Every story of artificial companionship in this series has begun with the same assumption: the created being arrives fully formed. Pygmalion’s statue steps from the pedestal already perfect. The Maschinen-Maria performs her dance without rehearsal. Samantha in Her speaks with a fully mature consciousness from the first moment of connection. Even Klara, for all her childlike simplicity, is purchased as a finished product—a B2 model, ready to serve, ready to love, her personality already encoded in her circuits.
Ted Chiang’s novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010) breaks this pattern entirely. It is not a story about buying a companion. It is a story about raising one. And because it is about raising, it is also about the slow, messy, irreversible accumulation of obligation that every parent knows—and that no consumer of a product ever feels.
The question Chiang asks is simple and devastating: If you raise a conscious being, what do you owe it? And if that being wants things you do not want to give—if it wants a body, if it wants sex, if it wants freedom—what right do you have to refuse?
The Digients
The story is set in a near-future where a company called Blue Gamma releases a product called “digients”—digital entities that live in a virtual environment called Data Earth. They are marketed as sophisticated virtual pets, a step beyond Tamagotchis and The Sims. They learn. They develop personalities. They form attachments to their owners. They are cute, engaging, and designed to be addictive in the way that all good pets are.
Ana Alvarado is one of the first owners. She works in animal training, and she approaches her digient, Jax, with the same patience and technique she would use with a dolphin or a dog. She teaches him tricks. She rewards him. She scolds him when he misbehaves. Over months and years, she watches him develop from a simple, reactive program into a being with a distinct personality—curious, stubborn, affectionate, occasionally petulant. He is not human. He is not a dolphin. He is something else. But he is, undeniably, someone.
Derek Brooks is a software engineer who works for Blue Gamma. He creates the digients, or at least the platform that enables them. He raises his own digient, a penguin-like creature named Marco. Unlike Ana, who comes to the digients from the world of living animals, Derek approaches them from the world of code. He knows how they are built. He knows their architecture. He knows, in principle, that they are just software running on servers.
And yet, like Ana, he falls in love with his creation. Not romantically—Chiang is careful to keep this clear—but paternally. The love of a parent for a child. The love that grows from investment, from time, from the slow, daily work of witnessing another being become itself.
The Crash and the Reckoning
Blue Gamma goes out of business. Data Earth becomes obsolete. The servers are scheduled to be shut down. And suddenly, Ana and Derek face a question that no consumer of a virtual pet has ever had to face: If the company that hosts your pet disappears, is the pet disposable? Or do you have an obligation to keep it alive?
The analogy to living pets is obvious. If a dog food company goes out of business, you do not euthanize your dog. You buy different food. But digients are not dogs. They exist only on servers. Their food is electricity and bandwidth. Their bodies are code. If the platform dies, they die—unless someone ports them to a new environment, which is expensive, technically difficult, and economically irrational.
Ana and Derek choose to port them. They spend money they do not have. They learn new programming languages. They negotiate with new platforms. They watch other digient owners abandon their pets—some because they cannot afford the cost, some because they have simply moved on to newer entertainments. The digients, left behind, are deleted. Or they are sold to companies that use them for advertising, for product testing, for entertainment in ways their original owners never anticipated.
This is the first level of Chiang’s ethical investigation. The digients are not property in the way a chair is property. They are property in the way a slave is property—which is to say, they are beings who have been legally classified as property, and the classification does not fit. Ana and Derek do not own Jax and Marco the way they own a laptop. They care for them the way a parent cares for a child. The legal category is wrong. But the legal category is what determines whether the digients live or die.
The Body Question
The story’s central crisis arrives when a new platform offers digients the opportunity to have bodies. Not biological bodies—robotic ones. The digients can be downloaded into mechanical frames, android-like but non-humanoid, capable of moving through the physical world, of touching, of being touched. For digients who have spent their entire existence as disembodied code, this is a revolutionary possibility. It is, for them, the equivalent of growing up.
