Watson’s robot-courtship scheme

Watson’s robot-courtship scheme turns an overworked narrator’s wish to pursue Elaine into an experiment in duplicated identity: a custom android courts her while the narrator remains at work, and a concealed camera lets him observe the encounter. What begins as a solution to a shortage of time becomes a test of whether love can be delegated and scripted. The robot’s astonishing fidelity makes the scheme feel like one person gaining a second body; Elaine’s independent responses soon show why that apparent unity cannot make courtship fully controllable.

Impasse and the Commission

The scheme begins when the narrator reaches an impasse between competing demands on his time. In frustration, he strikes the desk with his fist and upsets an antique ashtray. Gordon Simms, one of his robot secretaries, enters to ask whether anything is wrong. Gordon’s presence does more than punctuate the outburst: as a working android, he makes the possibility of a second body newly visible to the narrator. Gordon belongs to Speny’s Deluxe Limited Personalized Series, is number twelve in a run of twenty-five, and is tall and thin, with a slight stoop and an appearance likened to Leslie Howard. Government-required stamps on his forehead and hands are the visible signs of his artificial nature. The sight of him prompts the narrator’s solution.

The narrator asks Gordon Simms who makes the best hand-crafted, individualized robots. Gordon names Snaithe of Greater New Newark without hesitation. The narrator finds Snaithe ordinarily larcenous, but hires him to build an android without government markings, identical to the narrator and capable of reproducing his behavior patterns. The narrator pays heavily for the commission, yet considers the expense acceptable: he has plenty of money and almost no time to spend. The scheme therefore answers a practical imbalance with a purchase, but its ambition exceeds ordinary delegation. The machine is meant not merely to perform tasks but to stand in for the narrator in a personal relationship.

Making a Second Self

The robot arrives at the narrator’s apartment by pneumo-express. He activates it and immediately begins preparing it for the assignment, transmitting relevant data directly from his computer to its memory tapes. He enters a courtship plan and runs the necessary tests; their results are better than he expected. The scheme is built from both technical preparation and behavioral imitation: the narrator supplies information, sets a plan, and checks its performance before trusting the android with Elaine.

On the evening of the test, the narrator calls Elaine and makes a date. He spends the remaining day on Spring market offers that have begun to pile up, then dispatches the robot at 8:00 pm. He names the android Charles II. While Charles II goes on the date, the narrator takes a brief nap and returns to work. This division of the evening gives the plan its initial appeal: the same hours can serve professional obligations and courtship, with the android acting where the narrator cannot be present.

Observation and Exact Imitation

Charles II returns promptly at midnight, as programmed. The narrator does not need to interrogate him, because Snaithe has installed a miniature concealed movie camera in the robot’s left eye. Through that recording, the narrator watches and listens to the beginning of the courtship, experiencing it with mixed emotions. The camera makes the arrangement more than substitution: the narrator can monitor the encounter afterward, turning the robot’s date into both a romantic proxy and a record for its human model.

The recording reveals how closely Charles II reproduces the narrator. The android clears its throat before speaking and rubs its forefinger against its thumb while thinking. These small habits make the likeness intimate and, at the same time, unfamiliar. The narrator notices that his own laugh comes unpleasantly close to a giggle; he decides to phase that and certain other annoying mannerisms out of both himself and Charles II. The copy thus becomes a mirror with practical consequences: watching the robot allows the narrator to inspect habits he had not previously noticed, then treat the duplicated body as an opportunity to revise them.

Efficiency Meets Courtship

Taken together, the first experiment pleases the narrator. He regards both his work and his courtship as proceeding with high efficiency, and understands the result as the achievement of an ancient dream: one ego served by two bodies. The arrangement offers an intoxicating kind of divided presence. The narrator can continue his commercial work while experiencing Elaine’s company vicariously through Charles II, and he describes those evenings as genuinely moving despite that distance.

The emotional record is not limited to a smooth, prearranged courtship. The narrator recalls a first quarrel with Elaine, her beauty and stubbornness, and the pleasure of their reconciliation afterward. But making up exposes the scheme’s central difficulty. Charles II has been programmed to proceed only to a discreet point of physical intimacy; the narrator had tried to specify where the encounter should stop. He learns that one person cannot plan every move in a courtship involving two autonomous beings, especially when the other participant is a woman. To preserve verisimilitude, he has to permit the robot greater intimacy than he had initially considered advisable. The adjustment marks a limit, not a collapse, of the scheme: the proxy can enact the narrator’s patterns, but Elaine’s presence makes courtship responsive to another person rather than obedient to a single script.