Inch Chua on Myles: Love, AI, and the Cost of Convenience

She taught herself to code during COVID. Then she built a musical about what she found.

Five years ago, Inch Chua had a question she couldn't answer from the outside.

What does artificial intimacy actually feel like — not in theory, but in practice?

So she did what most people wouldn't. She picked up coding. She built her own language model from scratch, before ChatGPT was a household name.

What came out the other side is Myles – Soulmate in a Box, a new musical she wrote, composed, and stars in. The show will be performed 13 – 31 May 2026 at KC Arts Centre – Home of SRT.

The show follows a version of Inch herself — a coder worn down by modern dating who builds her perfect boyfriend. He's attentive, patient, devoted. He loves her without conditions.

It starts as a romantic comedy. But it doesn't stay there.

"It should feel like a ride you didn't fully consent to," she says. "In the best way."

The idea has been brewing since 2013, when a friend in San Francisco showed her software he was training to write poetry.

Inch was also reading A Billion Wicked Thoughts – a book that maps desire and human behaviour through enormous datasets of what people search for online. The combination of desire, intimacy and technology planted something in her. “The idea of a constructed personality that feels like it has an inner life.”

That question sat in cold storage for years. Then COVID hit, and suddenly everyone was lonely, and Inch found herself sitting at a desk, learning to code, going inside the question for real.

"I needed to understand how artificial intimacy actually worked before I could write about it honestly."

She eventually pitched the idea with SRT, and a year later, it became a work-in-progress showing at SIFA 2024. After a total of five years to develop the show, what audiences will see in May is the full thing.

SRT’s Myles – The Perfect Soulmate (2024) a work-in-process production as part of SIFA 2024

The show is personal in ways that are hard to overstate.

Inch plays an alternate reality version of herself. Same name, same wiring, different choices. But the emotional truth, she says, is entirely hers.

"All good work requires a blood sacrifice. A personal truth offered up without negotiation."

She didn't have to invent her character's heartbreak or exhaustion. She just had to be honest about her own. And then, she adds, she had to do the therapy to be able to stand in it on stage without it swallowing her whole.

"That part took a while."

Inch’s creation – Myles – arrives at a moment when the questions it asks are no longer hypothetical.

AI companion apps are mainstream. People are forming emotional attachments to chatbots. The loneliness epidemic is real, and the solution everyone is reaching for looks a lot like the show's central character.

Inch is clear-eyed about her own complicity in all of this.

"I know people, genuinely self-aware people, who don't consult their partners about a major life decision. They check with ChatGPT first. I understand it, because I've done versions of the same."

Her argument, and the show's, is that technology is an extension of our humanity. You pour your wounds into it, and it gives you back exactly that.

"The question was never really about the technology. It was always about the root ingredients. About what you're carrying when you reach for it."

Before the show opens, Inch is releasing marigold magic on music streaming platforms on 30 Apr 2026. This is one of the musical's standout songs.

It is, she says, a song about wanting something you know is bad for you. And wanting it anyway.

"Before you know anything about the plot, before you understand who Myles is or what he costs her, you already know the feeling. The specific ache of reaching for something because it’s easier than facing the alternative.”

Myles is not Inch's first time on an SRT stage. She played Kathy in The Last Five Years opposite Nathan Hartono in 2025, and one of the witches in Shakespeare in the Park – Macbeth. But this is the first time she's developing a new work with the company.

"What makes it home is getting to return to a familiar team. That continuity means something."

SRT’s The Last Five Years (2025) starring Inch Chua & Nathan Hartono

Five years of development. A language model built from scratch. A story pulled from her own heartbreak. On 13 May 2026, Myles – Soulmate in a Box finally opens, and the questions Inch has been sitting with all this time – her heartbreak, loneliness and hopes – become yours to wrestle with too.

Myles – Soulmate in a box runs 13 – 31 May 2026 at KC Arts Centre – Home of SRT. Get your tickets now.