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We eat on the living room floor because my table only seats two and there are five of us, one of whom doesn’t eat but is sitting cross-legged among us anyway because nobody told him he didn’t have to.
Gemma asks him about his power source and his processing speed and the structural composition of his framework. She takes notes in handwriting so small and precise it looks typed. Aiden answers everything—patiently, thoroughly, with the same flat sincerity he brings to every interaction. When Gemma asks if she can see the access panel, he lifts his shirt and opens it without hesitation, and Gemma leans in with her phone flashlight and says “oh my gosh” under her breath in a tone I’ve never heard from her before. Reverent. Almost breathless.
“This is years ahead of anything I’ve seen,” she says, half to herself. “The neural threading alone— Murdock was insane, but he was a genius. An actual genius.”
“Should I be concerned that you’re more excited about his rib cage than I’ve ever seen you about an actual human man?” Liv asks.
“This is more exciting than any human man.”
“Harsh but fair.”
Liv’s questions are a different species entirely. She’s tucked into the corner of the couch with her wine, her legs curled underneath her, and she fires them off with the casual confidence of a woman who has never once been embarrassed by her own curiosity.
“So you were built as a companion,” she says. “What does that mean, exactly? Like, what were you supposed to…do?”
“I was designed for social and emotional partnership,” Aiden says. “Conversational engagement, domestic support, adaptive companionship tailored to the user’s psychological profile.”
“Uh-huh. And what about, like…” She makes a vague gesture. “The physical stuff.”
“Liv,” I say.
“What? It’s a valid question. He was designed as a companion. I want to know the specs.”
“You want to know the specs?”
“All of my systems are fully functional,” Aiden offers, because he doesn’t understand that this question is different from Gemma’s and answers it with the exact same tone. “I was built to be anatomically comprehensive.”
Liv looks at me over the rim of her wine glass. Her eyebrows are so high they’ve practically left her face. “Anatomically comprehensive.”
“Liv.”
“I’m not saying anything! I’m just processing the phrase ‘anatomically comprehensive.’ Give me a minute.”
“No minutes. Zero minutes. New topic.”
Avery has been quiet through most of this. She’s sitting against the wall with her food, watching Aiden with that steady, unblinking attention she gives everything. She hasn’t asked a single question. Yet.
She waits until Gemma is writing and Liv is pouring more wine, and then she says it. Quiet. Direct.
“Do you want to be here?”
The room shifts. Liv stops pouring. Gemma’s pen pauses. I look at Avery, then at Aiden.
He’s quiet for long enough that I start to worry. Not his usual processing pause—longer. Like he’s reaching for an answer in a part of himself he hasn’t accessed before.
“I don’t have a reference point for wanting,” he says. “I know that Ruby’s apartment is warm and that warmth is preferable. I know that when Ruby speaks, my processing allocates more resources to listening than to anything else, and I don’t know why, but I’ve stopped trying to override it. And I know that when she told me to stay, I felt—” He pauses again. “Relief. I think the word is relief. Because the alternative was going back to where I was before, and where I was before was very dark and very quiet and I don’t want to go back there.”
Nobody says anything for a long moment.
Liv blinks rapidly and takes a drink of wine. Gemma writes something in her notebook, but slower than before. Avery just nods once, like she got the answer she was looking for.
I am looking at a spot on the floor and concentrating very hard on not reacting because my idiot girlfriends will definitely read into it.
“Okay,” Avery says, and her voice is softer than I expected. “Okay.”
The energy settles. Liv cracks a joke. Gemma asks another technical question. The evening drifts into something that almost feels normal—four women and a synthetic man sitting on a floor eating pad thai, and if you squinted, if you didn’t know, you’d think it was just a regular Tuesday with a very quiet new boyfriend nobody had met yet.
It’s almost ten when they start gathering their things. Gemma packs her toolkit and tells me she wants to come back this weekend for a more thorough diagnostic. Avery hugs me at the door—quick, tight, meaningful—and says, “He’s interesting,” which from Avery is a five-star review.
