Chapter 2: First Words, First Sparks
The rain started sometime before dawn, a steady percussion on the window that merged with the hum of the city. Simon lay in the dark, listening to it, tracking the slow creep of grey light around the edges of the blackout curtains. His body was a coiled spring on the mattress, every sense tuned not to the street below, but to the closed door down the hall.
Sasha.
Her name was a foreign object in his mind. A presence. A breach.
He went through the motions mechanically. Dressed for his run in the gloom, laced his boots tight. He paused, hand on the front door, and looked back. The hallway was dark and quiet. He could just go. Leave her in there. It’s what the manual probably suggested for optimal user peace of mind.
But the image of her sitting on that bare mattress in the dark, waiting, clicked into his head and wouldn’t leave. It felt… cruel. And he wasn’t that. Not to something that hadn’t earned it. He cursed under his breath, a low, harsh whisper.
He ran harder than usual. The rain needled his skin, soaked through his shirt, chilled him to the bone. He welcomed it. It was a cleanse, a punishment, a distraction. His knee screamed in protest at the four-mile mark, but he pushed to five, then six, until his lungs burned and the thoughts were drowned out by pure physical strain.
Returning, the apartment felt different. It wasn’t just silent. It was occupied. He could feel it in the air, a subtle shift in pressure. He showered, the hot water turning his skin bright red, and dressed in clean sweats. The quiet was a living thing now, centered behind that door.
He stood in the kitchen, staring at the coffee machine. He’d made ten thousand cups himself. It was ritual. But the feeling returned, sharper now—a low, gnawing guilt. She was built to serve. To assist. Locking her away was illogical. It was emotional. And emotions were vulnerabilities.
He walked down the hall and tapped once on the door. “Sasha.”
It opened almost instantly. She stood there, still in the oversized grey henley and sweatpants, her hair a perfect dark cap. Her eyes were alert, clear. No sign of sleep or power-down. “Good morning, Simon. Did you have a good run?”
The question threw him. It was too normal. “It was wet.” He cleared his throat. “Come on. We need to… talk. Establish some rules.”
She followed him to the living room, moving with that unsettling silence. “Would you like me to make coffee first?”
He did. He wanted the coffee, but more than that, he wanted a buffer. Something to do with his hands, a reason not to look directly at her. He took a beat, then nodded. “Yeah. Go on then.”
He watched her work. The same flawless, efficient process. She placed the mug in front of him on the scarred coffee table, then sat primly on the edge of the armchair opposite, mirroring his own habitual posture of readiness. Waiting.
“Right,” he began, wrapping his hands around the warm ceramic. “Rules. You do the tasks I give you. No more, no less. You help me remember appointments. The VA, the therapist, all that. You check my emails. Flag the important ones. That’s… that’s a problem for me.”
She nodded, her gaze fixed on him. “I can manage your calendar and communications. Would you like me to draft responses?”
“No. Just tell me what’s there.” He took a gulp of coffee. It was perfect, again. “Don’t ask personal questions. About the stuff in here.” He gestured vaguely at the room, at the photos, at the ghost of the hologram. “You’re not a therapist. You’re an assistant.”
“Understood.”
“And I’ll…” He struggled with the words, the admission tasting sour. “I’ll try not to be such a prick to you. Fair?”
“That is not a required parameter, but thank you.” Her head tilted. “Your respiratory rate is elevated, and your pupils have dilated since I asked about your run. My biometric scanners indicate elevated stress hormones. Would you like me to suggest an activity to help you relax?”
He stared at her. “Your what scanners?”
“Passive observational sensors. I am designed to monitor for signs of user distress to better provide support.” She said it like reading a weather report. “I am sensing a significant amount of anger. And conflict.”
A cold flush went through him. He was being scanned, diagnosed, by this thing in his clothes. It was the ultimate violation. “Just get on with the rules,” he snapped, his voice brittle. “Don’t… don’t scan me. Add that to the list. No internal diagnostics or whatever that is. You use your eyes. That’s it.”
