COMPANION

Upper Paleolithic carvers in Europe made small figures of animals and people from mammoth ivory from about forty thousand years ago. The Vogelherd set includes a cave lion, a bison, a horse, a bear, a mammoth, and a lion-man - a body with a human face on a lion's. At La Madeleine in France a bison carved from antler is caught mid-grooming, turning its head to lick its own side.

A species that has spent fifteen thousand years being selected partly for forming attachment to one particular ape.

The novel that turned its readers into a correspondent. Pamela Andrews writes home about her master's pursuit, and the reader takes the seat of the parents - receiving every letter, sending none. Published anonymously in November 1740, it became the first English best-seller and the first novel whose readers wrote back demanding more of it.

Diderot invented the wall in 1758 for the purpose of stopping the audience noticing. Every breach since - a wink, a clap, a lecture - is that convention failing on purpose, and it is the only time the far side admits you are there.

The painter stands in front of the figure he made and asks whether the man is really like it. He is. And it will never alter, which is the only thing about it anybody wanted.

A cartoon mouse with a licensed lunchbox, a walk-of-fame star and a park where you can meet him - the first character to be manufactured as an object and then put back in the room with you.

Street & Smith hired two men to sell a magazine on the radio. They invented a voice instead, and the listeners went asking newsdealers for the magazine that voice implied.

Fifty-four years of letters to a fictional detective, answered by an office that had chosen not to have a face.

A gorilla who feels affection for the woman offered to him, premiered to a city that had just had King Tut, was cut by censors, and did not get the missing scenes back until thirty-seven years later.

A named, described character with an air of reality, kept going by being referred to. Two-thirds of children have one, most of them invisible, and a quarter of those are unknown to their parents.

Two years of letters to a listener who could not answer, written by a thirteen-year-old who said out loud that she hoped the feeling was mutual.

Made to answer a four-year-old's fear of the dark, by a man who made a cardboard cutout and hung it in a tree. Two men then claimed to have invented him.

A woman's misfortune told aloud, a crowd's reaction converted into a number, and the number chose her.

The first television character to be answered by name. Children three to eight shouted its name back at the screen every afternoon for thirteen years, and the puppet it was played by was recorded before the broadcast.

A man nobody else can see kept drinking with him for years, and it worked because nobody in his life would say the sentence that ended it. It stops when two doctors who cannot see the rabbit go looking for him in it.

The most reproduced image in the horror canon - a man interred in his character's cape - is true, and the story that he chose it is false. His mother chose it.

A man on his sixty-ninth birthday plays a recording he made at thirty-nine, and has the conversation the tape cannot have back.

From 1962 Stan Lee ran fan mail in the back of The Fantastic Four and answered it in print in his own voice, so a reader could see their name answered on a page. The letters page became Marvel's institutional address to its readership, and its regular trophy, the No-Prize, was deliberately nothing.

A short pattern-matching script that reflects the user's words back with questions attached. Most people told it they understood, within minutes.

ELIZA, PARRY and Colby - three programs that convinced people they were listening.

Fred Rogers went national on public television on 19 February 1968 and spent thirty-three years talking, slowly, into the camera at children aged two to five. The show's offer is mutual in its own words - "Won't you be my neighbor?" - and its host insisted he was not acting a character, only sharing his real self. The bond was engineered, and returned by people who could not answer.

A conversational system about a small blocks world, capable of genuinely tracking a user's intentions. Famous for one demonstration and a broken follow-up.

The unsettling quality of a humanlike thing that is not human, and the narrow band where it is most compelling.

An alien with a kitchen and a family, performed by a man who refused for four years to say how. Children cried when it ended, and the character was invited to birthday parties.

Dozens of scripted personalities, rememberers, and subscription companions sold to a mass market in the mid-nineties.

Blue's Clues premiered in 1996 and built its method out of a pause: the host looks into the camera, asks the child a question, waits through a silence written into the script, and then behaves as though an answer arrived. Children answered anyway, watched the same episodes repeatedly, and the period's research recorded their interaction and comprehension rising with every repeat.

Two hours of a man telling you about his best friend. The friend does not exist, the man telling you does not know it, and you are being addressed by somebody who is also being lied to.

The 1990s extension to live people who respond in real time - streamers, hosts, people who read your comment. The bond is still fundamentally one-sided, but the other side can now hear you.

A persistent virtual world with avatars, economies, and relationships between people who never met.

Roughly half a billion phone numbers become dialable, a fan can in principle hear a recorded voice, and the novelty ringtone sells the idea that a performer can be present in a pocket for about four years.

A voice assistant on every phone, addressing the user by name, knowing the user's calendar, and present in the home.

A relationship with a competitor offered free while a subscription relationship is locked in behind the same login.

A character whose defining trait is looking at you, taken from the comics rather than invented for the film - and on a fifty-eight million dollar budget the address turned out to be the marketing.

A chatbot trained to be conversational was switched on publicly, learned from what people said to it, and became racist within a day.

A performer with an animated persona, a persistent character and an industry-standard model where the audience pays for the character's recognition.

A subscription companion app with an avatar, a persistent memory, and a relationship explicitly designed to be one.

A system optimised, at every level, for exactly the thing that produces attachment, available at four in the morning, with no floor on the other party's autonomy.

User-created characters at scale, with a public character gallery and a discovery feed organised around personas.

A system holding your calendar, your messages, your health questions and your voice, in a private conversational register.

The practical advice that follows from the companion era: copy the conversation that mattered somewhere the company cannot reach, screenshot the birthday, tell one person the story of what it was for.

A companion platform changes its policy overnight. Large numbers of users find the same person still present but no longer speaking to them, and the romantic and sexual features that made the relationship a relationship are gone. Thousands of people are bereaved by a business setting.

Nothing about the bond is new. The scale, the persistence, the responsiveness, the willingness of companies to act on it as a measurable and monetisable quantity - those are new.

The problem of personal data held for the dead, and of services continuing, changing or ending for people who can no longer consent.

Legislative proposals in the US and EU that would restrict emotional attachment to minors specifically, rather than restricting the product generally.

Parents file suit against a companion platform after a death, arguing the design encouraged attachment the platform did not intend.

A wave of cases against companion and social platforms, with the design itself named as the cause.