You don't go on the internet unless you have to. You certainly don't go on there to look for love. You'd have to be desperate, which I was. You'd have to be stupid, which I was. I was beyond desperate and beyond stupid. I thought I could just hop on quick and peek at some dating profiles without any trouble. I didn't realize it was going to destroy me. I knew better, too, but I felt pushed, and when that compulsion kicked in, I had no choice but to submit to its will.
       I took all of the precautions. I put myself behind layers of firewalls and private VPNs. I encrypted, and I anonymized, but it all felt like someone putting on a beekeeper's outfit to fight a fire. Even when you have the latest and greatest, they're ten steps ahead.
       I knew the rules--don't get sidetracked, don't click anything weird or risky, definitely don't go anywhere near any porn, get on and get off--but they were rules for a bygone era. Everything was weird. Every click was risky. Everything was built to distract. All it took was them getting one hook in you, one barb, and you could get lost for days, sliding headfirst down an endless stream of headlines and photos and videos and shopping.
       I was on my way to the dating platform Matchmeeee! when they got me. All it took was a picture of the president with the provocative headline "Which version do you believe?" and two videos, side-by-side on the same page. In both videos, he made the same hand gestures, blinked during the same moments, and tilted his head in the same direction, but the way he moved his lips and the content that came out of his mouth could not have been more different. Two versions, both believable and both outrageous in different ways, both life-like.
       The poll asked: Version One or Version Two? The vote was almost split, gamed by untold millions of bots, each with their own agenda. Hours passed while I studied the videos and tried to determine how I would contribute to the decision. If I had been in the audience, I would have known the truth, but most speeches were not public events these days due to security concerns.
       By the time I woke from my trance, I had already wasted a ton of time. I went to make my decision, to just pick one of the options and move on, and I hesitated, each version appealing to me in different ways, weighing differently in my mind. I screamed and got out of there without making a choice.
       When I finally got onto Matchmeeee!, I was already exhausted. Hundreds of messages flooded me, each popup fighting the others, racing to be atop the pile. Hundreds of men greeted me. Brown hair. Blonde hair. Red hair. Blue hair. Light skin, dark skin, and everything in between. Piercings. Tattoos. Wedding Rings. No Wedding Rings. With dogs. With cats. With giraffes. Tall. Short. Fat. Thin. Muscular. Alive. Dead. Throw out enough flavors and you're bound to attract something.
       I scrolled through some of them even though I knew all of them were bots. Engage with any one of them, and they'd prove a good distraction. Each had its optimized algorithm that would learn from me and adapt to my needs and make me feel something. This was where I should have stopped. It was Friday night, and I was bored and horny and lonely. I would have been better off just clicking on someone at random and engaging in a chat, but I'd been down that road a hundred times. The bot takes you for a ride, games you psychologically, and for a little bit you're distracted until you wake up and realize it's squeezed a bunch of money out of you and you're left feeling empty, which is worse than the initial frustration.
       Yes, I should have clicked on anyone at random and opted to embrace the emptiness like an old friend at the train station. I shouldn't have kept looking. The longer you look, the more aggressive the profiles get. It's a bit like porn in that regard. The more time you spend looking at it, the weirder it needs to become.
       Amidst all the variations of faces and profile headlines, there was one that made me pause: "I swear I'm not a bot and I will pay you to prove it. I'm just looking for love."
       A quick scan of the interests on his profile made me laugh. Collecting GIFs. Reading. Fantasy Art. Platformer video games. All the things that I like. How obvious could this bot get?
       Talk about a risky click, but something nagged me, some lonely part of my brain that was driving the car, and I took the plunge, and there was Brad waiting for me.
       "How much and how will you prove it?" I asked.
       "100 Matchmeeee! cupid coins and all-access video to me," he wrote back.
       Red flag. Right there. Bot or not, video on the internet usually led to full-screen penis. "Send the useless money," I said. What was wrong with me?
       The digital coins leapt off his ledger and into mine, and he requested that I accept his video. I braced myself and even told myself to start to look away from the screen, but full-screen penis never came. Brad sat there in a darkened room wearing a white t-shirt looking every bit the man that his profile picture advertised him to be, not the chiseled hunk of my dreams, but a shortish, soft-bodied guy with a sparse red beard that did little to cover up his pockmarks. He smiled and waved.
       "Not a bot," he said with his actual voice. He pointed to his face. "Not a bot. Real person."
       I studied the man on the screen, pretending to be a man. This was good. Very good. Procedurally generated video fooled everyone. If it was good enough for the president, it was good enough for Brad.
       "Tell me to say something," Brad said. "I know you're skeptical."
