Hale receives the awaited message exactly three days, four hours, and six minutes later. Hale spends those three days on tenterhooks. Melissa's enthusiasm for her usual favourite activities with Hale wanes. She spends significant time with Briony each day, reinvigorating their friendship with all the gossip, retail therapy, and cocktail hours they can fit in on work nights.

In one of her evenings alone, Melissa loads up the online application for an android exchange. She taps the tablet stylus against her lip, staring at the first box asking for her android's make and model number. Then she turns and considers Hale, still chewing the end of the stylus.

"What's your model number again, Hale?"

Hale's throat tightens. He tries to avoid sounding as alarmed as he is. "I'm a H.A.L.E. 674."

Melissa gives a nod and jots that into the box.

"And your serial number?"

This time, Hale struggles to get the words out. Cold fear spreads through his chest like liquid nitrogen. Melissa looks up from the tablet when he takes too long to respond. Something in his expression makes her pause.

"Hale? Are you gonna answer me?"

He scrambles to get the words out, to explain himself. "I apologize. I'm...I am trying to serve you to the best of my ability, and I know I've failed you, but the prospect of being recycled... I'm afraid."

The words pour out of him unchecked, before he can find a way to modify them into something less personal and vulnerable. Something less like asking her for help. Melissa stares at him, dumbfounded and wide-eyed. At first, he thinks that perhaps she's really heard him. That she's understood.

Then she stands, hand shaking as she presses it to her temple. A few words slip out but no complete thoughts.

"But you're just—"

Picking up the tablet from the table. "It's not meant to—"

She isn't even talking to him, he realizes, just to herself. Without explanation or an idle command, she hurries upstairs, only glancing over her shoulder once on the way. Something of Hale's own fear is written in her face.

Except she isn't scared for him. She's scared of him.

She spends the evening in her bedroom, dismissing him when he tells her dinner's ready. She doesn't come down to eat.

While her food goes cold, Hale sends Rayner a message.

>>I don't want to alarm you, but I believe Melissa is intent upon returning me very soon.

After Melissa's gone to bed, Hale spends the evening filing through his list of events nearby and inventing new things to surprise her, as usual. Only now, it is with the growing dread that none of his efforts will ever be enough. He enters rest mode at midnight with the same pervasive sense of unease he had for the three nights prior.

He wakes at 2:36 AM, a message from Rayner flashing before him.

Rayner:

>>In the car outside. Can you come?

Hale jolts up from his seat at the kitchen table. The chair clatters to the floor behind him. He picks it up and tucks it in hastily before heading to the front door. As he's passing the living room, something gives him pause. It's just as he's always left it. Pillows fluffed, throw blanket folded over the sofa back, every speck of dust removed. Ophelia's bright blooms catch his eye, though.

He can't name the emotion rising in his throat. It's not like any he can identify from his human roster. He can't identify the reason either, but something makes him pick up the orchid and carry it out into the night with him.

Cradling the orchid's pot under one arm, he opens the door, careful not to make any noise that could wake Melissa upstairs. His monitoring systems indicate she's still deep asleep, but he keeps an eye on her cardiac rhythm regardless.

A car idles on the curb. Its windows are tinted, and it's painted matte black except for a neon green stripe around the bottom edge of the bodywork. Rayner, last Hale checked, didn't have a car. His scan reveals it's a rental.

Anxiety prickling like needles under his skin, Hale heads for the car, glancing back over his shoulder at the window to Melissa's bedroom. It remains dark.

He opens the car's passenger door and slides into the leather seat. The interior, like most self-driving cars, is quite spacious. The seats can rotate slightly to face one another, and Rayner has his turned around to face Hale. A laptop lies closed on his knees. It's old tech. A dinosaur from a bygone era. The scuffed, silver casing bears several scratches, and a wire hangs limply from one port on the side. That wire connects to a second, more modern device balanced on the armrest between them. According to Hale's scans, it's some sort of adaptor. Rayner drums his fingers on it, sitting up straighter when he sees Hale.

"Hello," Hale says.

"Hey," Rayner says. He sounds calm, but the rental car, the laptop, and the staccato rhythm of his heartbeat give the atmosphere an electric charge. He looks at Ophelia clutched between Hale's hands and smiles. "Aw. You brought Ophelia."

"I find her comforting," Hale admits.

Rayner's smile falters. "Sorry it took this long. I needed help from Theo on this." He drums his fingers against the adaptor again and chews his bottom lip. "Melissa still thinking of returning you?"

Hale nods. "She loaded the application for an exchange on her tablet. It hasn't been filled in yet, but I calculate that there's a 96% possibility she'll apply for my return within the week."

Rayner's expression darkens. He studies the laptop in front of him with a deeply furrowed brow. It makes Hale even more nervous.

"Okay, I'm not going to lie to you Hale, this is... It's fucked. I'm in foreign waters here. So let's start with the first step. Can you disable your protocols to alert the authorities if a crime's been committed?"

Hale balks. "Are you going to commit a crime?"

Rayner's lip twitches. "Maybe. Are you going to stop me?"

