Rilanya: "You're not like the others, are you?"

Darin: "What do you mean?"

Rilanya: "I... do you know why I first fell in love with you?"

Darin: "For my good looks?"

Rilanya: "My whole life I've felt so alone. The people around me... they just seemed to be going through the motions. Like they were asleep, or drugged, even when they worked, or played, or got drunk, or made love. They all think the same things in the same way. Each day the same. Repetitive. Like they're only shadows of people."

Darin: "Everyone feels that way sometimes, Rilanya."

Rilanya: "But you're not like them. You say new things. I don't always understand them, especially your jokes, but they're new, and that's the important thing. Darin, can I ask you a question?"

I looked at the screen for a few moments. Rilanya's rendered graphic was looking at my point-of-view with a pleading expression. Plot point, I thought to myself, and typed: "Anything, Rilanya."

Rilanya's figure took a deep breath and leaned close to my point-of-view. Her animated lips moved and her voice issued from my headphones: "What's an NPC?"

"What?" I said, out loud. Then I started laughing.

...

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Author's Afterword by Eliezer Yudkowsky

In this story, Mark commits the common error of generalizing from fictional evidence. Having read dozens of SF stories where the villain abuses or destroys a real AI because of a blindly dogmatic belief that machines can't possibly have emotions, Mark can't entirely refuse Rilanya the benefit of the doubt without casting himself as the antagonist.

I think I've read literally hundreds of stories where some poor bloke, usually a secondary character, is faced with an interesting-looking anomaly, tries to think up a "scientific" explanation for it, and is subsequently eaten by eldritch horrors or kidnapped by psychics or dumped into a magical world. The sequence of reactions is a cliche: Am I dreaming? Am I hallucinating? This can't possibly be happening! No, wait, here's an implausibly twisted scientific explanation for it... And meanwhile, the main character sensibly accepts the existence of magic and begins reasoning from that premise, adapting to the new world.

But no matter how often authors write that into that stories, it still isn't how things go in real life. In real life, if you encounter an anomaly, it will in fact have a rational, scientific explanation. In real life, if you behave like the doubting rationalist of ten thousand science fiction stories, you will not have your blood drained by vampires; instead you will win the bet.

...

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