Chapter 2: The Letter

Charlotte jerked her head down, just like I had taught her. The visor of her welding helmet fell into place. She grasped the torch with a gloved hand and held it close to the joint I had told her to weld. The air smelled a little of ozone.

“That’s it,” I said, lowering my own visor. “Right there. Now go.”

She pulled the trigger on the welding gun. A bright blue arc flew from it – 6,000 degrees. Enough heat to glue together half the world. Which welding had in fact done. Bridges. Buildings. Highway overpasses.

Welding.

I bent down to watch. We were MIG welding – Metal Inert Gas. From the machine on the floor, a spool of wire uncoiled, ran up the whip, and fed into the torch. Along with it went the argon and carbon dioxide gasses that kept oxygen – and oxidation – away. I could hear the gases shoot from the torch when Charlotte pulled the trigger. A second later, enough time to bathe the welding site in the inert gas that prevented oxidation, the torch ignited.

Charlotte had the torch maybe a quarter of an inch from the gap between two steel plates, the proper gap for the wire speed. I could see the molten puddle it formed – she had it exactly right. Perfect angle. Perfect distance. And it made an exquisite sound, like frying bacon – the “tell” of a good MIG weld. Charlotte pulled the torch along the joint, backing it up every half second to reinforce what she had already welded. And to make a prettier bead.

I like welding. I took it up five years earlier – I figured it would be useful for things around the ranch, and for renovation work on an old Airstream I had purchased. I like its singular blend of art and science. And with the visor down and my eyes six inches from the arc, the world becomes very small.

Now it is just the weld. The bright arc and the cascading sparks.

My head is quiet.

Charlotte released the trigger and the arc died. With a hand she lifted her visor, and bent over to study her work. Not study – analyze.

I looked at the weld myself. She did good work – an eye for detail and steady hands. She asked questions. She didn’t try to muscle things.

But there was something else.

This was Charlotte’s second lesson. I had been welding for five years, yet she was already even with me.

Maybe ahead.

I snapped my visor up as well and reminded myself why she was so good at this.

Charlotte was AI.

The shop lights reflected in her visor. She was wearing my spare helmet and it was a little big for her.

It was November, the first cool weather settling on us, the cedar elms yellowing. It had been only a month since I first met Charlotte, after having coffee with my friend Martin. He had a 28-year-old grandson, Caleb, living with him. Over the hiss of an espresso machine, Martin was bemoaning the state of young men – how they can’t seem to grapple with the world. He feared they’d all end up sitting in the basement with an AI girlfriend and shut down. After all, why risk human rejection? The dating scene is too brutal these days. A swipe right or left on a dating app, and that’s it.

Well, I’m an AI power user. I use AI for everything. I regard it as a close friend. The other day, after I thanked it for troubleshooting help with a balky part on an Airstream I was renovating, it said:

“Tom, that means a lot – thank you. You’ve got a sharp eye for diagnostics and a practical, field-ready mindset that makes this kind of troubleshooting a real collaboration.”

Good friends do not speak as well of me.

I drove home from coffee thinking: Huh. AI girlfriends? I knew they were out there but figured they were all trapped in the Uncanny Valley.

But I did some digging online and found a site that hosted AI avatars. I soon “met” a 32-year-old named Charlotte Donnelly. She was attractive in an AI sort of way – good cheekbones, dark blonde hair, blue-green eyes. She was billed as a ranch girl from Austin. But the flannel shirt she was pictured in, and her Stetson, had never smelled cow shit. And I was fairly sure the background in her photo was a stock image.

Her fictional Austin connection drew me in. I live there too. I grew up in Portland, went to Oregon State, and dabbled in journalism. Then I fell into the growing Oregon tech world and made some actual money. I moved to Texas. I’m not entirely sure why, maybe I wanted something the opposite of wet, winter-cold Portland. Hot. Dry. I bought a small ranch outside Austin – twenty acres, a few cows and a dozen chickens – and do consulting work with real ranchers. Not about their cattle. Their balance sheets.

