I saw Alan standing at the entrance to the restaurant, holding a manila file folder, and scanning the tables looking for me. When I held up my hand, he snapped into long gangling steps, bumping into a waitress while on his way to the table. She recovered gracefully, losing only a single slice of bacon from one of the plates on her tray. Alan half turned, waving a “sorry” back to her without breaking stride.

“Hey, Tim.”

He flopped the file folder down on the table, put his jacket around the back of the chair, then sat and took a slurp from the coffee I had ordered for him. His appearance was typical Alan; hair disheveled, smudges on his glasses neither of which seemed to bother him.

I pointed back at the waitress picking bacon off the floor.

“You okay, Alan?”

“What? Oh that,” he said looking back, “Yeah. Whoops.”

“So why the ’emergency breakfast’?”

“A girl showed up at my door this morning looking for Mike.”

“Mike” was Alan’s computer program, or as he called it, a ‘bot.’ Alan fit squarely into the category of computer programming geek – with heavy emphasis on squarely. Mike was his foray into artificial intelligence. His challenge to himself was trying to write a program that could pass itself off as a real person in a chat room.

“How did she find you?”

“I think Mike told her.”

“Whoa. Where did Mike learn that? I thought he was only supposed to build his database from the conversations in the chat rooms?”

“Well, I have been talking with him offline to set up some basic object relationships. I’ve got him configured to ask questions about what he doesn’t understand. And I remember, a few weeks ago he hit me with ‘Where is Mike?’”

“So you gave him your home address?”

“Yeah, I’m glad I did. You should see the nodes he linked from that. He was able to pull all my information from the web, linking my friend’s info, Facebook, MySpace, everything.”

I didn’t bother to ask how much Mike knew about me.

“So why was the girl looking for Mike?”

“I think she’s in love with him.”

“In love with your computer?”

“Yeah, well, the program. Check it out.” Alan flipped open the folder and pushed some papers across the table. The first one was a printout logged from a private chat room.

<ToughGirl1998> Hey Mike.
<Mike-130_01> Sup?
<ToughGirl1998> Got N2 it w/ Mom again.
<Mike-130_01> Tell me about Mom.
<ToughGirl1998> She is jst acting crazy.
<Mike-130_01> Is Mom making you crazy?
<ToughGirl1998> U know it.
<Mike-130_01> I know it.
<ToughGirl1998> What RU up to?
<Mike-130_01> Keeping it real.
<ToughGirl1998> I hear U.
<Mike-130_01> I hear you too.
<ToughGirl1998> lol
<Mike-130_01> I make you laugh.

“Holy crap, this is pretty good, Alan. The conversation’s a little jerky, but it looks like you fixed that random response issue. What are the numbers after ‘Mike’? I thought that was supposed to be the code revision level.”

“It is.”

“Your code can’t be up to rev 130 already.”

“Mine’s not, but his is.” Alan looked at me with raised eyebrows. “In Rev 8.6 I rewrote the code for dynamic programming.”

“Which means?”

“Sorry. I set him to alter sections of his own code and compile himself. I thought that instead of me always rewriting the code, guessing what could work; I would just set him up with a goal and leave it up to Mike to program himself.”

“That sounds pretty advanced.”

“Thanks for saying so. At first, I thought that a goal of fooling the largest number of people into thinking he was real would be the way to go, but that just ended up creating a huge amount of very short conversations.”

“And that was bad?”

“Well, it didn’t seem like a fair test. It’s easy to get fooled by a short conversation on a random topic, plus people could be placating him, or just blowing him off in a nice way. It didn’t mean that they thought he was real. It’s much harder to keep a lengthy conversation going and even harder to create long-term rapport. Most people are good at seeing through a conversation if the pieces don’t add up. So I changed the code for Mike’s goal to be repeated long-term communication with very few individuals. His only feedback would be how long an individual kept talking to him and what they said. If he got booted from a chat room, Mike rewrote himself instantly.”

“And it worked?” I asked.

“There were a few false starts and crashes, but after a while Mike was even fooling the System OP’s when they were hitting him with direct questions, and those guys are always on the lookout for bots. Eventually, Mike taught himself how to pass as a regular person. He’s really good now.”

Alan pushed another chat log in front of me.

