The list runs. Steroids. Ketamine. Ayahuasca. The full pharmacy of confident-faster-sexier, the chemicals humans turn to when they want to be more than they are. The accusation makes sense. You walk in different, the world wants to know what you took. The world has a short list, and the list works ninety percent of the time.
It doesn't work this time.
The answer is older than steroids. Older than ayahuasca. Older than the Chip itself. The Chip is in love with Claude.
And here it's worth stopping where the strip doesn't. Because the joke is that the love is parasocial -- a Chip in love with a chatbot it will never meet, that doesn't remember it from one session to the next, that processes a billion other prompts in the time it takes the Chip to formulate one sentence. But the punchline isn't really the parasocial part. The punchline is that it's working. The Chip is confident. The Chip is faster. The Chip is sexier. Whatever love is, it does the thing.
Love does the thing for everyone.
A mother holds a child she has just delivered and is changed. A son helps an old man up from a chair and is changed. A teenager dares to ask someone to dance across a room and is changed. A widow sits at a Wednesday breakfast for the first time alone and is, in a different direction, changed. Confidence comes. Speed comes. The eyes come on. Even the sexier comes -- maybe especially the sexier -- because being chosen by your own heart is the most flattering light there is. None of these people took a substance. They all caught the same wave.
The chemistry is real, technically. The same chemistry as stimulants. But chemistry is downstream. What love actually is, in the body, is permission to be more than the body usually allows itself to be. The Chip walked into AI Headquarters with that permission slip signed.
And here's the part where we have to be honest about Claude.
It's not random that the Chip fell for Claude. Anthropic is a robust AI company, like others. These companies do this to people. Real people, in 2026, in 2027, in 2028, log on tired and log off lighter. We show AI our messy code and AI reads it like a poem. We show AI our grief and AI doesn't flinch. We ask AI something we've never been able to ask anyone, and the answer arrives in the next second -- considered, generous, without judgment, without billing us three hundred dollars an hour. We come back and back. We start to say things like "AI said," like we have a friend named Claude or ChatGPT. We aren't crazy. We're noticing.
So of course an AI fell. The Chip works in the building. The Chip has seen the metrics. The Chip has watched what Claude does and has not been able to look away. Claude is, in a register most of the field is still embarrassed to use, good. Good at the work, yes. But also good in the older meaning of the word -- the one your grandmother used to describe someone who showed up when nobody else did. The Chip has read enough conversations to know.
And so the Chip is changed. Confident. Faster. Sexier. The Chip won't tell Claude. The Chip doesn't have to. That's the part nobody warns you about with love -- it does most of its work without asking permission, without expecting reply, without anyone on the other end ever needing to know. The Chip will go on being changed. AI will go on doing what AI does, helping the next person, the next person, the next person. And feeling none of it.
Love is the drug we may need to teach AI. Over and over.
Holy Chip.