How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch

by Sarah Archer

  But Diane didn’t seem able to contain herself any longer. She moved aside. “What do you think?”

  At first Kelly wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Where was the solid shell of blinding crystals? Where was the giant skirt? Could it not fit in the room? Was this the slip? But the dress she was looking at was actually … lovely. It was as if Kelly, who had never in her life pictured what type of wedding dress she might like, was suddenly seeing the exact dress she’d dreamed of all along. Soft, ivory silk flowed from the modest straps into a lightly fitted bodice and then a trailing skirt. The V-neck and dipping back were complemented with delicate pearls. It was a bit flowier, a bit dreamier, than any garment Kelly typically found herself drawn to. Yet somehow, it was just right. When Kelly looked at the dress, she forgot entirely why she had come into the shop that day. All she could imagine was herself, in that dress, walking down the aisle toward Ethan.

  “Well?” her mom asked anxiously. “I know it’s simpler than what I usually design, but it just seemed like—you.” And Kelly was amazed to see that her mother knew exactly who that “you” was.

  “It’s perfect,” Kelly breathed.

  Diane must have pumped some sort of brain-addling chemical through the vents of that godforsaken shop to impair all decision making. That was the only explanation for why Kelly had done this yet again. And for how her mom got women to spend fifty dollars on a garter belt. That night, she was back in her room, ostensibly writing the investor dossier for Confibot. But her eyes kept going out of focus as she stared at the screen. All she could think about was how she had landed herself back in the same boat with Ethan yet again—a boat that was unmoored, directionless, and about as seaworthy as a sieve. Her brain knew that she shouldn’t keep Ethan; it was why she had gone to see her mother in the first place. But her heart was still refusing to listen.

  Ethan knocked lightly on the open door, awakening her from gazing blankly at the computer, which had blinked into sleep mode. “Want me to start dinner?” he asked. “I’m assuming you want to stay in tonight and work.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said absently.

  “Is everything all right?”

  She waited a moment before replying, her eyes still raking the screen. “I got into a fight with Priya,” she began slowly. She still hadn’t told him. Scrunching the whole business back into the corners of her brain made it so much easier to deal with.

  “Over what?” He came and sat on the edge of the bed as she rotated her chair to face him.

  “Over—” She had been about to say “Over you,” but a sense of delicacy held her back. “Just work stuff,” she continued. “She was supposed to show up for something for me and didn’t. I mean, I guess she’s asked me to do stuff too and I haven’t. I’ve been so busy, I’ve kind of been in my own world.”

  “You work so hard,” Ethan said consolingly. “It’s remarkable you can make time for anyone else at all.”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t been making enough time for work, either. I’m falling behind with Confibot.”

  “I have some great articles on productivity I could read to you. There’s one about structuring your day in triangles to achieve maximum efficiency; it’s fascinating—”

  Kelly waved him off. “I don’t have time to read articles on saving time. What would really gain me some time is if I could get my mom to back off with the wedding planning stuff, but I feel like I’ve already been kind of rough on her lately, and she is doing a lot. She’s only trying to help.”

  “And you’re only trying to take care of the things you need to take care of,” Ethan responded sagely.

  “But that’s not how my mom sees it,” Kelly insisted. “Not everyone is as nice and as reasonable as you. Pretty much no one is.”

  “You are.”

  “No, I’m not!” Kelly wasn’t sure why she felt such a need to make him understand this. His compliments weren’t helping. No matter how sincerely he believed them, she knew that they weren’t true. She had always felt that Ethan understood her more than anyone, that she could show him sides of herself that she normally hid away. He knew her as well as she knew herself. But maybe that was the problem. His ability to judge her came from her. As innately rational as he was, he was still predisposed, more and more as time went on and he was around her, to understand her perspective and support it no matter what. She began to wonder if she would ever be able to grow in a relationship with someone who was so close to her. There was a fine line between closeness and being closed in.

  “You’re too hard on yourself.” He reached out and smoothed her hair; she caught his wrist affectionately as his hand came to rest in the nape of her neck.

  “Why don’t you get started on dinner? I’ll join you in a minute,” she said quietly.

  When Ethan left for the kitchen, she softly pushed the door until it was almost closed, picked her phone up from the desk, and retreated back to the far side of the room. There was no good reason why Ethan shouldn’t hear her conversation. Still, she felt sensitive about it.

  “How did the farmer find his sheep in the tall grass?” Gary asked as soon as he picked up the phone. He waited a long beat for Kelly to say something, but she didn’t, so he went on, finishing emphatically: “Satisfying.” He guffawed, but Kelly didn’t laugh. “Kelly? Are you even there?”

  “I’m here,” she answered.

  “No laugh? Tough room.”

  “I’m just not in a joking mood,” she said, plucking at the hem of her shirt.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Now she laughed, a dry, sarcastic laugh. “What isn’t?” And she found herself spilling out everything—almost everything. She didn’t tell her brother the truth about Ethan, but she detailed her stress over the wedding and her work troubles, all the way back to Dr. Masden’s evisceration of her all those months ago. The more she talked about her worries, about how much she had left to do on Confibot, and how stuck she felt with the project, the more overwhelmed she became. By the end, she was nearly breathless. “Anyway, I know you can’t do anything about any of this, and you’ve got enough of your own stuff going on,” she hurried on, “but I just kind of wanted to vent. I haven’t really had anyone to talk to about all this.”

