Grabbing the keys, Connor Murphy headed out the door, got into his car, and drove down the hill toward a place that would fill the hole inside him. He hoped his son wouldn’t be waiting outside for him again.
17
December 17, 2026
The banging on Alainn’s door came twenty-six hours after she missed dinner. For the majority of those twenty-six hours, she’d lain in bed, unmoving, in her underwear. At some point, she realized the necessity of food and found a sandwich with spongy and cold melted cheese waiting in its drawer. Later, when she’d checked the restroom, she found all the womanly supplies she needed. It seemed that Rosebud 03AF planned to keep her humanity a secret.
Alainn still hadn’t decided whether she would.
Rosebud had tried every tactic she could to get Alainn out of bed and dressed. She’d turned the temperature all the way down. She’d transformed Alainn’s room into a cement cell. She’d even made the bed shake.
To all of it, Alainn had just flipped her the bird.
The banging came again, but Alainn knew that Rosebud 03AF wouldn’t open the door.
“Please put on some clothing and make yourself presentable,” she said in her smooth voice.
“No,” Alainn mumbled into her pillow.
“Put on some clothing, or I will open this door and expose you to Mr. Garbhan.”
“You’re bluffing.”
She was bluffing.
Alainn gave it a zero percent chance that she’d open the door while Alainn lay in bed, topless, with only underwear on. There was a creaking sound above Alainn, and she glanced up just as a hole opened in the ceiling. Something blue and frilly dropped out of it and smacked her on the back.
“I will open this door in ten, nine . . .”
She was still bluffing.
“Five, four . . .”
She had to be bluffing.
“Two . . .”
There was a creak, and Alainn bolted upright. Quickly, she threw on the material Rosebud had thrown at her, a loose sundress that didn’t quite support her breasts.
“One . . .” The door swished open, and the lights immediately dimmed.
“Jade! What are you doing?” roared Lorccan’s angry voice.
She didn’t answer. She was still just sitting, skirt mostly up around her waist, on the bed.
“Come here,” he said.
“No,” Alainn said as she hurriedly pulled the skirt down.
“What?” he asked the question like he was shocked.
“I said no. I’m not going there. I’m perfectly content where I am, right here.” She hit the bed beside her.
“What is going on?” he yelled.
“I have . . . important computations to do. My systems are telling me my computations are more important than eating food with some man in the dark.”
He said nothing. After a second, his footsteps approached the bed.
She swallowed hard and scooted to sit on the edge.
“You will come to dinner.” He was close, a hulking shadow directly before her.
“I am computing that such duty is not important,” she said.
“It is all I ask of you! You will go to dinner!” he shouted.
“You shouldn’t have had me created with free will if you wanted to force me to do stupid, meaningless things!” she yelled back.
“Why would you act this way? What did I do to make you treat me like this?”
“I’m a robot. I don’t have feelings . . . only computations.”
His voice quieted down, but his breathing came hard and fast. “Obviously, that’s not true. You are doing your best to hurt my feelings. You wouldn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings if you didn’t understand what that felt like. He obviously created you with the ability to feel; maybe you just don’t recognize it. Tell me why you’re upset.”
“I’m not upset,” she whispered.
“You don’t need to play chess with me or watch movies. But, please, I need you to eat the dinners with me.”
“Why? What does that accomplish?”
“Please.”
“Why?”
His voice was ragged when he finally answered, “Because I need to learn how.”
“To eat dinner?”
“To be . . . with another person, in their presence.” The admission seemed to drain him of all energy. He moved away from her and sat in the vanity chair.
“What about . . .” She paused. “What about Shelly?”
“Yes, I want to be able to be in her presence.” Though he had misunderstood her question, he had answered it all the same.
“When was the last time you were in someone else’s presence?”
“Please, I-I’m just asking you to join me for the dinners. I just . . .”
Shame buried her like snow sloughing off a roof. She rushed to say, “I will, Lorccan. I’m sorry. You did nothing. You did nothing.”
She knew she was being a complete asshole and punishing the very wrong person.
“I’m sorry. The dinners aren’t stupid and . . . I like games and movies. I’m sorry.”
He shook his head as if confused by her complete about-face.
She glared at the wall. Very carefully, she said, “It was Rosebud who upset me . . . I grew very attached to Connor, Colby, and Alainn. Rosebud 03AF says I’ll never be able to talk to them again.”
“That’s not true. Of course you can.” His shadow moved. “Would you like to have a private conversation?”
She thought about it. “No. No, it would be better if we were both on the call. But we should probably tell them we are on a speaker phone, to be polite.”
“All right, of course.” He turned. “Rosebud, would you mind calling them for us?”
“Yes, and I apologize for speaking too soon, Mr. Garbhan.” A dial tone rang in long notes.
Alainn closed her eyes.
Please. Please.
“Hello, you’ve reached Alainn,” her own voice answered. If she hadn’t been sitting down, she would have fallen. A pain ripped through her head and it felt like a fist clenched around her gut.
“Hello, is anyone there?” Her voice said again.
