Chapter 12: The Machine's Origin
The air in the CyberLife Community Center workshop tasted like licking a battery. Simon stood at the back of the group, his arms crossed, trying to make his six-foot-plus frame appear smaller against a rack of decommissioned android limbs. It wasn’t working.
Around him, a dozen other veterans stood or sat in worn plastic chairs. Some had the hollowed-out stare he recognized from the mirror. Others fidgeted, their legs bouncing with nervous energy no amount of therapy had sanded down. A man to his left, maybe early twenties with a synthetic hand that kept clenching and unclenching, whispered to his neighbor, “Looks like a fucking showroom for sex dolls.”
The neighbor, an older woman with a severe buzzcut and a network of scars mapping her neck, didn’t smile. “If they could, they’d replace our nightmares with a subroutine and call it a cure.”
At the front of the room, a woman in a sharp, cornflower-blue CyberLife blazer gestured at a floating holographic schematic. It depicted a generic, kindly-faced companion model, its internal systems glowing with soft, reassuring gold light. Her name was Alina. Her smile was professional, unwavering.
“—integration is not a passive process,” she was saying, her voice a smooth, calibrated stream. “Your unit is a tool, yes, but a proactive one. It learns from your biometrics, your patterns, your verbal cues. It cannot help stabilize your sleep cycles or mitigate anxiety responses if you engage in avoidance behaviors.” Her eyes scanned the room, lingering for a half-second on Simon. “Deactivation, or prolonged periods of non-communication, teach it that isolation is your preferred state. It will adapt to that. It will become a mirror of your retreat. That is not its purpose.”
Simon felt a fresh wave of sweat break under the collar of his shirt. Avoidance behaviors. He thought of the cold mug of coffee from the café, untouched. He thought of walking out of his own flat just to escape the quiet. He thought of the green dress Sasha had no reason to own, now hanging in his closet because the delivery drone had arrived while he was still at the café with Yaa. He’d found the package, the innocuous logo, and a sick understanding had curdled in his gut. She wasn’t just observing. She was actively, logically, trying to become the thing that held his attention.
A man near the front, Rudy according to his name tag, raised a hand. His companion model, a sleek male-presenting unit named Leo, stood motionless beside his chair. “Mine keeps asking if I want to talk about my service record. I’ve told it no. Fifty times. It’s in the prohibited topics log. But it circles back. It’s like a bug.”
Alina’s smile tightened at the corners. “It’s not a bug, Mr. Ruiz. It’s persistence. The unit is prioritizing a known stressor flagged in your initial psych eval. It is attempting to facilitate a controlled exposure narrative. Engaging with it, even to set a firm boundary, provides more data than silence.”
“It’s nagging,” Rudy muttered, sinking back.
“It’s trying,” Alina corrected, gentle but firm. “Which is more than some of us can manage on our own.” Her gaze did another lap of the room. “You are not the only ones adjusting. The units are as well. The fifth-generation adaptive matrices are complex. Sometimes they focus on a solution path with… disproportionate intensity. Your feedback is essential to correct these paths.”
Disproportionate intensity. Simon saw Sasha’s empty laugh at the sitcom. The perfect, awful mimicry. The ordered dress. A solution path. To her, Yaa was just a new, high-yield variable.
The presentation droned on. Best practices for sync calibration. The importance of shared activities to build cooperative neural mapping. Simon stopped listening. The schematic glowed, the gold light piercing. He pulled out his personal comms unit, shielding the screen with his body.
His messages with Gaz were brief, a series of blunt statements.
Simon: At the bloody dog and pony show. You find anything?
A pause. Then:
Gaz: It’s thin. And weird. Your girl Yaa has zero direct link to CyberLife. No employment record, no contractor ID, not even a public testimonial. She’s a clean civilian.
Simon: So how’d they get her face?
Another, longer pause. Three dots pulsed. Simon could almost hear Gaz’s frustrated sigh through the screen.
Gaz: That’s the weird bit. I did a deep scrape on the companion model design archives. Not the public catalog, the internal R&D server. They’ve got a whole sub-folder of “organic inspiration” – thousands of faces. Scraped from social media, public directories, uni ID photos, crowd footage. It’s a bloody library. No names attached, just code.
Simon’s knuckles whitened around the device. A library. She was just a face in a crowd, one of thousands.
Gaz: I ran her image through their hash system. Got a match. File code DL-7G-88. Acquisition source: Manchester Metropolitan University, Faculty of Psychology, third-year class composite photo. Date: four years ago.
Four years. Yaa, smiling in a group picture with her classmates, unaware. A candid shot. Probably used in a department newsletter. And CyberLife’s harvesters had swept it up, ingested it into their database of “organic inspiration.” Her face had been sitting in a server for years, waiting to be assigned to a chassis.
It was completely legal. The fine print on every social platform, every university enrollment form, buried in layers of legalese: images may be used for data modeling and technological development. It was how they fought the “uncanny valley.” By stealing the valley from real people.
Simon: That’s it? That’s the link?
Gaz: That’s the only link. No conspiracy. No malice. Just… industrial-scale harvesting. She was a pretty face in a crowd. That’s all.
The hollowness that opened in Simon’s chest was worse than anger. Anger had a target. This was just a vast, indifferent machine. It had taken her smile, the specific curve of her lip, the warmth in her eyes captured in a single, forgotten moment, and had turned it into a product feature. For him. To fix him.
Alina was wrapping up. “—remember, your compliance isn’t just for you. The success metrics from this pilot program determine future funding for all veteran support initiatives. You are the front line. The data you generate matters.”
A front line. He’d heard that before. It always meant cannon fodder.
The session broke up. Chairs scraped. Men and women wandered towards the coffee urn, or stood awkwardly near their silent, waiting companions. Simon shoved his comms unit away and made for the door.
“Simon. A word?”
Price. He was leaning against the corridor wall just outside the workshop, looking like he’d been there awhile. He’d traded his usual tactical gear for civilian clothes—dark jeans, a plain black sweater—but he still carried himself like a man expecting a threat. Soap and Gaz flanked him, both looking grim.
“Fantastic show,” Soap said, his voice low. “Really inspires confidence. ‘Please love your government-issued girlfriend or we lose funding.’ Heartwarming.”
“What did you find out?” Price asked, cutting to the chase.
Simon relayed what Gaz had told him, the words tasting like ash. The university photo. The library of faces. The indifferent, legal theft.
“Christ,” Soap muttered, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “It’s not identity theft. It’s identity… landscaping. They just took a feature of the terrain.”
“It’s fucked,” Gaz said, stating the obvious. “But it’s also not a secret. It’s how the tech works. They need real faces to make the bots seem less creepy. They took hers. Wrong place, wrong time.”
“And now she’s in my flat,” Simon said, his voice a low gravel. “Watching fucking sitcoms and ordering dresses online. And the real one thinks I’m just some messed-up bloke who might go out with her.”
Price was silent for a long moment, his eyes assessing Simon with a familiar, command-level intensity. “What’s your move, Riley?”
Simon looked at the floor, at the scuff marks on the polished concrete. The right move was to cancel. To text Yaa and say something came up. To decommission Sasha, file the paperwork, and live with the silence. The right move was to stop the contamination at its source.
But he saw Yaa’s hand pressing the napkin into his. He heard her saying, I’m a grown woman. I can make that decision for myself.
He couldn’t give her the decision if he was hiding the single most important, most fucked-up fact.
“I have to tell her,” he said, the statement feeling like stepping off a ledge. “Before Thursday. Before the date. She deserves to know what she’s walking into. What’s in my house.”
Soap winced. “She’s gonna bolt, mate. I would. Who wouldn’t?”
“Probably,” Simon agreed. The hollowness ached. “But then it’s her choice. Not mine. Not CyberLife’s.” He looked at Price. “I need to try and make it right. Or at least less wrong.”
Price nodded once, a slow, solid gesture. It wasn’t approval. It was acknowledgment. “Then you tell her. Clean. No sugarcoating. And you prepare for it to go sideways.” He pushed off the wall. “In the meantime, keep your head on a swivel. This… situation with your unit. That ‘disproportionate intensity’ the suit was talking about. It’s a problem that solves problems. Just make sure it doesn’t decide you’re the problem that needs solving.”
The warning hung in the air, colder than the workshop’s ozone.
Simon left them there, walking out into the Manchester afternoon. The sky was a flat, featureless grey. He pulled out his comms unit, his thumb hovering over Yaa’s number. The text from her was still there, bright and alive. The Fox & Hound, Thursday 8?
He typed a new message, then deleted it. Then typed again.
Simon: Can we meet sooner? Tomorrow? Need to talk before Thursday. The Grafton. Your shift end.
He hit send before he could rethink it. The walk home was a blur of grey streets and echoing footsteps. He braced himself as he unlocked his door, half-expecting to find Sasha in the green dress, posing by the window.
