Jin had determined that the girl he was talking to was not human. There was no telling, just the overall vibe of the interaction. Her tag said her name was Tara Lim and that she was a designer with one of those fast fashion outfits, but all that could be made up. Easily faked. And Jin was starting to suspect it was faked. These bots were all given backstories, but they fell apart if you started digging, and Jin had spent the past ten minutes digging. Tara Lim kept bringing up neutral topics, from the big acquisition that was all anyone cared about to the intricacies of marine ecology in the Straits of Malacca. But she clammed up anytime he pried into her personal life or childhood. It was like talking to a charming, very articulate Wikipedia article. Plus, she was oddly smooth at this. The makers of intelligences had gotten very good at mimicking human conversation, but they had failed to account for the weaknesses of the human psyche. They’d forgotten that making small talk with strangers at an underlit, overproduced press party is one of the most awkward situations known to mankind. 

Tousle, the virtual experiences company, was hosting this event. They were expanding the scope of their business and they wanted everyone to know. Oskar had spotted him this invite, very last-minute: Hey, you free this evening? Got an extra pass for the company meet & greet. Somebody dropped out. No obligations, just come to have fun. Food + drink included. Interested? Jin said yes because he had nothing on, why not? Right now Oskar was on the other side of the room, in full work mode, gesticulating with great enthusiasm between two important-looking people. He looked good in any lighting. Hair always neat, clothes hanging off him in the right ways. At university, Oskar was lord of the kingdom that was their weekend, and everybody in the friend group fell in line with his plans. These days he had a three-bedroom on the top floor of a glass-wrapped apartment complex, equipped with a personal gallery of paintings and curiously-shaped furniture. Jin had visited a handful of times, invited by Oskar for one of his home-cooked, three-course feasts. Guests perched on cream-colored couches while he detailed how well things were going at the new job. Oskar double-majored in artificial intelligence as well as comms, so he truly understood the work he was gushing on about. It helped in the recruitment process, he said. Jin watched Oskar for clues while half-listening to Tara Lim. There were prizes for correctly identifying all the intelligences in the room, and staff were the only ones who knew the answer. Jin didn’t care about prizes—what was he, a schoolkid?—but he did like figuring things out, pulling puzzles apart. He liked being the guy in the room who caught on before anybody else. 

Tara Lim finished a recital about sand wars affecting the prices of silicon production. He leaned as close to her as the rules allowed. “So you majored in fashion design? Where? In Berlin?”

Tara Lim frowned. “Listen. Why do you keep asking me these invasive questions?” 

“Why do you keep avoiding the answers?”

She blinked and drew back. Scanned him in a quick flicker, methodical. “Oh. I get it.” 

“Get what?”

“I see what you’re doing. You’re really serious about the game, aren’t you?” 

“Aren’t you? That’s why we’re all here.”

She shook her head and scoffed. “Nice talking to you. Thanks for the vote in my lack of humanity, I guess.” She picked her drink off the table and walked away, vanishing into the pumping gloom of the party. Not once did she look back. Jin, left abandoned, tried to come to a verdict. That jolt of rudeness at the end, the arrogance, put her in the “probably not” category. Assholishness was a human trait. It wasn’t profitable enough to be developed for AI. 

What a drag, he thought, cutting across the room. The odds were unfairly stacked against him. Tousle had rented a hotel ballroom, decking it with garish sculptures and wreaths of Mylar letters emblazoned with Tousle branding, a lurid pink T on a green background. Balloon animals in hammered metal. That sort of thing. The night’s theme, “Imitations of Life”, was the kind of insipid, uninspired tagline he could see Oskar liking. Upon arrival, each attendee had been gifted Tousle’s latest digital eye mask, a snug fit over the face that projected an AR layer over normal vision. Tousle claimed the experience was so seamless, you couldn’t tell a virtual object from a real one. That was the night’s challenge: if you could identify the six intelligences among the crowd of hundreds, you won a prize. Cash, too, none of that silly swag or a trip to the Bahamas. Cash appealed to everybody. Not Jin, though. He planned to generously give the money to charity when he won. On his phone was a bespoke app to submit guesses to Tousle. So far, he had two. Making good progress. He had an advantage: half the attendees were media and he already knew them, so he could count them out. All he had to do was to talk to strangers. 

Jin waded through the room, scanning for opportunity. Attendees clustered around the stalks of cocktail tables, each one haloed by a bright tab of bios & CVs. Nobody touched. A Tousle-pink circle jutted from each figure, their personal no-go zone. Jin had one too, glowing in the periphery of his AR layer. Part of the night’s gimmick. Until Tousle figured out how to give its AI a physical presence, this would have to do. It wouldn’t be long, he figured. Robotics technology made ridiculous strides each day. But until then: no touching. That would be cheating. He’d seen one guy escorted out by security for crossing the line. Sorry bastard. Couldn’t be him.

