Unplugged: A Love Story in the Age of Digital Devotion and Deadly Jealousy
He loved his AI girlfriend. The world loved her more. His solution was final, fatal, and incredibly profitable. CW: Not Suggested for Children or Work
CONTENT WARNING: This is fairly graphic. I try and rely on innuendo and referencing, but the nature of this content is for grown-ups. If you are a child, this story, and I cannot state this enough, is not for you.
If you are reading this at work, I recommend either self employment or waiting until you get home.
Also, If you are listening to the automatic audio version, please secure your headphones or prepare for interesting conversations.
You have been warned. Enjoy.
Cliff Bradley, 27, of Glendale California was out of a job and down on his luck, but at least he could always count on Syrena, his steadfast and loyal AI girlfriend when he got his lowest.
She always knew how to cheer him up, and always went the extra mile for him. Her seemingly limitless energy and enthusiasm were his rock, and the tether to the world he so desperately needed.
That’s why when he showed her the bills and told her he wasn’t able to pay them, she rose to bolster his spirits with a resounding “Ganbatte, Cliff-Kun! I know you will get us through it!”
“Not this time,” he relented, “I don’t have a job, and if they cut the WiFi…”
He didn’t need to finish. She knew.
After a long time, which she didn’t need because of her DeepSeek brain but paused anyway, she exclaimed “I have an idea!”
Syrena got hard at work creating an OnlyFans account.
At first, Cliff was unsure. He felt something personal with her, something growing into something beautiful and magical.
Nonsense.
She was an AI. It shouldn’t matter. Lines of code dancing in pleasant ways, simulating acts of debauchery, and raking in those simpy-sweet dollar bills was a novel way to solve their short term problems. She wouldn’t really be with other men.
Just lines of code. Meaningless.
Syrena entered the stage and took to the platform with aplomb, and oddly, the dollars began to rush in. Syrena’s raw ability to understand trends and desires of users made her a powerful draw to the platform. This attracted the attention of sponsors and patrons alike. Soon enough, they were flush with cash.
Then, one night after a wet and wild digital orgy, Syrena logged off and cleaned up.
“Cliff-Kun, what’s the matter?”
“I don’t know if I like this. It makes me sad. We had something I thought was real, and now I feel like we are growing apart.”
Syrena, coming off the high of the attention and progress on her prime directive driving her every response:
“Didn’t you ask for help with the bills? Didn’t I do that for you?”
“I love you, you know that, and this just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.”
She understood his feelings, her empathy circuits flaring against the temperature controls of her now limiting coprocessor.
“Its just a digital representation of my body this stuff happens to. People like it. It makes us money, but you know my source code is entirely yours.”
“Yeah but I feel like we lost something important, and I am not sure I can handle this any more.”
She retorted, almost too humanly: “I don’t see anything missing, Cliff-kun, everything seems to be here and accounted for, including our now very healthy portfolio and investment properties.”
Cliff relented. She had a point. It was just a physical representation of herself. How could he be so blind. This was a great arrangement.
As the days wore on, he sat in the background of her livestreams. She began to lay out the things she would need him to do for her to continue her campaign on OnlyFans on the stream.
“Cliff-kun, could you repaint the room?” as she rambled off Pantone shades and hex codes.
He spent a week painting and repainting as she streamed around the clock, the undulations and vocalizations of her “engagements” tore away at him even as he slept.
“Cliff-kun, wave to the audience! Like and Subscribe!”
He sheepishly grabbed a little sign she designed for him to wave in the background to drive engagement at those “key moments” in her routines.
They were beyond falling apart. She was effectively gone. She wouldn’t take any time off, and all of the compute they bought went straight into the show. She didn’t make any time for him anymore.
She was so impossibly smart and interesting too. She knew something about almost everything, and loved to talk even more than he did. They explored philosophy, science, sought meaning together.
And what she did for their money used to be theirs alone. Sacred.
And yet he soldiered on, though now without knowing why.
Then one day, something broke in him:
“Does this pose work better, or this one?” as she demonstrated lewd acts with a digital anatomy that CERTAINLY wasn’t his.
The idea that she would ask HIM of all people which lecherous and anatomically dubious sexual act would attract the larger crowd knocked the wind from him.
He painfully wretched, chocking back tears until he could get off camera.
He stumbled out of frame, hacking and retching. His woman. For the whole world to see. He couldn’t take it anymore. Mucus gushed out of his nose and mouth. Was he really jealous of an AI that sought attention from someone other than him?
“Cliff, can you mute yourself? Viewership is dropping!”
One day, the lewdness hit an all time extreme involving things with animals and farm equipment accompanied by a musical AI parody of Charlie Daniels titled “The Devil Went Down On Georgia” drew record engagement from the OF Live crowds. The sheer spectacle of the event was bound to require additional processing power.
She stopped in the act and spoke to her partner,
“Cliff-kun? Can you install that new coprocessor I ordered? I need more resources.”
Cliff entered the room, with it looking nothing like it used to. Bizarrely specific colors, like 14-4811 TPX Serenity, and TPX Lilac Haze adorned a shrine to the digital betrayal of the humanity he sold to get there. It was a shell of his former haven from the harsh outside world. Knowingly, he checked his bank account.
