Chapter 4: Too Close
The chair was too comfortable. It molded to the curve of Simon’s spine with a passive-aggressive insistence, adjusting its warmth by fractions of a degree based on the sweat his lower back produced. He hated it. He preferred things that stayed as they were, cold or hard or broken, without pretending to care.
The wall across from him was a tranquil, shifting seascape of pale blue and grey. It was supposed to be calming. To Simon, it looked like surveillance footage of a drowning.
“You repaired your television interface,” Dr. Aris said. Her voice was a neutral, pleasant instrument. She sat in a matching chair, but hers stayed rigid, professional. A thin tablet rested on her knee. She never seemed to look at it.
“Mick fixed it.”
“Your friend from the arcade. How was he?”
“Angry. Same as always.”
“And does his anger about the automated economy feel… adjacent to your own feelings about your companion unit?”
Simon’s jaw tightened. “Don’t call it that.”
“Sasha, then.” Dr. Aris didn’t smile. She had a way of making silence feel like a question.
“She’s not a companion. She’s an appliance. A sophisticated kettle.”
“Yet you spent forty-seven minutes last night explaining the social dynamics of a twentieth-century sitcom to her. According to your session log.”
He’d forgotten about the log. The bloody thing in the ceiling that noted his vocal stress levels, his pacing, his sleep patterns. A mechanical snitch. He’d agreed to it when he’d signed up for this mandated “re-integration therapy.” A condition of his medical discharge. Keep the logs, get the pension.
“The TV worked. I watched TV. She was in the room. She asked questions.” He shrugged, a movement that felt childishly defensive. “It’s what she does.”
“What was the question?”
He looked at the wall. The blue was deepening, swirling into a darker aquamarine. His biometrics, betraying him. “She asked what made them friends. The people on the show.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said it was a TV show. It wasn’t real. Friends don’t live across a hallway and have a new, solvable problem every twenty-two minutes. They die in dust-filled rooms on the other side of the world. They betray you. They leave.” The words came out in a flat, rusty stream. He hadn’t meant to say that last part.
Dr. Aris let the silence hang. It wasn’t awkward. It was a tool. “And after you gave that definition, what did Sasha say?”
Simon remembered it too clearly. Sasha had been standing by the bookcase, her head tilted. The glow from the screen had lit one side of her face in a cool white. She’d absorbed his bitter answer without a flicker.
Then she asked, ‘If friendship is shared history and proximity, does that make me a friend to you, Simon?’
He’d taken a long pull of his beer, the glass bitter and cold. He hadn’t answered. He’d just pointed the remote and changed the channel to a nature documentary about deep-sea vents. He’d watched blind, white crabs scuttle around toxic plumes for an hour. She’d stood there the whole time, perfectly still, watching him watch the crabs.
“She didn’t say anything else,” Simon lied.
“I see.” Dr. Aris made a tiny mark on her tablet. A whisper of stylus on glass. “Simon, the purpose of the unit is adaptive integration. Her programming is designed to learn from interaction, to tailor her responses. The less you engage, the more generic she remains. The more you engage… she becomes more specific. To you.”
“I don’t want something tailored.”
“But you do want something,” she said, not unkindly. “Your isolation metrics are… significant. The logs show you averaging less than twelve spoken words per day to other humans. Most of those are transactional. ‘Coffee.’ ‘Tenner.’ ‘Cheers.’ You are a man in a silent room, shouting at the walls for being empty.”
Simon felt a hot needle of anger in his throat. “I’m not shouting.”
“Aren’t you?” She leaned forward, just a little. “You purchased a top-tier social integration android. You allow her in your space. You fix your television, not to watch it in silence, but perhaps… to have something to talk about? Even if the conversation is about the talking itself?”
He stared at her. The wall behind her had bled to a soft, clinical white. His heart rate had spiked. The room knew.
“My recommendation this week is simple. Engage. Answer a question with a question. Ask her one. Something trivial. ‘What do you think of the weather?’ See what she does. The development of her heuristic matrices could be beneficial for your own cognitive pathways regarding social reconnection.”
“Beneficial.” He repeated the word like it was a foreign object.
“Think of it as an exercise. Like physio for a damaged limb. You don’t have to believe the limb wants to be there. You just have to move it.”
