Chapter 3
Take Your Time
Maisie
It’s just gravity, I tell myself, as I stare at it for another five minutes.
Gravity is why the vaguely humanoid blob’s head lowered as if to meet my gaze.
And the golden swirling eyes? Just a trick of the light.
There’s a packing slip in a clear adhesive envelope stuck to the inside of the crate panel. Eventually I gather the courage to peel it off and unfold it with hands that are doing something I’m going to call steady because the alternative is admitting they’re shaking.
The paper is thick, cream-colored, the kind of stock I’d use for a premium product insert if I could afford premium product inserts. The text is printed in a clean sans-serif, plain and professional. It reads:
Somatic Deep-Tissue Relaxation Unit
Color: Aquamarine
Status: Dormant. Awaiting activation.
Activation: Sustained skin contact for 5 seconds.
And at the bottom, set apart from the rest like an afterthought:
Your unit learns. Give it time.
I fold the packing slip and set it on my worktable next to a tray of curing salt scrub. I look at the thing in its foam cradle. The thing with arms. And legs. And a head.
“You’re a sex doll,” I say out loud, because saying it out loud is the only way I’m going to make this real enough to process.
Some part of my brain assembles a hasty explanation.
High-end. Silicone. Some kind of next-gen formless doll situation, the sort of thing that exists on the bleeding edge of personal technology where people spend thousands of dollars on lifelike companions with warming elements and AI integration.
Except I spent a hundred dollars, and this thing looks like it cost more to design than my entire workshop.
I’m rationalizing. I know I’m rationalizing. The shape in the crate doesn’t look like any silicone product I’ve ever seen. It looks like something that’s choosing to hold still.
I reach out and touch its arm.
The surface is warm.
Warm the way skin is warm, the way something alive is warm, and my fingers freeze against it because I was expecting the cool, inert smoothness of silicone or resin or whatever space-age polymer you’d use to manufacture a personal wellness device.
This feels like touching the inside of someone’s wrist. There’s give to it, a softness over something denser underneath, like muscle beneath skin, and the texture is slick and smooth and softly yielding in a way that makes every hair on my arm stand up.
Then something happens in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
The iridescence ripples outward from where my fingertips rest, a slow pulse of color that moves across the entire body like light through water, teal bleeding into violet bleeding into gold. The warmth intensifies just slightly, just enough that my hand twitches but doesn’t pull away.
And then it moves.
The arm I’m touching flexes. A slow, liquid contraction, like a muscle stretching after long disuse.
The fingers of its hand, which I now realize are longer than human fingers and not quite the right number, curl and uncurl like a fern frond testing the air.
I yank my hand back so fast I knock over a jar of mica powder on the worktable behind me.
It hits the concrete floor and shatters, sending a plume of rose gold into the air between me and the crate, and for a surreal half-second I’m standing in my own glitter bomb watching a full-sized humanoid shape wake up inside a shipping container.
“No,” I say.
It keeps moving. The whole body now, slowly, the way someone stirs from a very deep sleep.
The torso expands and contracts. The head lifts, and where a face should be there’s a smooth, featureless surface of shifting color, teal and violet pulsing in a rhythm, like breathing.
“No,” I say again. “Absolutely not.”
I’m gripping the edge of my worktable with both hands. Mica powder is settling on my apron, my arms, the floor, catching the fluorescent light and making everything look like a craft emergency at a fairy convention.
The thing in the crate is sitting up. It’s sitting up. The foam cradle dimples and reshapes around it as it moves, and the motion is liquid and unhurried and so smooth it barely looks like movement at all, more like a time-lapse of something growing.
It unfolds out of the crate in a single, fluid motion, and when it stands, it’s tall. Eight feet, maybe more. Broad in the shoulders, tapering at what I’ll call a waist, with limbs that are proportioned almost right but have that uncanny fluidity of something with no bones inside.
It takes a step forward, and its foot meets the concrete floor with a soft, wet sound, and the mica powder on the ground parts around it like it’s being gently pushed aside.
I reach behind me for the crowbar without looking, and my hand closes around it, and I hold it between us like a woman who hasn’t thought through what a crowbar would do to something made of liquid.
It stops moving.
It stands there, four feet away, enormous and faceless, its colors pulsing across its surface until it settles into a slower rhythm.
Patient.
The word from the listing.
The word that made me stop scrolling at 1 a.m.
It waits.
I’m holding a crowbar up like I’m about to beat the hell out of it, and it simply waits.
“What,” I say, and my voice comes out remarkably level for someone who is two seconds away from a psychotic break, “are you?”
