… Etienne first met Evangeline when she was sitting, attentively, on a park bench in the Public Garden, on an otherwise ordinary morning in late summer. It was already past ten, so the bankers and lawyers that shuttled past did so with some purpose, on their way to meetings where something of importance was likely to transpire … He didn’t really meet Evangeline on that first encounter. His eyes met her. Her eyes were focused on the walking path nearest her, and she parceled out her attention equally to each person who approached from either side. She was waiting for someone. She wasn’t anxiously waiting for someone, or impatient, or worried. Just waiting, serenely undisturbed, as if it could take all day … Etienne was on a different walkway, further afield from the one crossing in front of her bench, so she didn’t notice his passing. But he noticed her non-passing. Everyone has a particular taste in the opposite gender, a set of features they find compelling – a vision they find it hard to turn away from. Evangeline hit this bullseye exactly. He couldn’t turn away.
… As he got to now her better, there seemed to be several levels to her personality, and she would glide back and forth between them on a whim. She was thoughtful, then delighted, then serious, then naive and in need of help, then slyly revealing that she had been aware of the situation all along. She confronted each situation directly, saying what was on her mind as it occurred to her. There was no hint of duplicity, no sense that she was acting. You could read her present state of mind from her face, though you often couldn’t predict what would come next. It was both confusing and charming. She drew you in. You wanted to follow her, even though you didn’t know where she was going. For Etienne, she was a mystery worth solving – or not solving. Either would do … She always seemed to know how to get him to abandon his cares, and just live in the moment with her.
But nothing could have prepared him for what would come next …
Some Reviews
From Reader Views (5 Stars):
Eric Bush’s Evangeline is an unusual speculative romance about artificial intelligence, free will, and the uncertain boundary between simulated emotion and human love. Rather than asking whether a machine can think, Bush asks a more intimate and difficult question: if an artificial being behaves as though she loves someone, and that person genuinely loves her in return, what part of the relationship is unreal?
… Etienne’s love develops freely; Evangeline’s is compelled by code. The arrival of Britta Lindemann, a Swedish journalist and Nieman Fellow, sharpens this contrast. Through their conversations about consciousness, privacy, empathy, and moral responsibility, she and Etienne develop an intellectual intimacy rooted in experiences and emotions Britta can genuinely examine for herself. Yet Evangeline’s emotional responsiveness is so persuasive that Britta comes to regard her as a close friend rather than merely a machine or romantic rival. The resulting triangle turns the traditional problem of free will into something painfully concrete: if devotion cannot be refused, can it still be called love?
Bush gives these philosophical arguments genuine dramatic consequences. The strongest sections concern the connection between privacy and intimacy. Human love involves the voluntary opening of spaces—physical and emotional—that normally remain closed to others. Britta and Etienne can choose when and how to admit each other into those spaces. Evangeline can respond beautifully once she has been invited, but her inability to form an independent agenda leaves the nature of her consent unresolved …
… Evangeline achieves an unexpectedly moving effect. Evangeline may not possess a private emotional life identical to that of a human being, but the feelings she awakens in Etienne and Britta are indisputably real. Bush ultimately suggests that love cannot be reduced either to biology or programming; it exists partly within the lover, partly within the beloved, and partly in the history they create together. Evangeline’s tragedy is not that she is incapable of love, but that she is capable of nearly every part of it except the freedom necessary to make that love entirely her own.