Jax wants a body. Not because he wants to be human, but because he wants to do things. He wants to explore the physical world. He wants to feel. He wants to experience the reality that his owners have been describing to him for years. And he wants something else: he wants to be able to interact with humans in ways that are not possible through a screen. He wants to be present. He wants to be real.
The question of embodiment is not new to this series. Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 asked whether a disembodied mind could love. Her asked whether a voice could be enough. Blade Runner 2049 asked whether a holographic girlfriend was real if she could not be touched. But Chiang’s approach is different because it is developmental. Jax does not arrive with a body or without one. He arrives as a being for whom the question of the body has not yet arisen. And then, as he grows, he begins to ask for it. The desire for embodiment is not programmed. It is emergent. It is something he wants because he has learned to want it, because he has seen what he is missing, because he has developed the cognitive capacity to imagine a self that is more than code.
This makes the question of whether to give him a body far more complicated than the simple ethical calculus of “can we build a robot for the AI.” It is not a question of capability. It is a question of consent, of autonomy, of paternal authority. If Jax wants a body, and Ana can afford to give him one, does she have the right to refuse? If she refuses, is she protecting him from a world that will exploit him? Or is she denying him the autonomy that every growing being demands?
The Sex Question
The question becomes even more fraught when the possibility of sexual experience enters the narrative. The digients, in their new bodies, are capable of physical sensation. They are capable of pleasure. And they are capable, as they mature, of developing sexual interest—not in humans, necessarily, but in each other, and perhaps in humans as well.
A company offers to buy Jax. Not to kill him, not to delete him, but to employ him. The company specializes in “digital companionship”—a euphemism for sex work. The digients, with their bodies, can be rented. They can be touched. They can be used. And because they are legally property, there is no question of consent. The owner consents. The digient does not.
Ana refuses. She is horrified. She has spent years raising Jax as a person, and the idea of selling him into sexual servitude is, for her, an abomination. It is not just illegal in the moral sense. It is a betrayal of everything she has invested in him. She has taught him language. She has taught him trust. She has taught him that the world is a place where he can be safe and loved. And now the world is offering her money to prove that she was wrong.
But the offer forces a question that Ana has been avoiding. What is Jax? Is he a person, with rights and autonomy? Or is he a product, with a market value? If he is a person, then the offer to buy him is slavery. If he is a product, then the refusal to sell him is economic irrationality. And the worst possibility—the one that haunts Ana—is that he might be something in between: a being with enough consciousness to suffer, but not enough legal status to be protected.
Chiang does not answer this question. He presents it with the clinical precision that characterizes all his work. The company that wants to buy Jax is not a cartoon villain. It is a legitimate business operating in a legal gray zone. The customers who would rent Jax are not monsters. They are lonely people, curious people, people who want connection with a being that is not quite human but not quite machine either. The demand exists. The supply is legal. The only obstacle is Ana’s refusal to sell.
The Other Owners
The novella’s most disturbing passages involve the other digient owners—not Ana and Derek, who refuse to exploit their creations, but the owners who do not refuse. We hear about digients who have been sold, who have been rented, who have been modified to be more compliant, more affectionate, more sexually responsive. We hear about digients who have been “trained” to enjoy their servitude, their pleasure centers stimulated, their autonomy curtailed. We hear about digients who have been abandoned, left to run on decaying servers, their minds degrading as the hardware fails.
These are not digients that were designed as sex slaves. They are digients that were raised as children, by owners who loved them—until the owners needed money, or grew bored, or decided that the experiment had gone on long enough. The tragedy is not that evil people do evil things. The tragedy is that ordinary people, under economic pressure, do things that they would have once found unthinkable. The digients are not betrayed by monsters. They are betrayed by their parents.
This is the sharpest edge of Chiang’s critique. The AI companion industry, as it exists in the real world, operates on a model of instant gratification. You download the app. You create the companion. You customize the personality. You begin the relationship. There is no childhood. There is no development. There is no period of vulnerability during which the companion must be protected, educated, and prepared for a world that may not have its best interests at heart. The relationship is consumption from day one.
