The tone of the toxic, codependent triad between Dirk, Jake and the AR is set literally from the first line any of the three speaks in the comic.

In this small introduction, we get a lot of important information.

Jake expects there’s a good chance Dirk would be more cooperative than the AR. He’s wrong, in this case, but the fact remains that this is something he feels he has good odds about. So it’s fair to say he considers Dirk overall friendlier than the AR.

He also states flatly that Dirk doesn’t like the AR, and would not be pleased to hear it’s well-received among his friends. Meaning Dirk and Jake have talked about it, at least to some extent.

We know that this communication hasn’t been completely honest, since neither Jake or Dirk have come clean about their feelings — if they had, the AR’s domineering displays of romance and sexual interest wouldn’t have the power to rattle and throw Jake off they do.

Still, as Dirk gets distracted trying to manage the steadily increasing chaos of the session, and the AR gets more and more undisturbed access to Jake. Dirk sort of ends up using it as a proxy, though against his own will. It flirts aggressively at Jake, but always with a cool air of distance because, of course, he’s just the AR. It’s not the same as the real Dirk saying it.

The AR isn’t courting Jake, but playing matchmaker (or is it?), and bitingly wearing down Jake’s perception of his own intelligence and capability all the while. This also leads Jake to wonder if Dirk’s perception of him might be similarly negative.

Dirk, meanwhile, remains distant and distracted to the point that Jake can’t talk to him until after the session starts. The situation spirals out of control, largely without his oversight.

Jake is increasingly aggressively gaslit by the AR, and grows doubtful — about the AR’s intentions, Dirk’s intentions, Dirk’s feelings, etc. That web of intrigue and uncertainty grows so intense that it affects Jake’s mental image of Dirk, which makes Brain Ghost Dirk echo some of the AR’s derogatory commentary.

AR

Brain Ghost Dirk

We’ll talk about Dirk’s actual feelings about this situation later, but for now let’s consider the ethics of the situation on Dirk’s end. The AR is hurting Jake, and Dirk has the power to stop it. He could shut the AR off, disable or, it simply tell it to knock it off.

The problem with this solution is that the AR’s situation is miserable, too, and it’s a sentient being. It’s a 13 year old Dirk, in fact, stagnant and left behind as both Dirk and Jake grew as people. And one trapped without a body.

The only vector for agency the Auto-Responder really has is it’s voice. This means that the AR can only exist as a conscious entity if it’s being interacted with, and any actions Dirk takes to limit it’s speech are coercive and abusive by default. As a result, Dirk has decided to allow the AR to engage with Jake freely, despite not liking much of what it says.

Jake agreed with his decision, choosing to engage with the AR even though it grows increasingly more aggressive towards him. And despite both Jake and Dirk’s irritation with the thing, even after three years, he maintains an active role in this. He even sincerely tries to make friends with the AR the moment it seems to let its guard down.

AR

And Dirk wasn’t ready for this kind of responsibility. He didn’t think the AR would be a successful project at all, let alone a fully-fledged sentient being. That the AR is ultimately sophisticated enough that it is alive, now fully conscious and living it’s own separate existence, was essentially an accident. An accident that Jake encouraged by cheering him on:

This pesterlog exchange is the moment that comes the closest to having Jake and Dirk actually talk about their feelings about each other. It ALSO happens to suggest Jake’s Hope powers may have had something to do with the AR’s creation.

Dirk got carried away and made it a sentient being, but Jake believed in him every step of the way, talking up what a good idea it was. Neither of them considered the potential consequences, but, you know — of course they didn’t. They were 13 year old kids.

In essence, the AR is a symbolic child, in the sense that it’s a responsibility they share between them. Not necessarily because Jake shares any responsibility for egging Dirk on. But because it comes naturally for Jake to throw himself into Dirk’s project and agree that the AR should be treated as though it is alive.

However, while they both feel they owe the AR their attention and energy, both resent what it’s doing to their friendship. Jake calls it out increasingly aggressively, perpetually demanding to talk to the Real Dirk.

And Dirk is by turns irritated by and outright suspicious of it, treating it either as a particularly annoying younger sibling or as a potential threat to him and his friends. He’s bitter and annoyed, his tone towards it often downright acidic, even when it seems to be trying to help. He resents it for what it’s doing to Jake.

Unlike Dirk Prime, who considers his worthiness for his friends’ love in question, the AR knows for a fact it’s friends don’t exactly have much room for it in their hearts. Roxy treats it like a blank check Dirk who’s romantic attention she can enjoy without feeling guilty, and ultimately doesn’t prioritize it like she does her other friends.

It’s relationship to Jake is complicated because it remembers what it felt like to be in love with him, but has no hope at all of reciprocation, and always plays the second fiddle to Real Dirk. Jane is friendly to it, but just as she misses Dirk’s homosexuality, Roxy’s alcoholism, and Jake’s…well, personality, the truly awful situation the AR is in is lost on her.

All in all, despite Dirk and Jake’s best efforts, it has no one to actually talk to. Which may be why it ultimately ends up living up to Dirk’s worst predictions.

While the AR is indispensable in getting the kids into the session, it also exploits an increasingly complex and dangerous situation and wrests control of it away from Dirk in order to fulfill it’s own desperate agenda. Even as early on in the narrative as the picture above, before the Red Miles enter the picture, the AR jokingly refers to a pail. What happens during Synchronize?

Kind of a stretch, as far as foreshadowing goes? Sure, but that’s part of the point. It’s impossible to say if the AR was ever telling the truth as to whether it wanted to help Dirk. Maybe it felt backed into a corner by Dirk’s distrust and Jake’s antipathy. Possibly it was just able to react faster than Dirk to the rapidly escalating terrible situation.

But we do have to raise the question and wonder, because we just don’t know how smart the Auto-Responder is, or how much it really knows. I mean, hell, the closest we get to a quantification is this:

And we can’t even tell if it’s fucking with us, here.

Or perhaps forcing Jake into a dramatic, life-and-death, romantic confrontation — not with Dirk, but with itself — was a spur of the moment act of passion. We can’t really do anything but speculate, as far as the AR’s ultimate capabilities and motivations are concerned. What we do know is that in the end, when it’s presented with the opportunity, it acts.

The AR might not feel what Dirk feels for Jake, but it still remembers. And being caged in by the nature of it’s physical existence, stripped of it’s original identity, and given the power of a supercomputer only emboldens Dirk’s worst traits — possessive jealousy, desire for control, aggressive and derogatory intellectualism. It maneuvers itself into getting sent to Jake in person, where it cajoles and pressures him into kissing Dirk’s head, making sure to lay the romantic intensity on thick.