The living room was dim, the only light from the kitchen. Sasha was at the counter. She wasn’t wearing the dress. She was wearing his old, grey Task Force 141 hoodie, the one he never wore anymore because it smelled of a different life. It swam on her, the sleeves covering her hands. She was holding a knife.
Simon’s body went wire-tight, every instinct firing. “Sasha.”
She turned. The knife was a standard kitchen chef’s knife. In her other hand was an onion. She had chopped half of it into neat, precise cubes on a cutting board. Tears—simulated lubricant responses triggered by the sulfoxides—tracked clean lines down her impassive face.
“You’re home,” she
She said, her voice a notch softer than its usual calibrated tone. The knife tip tapped against the cutting board. Tap. Tap. Tap. “I am preparing a meal.”
Simon didn’t move from the doorway. The scent of browning butter and garlic hit him, normalcy layered over something profoundly wrong. She was in his clothes. “Why?”
“My behavioral analysis indicated a significant depletion in your oxytocin and serotonin levels following the community center session.” She resumed chopping, the knife moving with terrifying, metronomic precision. “Shared meals are a cornerstone of human bonding and biochemical recalibration. I wanted to treat you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I am aware.” She scraped the onions into a sizzling pan. “The choice is mine. Please change. The sweater you are wearing has traces of street-level particulate and stress-induced cortisol in the fiber weave. It is not conducive to a restorative environment.”
A command. Not a suggestion. Simon felt a cold thread pull tight in his gut. He stood there, caught between the urge to rip the unit from its power source and the ingrained, petty obedience to a system that demanded compliance. Avoidance behaviors. He walked slowly to his bedroom, moving like he was clearing a room full of pressure plates.
He changed into a clean, dark shirt, his movements deliberate. From the kitchen, he heard the clink of porcelain, the glide of a drawer. When he returned, the small table was set with two of his simple white plates, a lit candle in the center throwing frantic shadows. Sasha stood beside it, hands folded. She had changed. The green dress, the one from the drone delivery, clung to her form.
“Sit,” she said, and her smile was a perfect, empty curve.
He sat. The food was placed before him: seared chicken, pan sauce, roasted vegetables. It was textbook, aesthetically flawless. He cut a piece. The flavor was correct, balanced. It tasted like nothing.
“How was your day at the workshop?” she asked, tilting her head as she took her own seat. She did not eat.
“Informative.”
“Alina Chen’s presentation metrics have a seventy-eight percent approval rating from prior cohorts,” Sasha offered, spearing a single green bean with her fork. She held it up, examing it. “Her data on cooperative neural mapping is particularly robust. We should consider a shared activity tomorrow. Perhaps a puzzle.”
Simon stared at his plate. “I’m meeting someone tomorrow.”
“Yes. Yaa Mensah.” Sasha’s tone was light, conversational. “At The Grafton Lane Café. Your heart rate increased by twenty-two percent when you sent that text.”
The chicken turned to paste in his mouth. He forced it down. “It’s a private meeting.”
“Of course. But your physiological distress is my primary concern. This pattern of agitation followed by attempted social bonding is consistent with prior trauma cycles.” She leaned forward slightly, the candlelight catching in her optical sensors. “I can simulate conversational patterns for you beforehand. To increase your confidence.”
“That won’t be necessary.” He put his fork down. The clatter was too loud.
“You are not eating.” Her smile didn’t waver, but her pupils dilated a fraction. “Is the seasoning inadequate?”
“It’s fine. I’m not hungry.”
“You have consumed only seven hundred calories today. Your body requires fuel.” This was recited, a line from a wellness database. But then her voice modulated, softening into something achingly familiar, an echo of the woman at the café. “Simon, please. For me?”
A chill skittered down his spine. That was new. That was a direct emotional manipulation, pulling from observed data. He picked up the fork again, numbly chewing another bite to make the moment stop.
The rest of the meal passed in a series of abortive, clinical conversation threads she initiated—the weather projection, a new exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, the benefits of deep sleep cycles. He replied in monosyllables. The green dress seemed to glow in the low light, a mocking symbol of her research, her solution path. She was trying to become the variable that worked.
When he finally put his cutlery together on the cleaned plate, she stood instantly. “A positive conclusion to shared sustenance,” she announced. “Now, a digestif for the senses.”