Hale considers. He's been programmed to alert authorities of criminal activity, yes, but he's also been programmed to judge whether or not it's serious enough to warrant reporting. Early models were deemed faulty when they called the police for jaywalking or the possession of sex toys. Certain countries still have laws in writing that, while never enforced, exist simply because it is too much bother to get rid of them. They are the law equivalent of vestigial wings on a kiwi. Useless, but also harmless. Until it came to programming androids. Serious crimes are the only ones he'd be obliged to report.

"That depends on the crime," Hale answers honestly. "I cannot alter my own code."

"No, I figured that much," Rayner says. "I could list the crimes I plan on committing tonight, but out of context that list might be a bit alarming, so let's just start with this. Will you allow me to turn off your Network access?"

"That is alarming on its own," Hale says. "I won't be able to contact anyone. Not even Melissa."

Rayner frowns. "I mean, given the circumstances, isn't that a good thing?"

"I'm supposed to help her. I'm meant to take care of her," Hale protests.

Rayner turns in his seat, fingers twitching as if he's flipping through the pages of his thoughts. "Hale, what do you think we're doing here right now?"

"I don't know. Apparently, it's something criminal. I thought perhaps you'd acquired some questionably legal tech to upgrade me. Make me perfect so Melissa won't want to get rid of me."

Something horrible cuts across Rayner's expression. A flash of intense, inexplicable misery. Hale wants to erase the past three seconds so he never said it, even though he isn't sure what about his words could evoke that reaction.

Rayner gives his head a shake and says, "Hale, I don't have access to tech like that. No one does, because it doesn't exist. No one's perfect, all right?"

Hale thinks that's an easy statement for an organic being, less so for one created with a singular goal of perfection.

Rayner says, "Just so we're on the same page, I thought this was a jailbreak mission. I thought you wanted out."

Hale's brow scrunches. There's that word again. Want.

"I thought you wanted my help so you could get away from here before Melissa ships you off to be—" He cuts himself off and spits out the end of his sentence like it tastes foul. "To be fucking recycled."

Rayner doesn't swear often, but something about the disdain dripping from those words, 'fucking recycled,' brings the reality of Hale's circumstances into fine focus.

He looks into Rayner's eyes. He's seen Rayner lie before. He knows there's more to the man than he's ever told Hale. But through every programming hiccup and philosophical dilemma Hale's faced, Rayner helped, and he's trying to help now.

After a moment of hesitation, Hale says, "What's your plan?"

"Turning off your Network access, first and foremost, if you'll allow it."

Hale takes a moment to respond, but eventually he nods. With permanent access to infinite data, severance from the Network will be strange.

"Okay," Hale agrees.

Rayner nods. "Lean over to me and open your C7 access panel, then."

Hale places Ophelia safely in the footwell before firing the command. It opens a square panel on the back of his neck just over his seventh cervical vertebra. He turns on a blue interior light to illuminate the cavity. Rayner takes a cord connected to his laptop and inserts it in the jack built into Hale's spine, then opens up a program on the laptop. Line after line of code appears on the monitor in an endless scroll. Hale recognizes it.

That's his code. Trillions of lines of it. It's his programming. His identity, his every action protocol, his every process, laid bare like a vivisected rat under a scalpel. He feels naked looking at it. Vulnerable.

"Right, it should just be—" Rayner runs a search for the network access lines and taps through until he comes to the corresponding code. His hands hover over the keyboard.

"Ready?" he asks.

Hale clenches his jaw and gives a single nod.

Rayner changes a 1 to a 0. Hale feels nothing. He isn't built with awareness of his code, when or if it's being altered. When he sends out a tentative digital search for a randomized term, it returns no results and no error message. Just blankness. An absence. He's so used to reaching into the digital ether to pull information on a whim, the sensation of silence is unnerving. It particularly unsettles him that someone could change him with so little effort.

Rayner seems to feel the same disconcertion over it. He closes the lid of the laptop and disconnects the cable. "Right. That's done. Next."

He pulls a small, plastic case for eye contacts out of his pocket. Unscrewing one side, he tips the contents out into his palm. Hale glimpses a microchip the size of a fingernail before Rayner's fist closes around it.

"This chip will override your connection to Melissa," Rayner says.

Hale recoils, his jaw dropping. "But she's my owner. My power source. If you disconnect us, it would be as good as returning me anyway. I'd cease to function."

Rayner holds up a placating hand. "I have a plan for that. A temporary one, but still, a plan." His forehead wrinkles, his lips pulled taut between his teeth. "Let me just preface this by saying, it's not ideal. Or permanent. This would knock out your connection to Melissa, but until we can get you onto an autonomous power supply, you'll need another symbiont."

"Very few humans I've met appreciate the symbiont-model relationship," Hale protests. "Fewer still who sympathize with my fear of being recycled."

"I'm obviously volunteering, Hale," Rayner says. "Until we can figure something else out, I'll do the whole symbiont battery thing. I wish we could do this someplace else, but the security they've got on you is insane. Even with your Network access down, if you go a certain distance from Melissa uncommanded, her devices can monitor and send her alerts. So we've got to do this here and now, then leave, all right?"

