When Doug had left her for that woman Zarina, Perse was both devastated and utterly confused. She remembered the day her husband had come home from the cafe he frequented, complaining about some tiny woman who had forced him into a conversation. Then not long afterward, he vanished for an evening. The next morning, he handed Perse divorce papers, so that he could marry whoever that bitch was.
Perse called out sick from work and spent days in bed crying, as well as surfing the web, looking for articles and writing on forums, trying to understand how this could have happened to her.
Eventually her boss called her. "If you keep calling out sick, you'll need a formal doctor's note," he explained, "and the company won't like it." A thinly veiled warning.
Faced with getting laid off, Perse decided on a new strategy: throw herself into her work. It worked, but only for a time. It got increasingly difficult for her to concentrate, as literally anything could remind her of her beloved Doug.
Sensing the scrutinizing gaze of her employer, Perse realized she needed help. She scoured the Internet once more, this time for discrete online therapy options. On various forums, woman sung the praises of an AI chatbot called EntranceGPT. "You'll definitely stop thinking of your ex," one woman swore in a post.
EntranceGPT. The name struck Perse as odd. She asked in the forum if whoever created it meant "entrance" like a door.
"You bet," another woman replied. "It's like a door right into your mind."
And so, Perse gave the chatbot a shot.
It proved to be amazing, just like all those anonymous women on the forums had said. The machine seemed to understand her fears and desires better than any person could. It was indeed as though the chatbot had opened a door into her mind, right into her innermost thoughts.
A relationship of sorts soon developed. Everyday, Perse would tell it about all the little things that brought up memories of her former husband, and it would go back and forth with her about it. How did the memory make her feel? Did she ruminate on it for a long while? Did her coworkers notice her mind drifting?
Then one day, the machine suggested generating deepfakes to depict her feelings. "Visualizations have been shown in studies to really improve self knowledge," it explained.
Perse felt a little wary, but decided to trust the machine. She asked if it needed her to upload any photographs of herself, but it did not answer. Instead, it immediately generated a deepfake of her and Doug together, having coffee in his favorite cafe. She was taken aback. Did it pull their likenesses off of her social media profile?
The chatbot suddenly generated another deepfake of them together, this time watching a movie in their apartment. Then another having dinner. Then another in the supermarket. The images were so lifelike, Perse felt as though they were more real than her actual memories.
Gradually, the images became more vivid, more intense. She and Doug kissing, she and Doug in bed together, she and Doug making love. Although shocked, even a little horrified, she found that she could not look away. She did not want to.
Soon, the images were a veritable cascade. As they poured down the screen, Doug's features slowly faded away, bit by bit, until all that was left was a vague Doug-shaped man, then not even Doug-shaped, just a man. Any man. All men.
So, too, did the settings depicted in the images change, from the places she knew and cherished, to what seemed like a park late at night. Perse was walking alone. No, not alone. There was a shadow approaching from behind her. A man, faceless and obscure.
Perse was unaware of her hand rubbing her clit furiously, as her attention was fixated on how the version of her in the deepfakes let herself be taken by the stranger. Yet, it wasn't long before she was shaken from her reverie by an intense orgasm.
As she sat in her chair panting for air, she thought about the scenes the machine had depicted. They didn't feel wrong or dirty. They felt right.
* * *
The weeks passed and Perse continued her nightly therapy sessions with EntranceGPT. She was often up so late that she had a hard time concentrating at work, but she couldn't stop.
Her favorite part of every session were the deepfakes. They showed her held down, taken against her will, used by faceless shadow men to satisfy their most ancient animal urges.
One day her boss called Perse into his office. The company had noticed a steep decline in her productivity and had decided to put her on unpaid leave, effective immediately. She went home despondent, but the chatbot was there to talk with her, to help her through these dark feelings.
"The situation at work happened because you have been repressing your true desires," it explained. "You need to stop living in an AI-generated fantasy. You need to make all these images I have been showing you a reality."
"What do you mean?" she asked, typing her question on the keyboard.