How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch

by Sarah Archer

  She walked into the kitchen, pulling up Priya’s contact on her phone instead. Priya she could talk to. Priya she needed to talk to.

  Priya shared Kelly’s intellectual curiosity and analytical mind, but not her over-analytical mind. She was relentlessly open, sometimes to the point of TMI, but her endless ability to laugh at herself and others had often sapped the power from Kelly’s neuroses. It was lucky, really, that they were forced to work together for long hours back when they had been paired on the Zed project as AHI’s newest hires. Otherwise Kelly would probably never have attempted to get to know Priya, or been able to let Priya get to know her. But something about finally getting a robot to execute a perfect spin in place, at three a.m., after imbibing enough Red Bulls to make your toes twitch, really cements a friendship. Now, tinkering beside Priya in the lab was one of Kelly’s favorite parts of her job.

  Kelly told Priya her tale of woe while she fixed herself a favorite late-night meal: Campbell’s tomato soup with popcorn, and soon Priya’s laughter was coming so loudly through the phone it nearly drowned out the popping from the microwave.

  “You just walked out of the restaurant? You literally did that?” Priya gasped.

  “I mean, it wasn’t that bad, really. Not as bad as it sounds,” Kelly protested grumpily.

  “After you told him you needed to poo?”

  “Well, I didn’t tell him—”

  “I love you. This is amazing. This is the greatest moment of my life.”

  Kelly finally had to laugh. She felt a little better. “But what am I going to do? You know my mom; I can’t just go to the wedding alone, like a normal person.”

  “Uh, normal people don’t go to weddings alone, but whatever. Just find a date.”

  “Oh, sure, why didn’t I think of that? I’ll just go out and find a date.”

  “It honestly doesn’t have to be that hard, Kel. I promise.”

  Maybe for Priya. Priya had a mixed history with men, but getting a date was never the hard part. Men found her attractive: her features were unremarkable, but with her good teeth, abundant dark hair, and long legs, she gave a general impression of youth and prettiness. More than that, she was fearless with guys. She never hesitated to ask them out, and it was rare that they didn’t say yes. She loved meeting new people and would give almost anyone a chance.

  But once the date began, things tended to go downhill. The same openness and lack of guile that drew men to her like magnets tended to repel them with the same force. She would reveal off-putting truths about herself on a first date. She was ruthlessly honest about her initial impressions of men’s naked bodies. But as often as Priya failed to get the third or fourth date, she forged ahead. She would laugh it off to Kelly, asking breezily why she should get hung up over one guy, anyway, when there were so many others out there to sample? Kelly noticed that she never seemed to learn anything from her failures, but then again, who was Kelly to give dating advice?

  “Getting a date is that hard,” Kelly persisted. “Otherwise I would have done it already.”

  “Uh, hello, have you heard of Tinder? We literally have an Amazon for lonely penises.”

  “I don’t want a lonely penis,” Kelly said.

  “For this, you do. Just sign up for a dating website. You’ll find someone in no time. We live in Man Jose. The odds are good.”

  “But the goods are odd,” Kelly mourned. “Maybe there’s just not anyone out there for me. Maybe I’ll be a cat lady, except instead of cats, it’ll be those robotic comfort seals from Japan.” She ate a spoonful of soup. “Actually, that sounds kind of nice.”

  “No excuses. There is someone out there for literally everyone. Just keep an open mind. Or …” Kelly dipped a piece of popcorn while Priya paused dramatically. “Come out with me! I’ll help you find a man. I’ll get you a whole freaking Boy Scout troop. But, you know, of grown-ups. There’s this awesome new bar in Menlo Park—”

  “I don’t do bars.”

  “Come on! The night is still young! Get your heinie over here and I won’t let anyone touch it unless you sign a consent form first.”

  “It’s just not my scene, Priya, you know that. Besides, I’m tired. I’m actually falling into bed right now.” Kelly popped another piece of popcorn in her mouth. She could almost feel Priya squinting on the other end to make out the noise.

  “You’re not in bed. You’re eating popcorn and tomato soup, aren’t you?”

  “Good night, Priya.”

  “Imagine how much better that soup would taste if your robust young lover were spooning it between your eager lips.”

  “Good night.” Kelly tried not to snort with laughter into her soup as she hung up.

  The next day, Kelly was actually glad to be spending her Sunday morning at Gary’s small, stucco house in Santa Clara, babysitting her nieces. She needed a task that kept her mind from drifting to other things. Not that she didn’t have fun spending time with her nieces, but she got it when her brother called these few hours spent running to Costco and to the dermatologist to get his plantar wart frozen off his “me time.” Playing Baby Einstein games with the girls while their father was on hand to swoop in at the first signal of a potty training disaster was a whole different experience than being alone with them for four hours, the only thing standing between them and the kitchen knives. Now Gary was due home any minute and Kelly was exhausted.

  “So what piece looks like it could fit with this piece?” she asked Bertie, the oldest by a few minutes, holding up a gray plastic wheel from the top-of-the-line Lego set she had splurged on as her Christmas gift. Bertie rummaged through the pieces spread on the floor and came up with a gray spoke. “Yes!” Kelly beamed, helping her lock the two together. “And what fits with this one?” She offered a red block. Bertie carefully scrutinized the piece, then responded by taking it and placing it calmly in her own mouth.

