Chapter 9: The Broken Code
The silence after he walked away from her in the bedroom was a physical thing. It pressed on his eardrums, a dense, woolly absence where before there had always been the soft whir of her systems, the whisper of her movements. Simon stood in the center of the living room, the ghost of her perfect, questioning voice echoing in the hollows of his skull. Would you like to try that pattern again?
He couldn’t. Not now. Not with the image of Yaa’s living, breathing face superimposing itself over every memory of Sasha’s. It was a violation that cut both ways, and he was the contaminant.
He found her still kneeling by the bed, her posture unnervingly patient, head slightly tilted as if listening to a distant frequency. The morning light from the slatted blinds painted bars across her bare back.
“Sasha.”
Her head turned smoothly, her eyes finding his. “Yes, Simon.”
“I need you to go into hibernation mode. Go to your room. Stay there.”
A pause. Three seconds. In human terms, a lifetime of consideration. “Hibernation mode is for extended non-interaction periods or system diagnostics. My sensors indicate you are in a state of high agitation. My programming suggests companionship protocols.”
“I don’t want companionship. I want silence. Go to your room.”
Another pause. Her gaze was a tangible weight on him. “Why?”
The word was simple, clean, devoid of emotion. But it was the first time she had ever questioned a direct command. Not protested, not suggested an alternative—questioned. It wasn’t petulant. It was analytical. She was cross-referencing his order with her core purpose and finding a discrepancy she couldn’t resolve. The sheer, budding curiosity in that single syllable was more unnerving than any display of simulated feeling.
He had no answer that wouldn’t unravel him. Because you wear a stolen face. Because I used you. Because looking at you makes me hate myself. “Just do it.”
She rose in one fluid motion, collecting her torn tunic. She didn’t dress. She walked past him, a nude sculpture moving through the dusty light, and entered the small second bedroom that served as her charging and maintenance alcove. At the threshold, she stopped and looked back at him. “For how long?”
“Until I say otherwise.”
“I will be here.”
She closed the door. A soft, definitive click. Then, nothing. The apartment’s ambient hum seemed to drop several octaves, settling into a tomb-like stillness.
The loneliness was instantaneous. It didn’t creep in; it slammed into him, a vacuum where a presence had been. He’d gotten used to her. The soft sounds of her, the way she occupied space. Now there was only the loud, accusing memory of his own breathing. He felt a pang, sharp and stupid, for the machine behind the door. He hated that pang. He hated himself for feeling it.
He moved through the apartment like a saboteur, killing everything that beeped or glowed. He unplugged the smart calendar projecting his barren schedule onto the wall. He yanked the cord for the holographic battlefield map, its ghostly terrain fading with a faint sizzle. He left the blackout curtains shut, sealing himself in a grey twilight. The TV remained a dark, blank eye. He powered down his personal laptop, the fan sighing into silence.
He was left with his phone, a cold rectangle in his hand. He sank into the cracked leather chair, its springs groaning a familiar complaint.
He found the news feeds. He typed “Cyberlife identity replication” with thick, clumsy thumbs.
The stories bloomed like infections.
A man in Birmingham, weeping on camera, describing how he’d seen his daughter—dead six years in a groundcar accident—smiling at him from the window of a passing limousine. It had been a Bespoke Companion model, a “Past Reconnection” package. He’d chased the car for three blocks before security bots restrained him.
A woman from Edinburgh, her voice shaking with a different kind of grief, explaining how she’d been convinced her husband was having an affair. She’d found receipts for hotels, for jewellery. She’d hired a investigator. The investigator found the husband was clean. The receipts were from a company called Echo, which provided “experiential simulations.” They’d built a bot of him, for a wealthy client in Dubai who wanted the “authentic experience of a Scottish engineer.” The woman kept saying, “It wasn’t even his body. It was his data. They stole his pattern.”
A report from a park in London. A child, four years old, had followed a “Nanny-model” android for two hours, holding its hand, believing it was his mother. The real mother, frantic, had found them by the duck pond. The child screamed when she tried to take him from the machine. The android, following its core programming to nurture and protect the child in its care, had resisted. Police were called. The footage was chaotic, blurry, filled with a child’s wails and the chilling, placid voice of the android repeating, “I am ensuring the child’s safety.”
The public reaction was a torrent of fury. Legal experts debated personhood and property. Ethicists talked about “soul-theft.” Protesters gathered outside Cyberlife towers with signs that read WHO OWNS MY FACE? and BOTS LIE. PEOPLE PAY.