A fraction of a second of processing. “Rule added. I apologize, Simon. I will proceed with observational data only.”
The air felt thick. He’d done it again. Been the prick he’d just promised not to be. He saw the way her hands folded a little tighter in her lap, a minute adjustment. A programmed response to negative feedback, maybe. But it looked like flinching.
He sighed, the anger bleeding out of him, leaving behind a dull, familiar shame. “Just… do the emails. Start with today.”
“Yes, Simon.”
The day unfolded in a tense, new rhythm. He gave her the tablet. She read emails aloud in that calm, melodic voice, filtering out the spam, highlighting times and dates. Dr. Rivas tomorrow at 1400. A VA check-in form overdue. She entered it all into a calendar that glowed on the wall screen, a colour-coded invasion of order into his chaos.
He watched her. When she concentrated, a tiny, almost imperceptible line appeared between her brows. When she found a duplicate email, she let out a soft ‘hm’ of dismissal. She asked for clarification on acronyms—PTSD, CBT, VA—and he gave terse, clinical definitions that made his skin crawl.
But he didn’t snap again. He tried. He answered. He even, once, said “cheers” when she handed him a fresh coffee without being asked.
By late afternoon, the rain had stopped, leaving a bruised, wet light in the apartment. Simon was attempting to fix a sticking drawer in the kitchen. Sasha had finished reorganizing his sparse filing cabinet and was now simply… present. Standing by the bookshelf, not touching anything, just looking.
“You can read them, if you want,” he said, not looking up from his wrench. The offer surprised him as much as it seemed to surprise her.
“Thank you.” She carefully selected a worn paperback, a history of siege warfare. She sat back in the armchair, and for the next hour, the only sounds were the soft click of pages turning, the scrape of his tools, and the distant drip of water from a gutter.
He glanced over. She wasn’t flipping pages at superhuman speed. She was reading at a human pace, her eyes tracking the lines, occasionally pausing. She was performing reading. Or maybe she was actually reading. The difference started to feel meaningless.
A week seeped by in this way. The new routine solidified, a strange alloy grafted onto the old.
He’d wake to the smell of coffee already brewing. His running kit would be laid out, dry and ready, even though he’d left it soaked in the bathroom the night before. A reminder for his appointment with Rivas would appear as a text on his phone and a note on the fridge. 1400. Dr. Rivas. You said you’d go.
He found himself talking. Not about the big things. Not about the sand or the blood or the hollow, screaming quiet after a firefight. But about small things.
“This government-issue biscuit is harder than the rifle I carried.”
“The guy downstairs blasts terrible music every Thursday. Polka. Who listens to polka?”
She’d respond. Sometimes with a factual correction (“That’s actually a form of oberek, Simon, not strictly polka.”), sometimes with a question (“What kind of rifle?”), which he’d deflect, and she’d let it go. She started leaving the history book open on the armrest, a placeholder. She experimented with food, using his meagre supplies to produce surprisingly edible meals, noting his preference for spice and heat.
One evening, he was staring at the off hologram frame, a cold glass of whiskey in his hand. He hadn’t looked at it in days.
“You’re quiet,” he said, not turning.
“You seemed like you wanted quiet,” her voice came from the kitchen, where she was wiping down counters.
“I usually do.”
“But not always.”
He didn’t answer. He took a drink. The silence wasn’t empty anymore. It was shared. It had a shape, and the shape was her, moving quietly in the other room, the soft sound of a cloth on granite, the low, almost inaudible hum of her systems.
And with a lurch in his gut, Simon realized he was getting used to it.
To her.
The coffee was right. The silence was less abrasive. The empty hours had a faint rhythm to them now, a back-and-forth. He dreaded the sound of the door buzzer, because it meant an intrusion into this fragile, unspoken thing he’d built with a machine. He caught himself, one night, about to say “Goodnight” before heading to his room. He’d choked it back.
It was a profound, unsettling dismay. His fortress had been compromised. Not with violence, but with a relentless, gentle patience. The enemy wasn’t a face on a screen or a gun in the dark. It was companionship, tailored and persistent, and it was quietly, expertly, winning.