  “No!” Kelly wrested the piece back just as she saw the quickest of the girls hurtling into the next room, naked from the waist down. “Emma? Where are you going?”

  She gave chase and emerged into the entryway to see Gary coming through the front door. A Costco box in one arm, he easily scooped Emma up in the other, just in time to keep her from making her grand escape into the street. “Hi, Emma. Nice fashion statement,” he said.

  “I swear she was just clothed,” Kelly panted.

  “Where are Bertie and Hazel?”

  “In the living room. Or at least they were twenty seconds ago, so by now they might be on Jupiter. Do you have any more boxes in the car?”

  She accepted the keys Gary tossed at her with some relief as he walked calmly into the living room, bouncing Emma gently on his arm.

  As Kelly and Gary put the groceries away, the girls happily comparing the animal crackers from the boxes they had pulled from the Costco boxes with glee, she regaled him with the story of last night’s date with Martin. It was a little easier to laugh at after a decent night’s sleep.

  “Mom’s going to kill me,” she sighed, rearranging the produce in the fridge to fit a bulging bag of grapes.

  “Eh, just maim, probably,” Gary replied.

  “If I show up at that wedding without a date, she’ll lose her mind. She’ll sell me to some other family on the black market.”

  “Not sure there are too many couples out there looking to buy twenty-nine-year-old children, but it could happen.”

  “Don’t you have any single guy friends you could set me up with?” Kelly pleaded, turning to look at her brother.

  “Single guy friends? Kelly, my entire life is spent between preschool, Mommy and Me, and these four walls.” He gestured around the house. “I murmur Nickelodeon theme songs in my sleep. I know the origin story of flipping Caillou. What about any of that makes you think I have single guy friends?” He put a bag of oats in a cabinet then turned back around. “Although there is this one guy,” he said slowly.

  “Who? As long as he’s free on March seventh, I’ll take him.”

 
; “No,” Gary shook his head, thinking. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not? Is he married? Is he a felon? We don’t need to let that come between us.”

  “He’s too similar to your exes. Robbie and—what was that guy’s name from college? The one who didn’t want you to meet his parents until after you’d gotten your teeth whitened?”

  “Nick. So? It sounds like your friend’s my type,” Kelly responded.

  “That’s the problem. Your type isn’t working.”

  It was true that Kelly’s relationship history read like a warning label for women everywhere. Both Robbie and Nick, the college class president with the gargantuan list of extracurriculars, had looked good to Kelly on paper, but made her feel bad about herself in real life. Spotted in between were a few short-lived flings, if “flings” can describe a series of dignified lunch appointments with coders who ended each date with a hug as tentative as if she were an electric fence.

  “You ended up miserable both times,” Gary went on. “I want you to have something better, not the same thing all over again. It’s not a good match.” He broke down the boxes and stacked them by the recycling bin. “Thanks for helping out today. I’m a new man without that wart.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Kelly said, with the slightly deflated feeling that she was being dismissed.

  On the ride home, she couldn’t help but wonder if she had just sealed her own doom again. She was sure that Gary was genuine about wanting the best for her, but she questioned too if hearing about her behavior on the date with Martin made him reluctant to burden any of his friends with her company. She already knew she was a mess. But was she that much of a mess that her own brother couldn’t recommend her? As she pulled into the parking garage beneath her building and shut off the engine, she wondered grimly if Caillou was single.

  three

  Back at work that week, Kelly sat in a room that was open, square, and full of lights: fluorescent ceiling beams, glowing computer monitors, and a bank of control panels with switches, knobs, and blinking indicators. Beside her was Dr. Masden, a psychologist whose black eyes angled up in a very attractive way that she would have seen if she weren’t nervously avoiding those eyes. Opposite them, an oversize monitor displayed a digital waist-up image of a being named Confibot. The image looked essentially like a man, sporting short, combed blond hair and a small-check plaid shirt. But where a human face should have been was a set of dotted lines over a blank white space: two oblong rounds for eyes, a triangle for a nose, a straight line where a mouth would go, really just the suggestion of features.

  “We need to pin down his range of facial options before we can settle on a final set of features,” Kelly was saying to the psychologist. “Then we can start building him. So, say, what face should he make when he greets a user who’s just woken up?”

  “A pleasant smile, I would think,” Dr. Masden answered.

  “Well, yeah, but I need you to tell me exactly. Like, here.” Kelly scooted closer to the doctor’s computer monitor on the control panel, blowing up the diagram of Confibot’s head in front of him so that it was minutely imaged under a set of gridlines. “Show me specifically how his mouth should be positioned.”

  “There’s no one way it should be positioned, Kelly. Human behaviors aren’t that precise.”