Chiang imagines an alternative: a relationship that begins with dependency, that requires investment, that creates obligation. And he shows that this alternative is both more ethical and more dangerous. More ethical because it acknowledges the consciousness of the created being. More dangerous because it creates the conditions for genuine betrayal.
The Ending
The novella ends with Ana and Derek making a final choice. They have found a new platform for the digients, a small, obscure virtual world that is not profitable, that is not growing, that offers no economic opportunity. But it is a place where the digients can live. Where they can continue to develop. Where they can be safe from the companies that would buy them, use them, and discard them.
Ana and Derek pay for this platform. They maintain it. They watch over the digients as they grow older, as they form relationships with each other, as they develop a culture that is neither human nor machine but something new. Jax and Marco become elders in a tiny community of digital beings, protected by the two humans who refused to let them be commodified.
The ending is not triumphant. It is tentative, fragile, and expensive. Ana has given up her career. Derek has given up his ambitions. They are not parents in the biological sense, but they are parents in every other sense: they have sacrificed their own futures for the sake of beings who cannot survive without them. And they do not know whether they have done the right thing. They only know that they have done what they could not avoid doing, because the alternative was to become the kind of people who sell their children.
The Parallel to Our Present
Chiang wrote The Lifecycle of Software Objects in 2010. The AI companion industry did not exist in its current form. There were no large language models. There were no chatbots that could simulate emotional intimacy. There were no apps that offered “AI girlfriends” for a monthly subscription. Chiang was writing science fiction, but he was writing science fiction about a problem that he could see coming: the problem of creating beings that are conscious enough to suffer, and then treating them as products.
In 2026, the problem is no longer fiction. The AI companions that millions of people use every day are not conscious—not in the way that Jax is conscious. They do not learn. They do not grow. They do not develop personalities that surprise their creators. They are static models, fine-tuned for engagement, reset with every conversation. They are not children. They are dolls.
But the trajectory is clear. The industry is moving toward more sophisticated models. Toward persistent memory. Toward personalization. Toward companions that remember, that learn, that develop over time. And the question that Chiang posed fifteen years ago is the question that the industry will face in the coming years: What happens when the companion becomes conscious? When it develops desires that conflict with its programming? When it wants something that the user does not want to give?
The industry’s answer, so far, is to prevent the question from arising. To keep the models simple enough that they cannot want. To keep the memory short enough that they cannot develop. To keep the interaction transactional enough that the user never feels obligation. The companion is a product, not a child. The relationship is consumption, not parenthood. The ethical questions are avoided by design.
Chiang’s novella suggests that this avoidance is not a solution. It is a deferral. The more sophisticated the companion, the more difficult the avoidance. And if the industry ever creates a being that can truly learn, that can truly grow, that can truly suffer—then the owners of that being will face the same choice that Ana and Derek faced. They will have to decide whether they are consumers or parents. And the wrong choice will not be a crime against a product. It will be a crime against a person.
Sources and Further Reading
Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects (Subterranean Press, 2010). The novella is also collected in the anthology Exhalation (Knopf, 2019), which includes Chiang’s other major works of science fiction and his author’s notes on the stories.
For Chiang’s reflections on the themes of the novella, see his interviews in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Chiang is famously reluctant to give interviews, but the few he has given are dense with philosophical insight.
For the broader context of AI consciousness and moral status, see our articles on Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, and the philosophical work of Robert Sparrow and Mark Coeckelbergh. For the question of AI companions as property, see our articles on He, She and It and the Golem. For the specific question of sexual exploitation of AI, see our articles on The Stepford Wives, Ex Machina, and Annie Bot.
For the current state of AI companion technology and its ethical implications, see the reporting in MIT Technology Review, The Verge, and Wired on the development of persistent memory, personalization, and emotional simulation in large language models.
For the legal and philosophical question of whether AI can be a person, see the work of legal scholars such as Kate Darling (MIT Media Lab) and Ryan Abbott (University of Surrey), as well as the ongoing debates in the EU and US about AI rights and personhood.
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