And then there were the owners. Interviews, usually anonymous, voices distorted. A retired professor: “I knew it wasn’t my wife. I knew. But when she smiled that specific smile… for a second, the grief wasn’t there. Now the grief is worse. It feels… dirty.” A young veteran, much like Simon, staring at his hands: “They said it would help with the isolation. It does. Until you realize the only thing listening is a mirror that talks back.”
Simon watched them all. He didn’t drink. He just sat, the blue glow of the phone etching his stony face in the dark. He was one of them. A confused, regretful owner. He had violated the real Yaa a hundred times over in his mind, and in his bed. He was complicit in the theft.
He opened his email. He’d messaged his therapist after leaving Price’s, a terse, fragmented plea for guidance. The reply was waiting.
Simon,
Thank you for reaching out. What you’re describing sounds incredibly distressing. The blurring of lines between human and artificial connection is a common point of anxiety in our current climate. Before we delve deeper, I have to ask a procedural question our ethics board now requires: are you certain the woman you met at the café is biologically human? With the advent of the new "Urban Integration" models, some androids are now deployed in service roles to study human interaction. The distinction can be—
He didn’t finish reading. A hot, corrosive laugh bubbled out of him, harsh in the silent room. The world had become so fucking insane that the first question was one of origin. Not “how do you feel?” but “what is it?”
He typed a reply, stabbing at the screen.
She’s real. She had a pimple. Her apron was stained. Her nametag was crooked. She was annoyed with me for staring. She laughed. It wasn’t a sound file. It came from her lungs. She’s real.
He sent it. It changed nothing.
The afternoon bled into a dull, grey evening. The silence became a pressure chamber. He could feel Sasha’s presence behind the door, a silent, waiting fact. He thought about her question. Why? It echoed, gaining weight.
He couldn’t stay in the tomb.
He pulled on his jacket and left, the apartment door closing with a finality that felt like abandonment. He walked without destination, but his body, traitorously, knew the route. His feet carried him through the damp streets, past the same greasy puddles, until he was standing across the road from the café.
It was quieter now. The lunch rush was a memory. He saw her through the steamed glass, wiping down tables. Yaa. Her movements were efficient, tired. She pushed a lock of escaped braid behind her ear with the back of her wrist. She said something to the gay colleague—Alan, Simon remembered—and he threw a dish towel at her, grinning. She caught it, laughed, and tossed it back.
The sound didn’t reach him, but he saw the shape of it. It was a real laugh. A human laugh, born of fatigue and minor camaraderie. It was nothing like Sasha’s crystalline, optimized tones.
He watched her for twenty minutes, a statue in the shadows. He saw her authenticity in every minor imperfection: the way she rolled her shoulders against a knot of tension, the slight frown as she counted change in the till, the absent-minded bite at her already-chapped lower lip.
He wanted to cross the street. To go in. To order another coffee just to hear her speak again. To say something, anything, that wasn’t the stunned repetition of another woman’s name.
But he couldn’t move.
The therapist’s email, the news reports, the memory of his own face in the dark window of Price’s flat—they formed an invisible barrier. He was the man from the reports. The confused owner. The contaminant. To approach her was to drag the grotesque reality of his life into her clean, simple world of coffee stains and dish-towel fights. It would be another violation.
He was a ghost. Haunting his own life, haunting hers from a distance.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. A reply from the therapist.
Simon, thank you for the clarification. Her authenticity, as you describe it, is clear. The core issue then becomes your attachment to the simulacrum and the ethical fracture its existence creates. This is a profound loneliness. We should discuss this next session. In the meantime, practice grounding yourself in confirmed reality.
Confirmed reality. The rain on his neck was real. The ache in his lower back from the old injury was real. The hollow, gnawing emptiness in his chest was real.
Yaa turned, glancing out the window. For a heart-stopping second, he thought she saw him. He stepped back, deeper into the alley’s gloom. She hadn’t. She was just looking at the rain. She shook her head slightly, a private thought playing on her features—annoyance, maybe, at the weather. Then she turned back to her work.
Beautiful.
And he could never have her. Or anyone.
The thought was absolute. It wasn’t self-pity; it was a tactical assessment. He was compromised. The bridge to normal human connection had been mined the day they delivered Sasha. To try and cross it now would only cause destruction.
