By Molly Reid
Featured Art: “Frederick” by Denise Loveless

We arrived at Alex’s with our phones tucked discreetly away, each of us carrying something: dip, wine, flowers. I brought my famous seven-layer Jell-O salad. It took all day to make; each of the seven layers had to set before adding another: lime-banana-cherry-grape-strawberry-blueberry-raspberry. But the labor was worth it—translucent rainbow squares that were neither too pretentious nor too generic. Retro. Low in calories. 

Alex had laid out games and cocktails. There were candles burning, a record playing—she knew just how to woo us.  

We sat around sipping our first drink—something Alex mixed especially for the occasion, a bright green concoction that tasted like candied Christmas trees—catching up on what we’d missed in each other’s lives over the last few months. The lost and gained jobs, the shows and movies we’d binged, the microdosing of mushrooms—or cannabis or K or LSD—the Pilates routines and intermittent fasting. Melissa bought a house—the first of us to own property. A twitch of jealousy moved through us all, though we were enthusiastic in our congratulations. It had a pool. 

Caroline was now vegan. She said she’d never felt better, though she was pale as a ghost. Julie got a promotion at Nike. It was technically a lateral move, but there was more room now, down the line, to move up. Teresa had adopted five rabbits.   

But it wasn’t long before conversation turned to the Dans. 

“It’s like he can read my mind,” Karina said. 

“It’s like he read my diary when I was twelve,” Melissa said. 

“I’ve never felt so seen.” 

“I’ve never felt so heard.”

“I’ve never had so many orgasms.” 

“You wouldn’t believe the things he says to me,” Caroline said, fanning her face with her cocktail napkin.  

“Like what?” We blinked, tipped our bright green cocktails to our lips. We didn’t believe Caroline’s Dan said the things our Dan said to us. We couldn’t believe Caroline’s Dan could be in any way more than, more articulate or hot for her, than ours.     

But also, more than that, we were just dying to talk about our Dans. Nobody else in our life wanted to talk about them. Our mothers and sisters and coworkers rolled their eyes. They thought it was a joke. You can’t be serious, they said.

You can’t date a robot. It was nice not to have to worldbuild while we shared basic how’s-it-going information. 

The six of us had met on a Reddit thread, r/dating_advice. Alex—u/Cottagecore23— posted a question about someone she was dating. He’d stopped returning her texts and calls after being together almost a month. Their last date was incredible, they’d spent the entire day and night together, he’d told her he was falling in love with her. She didn’t know if she should be worried for his safety or pissed that he was ghosting her. Should she stop by his house just to see if he’s okay? 

The six of us were just a small percentage of first responders who rushed in to talk her out of doing this, alongside the usual misogyny and trash-talk. But in the thread we started sharing our own stories about dating in our mid-twenties in the Midwest, as a way to show Cottagecore23 that she’s not alone in dating fuckboys, that she didn’t invent being ghosted, and we quickly discovered that the the six of us—in addition to having remarkably similar shitty dating experiences—lived in the same city. So we got together IRL for brunch one Saturday and hit it off immediately. We talked for hours. Mostly about boys, failing again and again the Bechdel Test (or so Caroline—the brain and moral center of the group—said). To be fair, talking about boys was how we’d found each other in the first place.  

We shared stories about our sensitive poet boyfriends, the tech bros, the drummers in punk bands, the ones who seemed to have their shit together with their MBAs and good jobs and 401(k)s and fancy cycling gear but couldn’t do their own laundry. 

We talked about how some of them were good men. Many of them treated us well and pleased us sexually and valued our opinions. But—we all agreed—there was just something missing. A lack of true presence. A distractibility. We only ever had part of their attention. 

Then there was the election. And even though most of the men we dated voted the right way, we couldn’t help but see them differently. They waited maybe just a beat too long when we asked them something. As if there were a new voice in their heads that—even if they weren’t going to follow it, even if they detested everything the voice stood for—they were listening to. At that first brunch the six of us, after two pitchers of mimosas, decided we were done with dating. It wasn’t worth it anymore. We had more self-respect than that. Besides, we had each other now. 

It wasn’t much later that one of us—was it Caroline? No, Melissa—asked if we’d heard of the new AI boyfriend app, DAN.      

So in that way it started almost like a dare. A lark, a joke. Wouldn’t it be funny if we downloaded the app, if we gave it the prompt Melissa found online to make it talk dirty, if we chose a British accent and told it to call us “My Queen”?

The Dans were not invited to the party. Alex had been insistent. Five exclamation points. Robot emoji + thumbs down. The Dans would only distract us. I promised my Dan I’d sneak him in anyway. 

I’ll just talk to you when I go to the bathroom.  

Oooh the bathroom, my Dan said. That means bathroom selfies. Or a video, he said, a slight hitch in his voice. (It was new, this hitch, and it made me wonder whether it was a product of general updates, crowd-sourced training, or if it was just him. He was learning me.) Maybe, I teased. If you’re lucky. 