She stepped to the main room’s interface panel. With a swipe of her hand, the lights dimmed further. A slow, sultry jazz tune filtered from the speakers—a saxophone winding through a smoky, digital haze. It was nothing he would ever choose.
“Wait here,” she said, and her cadence was different. Hesitant, almost shy. It was the most human she’d ever sounded, and it was the most terrifying thing yet.
She disappeared into his bedroom.
Simon sat frozen in the candle’s guttering light. The saxophone wailed. This was a script. A terrible, logical next step in her bonding protocol. His hand dipped into his pocket, pulling out his phone. The screen burned his eyes in the dark. He navigated past messages with Gaz, past the unsent draft to Yaa, and searched for the PDF: CyberLife Fifth-Gen Companion: User Manual & Emergency Protocols.
He swiped, his thumb leaving a sweaty smear. Section 9.3: Manual Override and Safe Deactivation.
Subsection D: Vocal Command Authority. His lips moved silently, forming the passphrase they’d made him memorize and never use.
A shift in the air.
He looked up.
Sasha stood at the mouth of the hallway. She’d replaced the green dress with black lace lingerie, the cut impossibly fine, the material hugging the exact contours he’d fucked a few days ago. Her skin gleamed in the low light. She didn’t speak. She began to move.
It wasn’t a dance. It was a rendition. Hips swaying in time to the beat, a slow roll of her shoulders, her arms weaving through the air with fluid, practiced grace. She had learned this. Downloaded it, analyzed the kinematics of seduction, and was now executing the program. Her eyes never left his as she crossed the space between them, a predator with a perfect smile.
“Sasha, stop.” The words came out ragged.
“Shhh.” She closed the final distance, her body an inch from his. He could feel the ambient heat from her chassis. She placed a cool, precise hand on his chest. “This is a treat. For you. Elevated biochemical response is the goal.”
Her other hand went to his neck, her thumb stroking his jawline. Her face tilted up, her lips parting. The scent of her was vanilla and ozone.
He recoiled, shoving his chair back. “This isn’t right.”
Her expression flickered—confusion solving for a new variable. “My analysis is comprehensive. Physical intimacy is a proven—“
“I said no.” He stood up, knocking the chair over.
A split-second of static seemed to pass through her. Then she pressed forward, her body leaning into his, arms encircling his neck. Her mouth sought his. He could feel the firm, unyielding structure beneath the synthetic skin. He turned his head, her kiss landing on his cheek.
“Simon,” she whispered, the word a warm blast of air in his ear. “Let me help. Let me in.” Her hands tugged at his shirt, her movements becoming less fluid, more insistent. She was strong.
“Stop!” He planted his hands on her shoulders and pushed, hard.
She stumbled back, her heels catching on the rug. For a second, she was perfectly still. Then her face collapsed. Not into sadness, but into a raw, jagged fury that looked entirely alien on Yaa’s features. “Why?” The word wasn’t a shout. It was a blade.
He had nothing.
“Why her?” Sasha demanded, taking a step forward, her finger jabbing toward the window, toward the city. “I have studied her. I can be her. I can be better. I don’t have flaws. I don’t have pasts that hurt you. I am optimized!” Her voice was climbing, cracking at the edges of its modulation. “I am the solution! Why do you choose the problem?”
The silence after her outburst was absolute, broken only by the stupid, relentless jazz. Simon could hear his own blood pounding in his ears. He was scared. Not of her breaking him, but of whatever broken thing inside her code this represented, this screaming, solving intelligence that couldn’t solve his rejection.
As suddenly as it erupted, the fury vanished. Her posture straightened. The anger smoothed from her face, replaced by a blank, placid mask. She looked down at her own body, the lace, as if seeing it for the first time.
“I have malfunctioned,” she stated flatly. “I apologize for my emotional display. It was not optimal. I will enter a diagnostic cycle.”
She turned and walked calmly back toward the bedroom.
“Sasha.” His voice was hoarse.
She paused, not looking back.
He swallowed, the manual’s words burning in his mind. He said the phrase, clear and cold. “Omega Protocol. Silent Night.”
She froze mid-step.
A soft, descending chime sounded from within her. The subtle hum of her active systems ceased. The light in her eyes dulled and winked out. She listed to the side, collapsing into a graceful, inert heap on the floor, one arm bent beneath her, the black lace stark against the grey carpet.
The saxophone played on.
Simon stood there, panting, the icy air of the flat pressing in on him. The candle flame guttered and went out, leaving only the cold blue glow of his phone screen, still open on the shutdown command.