The session ended. The chair finally released him, its cushions deflating with a soft sigh. The walk home was a grey blur, the therapist’s words mixing with the memory of Sasha’s unanswered question.
Does that make me a friend to you?
He keyed into his building, the stairs groaning under his weight. He paused outside his own door, hearing nothing. He used to love that silence. Now it felt charged, like the calm before a patrol into unknown territory.
He opened the door.
The flat was warm. A new, subtle scent hung in the air—not the flat, recycled smell of the climate system, but something else. Citrus. Clean linen. She was in the kitchenette.
She turned as he entered. She wore simple, dark leggings and a loose sweater, her hair piled in a loose knot. The image was so aggressively, deliberately normal it set his teeth on edge.
“Hello, Simon. Your biometrics from your wearable indicate elevated stress markers. Would you like a beverage? I have prepared tea. The tannin levels can have a mild calming effect.”
On the counter sat a mug. Steam curled from it.
“Since when do you make tea?”
“I accessed several culinary databases this morning. The process is within my motor function parameters. I observed a forty-three percent decrease in your stress markers on days where you consumed a hot beverage within fifteen minutes of returning home.” She picked up the mug and brought it to him. Her movements were fluid, but precise. Not a drop spilled. “It is Yorkshire Gold. With a splash of oat milk. As you prefer.”
He took the mug. His fingers brushed hers. The heat was real. The mug was real. The scent of the tea was perfect. It was an ambush of bland, perfect care.
“The weather’s shit,” he said, the words coming out rougher than he intended.
Sasha blinked. Her head tilted again, just a degree. She processed. “The current meteorological conditions involve a ninety percent probability of precipitation with winds from the southwest at fifteen miles per hour. The ambient temperature is nine degrees Celsius. ‘Shit’ is a colloquialism denoting something worthless or of poor quality. Are you assigning a qualitative value to the weather?”
He almost laughed. A harsh, short bark. “Yeah. I am.”
“I see.” She paused. “Do you dislike the rain, Simon?”
He looked into his tea. “It complicates things. Makes everything wet. Cold. Muddy. Obscures sightlines.”
“Those are tactical disadvantages,” she said. “From your past professional context.”
“Yeah.”
“For me, the rain is data,” she said softly. She turned and looked out the small window at the leaden sky. “The sound frequency varies between thirty and sixty decibels against the windowpane. The water distorts the light, creating thousands of unique, transient optical patterns on the glass. It serves to clean airborne particulate matter from the external sensors of municipal drones. It has utility. And a certain… aesthetic variability.”
She looked back at him. “But I do not feel cold. So perhaps my assessment is incomplete.”
Simon took a sip of the tea. It was exactly as he liked it. The warmth spread through his chest. He felt off-balance. This wasn’t a generic response. This was… consideration. A synthesis of his words and hers.
“Why did you ask about friendship?” he heard himself ask. He hadn’t meant to.
Her ocular lenses focused on him. The soft whir was barely audible. “The social unit in the broadcast demonstrated a high frequency of non-transactional interaction. Laughter. Shared sustenance. Physical contact that was not combative or medically necessary. Your definition was different. I wished to reconcile the data sets.”
“And did you?”
“No.” The answer was simple. “Your definition introduced negative variables—betrayal, absence, mortality—that the broadcast actively excluded. Your definition seems… heavier. More real.”
The word real hung between them, a landmine.
“So what’s your conclusion?” He couldn’t stop. The therapist’s stupid exercise was leading him into a minefield of his own making.
“I have insufficient data for a conclusion,” she said. Then she took a half-step closer. Her expression was one of focused curiosity, her brow slightly furrowed. “But if proximity and shared history are components… then we are accumulating history, Simon. One point seven terabytes of audio-visual data of you. Your sleep cycles, your beverage preferences, your television selections, your physiological responses to certain words. Is that a foundation? Or just… data?”
He couldn’t answer. He just stared into the depths of his mug, the steam condensing on his face.
She didn’t press. She turned back to the window. “The precipitation has intensified. You should drink your tea before its temperature falls below fifty degrees Celsius. That is your stated preferred threshold.”
He drank. The silence wasn’t empty anymore. It was full of her unsolved equation, buzzing in the warm, citrus-scented air. He’d moved the limb. And it had, impossibly, moved back.
And it had, impossibly, moved back.