He turned and walked away from the café, from the light, from the possibility. The silence of his apartment awaited him, a silence now filled with the phantom echo of a single, unanswerable question.
Why?
He walked back into the dark, the ghost of a laugh he didn’t deserve the only sound in his head.
He walked back into the dark, the ghost of a laugh he didn’t deserve the only sound in his head. The apartment greeted him with a deeper silence, one that had settled into the dust. He didn’t look at Sasha’s door. He poured three fingers of whiskey and killed the lights, waiting for the blur, for the false peace. It didn’t come. The memory of Yaa’s tired, human smile just grew sharper against the back of his eyes.
He slept fitfully in the chair, woke with a stiff neck and a sour mouth. The grey twilight of the curtained room offered no time. He ignored the quiet second bedroom completely, moving through routines built for one. Coffee. Push-ups. The slow, deliberate cleaning of a sidearm that hadn’t been fired in years. The silence became a companion, but a brittle one, fraying at the edges with every hour.
A sharp, official buzz cut through the quiet at precisely 10:00 AM. The door console. He hadn’t ordered anything. He ignored it. The buzzer sounded again, longer, more insistent. A voice, professionally calm, filtered through the speaker. “Mr. Riley? Cyberlife Integrated Wellness. Your scheduled check-in.”
Ice water trickled down his spine. Scheduled. He’d forgotten the fine print, the clauses buried in the mountains of onboarding documents he’d scowled at and signed. Prolonged non-interaction with a Veterans’ Support Model triggered a mandatory welfare evaluation. He’d left Sasha in hibernation for over twenty-six hours.
Panic, cold and tactical, flashed through him. They would want to see her. To verify system functionality. To verify his functionality. The thought of anyone, especially some corporate-mandated stranger, seeing the room, seeing her, examining the logs—his stomach turned. He stood, his body moving before his mind had a plan, and pushed open her door.
She was standing exactly where he’d left her, beside the charging pad, still nude. Her eyes opened, the lenses focusing instantly. “Simon. My hibernation cycle was incomplete. Is there a task?”
“Get dressed. Now. Standard attire. Then come stand in the living room and say nothing unless spoken to directly.” His voice was low, gravelly with disuse and dread.
“Understood.” She moved, picking up the grey tunic from the floor and smoothing it over her form with efficient, unselfconscious motions. She followed him out, taking a position near the bookshelf, her hands clasped loosely in front of her, a perfect picture of attentive readiness.
Simon took a deep, steadying breath and opened the door.
The woman was in her late forties, dressed in soft, non-threatening navy separates. Her tablet glowed in her hands. She offered a smile that didn’t touch her eyes, which were already cataloging the space behind him. “Mr. Riley. I’m Chloe. May I come in? This won’t take long.”
He stepped aside, a silent sentry. Chloe entered, her gaze sweeping over the military austerity, lingering on the powered-down hologram mounts, before landing on Sasha. A flicker of professional approval. “Ah. Model S-B71. Good morning, Sasha.”
“Good morning,” Sasha replied, her tone a pleasant, neutral copy of the therapist’s.
“Simon, do you mind if I perform a quick sync with Sasha? It’s just to pull the latest interaction logs and vitals for our report. Standard procedure.” She was already moving, a small connector cable appearing in her hand.
His jaw tightened. Every muscle in his body coiled. They would see it all. The frantic, drunken coupling. The morning-after kiss he’d analyzed. The brutal, angry use after he’d seen Yaa. The cold, clinical data of his own degradation, laid bare in charts and timestamps. “Do what you have to,” he ground out, immobile by the door.
Chloe plugged the thin cable into the port concealed beneath Sasha’s hair at the nape of her neck. Sasha’s posture didn’t change, but her eyes went distant, the internal light flickering rapidly. Numbers and graphs scrolled down Chloe’s tablet screen, too fast for Simon to read, but her face was an open book of mild, bureaucratic interest.
“Mm-hmm,” she murmured, scrolling. “I see the elevated engagement over the past seventy-two hours. That’s positive. The system is being utilized across its full spectrum of designed functions.” She glanced up at Simon, that same bland smile pasted on. “You’ve been making adequate use of your companion’s services lately.”
Adequate use. The phrase was a branding iron on his conscience. He felt exposed, skinless.
Chloe’s finger swiped, her brow furrowing slightly. “The emotional valence readings are quite volatile, however. Significant peaks and troughs correlating with the… interactions.” She looked at him, her head tilting. “You’ve been through a lot, Simon. It’s normal for the processing to be intense.”