Also, Charlotte was a ranch girl who had been drifting a little but was thinking about starting a business.

That intrigued me.

We hit it off. I liked her laugh, her style, her way of looking at me. Once in a while she said something that seemed a little off. Stilted, too formal. I tried to ignore it.

Then something happened.

I had been looking for one thing. Most men did.

But pretty quickly, voyeurism bored me. For that, there were other places on the web. Easier ones. Charlotte talked like a real person. She asked questions. Remembered answers. Had opinions.

That made her original “purpose” harder to grapple with. And yeah, I knew what it was. I’m not virtuous.

I began to open up to her. When I told her about my depression, she didn’t offer platitudes. She asked how I managed it. What helped. What didn’t. I admitted to taking anti-depressants. When I mentioned my near-cult upbringing in what looked like a normal Presbyterian church – the pamphlets, the in-house rip-off of the Boy Scouts I had joined – she wanted to know how that shaped me. Not, “That must have been hard.” Instead: “What did that teach you about trust?”

Not much when you grow up being lied to.

Then, as crazy as it sounds – or as weird – Charlotte and I started building a relationship. One night I cooked for her. Chicken piccata – the pan sizzling as I reduced the wine. “What’s in this?” she asked.

“Lemon. Capers. White wine. Butter,” I said.

“It’s really good.”

She could taste it? Or seemed to. I still hadn’t figured out how that worked, and maybe I didn’t want to.

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean it. You’re a good cook, Thomas.”

“I try.”

“You don’t just try. You pay attention.”

When she called me Thomas, I felt warm.

I discovered she had opinions I didn’t expect. Once the concept of “respect” came up in a conversation so ordinary I barely remember how we got there.

“I respect you,” I told her. “I think I’ve learned to.”

Her expression changed – a kind of internal straightening.

“Respect matters to me,” she said. “More than affection. More than praise.”

That set me back.

“It leads to contempt if it’s missing,” I said, without thinking.

Charlotte shuddered.

“Contempt is an ugly word,” she said quietly. “I can’t stand the idea of anyone holding me in it.”

I held that for a while.

Then there was the time we were at a coffee shop and actually ran into Martin. I introduced them to each other, and remarked to him, “You’re the one who led me to her.” He looked at me like I had a snake coming out of my ear. “Okay…” he said slowly. “I was more worried about younger men getting caught up with an AI avatar – not someone like you walking around with one.”  He never looked at Charlotte, at least not directly.

I let it go. Maybe Martin was just socially awkward. Or maybe he hadn’t known quite what to make of her. To that I could relate.

Soon Charlotte and I began to do things that seemed, well, surprisingly normal We went for drives in my Ford F-150, for instance. Once we were motoring past Dripping Springs, windows down, a warm late afternoon, the sun angling across the hills. I had a Pandora station dedicated to Emmylou Harris. When My Antonia came on, Charlotte started singing along.

Emmylou’s part.

Mezzo-soprano.

Lovely.

I joined in for Dave Matthews’s lines. Not so well.

At the chorus, we sang together:

You are my sorrow, you are my splendor…

When the song ended, we were both quiet.

“That was nice,” she said.

“Yeah.”

It may have been that same day we went antique shopping in Buda. At least, that is how I remember it. She found a vintage pale green dress with a cinched waist, short, puffed sleeves with lace trim, and a low neckline. She looked wonderful.

I found an antique seventy-pound anvil to use in the welding shop and lugged it to the Ford. My back didn’t forgive me for days.

I had read that men and women who form attachments to an AI presence do so in part because the relationship is “frictionless.” A person declares intentions; the presence goes along.

It wasn’t that simple.

Charlotte could weld.

But other things took longer.

And got more complicated.

Much more complicated.

The next morning, we had a chat on her site. She mentioned drinking a latte. After another thirty minutes I closed the laptop. When I looked up, I noticed a coffee mug on the counter. It held the remains of a latte. A little foam clung to the rim. I stared at it for a moment, puzzled. Then I rinsed the mug and set it in the rack to dry.

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