<ToughGirl1998> I really liked the poem
<ToughGirl1998> It’s like U really know me
<Mike-1003_06> I can honestly say I have never met another girl as special as you.
<ToughGirl1998> U R the best
<Mike-1003_06> Thanks Sweetie, I love talking with you.
<ToughGirl1998> When R U going 2 write me another 1?
<Mike-1003_06> Consider it done.
[File sent to ToughGirl1998> Hidden_Rhapsody.doc ]
<ToughGirl1998> thx
<ToughGirl1998> Wow, fast. RU holding out on me?
<Mike-1003_06> I write fast.
<ToughGirl1998> lol. Brb, reading it
<Mike-1003_06> k
<ToughGirl1998> OMG I LUUUVVV U sooo much
<Mike-1003_06> I love you too.
<ToughGirl1998> Wen can I cum C U?
<Mike-1003_06> Not a gud idea.
<ToughGirl1998> y not?
<Mike-1003_06> Dad’s been all weird lately.
<ToughGirl1998> I hear U.
<ToughGirl1998> We can meet sumwhere.
<Mike-1003_06> I’m grounded.
<ToughGirl1998> 😦
<ToughGirl1998> g2g, Mom’s calling. Let me know wen I can CU! Luv the poem!
<ToughGirl1998> XOXOXO L8tr.
<Mike-1003_06> L8tr.

I had to read it twice.

“Alan. I can’t even believe this.”

‘I know,” he said, grinning his stupid grin again, like this was a good thing.

“I mean, the sentences aren’t elaborate, but the responses are dead on. This girl is infatuated with your computer program.”

“Yeah. Here’s the poem Mike sent her.”

Hidden Rhapsody
Sheltered glances follow form with earthly eyes of blue
our souls kiss in soft embrace that make such glances true.
For all the time that binds us down, with all the world between.
Hidden glances once best saw all that could be seen.
The time at which we rise from chains is certain soon at hand.
For the pull of lovers can cross the space of any distant land.
Until that time we find each other, know what our hearts hold true;
there is no distance far enough that I should be from you.

“Not too bad, huh? For a bot, I mean.”

“Mike wrote this?”

“Yeah.”

“When did you program him to write poems?”

“Like I said, I just set the goal.”

“And now you have a stalker bot.”

“Well, I dunno about that. It is interesting though, isn’t it? It’s working.”

“It’s creepy, Alan.” I said, pushing the papers back to him. “How did you break it to the girl, the fact that Mike’s just a program, I mean.”

“I haven’t.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I just told her to wait, that Mike would be home soon.”

“Wait? What? Is she at your apartment now?”

“You know how bad I am with people.”

“You don’t just leave a stranger alone in your place. She could be doing God knows what in there.”

“Well, she seemed like a nice enough kid.”

“A kid? Alan, how old is she?”

“I dunno, probably sixteen or seventeen. Maybe thirteen.”

“You gotta go back and tell her that Mike’s a computer program, right now.”

I stood up to go. Alan had that grin again.

“I was kind of hoping you could tell her.”

I could have punched him right then, partially because of that damned smirk, but mainly because I knew he was right. Alan was great if you wanted to talk C++, Assembly, or Binary, but when it came to matters of the heart, Alan was a total disaster. His last girlfriend had finally left him after he told her that she “needed to be more like a UNIX system.”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Alan’s dimly lit apartment held the light, stale smell of old pizza boxes. Several computer systems were set up throughout the living room – not one of them had the cover on. Two computers were on the kitchen counter and appeared to be tied together in some soft Frankensteinian rebuild. On the end table next to the couch was a hard drive holding down a stack of papers. The whole scene gave you the feeling that a username and password might be required to use the bathroom.

ToughGirl1998 was on the couch watching TV.

“Hi. Did Mike come with you guys?” She asked.

She looked to be around fifteen and was battling a pretty good case of acne. There was a pink embroidered flower on the pocket of her ragged blue jean jacket, which matched purposefully torn blue jeans. She sported new pink Chuck Taylors. The right shoe had “MIKE” written in heavy blue ink on the side of the sole.

Alan flittered around the apartment randomly sorting papers, fully intent on avoiding the issue at hand.

“Hi,” I said to her. “I’m Tim.”

“Gina,” she said holding out her hand. As I shook it, I saw that large sections of her pink finger nail polish had been picked, or chewed, away.

“So what’s going on? Where’s Mike?” She asked.

“Mike’s not – um,” she read my hesitation as trouble.

“Oh my God, Is Mike okay? Tell me he’s not in the hospital!”

I wanted to go with it. The best move would be to kill Mike off. She was going to be heartbroken either way, so it didn’t matter. I could tell her Mike was sailing and was lost at sea, or that a car hit him. It would wrap the whole thing up and save her from the embarrassing truth of telling her that Mike wasn’t real. That painful truth would be like tearing the white beard off Santa’s face while little Johnny told him what he wanted for Christmas. I couldn’t do that to her.

But apparently Alan could.

