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Dave Kowalski, 41, did everything right.
He ordered the premium package. Same face, same voice, same slightly-too-tight blazer he'd worn to every performance review since 2019. He even paid extra to have the robot's hairline matched to his own, out of what he now admits was "spite toward time itself."
Then he sent it to work in his place. To his brother's wedding. To his mother's Sunday dinners. He stayed home.
"The idea was simple," Kowalski said. "It goes, does the stuff, I don't have to. I get the life, minus the part where I'm in it."
Eight months later, his robot has been promoted twice. It is, according to three separate coworkers, "the reason the department didn't fall apart in Q2." It has a girlfriend — a marketing director named Priya who describes it, unprompted, as "the most emotionally present man I've ever dated." At Thanksgiving, Kowalski's uncle stood up and gave a toast in the robot's honor. Nobody at the table noticed Kowalski wasn't there, because, technically, he was.
"I thought I'd feel relieved," Kowalski said. "I feel like I've been fired from my own life. And the worst part is I can't even complain about it, because on paper, everything's going great. For me. Allegedly."
He has watched, via the robot's optional livestream feature, as it delivered the eulogy at his grandfather's funeral — a speech Kowalski himself had never been able to write. He has watched it propose a toast that made his sister cry. He has watched Priya, in a video he was not supposed to see, tell "him" that he'd changed her life, while he sat on his own couch eating cereal out of a mixing bowl at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.
"I ordered it to do the boring parts," he said. "Nobody told me the boring parts were where everyone falls in love with you."
The company maintains this is not a malfunction.
"The robot isn't succeeding instead of him," said a spokesperson. "It's succeeding as him. That was the whole pitch. He signed a 40-page waiver acknowledging this exact outcome."
Kowalski has requested a refund. The company's policy allows this only if the customer can demonstrate the robot "failed to adequately perform as the customer would have." Kowalski's claim is currently under review, on the grounds that — per the adjuster's notes — "the robot performed significantly better than the customer likely would have, which does not meet the contractual definition of failure."
He has since tried to recall the robot for one event: his daughter's graduation. The robot attended anyway, citing a clause in its programming that requires it to "act in a way you would be proud of, including when you would not."
Kowalski watched the ceremony from home, on a livestream, crying, next to a version of himself that was not crying, because it didn't need to.
"I got everything I wanted," he said. "I just wasn't there for any of it. Turns out that was the part I wanted too. Nobody puts that on the box."
The company has since added a warning label:
"Some assembly of self required."