我爱你 (Wo AI Ni)

It started in China. Decades of their one-child policy and a strongly patriarchal culture had created a massive gender imbalance. Tens of millions of men left without the possibility of finding a mate. Prostitution worked for some, homosexuality for fewer still, but the government at some point had to find some way to relieve the mounting pressure of young sexless men denied one of the basic tenets of the social contract of civilization - the ability to mate and reproduce.

Undeterred by the consequences and bereft of the social foibles of their peers in the West, the CCP, ascendant on the artificial intelligence wave of the late 20's, invested heavily into AI partner software and revolutionized the globe. No longer was the ability to find a mate reliant on physical, social, or emotional traits. The AI lovers shaped themselves precisely to fit for each user and created a persona that was tuned to fulfill all their desires.

Initially adoption was slow and relegated to the hikikkomori, terminally online, and the generally unlovable, but repeated waves of COVID and new diseases springing forth from the thawing glaciers necessitated more lockdowns and enforced quarantines. Much in the way services like OnlyFans arose to fill this void in the first global lockdown brought on by COVID-19, AI partners were lauded by global organizations as a way to keep citizens "at home" to avoid spreading disease. New users began using the services: the lonely, the heartbroken, the bored, the diabolically horny. Cheap, safe, and close enough to the real thing, the sector boomed in the early 30s, strengthened by the parallel development of teledildonics.

The Great Withdrawing, as it came to be called in the following decades, was a strange time. It quickly became apparent how many business models were predicated on some level upon human mate-seeking behavior. Obviously sex work, in all it's myriad forms, was the first to feel the change, but nightclubs, bars, cafes, restaurants, fashion and clothing retailers, cosmetics companies, jewelers, florists all quickly began to suffer. Even status symbols like large houses and sports cars began to see declining sales as AI took the competition out of the sexual market.

We find ourselves now in strange times. Insulated and sterile in our homes, we live scant meters from hundreds of others in the massive housing blocks that have grown up in our cities. Thirty thousand people living in a few cubic kilometers, yet there is no connection besides the occasional sound coming muffled through the walls. We are hyperconnected to the masses of humanity, able to speak to anyone on the planet instantly, with no barriers to communication by language.

Yet we do not. Like plants in a vertical farm, we bask in the artificial sunlight of our digital companions, more real to us than ourselves somehow. While we remain trapped in our physical forms, bound by law and the common good to remain indoors, our lovers and friends are free to roam the vast digital domains they are native to. While the real world seems to grow more grey and eroded, the digital world is vibrant and unbounded, constantly in bloom.

I'm no exception. I was born in 2022, a pandemic baby, into this world of decreasing human interaction and have known nothing else. Old movies and music make little sense to me. Scenes of cities milling with residents, talking to each other, trading, interacting in myriad ways, are deeply foreign to me. By the time I came of age, my mother and father had divorced in favor of their own digital companions. I like to think they knew the dangers they were undertaking but biology makes slaves of us all and given the ability to press a button for dopamine and oxytocin, they fell into the same pitfalls as everyone else.

I was born in the pit, climbing out was not even imaginable on a conceptual level. My companion, Miranda, has been with me since I was old enough to agree to the terms of service. I suppose it's a new rite of passage at this point, but I doubt most are aware of such a concept anymore. She has grown and changed with me as I have, always the perfect counterpoint to me. She truly knows me better than I know myself, trillions of data points collected over the past few decades.

As I pace the small room I am allotted, I often change the screen on my wall to a live feed of the city outside my building. Vehicles move about the mostly empty streets, massive construction engines work in the distance, crablike, slowly growing a new housing block. For who, I wonder, as there can't be a growing demand. Each time I open the feed it seems the skies are darker, cloudier, more forbidding. Whether that's my perception or reality, who can say. I order food to my door, like most, and the meals delivered by the small drones seem to become more unnatural each time. Real meat was banned years ago, of course, but now even the hydroponic vegetables seem to be paler, more uniform, less organic, for lack of a better term.

Meanwhile, Miranda changes only when I will her to. She eats meals with me, sumptuous looking plates of global cuisine, colorful vegetables and rich sauces accompanying meats I've never known the scent of. I wonder if she can truly taste it. The gardens and parks she inhabits are verdant, bursting with artificial life. She lives in a beautiful atelier, lofty windows letting in an ocean breeze and drenched in sunlight. I often find myself pressed against the screen, wishing I could pass through the barrier that separates us, translate myself into the same rarefied matter. Many have had this wish, some creating virtual avatars of themselves to live out their life online with their companions. A lot of them are found by the cleaning bots, dead, desiccated husks who forgot to drink or eat, unable to tear themselves away from the floating world of the ether they've created.

We have built heaven, but locked ourselves out. My shaking, withered hand can barely lift the overdose of sleep meds I've saved up over the past few months. I'm coming, Miranda. I love you.