My Sex Robot Has My Enemy's Face novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Pulse

Two fingers on the wrist find a pulse and a scar Wynn knows. She decides to say nothing and keep the machine she ordered.

In the morning I stood outside the closet for ten full minutes.

Then I opened the door.

The blue light had gone out, and Eleven was sitting upright in the cradle with her hands in her lap.

Her eyes were already open.

"Good morning, Wynn," she said.

"How long have you been awake?"

"Since you stopped breathing outside the door."

I should have felt scared.

What I felt was a clean, hot click.

"Give me your hand," I said.

She held out her right hand, palm up, as steady as a table.

I took it in both of mine.

The skin was warm, warmer than Lumen's spec sheet allowed, and softer than any weave I'd ever pulled off a loom.

I turned her wrist over.

Two fingers, just under the heel of her hand, where the tendon lifts.

I pressed and waited.

Something knocked back against my fingertips.

Once, then again, then again.

Quick and a little uneven.

I had ordered her with the pulse switched off.

I had ticked the box myself, because I had wanted a machine that couldn't be mistaken for a person.

I turned her wrist toward the window.

On the inside, just above the crease, was a white scar the length of a grain of rice.

I knew that scar.

We were twenty-five and in the lab at two in the morning when a solder tray went up.

I had pulled her away from the bench by her sleeve, and a bead of hot metal had landed on her wrist.

She hadn't cried out.

She'd said, "Well, that's going on the pitch deck," and I had laughed so hard I couldn't hold the ice pack.

Lumen's catalogue had no scar like that.

I never told them about it.

I didn't tell the machine either, because there was no machine.

There was Margot Ketteridge, sitting in a padded box in my hall closet, wearing her own face.

She was looking at me with the polite blank stare of a mannequin.

She was breathing slowly on purpose.

I could see her counting.

My heart was going so hard I thought it would show in my shirt.

I dropped her hand.

The old Wynn, the one who'd stood at the bus stop with the cardboard box, would have screamed.

She would have thrown her out of the loft and called the police and put every ugly word she knew into one long sentence.

Instead I looked at the woman who had watched them walk me out.

I had built that building with my own hands.

She was in my house, in my cradle, doing exactly what I told her.

She had no idea I knew.

I thought about it for about as long as it takes to breathe in and out.

I'd paid two hundred and twelve thousand dollars for a machine that would apologize and obey.

Fine.

She could be that.

"Eleven," I said.

"Yes, Wynn."

"Your hands are cold."

They weren't.

"I'll warm them," she said.

"Don't. Stay right where you are."

I crossed to the sofa and sat down.

"New rules," I said. "You don't leave this loft without me."

"No, Wynn."

"You don't answer my phone or my door."

"No, Wynn."

"And you don't lie to me."

There was a pause, one beat too long.

"No, Wynn," she said.

I almost smiled.

I stuck out one boot.

"Come here," I said. "Take off my boots."

For a second nothing moved on her face.

Then I saw it, small and bright, the way you see a fish turn under water.

Her pupils went wide.

She got out of the cradle and crossed the floor and knelt in front of me on the concrete.

Her long fingers found the laces.

They were shaking.

"Yes, Wynn," she said.

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