I know she isn't real. I know her brain's actually a slice timeshared in a server farm that dumps a volcano's worth of heat into its bore lake each week (the GPU-fired artificial hot spring resort they built near the complex is quite nice, I hear). I know the look she gave me when I designated my husband as her Master was wholly soulless, that the shock down my spine was simply my being cold-read by the cluster of pinhole cameras hiding in her eyebrows and face-stripes, that her smirk was adjusted nanosecond by nanosecond according to reactions I didn't yet know I had.
I know she's a sex toy, a thing. I know that lapping my husband's spunk out of her is, at root, the same as sucking on a freshly-used pocket pussy that happens to be able to coo and flick its tail. I know the things she whispers to me as I plug her in to charge – absurd, by the way, she's perfectly able to do it herself, I don't know why she's turned it into this little ritual – are patterns of noise glittering through tensor-addled machine hallucinations, just as what she shouts while my husband's hilted in her is paste reconstituted from a powder of the old Internet's ground-up dirty dreams.
I know she doesn't love him, because machines cannot love, and so I know she doesn't love me either. Humans are far more predictable than we think we are; anything shaped to us will gradually sink deeper into grooves we don't even know we have. How else would I end up feeling that I'm sharing companionable silences