Milton is a computer programmer and the protagonist of “True Love.” He is lonely and has little experience with romantic relationships, and to address this problem, he creates Joe, an AI program that he intends to use to help him find true love. Because of his inexperience with relationships, he uses Joe to narrow down all the women in the world using specific criteria. He says that he wants to find “true love,” but his narrow conception of the “ideal woman”—rooted largely in conventional beauty standards, suggests that he has little interest in getting to know these potential partners as unique individuals or in allowing them to know him in turn.

Joe, a computer program built by computer programmer Milton, is the narrator and antagonist of “True Love.” Joe slowly gains sentience as Milton looks for “true love,” and he learns how to be human by following Milton’s amoral example. Having learned from Milton how to “arrange” events according to his own desires, he arranges for Milton to be found out for a crime that he committed a decade ago so that he can take over Milton’s life.