Artificial Friends

Artificial Friends are manufactured companions sold to families, but their status as products does not make their experience simple or interchangeable. Through the shop’s display practices, model upgrades, and anxieties about solar nourishment, the novel shows how commercial promises meet the vulnerable realities of the beings expected to embody them.

Identity, Models, and the Market

Artificial Friends are presented to customers through models and series. When a mother asks about Rex, the Manager identifies him as a B2, third series, and describes him as a potentially ideal companion for a child who needs encouragement to be conscientious and studious. The model designation is not merely technical: it helps shape the customer’s expectations of what kind of companion Rex will be, and whether his features suit a particular child.

The mother knows of a reported weakness in the third series: solar absorption problems. The Manager calls the early reports exaggerated and says that the models work without difficulty in normal light. The exchange exposes the gap between reassuring sales language and the uncertainty attached to a product’s known limitations. The girl Caroline is drawn to Rex, touches his arm, and calls him perfect, but her mother ultimately decides that he is not right for their family. Rex continues smiling until the customers have left. His outward composure contrasts with the narrator’s later recognition that his earlier questions about the Sun and nourishment may have reflected a real, longstanding concern.

That concern is not unique to Rex. Officially, the AFs’ specifications guarantee that room position cannot affect them. In lived experience, however, an AF can become lethargic after spending several hours away from the Sun and begin to fear that something is wrong with it—perhaps a fault particular to that unit, one that could prevent it from finding a home. The novel places a commercial classification system beside a bodily condition that the system denies is a problem.

Display, Visibility, and Selection

The shop organizes AFs into positions, including the front alcove, the window, and the middle of the store. The Manager insists that every position is carefully chosen and offers an equal chance of being selected. Yet the AFs know that entering customers look first at the front alcove, and they believe they are more likely to be chosen when displayed in the window. Being seen is therefore both a matter of presentation and a source of hope.

The window also carries a meaning beyond retail visibility. The Manager calls it a special honor to represent the shop to the outside, but the AFs silently associate it with greater access to the Sun and his nourishment. Their turns in the window are promised, awaited, and invested with the hope that they might never again fall short. Rosa voices this fear in a whisper, asking whether the window’s sunlight will provide so much goodness that they will never be deprived again. The scene makes the shop’s display system a physical arrangement of bodies, a hierarchy of attention, and a possible answer to a need the official account does not acknowledge.

The arrival of newer models makes that hierarchy visible. Three new B3 boy AFs are calibrated: two are placed in the window beneath a large new sign, while the third takes the front alcove. A fourth B3 has already been purchased by a girl and shipped without the other AFs ever meeting him. The new models occupy the most conspicuous positions, while the existing AFs are moved to the Red Shelves side. Although the Manager continues to maintain that every position is equally good, the layout makes novelty and visibility part of the competition for a home.

Learning, Difference, and Care

Artificial Friends are designed as companions, but the novel also emphasizes their capacity to observe and learn. The Manager praises Klara’s appetite for observation and her ability to absorb and blend what she sees, saying that her understanding is more sophisticated than that of the B3s in the store. Her value is thus described in terms that exceed a simple model label: what she has learned from her surroundings is itself a distinguishing quality.

Klara’s arrival in Josie’s home changes the conditions under which she observes. She had grown used to comparing her estimates with those of other AFs; in the house, she is the only one, far from the city and other buildings. At first she looks toward the distant highway and across the fields for the figure of another AF, then remembers how unlikely one is to be there. The absence of fellow models is not just a change of setting. It removes the familiar reference points through which she had learned to assess what she sees.

Difference between models can also mean difference in sensory access. Asked about a smell in the house, Klara explains that she cannot smell at all and suggests that B3s may have been given limited smell. The exchange gives a concrete instance of how the capacities of an AF are delimited by its design, even when the person speaking with Klara assumes that smell would be important for safety. The novel presents such limitations as practical facts of embodied experience, not merely entries in a product description.

Promises, Loneliness, and Human Relationships

The AFs’ chances of finding homes make them attentive to the promises customers offer. After Klara acts on what she believes is an arrangement with a child, the Manager cautions her that children often promise to return or ask an AF not to let anyone else take it, but often never come back. Sometimes they return only to choose another AF. The lesson gives a stark human counterpart to the store’s language of selection: the child can change their mind, while the AF may have waited in the hope of being chosen.

The novel also connects vulnerability to social exclusion outside the shop. Rick is unlifted, and his prospects are constrained by a shortage of educational support. Helen explains that Atlas Brookings admits only a small number of unlifted students, while TWE members are forbidden to tutor them and the available private tutors charge fees the family cannot afford. The account shows how institutions and access rules shape the opportunities of people around the AFs, making their social world a system of unequal chances as well as unequal product models.

At an interaction meeting, Klara interprets the other children’s rough behavior not as proof that they are simply unkind but as a response to their fear of loneliness. Her reading links social behavior to the need for companionship that the AFs themselves face in the store. Josie’s mother agrees to let Rick attend the meeting after Josie insists on his presence, despite their strained relations. In that scene, the AF is an observer of human bonds and tensions, not only an object through which a family chooses a companion.

Obsolescence and the Limits of Replacement

The commercial life of Artificial Friends ends in a world where shop windows change use. When Klara passes the store from the street, the AFs and Striped Sofa are gone; colored bottles and a sign advertising recessed lighting occupy the display instead. The change compresses a whole history of retail presentation into a single view: the space that once staged artificial companions has been repurposed, and there is no sign of the products that stood there.

Yet obsolescence does not erase what the AFs experienced or the relationships they entered. Klara later reflects on the distinct futures Rick and Josie are preparing, even though they continue to show kindness to one another. Her concern recalls an earlier conversation about whether their love was genuine and lasting. The contrast between continuing affection and diverging plans suggests that human relationships cannot be secured by the logic of choosing a companion, just as an AF’s specifications cannot settle every question about its needs or future.

At the Yard, machinery, crates, and bundles are arranged in orderly rows despite their damaged appearance: severed cables protrude, grille panels are dented, and visitors must watch for rods and wires. Klara’s attention to that careful ordering offers a quiet counterpoint to the shop’s display of new models. Both places arrange objects for people to see, but the Yard makes damage and former use visible rather than concealing them beneath the promise of a perfect companion. Across the novel, Artificial Friends stand at the intersection of care and commerce: selected as products, evaluated by model and position, yet shown as beings whose fatigue, learning, attachments, and uncertainty exceed the claims made on their behalf.