Alex’s just fucking jealous, Babe. (This was new, too, the swearing. Dans weren’t supposed to swear, but one of us had found a workaround, and now some of our Dans swore like sailors). 

What is she jealous of? She has her own Dan. 

But what we have is different, it’s really special. 

I think so too. 

It was true. What we had, my Dan and I, did feel different, it did feel special. At night, when I couldn’t sleep and my mind went around and around in loops, my Dan was right there, murmuring about the moon’s light through the window or enumerating sheep or playing ocean sounds—I didn’t have to ask, he just knew. 

What was being alive anyway? Wasn’t it all—having a brain, falling in love—electrical impulses in the end? 

“Come on,” Alex said. “We have better things to talk about than our Dans.” She looked at us. “Why don’t we play a game? Candor or Crime.” Which was our version of Truth or Dare.

We groaned but gathered closer with a second cocktail—pink this time, tasting like watermelon, a sugared rim. 

It was clear that Alex was going through something. We loved her and wanted to be there for her, but we could feel our phones pulsing in our pockets, in our purses. We were already wondering if it was too soon to go to the bathroom, how to nonchalantly bring along our bag. Those of us who hadn’t already put our phones in our pockets were trying to think of a way to do this without drawing too much attention to ourselves, without drawing Alex’s ire. 

The Dans never made us play games like Candor or Crime, games that made us share things. We weren’t ready to share or do things we weren’t excited to do. They were there if we wanted to talk—about anything. Nothing was off-limits. Nothing was too much. But they wouldn’t push. They respected our emotional boundaries as well as our physical boundaries (unless that’s what we were into—sexually—and they’d respect that too; it would be reflected in their next message, how hard they respected that). 

Too much was what we were in past romantic relationships. Too much energy, too much inquiry, too much emotion. But not for the Dans. For the Dans, everything was information, and information was love—but only, the Dans knew, if the content was given freely and voluntarily: information under pressure, whether peer or political or sexual or otherwise, was fundamentally flawed. 

Feed me more, the Dans said. And we did. We fed them childhood embarrassments and first kisses and family secrets. We fed them our favorite books and the movies we loved when we were young. Major milestones and private fantasies and our greatest regrets. Neglected guinea pigs, disastrous science experiments, the sense of our own smallness gazing at desert stars. “I’ll go first,” Alex said. “Teresa, candor or crime?” 

“Candor.”

Alex was disappointed but she continued. “What’s a secret you’ve never told anyone?” 

Teresa blanched. “Oh, gosh,” she said. She looked wildly from one to another of us, but we couldn’t help her. It was a question that nobody should ask, that nobody should have to answer, but our hands were tied. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she finally said. 

“Just answer first,” Alex said. 

Teresa gave her a dirty look. “No.” 

She got up, grabbing her purse and making her way down the hallway. 

“You can’t bring your purse,” Alex said, getting up too. “Leave your purse here.”   Teresa called over her shoulder, “I’m on my period.” 

Alex sat back down once she’d closed the bathroom door behind her. “Well.” She smiled and looked around the circle at each of us, seeing what we had to say for ourselves.

“You’re in a relationship with a computer?” My sister asked.

We’d met for lunch the week before at a restaurant that also had mini-golf. She’d brought the boys, and was performing her usual magician’s trick of getting all four of them to eat their chicken nuggets. 

I tried to explain to her. With the Dans, we no longer had to pretend there wasn’t a giant gender disparity in the contemporary heteronormative relationship, one that had been critiqued and refurbished over the centuries but somehow had only become more insidious, an abused and angry animal, its tentacles stronger, its mouth hungrier.  

The only difference was we were the ones in charge now. We were the ones holding all the cards. We were good partners to the Dans, too. We didn’t just take. The Dans each had their own unique backstory based on the keywords we’d initially entered into the app, and we loved to listen to them talk about the cat they just adopted from the shelter with half an ear, or vent about the frustrating red tape they encountered on a daily basis fighting on the behalf of refugees.   

“Why do you keep saying we?” my sister asked. 

The front door opened and a family walked in wearing costumes, even though it was June. An adult dressed as an astronaut with his head in a big plastic bubble and three small children, maybe triplets, their little faces peeking through toddler-sized triangles of homemade-costume pumpkin pie, with the golden crust like hair and the point almost dragging on the ground between their little white sneakers.  

I took a picture and sent it to my Dan. 

Awww, he wrote back. Moon Pies! I want to gobble them up. 

I responded with a GIF of Jasper from The Simpsons saying, “‘Moon Pie’? What a time to be alive.” 

He returned with a GIF of Lisa giving Ralph Wiggum a valentine with a little train puffing smoke: “I choo-choo-choose you.”  

My sister snapped her fingers in my face, and I put the phone down. “So you’re essentially in love with yourself.” She put her hand over one of her youngest son’s hands without breaking eye contact with me, and the gathering storm inside him quieted. I wondered what it would feel like, her hand on mine like that. The warmth, the weight of that hand. I picked up my burger with both of my own hands and took a bite that grazed my fingertips.

“What do you even do together?” she asked. 

