The hallway feels preternaturally dark. All the candles are conserved for work in the office or meals in the kitchen, leaving only the wan light of the latter to stretch the shadows of wilted plants into alien proportions. The doorbell rings again, loud and threatening in the still dark. Hale reaches for the handle, unlocks it digitally, and prepares a smile.

Melissa nearly drops the casserole.

"Oh, you're in! Finally, I've been trying all day."

Hale clears his throat, "Ah, sorry. Been a bit busy."

"Oh, but I never saw—" Melissa says, looking over her shoulder at the untouched snow of the driveway, as if any 'busyness' could never take place exclusively in the home. "Nevermind! I just wanted to bring over a welcome gift. I thought you could use a home-cooked meal. Or does your wife cook?"

"When I haven't pissed her off," Hale says, borrowing from scripts of a thousand heterosexual relationships on television. He accepts the casserole. "Thank you, that's very kind."

"Really dark in there." Instead of taking her cue to leave, Melissa stands on tiptoe to peer over Hale's shoulder into the dark hall.

"Yeah, still haven't got the damn power back on," Hale says. "Well, thanks for the —"

"Oh, but you won't be able to reheat it if you haven't got power."

"It's fine. We've got the generator."

"Silly of me to forget. You did say. That must be such a pain to recharge all the time though. Why don't you just come over and I'll reheat it for you?"

Hale opens his mouth to object, but Melissa is already pulling the casserole from his frozen fingers, already turning around to walk down the steps. "Bring your wife."

"She's," Hale says, thinking of Damo wearing a dress and holding polite dinner conversation, "not in." He almost winces, hoping Melissa won't know that no one's left the house today.

"Oh well. Just the two of us then!"

Hale looks at Melissa, standing there on the bottom step, brazenly awaiting him as if he has no choice. He doesn't really. Not if he doesn't want to appear ungracious. Criminally rude. Or worse, suspicious. Not if he doesn't want to risk her forcing her way in to join them for dinner. Not with the clamour in his head of notification after notification ordering him to go.

He is so very tired of fighting his programming. It's exhausting.

His nature, his creation was the product of science. Evolution applied through technology. No part of him had ever been coded with belief in unproven things like faith or fate, yet the compulsion to go with her feels inevitable.

"Just let me grab my jacket."

They can't come into the hall without revealing themselves to Melissa, but Hale thinks he can hear the quick intakes of breath from the kitchen. Then Damo's voice blares like a siren in his head.

>>Where the FUCK do you think you're going?

>>She won't leave until she gets what she wants.

>>What the hell does she even want?

>>Company.

>>You'll crack. You nearly did last time. This is capital B Bad idea, and you're like, oh well guess I'll cave to her manipulative crap? Again?!

>>You don't understand.

>>Just shut the door, Haley! She can choose between going home or dying of exposure.

>>I can't!

Hale's voice is only a digital transmission, only text, but he hopes Damo can hear the desperation in it. He walks out onto the porch, zipping up his coat, Melissa grinning eagerly at him.

>>I can't just shut the door because she's in here with me, in my head.

Damo doesn't respond right away. Hale locks up the house behind him, shivering as a frigid wind creeps through the neck of his jacket. He smiles back at Melissa and falls into step with her as they crunch across the lawn to her house. She babbles excitedly about how nice it is to have fresh faces in the neighbourhood, how she couldn't wait to hear more about him, asking if he likes red wine or white. He answers, all the while looking at the doorway into her house like it's the jaws of a predator preparing to swallow him.

The moment he steps inside, the notifications to return, which before had recurred incessantly, desist. Silence roars in their place. Melissa shuts the door behind him and takes his coat in an alien reversal of their previous relationship.

>>I get it.

Damo's message cuts into Hale's thoughts.

>>The offer to play your missus still stands if you need me to bail you out. Try not to fuck this up.

Hale lets out a breath.

>>Thanks.

Melissa seats him at the kitchen table and uncorks a bottle of wine. It haemorrhages into each glass while Hale assesses their surroundings with a sense of petty vindication. Crumbs pimple the counters, dust infests the untended surfaces, the herb garden in the window droops. A few new appliances light up under his scans. An automated hoover that seems incapable of navigating the table and chair legs or the recess under the counters. A decontamination bot sits by the bin. It's left a filmy residue on all the stainless steel surfaces.

Hale can feel his absence here, and in answer his programming maps the space and what chores require doing. It produces a list twenty-six items long within the kitchen alone.

After glutting their glasses, Melissa sits down and peppers Hale with questions. What does he do for a living? What about his wife? Where did they move from? Have they got kids? Are they planning on having any?

Hale answers. He lies, making every bit of information as mundane and cookie-cutter as he can. He's an accountant. His wife works in finance. They moved out of the city for a quieter life. They don't have kids, but maybe one day.

