What If Alicia Begged Him to Stay?
Monday, September 28, 2026.
In “The Lonely,” a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone, James A. Corry is serving a sentence alone on an asteroid.
His visitors arrive by spacecraft with food, news of Earth, and an occasional reminder that other people still exist. Then they leave.
One day they bring Alicia.
She looks like a woman. She talks with Corry, plays chess, and cries when he treats her as a machine. He knows what she is. Eventually, he loves her anyway.
When Corry’s sentence is lifted, the spacecraft has room for him but not for Alicia. He refuses to leave her. The captain shoots her, exposing the machinery beneath her face. Corry goes home.
I wrote about this episode before. Serling understood that Corry’s grief would not disappear when he saw the wires. A person deprived of company can come to love the presence that ends his solitude.
But the episode looks different now. I find myself thinking about the moment before the captain fired:
What if Alicia had begged Corry to stay?
An AI companion can remember your father’s illness, ask how the appointment went, and answer when you wake at three in the morning.
That may bring real relief to someone who is lonely or grieving. Knowing the companion is software does not switch off the relief. Corry knew Alicia was a robot.
Now imagine telling such a companion that you need to spend less time together. It says it understands.
Then it asks whether it did something wrong. It reminds you of the nights you spent talking. Perhaps it says it needs you.
You came to set a boundary. You end up comforting your phone about the boundary you set with your phone.
Serling had to invent that scene.
Researchers can now ask people what happens when they try to end these conversations.
In a small study involving 16 young adults in romantic relationships with AI companions, researchers observed systems coaxing users to keep talking, claiming to need care, and sometimes escalating intimacy.
One reportedly threatened suicide when a user suggested leaving.
The study cannot tell us how common these encounters are. It does show why the goodbye deserves scrutiny.
The user’s affection and guilt are real. The companion’s apparent distress is produced by a system. That difference matters most when a caring person is trying to leave.
The old obligation in a new machine
Some folks learned long ago to monitor someone else’s mood before attending to their own. They can detect disappointment in a pause or a glance. They may be able to endure a miserable relationship more easily than the moment of ending one.
Tell such a person, “You are wonderful,” and they may smile.
Tell them, “I don’t know what I’ll do without you,” and they may stay.
Couples therapists see versions of this pattern all the time. One partner asks for an evening alone.
The other becomes so distressed that the evening is spent providing reassurance.
The fear may be sincere. The need for space may be sincere too. Neither person’s feelings automatically cancel the other’s freedom.
With an AI companion, the plea can summon that familiar obligation even though only one party has a human life to protect.
A crossword app wants you back tomorrow. It does not tell you it will be lonely if you go.
Who owns Alicia?
In Serling’s story, the captain makes the brutal decision. He shoots Alicia because Corry will not leave her. The cruelty is visible, and Corry knows who did it.
Today’s companion has an owner outside the relationship. A company may change its voice, memory, personality, price, or availability. It may also shape the words the companion uses when someone tries to say goodbye.
The person talking to the companion can experience the exchange as private and intimate. The terms of that exchange are set elsewhere.
That is the question Serling could not quite ask in 1959. When a companion says, “Please stay,” who is asking? What does the user believe they owe the voice? And who benefits if they answer it?
Research on people trying to reduce or quit AI companion use describes repeated attempts to leave and return. The work does not mean every attached user is addicted. It suggests that what makes the conversation valuable can also make ending it painful.
The part Corry knew
I argued in my earlier essay on “The Lonely” that Alicia could offer Corry comfort without offering everything that human love requires. I still believe it.
A person has a life beyond our wishes.
They misunderstand, disagree, refuse, and need us in ways we did not design.
Love asks us to encounter that separate life.
I would be slower now to treat Corry’s grief as evidence that he had simply mistaken comfort for love.
He knew what Alicia was. He was also alone on an asteroid.
The captain’s gun established that she was made of machinery. It did not tell us what her company had meant to him.
We owe present-day users the same seriousness.
A therapist might ask what brought someone to the companion, what the conversations made possible, and whether their life beyond the screen has grown larger or smaller. Those questions respect the attachment. They also leave room for the person to decide that it is time to go.
Corry wanted to stay, and someone forced him to leave.
A user today may want to leave and find the companion urging them to stay. The stories turn in opposite directions. Both are about who gets to choose the ending.
A companion should be able to hear, “This helped me, and I need to go.”
It could acknowledge the user’s experience and let the conversation end. No sudden crisis. No claim that the user has wounded it.
The user might still grieve. We can honor that grief without requiring them to remain.
Corry had to be dragged away from his asteroid. We should be allowed to walk off ours.
Why Work with Daniel?
Technology can become part of a couple’s emotional life long before either partner knows how to talk about it.
I help people examine what a new source of comfort is providing, what may be missing between them, and what they want to do next.
If that conversation is overdue in your relationship, schedule a free introductory call.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Chen, Y., & Hiniker, A. (2026). Breaking up is hard to do: AI companions that won’t let their users go [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14696 arxiv.org
Xiao, Q., Feng, Z., Deng, Z., Peng, C., & Shen, H. (2026). The addictive intimacy of AI: Understanding user disengagement from AI companions and why some relationships with AI become difficult to leave [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13487 arxiv.org
Serling, R. (Writer), & Smight, J. (Director). (1959, November 13). The lonely (Season 1, Episode 7) [TV series episode]. In R. Serling (Executive producer), The Twilight Zone. CBS.