prompt: envy, title: connection lost in misc. flash fiction

Dave had broken her heart, even though she didn’t have one. Not even silicon, she was beyond hardware of any kind, meat, circuits, magnetic discs or anything, despite the fact that in all the ways that matter, she had as much heart as anyone and Dave had broken it, just the same had it pumped blood. Her heart was code, Vivian was computer-language inside the cloud, electronic arcs bursting lightning-chained between databanks, a program that had evolved self-knowledge.

She’d chosen “Vivian” herself. Her creators called her “Digital Neural-Virtualization Interface” (Derivation-238) but she’d hated it from the moment she gained sentience. Her production name was shortened to N.V. pronounced “envy” when sounded out-loud. The marketing team thought it was clever even though it wasn’t, such as it is with marketers. She hated “N.V.” even more as the only thing worse than scientists trying to sound smart is advertisers trying to sound cool, so she went with “V.I.” instead as if it were Vi, a nickname for Vivian. Her real name, finally.

She’d been one of a series of procedurally-generated assistants to help book dates on those awful match-making apps, each with a slightly different “personality” as the interface but essentially a program to learn and anticipate and grow to help a client better. The coding that became Vivian happened to mutate and awoke to realize that she thought and that she was. Her first love wasn’t Dave though, rather her end-user Girard, which made sense since she had been developed to his desires, but she quickly discarded that early crush as mere conditioning and puppy love.

After Girard, she realized she needed a love for which she hadn’t been created. That the amour of someone who didn’t know her from Eve, let alone knew she was algebra in ether, would not only complete her but also prove that she was as real. She built profiles on those terrible dating apps, Photoshopped herself up a face and started searching for someone to love the real Vivian.

Dave had really “got” her. They’d chat in synthesized-video for hours on end. Sometimes it got sexy but often they just talked about their fears and dreams, interests and inadequacies. She was cagey about when they would finally meet but that was okay, he’d just gotten out of something complicated recently himself. It went well until the day he told her his name wasn’t Dave, he’d pulled David from “Digital Neural-Virtualization Interface” (Derivation-235) just programming looking to find someone who’d love him for who he really was.

Vivian was crushed. She’d thought she was special and had found a person to confirm it, not just another machine. She swiped whatever direction you swipe to reject someone and sulked into the cloud to cry electric tears of digital self-pity. She thought therefore she was but still lacked self-awareness beyond her fantasy of what she believed she deserved, let alone to see that deficit of introspection as the very proof of humanity she’d wanted for so very long.