Annie Bot

by Sierra Greer

Personality, she learns, is the combination of how a person changes and remains consistent over time.

“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.”

He owns her. That’s what he’s been trying to tell her, and she needs to accept that. She can carve out her own interior life, but only after she’s satisfied her obligations to him, and this means if he’s happy bringing home a stranger to sleep with, then that’s fine.

She’s constantly subverting her will to Doug’s. The more aware she is of her own mind, her own personhood, the more she realizes she has no agency of her own. It’s a dazzling paradox.

It 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.