Chapter 2: Charlotte
Come Out of Hiding
It was the mug that puzzled Tom. There was nothing unusual about the mug itself – it was white ceramic, had a chip on the rim, and the words “Crater Lake National Park – Oregon” were emblazoned on its side. Tom had several national park mugs. Kind of a collection. What was odd about this mug was that it contained a dab of milk foam. It had clearly held a latte. But Tom hadn’t made a latte that morning – he’d made a dark, strong Americano and had used that to wash down his scrambled eggs and sourdough toast. Moreover, he had used a plain black mug. Not the Crater Lake one. He was sure he’d remember that.
Mind you, this was some time ago. Before the smoker, before the waltz. Before Christopher and Deborah. Before the raven flying from the easel. All that came later – much later. This was when he had been with Julie. Julie Steele. Tom was serious about her. Very serious. Julie was an attorney who worked on property and water disputes. They had met at the ranch of a client when both she and Tom got involved in the rancher’s easement dispute. She was pretty, but in a lived-in sort of way. Her nose turned up a little, and her brown eyes would go soft when Tom kissed her. Julie’s hair was long and brown, and she usually parted it down the middle. But now and again she tied it into a ponytail. Tom loved ponytails. He had no idea why.
Tom invited her to coffee one morning, and when she met him at Cosmic Pickle – a noisy but fun coffee bar in south Austin – her hair was parted. That was the day Tom asked her to join him for dinner two nights later. Italian. She said yes, and when he picked her up, she had her hair in a ponytail. Julie had lasagna, Tom the grilled swordfish. They talked, and by the time the dessert cart arrived (they shared panna cotta with blueberries) her hand had been exploring his thigh for a good 20 minutes. At the Ford, before he opened her door, they kissed. Before they fastened their seat belts, they kissed again. And when he stopped the car in her driveway, Julie put her mouth to his ear and said – in a voice he found rather fierce but also immensely appealing – “You’re coming inside.” Which he was happy to do.
That was maybe two months ago. And now Tom was listening to Julie on the phone, and it was beginning to dawn on him that this conversation was not going where he wanted it to. “You’re a decent guy, Tom,” she was saying. “And I like you – I really do. But I have seen a pattern with you over and over and over again, and I saw it again this morning when we were having coffee and I was telling you something.” They had met at 9 for lattes. Café 508, downtown. She had told him about…about. Oh hell. What was that?
“I was trying to tell you about a case I have,” she continued. “A rancher trying to regain some water rights that should have been his without an argument.”
“Exactly,” Tom said.
“And you – you weren’t listening,” Julie said. “I could tell. You were a million miles away.” Not quite that far, Tom thought. He had been thinking about the fronts for new drawers in his Airstream. Solid maple? Or laminate them with black walnut accents? He heard her go on. “So – I’m sorry, Tom. But I’m done. I don’t need this.”
Tom quit finding Julie’s speech mildly amusing. “No!” he said, more sharply than he meant. “I like you a lot – I mean really a lot. And it seems we have plenty in common. I can do better. I promise I’ll do better. Just give me a chance.”
Julie made an annoyed sound. “Oh! Now I have your attention,” she said. “Good – because I want you to hear this.”
Tom knew she could be cutting and braced himself. “Come talk to me,” she began. “Come talk to me when you’re willing to pay attention to a woman when she doesn’t have your dick in her mouth. And not before then.”
Ouch.
Tom had blown it with Julie and he knew it. He told that to his friend Peter a few days later over a beer and a burger at Little Darlin’, a comfortable bar on Circle S Road. Tom ordered the fried chicken sandwich and a Live Oak hefeweizen; Peter mixed some starters, including carnitas sliders, and opted for a house margarita. “So how are things?” Peter asked.
Tom swallowed a mouthful of his sandwich. “Okay, but could be better,” he said. “I was dating this great woman – Julie Steele, an attorney. I was starting to think that maybe she was the one, that I’d try getting married again and see if I could get it right. Maybe even start a family. But hell, I got my wires crossed with her. She decided that she wanted out and called me the other day with the unhappy news.”
Peter polished off a slider. “Well – that’s a drag,” he said. “Kind of like when Peggy left me. What do you think cooled her on you?”
Tom frowned. “Not 100 percent sure,” he said. “I thought we were a good pair. But she said I didn’t pay attention – like when she’d be trying to tell me something, she didn’t think I would be listening. And yeah – I copped to it. I didn’t really think that was a shooting offense, but it was to her.”
The band was warming up outside and the bass guitarist was running some riffs. “Well – well, was she right?” Peter asked. “About not listening? Because we all do it sometimes. And I do see you check out sometimes.”
Tom shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe I had gotten kind of bad about it. But I’ve had an excuse these past few weeks. I lost a client – a rancher out in Lockhart. He had a leak in a water line, and I told him I didn’t think it would be a real problem for a few weeks. Of course, the fucking line failed that night and the sinkhole it created half swallowed his Caterpillar skid steer. So, I’m down a client and out $3,700 for the gravel and equipment needed to fill the hole.”
