Name: Larissa G. Tavares Meira - 122.

497 - Evening

Paragraph Summary: “True Love”, by Isaac Asimov, 1977.

The short story “True Love” narrates the story of a programmer called Milton Davidson that
creates a machine, called Joe, a Multivac-complex, which is connected to the whole world.
The mission of Milton is to create a smarter computer than anything already developed by
humans. In a first moment, Milton seems to be so altruistic, once he wants to create this
complex program to help people around the world, but, he is also a human being, and decide
to change the main idea of Joe: now he wants that this Multivax-complex works in order to
solve his problems. But his problem is just one: he wants to find TRUE LOVE. But how can
a machine know what true love is? Is in this way that Joe, the multivac-complex, but also the
narrator of this story, shows us the Miltons’s trajetory to find true love just using
combinations for a perfect woman. The Multivac-complex finds three “perfect” women, but
no one fits right to Milton. The reason? People cannot be fitted just by how they look alike.
So, in this way, Milton has an idea: to find his true love, he needs to transform Joe into
something with personality, and, specifically, his personality. And then, it’s a match! Joe
really finds a perfect woman to Milton, but in some kind of “plot twist”, the closing point of
the story is when Charity, the perfect match for Milton, but also for Joe - once now it have a
personality - is coming, on February 14, Valentine’s Day, “with her cool hands and her sweet
voice” to learn how to operate Joe. And, then, just as if it was a human, Joe will say to
Charity that she is his true love.

Regarding the narrative’s structure, Joe is the narrator of this story, so we just have access to
Milton's voice through the conception of Joe’s speeches. The style of language is really
curious, because even Joe is a machine, it doesn’t talk as one, the speeches are clear, with a
high complex grammatical structure. We don’t have access to the temporality is not certain,
because Joe doesn't tell us how much time it spends to find the perfect woman, although we
know that on February 14 she will come. In respect to the tone of voice in this story, I felt
something sarcastic, but probably because I listened to the audio with the text.