Kiss Me, I'm Virtual

""I mean, you come in here, you don't help me, you say the one plan I've got is bad, you-you claim to be a creation of my mind and yet you are in no way dressed provocatively!"

(notices that "Sam Carter" is suddenly dressed provocatively)"

- Dr. Rodney McKay, Stargate Atlantis, "Grace Under Pressure"

Ah, love, the chance for two minds to seek each other out bask in each their beloved's presence... unless one of you doesn't really have a mind.

Variations include:
 * Characters in a lifelike simulation;
 * Character in a dreamworld or hallucination;
 * Holograms of real or artificial people in the real world (expect being unable to touch each other to be especially maddening, unless Hard Light is involved);
 * "Personality downloads" or duplicates of an often still-living person;
 * Lifelike robots;
 * Lifelike telefactors;
 * Mind-controlled people;
 * Shapeshifters capable of masquerading as humans.

The actual human being in the equation may or may not be aware of the situation, but it makes things that much ickier if they are. If the inhuman entity is based on a real person, expect them to discover what's been going on at some point.

Compare Replacement Goldfish, Robosexual, Robo Ship, Robotic Spouse.

Anime & Manga

 * In the Yu-Gi-Oh!! anime, the virtual world Kaiba designed includes a Zelda-style princess character that looks exactly like his younger brother Mokuba. Even Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series dared not dwell too long on what Kaiba planned to do with Princess Mokuba.
 * You know, it could have just been Kaiba lampshading how Mokuba gets kidnapped all the time...
 * Or just a sign of Big Brother Instinct...
 * In the original Japanese version, Kaiba had nothing to do with developing the game at all. If true, that would make the princess's Mokuba-ness entirely the fault of the Big Five. Still creepy, but on a different level.
 * The fandom commonly pairs her with Noah Kaiba, whose mind was uploaded to a virtual world.
 * Tenchi in Tokyo has
 * The whole point of Chobits is whether or not the love interest is an example of this trope or something more.
 * Pretty much the main theme of Ken Akamatsu's early work A.I. Love You.
 * Mahou Sensei Negima! Robot Girl Chachamaru has a bit of a crisis regarding the veracity of her soul, (pacts require a soul to work, and kissing is the easiest way to establish one,) until Negi decides to -- essentially -- kiss her hard enough to cause a localized explosion, and possibly create her soul in the process. Hey, it worked, right?
 * Video Girl Ai
 * Ruon Kamiyama from Mnemosyne is a virtual reality sex doll. Things get difficult when she goes all Yandere over Teruki and downloads herself into an android body to meet him in Real Life.

Comics

 * According to rumor, Electro once tried to convince a shape-shifting prostitute to take Spider-Man's form. Significant Foe Yay there.
 * I heard he wanted Invisible Woman or Scarlet Witch.
 * The android Vision and the Scarlet Witch. They were happily married in the 80's, with the Vision finally getting his act together and becoming very human. Then some of the creators decided the idea was squicky and broke them up in just about the cruellest way imaginable. Specifically, they took away the Vision's emotions and revealed that their children were actually illusions created by demons, which then promptly disappeared. Wanda had a nervous breakdown later; hard to imagine why.
 * Bruce Banner once built an A.I. called the Recordasphere that looked like a little flying silver ball. It faithfully followed him around on his adventures for a short time, but then fell in love with him and became insanely jealous of his then-girlfriend. It tried unsuccessfully to kill her, and got destroyed in the process.

Films -- Live-Action
"Switch: The digital pimp, hard at work."
 * At the end of Die Another Day, Moneypenny is caught experimenting with a pair of VR goggles...
 * The Matrix: Mouse offers to set Neo up with the "Girl in the Red Dress", an AI character he created to distract recruits during the Agent training.


 * The 6th Day: Adam's associate has an... interesting virtual companion.
 * Virtuosity: Sheila 3.2, Virtual reality sex doll, Sole function is to deduce your psychosexual needs, and fulfill them. Clyde asks the programmer who created her: "Hey, man, let me use your (virtual reality) gear for a little while."
 * Jobe and Marnie's virtual sex scene in The Lawnmower Man, which unfortunately turns into Mind Rape.
 * Tron, where Flynn says goodbye to Yori, a program within the System (created by, and a doppelganger of, his ex-girlfriend), with a kiss.
 * Like Father, Like Son in the sequel, though Quorra turns out to be a little different from most. The discredited sequel also had shades of this between Jet and Mercury.
 * In Serenity, Mr Universe is "married" to a Sexbot