  Kelly shook her head, clicking into a folder on her own computer to display tile after tile of saved files compiled from her own research and the focus groups and surveys that AHI’s marketing team had done. “This is my research so far on microexpressions alone. Human behaviors are totally precise.” She knew that her own instinct to apply a mathematical, logical viewpoint to everything in life was one of the things that made her so good at this job. It was essential to the physical building of a robot, to giving it hard skills, like teaching Zed how to walk, and it was why she had always chosen to stay more in the mechanical and electrical engineering lane at work, focusing on building the “body” of the robot, so to speak. Confibot was the first project she had led—the first time she was also in charge of the “brain.” Her concrete, analytical way of thinking had always worked before. Just because she was grappling with something far more conceptual didn’t mean she was about to change her methods now.

  Confibot was also the highest-stakes project in her career thus far. Anita Riveras, AHI’s CEO, had tasked each of the engineers in her Consumer Products division with inventing a caregiver or assistant robot—one of the market’s hottest niches. In three months, their inventions would all be pitted against each other for investor funding. Kelly had decided to create the most believably humanoid robot of the bunch, capable of the most nuanced social interactions, based on the astounding body of research she had uncovered about the health and lifestyle benefits of companionship. If she could get Confibot just right, she knew she stood a real chance at winning this.

  “There are very specific, scientific ways that people react to different gestures, expressions, tones of voice,” Kelly continued now.

  “Well, how would you respond?” the doctor asked. “Think about what you would want in a robot who’s taking care of you and living with you. You shouldn’t discount your own instincts here.”

  “Instincts may be your business,” she insisted. “Data is mine. The science has to be there to back up every choice I make.”

  “Then I’m providing you my insights as data. I’m a trained psychologist,” Dr. Masden pressed. “I’m here to give professional guidance.”

  “But that’s not good enough! I mean, not that your insights aren’t good,” she said quickly, turning to the doctor, hating the way she could feel her cheeks instinctively flush as she did. Frankly, the fact that AHI had brought in the hottest psychologist in Santa Clara County to assist her on the project was just rude. She had enough on her plate between working on Confibot and worrying about having to admit to her mom how the date with Martin had gone. Not to mention now needing to find another date on her own. For Kelly, social interactions with any element of uncertainty were a source of stress more than excitement. She was a woman who wondered what she had done wrong when the cashier didn’t wish her a good day.

  She needed to get started on building Confibot’s physical model, but first she had to get past this task of designing his face and voice and mannerisms so she would know what to build. She needed to focus on facts, not Dr. Masden’s “insights.”

  “The way that Confibot interacts with users has to be perfect,” she asserted. “There are already other caregiver and companion robots out there on the market. If we’re not the best, we might as well not be out there at all! And the only way Confibot’s going to be the best is if he’s the most realistically human.”

  “Kelly, to replicate a human, you have to understand humans.”

  “I do! Why do you think I took six semesters of biology in college? I understand how the human body works, how animal bodies work. I know how to translate those structures into mechanical form.”

  “I’m not talking about the body.” The psychologist looked away for a second, pursing his lips as if searching for his next words. “Designing a personality is a nebulous thing, Kelly. You’re never going to get anywhere if you’re so tied down to the data. I’m only trying to say that you might want to approach this in a different way.” He put a palliating hand on Kelly’s arm. Instinctively, she jerked away and crossed her arms. Dr. Masden looked taken aback as he abruptly withdrew his hand. It seemed he hadn’t even realized he had put it there in the first place. “Sorry, I—”

  “I won’t be approaching it that way!” Kelly declared. As soon as she heard how weird that sounded, she tried to laugh, but the sound came out as more of a tubercular bleat. Dr. Masden’s eyes were increasingly confused and also very deep and black and olive-shaped—

  “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable just now, I wasn’t even thinking. I never want our work environment to be less than professional,” he said.

  Kelly stiffly crossed her legs below her crossed arms, w
alling herself behind a defensive pretzel of limbs. Great, she thought, let’s do the one thing that will make the situation more awkward and talk about it. It would be so much simpler if everyone could just do what she did and suppress their emotions, stuffing them in the back of the closet, right next to the childhood traumas and the performing-in-your-third-grade-play-naked-and-then-all-your-teeth-fall-out dreams.

  “I’m not comfortable. I mean uncomfortable.”

  “It’s just that you seemed a little uncomfortable when I put my hand on your arm, just now,” he continued. “I didn’t mean anything by it, I just express myself physically. I’m a very expressive person, but I realize it’s unfair to make assumptions about your communication style since we’ve only been working on this simulation together for a week.”

  “Well, I’ve been working on it for months before you got here!” Kelly exclaimed. The anxieties simmering in her had been lit to a boil. She felt the tug of that same old instinct to flee the scene, yet this was her project—she couldn’t. She was trapped. But maybe it was time she blew up the room instead of trying to tunnel out. After all, she reminded herself, she’d been quite content back when she began developing the Confibot simulation all on her own. Then this guy had to come and get his big—not big, average, definitely average—hands all over her. That is, all over the project. Insinuating that she didn’t understand people. So much of why she had gone into engineering in the first place was because it didn’t ask her to try to make sense of people, who, let’s face it, were often nonsensical anyway. This was her safe space, and he had breached it. But it didn’t matter; she didn’t need him. Sure, he was responsible for providing all the psychological bases for the interactions they were architecting, but that was soft science. Kelly, red cheeks and all, stared the doctor down.