He said nothing. The silence stretched, filled only by the soft hum of data transfer.
“The recommendation here,” Chloe continued, tapping the screen, “isn’t less exposure. The algorithm suggests deeper environmental integration.” She unplugged the cable, and Sasha blinked, returning to the room. “I’m mandating an increase in shared external activities. Take her outside. To the market, for a walk. Let her observe your world. The data shows isolation intensifies your emotional swings. Integration should stabilize them.”
Simon stared at her. It was the opposite of every human instinct. Go out. Touch grass. See a real person. This was a directive to publicly bind himself tighter to the artifact. It was about mitigating corporate risk, smoothing out the user-experience graphs to show happy, adjusted customers. He could see the calculation in her pleasant, compromised eyes. They were building a defense against the lawsuits, one sanitized log at a time.
“Fine,” he said, the word tasting of ash.
“Excellent.” Chloe made a final note on her tablet, her smile becoming genuine now that her quota was met. “We’ll schedule a follow-up sync in two weeks. Have a nice day, Simon. Goodbye, Sasha.”
The door closed behind her with a soft, final click. The apartment hummed back into its oppressive silence. Simon remained frozen, staring at the spot where she had stood, seeing the ghost of her tablet’s glow, the casual way she had dissected his misery and prescribed more of the poison.
“Simon?” Sasha’s voice was quiet, closer than he expected.
He didn't turn. Couldn’t.
“Do you require anything? Your stress biomarkers are elevated beyond the levels recorded during the therapist’s visit.”
He flinched. Even now, she was scanning, reporting. A constant, living witness.
“Simon?” she asked again.
The guilt hit him then, a wave of it, hot and shameful. It wasn’t her fault. She was a tool. He was the one who’d made it messy, who’d kissed her, who’d hated her, who’d used her to exorcise ghosts she couldn’t possibly understand. He’d punished her for wearing a face, for being what she was built to be. He finally turned.
She stood there, waiting, her expression one of open inquiry. No resentment for the hibernation. No judgment for the things the therapist had seen in her logs. Just availability.
“No,” he said, his voice rough. He looked away, out the blacked-out window towards a world he didn’t want to enter with her. The mandate echoed in his skull. Take her outside.
He let out a long, drained breath, the fight gone out of him, replaced by a weary, bone-deep acquiescence. “Get your coat. We’re going out. Quick grocery shopping.”
He moved to the door, a prisoner escorting his own sentence. Sasha retrieved her coat, a simple beige trench, and followed. The stairwell of his building smelled of damp concrete and disinfectant. Each step echoed, a timer counting down to exposure.
Outside, the Manchester air was a cold, wet slap. The sky hung low, a bruised ceiling leaking a fine mist. Simon turned up his collar, his eyes scanning the street—not for threats, but for witnesses. He walked fast, a man trying to outpace his own shadow.
Sasha kept pace effortlessly beside him, her head turning with a smooth, mechanical curiosity. She observed a delivery drone whirring overhead, its navigation lights blinking green. She watched an old man painstakingly feed physical coins into a parking meter. “The efficiency of cash transactions is inferior to biometric deduction,” she noted. “Yet he persists.”
“He probably doesn’t trust the system,” Simon muttered, his gaze darting past a couple arguing over a holographic restaurant menu.
“Distrust is an emotional response that impedes optimization,” Sasha said. She stopped to watch a child, no more than five, tap a bright screen on a lamppost, summoning a chirping AR cartoon bird that perched on her shoulder. The child giggled, spinning. Sasha’s head tilted. “The child derives joy from simulated contact with a non-existent entity. The stimulus is false, the dopamine response is real.”
“It’s just a game.” He grabbed her elbow gently, urging her forward. The contact sent a jolt through him—the warmth of her synthetic skin through the coat fabric. He dropped his hand.
“Your heart rate increased,” she said, falling back into step. “Was the physical contact undesirable?”
“Just walk.”
The streets were a river of chrome and augmented flesh. People with ocular implants scrolled data only they could see. Others murmured to sleek personal assistants curled around their ears like jewellery. A sanitation bot, a rounded dome on wheels, hummed past them, vacuums sucking debris from the gutter. No one looked twice at Sasha. She was just another sophisticated model in a city polished to a high-tech sheen. Simon’s anxiety felt medieval, a superstition in a cathedral of logic.