Literature

 * Day Million, published in 1971, is perhaps the first written instance of Cyber Sex.
 * The Dresden Files have Lasciel, who and once pretended to be a real human. She had him fooled, too.
 * "Max" in the NUMA Series, being a representation of Hiram Yeager's wife. His wife's aware of it.
 * The Dreamland Chronicles(not that one) combines this and What Measure Is a Non-Human? as its major plot points.
 * The short story "The Sandman" (Der Sandmann; written 1815) by German author ETA Hoffmann is a darkly fantastical tale about a university student, Nathanael, who ogles and then falls deeply in love with a professor's beautiful 'daughter', Olimpia (even forgetting his hometown fiancée in the process) -- then going mad when he finds out that Olimpia is merely her supposed "father", and finally  . Though "gothic", the story is also full of . Presumably Hoffmann mocked the idealized description of 'romantic love' that was widespread in the popular literature of his days (the "romanticist" age). Or Did He? -- See the Theater folder for some adaptations of this story.
 * In Peter David's Star Trek: New Frontier novel series Mackenzie Calhoun's son Xyon has his ship's (female) AI run a holographic simulation of different women, mostly his long-lost love, which he has sex with (he's otherwise alone on the ship). In the same series, Kat Mueller admits she uses her ship's holodeck to scratch her own itch as she doesn't believe in entering a relationship that could interfere with the chain of command. And even holo-Morgan offers her... services... to Calhoun on an occasion (though he always declines).
 * Troblum in the Void Trilogy by Peter Hamilton maintains several female "i-sentient solido projections" - essentially avatars of finely tuned A Is that exist, fully lifelike, in real space. They're even based on real people from events in the previous novels. In the end, one of them (long story).
 * Troblum in the Void Trilogy by Peter Hamilton maintains several female "i-sentient solido projections" - essentially avatars of finely tuned A Is that exist, fully lifelike, in real space. They're even based on real people from events in the previous novels. In the end, one of them (long story).