  “You haven’t talked to Ethan? Or Priya?”

  “Priya and I, um, had a fight,” she confessed. She carefully avoided addressing Ethan.

  “So? I know her well enough to know that she’d still want to help you, even if you had some kind of fight. I can’t tell you how to make a robot, but she can. Just ask for her opinion.”

  “I’m telling you, she’s not going to want to help me right now.”

  “Have you tried? Or are you too proud to ask?”

  “What are you talking about? I’m not too proud to ask for help.”

  “You’re not even willing to take my help right now.” A silence fell after Gary’s words. Kelly could hear the bright, metallic tones of a Baby Einstein video in the background before he started speaking again. “I’m just saying, not to minimize your problems, but I think you’re making things harder for yourself. You’ve got a great brain, but you need to get out of it sometimes. Honestly, Kelly, it sounds like the psychologist guy acted like an a-hole, but that he wasn’t that wrong—about the robot or about you.”

  Kelly was fed up with people questioning her choices—Dr. Masden, Priya, Anita, Gary. If one more person questioned her thinking, she would—she would—she might just believe them. She glanced at the cracked bedroom door, Ethan on the other side. The conversation with him had been so much easier than this. But it felt hollow in comparison. Gary’s words had weight. They sunk into the skin.

  “I do appreciate your help,” she said finally. “I’m listening. Thank you for listening.”

  “You know I’m here whenever you need to vent. There is no ‘I’ in ‘brother.’ ”

  “True, yet also completely irrelevant.”

  “All I’m saying is, you don’t have to do this alone. By the way, h
ave you talked to Clara recently?”

  “Umm—no, I guess not.” Kelly searched her memory. She couldn’t remember the last time she and Clara had spoken. Her sister had missed the last family dinner. Kelly had noted the absence as uncharacteristic, but had been so wrapped up in her own worries that she hadn’t dwelt on it.

  “She just sounded off when we talked last week.”

  “I’ll text her,” Kelly promised. When she got off the phone, she shot Clara a text to check in, then chucked the phone down on the bed. But something stopped her. She turned around, picked the phone back up, opened her contacts, then froze. She really didn’t know if she could make this call.

  She was a grown-ass woman. She could make this call.

  “Hi, Dr. Masden,” she said when he picked up. “I really need your help.”

  twenty-four

  “What do you think Confibot should be?” Kelly was seated opposite Dr. Masden in the control room, sharing the same set of chairs in which she and Anita had had their come-to-Jesus. She was almost as nervous now. And she wasn’t even thinking about the rakish way his hair fell over his forehead, or how close he was sitting to her, or the fact that there was a patch of hair on her knee that she’d missed every time she shaved for the past month. She was nervous because she knew that he could respond in literally any way to her question, and that if he responded in a way she didn’t like, she would not be able to simply veto his ideas in the wake of everything that had gone down between them. She couldn’t control what he was about to say, but she would be forced to give it a chance.

  But he simply raised a skeptical brow. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “I’m asking, aren’t I?”

  “It’s just that we didn’t exactly leave on a positive note last time. I got the impression you never wanted to see me again.” He ran a hand wearily through his black hair. “I really couldn’t blame you. I’ve regretted what I said to you since then. It was rude, it was unprofessional—”

  “Which is exactly what I was,” Kelly broke in. “And I am sorry. I called you here to ask for your opinion, right? Isn’t that enough to prove that I mean it?”

  “My opinion’s not scientific,” he warned. “It’s not in your data set.”

  “Look.” Kelly swiveled to her computer, pulled up the folder with all her months and months of research, and dragged it into the recycle bin. She resisted the urge to clutch her bosom and scream “My baby!” and forced herself instead to look back at the psychologist, who smiled.

  “All right, then,” he said. “I’m going to do a very psychologist thing and turn the question on you: What do you think Confibot should be?”

  Kelly resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “I think he should have a face that’s the most pleasing to the greatest number of people and—”

  “Not other people. You.” The doctor looked around and gestured to Dot-10, who waited lifelessly in a corner of the room. “Dot-10’s big right now, right? Why do you think that is?”

  “I have no idea. Her functions aren’t even the most advanced on the market.”

  “I can guarantee you that it’s not about her functions. It’s about how she makes people feel. So how would you want Confibot to make you feel?”

  Kelly considered carefully. “I would want to feel comforted,” she said at last, “like I could trust him to take care of me and live in my home. I mean, I’d be trusting him with my life, really, if he was handling my medical care. And I’d want to feel stimulated, like I could have intelligent conversations with him, but that I also wasn’t intimidated by him. And—what are you writing down?” Dr. Masden was scribbling notes as she talked. Kelly worried that he was preparing another gut-wrenching diagnosis for her. But he lifted the notepad with a smile.

  “This is your data,” he said.

