Story: Apple of His Eye by K.I. Borrowman

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay, I'm growing a little tired!

But at least this time we have the following (slightly separated) pair of opening lines:

"Do you believe in magic? I certainly didn't, until last Wednesday." and "...Flat-screen TV the size of a swimming pool and full-on speaker array for gaming".

So this could be either quite modern, or even a couple years into the near-future. Good enough!

... and I'll just leave this one as a topic starter for now!

http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/ ... isEye.html

I was loving this story until the computer started to tell the girl's story. I don't care for heroines who throw their lives away for worthless geeks.

But the author won me back with the ambiguous ending. I like to believe it was just a hoax perpetrated by a lonely old bachelor. No "true" woman would do the former, but he would do the latter.

Pygmalion in reverse.

worthless geeks.

You mean like the people that deveop and maintain the technology that enables you to make
sich an remark? (OK, the story just says 'software job' and that is just one posibilty...)

II like to believe it was just a hoax perpetrated by a lonely old bachelor.

You got point there. Essentially all the input into the system was guided by the computer's owner,
who might have known the response of the system beforhand and have steered his guest towards providing fitting keywords.

On the other hand, the author really seems to push the idea that the system responses display unexpected intelligence -in my eyes even overdoing it - in that she has the guest muse about artificial intelligence when all the computer has done so fare is display an unusual prompt.

I don't care for heroines who throw their lives away for worthless geeks.

Throw away her life, indeed. But form whom or what? That so called wortheless geek is part of her considerations only in so far as what she wants from him. It's for herself, for her own wishes and needs that she acts, not for anyone else. And by possessing the computer she also seems to have destroyed his pet project (or mission in life). There might be some deep story here if at least one of these consequences hab been voluntary. But as is is neither her corporal death nor the destruction of her rival, the pet project did enter her considrations before she made any decision,
that is as long as she could have had any say in that matter. So what remains is doing something really stupid in order to gain someone's attention and accidentially dying.

[Lester Curtis]

As I see it, Randy (the POV narrator) was the only winner in this story; he got a practical bit of advice out of the encounter and followed it. The other two pretty much permanently condemned themselves by their poor choices. So, it had a good outcome for one of the three of them, which isn't bad.