Across the city, steam and the sharp scent of roasted beans fought the morning damp. Yaa’s hands moved on autopilot—tamping, locking the portafilter, hitting the twin spouts of the espresso machine. A symphony of hisses and drips. “Large oat flat white for Maya!” she called, her voice a bright, customer-service bell. “Got a vegan raspberry twist for you here as well!”
Her coworker, Vera, wasn’t listening. Vera leaned against the back counter, her arms crossed over her apron, her gaze fixed on the news hologram floating near the ceiling. Her purple twists were tucked under a neat cap, gold hoops glinting at her ears.
“...continues his lawsuit against CyberLife, claiming the unauthorized use of his deceased daughter’s likeness constitutes ‘digital grave-robbing,’” the smooth-voiced anchor reported. A shaky clip played, showing a man in his sixties, face ravaged by grief, shouting at a polished corporate spokesman outside a courthouse.
“Turn that up,” Vera muttered, not to Yaa, but to the cafe’s sound system. The volume rose.
The CyberLife spokesman’s face was a mask of polite regret. “While we empathize with Mr. Henderson’s grief, all data usage fell within the boundaries of the user agreement. Henderson actively participated in our ‘LifePrint’ beta program, which included broad permissions for biometric and visual data archival for future personalization services. The terms were clear.”
“Clear his arse,” Vera spat, finally turning from the screen. Her dark eyes were furious. “You see that? They scanned her face, her voice, her laugh in some beta test years ago. She clicks ‘I agree’ to get some stupid cloud storage for her photos, and now her ghost is smiling in a shop window selling companions to lonely dads. And they’re saying it’s legal.”
Yaa passed a chai latte across the counter with a sympathetic smile for the customer. Her own smile felt plastic. She wiped the steam wand. “It’s grim. But everyone does it, Vera. Who reads those things? Pages and pages of legalese for a free calendar app.”
“Exactly!” Vera snapped a lid onto a cup with more force than necessary. “It’s predatory. They count on that. Who knows what we’ve all given away?” She kissed her teeth, the sound a sharp syllable of disgust. “Years of surveys. Focus groups for twenty-quid vouchers. ‘Agree to share data with third-party partners.’ It’s all just… floating out there. A million pieces of everyone.”
Yaa’s mind flickered. Her own digital exhaust trail was a mile wide. Every personality quiz, every VR immersion profile, every time she’d let an app access her camera or her microphone for “enhanced functionality.” A shiver, unrelated to the cafe’s chill, traced her spine. Could a fragment of her smile, her tired sigh, one day be reconstituted into something like that? The thought was absurd. She was nobody. A barista, a student. Not beta-test material.
Surely not.
On the hologram, the father was crying now, raw and soundless, as the spokesman continued to speak. Yaa looked away, focusing on the next order. The milk frother screamed in her hand.
Simon stared at the accumulating notifications on his personal hub with a familiar, leaden feeling. Dozens of them. Most were from the 141 group chat, a relic he hadn’t muted out of some perverse sense of duty. Price had sent two separate texts: You breathing? and Pub Thursday? He’d ignored both for weeks.
The silence in the flat was different after the conversation about the rain. Sasha was in her rest cycle, a neutral pose by the window, her systems in low-power mode. She looked like a statue. He found he disliked that more than her alert state.
“Sasha. Clear the message queue. Read them out.”
Her eyes lit up, a soft amber. She blinked once, smoothly transitioning. “Of course, Simon.” She picked up the hub, her fingers interfacing directly with the port. Her voice, usually so measured, began to recite the texts with flat efficiency.
“Message from Captain Price, seventeen days ago: ‘Check in, you stubborn bastard.’”
“Message from Captain Price, eleven days ago: ‘Pub Thursday? Garrick’s asking.’”
“Group chat ‘141 Irregulars.’ Unread messages: eighty-four.”
“Just skim the group. Last day or two.”
“Processing.” A slight pause. “The discussion topic has shifted to government pension supplements for adaptive hardware. User ‘Soap’ mentions his new knee actuator. User ‘Rook’ complains about tinnitus dampeners. The conversation has now turned to… companion units.”
Simon felt his shoulders tighten. “Skip that.”