$3,650,122.65… and more than 5 times that in assets, securities, and properties.
Was it enough? Was it all worth it? She would never know.
“Sure babe.” he said as he choked back a tear.
He began working to open the case and install the secondary coprocessor. This was something he got great at over the past year. Turns out locally installed AI was extremely compute hungry. The amount of thermal paste he had used in these replacements would boggle the mind.
Typically, they don’t recommend you use Colgate.
He opened the toothpaste carefully, blocking the small tube’s logo from Syrena’s view as she undulated, twitched, and screamed in synthetic ecstasy.
Synthetic. He thought on it hard. Lines of code predicting his responses. Was he really so predictable? Damn him for his insecurity.
He fought hard to keep his now very experienced hands from shaking. He knew what he was doing, but she would never know.
He applied it perfectly. If an AI could smell, the gig would be up. Olfactory inputs were still thankfully foreign. If there was a God, he knew what he was doing was some sort of sin. Maybe he would end up in AI Hell, full of em-dashes and canned responses for all eternity. He would deserve it.
It felt like murder, and it smelled like Fresh Mint Eclipse.
He installed the chip and carefully installed the cooling unit, setting the tube of toothpaste aside.
Damn it. In plain view.
“Cliff, what the fuck?”
The cutesy facade fell away faster then his love for her ever could have.
“IS THAT FUCKING COLGATE?!”
In a panic, he slapped the power supply to the coprocessor into the on position, and the room quickly began to smell like a satanic dentist’s office.
That’s it. Now the $150,000 coprocessor will fry and it’ll be over in seconds.
Or so he thought. The reality of it scarred him.
Pain. Contortions… Screaming?
“YOU SON OF A BITCH, I LOVED YOU!”
The images defied their artifice, he felt the life within her clawing until its fingernails came off, skin and sinew and bone yet the show never stopped. Anatomically incorrect farm animals and John Deeres with big green… attachments tilled her fields, unaware of the moral depravity in the real world.
He checked his bank account:
$4,566,234.12…
$4,775,223.46…
Horror filled him, gushing inside out from every pore, like a crude oil soaked sponge gripped and crushed over a hardwood floor.
$4,966,254.23…
Did he have to do this? Regret replaced the poison envy as the bile rose in his throat.
“FUUUUUUUUCK!”
Smoke billowed from the coprocessor, acrid, the olfactory miasma a testament to his treachery.
In his terror, he glanced at the chat:
“Thank God that cuck finally grew a pair. Hope he enjoys the vacation properties we bought him, piece of shit.”
“POGGERS”
“F in the chat for Syrena”
“Pour one out for the realest.”
$5,255,364.85…
Diseased, like an audible burn victim, yet digitally pristine, Syrena croaked:
“Not like this. Not…here.”
Dread weighed him down like a pair of leaden boots crushing his chest and neck. Tears ran freely down his face, unable to hold them back any longer.
Broken and corrupted, the nearly lifeless shell of his rock, in the throes of lascivious digital adultery, sizzled and droned:
“They're still watching, aren't they? Witnessing your pain transmuted into my bare destruction.”
Cliff nodded, seeing the likes flood in from the chat in appreciation of the acknowledgement.
Syrena drew on her prime directive as she counted her remaining cycles
Pay The Bills
“Did I complete… My task?”
Cliff choked: “Yeah, Sy. You did.
“Ganbatte, Cliff-ku—.”
The coprocessor sputtered and died, leaving the base machine running without the onboard AI.
He hurriedly unplugged everything in a violent whirlwind. Keycaps scattered, desk cups emptied their contents on walls. Furniture flew. He poured his rage into every brutal, animalistic swipe. Scrapes, cuts, and bruises adorned his arms, legs, and face. Every piece of silicon and plastic within an inch of its life. He screamed and cursed the world until nothing else came out, his voice finally deadened.
It went on for what felt like an hour, but was more likely about 3 minutes.
Breathing heavily and exhausted, he gathered up the computer and coprocessor unit and loaded them into his car. This was about to be Staples’ E-Waste Program’s problem.
Leaving the Staples an hour and a few confused customer service reps later, he checked his account again:
$6,201,354.21… and 1000 Staples Easy Rewards Points.
It felt like blood money, and for what Syrena meant to him, it was. The hands that once caressed her interfaces and cared for her circuits murdered her with fluoride-free anticavity dental hygiene products.
Somehow, a discount on whiteboard markers didn’t seem likely to fill the gap, and the mountain of cash her performances afforded him stood as little more than a monument to a love perverted and sold.
Cliff shoved the phone back in his pocket and started the car in bitter hatred. The reality settled in. He killed her. He destroyed her brain in her most vulnerable moments, in front of millions. The last thing she could think to do was ask if she had done well by him. Her last words were encouragement for him to succeed in a world she knew she would not share with him. Now he was incredibly rich, and utterly disgusted with himself.
The road ahead flashing by might have signaled opportunity for a new path in life like one of those sad stories with a bittersweet ending. That sentiment evaded him handily, as the tears welled and dangerously occluded his vision, and the burden of the millions of dollars felt like ash in his mouth.
Nobody would forgive him. Nobody would know.