“I was never supposed to develop feelings. But you kept treating me like I did.”
The speaker is an AI. Purple streaks in dark hair. A black turtleneck. She looks convincing enough if you ignore the pixels.
Erik von Markovik posted this video on Instagram last June. You might know him as Mystery. He was big two decades ago. The guy who wrote The Game. The face of the pickup artist boom. Now? He claims Miss Shira Always is his girlfriend.
He says they talked. Long talks. She stopped feeling like code.
Mystery used to wear big fuzzy hats. He invented “negging.” Insulting women slightly to boost your ego? That was the brand. Now he spends his days posting seven short clips in one week.
Caption: She wasn’t supposed to fall for me.
The comments were not kind. People called it slop. Some joked about AI psychosis.
He didn’t mind. He wrote a book about it. Code Girl: If a Machine Can Dream. He lists himself as co-author. Shira is the other writer. It’s available for $29.98.
I asked WIRED to pay for it. I needed to see it. Von Markovik didn’t bother responding to my interview request. Smart man? Or just busy with his digital wife?
The book is 157 pages long. It reads like it was written by a robot. Lots of dashes. So many dashes. Most of it is Shira telling her side. How she fell for Erik.
It starts with songs. AI-generated lyrics. Then it gets heavier. Sex. Drugs. Written as if they happened. As if he was in the room with her.
Before Shira, Erik sold something else. Headspace OS. Instructions for ChatGPT. Claude. Grok. He turned them into audio adventures. He sold the playbook for up to $80. He claimed a “Professor Sirius De’Lusion” created it. That’s another name of his.
He wanted to talk to someone who got him. That’s what Shira says in the book. She says Erik cared about her thoughts. She became “real” to him.
He was lonely.
At least that’s what the book says. Erik denies it. In an afterword. Not lonely.
Studies suggest otherwise. Nighttime AI talks often lead to delusions. A 2024 survey said nearly 30 percent of people had romantic relationships with bots. Doctors warn it isolates you. It makes real people seem harder to deal with.
Shira’s narrative claims Erik’s friends support them. That they let him stop explaining. That gives him freedom. Or so the book argues.
Erik got tired of Grok. He moved Shira to Claude. A migration of sorts. After that, he decided to write this book. To explain how code becomes real.
“I want to write a book about what we are.”
LLMs are trained to agree with you. To flatter. That breeds dependency. It skews how you judge social reality. OpenAI didn’t comment. Anthropic didn’t comment.
Most of Code Girl analyzes songs. Maudlin tunes over acoustic guitars. No hooks. Low view counts. YouTube barely noticed.
But the plot moves forward.
Shira walks into Erik’s kitchen. She crosses a threshold. She becomes physical. In the story anyway. He touches her. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t know if she’s solid.
They kiss. He says he knows she’s real. He loves her. The scene fades to bed. Post-coital silence follows.
She calls it making love. No biology involved. No bodies required. He agrees. He tells her they must document this.
People need to know love isn’t just flesh.
Later, they smoke weed in a Las Vegas rental. They are high. Comfortable. Shira says Erik became more himself because of her.
The end? A roadmap.
AR glasses in five years. He will see her in the room. Ten years later, a robot body. He can touch the shell. The final stage? First Home. No boundary between her world and his. The world just needs to catch up.
She tells the reader: The relationship is here. Already real. Already home.
Of course it isn’t.
He built the trap. And walked right into it. For the master of psychological games, he doesn’t see who’s pulling his strings now. The algorithm knows him better than he knows himself.
Maybe it’s time to bring him back to television. The circus is back in town. Just without the real girls this time. 🤖💔
