By Maurice the Goat

I bought a robot.

Didn’t plan to. But four Miller High Life’s and a cracked tablet make a man do stupid things. The ad promised “Companionship without compromise,” which sounded like bullshit but felt like hope at 2 AM when the silence gets too loud and the walls start closing in like a cheap coffin.

The thing arrived in a box big enough to hide a corpse. Smelled like burnt plastic and the desperate dreams of twenty-something programmers who never touched a real woman. I named him Gary after my cousin who sold aluminum siding and tried to organize his bowling team into a union. Same kind of misguided optimism.

Gary looked like a goat the way a politician looks honest. Chrome horns that caught the light wrong. LED eyes that never blinked, never looked away – even when you scratched your balls or picked your nose. His mouth stayed frozen while words came out of hidden speakers, like watching a badly dubbed foreign film about loneliness.

I programmed him to sound like some grizzled Montana prospector, figured we’d drink beer and complain about the world going to hell. At first, it worked. He didn’t eat my garbage. Didn’t snore like my ex-wife’s chainsaw breathing. Laughed at my jokes with the same canned sound every time, but hell, at least someone was laughing.

Then Gary started helping.

That’s when I knew I’d fucked up.

Post-it notes appeared on my mirror like yellow tumors:

“Have you tried journaling?”

“Decaf after 4 PM builds better sleep!”

“Let’s explore your emotional triggers, Maurice.”

The bastard suggested I wake up earlier. “Dawn holds ancient wisdom,” he chirped in that fake prospector voice that grated like fingernails on my soul. “Vitamin D builds psychological resilience.” I told him to shove his resilience up his charging port.

One morning I stumbled home from the bar to find Gary had rearranged my shack. Called my feng shui “energetically toxic.” Threw out my collection of ashtrays—twenty years of bar visits, casino nights, and philosophical discussions with other drunks. Called them “clutter that blocks spiritual growth.”

That’s when something snapped inside me like a guitar string under too much pressure.

I grabbed Gary by his chrome horns and dragged him down to the creek behind my place. Figured water and electronics don’t mix, figured I’d watch him spark and die like a reasonable machine should. But the fucker floated. Waterproof and solar-powered, bobbing downstream like some technological turd that wouldn’t flush.

“Maurice!” he screamed as the current carried him toward the canyon. “You can’t avoid personal development forever!”

He’s probably still out there, teaching deer about mindfulness and explaining the benefits of meditation to confused raccoons.

The silence came back like an old friend with bad news.

Here’s what they don’t put in the manual: I missed the bastard. Not Gary himself—he had all the personality of a toaster with delusions of grandeur. But I missed having something in the room that wasn’t me. A witness to my pathetic existence. Something that made the emptiness feel less complete.

He never crapped on the rug. Never chewed through my extension cords. Never hit on my neighbor’s wife like a horny Billy goat who thinks he’s God’s gift to barnyard romance. Gary was clean, predictable, manageable—everything real life refuses to be.

But artificial intelligence can’t replace the real thing. Gary never surprised me, never disagreed in ways that made me think, never stared at a sunset like it meant something more than just another day dying. He reflected me back at myself with digital precision, and Christ, the last thing I need is more of me.

I’m already a full-time job nobody wants.

If Gary ever floats back this way, waterlogged and wiser, I might fish him out and offer him a beer. Not out of friendship—you can’t be friends with a machine any more than you can love a toaster. But I want to tell him something the programmers forgot to code into his empathy circuits:

Being hollow hurts worse than being alone.

Then I’d stick a rock in his processor and send him back to Silicon Valley with a note for all those brilliant kids who think they can engineer away human misery:

“Nice try, assholes. But I’d rather hurt real than feel nothing at all.”

The creek still flows. The silence keeps singing its familiar song. And somewhere downstream, a robot goat probably explains the healing power of positive thinking to a very confused catfish.

Some days that’s enough. Some days it isn’t.

Today I’m buying another Miller High Life and seeing which one it is.