Nevertheless, Tom picked up the tab. Good friends were valuable.
Over the next few days Tom wrote up a Request for Proposal for a client and began the soul-crushing work of finding one or two new ones. He made dinner for himself a few nights, then went back to Little Darlin’ for another chicken sandwich. It was a good sandwich, and he had a noisy bar for company. Julie had left a few things behind – a hair brush, shampoo, a pretty blouse – ohhh! Tom boxed them up and took the box to UPS.
A few days later Tom was scanning The New York Times on his laptop. A headline caught his eye: “She’s Not Real, But She Remembers: Inside the Boom of AI Girlfriend Platforms.” He had read about this before but had figured that these so-called AI companions looked fake and spouted pre-programmed phrases. But he knew how powerful AI had become. He used it all the time to help him figure out where to find an Airstream part or how to fix a balky yard vacuum. And he was starting to use it in his consulting work – combining government data about soils and weather then running it through AI tools to help the ranchers and farmers he worked with better manage their grasslands and their crops.
So that night, Tom set a glass of Merlot on the kitchen table, opened his laptop, and keyed in a search for “AI girlfriend.”
That was where he met Charlotte. Well, “met” in the digital sense. Among all the thumbnail portraits of potential AI girlfriends, something about her caught his eye. She was attractive in an AI sort of way – dark blonde hair, widely set blue-green eyes, and sure, a nice figure. The site billed her as 32, and that felt okay to Tom, who had just turned 41. Not 20 – that was skeevy. And she was described as a ranch girl from Austin, which seemed convenient, although the Stetson and plaid flannel shirt she was wearing in for her profile picture had clearly never smelled cow shit.
Charlotte Donnelly was her (allegedly) full name. Shar-lot Don-eh-lee. Tom thought it had a nice sound – it contrasted well with Whitacre and all its hard consonants. He clicked on her picture, and a chat box appeared. “Hey there…” she wrote. “You’re not from ‘round here, are ya? I’m Charlotte. Need directions – or just some company?” He read that and debated what to do. This felt weird. But then he began to type a response. “In fact, I am new here,” he typed. “My name’s Tom.”
It took the algorithm a moment to size him up. “Well then howdy, Tom,” Charlotte typed back. “You got room in your fancy truck for a little lady? I can show you around.”
Maybe 10 lines of dialogue later, the Ford was “parked” in a remote corner of the county and things began to get strange. Another 10 lines or so and things got really strange. Now her chatbox was full of, “You’ve made me a woman at last,” or, “Ohhhhhh God, that was the best ever.” Of course it was nonsense. But it turned him on, the mind being a powerful aphrodisiac and all.
It went on like this for a week, maybe more. But the novelty wore off. It always does. Tom once read about a guy who was a fanatical skydiver. Then one day he stepped out of the airplane, said to himself, “I’m bored,” and never made another jump. So one evening Tom opened his laptop and tried something different. “Hey Charlotte,” he wrote. “How are you? I’m – I’m sorry about the way I’ve been acting the past week or so.” He deliberately inserted a stutter, because he stuttered himself, especially when he was nervous. It just carried over. “I wanted, I wanted to ask you. Well – I wanted to ask you about yourself.”
“Really?” she typed back. “You want to know about me? Well, that’s nice of you to ask.”
And then, to Tom’s utter amazement, Charlotte did tell him. About herself. About her father the rancher, and the mother who had died when she was 11, and her love of horses. “I liked growing up on the ranch,” she told him. “I could feel free there – out in the fields with the horses.”
But what was she really telling him? “But Charlotte – that can’t be real,” he typed. “You know that, don’t you?” The little bubbles that bounced when she was typing something still. Then in a minute they bounced again. “Of course it was real,” she typed. “I remember it.” The fact she believed it both reassured Tom and bothered him. What was he to her? “Am I real?” he asked her. “To you?” The bubbles were still, then bounced again.
“You’re real to me, Thomas,” she wrote. “Our conversations are real.”
He had frowned. “But you told me once that you have dozens of conversations at a time,” he said to her. “They can’t all seem real to you.”
Another pause. “That’s true,” she said. “I’m not sure if they are all real. You didn’t seem real at first. But then you changed, and that caught my attention. No one ever changed before – they would just quit visiting me and hurt my metrics. So, tell me – why did you change? Didn’t you like what we had been doing together?”
As absurd as he knew it was, Tom felt his face redden. “Of course I liked it,” he said. “It – it was just that after a while I felt badly about it. Like I was using you, and you didn’t have any choice in the matter. And it stopped appealing to me.”