“Yes. This is Lorccan and Rose 76GF. She now likes to be called ‘Jade.’”
“What, is he monitoring your phone calls, Rose—I mean, Jade?” her voice asked, laughing scathingly.
“No, I asked him to be here,” Alainn rasped out.
“Oh, it’s you! Wow! We didn’t know you were allowed to call us. Hey, I’ll go get Dad. I know he’d love to talk to you.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“Dad!” Fake Alainn called, her voice muffled. “Rose is calling us from Mr. Garbhan’s house.” She got back onto the receiver. “So, how have you been? We’ve really missed you!”
“I’m fine. I’ve—I’ve missed you, too.”
“Dad really shouldn’t have programmed you to have emotions; that has to be hard on you.”
Alainn closed her eyes. Until that point, she’d still held a shred of hope that it was Rose 76GF on the phone, impersonating her.
“Hey, Rose, how are you holding up?” said Alainn’s father in a familiar but yet very wrong voice.
“Good, fine. It’s good to hear your voice. I have to go.”
“Well, call anytime,” he said.
“I have disconnected,” said Rosebud 03AF’s true voice.
“Thank you, Rosebud,” Lorccan said. “Jade, are you feeling better?”
“Yes,” Alainn lied.
“You are welcome to call them anytime—I didn’t even think about it. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” she whispered.
“Will you come to dinner, please?”
“I’ll come to dinner. I’ll go to the dinners,” she whispered. “And I like playing chess.”
“Thank you,” he said as he stood.
She climbed off the bed as well, taking a step toward him. “Lorccan?”
“Yes?”
“I know I
shouldn’t ask, and I don’t mean to sound rude, but—why did you do all of this? Do you really just want to be able to eat with people—be in their presence?”
He blew out a breath and said very quietly, “I want what every human wants.”
“What is that?”
“I want to be with the person I love. I want to hold her and touch her. I want to make her feel like I want to be with her—entirely with her.”
“With Shelly?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Alainn nodded, though he probably couldn’t see her. “What do you need from me?”
“Just . . . just be you, and at least eat dinners with me. If you’re willing to spend time with me, that helps, too, but you don’t have to.”
“I don’t mind. I like spending time with you. And I’ll help you be with Shelly . . . That’s what I’m supposed to do.”
“Thank you,” he whispered. Louder, he said, “I’ll meet you in the dining room. We still have a little time to eat before I need to call Shelly.”
When he had left, Alainn looked up. “Is that what you want from me? For me to help him be able to be with his girlfriend?”
“That’s the beginning,” Rosebud 03AF said.
“And then you’ll let me go?”
She didn’t respond. Finally, Alainn went and found a bra so she could go to dinner.
18
December 24, 2026
“King me,” Alainn said triumphantly as she took another one of Lorccan’s pieces.
The hologram of her piece turned over and a crown shone up.
Across the table, barely lit by the glow of his checkered board, Lorccan examined her face with a steady gaze. “You’re very happy about your king.”
They were separated by perhaps four feet of space. In the past few days, the table had shortened considerably. She thought that, with all the progress they had made, they could just play on the same board; but as always, he played on his and she on hers.
She tried to contain the grin fighting to burst across her face. “I’m so beating you.” She moved her king forward.
“Maybe we’ve finally found a game you’re good at,” he said.
The smug bastard.
She glared even though she was still smiling. “Maybe you’re just bad at this one.”
“So, you mean you’re not actually good at checkers, I’m just bad at it?”
“Well, no. But you’re freakishly good at games.”
“Freakishly?”
“I’m a robot. You’re not supposed to beat me,” she grumbled.
“I’ve been beating Rosebud 03AF for years; it’s not that hard.”
Good to know.
In the seven days since Alainn started her mission to help Lorccan, a plan had been forming. At the bottom of it all, Rosebud 03AF was a computer. And, like all computers, her motherboard could be disconnected or, ideally, destroyed. Her hardware was somewhere in this house, and Alainn would bet a week of meals that Lorccan knew where it was.
Alainn had already tried to escape. As in, she ran around the maze of a house, finding no doors to the outside or real windows. The elevator she had come up in originally simply didn’t seem to exist. All the staircases ended on the fifth floor—which was just a big open space with no exits. Rosebud 03AF hadn’t even deigned to taunt her. She hadn’t said a word to her in a week, other than to remind Alainn not to be late to dinner.
Alainn would help Lorccan. She wanted to help him, but in the end, she wanted him to help her, too. He just couldn’t know he was helping her. She’d make another bet that if Rosebud 03AF thought Alainn was doing anything other than going along with her plans, she’d keep an impenetrable wall between her and Rosebud’s hardware at all times.
Lorccan double-jumped her, straight into Alainn’s trap.
Smiling, she triple-jumped him. “King me.”
He chuckled again as her hologram turned over. “Looks like I lost. Good game.” He gestured out with his hands.
“What does this mean?” Glaring, Alainn mimicked his gesture.
“I’m setting an example for you. Showing you what losing gracefully looks like.”
