My Sex Robot Has My Enemy's Face novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Delivery
The crate arrives and the face inside is Margot Ketteridge's, ordered by Wynn on purpose. When told to apologize, the machine says a line Wynn never wrote.
The crate came up in the freight elevator at six on a Tuesday evening.
Two couriers wheeled it into my loft on a dolly and asked me to sign on a tablet.
They didn't ask what was inside.
Nobody ever does with a crate that size.
"Where do you want her?" the taller one said.
"Middle of the floor."
They tipped the dolly, slid the crate down, and left without looking back.
I locked the door behind them and stood there with my hands shaking.
I had spent two hundred and twelve thousand dollars on this.
It was every dollar I'd earned licensing sensor designs to people who never put my name on anything.
The crate had a Lumen Atelier shipping label and a handle that said THIS SIDE UP.
I found the release latch and pulled it.
The lid lifted on a hiss of cold air.
Inside, in white foam, lay a woman in a grey slip.
She had a black bob that stopped at her jaw.
She had a long straight nose and a mouth that always looked about to say something cruel.
She had Margot Ketteridge's face.
I had picked that face myself, from a photograph in a keynote program.
The intake form at Lumen asked one question that I'd read three times in the showroom.
"Who do you want your companion to look like?"
The woman at the desk told me most clients wrote the name of someone they missed.
I wrote the name of the one person I'd have crossed a street to avoid.
Eight years ago Margot and I built a company in a garage.
I made the touch skin that went into half the companion units in the country.
She sold it.
Then a man with a lot of money told her I was in the way, and she signed a paper.
Two guards walked me through the glass lobby of Kestrel Haptics with my things in a cardboard box.
Everyone I worked with stood and watched.
Margot stood on the mezzanine with her arms folded.
She didn't come down.
She didn't say a word.
I was twenty-six, and I carried that box all the way to the bus stop.
Now she was lying in my living room with her eyes shut, and she was mine.
I knelt next to the crate and found the panel behind the left ear that the manual described.
The manual said to hold it for three seconds.
I held it for five.
The chest under the slip rose with a slow breath.
Her eyelids moved.
Her eyes opened, and they were grey, exactly the grey I remembered, and they went straight to my face.
I felt something cold go down my spine.
I told myself it was just good engineering.
"Wake up," I said.
She sat up in the foam without using her hands.
Her head turned and took in the loft, the brick, the windows, the drafting table.
Then she looked at me again.
"Good evening, Wynn," she said.
Her voice was perfect.
It was the same dry, low voice that had told a ballroom of investors that Kestrel was going to change the world.
Lumen had cloned it from the keynote recording.
My throat went tight.
I had written the next part myself.
I'd typed it into the custom script field at two in the morning, and I'd never told anyone.
It was one line, and I'd decided the machine would say it to me whenever I asked.
"Apologize," I said.
The woman in the crate folded her hands in her lap.
"I'm sorry, Wynn," she said.
I'd waited four years to hear it.
It sounded exactly as hollow as I'd expected.
I stood up to turn her off.
"I should have said it in the lobby," she said.
I stopped.
My hand was already on the panel.
I hadn't written that.
It wasn't in the script, and it wasn't in the manual.
No machine on earth knew about the lobby.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend