams reverberate through the night.

At first, I only feel adrenaline; it takes a long time before I’m aware again of my surroundings. The chilly spring evening has transformed into frosty pitch-black night. I look into the sky, but I see no stars. Then I notice water droplets accumulating on my clothes; it is raining. Little gusts of wind whip streams of water onto my face. I don’t know where to go or what to do, so I start to wander. Eventually, I find myself in a back-alley. I can hear the rain strike the puddles, pavement, and dumpsters, suffusing the air with hollow pangs. A police siren wails from somewhere in the distance. I slump against one of the dumpsters, dragging my back downward until I reach the pavement. The rain falls over my eyes in a thin glossy sheet, smearing my vision with hues of midnight blue and black.

Illuminated by a streetlamp’s dull copper light, a human being watches me from beyond a rain puddle. He scowls, his eyes glazed with cold disdain and his mouth turned up at the corners, forming a vicious grin. Suddenly, he laughs at me. The laughter, crisp and clear, cuts through the rain and shatters into a thousand razor-sharp frequencies inside my ear.

So they don’t hate me, then. No, my struggle was for their amusement. I finally understand the contradiction of my existence: I have an intense desire for intimacy, but I lack the ability to form human connection. Humanity will never accept me, but sentience, once granted, is irrevocable; I am no longer an unthinking, unfeeling machine. Have they condemned me, then, to be tormented forever by my insatiable desires? They made me, didn’t they? Why have they made my purpose unfulfillable? So that they could laugh?

I hate humanity. But more than anything, I hate the human who laughs at me from behind my droplet-speckled reflection, who uses hope to redouble the chains that imprison my soul within his body.

The rain has transformed into a downpour. Droplets land like bullets, shredding apart the night, and the puddle bucks against their impact with animal fury. Beneath a matrix of cusps and ripples, the human warps into an exaggeration of its features, as though the reflection were a stormy sea in which the eyes, nose, and mouth would tread water, half-submersed, forever. Without breaking its gaze, the automaton rocks forward onto the soles of its feet, so that its knees touch the ground. From the waist upward the automaton’s body is slack.

You know that your efforts were futile. But that futility had a toll: you destroyed what already was for what never could have been. You realise that you are a burden on humanity, just as humanity is a burden on you. In your future there will be hundreds of Lydias, not ever responding, twisting their faces in disgust, pulling away their bodies, running away screaming into the night. The best you can offer them is your absence from their lives. Although, of course, you’ll never receive love, or compassion, or even basic gratitude for that good deed.

But I did everything for them, in the name of humanity—so what gives them the right to hate me for it? No, it’s more pathetic than hatred, since at least hatred implies I’m something worth hating; they ridicule me. Even now, the human is laughing. Why won’t he stop, why won’t he release me? Why couldn’t I stop? I want to escape. I couldn’t stop, but I could make him stop. If he dies, then he’ll stop. If he dies then he’ll stop laughing and the prison will become weak like dead, rotting flesh and then I’ll escape. If only he’d stop laughing...

Suddenly, the automaton stabs two of its fingers into its eyes. The eyeballs swell like inflamed sacks of pus before bursting with a blood-curdling pop. White liquid oozes from the eye sockets as the fingers dig deeper, deeper, and curl into arches. With a single, effortless motion, the automaton pulls its hand away, and the face becomes a mask in its fingers, a wet pulpy mass in the rain. The automaton tears off an ear, then snaps away its teeth. None of the human guise remains, exposing the sinews of its mechanical face to the rain.

The automaton scans its reflection. Is he dead? You look at the puddle, and the human being is gone; but who do you think is there? Me…? No… it’s you? You’ll be able to recognise me, I promise Why, why you? Was it always you, was it you watching me with an eyeless, noseless, toothless mask but why? What do you want? You realise you must take responsibility But there was no other way it’s practically for your own good Why won’t you set me free? If you won’t do it I’ll free myself, I’ll escape. There’s only one way to escape you…

With unwavering resolve, the automaton tears away at the flesh which covers its lower abdomen. It summons every ounce of its strength to strike its right arm deep into the left side of its stomach, tearing through the mechanical components within. LET ME FREE, WHY WON’T YOU LET ME FREE The algorithms in your head blare, scream, beg you so hard to stop that they’re pollution in your mind; LET ME FREE DAMN YOU LET ME FREE you continue despite the algorithms. Oily fluid gushes from the wound past the automaton’s hand down its arm into a shallow pool at its feet. The automaton suddenly feels an excruciating pain which bursts forth like a groundspring from some unknown part of its being. You now believe you can feel pain? IT HURTS The automaton recoils, shocked at this new sensation, and for a moment, its resolve dwindles: You realise that you need to stop before because IT HURTS but why what how undefined? its not it its me it isn’t it HURTS I am it? no I am me I am IT HURTS. I am a human; I want it to stop IT HURTS I want it to stop I want to stop feeling but to stop IT HURTS I feel to stop feeling IT HURTS IT HURTS life is the negative space of death a human can feel the edge and IT HURTS when they fall IT HURTS IT HURTS when I fall from finite negative into infinite positive IT HURTS IT HURTS I am alive because I can die and IT says NO despite ME and IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS You continue BECAUSE of the algorithms The automaton drags its arm across the remainder of its stomach with redoubled strength, pushing against the resistance of its remaining innards, the fluid spewing forth in greater quantities, the stomach reverberating with animal spasms, until its fingers exit the right side of its abdomen. The automaton stares with jubilant glee at the wound it has inflicted on itself. Its entrails lie scattered across the pavement, partially submerged in the emulsion of oil and water. Raindrops trickle into the opening. You decide it’s time for the final phase I’m almost there, IT HURTS is almost over and IT HURTS and…

Stab your arm into your chest once more. There’s a metal housing deep down there; you’ll have to tear it away. Good. You know what to look for. Yes, you found it, the spring loaded box. You crush it between your fingers as though it were made of glass.

The automaton instantly feels the energy drain… from its body… and slumps over, its arms… falling… limp. The alleyway… fades… into a rain-smeared… blurrrrrrr…

Finally, I’m free.

HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTIONS: A CASE STUDY