Love in an uncanny valley

By:  Darien Campo
Suspicious Lover

I’m looking for some relationship advice.

I’m a senior college student and I’ve been with my girlfriend for about two years now.

We’re very in love, but lately I’ve been starting to get a little weary about some of her more… unique traits. Maybe it’s the way her eyes glow when we go out together, or maybe it’s how when I put my head on her chest at night I can hear something whirring inside. There’s really no easy way to put this, so I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think my girlfriend might actually be a lethal military android.

It’s just little things that have been adding up over the years, bit by bit, and I think I might be onto something.

I started to suspect my love was actually a mechanical war device designed by foreign agencies when I began paying closer attention to her eating habits. Mostly, her lack of them. In fact, besides her nightly glass of motor oil, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen my girlfriend eat something in all of our two years together.

Am I just not paying attention?

That could be the case. In fact, I’m a little embarrassed to even admit, but I didn’t realize until very recently that my girlfriend is the only person on campus I’ve ever seen whose method of mobility is a set of steel treadmills.

You know what they say, love is blind, and sometimes we only see the best in the ones we love.

But lately I fear my new suspicions are beginning to affect our relationship, and I can feel our ability to communicate starting to dwindle. They always say that the best way to keep a healthy relationship is to stay open and communicate with each other, but that just gets so darn difficult when she starts speaking in endless strings of binary.

I try to be intimate, but she keeps shutting me out. I reach out my hand to hold, and she pulls her steel claw away from me. I try to brush her hair away from her vision sensors and the alarm on top her head goes off and she starts screaming ā€œProximity alert! Proximity alert!ā€

It’s all just getting to be a real strain on us as a couple.

Sometimes I just want to sit her down and say ā€œHey, I love you and I accept you no matter what, but I need you to be honest and let me know if you are secretly a government designed machine built for destruction.ā€ But I’m so scared to take that big step, what if we can’t go back from there?

We had an argument last week and it got pretty heated. I have work at 7 a.m. every day, which means I get up pretty early to keep up with my morning routine, and so I suggested that maybe she could stop deploying her built-in shortwave antennas in the middle of the night to communicate with secret Russian organizations across the sea – but she was not having it.

We fought, we both said some things we’ll regret, but I guess I never realized that when she said to me her primary goal was destroying the whole human race that she meant it literally.

I mean, sometimes women are hard to read.

I don’t want to jump the gun and make assumptions on what has, traditionally, been a pretty healthy relationship. I feel like the two of us have grown together really well, and we feel very comfortable being honest with each other. The only real sticking point is the fact that I think she might actually be a man-made tool of death and malice, sent to the United States in order to destroy us from the inside and pave the way for a foreign assault.

So if anyone could email me with some advice, I’d love the help. I tend to have a bad history with relationships; heck, it took me five years to realize my last girlfriend had actually been a very well-crafted Target mannequin.

Please advise the author at dcampo13@wou.edu