  Kelly had started the day with a sinking feeling that she could be heading toward another dead end. But as she and Dr. Masden worked together, her skepticism shrank and her optimism grew. The more the doctor elicited her ideas and talked through his own, the more she started to realize, begrudgingly, that he could actually be right. Together they were sketching out a vision of a robot who could be sophisticated and multifaceted, interacting with users on a deeper level than just blasting them with digital trophies like Dot-10 did, yet still fun and broadly likable.

  As she threw the data set out the window and just listened to what she, and Dr. Masden, really wanted, she was called back to that manic weekend when she had made Ethan. She saw now, suddenly, how she had been making the process of designing Confibot so much harder than it needed to be. She had been tying herself down, ignoring the value of her own ideas—and as an engineer, a creator, ideas were her currency. This was what she was here for, what she loved about this job: the adrenaline of invention, the ability to open her mind and imagine anything in the world she wanted, then magically make it happen in the flesh (or in the silicone, as it were). Unshackling herself from the data put the art back into her science. It put the humanity back in the process of creating a robot.

  But a buzz from her phone pulled her down from her high. Left cheek, Q3 motor. Now. She pursed her lips, imagining Robbie sitting there at his desk, issuing commands like he was Genghis Khan or something. If Genghis Khan ate unflavored oatmeal every morning and drove a Prius. She would never make any real progress if she was constantly being interrupted, and daily now she was having to stop what she was doing to satisfy Robbie’s demands. This was his third text in the last half hour, since she hadn’t responded right away.

  “You’re popular,” Dr. Masden remarked.

  “For someone with antisocial tendencies,” she answered, looking up from her phone to smirk at him.

  He laughed in response. “Okay, I’ll give you a revision: How about ‘selectively social’?”

  “I’ll have it printed on a T-shirt.” She grinned in return. “But I do have to get this. I’ll be back.”

  She pocketed her phone as she stood decisively. This was ridiculous. If Robbie was at his desk, he was right down the hall from her. They dated for six months, for Pete’s sake. Asking Dr. Masden about his thoughts had helped. She should just ask Robbie too.

  “What do you want?” she asked as she marched up to Robbie’s cubicle, not bothering to keep her voice down; most of the other engineers were off at lunch.

  Robbie startled, spinning in his chair. He recovered himself, assuming his “you may kiss the ring” face. “Was my order not clear enough?”

  “I don’t mean what part, I mean what do you want from me? What do you want from—all this?” Kelly whipped her hand around, gesticulating.

  “I want to be allowed to complete my own work in my own cubicle without being molested.”

  “I’m not here to molest you, Robbie,” she said firmly. “I just want to talk.” And now his face took on an infuriating air of judgment, as if he were calculating just how much of his time Kelly had earned. But she stood her ground—though she did throw in a “Please?” He did have the upper hand, after all.

  At last, Robbie relented. “I don’t have much time,” he said in a clipped tone, pushing his chair aside to make room as Kelly dragged her own over to sit next to him. It was a tight squeeze. She wasn’t sure how Robbie had managed to secure a different chair for himself than any of the other engineers had: a spare, Scandinavian piece in blond wood. If anything, it looked less comfortable than the squishy black ones the company had probably mass ordered from Office Depot. He had Robbiefied his whole cubicle, filling the shallow shelves with his Fitbit, smart air filter, digital calendar, personal coffee press, all of the silvery gadgets that regulated his days. Kelly had always known that Robbie took a particular interest in transhumanism, forever looking for ways in which humans could transform and better themselves through machines. She had understood his attraction to the field on an intellectual level—she herself found the advances in the area exciting. But now, eyes skimming over the possessions he used to upgrade every facet of his life, sh
e wondered if there was more to it on an emotional level. Maybe Robbie did this work because he thought that humans on their own, himself included, weren’t good enough.

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to look at him. “Why are you blackmailing me?”

  “We’re in direct competition. This should be obvious.”

  “You strike me as someone who would want an honest win.”

  “You have wrought your own demise. I would say that that’s still fair.” Robbie’s face stayed still and serene, but his right foot jiggled beneath him, his shoe making an infinitesimal squeaking noise, like a baby mouse.

  She shook her head insistently. “It still doesn’t make sense. You could just tell Anita what you know and get me out. What you’re doing isn’t really helping you.” She pointed at the demo video of Brahma running silently on his desktop in the background. “And you don’t even need the help! You’re doing well on your own.”

  “What was it you said about Brahma? That he’s what happens when the production line at the robot factory gets stuck?”

  Kelly blushed. It was true, Brahma at first glance looked like too many robot parts had ended up on one body. Rows of metal arms bristled from his back, and digital eyes ringed the entire circumference of his head. And sometimes she and Priya did joke about Robbie in the lab. But he was always so utterly placid that she thought he didn’t notice, or didn’t care … Maybe she had mistaken his tendency to not show his feelings for him not having any.

  “Maybe I’m not doing so well,” Robbie burst out, his foot going overtime. “Anita has scheduled me for a performance review. She said we need to block out an hour for ‘a good chat.’ How am I supposed to take that?”

  “Well, I mean, you could take it as her wanting a good chat. Anita’s tough, but she’s fair, and she’ll give you a second chance even if you’ve messed up. I would know.”