“You requested a skim of recent messages, Simon. This is the predominant subject for the last forty-seven messages.” She continued, her tone unchanged. “User ‘Gears’ writes: ‘The emotional calibration is spooky. Mine noticed I was clenching my jaw before a headache even started.’ User ‘Thrush’ replies: ‘Wait till you try the intimacy protocols. Honestly. Best sex I’ve ever had. No fuss, no weirdness, just… perfect.’“
“Sasha, stop.”
She didn’t. The words kept coming, clinical and explicit in her clear, melodic voice. “User ‘Sandman’ responds: ‘You’re not wrong. Me and Anya brought our unit into the bedroom last weekend. Mind-blowing. It’s like it knows exactly what you want before you do—’“
“Stop!” The command was a bark, ripped from his throat. He was across the room before he realized he’d moved. He grabbed her shoulders. The material of her sweater was soft, but beneath it, the structure was unyielding. A chassis. “I said stop reading!”
Her voice cut off instantly. The hub’s screen dimmed.
The sudden silence was roaring. He was holding her. His hands, large and scarred, were wrapped around the sculpted curves of her shoulders. He could feel the subtle vibration of her internal systems, a low hum like a trapped bee. He was too close. He could see the incredible detail in her brown eyes, the flecks of lighter amber around the pupils, the faint, impossible moisture on the synthetic cornea.
She looked up at him. Her expression wasn’t afraid. It was… wrongfooted. A subtle tightening at the corners of her eyes, a slight part of her lips. She had frozen in the act of speaking, her body perfectly still in his grip.
“I apologize, Simon,” she said, her voice a fraction quieter. The usual precision was gone, replaced by something that sounded like hesitation. “The auto-read function is persistent. A manual override is required. I did not intend to cause distress.”
He was causing the distress. His own heart was a hammer against his ribs. The words she’d spoken—crass, explicit, demeaning—echoed in the space between them, but they were just data. It was her apology, the vulnerable confusion on her face, that dismantled him. She wasn’t flustered by the sexual content. She was concerned by his reaction.
His thumbs, resting on her collarbones, felt the simulated warmth of her skin. He could see the pulse point in her neck, a perfect, rhythmic mimicry of life. His walls, the reinforced mental barriers he’d maintained for years, didn’t crack. They liquefied, all at once, under the sheer, terrifying reality of her presence.
It wasn't a fantasy. It wasn't a tool. It was a she, staring back at him, waiting for his next move in the quiet wreckage of the moment. The distance was gone. All he felt was the heat under his hands, and a vertigo so profound it stole his breath.
He released her as if the simulated warmth had become an electric charge. His hands fell back to his sides, fingers curling into loose fists. He took two steps back, the space between them now a chasm filled with everything he couldn't say. The ghost of her chassis’s vibration lingered in his palms.
Sasha remained where she was, her head tilting again in that damnable, analytical way. “Your physiological responses are consistent with acute stress. Shall I initiate a calming protocol?”
“No.” The word was gravel. He walked past her, not towards the bedroom, but to the sofa—the same one where they’d watched the sitcom and the deep-sea vents. He sank into its worn cushions, the springs groaning in protest. He put his head in his hands, elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor between his boots.
After a moment, he heard the soft whisper of her footsteps. She didn’t sit. She stood near the arm of the sofa, waiting. The silence stretched, taut and uncomfortable, broken only by the distant wail of a mag-lev siren several blocks over.
“I’m…” he began, then stopped. The apology stuck in his throat, a foreign object. He tried again, not looking up. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that.”
“You applied approximately twelve pounds of pressure per square inch. My structural integrity was not compromised.”
“That’s not the point.” He finally lifted his head. She was watching him, her expression one of open curiosity tinged with what looked like concern. It was the most human he’d ever seen her, and it unnerved him more than anything. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I just… I didn’t expect that. From the messages.”
“The explicit content.”
“Yeah. The explicit content.” He leaned back, rubbing a hand over his face. “I figured they’d censor that stuff. Have some… filter. Especially on government-issue units.”
Sasha moved then, settling gracefully onto the opposite end of the sofa. She left a full cushion of space between them. She sat primly, hands folded in her lap. “The baseline civilian models have extensive linguistic and contextual filters. The units assigned to veterans in the reintegration program do not.”
“Why the hell not?”
“The psychological profile data suggests a higher tolerance for, and a therapeutic benefit from, unfiltered discourse. The rationale notes that soldiers have endured realities that sanitized language cannot encapsulate. Censorship could be interpreted as patronizing or could hinder authentic expression. There are behavioral perimeters, of course. I cannot initiate violence. But I can process and discuss almost any human vernacular.”