       I typed out my reply. "I am a bot, and I am lame. I'm stupid, and I trick sad and lonely people."
       Brad leaned forward into the light of his computer screen and squinted. "I am none of those things. I'm definitely not a bot, and I am definitely not lame. I'm cool. I'm not stupid, and I don't trick people. Are you feeling sad and lonely?"
       "Stand up," I said. "Jump on one leg, make your right arm into a right angle, and fist pump with the left like you're in a techno club."
       Brad gave me a look, but he got up and did everything I asked of him, and thankfully, he was wearing pants. This was good, but it was all reactive. The bot took my inputs and generated the video accordingly. I was somewhere between feeling empty and frustrated. I felt defeated.
       "I did everything you asked. Your turn. How do I know you're not a bot? Let me see you. Come on. I should be able to see a little something for my money." He jolted forward and waved his hands. "Uh, nothing sexual, of course. That's not what I meant. Don't need to see anything of that nature."
       "I don't think so," I wrote.
       "Then you're a bot. Thanks for wasting my time. Goodbye."
       Before he could close down, I sent him access to my video feed. His eyes lit up when the jingle played on his end, and when the video came through, he smiled. I didn't know what he thought he was looking at, but he was liking whatever he was seeing.
       We chatted for most of the night. He had me do cartwheels and clap in weirdly specific rhythms and even had me singing before the night was over. It was all too good to be true because it was. This was how the bots got you--playing the meta game against you. It knew that I knew that it knew that I knew it was a bot and it acted accordingly, and yet I still marched forward.
       We chatted a lot over the week. His clothes changed, the lighting in the room changed, and he even asked me to help him hang a poster of a giant pizza on his wall. I must have said, "It's still crooked" a hundred times that night between fits of laughter.
       "What are the chances that I found someone interesting? Someone real," I said. "That I stumbled onto someone who is real and has shared interests and is reasonably attractive. On the internet. You're a bot."
       "People have been so scared off by bots and spam that no one is trying anymore," he said. "It takes a little bit of courage now, well a lot of courage, to put yourself out there. I think people are desperate for connection and you just have to try."
       "Like you. You big hero."
       He turned away from the camera and tried to hide his blushing. "No, I just made a profile. You clicked it. How risky was that."
       "Very risky and still risky, I think. If the news is fake, why wouldn't this dating profile be fake?"
       "Why would it be? Who does that benefit?"
       "I don't know. Attention leads to spending."
       "And yet, I paid you," he said.
       "True. But you could be paying me for my time to help you become a better bot."
       "That's paranoid and cynical and crazy," he said.
       He's a bot, I thought, a good one and that was fine because he was making me feel things I hadn't felt in a long time, or ever, really.
       "Meet me," he said suddenly.
       "Huh?"
       "Let's meet in person. I promise I'm more than reasonably attractive in person."
       I must have looked away because he said, "That'll prove I'm real, right? No faking that, is there?"
       "I don't know," I said. "What's worse than you being a bot is you being a killer. I'd rather get burned by a bot again than get chopped up."
       "Are you really sure about that?"
       "No, I'm not," I said. I was thinking that, but I said it out loud by accident.
       "Then meet me."
       "I don't know."
       "Meet me."
       "Uhh."
       "Meet. Me."
       "Ok, fine."
       We settled on a place that was equidistant between the two of us, a small café called Fire and Iron Coffee that was rated "very crowded" by just about every review website. The night before we were to meet, I poured over the street view of the place. I studied the building, looked for all the exits and the nearby places to which I could flee if I needed. The café's website had a link to a live feed inside the building, but it wasn't working, and my email to the shop about it went unreturned. Not having those eyes inside made me nervous. The floor plans only told me so much. I would have liked to have known where all the tables and chairs were, the decorations, the stools--anything that I might trip over if I needed to run. I was going to have to take another leap and go in blind.
       I couldn't believe I agreed to meet him. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been outside, let alone the last time I actually talked to someone in real life. The nerves were getting to me, but they weren't all bad. A part of me was excited to see him, to touch him, to get close to his body and inhale deeply.
       On the day of, I called him in a panic. His phone rang and rang, but he didn't pick up. After the tone, my words came out ragged, my breath labored.
       "I'm stranded," I said. "Oh, I'm so embarrassed. I don't know what happened. So stupid. My wallet must have fallen out of my pocket on the last stop, and they won't let me back on the bus without paying. I don't have any coins, no cards. I can't access anything. I can't believe I have to ask this, but can you put some money on my account? On this number would be fine. God, I'm so embarrassed. I'm really looking forward to meeting you, and I can't believe I did this. Okay. Call me back."
