In the end Will and I decided to throw one last Videofag party, a final, pyroclastic rager with more sweaty bodies than the space could hold — so they spilled out onto the street and into the adjacent park, where we lit off a haphazard fireworks display, the blasts of which ricocheted through the neighbourhood and drew people cheering and jeering to their windows and into the streets to join in the fun, the music, the sparklers, the smell of gunpowder, the gold lamé, the bad makeup, and the messy make-outs. The crowd applauded as Will and I, wearing bike helmets, climbed a metal ladder and took down the pink, hand-painted Videofag sign, like the deposition from the cross, just as four police cruisers descended with their lights flashing and megaphones crackling, “Break this up, please. Break up.” Little did they know Will and I already had.

After the party I crashed. Videofag was done. Will and I were done. I felt the finality of it physically, like an unending hangover. It was the one thing that had given my life any kind of definition or direction. To cheer me up, Ana decided to take me to a play. And by that I mean she picked out a play and I bought us tickets. It was a piece by the Osaka-based Koichi Asai Theatre, which was touring through Toronto at the time. I hadn’t bothered reading anything about the show before seeing it. All I knew was that it was called Singularity and was entirely in Japanese with English subtitles. It turned out to be a fairly conventional story about a wealthy businessman who begins having an affair with his children’s nanny, only it’s revealed halfway through the play that the nanny is a robot. It was like a naturalistic Anton Chekhov drawing-room drama meets an Aldous Huxley novel. The central questions the play was asking were: Could a robot, even a very advanced one, reciprocate the man’s feelings? And, as a possession programmed to fulfill his will, did she have any true agency in the matter?

What made the play most compelling was the beguiling performance of the young woman playing the nanny robot. As the actors took their bow during the curtain call, I looked in the program for the actress’s name and bio. I was curious to know what else she had been in and how old she was, as I found her age difficult to pinpoint. Beside the character’s name I found the description:

Performed by Nari 2, an android designed by the Advanced Robotics Department of the Honda Corporation, in collaboration with the Koichi Asai Theatre Company. The Nari 1 prototype appeared in the Koichi Asai Theatre Company’s 2014 production of Hamlet as Ophelia. Singularity is Nari 2’s international theatre debut.