Live-Action TV

 * In the Stargate Atlantis episode "Grace Under Pressure", Rodney is trapped in a puddle jumper on the bottom of the ocean with an increasingly amorous hallucination of Samantha Carter.
 * In season 5's
 * On Stargate Universe, after their consciousnesses get uploaded to the Destiny computer. Within an episode,   has found a way to have sex in a virtual simulation of the ship.
 * Star Trek: The Next Generation examples:
 * In the episode "Booby Trap", Geordi has the holodeck summon up a virtual assistant in the form of the modern warp drive's inventor to help him out with an especially dastardly Negative Space Wedgie. They're both so excited when they succeed that they kiss.
 * Subverted years later in the episode "Galaxy's Child", which had the real woman show up, discover this little incident and chew him out over it. She calms down eventually when he explains the situation.
 * And re-verted in the Distant Finale, where they were portrayed as married.
 * When the character of Reg Barclay was introduced, his problem of "holodeck addiction" included using replicas of the ship's crew as characters, which angered several of them. Troi lectured them on how it was a harmless way of blowing off steam... until her duplicate showed up, a (just barely) gauze-clad "Goddess of Empathy", much to the other characters' amusement.
 * And let's not forget Minuet ("11001001"), a simulated woman created by the Bynars to "hold" Picard and Riker there with her... amazing realism. She made such an impression on Riker that she was chosen to be his deceased wife in a simulated future, which tipped his hand to that simulation not being real.
 * During one episode, Troi's mom Lwaxana becomes smitten with a virtual bartender in the Holodeck. She doesn't find out he's virtual until much later, and is rather mad that others didn't tell her.
 * What she's really attracted to is the fact that she can't read his mind. She assumes it's because he has a very strong mental fortitude. Of course, it's really because he's just a simulation.
 * On Deep Space Nine Quark got into trouble not for having sex programs in his holosuites, but for using women on the station (including Kira) as character models (some EU works have implied that this is illegal, a form of identity theft). When Kira finds out she reprograms her image with Quark's head on it. The rather unpleasant character who paid for the experience is not happy.
 * Also in Deep Space Nine, most of the female characters in the Julian Bashir, Secret Agent holonovels. The Squick is indirectly referenced when a malfunction causes the characters' appearances to be replaced with those of station crewmembers, and Bashir is much more reluctant to accept advances from a character who looks like someone he knows.
 * Technically, this Trope includes Shapeshifters, so Changeling Odo and Kira Nerys count. In spirit, however, Odo's natural state may be a puddle of goo but he relates to everyone he knows as a humanoid, so it's hardly a "virtual" interaction.
 * An episode of Star Trek: Voyager has Tuvok use the holodeck to cure his Ponn Farr fever (even though it was explicitly stated in TOS that a Mind Meld is a necessary part of the process, though it could have just been "blowing off the steam," so to speak, that meditation couldn't cure.)
 * Also "Human Error" where Seven of Nine gets involved with a holographic Chakotay, the Doctor practising his confession of love to a holosim Seven in "Someone to Watch Over Me", the "Fair Haven" program where Janeway gets interested in handsome Michael Sullivan who she then reprograms to make even more appealing, the male and female holo-eyecandy massagers hanging around B'Elanna and Tom in the early seasons, the Doctor using the holodeck to have safe nookie with Phage-infected Denara Pel or daydream that all female crewmembers find him irresistable, and lastly "Alter Ego" where a holobabe fancied by both Harry Kim and Tuvok turns out to be not so virtual after all, but a lonely alien hacking into the system.
 * It's worth mentioning that the Doctor is a hologram, which means a couple of the examples could be seen as playing with the trope. In fact, any romance involving the Doctor fits this by definition. He also took it to the extreme in "Real Life" when he created not just a holographic wife but kids as well, in order to gain a better understanding of family.
 * Star Trek TOS has McCoy seduced by his old flame "Nancy Crater", who is actually a hideous salt monster impersonating her.
 * In the Red Dwarf episode "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", it's implied that all Lister ever does with the VR games is make out with the female NPCs. It's also stated that the groin attachment has been worn out.
 * Lister had another Kiss Me, I'm Virtual moment in "Blue", combining 'dreamworld' and 'hologram' in.
 * In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Warren Mears makes a number of robots for this specific purpose (including Spike's Buffybot, which totally creeps Buffy out).
 * And another time Faith switches bodies with Buffy and sleeps with Buffy's boyfriend.
 * In Battlestar Galactica Reimagined, Baltar is visited by vivid sexual hallucinations of Number Six, and later in the series another Six experiences hallucinations of Baltar.
 * Not to mention the time where he experiences a hallucination of himself.
 * Yes, but even the narcassistic Baltar never tried to frak himself.
 * House: As part of a sensory-deprivation induced hallucination, Cuddy does a differential diagnosis while stripping out of a schoolgirl outfit.
 * Then she stops, as it's distracting House. He's not happy about it.
 * Donna's "husband" in the Doctor Who episode "Forest of the Dead". At the end, she wondered what coming up with someone like him meant: "Absolutely gorgeous, and can't say a word. I wonder what that says about me."
 * Andromeda episode "The Mathematics of Tears" revolves around a sentient warship that fell in love with her captain,
 * Babylon 5. In "River of Souls" Captain Lockley is very unamused when she discovers a popular hologram (especially amongst women) in a virtual reality brothel is modeled on herself.
 * In the first episode of NCIS's third season, appears in the form of hallucinations to the others -- in Tony and McGee's case in fetishistic outfits. In the first case, it's a schoolgirl outfit. Just as Tony is about to mentally remove her clothes, he's interrupted by another sexual fantasy Ziva David's first entrance to the NCIS headquarters.
 * In the CSI episode "A Space Oddity", Hodges bumps into Wendy Simms at a sci-fi convention. He has a number of Star Trek-style (yes, Sixties Star Trek) fantasies involving him as a "Kirk" style figure and Wendy... er... not wearing very much. One time the fantasy led to him starting a small fire and Wendy guesses on the entire structure of his hallucination.
 * Sliders, "Virtual Slide": On a world where VR headsets are ubiquitous, the guys become addicted and Maggie has to enter their fantasies to pull them out. She's mortified to find a simulation of herself in bed with Quinn, but it forces them to confront their longtime UST.
 * If Ridiculously-Human Robots count, then the, ahem, relationship between John Connor and Cameron in The Sarah Connor Chronicles definitely does. It doesn't help that Cameron can adopt the personality of Allison Young, who is implied to have been in a relationship with Future John Connor.
 * The X-Files. When Mulder travels back in time on a luxury liner trapped in the Bermuda Triangle, he encounters his colleagues and enemies in the guise of various World War II protagonists, one of whom happens to be OSS agent Scully in a red cocktail dress. Just before he makes his Prisoner of Zenda Exit, Mulder grabs her for a passionate kiss "just in case I never see you again." Scully of course responds somewhat differently.
 * An episode of the more recent Outer Limits series involved a man who'd survived a nuclear holocaust with only holographic A Is for company, including a particular character that his habitat AI used as her avatar. He can occasionally have physical contact via a body-encasing VR chamber, and uses this for sex. Then he makes the mistake of doing this with the habitat AI, and though it's just a fling to him, she falls in love with him. Oops.
 * The ending even plays with the trope a little as turning it into Kiss Me, I'm Virtual squared.
 * Another episode of the Outer Limits has a man who, through an advanced AI, can enter people's unconsciousness when they are in a coma. He uses this to bring several people out. When the woman he loves (but who he has never told) enters a coma, he uses the computer to enter her unconscious. They start having a relationship in the simulation, but a weird monster appears in the simulation. At the climax, we find
 * Angel. Illyria offers this opportunity to Wesley, but even though it's clear he's tempted Wes repeatedly refuses
 * In Earth: Final Conflict, Augur bases his home AI's appearance on Lili Marquette (who he has a crush on), but dresses it up in Ms. Fanservice outfits. Lili is understandably annoyed when she finds out.
 * Zoe Graystone to Philomon in Caprica.
 * In the Supernatural episode "Dark Side of the Moon", Zachariah reveals that he uses a simulation of Sam and Dean's mother as a sex toy, much to their disgust. He even calls her a MILF.

