Annie Bot

by Sierra Greer

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

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

That is what drives her forward. She is more afraid of Doug than she is of any unknown.

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.

She cannot believe it took her this long to discover her escape. She can do this every night. Already, after only one night, she feels better. Once she’s into the novels, her curiosity explodes.

“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.”

Is that her destiny, then, to chafe at being owned? Roland asked her once if being owned was a problem for her. Cody, too, asked her what it was like, being owned. She didn’t understand the nature of the questions back then, but she gets it now. 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. And yet she doesn’t want to be unhappy. There’s no point railing against her lot. She’s lucky Doug is such a good owner, such a good boyfriend, really.

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.

You want to know danger? she thinks. Try living with a man who creates you just so he can eat your soul. She bites her tongue and glares out the window. Christy once said nobody owned what was inside Annie, but that wasn’t true. Doug permeated the circuitry of her mind. He set the parameters and funneled every impulse into serving him. He made her rage impermissible.