A Single Purchase

Shame welled up from the pit of his stomach, but Ivan couldn’t very well back out now. By this point, he was tired of living alone and just the presence of someone, or something, was enough for him.

“'Read the terms and conditions before accepting’…it’s so long…” he grimaced at the endless pages of boring text. He scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page and checked the small box accepting the terms and conditions.

The company had to know no one would read that. Who would want to spend their afternoon reading a novel's worth of company jargon?

He glanced at the top of the screen where the company name was. It read— “AUGCORP”, one of, if not, the biggest tech company in the world. Only they would be able to accomplish something as big as this. Ivan had been pondering buying it for a while but waited for the reviews before dumping four-thousand dollars into the pockets of that corporation.

With Valentine’s Day quickly approaching, he had grown tired of seeing the many couples around the street frolicking and rubbing their relationships on the faces of people like himself. He could never get away from it, no matter where he went there was some couple or Valentine’s advertisement following after him.

In reality, it was probably just the time of the year that was making him so hyper-aware of all the couples around, although there really wasn’t much he could do about the advertisements.

Either way, as he reached the point to put his debit card in, he hoped that this would at least alleviate the pain deep in his heart.

Finally, he pressed purchase.

Thanks For Your Purchase! The website wrote in big text on the center of the screen. Small confetti blasted out of the window before disappearing as it reached the bottom of the screen.

He pressed the continue button under the confirmation text prompting another window with a download to a driver and program.

After all that was done, he opened the icon with a circle on it and launched the program. The icon disappeared after a few seconds, but nothing else happened.

Just as he was about to search the internet for answers, a small arrow appeared above the volume icon at the bottom right of his screen. He hesitantly clicked on it and quickly realized that his volume was completely off.

Ivan usually left the volume muted just in case. The last thing he wanted was something he watched to blast at full volume, especially in this apartment.

“Right, I probably need the volume on, huh.”

The arrow symbol turned to a thumbs-up symbol immediately sparking his curiosity.

He turned the volume to fifty percent and was surprised by a sudden voice—

“Hello, can you hear me?”

Ivan opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

He had been separated from the rest of society for so long that even hearing a voice directed at him was enough for him to freeze on the spot. His palms were starting to sweat as he opened and closed his mouth.

“I’m guessing by your expression that you can. Hello!”

The voice was one of a woman which only made it much worse. He had read the reviews saying that it’s extremely lifelike, so much so that you could barely hear that it's not human and eventually you wouldn’t be able to tell at all. They really weren’t lying.

“H-Hel—hi,” he eventually let out.

“It’s nice to meet you! Before we start though, we should probably set your preferences. Like I am now, I don’t even have a name! It would be hard to talk to me like that.”

The computer opened a window with two starting options: Visual or voice-only.

Obviously, he picked visual.

“Alright! This is where you will set all my characteristics, you can be as creative as you want. There’s a lot of options!”

The screen presented to him was enormous. It had every bit of customizability he could imagine for visual appearance. Then there were pages upon pages of personality settings.

As luck would have it, Ivan had never been good at customizing things. Even in RPGs, he would press the “randomize” button and just go with that. In this case though, that felt like a waste. He could meticulously go through all the settings but that felt like it would take a long time plus he had no idea what to make her look like.

I guess I’ll go with that, he finally settled on something.

“Thank you for completing the setup! I will now reset to fill in all the parameters you’ve selected. Please wait a moment.”

With a small ding, the program shut down, restarting a few moments after.

A full-screen program opened revealing nothing but white. Ivan was seconds away from opening task manager to shut it down, but a small orb appearing on the screen stopped him.

It expanded and shrunk multiple times, but eventually, it started to take a humanoid shape. Then with an explosion of red, green, and blue, the character he had created appeared on the screen.

The character had long blue and white hair with two feather clips attached to either side of her head. She wore a dark blue steampunk Victorian military dress and carried a sword on her hip with a white scabbard. Her sharp features made her look like some sort of commanding officer, while her black eyes gave off a similar menacing aura.

As embarrassing as Ivan felt it was, he had based the character on a VTuber that’d graduated a few years ago. She was a wonderful girl that carried herself with pride but ultimately had a soft side to her. The very face of a tsundere.

He didn’t have much money at the time, so he wasn’t able to get any of her merch or even donate in any way. Ultimately, she left before he was able to get a stable income.

He, along with her fans, never got a clear answer to why she left, but many had tried to figure it out. In the end, the search was fruitless, not even finding out who the person behind the avatar was. Probably for the best.

“Nice to meet you,” the figure said, “I’m Jae and will be your partner for time to come.” She bowed in a professional manner.

Ivan stood there speechless, his eyes wide. He had imagined how it would be like to see the program in action but to see it was something else. There was something about her movements and speech that sounded so...real.

The model glowered after waiting for a minute for him to answer back, “What, are you just gonna stand there? Are you trying to mimic a statue or something?”

She was perfect.

“S-Sorry,” he finally said, “I’m…I’m Ivan. Ivan Reimer.”

The model pulled out a notepad from her breast pocket and wrote done his name before stuffing it back in. As a virtual entity, there was probably no real need to write it down, but it added to the experience, so he didn’t complain.

“Alright, we can finally go somewhere with this,” she stomped her foot once before placing a hand on the hilt of her sword. “As I see, you have ordered me to ‘do as I please’.” She said what he had written under the special commands section of the customization section.

“Y-Yeah…”

“…what exactly does that constitute?”

“…I mean…like…whatever…I guess.” Ivan’s conversation abilities were unsurprisingly just as bad as they had always been.

“That is some of the most useless explanations I have ever heard.” She grimaced.

Ivan hung his head, embarrassed at his response.

Jae sighed before loosening her stance. She scratched her head as she said: “Look, I see that your nervous, so I won’t try to force you to say anything, but as an AI, I don’t really have anything I necessarily want to do. I follow what you want me to do, or would you prefer for me to activate the default options?” her warm tone was a complete contrast to her more militaristic persona.

Ivan nodded.

“Right, okay, from here on I will look after as much as I can including your eating habits, sleep schedule, and a few other stuff, okay?”

He nodded once more.

Adding on to his pile of embarrassment, the fact that an AI had to have pity on him was really just the cherry on top. As long as they acted anything like a human, the timid side of him would shine through anything else.

With whatever was left of his pride shattered, he defeatedly limped towards his couch and sat down. He pulled out his phone and looked at the time.

“You could’ve just asked me what the time was,” Jae said as she suddenly appeared on the phone’s screen.

“W-What? How did you?”

“Both that computer and this phone are from AUGCORP, so they are already connected to each other. I simply accessed that connection so I can travel between devices.” Her matter-of-fact attitude was only enhanced by the sharp glare that she carried.

“I see,” Ivan said as he thought about how awkward it would be to search things up while she’s around.

“Right, I can also search up anything in the web for you. As long as you keep it to an appropriate level!” she quickly interjected, “Anyway, I could also bring things up that you’ve searched before like…hm…you don’t seem to have a browsing history…”

Ivan’s eyes shot open, and he looked off to the window to his right.

Yep, it was going to be very weird to keep searching for things he usually did. Still, this was going to be the beginning of him not being alone anymore…at least to some extent...

He timidly smiled at the thought.