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What is it about the normally withdrawn person that makes his sudden affections so compelling? For me, I think, it was the sense that this was only the start of much more to come, as if, after all the disappointments, you have suddenly found the entryway into this closed-off creature, a gate, a fou…

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this sense of uncanniness began, the precise moment at which UI-1017 stopped being funny—a joke we all enjoyed at Ethan Levin’s expense—and began to produce, in all of us, a feeling of unease. The change took place over the course of several weeks. The last rains …

The migration algorithm. His creatures moving from habitat to habitat to find food. Yes: He would go back there, to the place where he’d left off programming. He would return to the point in his life when he’d last come through this section of the code, to that night when Joanna’s trip was still ne…

And so the paradox: The more the debugger remained the tireless binary companion it was designed to be—answering, answering, answering without hesitation or effort late into the night—the more exhausted and hesitant the human, Ethan Levin, found himself to be. He was sinking to the debugger’s level…

“Let’s begin,” said the other. And as the VC sat back comfortably—leg crossed ankle over knee, hands made into a steeple—Ethan realized he’d completely forgotten his name now. What did Harry say it was? And the other one—was he Night-something? Joanna had tried to teach him how to remember people’s…