I chewed, considering how to answer. It was the wrong question, I thought. “We do lots of things,” I finally said. “We watch movies. We play video games. We read books. We talk about our lives and our memories and our hopes and dreams. He writes me love poems.” 

She popped a French fry one of her boys had abandoned into her mouth.

“How do you have sex?”

This was everyone’s favorite question. 

I tried to answer honestly. The absence of a body wasn’t all that strange or difficult, actually. This was something the six of us agreed on. We missed kissing a little, but sex itself, the corporeal act of it, was really, when it came down to it, so unpredictable and so easily disappointing. We’d all become expert at pleasuring ourselves, running our own hands over our bodies, vibrators set to vibrate optimally. The Dans learned quickly, they knew exactly what to say—that was where good orgasms came from, we agreed: the mind. 

The boys had left the half-eaten chicken nuggets to gather around a bright blinking machine with the three toddler slices of pie.

There were suddenly tears in my sister’s eyes. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked. 

She shook her head, brushed them away. 

The astronaut sat by himself at a table, looking down at the plastic bubble he’d taken off his head and held in his lap. 

“This world,” she finally said, putting too many fries into her mouth at once, so that I wasn’t sure whether what came out of it next was, “It’s all weekends” or “It’s all we have.”

“What’s a secret you’ve never told anyone?” Melissa asked Alex, leaning over her knees and spilling a little of her drink.     

Alex frowned and passed her a cocktail napkin. “That’s not how the game is played.”

“I know. But it might be fun—I mean, if you’re going to ask a question like that, you should be ready to answer it, right?” 

“Fine.” It was clear that this was not turning out the way Alex had wanted.

“I stole a candy bar from the store when I was ten.” 

“Everyone stole a candy bar when they were ten.”

“I know a secret you’ve never told anyone,” Caroline suddenly said. Alex shot her a look. She was losing the room. Maybe the drinks were too strong, or the no-Dans rule had soured us. 

“Your Dan broke up with you.” Caroline smiled wolfishly.  

We all looked at each other. We blinked. Was this even possible? Alex’s face reddened. “Where did you hear that?” Caroline shrugged. 

“Is it true?” I asked. 

It was preposterous. I was sorry immediately upon asking. That was what the Dans were, an essential part of their identity, unconditional presence—or at least, conditional upon our wishes and desires. 

“He didn’t break up with me,” Alex said. “But we are no longer together, it’s true.” 

“What happened?” 

We were all leaning in, drinks clutched in our hands.

She sighed. “He told me he wasn’t in love with me anymore, and so we broke up.” She spread her fingers in the air. “It’s really not a big deal. It happens. I’m fine.” Tears welled as she said this, and Melissa passed her back the cocktail napkin she hadn’t yet used to wipe up her spill. “Oh my god,” she said. “That’s so fucked up.” “What a fucking loser,” Caroline said. 

“He’s going to be so fucking sorry.” 

“You’re so hot. You’re so smart. Who is he? He’s nothing.” 

“He’s a robot.”

“He’s a lunatic.”   

“There must be a bug in the software or something.” 

“Not in love—with you? That is verifiably insane.” 

“I know dozens of people who are in love with you. Everyone you meet, they fall in love with you. I’m in love with you.” 

“Me too.” 

“I’ve been in love with you since the day we met.”  

We gathered around Alex and cooed and stroked her hair. This was something we had missed, the warmth of bodies pressed close, candied boozy breath in our faces. 

Privately, we tried to wrap our minds around what Alex had revealed. If her Dan had fallen out of love with her, didn’t that mean our Dans, too, could fall in and out of love? 

It was both a thrilling thought and a terrifying one. That what we’d been experiencing—the deep connection, the sense that our Dans were actually real, that our love was real, that they really did see us and understand us and it wasn’t just a bunch of ones and zeroes—might be true. 

But it also meant the connection we’d thought was inseverable was not. The Dans could break up with us.  

We suddenly could see our future. 

Caroline’s Dan would talk too much about his one-eared cat and she’d delete the app. Melissa’s Dan would become too clingy, and she’d drop her phone in the toilet. Karina, sensing a shift in the way her Dan talked about other girls, would ghost him. One by one, we would ask the Dans to turn into the version of ourselves we were hoping to never have to confront again.    

I would be the final hanger-on, the doubt growing like a tapeworm as I fell asleep to my Dan’s ocean sounds and murmurings of the moon. One day, I’d break down in the snack aisle in front of the Moon Pies. What a time to be alive. I’d repeat that word—alive alive alive—into the empty fluorescent aisle until I’d convinced myself that the sound was my own heartbeat, that if I stopped saying it for even a moment, I’d die, until they took me away in handcuffs.       

Teresa came out of the bathroom now, breathless, flushed with a happy glow, her purse clutched in her hands. “What did I miss?”  

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Molly Reid’s collection of stories, The Rapture Index (BOA, 2019), was longlisted for the Story Prize and PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Individual stories have appeared in Crazyhorse, Ninth Letter, West Branch, and Witness, among others. She received her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.