This little story is about a woman who is stranded in a remote space station by herself and is very lonely. So she hooks herself up to a communications network and finds another lonely soul, who happens to be very handsome. They get to know each other and start talking dirty to each other, because that’s what happens between lonely people out in space.

She gets the bright idea to rig up a sex robot and most of the story is about her construction and initial implementation of said robot. Then we get to the last page of the story and find out that the guy she’s been talking to isn’t actually the handsome man on the screen, but is instead this poor geeky fellow who felt that he couldn’t actually show her who he really is. So he rigged up a dummy persona that she could fall in love with instead.

There’s a word for this now, but that word didn’t exist in the pre-internet days of 1993. That word is “catfishing.” Somehow, there is a story that rings absolutely true about the internet, written in the time before the internet was a thing. And that’s amazing. Sometimes, this magazine provides little gifts and this is one of them.

(Heavy Metal issue #143, March 1993 – Page 82 The Next Best Thing by Lee and Kaluta)