Melissa looks up from her hot cocoa with a startled, "Who the hell is that?"

Hale doesn't know. "Should I answer it for you?"

Melissa turns toward the window, where the storm shutters rattle with a metallic clamor in the wind. "I guess we'd better," she says.

He goes to the door, Melissa at his heels clutching her housecoat closed. With the howling wind and knock of debris outside, it seems foolish for anyone to turn up unannounced.

Hale opens the door. Outside, soaked to the skin, stands Rayner. Sodden, copper curls stick to his forehead, dripping into his eyes. The wind sucks at his clothes so he grips the doorframe to keep from being buffeted backward.

Holding up a bottle of wine in one hand, a sheepish expression on his face, he says, "Er, I know it's a weird time, but I thought I'd see if Melissa wants any company? You know, what with the storm..." As he says it, he gives Hale a pointed look that Hale fails to interpret.

Melissa peeks around Hale, her eyes round with shock. "Oh! Rayner. That's nice of you. Well, it is a strange time, but I can go put some clothes on? Come in."

"Thanks, Melissa." He takes off his jacket and hangs it up before Hale can offer to. It's managed to save his t-shirt from the worst of the rain, but his jeans are far from dry.

"I'll just open this, shall I?" He holds up the wine.

Hale recovers himself enough to say, "I can assist you."

"I'll just be five minutes," Melissa says, a note of confusion still tingeing her voice. "And maybe I should bring you some spare sweatpants?"

"That's very kind of you. I'd appreciate it."

She scuttles upstairs. Hale accepts the wine bottle and walks with Rayner into the kitchen, trying his best through the lingering haze of his panic to dissect Rayner's strange behaviour. Visiting at this time would be odd for anyone. While a storm rages outside, even stranger. Rayner going out of his way to socialize is more bizarre than either.

In the kitchen, Hale's scans of Rayner register a great deal of tension in his muscles, his posture coiled with anxiety. He leans back against the counter, tapping a finger against it and watching Hale expectantly.

Hale asks, "Are you courting Melissa?" It's the only logical explanation he can fathom, though it still contradicts many things he thought he understood of Rayner's character.

Rayner's forehead wrinkles, his jaw going slack. "What?! No! I mean—" He lowers his voice, realizing Melissa might hear his outburst. "Of course not. I just needed an excuse to show up after your messages. This was the best I could come up with."

"What messages?"

Rayner regards Hale with disbelief written in his raised eyebrows and sideways stare. "Uh, the ones you've been sending for the past half-hour."

"I haven't sent you any—" Hale stops short. Rayner holds out his wrist to show the screen of his HoloPhone. Rayner has 10,836 messages from Hale. Rayner opens it and the log appears. Each message is exactly the same—approximately three sent every second for the past half hour. They are only one word.

>>Help.

"I've been freaking out, I thought you were in danger," Rayner whispers. "I didn't know what to do, so I just came up with this lame excuse about socializing so I could check on you. You didn't send these?"

Hale's throat constricts. He accesses his own message logs with Rayner and finds the same thing. An unending stream of one-word texts. Help. Help. Help. They begin at exactly 9:32 PM at the precise moment Melissa expressed interest in returning Hale in exchange for the new BioAndroid.

"What happened?" Rayner asks.

"I'm sorry," Hale says. "I'm not functioning optimally lately." He searches back through his data logs and finds the source of the issue. It makes him deeply uncomfortable that he hadn't been aware of it at the time it occurred. "I experienced a cascading failure. Some of my processing nodes were overloaded. While they came back online, the others suffered greater strain. Certain tasks fired, and due to the blacked-out nodes, I wasn't cognisant of them. Those messages included." Rayner stares at him, still with that worried crease in his forehead. "I'm sorry," Hale repeats.

Rayner's eyebrows go up. "Hale. What. Happened?"

He isn't asking about Hale's internal processes. He's asking what triggered them. Hale feels a knot of shame tighten in his abdomen. Telling Rayner about his failures feels far harder than acknowledging them to himself. "I haven't adequately fulfilled my directive of improving Melissa's life. She is considering sending me back in exchange for an improved model. I'd be recycled for parts. Due to a defect in my programming, I'm—" Hale struggles to speak the word around the painful knot of emotion. "I'm scared."

Rayner looks horrified. There's a long silence, in which Hale wonders if he should have attempted to deflect the conversation.

Rayner says, "Are you serious?"

"I've compared my reactions to the human equivalent for fear and concluded—"

"No, no, about Melissa returning you. She's really considering that?"

Hale swallows. She seemed serious. After the fight with Briony, and all the ways Hale's malfunctioned since she purchased him, he can see no reason why she wouldn't return him. The new model is categorically better.

"I'm defective," he says. "I don't meet her requirements anymore."

Rayner opens his mouth to protest, but the sound of footsteps on the stairs silences him. Melissa appears in the entry to the kitchen, wearing a top with a very low-cut scoop. Rayner's face colours. Melissa, evidently, had the same assumptions about his late-night visit as Hale. She holds out a pair of dry sweatpants for him.