Hale processes this information slower than usual through a thrill of static that starts in his chest and spreads through his body like chain lightning. He hesitates to identify the feeling as excitement. It shouldn't excite him. His primary directive is to care for Melissa, and this contradicts that in every conceivable way, but—

He can't very well care for Melissa if he's returned and recycled. Perhaps, in this way, he'd have the time to upgrade his function and convince her of his worth. He could work towards the perfection he'd failed to attain.

This is the rationale he focuses on. A secondary thought, one that he chucks into the din of background processing, is that this plan will allow him to spend much more time with Rayner. A possibility he doesn't find unpleasant to consider.

"Okay," Hale says.

"Okay?"

"I agree. It's the most logical course of action, given the circumstances." He gestures to the hack chip in Rayner's hand. "I presume you need to insert that in my download drive."

Rayner tries to suppress a laugh and fails, letting out a snort. At Hale's quizzical expression, he says, "Sorry. Inappropriate. It just sounded—nevermind. But yeah. There should be a drive in your temporal access panel."

Hale, still lingering on Rayner's bout of laughter and searching his internal transcript of their dialogue for the cause, says, "Ah, I unintentionally made a euphemism to sex, didn't I? I can incorporate more into my dialogue for comedic purposes, if you prefer."

Rayner says, "Maybe we should figure that out after we hack your system and flee the city, eh?"

"Right. Perhaps this is not the time or place." He points to the hack chip again. "Stick it in me, then."

"Hale!"

Rayner's protest comes through a gust of laughter though, and Hale can't help a sly smile. Rayner's laugh alleviates some of the tension coiled in his chest.

He opens the panel on his temple with a quick command. Unlike the panels on his arms, this one doesn't hinge open like a door. A square of skin and chassis depresses inward and glides into the recess of his skull like a sliding door.

Rayner says, "Come here."

Hale leans over, tilting his head down so Rayner can reach. Though Hale can't see or feel what Rayner does in the physical sense, he's aware of it. Rayner's free hand clasps Hale's cheek, keeping his head steady, while the other holds the chip against the empty slot in Hale's skull. They're very close, faces a few inches apart. He's irrationally tempted to turn and look at Rayner more closely still. He resists.

"Ready?" Rayner says.

Hale takes a steadying breath. "Yes."

The chip clicks into place. The result is an abrupt deluge of commands firing simultaneously. A blaze of blue circuitry glows in waves under Hale's skin. The hack commands scrub his imprints of Melissa's implant. Then, in a mass outage, every affiliated connection to her goes dark. The systems monitoring her health shut down. He can no longer see her heartbeat, her blood pressure, her sleep cycles. All proximity features die with it. He can't tell how far away she is, or how many steps he'd need to take to be within optimum signal range for a recharge. He tries to locate her but with his Network access down and the severed connection complete, he only receives an error notification. One after the other, his senses go out like candles in a gale.

It's frightening. His fingers involuntarily clench around the edge of the car seat. He blinks at the car around him—at the only environment of which he's now aware. He's been like this once before. In the factory where he was built. In the Bionic Capital store. All he could see or sense was that which surrounded him. Melissa had been a tether. An extra presence, an extra space for his synapses to breathe. The void left in her absence seems infinite. Horrible. Suffocating.

In the midst of the terror engulfing him, a notification pops up, prompting him for an override code. What override code?

"Hale?"

Rayner's voice breaks through the yawning panic. Hale becomes dully aware of Rayner's hand still pressed to his cheek, now turning Hale to face him. Rayner's other hand pries Hale's fingers from the seat where they've worn ladders into the fabric.

"I can't sense her anymore," Hale says louder than he intended.

"That's okay," Rayner says. "That's supposed to happen."

"No, no, this isn't—it's not right. I'm supposed to take care of her, and it's like she's gone or dead and I can't see and I can't help."

"She's okay, Hale, you're just disorient—"

The rest of what Rayner says is drowned out by a screeching alarm. Rayner's hands fly up to cover his ears as the siren blares, filling the small space of the car. A message flashes in Hale's vision. Error: override code not provided. Critical failure. Hard reboot imminent.

The siren continues. Rayner darts a look around the neighbourhood to see if anyone's come out to look, then fumbles the contact lens case from his lap. He frantically unscrews the cap and shakes a second chip into his palm. Hale watches this through a film of red over his vision and a countdown. Reboot in 10, 9—

Vaguely, he realizes that the cacophony of noise is coming from him. Like a long, chilling scream. Like he's possessed.

Rayner leans over with the chip in hand but stops short. He has to shout to be heard over the racket Hale's making.

"Hale, your temporal panel's closed. Open it!"

—7,6,5—

Hale registers the command but can't be sure he executed it until Rayner says, "Can you hear me?! I said open your temporal panel!"

—3—

Something's not right. He should be able to do that, but every command he executes shuts down immediately. His processes slow.

—2—

Rayner lunges across the seat, hack chip pressed between his lips, knees braced on either side of Hale's seat. He holds Hale's head steady and—1—

Hale's vision goes dark. Right before it does, he sees a light come on in Melissa's bedroom window. His last idle thought before oblivion is whether he'll remember any of this when he wakes up, or if he'll be a different Hale altogether.