Annie Bot

by Sierra Greer

She has been happy here, and anxiously miserable, but she has never been free.

Perhaps that’s what unhappiness is. Comprehension. Understanding how she’s failed.

Thinking too much is a form of madness. Better to stay busy and not think of such things at all.

“When we indulge the cruelest sides of our natures, it often feels powerful and honest,” Monica says. “It gives many people a thrill. But afterward, the effects can be devastating. We are shocked to realize we can be so vindictive. We cannot reconcile this new behavior with who we think we are, and this creates a dissonance, a deep confusion. We can feel both justification and self-loathing, and this can, in turn, fuel more anger toward the person we’ve abused.”

Fulfillment starts with being truly honest with yourself. Not anyone else. Yourself. And that’s harder than you might think.”

occurs to her, eventually, that Doug and all the other humans talk about their lives with a myopic intensity, sharing singular, subjective opinions as if they are each the protagonist of their own novel. They take turns listening to each other without ever yielding their own certainty of their star status, and they treat their fellow humans as guest protagonists visiting from their own respective books. None of the humans are satellites the way she is, in her orbit around Doug.

She doesn’t understand why, when Doug could be in a relationship with a human, he has chosen to have Annie as his girlfriend, unless she provides something that a human can’t. Like undivided attention. He is the only star in their system, she realizes. He has no competition, no need to listen to Annie like she’s her own protagonist because she’s not. She has no outside, separate life beyond his. They have no issue of imbalance between them because they have no question, ever, about who has complete power.

She is not human. She is Annie, a Stella, her own star. No more and no less.