The face that isn’t a face tilts. The smooth surface shimmers, and something happens to the area where a mouth might go. The surface thins, becomes translucent, and a sound comes out of it. Low, resonant, slightly liquid, like a voice heard through a wall of water.
“Hello.”
One word, and my knees almost buckle.
“H-hello,” I repeat, because apparently my crisis response is etiquette. “Hi. You can talk.”
The head tilts the other direction. The colors shift, teal blooming warmer, almost curious. “Yes.”
“You’re… alive?”
A pause. The surface ripples, traveling from its shoulders down its arms to those long and smooth and dexterous-looking fingers.
“I was… dormant,” it says. The voice is clearer already, steadier than just seconds ago. “During transit. Your touch woke me.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again. The crowbar is getting heavy, and some distant, hysterical part of my brain registers that the knot between my shoulder blades, the one I’ve been nursing for a week, released the moment I made contact with its surface.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m going to need you to explain some things. Starting with what you are, then ending with why the listing said ‘deep-tissue relaxation unit’ when you are clearly, obviously a whole entire living being standing in my workspace.”
The colors pulse. That breathing rhythm.
“I am what you ordered,” it says. Gently. Like it’s trying not to spook me.
“I ordered a vibrator!”
The silence that follows this outburst is so complete I can hear the fluorescents buzzing and the distant, homey hum of Mrs. Pritchett’s swamp cooler a quarter mile away, keeping her little house comfortable.
The abstract figure stands perfectly still. The mica powder continues its slow descent around us, rose gold glitter catching the light, and the scene looks like the world’s most unhinged snow globe.
Then the surface of its face does something. The colors warm, deepen, and the area where a mouth would be curves, just a little.
It’s smiling at me.
And the smile is kind. Not mocking or cruel.
“I am adaptive,” it says, and its voice is settling into something that resonates behind my sternum in a way I’m going to have to think about later. “I am what you need.”
“What I need is a refund and a therapist.”
“You needed rest,” it says. “You needed relief. The tension in your upper shoulder alone—”
“How do you know about that?”
“You touched me.” As if this explains everything. As if two seconds of skin contact was enough for a full diagnostic workup.
I stare at it. It stands there, iridescent and enormous, colors pulsing in that slow, steady rhythm, and it waits.
Infinitely patient.
My hand is trembling around the crowbar. My shoulder, the left one, the one that’s been clicking for a week, feels better already.
And the thing I’m thinking, the thing I can’t stop thinking, is that when I touched it, when my fingers pressed against that warm surface, something behind my sternum exhaled for the first time in years.
The studio is silent. The rosemary-oat bars are sitting in their molds on the far counter, forgotten, slowly passing the point where I should have checked their temperature.
The figure takes one step back. Gives me space. The movement is deliberate and careful, and I understand that it’s showing me it won’t come closer until I say so.
“I’m going to put down this crowbar,” I tell it, “but only because my shoulder is about to give out. I want you to know that has nothing to do with trust. I trust you exactly as far as I can throw you, and since you appear to be made of some kind of sentient jello, I honestly doubt that’s very far. ”
The colors ripple. That warm, almost-amused shimmer again.
“Understood,” it says.
I lower the crowbar. My shoulder sighs in gratitude. The figure stays where it is, tall and still, watching me with a face that has no eyes and somehow sees everything.
I flex my hand, the one that touched it. The warmth is still there. A residual heat in my palm, like holding a mug of tea and setting it down and still feeling it moments later.
My whole body leans toward that warmth the way a plant leans toward a window, and I can feel it happening, and I can’t make it stop, because some part of me, some exhausted and starving part sustained only by dregs of adrenaline and stubborn pride, doesn’t want to.
“Okay,” I say. “Here’s what’s going to happen.
I’m going to check on my rosemary-oat bars before they’re ruined, because that’s three hours of work I can’t afford to lose.
And then I’m going to make a cup of coffee.
And then you and I are going to have a conversation about what you are and why I thought I ordered a small personal device and received a sentient being, and you’re going to answer every question I ask. Clear?”
“Clear,” it says. And then, in that low, liquid voice, with the colors shifting to something warm and deep: “Take your time.”
Three words. Three simple, ordinary words that no one has said to me in years. Not my ex Kyle, who measured my hours like a foreman. Not clients, who need their orders yesterday. Not my own internal voice, which runs a constant ticker tape of faster, more, not enough.
Take your time.
My eyes sting. I blink it back, hard, and turn toward the rosemary-oat bars before my face does anything embarrassing.
Behind me, the thing I bought at 1 a.m. with wine on my tongue and concrete under my spine waits in my studio like it has all the time in the world.
And instead of doing the sane thing and returning it, all I can think about is what it’d feel like to have it touch every part of me.