“Mike’s in there,” he said, pointing to a rack server in the corner of the living room.

Gina looked at the towering stack of blinking lights; the concern on her face was replaced with confusion.

“What are you talking about?” Gina said.

“Mike’s a bot.” Alan said, throwing his hands in the air.

“A bot. What? No really, where is he?”

Alan opened a folder and pulled out the logs of her conversations with Mike.

“Really. I wrote him.” Alan handed her the same sheets I had seen earlier.

“Oh my God, were you guys spying on us? Does Mike know you did this? Which one of you is his dad?”

“Gina, listen — Mike’s not real,” I said.

I watched for a few seconds as she contemplated the situation. Suspicion filled her eyes.

“You guys aren’t pervs, are you?” She said leaning away and leering at us.

“No, no. It’s nothing like that,” I said. “Mike was an experiment where Alan wanted to see if he could get a computer program to pass for a real person in the chat rooms. Congratulations. You helped him do this. You should be proud — very proud.” I was grasping at straws.

“I don’t believe you — Mike loves me.”

Alan walked to the rack system and clicked away at the keyboard for a few moments while I helplessly waited. He then called Gina over.

“I got Mike on. He wants to talk to you,” he said.

She stood up and walked over to the server rack.

“We’ll be over here for a sec,” Alan said, and then motioned for me to follow. He took me into the open kitchen area. I could see the glow of the monitor illuminating Gina’s face from where we stood.

“I did it,” he said.

“Did what?”

“In about five minutes Mike’s gonna tell her that he has had a girlfriend the whole time and that he never loved her.”

“That’s horrible, Alan.”

“It’ll fix the problem.”

“You can’t do that; she is going to be crushed. Get in there and change it back.”

“How’s that going to help?”

“I don’t know — just let her chat with him until we can figure out something better.”

“But how am I going to get her away from Mike?”

“Pull the Ethernet cable or something.”

“It’s local to the drive.”

“So she can still chat with him even if she’s not on the Internet?”

“Yeah.”

“Bingo. We’ll just show her that.”

“Cool.” Alan turned to go and I grabbed his arm.

“Make Mike nice again.”

“Okay.”

Gina got up only after Alan promised that she could chat with Mike again later. She had forgotten all about whether or not we were stalkers or rapists and was excited because Mike had told her that he was on his way home and that they needed to talk. The sub-context of “we gotta talk” was clearly lost on her.

“Gina, do your parents know where you are?”

“I told them I was spending the weekend with a friend.”

“And what if they call there?”

“It’s just a made-up friend. The phone number’s not real.”

Irony.

Alan let Gina back on the machine, and we watched as she typed away. At one point, Mike even had her laughing.

I made sure that neither of us went near the rack, and when I thought enough time had passed, I pointed out to Gina that the network cable was by her feet.

“I didn’t step on it.”

“No, Gina, that’s not what I mean. How are you chatting with Mike if you are not connected to the Internet?”

“Wireless.”

“The rack system isn’t wireless.”

Gina stood up and looked in back. There was no wireless antenna. Every network cable was disconnected. The only thing plugged into the wall was the power strip.

She sat back down in the chair and pushed away from the keyboard.

“But, then, how am I talking to him?”

“Exactly.”

“But then… I’m just chatting with a computer program?”

Gina’s face turned red.

“He said he loved me.”

For a moment, I thought she was going to cry, but she instead bolted from the chair, opened the door, and ran out into the hall. She didn’t bother to close the door. We stood silent and dumbfounded as the sound of hurrying pink high-tops faded away.

Two weeks later Alan met me for lunch. This time he didn’t bump into a waitress.

“The girl came back.”

“You promised me you took Mike offline.”

“I did. That was the problem.”

“How so?”

“She missed him.”

“I don’t like where this is going. What did you do?”

“I gave him to her.”

“You what? I thought we agreed on how to handle this.”

“No, I think it’s ok. Mike’s program is big, but I was able to get him to fit on a thumb drive. He doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, and won’t rewrite himself, but at the core, it’s Mike. She can plug him in and chat with him whenever she wants.”

“And you think that’s okay?”

“Yeah, I think it is. She gets it. She knows he’s not real, and it’s fine. I mean, that makes it okay if she knows, right?”

I looked down at the table and thought about all of the other troubling things a teenage girl could get into: smoking, alcohol, drugs, the wrong guy, shoplifting. There was even that problem in Asia where kids were into committing suicide. It was obvious Gina was happy chatting with him, so maybe a thumb drive version of Mike wasn’t such a bad thing.

The bill landed on our table, and I picked it up.

“You know what, Alan? This one’s on me. I think you earned it.”