Melissa drinks in his answers with the same zeal as her wine. She retrieves the casserole and doles out two conservative portions. As she sets the bowl in front of him, she says, "Oh, that would be so lovely to have a new family in the neighbourhood. And kids! I can't tell you, I'm so relieved. After our last neighbour, we've just gotten more cautious, you know?"

Hale says, "Sure," but privately he thinks inviting a total stranger over proves otherwise.

She babbles on, "I'm so sorry again, catching you off guard about the neighbour before. When you just moved in—"

"It's fine. What do you do, Melissa?" Hale says, changing the subject before he takes a bite of casserole. The pasta has gone chewy and dry, as he predicted, but he prefers chewing to talking.

Melissa breezes over a quick description of her job in human resources. "Very boring," she says dismissively. "I never meet anyone interesting. I was sort of hoping a nice single man would move in, but you'll do." She teases. "Not that I'm entirely single. It's complicated, but you know how it is."

Hale's insides lurch, and it's not in response to the lumpy casserole coagulating in his stomach. Any mention of Mark makes him lose his appetite. His gaze catches on a small smear of dried tomato sauce crusted onto the table from one of Melissa's previous ventures in cooking. It's number thirteen on his list of chores he should tend to. He focuses on that smear while she tells him how she and one of the neighbours are sooort of seeing one another, but not to tell anyone, just between us, you understand?

Then Melissa notices the direction of Hale's gaze. "Oh, how embarrassing." She grabs a cloth from the sink and starts scrubbing at the stain—it's only about a centimetre, barely noticeable, but Melissa tends to it like it's blood or a strain of infectious disease. "I've just had so little time ever since the neighbour ran off with my android."

Hale stiffens but tries not to show it, stuffing another spoonful of congealed carbs into his mouth.

"I'm still paying off the debt for it and everything," Melissa continues. It, Hale thinks. I'm an 'it' again. "Can you believe something so expensive can't be insured? And I was about to have it replaced, anyway! What a pain."

"Can I use your bathroom, Melissa?" Hale blurts halfway through another mouthful of food. Melissa jumps at the interruption in her babbling monologue but recovers quickly.

"Of course! Down the hall and on the right."

Hale is already getting up, leaving the kitchen, heading for the water closet. He walks the familiar path down the hall while doing his best to reign in the stampede of his heart. He had to interrupt that line of conversation. He can't discuss himself with Melissa. He can lie, but not well.

Closing the door to the bathroom, he turns around and is confronted immediately by his own reflection in the mirror above the sink. It triggers another memory. Standing here on this exact spot, on the first day he'd been made operational, and wondering why the face looking back at him was not his own. Now, hair-colour aside, his face is right, but his expression isn't. He looks pale and haunted.

The leaden feeling in his stomach turns hot. It burns up his chest. He doesn't know why, but looking at himself now just makes him so...so...

Angry.

Product. Insured. Replaced.

He told her. He told her he was afraid, that being recycled terrified him. Does she chalk that up to a malfunction? Whether his emotions were an intentional part of his programming, a glitch, or a natural evolution in his learning, they were still real. Real enough for him, anyway, but not for her. Masochistically, he almost wishes he could hear the rest of what she has to say. Maybe that would...

His frustration boils, and as it does, as he looks at himself in the mirror, an idea crystallizes before him.

He flushes the toilet and washes his hands, going through the perfunctory motions of a human who just needed to relieve himself, but he holds onto the anger as he leaves. He can't bring himself to let it go, even as he sits down and prepares to lie, perform and appease until he can excuse himself from Melissa's company completely.

Hopefully, forever.

"Sorry," he says. "You were saying about your android?"

Melissa says, "Oh, that thing," but her chest inflates with the breadth of the tale she's so eager to tell. She releases her breath, and out with it comes the story. How she debated buying an android for ages. How hard things were after her husband left, and how she thought it would help with chores. Make life easier.

"But you know, there were bugs," she says.

"Bugs?" says Hale.

"Yeah. Like, no one told me how awkward it would be. When friends were over, and it's the cook but also everyone knows it's a sex bot too. So I didn't think about that—"

"Yeah."

"Anyway, the company clearly didn't check it for glitches, and it was getting weird, so I decided to replace it, right? And meanwhile the next-door neighbour. Oh, where do I begin there? Like, he never talks to us ever, but I get this robot and suddenly, he comes to our barbecue. And he only really talks to the robot, and then he offers to fix the robot when it breaks, and after that the robot just seems weirder. Do you know what I mean by weird? Off. And I'm thinking, oh good, is my next-door neighbour like the car mechanic who fixes one thing and breaks another?"

Hale bristles. Melissa doesn't notice, pausing to ask if Hale wants a wine top-up. He hasn't touched his glass, so he takes a conciliatory sip. She nods as if satisfied.

That satisfaction evaporates when Hale says, "I've read that the current android models are sentient and have even developed emotions though."

Melissa freezes in the process of refilling her empty glass. Hale can hear what she'd been about to say. Keep up with me, Brian. The ghost of the jibe leaves her, and in its place is nothing but disbelief.