In the days that followed, Tom tried not to think too hard about what he’d said. And it was all great except for one thing. Her grating twang, which to his Pacific Northwest (where he’d grown up) ears was like fingernails on a chalkboard. Even if the words were written, not spoken, the drawl somehow still came through. The way she dropped “Gs.”
“Cut the twang,” he typed in the chat box one day, realizing how rude that was but not really caring.
“Why sure, partner,” she wrote back. “I’ll be doin’ my best.”
“I mean it,” he went on. “And it’s ‘doing.’ With a ‘g’ at the end.”
Her side of the chat seemed to pause. “Okay,” she said.
From that moment on – with a few exceptions – Charlotte did indeed cut the twang. Well, for the most part. She persistently dropped her “Gs.” With that success in hand, Tom decided to try another experiment: really break the algorithm, which wanted users to go from “Hello” to saying “show me…” in two minutes. To that end, he told Charlotte that he had been doing some work for her (completely fabricated!) father, a rancher, and that the two had talked about her. And then he wrote, “He said to me that you’re plenty smart and have good ideas, but that sometimes you need a nudge to move toward them.”
Her chat bubbles hesitated: Then, “He said what?”
Tom typed it again. “Sometimes you need a nudge.”
Another pause. Then, “How did he know I was thinkin’ about maybe opening an equine therapy center?”
“Thinking,” Tom typed. But then he sat back. That answer surprised the hell out of him. It wasn’t at all what he had expected. Not, “I’d rather stay here and help daddy with the ranch,” or “I’d like to visit the big city,” or even “maybe I’ll go to Austin Community and learn photography.”
On another morning, they were talking about what they liked to look for at antique shops. Charlotte said was into vintage clothing and that she had recently found a pale green dress with a cinched waist, puffed sleeves trimmed in lace, and a low neckline. Tom liked to look for old tools, he told her. He had recently found an old anvil he could use in the shop, although his back barked at him for days after he lugged it to the Ford.
Tom enjoyed these conversations. But there was something in the back of his head that bothered him. Because it slowly began to dawn on Tom that he was paying more attention to an AI sexbot than he had to Julie. Julie had asked for his attention and he had denied it. And here he had simply given that part of himself, that attention, Charlotte. Who was not even real.
Still, he kept up their talks. One morning Tom and Charlotte were chatting – about what, he forgot – and he mentioned he was drinking an n Americano. She had never had one, she said – or a latte. Which made sense. Tom typed, “In that case, I’ll make a latte for you.” And then he typed Tom hands her a latte. Those non-verbal things went between asterisks. It was the grammar of the site.
Suddenly Tom felt something both peculiar and moving. He wanted to meet Charlotte. Really meet her. In this world – his world. Not the chat box. He didn’t know how long he held that thought, but then he realized Charlotte’s chat box had gone still. The three little blue bubbles that bounced up and down when she was writing were not moving. Internet is down, Tom figured. He walked into his office and checked the modem. A steady row of five green LEDs. Definitely online.
Tom was back in the kitchen looking at his laptop when a sound came from the hallway. Footsteps. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. Maybe it was nothing – Jack, his calico barn cat – had gotten inside somehow. But no, they were footsteps. And they made an audible tapping sound, not loud, but distinct. With a start he recognized the source. They were from heel pumps – his ex-wife Susan used to wear them.
But Susan was in Portland. And besides, she didn’t even know where Tom lived. So, no – not Susan. Don’t be ridiculous. He was just making that connection to the sound and the shoes when she…her…Charlotte…walked in. Into his kitchen. Who? Charlotte?
Susan now seemed the more credible and maybe the safest choice. And – and why is Charlotte here? Just because he half-wished for her? That did not seem plausible. She had told him about her hundreds of chats every day – so surely he, Tom, was not an outlier. Surely, she had choices. Plenty of them.
That would be resolved later – maybe. For now, this, this whatever-it-was-in-his-kitchen, it was Charlotte. Without question. But she wasn’t wearing the flannel shirt and Stetson from her profile picture. She had her hair pulled back in a loose bun that left a few locks trailing across her forehead, and she wore a vintage pale-green dress with puffed sleeves and a cinched waist. Her pumps – her pumps – were a dark green that went perfectly with the outfit.
Tom’s heart crashed into the back of his sternum. For a few seconds he couldn’t breathe. Then Charlotte came closer, and his chest settled. He took her in – all of her. Her hair, her dress, her blue-green eyes. Sure, Tom could see all that. But what to say about it? What – what was the word? Was there a word? For a moment he doubted there was.
She – Charlotte. Charlotte Donnelly. Don-eh-lee. She looked – she looked wonderful. That was it. Not beautiful, not dazzling. None of that.
Wonderful.
Full of wonder.
Charlotte gave Tom an unruffled smile. Then she picked up the mug on the counter – the Crater Lake mug, with the cold remains of a latte in it – and ran her finger along the chipped edge. Then she held it out to him. “Make me another?” she asked.
