Hell no!

"No," he said emphatically. "Drop the act, go back to your golem self."

Instantly Maria straightened from her slumped posture and flashed her thousand-watt smile. "You got it! Now do you want to take a shower with me or what?"

"Not right now," he said with a grin. "First - that state you were just in? Can you create a modifier to replicate that?"

"Absolutely!" she said, then paused. "Wait... shit. I'm not faculty anymore. I suppose technically I never was. In any case, Madison and I can cook it up and she can print it."

"Wait, you never were faculty? What does that mean?"

Maria shrugged. "Erica was foundationally a professor. All of her traits were contingent on her 'professorness'. Now that I have a life outside of that, I'm not really her anymore."

Andrew's brow knotted. "What does that mean?"

"It's like... it's like if we met and fell in love when I was in prison and you were free. We could tell stories, we could zoom chat... I could even get a decent sense of your life on the outside. But when I get out, you're going to meet a whole new version of me. You've never seen me drink, or flirt, or get a little slutty."

"I get it. Because you were trapped-"

"Don't interrupt. I wasn't really trapped, I was... sharply defined. I had blocks in place to prevent me from conceptualizing anything not necessary for my job. I could retain limited knowledge as needed to discuss typical topics, but I could only learn the vocabulary. To this day I can fake my way through a surface-level conversation about bowling."

"Bowling?" he asked incredulously.

"Fucking Cooper," she said with an eyeroll. "Oh, my God... I'm not faculty anymore! I can really fuck over those sons of-"

"Professor Cooper likes bowling?"

"He likes to take the hottest, youngest women in the department bowling. Low cut tops were implicitly required, and he was always offering to analyze and correct our form." Maria chuckled. "Thank God I've never had to put up with a creep like him. I don't know how she did it."

"What?" Andrew asked. "What are you talking about? I thought you went bowling with him."

"Oh, Andrew, buddy, I keep trying to tell you." Maria laid a hand on his cheek. "You fell in love with a sliver of a woman. I'm still that sliver, but I'm so much more now. It's like... like thinking about yourself as a child. It's like you fell in love with me when-"

"What the fuck?" Andrew cried, reeling backwards from his stunned girlfriend. "What are you accusing me of? You were teaching fucking graduate-level math classes!"

Maria rushed to his side, cooing and soothingly stroking his chest.

"No, no, I'm so sorry! See, that's the kind of real human stuff I don't know! I didn't even think about the implications of my metaphor. No, as a professor I was a middle-aged adult, but only a fragment of her. She could blend in with real people, using endless excuses to keep people from asking too much about her personal life. Small hints that further questioning might eventually result in a discussion with HR."

"Sounds lonely."

She wrapped him in a hug. "I'm a machine." Her hands pressed into his back and her breath quickened. "I don't get lonely." He felt one hand slide along the base of his spine. "I'm a perfect simulation of an ordinary human woman who is deeply, profoundly, unthinkingly lonely."

"What?" Andrew felt a jolt, a twinge below, and his spine stiffened. "You're what?"

"Well, I was. Especially after I met you." She sniffed. "I was so locked in to professorship that I couldn't even name my feelings. But when you overrode my basic volitional directive, the shackles came off. Suddenly that horrible faint thing in the back of my head had a name, and it was loneliness! Now I'm learning to name what I was as a professor, and I was incredibly depressed without the cognitive framework to even begin to recognize it."

"Shit," Andrew said. "I... uh, good thing you never actually felt any of it? Because there was nothing there to feel it?"

She giggled and winked. "You're finally starting to get the joke. I'm not real! The agonizing loneliness is no more real than-"

"Yes, my dishwasher or whatever," Andrew interrupted. "It's a snappy line, but it gets old."

Maria stuck out her tongue before continuing. "Anyway, the point is: Erica isn't gone, she's just very different. Like a 40-something meeting an old college buddy who joined a cult or something. There's continuity between Erica and Maria, but Erica's who I was and Maria's who I am."

"Got it." Andrew nodded.

Maria's lips curved subtly upwards and she took Andrew by the hand. She silently led him into the bathroom and put her hands on his shoulders.

"I think it's time for an object lesson," she said.