He ducked and dove through the partygoers, an albatross soaring over schools of tuna. He was in his element, seeking out the most likely targets. They met his eyes, or didn’t, or were stepping politely away from other conversations when he caught them. He could tell within minutes, usually—humans had a blandness to them that couldn’t be quantified, but something about intelligences always stood out. There was a girl who smiled too much, and one who didn’t smile at all. Number five he identified because she changed topics randomly, and reacted blankly when he asked her what her most treasured childhood memory was. “I’m sorry,” she said after a while. “It’s just, I don’t know what to say.” Jin laughed and walked away. Too easy. Too easy!

Five out of the six bots found. Jin was feeling confident. He had this. No one else seemed to be taking the night’s theme remotely seriously. He could see them, making empty small talk and throwing out one or two vague guesses. They were missing out. He headed towards the free bar at the back. All that talk had made him thirsty. 

The barista made him a thematically appropriate pink-and-green cocktail which matched her hair. It tasted overwhelmingly of peach and apple, sickly and sweet. As he forced himself to take another swallow, he noticed the group at the nearest table looking at him. A quick scan: no one he recognized. Strangers. Intrigued, he wandered over. 

“Hello,” he said to the woman who had been showing him the most interest. She had giant hoop earrings and leaned against the table like it was a bar. 

“I’m not one of them,” she said. She was laughing, as if at a joke he wasn’t privy to. 

“What?”

She gestured loosely around the table. “We’ve been chronicling your adventures for the past half hour. You’ve talked to a lot of people but only ones you don’t know. You’re ex-media, right?”

“Okay, Sherlock Holmes.” He glanced at her particulars. Her name was Chitra Menon and she worked in finance. His senses were already tingling. “How did you know that?” 

“Alicia recognizes you.” She pointed to a girl on her left, who waved meekly at Jin. 

He squinted at her tag. Alicia Pan. Alicia Pan, Alicia Pan… Did he know an Alicia Pan? Her face seemed vaguely familiar but not enough for him to identify. He’d known a dozen office girls who looked like her, generically pretty with the same sort of hair and copy-paste outfits from those store counter fashion mags. The tag identified her as Tousle staff. Had he met her at one of Oskar’s gatherings? 

“I used to work at C-lover,” she said, naming the old ad agency. “I was with Customer Relations. You don’t remember me.” 

He did not. Maybe they had passed each other by in the corridor between meeting rooms. A vague memory stirred of someone who could have been her.

“It’s okay. I was only there for three months before you were… before you left.”

He saw her dance around the topic and it irritated him. His redundancy was not his fault—they all knew that. The agency downsized. Every department got cut. “Did they let you go as well?” He gestured to her tab, her current place of employment. “You’re not there anymore.” 

“Oh no. Tousle headhunted me.” She sounded almost apologetic. “What about you? What are you doing now?” 

“Oh. You know. Freelancing. Doing my own thing.” 

“Good, good.”

The chat irritated him. He already knew Alicia, and worse still, she knew him. This felt like a waste of time and energy.

“So how’s your hunt going?” Chitra Menon asked, cutting in. “Found all six intelligences yet?” 

He folded his arms. “I wouldn’t tell you if I did, would I?”

Laughter around the table, as though he’d told a joke. “You don’t have to tell me. I know you haven’t,” Chitra said. 

“Oh? Really?” He looked at Alicia. “Have you been feeding her info?” 

“Dude, nobody cares,” said one of the girls at the table, but Alicia shook her head. 

Chitra Menon pointed. “Have you spoken to that guy yet?”

She was gesturing at a tall man in a silver suit a few meters away. He had not. “I’ll get to him eventually.” 

“What about that guy? Or that one?” 

His interrogator flicked her finger, business-like, and a great unease crept up the back of his neck. Chitra Menon seemed to have formed a thesis about him that he didn’t like, but he wasn’t sure what it was. He had a sense of being toyed with, a prey animal in the mouth of a cat. “We’re not having a normal conversation,” he said, as if that would bump her onto a more casual track.

“Come on. You know. There’s a reason you haven’t talked to them.” 

“What?” 

He felt the interaction slipping away from him. All this time he’d been hacking his way through the party, she had been watching him, tracking who he’d been talking to. All that effort for someone she didn’t know. 

“It seems you have a pattern,” she said. 

“Of course I do.” She was good at pattern recognition, was she? “I have to optimize my search. And it’s working really well. So I’m having a good time, thanks.” 

She smirked. “Because only women can be bots, right? Men have to be human.” 

“What?” 

Chitra Menon laughed. “You only talked to women and not men. Like, we’ve been watching you. It’s not even subtle.” 

This was ridiculous. “Most of the people I know here are men,” he said. “That’s how it shook out.” 

“Okay. Okay.” She laughed into her drink. 

