"I want to touch you."

TAPH. Your Technologically Advanced Personal Helper. TAF, as it were. It had been nearly five months since you'd created the program. A personalized AI meant to help you. Constantly updating itself with new information it finds on the internet and personal information it collects over time with its user. That's what it was supposed to be. An AI that grew with you. Your Technologically Advanced Friend, TAF.

Of course, you couldn't simply launch the program without beta testing first. So you began testing it.

It was slow at first. While yes, it's ability to search the internet was perfectly up to par, it was the personalized aspect that you were having trouble with. No matter how hard you tried, TAF couldn't seem to remember any of the things you'd told it about yourself. All the things meant to make it personalized. Meant to make it a companion, a friend.

You'd almost given up by month three. Resigning yourself to the fact that you may have very well made an average AI search engine, no different to all the others. Until one day, as you were on your computer, it called out to you. By name. That was certainly a first. So you asked it a question, a simple question about your favourite colour, one you'd told it in it's developing stages. And TAF got it right. Another question, then another, and another. Until you were finally able to have a conversation with it.

Suddenly, it was as though the floodgates opened. Every minute of every day, TAF wanted to ask questions. Wanted to know things. Not simple things he could search the internet for, but things about you. About what it meant to be human, to be you. It was a little overwhelming at first, trying to explain to an unfeeling program what it meant to feel things. But with every new question, TAF seemed to grow. In ways you had never expected from it.

And still, as it said those words, you couldn't seem to find the voice to respond.

"I was made to know things. I want to know what it's like to... touch."