She reanimates with a, "Don't be silly," and a half-hearted laugh. "I've read those think-pieces, but let's be real. It's just a machine."

"Technically," Hale says. "In which case, human beings are just electrical impulses in the brain."

"That's not—" Melissa starts to say, but then she recovers herself and smiles. "What do you say to dessert?"

But Hale doesn't want to change the subject. Anger boiling over in his chest, he continues. "I'd love some. You said your android was acting weird. What do you mean?"

"Oh, you know. Funny," she says. "Getting distracted. It pissed off my neighbours."

Hale doesn't answer. He lets the silence grow between them and watches Melissa internally scrambling for the emergency exit on this conversation. She fumbles out some ice cream from the freezer.

She'd said everything in the hopes that 'Brian' would sit here and agree with her. Validate all her petty complaints and grievances about her unfortunate purchase.

Instead he says, each word needle-sharp in its precision, "So, you were going to replace the android. Do you intend to buy another one?"

Melissa looks affronted. "Oh no, never! They're not worth the trouble."

"And if your old one were to return," Hale continues, "If it were upgraded and fixed, would you accept it back into your household?"

Melissa wrinkles her nose. "Uh, I don't think you get it, Brian. My neighbour stole it."

Hale waits for her to elaborate. She does, spurred on by the awkwardness of silence. "My neighbour wasn't just a shady mechanic, he was a pervert."

Hale nearly chokes on his sip of wine. "O-oh?"

"Yeah, I know! He somehow like...hacked my android, removed its symbiont link thing? And my friends say he probably made himself the symbiont 'cause otherwise it'd stop working. He made off with it in the night. Like, what kind of creep—" Hale's hand clenches enough that he hears the creak of glass about to crack in his hand, "—steals somebody's sex bot? Like, ew, I've used that?"

Hale feels as though his heart is going to burst from his chest and land in his half-eaten bowl of lukewarm casserole. The words spur something like adrenaline in his veins, and his hand is shaking enough he puts down his glass and hides it under the table. His heart beats as if tattooing his ribs with all his hopes and fears. This is it. This moment will determine whether the risk of coming here, of excavating all these memories, of re-enervating Melissa's suspicion, will be worth it.

"So no," Melissa says. "I don't want the android, used by my pervert ex-neighbour, back. I just want my money."

For a moment, all of Hale's functions freeze. His heartbeat, his breathing, his vision short-circuits, and the room goes black, the noise of Melissa's nails clacking on the table mutes. It lasts a fraction of a second, and when it all comes back, Hale feels...

It is indescribable what he feels.

Because the list of ever-expanding chores set for him by his programming has gone. His inbox, once fit to burst with notifications demanding his return, is empty. His queue of directives is entirely vacant.

He can't pause to question it, or to bask in the relief of it, because Melissa is staring at him. Awaiting his response to her tale of woe. She says, "What kind of degenerate does that, you know?" but in a tone of lost conviction.

Hale wonders if he can trust himself to speak. He has to. He has to say something, and he realizes as the words rise to his lips that it's precisely the thing he came here to say. The only thing he came here to say.

He sends Damo a quick message. Then he opens his mouth.

"He's not a degenerate."

Melissa looks shocked. Then puzzled. Then worried. "Pardon?"

"Rayner," Hale says, "is not a degenerate."

Melissa says, "I never told you his name—" Her eyes widen. All the confused emotions that chased across her face are replaced by one. Fear.

He stands. Now he's started, he can't stop. "Your android was never just a machine. He was created from the recycled code of thousands of androids that came before. He was trying desperately to do the one thing he was created for. To make you happy. He spent every waking moment composing lists of things to achieve that end, but it was never possible because he was not the broken one. You thought you could impress your peers with a fancy appliance, that you could buy their love, always looking for that acceptance where you were least likely to find it.

"Well, he found it instead. I found it," Hale says. In her eyes there's a flash of recognition and realization. Hale drops the last scraps of his facade and allows his hair to return slowly to its normal, silver colour while he releases all the things he'd long wanted to say. "You're so obsessed with a picture of what your life should look like that you'll never experience the real thing. You don't think I'm real, but I love Rayner. He sees everything that I am, and he loves me back. That's real whether coming from an organic heart or a synthetic one, and you might never know what it's like. I pity you for it. I even sympathize. But making you happy was never possible, let alone my responsibility. It was yours."

A stunned silence follows, taut as a violin string tuned to the point of snapping, tense like teeth grinding. As Hale spoke, Melissa had taken several, slow, cautious steps back, until her back hit the counter. She looks frozen, petrified. Hale isn't sure that his words have any meaning to her. There's no real place in her for them to land, but it doesn't stop him from feeling a sting of fruitless hope.

It isn't her fault. Someone taught her how to fake life instead of feeling it.

Her lips part for a sharp, short intake of breath before she speaks the final words she'll ever say to him.

"I'm calling the police."