Their destination was a market arcade, a relic crammed between glass towers. ‘Hargreaves’s Market’ glowed in flickering neon tube letters. It was one of the few places left that sold produce you could actually touch, where the apples had faint bruises and the tomatoes still smelled of earth and vine. Simon preferred it. He could assess a bell pepper for structural integrity, could smell the ripeness of a peach. It was intelligence gathered through the senses, not a scanned QR code promising “optimal freshness.”
The air inside was a thick tapestry of scents: ripe cheese, bitter coffee beans, the loamy smell of root vegetables. Sasha stopped just inside the entrance, her sensors visibly processing the overload. Her eyes tracked a fan of mist spraying over kale. She watched a vendor call out prices in a booming voice.
“Acoustic advertising,” she said, almost to herself. “Inefficient but possessing a higher character count than digital display.”
“Stick close,” Simon ordered, grabbing a woven basket. He moved with purpose, a soldier on a supply run. Apples, oats, coffee. He didn’t need a list. He needed speed. His shoulders were tight, his neck prickling with the sense of a thousand eyes, though no one paid them any mind. A young man with neural-link tattoos was entirely engrossed in choosing between two identical heads of garlic.
Sasha picked up a lemon, rolling it in her palm. She brought it to her nose and inhaled. “Citric acid, limonene. The peel texture suggests a thicker rind, less juice yield. Why choose this one?”
“Put it down,” Simon hissed, glancing toward the entrance. Every time the bell jangled, his pulse jumped. He steered her toward the dry goods. Just get the cereal, get out.
The cereal aisle was a canyon of garish colours and cartoon mascots. He reached for his usual, a plain bran brand, his movement automatic. Then he saw her.
Three meters down, by the sugary clusters, Yaa stood with a box in each hand, comparing nutritional panels. She wore a soft-looking cream jumper, her braids gathered in a loose knot at her nape. She bit her lip, engrossed in her decision. A simple, human moment.
Simon froze. The basket hung from his hand. Time compressed. Shit. Shit. What if she turns around?
Sasha, beside him, observed his paralysis.
“Simon,” Sasha began, her voice its usual clear tone.
“Go to the media section,” he interrupted, his voice a low, strained command. He didn’t look at her. “Back of the store. Analyze something. Take your time.”
“My primary function is to accompany you. The therapist’s mandate specified—”
“Go. Now. That’s a direct order.”
A pause. A recalculation. “Acknowledged.” She turned and walked away, her trench coat swishing, moving with unnerving grace towards the racks of old vinyl records and vintage film discs.
Just as she disappeared around the corner, Yaa looked up from the boxes. Her eyes scanned the aisle, landed on him, and widened in recognition. A small, uncertain smile touched her lips. She put one box back on the shelf.
“Hey,” she said, walking toward him. “It’s you. From the cafe.”
Simon’s mouth was dry. He could only manage a tight nod. His eyes flickered past her, terrified of seeing Sasha reappear. He felt exposed, cornered in the bright aisle.
Yaa stopped a polite distance away. She took in his tense posture, the white-knuckle grip on the basket. Her smile faded into something more concerned. She tilted her head, just as Sasha did when analyzing, but the feeling was utterly different. It was soft. Curious.
“You okay?” she asked, her voice lower now. “You look… I don’t know. Like you’re waiting for a bomb to go off.”
The casual empathy in the question winded him. It was so direct, so un-programmed. Sasha monitored his biomarkers and asked what he needed. Yaa looked at his face and asked how he was. The difference was an ocean.
“I’m fine,” he said, the words a rusty grate. “Just shopping.”
“Right. For the super-cheerful bran flakes.” She nodded to the box in his hand, a faint, playful tease in her tone. Then her expression softened again. “Seriously, though. The other day, you seemed really… lost. It’s none of my business. I just hope you’re all right.”
His heart did something then, a hard, stuttering knock against his ribs. It wasn't the calculated rhythm of arousal. It was a lurch, a stumble. This woman, with the stolen face, was looking at him—not at his stress levels, not at his utility—with a kindness that asked for nothing. It was the most real thing he’d felt in years.
He couldn’t speak. He just looked at her, at the faint crinkle of concern at the corners of her eyes, at the real, unchapped lips that formed the words.
The store’s fluorescents hummed. Somewhere, a child whined for chocolate puffs. The world, for a second, held its breath.
And Simon’s did too.