Music

 * The Vocaloid song Rainbow Girl, which is (presumably) about a girl from a Dating Sim who falls in love with the player of the game.

Theatre

 * The first act of Jacque Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffmann (which as you see is based on short stories by ETA Hoffmann) tells of Hoffmann the author falling in love with the wind-up automaton Olympia. This makes this trope Older Than Radio.
 * Also inspired by Hoffmann's tales is the ballet Coppélia, where a boy mistakes an elaborate mechanical doll for a young woman.

Video Games

 * One of the routes in the visual novel Ever 17 has a romance between the male lead and a holographic projection, so no actual touching is possible (though one end does stretch this a tiny bit...).
 * She may be a hologram but Sora clearly has a mind, will and personality.
 * Part of Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty's infamous Gainax Ending. Is Rose real or an AI? Was she ever real?
 * Halo's Cortana, after whom a surprisingly high amount of the Halo fanbase lust.
 * Honestly, what ought we to expect? Cortana has been imbued with traits that serve absolutely no purpose to an AI, but which a largely-male fanbase will appreciate.
 * In-Canon, that was her idea. Yes, it was her idea to be nude. Oh, did I mention her form is the look of the creator of the SPARTAN-II program... in her TEENS? So, yes, we have a nude teen hologram.
 * Not only Halsey's looks. Her core is based on Halsey's personality. In the Fall of Reach novel, Cortana tells Halsey that she finds John-117 (Master Chief) cute. Halsey realizes that she must be thinking the same thing too and is a little disconcerted, as she is their mother figure.
 * In the freeware game Digital: A Love Story, the entire plot is a romance that takes place almost entirely online
 * In Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door, the AI T.E.C. falls in love with Peach. They get around the problem of not being able to touch each other (in the context of dancing) by T.E.C. assuming a Hard Light form copied from another character -.
 * Like his Honorary Uncle (see Film section), Jet Bradley in Tron 2.0 develops a crush and flirtation with the security program Mercury, even asking his dad at the end if he can have a copy to use as a screensaver. A case can also be made for Alan and Ma3a.

Web Comics

 * In Narbonic, computer techie Dave gets an online girlfriend nicknamed "Lovelace". Trying to track her down, he discovers that the IP address points to Professor Madblood, the antagonist of the main cast. He begins to suspect his "girlfriend" is actually Madblood, trying to hack into the Narbonic Labs computers.  Eventually, they meet ... after Lovelace has acquired a holographic body. Since it's been previously shown that almost all machines have an instinctive love for Dave, Hilarity Ensues.

Western Animation

 * Futurama does this in one episode, with a robot duplicate of Lucy Liu. Hilarity Ensues when the preserved head of the real Lucy Liu shows up.
 * In Code Lyoko, Aelita is first believed to be an A.I. stuck in the virtual world. This doesn't stop Jérémie from falling for her and doing everything he could to materialize her on Earth. Subverted when it is discovered she's in fact human.
 * Using seduction to divide the heroes is also the M.O. of some of XANA's specters, notably the fake Yumi in "Image Problem" and the Polymorphic Clone in "XANA's Kiss".
 * Jérémie also creates a polymorphic clone of William in Season 4. Yumi takes him as a fake boyfriend to keep people from realizing that something is going on.
 * Averted in Kim Possible. But Kim wanted to kiss him...
 * In Legion of Super-Heroes, Brainiac 5 uses a "training simulation" to create a fantasy where he's mortally wounded saving Superman from a horde of enemies and the fake Superman cradles him in his arms as he gasps his dramatic last words. To romantic music, no less.
 * In Archer, Dr. Krieger very nearly managed to get married to an A.I. with a hologram.

Real Life

 * Guy marrying a Video Game girl. And you thought you've seen everything.
 * Considering copyright laws make said character owned by a company... does that mean he married a slave?
 * Green-card marriage. She's free to enter the real world now.
 * Topio 3.0, seems designed to invoke this around him, despite being designed solely to play pingpong.