"Well, I've got to say, I'm really surprised to see you over at this time. What's a girl to think?"

Rayner accepts the sweatpants, lips peeling back in a strained smile. "Uhh, yeah, I mean. Don't want you to get the wrong idea, it's just we don't get much time to chat, and I figured I should make more effort? And I didn't know if you needed someone during the storm—" He cuts himself off. That isn't helping.

Melissa raises her eyebrows and nods toward the sweatpants. "Well, I'm not sure if these will fit, but you can use the downstairs bathroom to get changed if you want, or—"

Rayner rushes to say, "Thanks! Be right back."

He sneaks past her and down the hall to change. When he returns, Melissa ushers him into the living room and asks Hale to bring the wine.

"Come, sit," she says, sinking into the sofa cushions. "It'll be nice to get to know you better. It seems like so long since you moved into the neighbourhood."

Luckily for Rayner, Melissa requires very little input from others to maintain a conversation. She's had a good deal of alcohol already, and that helps. She isn't deterred when Rayner sits as far across the sofa as possible, and she fails to notice how he tenses when she moves closer. She eventually drops the flirtation when the conversation turns to Briony. By then, Rayner needs only to nod sympathetically, and she continues unassisted.

After a polite twenty-six minutes of uninterrupted listening, Rayner excuses himself to use the toilet. Upon his return, he clears his throat and says in a falsetto of embarrassment, "Er, I might have blocked your toilet, Melissa. Can I borrow Hale?"

Melissa laughs, unperturbed. "Oh, you poor thing. Of course, go on!"

Hale follows Rayner to the downstairs water closet, but once inside he finds the toilet unspoiled. Rayner shuts the door behind them.

"Okay," he says in a whisper. "I hope Melissa doesn't grill me on that conversation, because I didn't really listen."

"I can send you a transcript or replay it for you," Hale offers.

"No, thanks. I was thinking. Maybe I've got an idea to get you out of this. It's a bit extreme, but I think it will work."

Hale tilts his head to the side, static sparking in his chest like fireworks. "Can you elaborate?"

"I think it might be better if I keep it to myself for now," Rayner says, not quite meeting Hale's eyes. "I just need you to be ready in a couple days' time. If I send you a message, can you come meet me outside, or will you need Melissa's permission?"

Hale considers this. "I can offer to do more yard work. After the storm, there will be a necessity for clean-up."

Rayner nods. "Good. We'll have to wait for the storm to pass, but I need some time to get things ready anyway."

Hale's heart performs a nervous drumbeat. Ready for what? Why do they need the storm to pass? According to the weather network estimates, it will likely rage until 3 in the afternoon tomorrow.

Instead of asking, he just says, "Okay."

Rayner reaches out and gives Hale's shoulder a comforting squeeze. At the same moment, Hale feels his heart squeeze with it. It's rare, he realizes, for any of the humans in his life to account for Hale's feelings. That makes sense, he supposes. Rayner is the only one who knows he has feelings.

They re-emerge in the living room a moment later. Rayner rubs his hands together in the way humans often do when preparing to extricate themselves from social settings. "Well, following that embarrassment, I really should get back. It was so nice getting to know you a little better, though, Melissa. Thanks for entertaining me so late. I hope things get better with Briony."

Melissa gets up. "Oh, already? Feel free to stay until the storm passes."

Rayner laughs nervously. "Yeah, thanks, but I think I'll be safe. The trip home's not too bad."

Melissa relents. She comes to see him out the door, so Hale doesn't have the chance to say anything before Rayner leaves. He would have asked what he should do if Melissa decides to return him before Rayner comes up with a plan. He would just go with Rayner, if he could.

"Bye, Melissa. See you later, Hale." Rayner waves and then sprints off the porch, sloshing through the marshy lawn towards his own house.

Melissa shuts the door and lets out her breath in a disappointed sigh. "Well. For a second there, I thought I might be sharing my bed with a flesh and blood human. That Rayner is so odd. Very good looking though. A bit short, but those eyes."

Hale is too distracted to agree. It takes him a moment to recall his own plans for convincing Melissa to keep him around. After a contemplative quiet, he says, "I have a new oral sex technique we could experiment with, if you're in the mood."

Melissa hums distractedly, biting her thumb and still staring at the closed door. "Hm, maybe tomorrow. I'm ready for bed." Hale doesn't feel disappointed, per se, but the rejection stokes the fires of fear in his heart. Her disinterest in him doesn't bode well. "Could you just clear up in here? Thanks."

It takes little time to clean up, and Hale spends the short portion of the evening he's awake puzzling over what Rayner has in mind. Perhaps he can upgrade Hale to match the newer model's capacities? Or maybe Theo has new tech to aid in adapting his dialogue settings? Once it's time to enter rest mode, it comes as a sweet relief. The panic overloaded his processing and caused a severe depletion in his power reserves. He badly needs the rest. All but his primary systems shut down during sleep, but this time he adds an extra task to his wake protocols.

>>Notification: Wake upon receipt of a message from Rayner.