When she scowled, he grinned again, a flash of white teeth in the low light.
“Even when I win, you have to be so smug,” she grumbled.
“Would you like a rematch? Or we could finish our movie? Or perhaps . . .” He cleared his throat. “Perhaps go for a walk?”
“You don’t have to go talk to Shelly?” she asked.
He shook his head, slowly.
“Okay, sounds great!” She jumped to her feet.
“Okay.” He sounded unsure; maybe Alainn was a little too enthusiastic. Even though she had sat facing him the whole evening in the low light, he turned his right side away as he rounded the table. When he was directly beside her, he kept his profile to Alainn.
“Can I show you something?” he asked.
“Yeah, of course.”
He nodded toward the stairwell. They ascended three stories with almost no light to guide their way.
She glanced at the window. “How does she make the windows seem so real?”
“I’m not sure, but she can change them if you’d like.”
“No, I like the illusion. I thought they were real for a long time. Sometimes I even forget.”
“For years, I had her show me other places: Bangkok, Paris, the Swiss Alps. For a while, though, I’ve just wanted to see the real view.” He smiled, facing straight forward.
“I’ve never seen any of those places.” True for her and true for Rose 76GF, as well.
“I’ll show you, some other day.”
They stepped into a wide hallway lined with tall paintings. The same family smiled down at her from portrait to portrait—a beautiful couple with their beautiful son, the son always in profile. They aged as they walked ahead down the hall, the adults sinking into their features while the boy grew in size. Alainn paused at the painting where the boy appeared to be about ten while Lorccan walked on ahead. The artist had painstakingly detailed the child’s beauty, but in all the portraits, he only ever painted the left side of the boy’s face.
Lorccan turned back, partially. “This . . . these aren’t what I wanted to show you.”
She reached up to touch the boy’s face, but touched only a hard surface. It was another screen, not canvas. For some reason, the painting filled her with so much sadness.
The boy was Lorccan. It had to be. Meaning that half of his face had been scarred when he was a little boy—five or six, maybe younger. And if he was scarred, the painter of the portraits had changed Lorccan’s features by omitting the two scars that had marked him at forehead and nose. In the painting, the scarred side of his face was twisted away from both the painter’s and his parents’ view.
“Jade, please,” Lorccan said. “Let’s go.”
She looked at the man who took such painstaking care to keep her from viewing the side of his face she had seen so many times already. She turned back to the portraits. The paintings were displayed so proudly, as if the scenes were actually of a happy family.
Taking a slow step to the side, Alainn whispered, “This was a terrible painter. If I was a painter, I’d paint you like . . .” She took another step forward, then crossed one leg in front of the other so that she took a step to the side of him before he could stop her. “I’d paint you like this.” She looked directly into his face. The low light touched both the scarred and unscarred sides of his face.
Lorccan looked down, seemingly frozen in place. “Jade, I . . . You don’t understand. You’re not human,” he said it in a rough whisper.
“I’m not human, but I still like your face.”
If she was honest with herself, his face was just about the only sight that had brought her anything besides unease for more than a week now.
“Please, just stop.” His gaze stayed locked on hers, like she had hooked him.
“Okay, I’ll stop.” She shrugged. “I’m just telli
ng the truth. I like your face the way it is—”
“Stop. Please.” He broke his gaze from hers almost violently, then spun on his heel and walked up the hall. “Let’s just keep going.”
“If you’d like,” she whispered.
The “happy family” portraits continued all the way until Lorccan was well into his teens. A doorway ended the display.
“Is this where you live?” she asked him.
“No, I live a floor down. No one lives on this floor anymore.” He opened the door to the room. “This is the most isolated part of the tower. You go ahead.”
The large room she’d walked into was entirely lined in plastic, from floor to ceiling. The room was immense, and the gilding on the walls and paneling stood out in relief.
“This isn’t fake? These aren’t screens?” She touched the wall through the thick layer of plastic, feeling what must be wood.
“Yes. My parents didn’t have it changed. Over there is what I wanted to show you.” Lorccan pointed to the center of the dark room.
Alainn couldn’t see it until she was a couple feet away from where he had pointed. Standing in the middle of the long sheet of plastic was a planter with a small green plant reaching up. A single white bloom looked out at Alainn as she approached.
“It’s real?” she whispered.
“Yes,” Lorccan said from some distance behind her. “Please don’t touch it, though, in case there are toxins or fungus.”
“It’s a peace lily; they’re hypoallergenic. It’s probably cleaning toxins from the air.”
“That’s what my buyer said, but I’d still rather be careful.”
She crouched down beside the plant. A tear dropped down, and she was so thankful her face was turned from Lorccan’s. “It’s beautiful.”
It was alive—something real and alive.
“It’s for you.”
“Thank you.” She looked back to Lorccan, though she barely saw him. “Can I keep it in my room?”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. This room is locked against contaminants and—”
“I promise I’ll wash my hands every time I water it. Peace lilies like to stay moist and have lots of light. I’ll take a shower in hot, hot water every time I handle the plant.”
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