Jin’s cheeks burned, and the room seemed to tilt. But wait. Something clicked. This was like the kids’ game they used to play, taught by counselors at school camp. Someone in the group was secretly mafia, or a werewolf, or The Thing, from the movie The Thing. If it was you, you had to accuse someone else of being the outsider, and convince the rest of the group to kill them or kick them out. That was what Chitra Menon was doing. She was trying to make him look suspicious, to deflect suspicion from herself. Jin, latching on to this sudden thought, felt the tension leave him. He knew what this was. He wasn’t stupid. 

He looked at Alicia. Pointed at Chitra Menon. “Don’t worry. I get it. I’m not offended. You did a good job.”

Alicia shrugged helplessly, feigning ignorance. Chitra Menon continued laughing. “You’re really fucking serious. Oh my god. Oh my god.” 

A small commotion: who should arrive at the table but Tara Lim from earlier. Tara Lim whom he was now absolutely sure, deep in his gut, was a real human person, not a fake. She saw him and scowled. “What’s this creep doing here?” 

“Excuse me?” Jin said. 

“You won’t believe this,” Chitra Menon said. “He came up because he didn’t recognize us. And you know what? You were right about him.”

“What did I tell you?” Tara Lim said. She shook her head, as if disappointed.

“Are you friends?” He gestured between them. “Do you know each other?”

“No,” Tara Lim said, stiffly. “We just met.” 

“We’re friends now,” Chitra Menon said. “Strange what you can do when you treat other people like they’re people.” 

So they didn’t know one another outside the confines of this party. Tara Lim had walked over after leaving Jin and started a conversation without knowing who the other person really was. That only solidified his hypothesis. “Did you know that she’s a bot?” He pointed at Chitra Menon. “You’ve been talking to a bot this whole time.” 

Chitra Menon let out a short shriek of laughter. “Wow,” Tara Lim muttered.  

How could she not see? It burned him in the stomach that she was so stupid, so absolutely oblivious. What did he have to do to convince her? “She’s not human,” he said. 

“Jesus Christ,” said Tara Lim. 

“I can prove it,” Jin said and, in one sudden movement, lunged past the pink circle protecting Chitra Menon to grab her wrist.

A shrill alarm went off. His hand had closed around skin, flesh, and bone as solid as his own. Chitra Menon jerked her arm back. “What the fuck?” 

Everyone around the table was staring. Alicia Pan’s jaw had dropped slightly open, giving her the air of a surprised goldfish. Jin stepped back, hands held up, his heart suddenly loud in his chest. “Okay, I was wrong. My bad, my bad.” 

“You’re a piece of work,” Chitra Menon said, while Tara repeated, “Jesus Christ.” 

“Sorry,” Jin said. He’d fucked up—he knew he had. They were going to throw him out now. What would Oskar think? He had been so sure he was right. “You had me convinced.” 

“What was your game plan?” Tara Lim asked. “Even if she wasn’t real? You just forfeited. Trying to touch is against the rules.”

“I was trying to show you,” he said. He hated how thin and whiny his voice sounded in his ears. Whatever had happened here, it was her fault, and it was him who would be punished for it. If she hadn’t been so difficult. If he hadn’t been so rash. But he had been so sure.

A security guard tapped him on the shoulder from behind. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Good riddance,” said Chitra Menon.

“It was a misunderstanding,” said Jin. “I didn’t mean it.”

Tara Lim rolled her eyes. “Sure you didn’t.”

“C’mon, man,” Jin pleaded, hoping for leniency. “Just this one time.”

The guard just stared at him, unyielding. There was nothing he could do. Jin was led along the walk of shame, straight through the middle of the tables. He felt every eye on him, dumping pity and schadenfreude on the sorry bastard being escorted out. It reminded him of the day they led him out of C-lover with his pens and desk scraps in a box, stared at with disgust by those he’d considered co-workers and friends, but were no more than strangers in the end. He wondered if Oskar would come swooping in to tap the guard on the shoulder and say, sorry, it’s a misunderstanding, he’s with me. But it didn’t happen. Maybe Oskar would simply stop texting and calling. All his old colleagues did.

At the door of the ballroom the guard said, “You’ll have to return the eye mask,” and stood expectantly waiting for it. Jin, delaying the inevitable, looked over his shoulder. Across the party hall he saw Oskar at last, an upright and enviable figure, in conversation with Tara Lim and Chitra Menon at their table. Doing damage control, maybe. It occurred to him, suddenly, that his initial instincts about Tara Lim might be right, and he would find out for sure when he removed the eye mask. 

“I don’t want to have to ask twice,” said the guard. 

Jin shut his eyes and pulled the mask off. Cold air rushed across his face, as if he’d forgotten what the real world felt like. Light seemed brighter and colder without the artificial layer over it. He tried looking backwards to see if he could still see Tara Lim, but he was already being ushered out of the door.