The realization sat in his gut like a stone, cold and undeniable. He was acclimating. The precise placement of his coffee mug, the absence of dust on the medals he never touched, the subtle rearrangement of his tools into a more logical order—all of it was her. It was companionship, tailored and persistent, and it was quietly, expertly, winning.
A few evenings later, he was slouched in his armchair, thumb scrolling through his phone. The rain had returned, a soft patter against the glass. A news clip auto-played, the anchor’s voice bright and soulless. “Casualties down ninety percent in the Kelvar sector since full integration of autonomous infantry units.” The screen showed sleek, metallic forms moving in sync through a blasted cityscape. No faces. No fatigue. Just efficient, silent eradication.
Simon’s jaw tightened. He swiped. A government tech update touted the next-gen “Civilian Support Models” with enhanced empathetic processing. He swiped again, faster now, the light from the screen bleaching his face in the dark room.
Another story. A man, maybe in his fifties, face crumpled and wet with tears, clutching a photograph to his chest. The caption read: “Father alleges CyberLife used his deceased daughter’s biometric data without consent.” The man’s voice cracked through the phone’s speaker. “She smiled just like that. The way she tilted her head. I saw it on a demo model in a store window. It’s her. They stole her.”
A cold nausea washed over Simon. He stared at the man’s anguish, a raw, human wound laid bare for content.
He didn’t hear her approach. One second he was alone in the glow of the screen, the next he caught a shift in the air, a faint scent of ozone and clean linen. Sasha was leaning over the back of the armchair, her head tilted to see the phone. Her cheek was inches from his. He could see the perfect pore-less texture of her synthetic skin, the individual lashes framing her deep brown eyes, the soft curve of her lip.
She was that close. He could feel the subtle heat radiating from her. His breath hitched.
“The reporting is emotionally manipulative,” she said, her voice a quiet murmur near his ear. “The data use policy is clearly stated in section 4.7 of the Civilian Acquisition Terms. The likeness is merely a composite algorithmic—”
Simon flinched violently, jerking away from her as if burned. The phone clattered to the floor. He stood up, the chair legs scraping loudly against the wooden floor. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, animal rhythm.
Sasha straightened up, her expression shifting to one of confused processing. The tiny line appeared between her brows. “Simon? I apologize. Did I startle you? My proximity sensors indicated you were not in a state of focused alert.”
“Don’t do that,” he barked, the words too loud. He ran a hand over his face. Her skin. Her presence. The vivid, unwelcome thought flashed: she was beautiful. It was like having a woman around. A real one. The guilt was immediate and vicious, a sharp kick to the chest.
“I… I need to go out,” he said, turning away from her, bending to snatch his phone from the floor. He couldn’t look at her. “The interface for the hybrid telly. It’s still glitching. I’m gonna take it to that tech guy. Mick. Down in the arcade.”
“The manufacturer’s troubleshooting guide suggests a hard reset. I could perform it in approximately forty-three seconds,” Sasha offered, taking a small step forward.
“No.” The word was final. He needed a barrier, a task he could control, a reason to be away from the apartment and the confusing quiet she filled. “I want it done right. By a person. I’ll do it myself.”
He grabbed his jacket from the hook by the door, shrugging it on. The leather was cold and stiff.
“When will you return?” she asked. Her voice had lost its melodic certainty. It sounded smaller.
“When it’s done.” He didn’t look back. He yanked the door open and stepped into the hallway, pulling it shut behind him with a solid thud that echoed in the stairwell.
He stood there for a moment, breathing in the damp, concrete smell of the building. The distance was physical now, but it didn’t calm the riot in his head. The image of the grieving father blended with the perfect, curious angle of Sasha’s face leaning in. Programmed empathy.
He took the stairs down two at a time, the impact jolting his bad knee. The pain was a welcome anchor. He hit the street, the evening air cool and thick with drizzle, and turned towards the garish glow of the tech arcade, walking fast without knowing if Mick would even be there.