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She taps the screen and sets the phone on the coffee table. The voice—Gemma—is audible now, and I can hear the shift in her tone from irritated to alert.

“Ruby. Explain.”

Ruby explains. She does it in fragments, circling back, correcting herself, occasionally pointing at me as if Gemma can see. She describes finding me in the utility room: the mud, the rain, the nakedness, the belly button I don’t have, the panel on my ribs.

“He says he was made,” Ruby says, and the word carries a weight I didn’t expect it to. “He says he doesn’t remember where he came from.”

“Don’t touch the panel,” Gemma says immediately. “Don’t try to open it, don’t—has he been aggressive?”

“No. He’s been—” Ruby looks at me. I’m sitting on her couch with my hands on my knees, in a T-shirt that’s too tight and sweatpants that are too short, and I’m watching her because she’s the only thing in this room that makes me feel like I have a reason to be conscious. “He’s been very polite, actually. Weirdly polite.”

“Ruby, I need you to listen to me. If this is what you’re describing, if this is an Elysium-class synthetic, he’s—this is—do you understand how significant this is?”

“Gemma, I just need to know if it’s going to murder me in my sleep.” I see her throat move when she swallows.

The room is quiet for a second.

“Is he in good condition? Any visible damage? What’s his mobility like?”

“He looks fine. He looks—” She glances at me again, and her face does the warming thing, the one where color moves into her cheeks and she looks away fast. “He looks fine. Very human-like.”

“Can he speak?”

“Yeah, he talks. He’s very, uh, literal.”

“Can I ask him questions?”

Ruby looks at me. “She wants to ask you questions. Is that okay?”

Nobody has ever asked if it’s okay before. I’ve been asked thousands of questions—in the lab, during testing, during calibration—and not once did anyone ask permission first. The question itself creates a response in my processing that I don’t have a category for.

“Yes,” I say.

“Hi.” Gemma’s voice is careful now, clinical but with a current of fascination running underneath. “Can you tell me what you are? Your designation, your model, anything.”

“There’s information in my access panel that I can’t read myself. I can guide someone through the process of opening it.”

Gemma exhales slowly. “Ruby, you need to open the panel.”

Ruby stares at the phone. Stares at me. Takes another drink of wine.

“I need more wine for this,” she mutters, but she’s already moving toward me. She sits on the edge of the coffee table, directly in front of me, knees almost touching mine. Her hands are trembling slightly, and I want to tell her she doesn’t have to be afraid, but I don’t think that would help because telling a frightened person not to be frightened has a zero percent success rate in every simulation I’ve ever processed.

“Okay,” she says. “Tell me what to do.”

I lift the hem of the T-shirt. “The seam is along my left lower rib. Press both ends simultaneously.”

She reaches out. Her fingers are cool, and when they make contact with my skin, I experience every point of touch as a distinct event, the way I imagine a drought experiences rain. I don’t move. I don’t breathe—not that I was remembering to breathe anyway—and she presses the two ends of the seam, and the panel releases with a quiet click and swings open about two inches.

She pulls her hands back fast.

Inside is what I imagine looks alarming from her perspective—a small recessed chamber in my rib cage, neatly organized wiring, a dark interface screen, and stamped into the interior surface in clean white text:

S-07. A.I.D.E.N. Unit 3. Project Elysium, Series One.

“S-07,” she reads. She says each word slowly, like she’s trying to make them mean something less terrifying than they do. Then to the phone: “Gemma, are you hearing this?”

“I’m hearing it.” Gemma’s voice has changed. The clinical distance is gone. She sounds like a person staring at proof that the impossible just walked into someone’s living room. “Project Elysium. That’s Murdock’s program. Ruby, that’s the—he’s a Series One. They were all supposed to be destroyed.”