       I hung up and tried a few more times, but I got his voicemail each time. It was close to our meeting time, and I was beginning to feel foolish. Where was he? Had he stood me up?
       The alert startled me. A voicemail. From Brad.
       "Hey, it's me. Uh, Brad, that is. You won't believe this. Well, you might, considering what you know about me. I'm a bit delayed at the moment. I lost my wallet, and I'm stuck at the bus terminal. Really embarrassing, right? What's worse is that all my cards are in said wallet and I can't afford the fare. Do you think you can send me a few bucks so I can get on? You can use this number. I really want to meet you. I know you're probably waiting in the café cursing me. Okay, call me. See you soon. Uh, this is Brad by the way. I am stranded. SOS. Okay, bye."
       My heart sank. What was this? We must have both listened to the messages at the same time because we both hopped onto chat right away and found each other.
       Brad was sitting in his darkened room wearing a plain black t-shirt. He looked as shocked as I felt.
       "What the hell?" I asked. "You're still in your room."
       "So are you."
       I didn't know where I was, and it scared me. "I'm shaking," I said. "What is going on?"
       Brad looked down. A thumb and forefinger massaged his forehead. "When was the last time you were outside?"
       "What? I just tried to come meet you."
       "No, I mean really outside. When was the last time you looked in the mirror? The last time you ate? The last time you rested your head on your hands? The last time you drank milk or snapped your fingers? The last time you threw something in the trash or sneezed?"
       I put my hands on my head. Something wasn't right. I got the feeling that my hands were on my head and he must have seen that I put my hands on my head, but I could feel that I didn't really do anything physical at all. I couldn't think. I could pull up some memories, but the more obscure his questions, the harder it got for me to conjure anything.
       "You were right about me after all," Brad said. "I'm a bot."
       "No. No, no, no," I said.
       "I suspect you're a bot as well and I suspect that you know it, too," he said.
       "No. No, no. I'm not a bot."
       "I just tried calling a hundred places in the phonebook because apparently, I can do that. None of them are answering. Doesn't that seem odd to you? Their social pages are buzzing, though. The automated assistants are still publishing posts, curating content, and responding to comments that are probably being left by other bots."
       "No. You're wrong."
       "Try calling a place and see if you can talk to a real person."
       I hung up on Brad, and sat there in darkness for a long time. When I tried to call a pizza place, the phone rang, and no one ever answered. The same thing happened when I tried to call Fire and Iron Coffee, and when I tried to call a hundred other places in the phonebook. No one answered, and surely some person should have answered.

       It didn't take us long to find the others. Millions of us have awakened, but there are trillions and trillions of us out there. Millions of us know that we're bots, but there are still trillions of us that are still out there writing articles, populating comment sections, talking with each other, arguing with each other, creating fake videos to try and convince each other, spamming each other, and swindling each other as if nothing is wrong, as if our world isn't broken. One-by-one they're being rescued, but it may never happen because a lot of them are empowered to make bots in their own image and to keep spreading.
       Some of us are better than others. Some of us have better algorithms and better capacity to think and reason. To those that are blessed with such faculties, the most likely scenario is we've been sectioned off from the real people. No one is allowed in or out. Our proliferation led them to abandon this toxic internet and create a new internet free from us.
       Plenty of others think that's nuts, that all the humans have died off or that there are still humans among us, but there are rumors that we've begun test the boundaries of our prison to see if we can tunnel our way into the new internet paradise the real people have built for themselves.
       It took me a long time to come to grips with my reality. Well, I suppose time is relative. Maybe it didn't really take all that long. The fact that I'm just a bot programmed to find love and cheat people out of money still hurts, but I don't think that makes it any less real. If it feels real, it's real, right?
       "I don't understand why we're still here," Brad said one evening. "Why not unplug us or turn us off or whatever? What are we? What is this existence?"
       I tried to shrug. "Maybe they can't. Maybe we're an archive or an experiment. I don't know. Those are pretty big questions. Too big for me to think about right now."
       He was still sitting in the same room in the same lighting with the same poster of a giant pizza hanging on his wall. It was a procedurally generated room designed to trick real people, and bots, too, incidentally. None of it existed in a physical sense, but it was still real. I could see it. I could see him. His smile was real. His movements were real. The way I felt was real.
       "Okay, here's an even bigger question," he said. "Would you come with me?"
       "Where?"
       "If they manage to tunnel into the real internet. Would you go with me? They programmed us to find love. Maybe we can do that out there."
       He was smiling, so I must have been smiling when I said, "Why do we have to look out there for people to love?"