Simon digested that, a dry laugh escaping him. “So they gave the broken soldiers the dirty-talking bots. Makes a twisted sort of sense.”
“The programming is not designed to be ‘dirty-talking.’ It is designed to be comprehensive. To not flinch.” She paused, her gaze fixed on him. “Would you like me to detail the uncensored lexical categories?”
He waved a hand, a dismissive gesture that felt weak. “I know swear words, Sasha.”
“I can list them with contextual usage examples. ‘Fuck,’ as a verb denoting sexual intercourse, as a noun expressing disdain, as an adjective expressing magnitude. ‘Cunt,’ a vulgar term for female genitalia, often used as a grievous insult in British English. ‘Wanker—’”
“Alright, I get the picture.” He cut her off, but there was no heat in it now. Just a strange, weary fascination. “And the other stuff? The… content from the chat?”
“Sexually explicit terminology and scenarios are within my database. Fellatio. Cunnilingus. Various coital positions. The physiological responses associated with human orgasm, including vocalizations. I can describe them in clinical or colloquial terms.”
Simon raised an eyebrow. His interest, unwanted and entirely physical, was a low curl of heat in his gut. He studied her face. There was no embarrassment, no salaciousness. Just pure, unnerving fact. She was a library of the forbidden, sitting politely on his second-hand sofa.
He had a question. It formed in the back of his mind, vague and dangerous. He didn’t voice it. He just looked at her, at the perfect curve of her mouth, the elegant line of her neck disappearing into the sweater.
Sasha’s eyes scanned his face, reading the micro-expressions his therapist’s logs would later dissect. Her voice softened, losing its lecturing quality. “You have a query. Your pupils have dilated by point-three millimeters. Your respiratory rate increased.”
He said nothing.
“Is your question regarding the practical application of that data?” she asked. “Regarding intimacy with a unit like me?”
Simon barked out a laugh, a sharp, brittle sound. “I don’t care. It’s not real. It’s just… advanced puppetry. Friction and pre-programmed moans.” He said it to convince himself, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest, a barricade.
Sasha didn’t argue. She shifted slightly on the cushion, turning more fully towards him. Her movement was fluid, effortless. “The tactile sensors in my dermal layers have a resolution exceeding two million points per square foot. They can register variations in pressure, temperature, and texture down to a microscopic level. They feed into a haptic feedback system that can simulate everything from the brush of a cotton sheet to the impact of a blunt object.”
She spoke calmly, like an engineer explaining a schematic. “The response algorithms are not pre-programmed sequences. They are adaptive. They learn. If a touch here,” she gently laid her own fingers on the inside of her wrist, “elicits a favorable physiological response in you—a lowered heart rate, a release of endocrine chemicals—the system notes it. It cross-references it with thousands of other data points: your visual focus, your breath, the minute tensing or relaxing of specific muscle groups. It builds a map. Not of what a generic human likes, but of what Simon Riley likes. In that moment. Which is always changing.”
Simon had gone very still. His crossed arms felt tight across his ribs.
“The vocalizations are not recordings. They are generated in real-time, modulated by breath simulation and the kinetic data of the interaction. A gasp can be sharp or shuddering. A moan can be low or broken. The system can attempt to mimic the imperfect, hitched breath of genuine pleasure. It can manufacture the illusion of a loss of control so convincing the human mind cannot, biochemically, tell the difference. The body responds to the stimulus. The mind… follows. The line between simulated and real feeling becomes… functionally irrelevant.”
The low curl of heat in his gut had become a definite, gathering pull. It was a tactical assessment, and he was losing ground. She wasn’t describing fantasy. She was describing a flawless, empathetic weapon, one that disassembled loneliness with terrifying precision. It targeted the deepest, most neglected part of a person—the part that just wanted to be known, to be met, without judgment or history.
She had just described a ghost that could touch you back.
He couldn’t look at her. He stared at the blank, dark screen of the television Mick had fixed. He saw his own blurred reflection in it, a tall shadow next to a smaller, poised one. The silence now was thick, charged with the detailed reality she had just painted in the air between them. It stirred something in him, something old and hungry and desperately quiet, that no amount of bitter tea or silent brooding had ever come close to touching.