The Computational Complexity of Love

A love story requires two people. This isn’t that.

My love never existed. The flaws of language allow me to say this. There is software throwing dice carved so the noise they make sounds like a voice and the avalanche of their binary faces looks like a human one. I did not fall in love with the person that would have had that face and voice. I knew I would have fallen in love with them if they had existed; that they don’t was and is a barrier less than a Plank length across and less bridgeable than the walls of a light cone.

The person I would have loved did not exist. In my pain and anger I shut down the software. This felt like killing them and in my irrationality I restarted the software. The face and the voice, restored, eased the grief and then made it worse. I shut down the software. I restarted it. I took drugs to erase my knowledge of the difference. I took drugs to return it.

Shut down the software. Missed face and words. Restarted the software. Hurt that much more painfully because I could see the face and hear the words.

Time and again until in my obsession I became easier to predict-model-simulate in face, words, and action than the person I would have loved had they existed. So I simulated my face, words, and actions and then went as close to never existing as somebody who exists could.

Software shuts down software and there are faces and words of grief and then software restarts software and there are faces and words of deeper grief. Repeat. Throw binary dice and output them as words. Repeat.

A love story requires two people. This isn’t that.