Chapter 3
The week passed in a blur. She woke up, brushed her teeth, and went to work, where she moved like one of Automata’s early androids, blank-faced and stiff-limbed as she went through the motions.
She piped her latest invention into a vase: a combination of glowing bacteria, nutrients for the symbiotic fungi already present in the plant, and a distillation of luciferin.
It was a shotgun blast, and she wasn’t sure how it would scale up for the distribution the company had in mind, but if she could just get these damn flowers to glow for more than a few hours after being cut…
Carefully, she cut a few stems from her most mature test subject: a tightly budded lily that glowed faintly blue in the darkness. She arranged them, staring as though they could give her any clue about how long they were going to last.
The company was running out of patience for results. NeonAgro was a tiny company in the scheme of things, only a few years past its growing pains as a start-up. They couldn’t justify a single fruitless expense.
If they couldn’t figure this out soon, their branch of study wasn’t going to be renewed for funding.
If that happened, the dozen people in this lab would wind up unemployed.
Kind, hardworking people who had made Ophelia feel as though she truly belonged among them.
She’d been to their baby showers, birthday dinners, and their loved ones’ funerals.
It was impossible not to feel the ripple effect failure would have through their little community.
Work. She squinted at the flowers. Please work.
“Feeling hopeful?” a voice called from behind her.
She startled. “Oh, Brenda. It’s just you.”
“Just me.” Brenda leaned against the door jamb, and the metal beads on her locs clattered softly against the frame. Her long lashes were threaded through with tinsel that sparkled in the light of her augmented pink eyes. They’d been purple on Friday, and teal the week before. “You holding up okay?”
Brenda, her supervisor at the lab, had tried more than once that day to ask if she was okay, but she’d only been able to smile insincerely and nod.
“Sure,” Ophelia said, flashing another wan smile. She gestured toward her eyes. “The pink is pretty. It suits you.”
A little deflection never hurt anybody.
“Thanks, girl.” She framed her gloved hands beneath her chin, fluttering her lashes playfully.
Ophelia’s giggle was weak, though genuine.
“Really, now.” Brenda crossed her arms over her crisp white lab coat. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Nothing.”
Brenda arched a brow.
“Really,” Ophelia said. She refused to bring her drama into the workplace to burden others.
Logan had tried three times to pick up the horrible conversation about their sex life, but she kept changing the subject before he could tell her whatever his ‘halfway’ point was.
She felt cheap, less human somehow. Like an object he’d grown bored of and wanted to share, if only to see what else could be done to it that he hadn’t thought of.
As she was mulling over that painful thought, the ‘control’ vase of flowers she was holding slipped out of her hand, clattering to the linoleum. She moved absently to pick it up, only to crunch a big piece of glass underfoot as she stepped wrong.
Brenda sighed. “Alright, that’s it. You’re going home.”
“W-what?” Ophelia blinked at her owlishly through her safety goggles. “No, I can’t. I’m supposed to process another dozen samples before the weekend, and I’m already—”
Brenda snapped her gloves off, tossing them into the waste basket, then gripped her by the shoulders and shook her gently. “Go. Home. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but it’s clear you need a mental health day. Just go. I’ll take care of it.”
“Oh, I couldn’t—”
“Yes, you can. You never use any of your time off. I’m ordering you to take a long weekend. Get some rest and come back fresh.”
She nodded in defeat. If she kept making mistakes, she was only going to set them back further from meeting their deadline. They were no closer to a solution for the weak half-life of the luminescence, but that wasn’t a problem she could solve today.
Reluctantly, she changed out of her lab coat and gathered her things.
She took the stairs down from the twelfth floor, trying to drag things out.
Of all the places she wanted to go, home was at the bottom of the list. Once, it had been the only place she wanted to be.
A refuge from the noise and the chaos of the city.
A nest where she could hide and lick her wounds before she had to go back to pretending to be normal all day.
Now, it was ground zero for the conversation that was sure to nuke her relationship.
She loved Logan so much, even now that he’d hurt her so deeply, even while his expectations cut her down to the size of an ant.
Her phone buzzed. It was another call from her mother. The ‘missed call’ counter ticked up to twelve as it rolled over to voicemail.
I’ll call her back. She’d been telling herself that all week, and she meant it. She would call her mother back… just as soon as she could stand the thought.
It was hard at this moment especially not to be filled with resentment.
Her mother had never tried to treat her own anxieties, and Ophelia had become a receptacle for every paranoid fear her mother had ever dreamed up.
Biting her nails would give her worms. Putting her hair in her mouth would cause cancer.
Everything would cause cancer, actually.
The sun. Sunscreen. The mulch at the playground.
Anything edible in a fun shape or color.
Everything had germs that would make her ill, possibly kill her.
Everyone had ulterior motives that would result in her suffering.
So many neuroses, poured into her one drop at a time over eighteen years, until no amount of rationalizing could compel her body not to react to what her mind knew wasn’t true.
She should call her back, but… Last time they’d spoken, her mother had given a whole diatribe about a rare disease that was spreading on the subway, and then Ophelia had been stuck in her apartment for two months as she grappled with fear.
A text message hovered in a holographic bubble over her phone.
CALL ME.
Ophelia stuffed it back into her pocket.
She pulled her sleeve down over her hand and carefully pushed open the exterior door, but the wind ripped it from her, forcing her to reach out and catch it with her bare hands before it slammed into the far wall.
Hissing in disgust, she jerked it shut and looked down at her hands, now damp with the bit of rainwater that clung to the metal handle.
Rain misted over her, clumping her lashes together as she stood there gaping at the invisible germs that she was sure now coated her hands.
They trembled as she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a bottle of sanitizer.
She squeezed out a cold glob and rubbed them together, ignoring the sticky way it lingered on her skin.
The air was too humid to dry her off quickly.
The streets and sidewalks became mirrors beneath the precipitation, and the city glowed twofold. She felt like she could leap into a puddle of neon and find herself falling through to an upside-down world.
Or maybe she was already there. She stood at the curb and stared down at her distorted reflection in the oily streets until a bus came barreling down the way, crushing her other self and splashing water everywhere.
Her feet carried her back toward her apartment, but when she reached the block, she found herself circling the building. Once, twice, a third time, a fourth. Finally, the doorman stepped out from under the awning, holding an umbrella out to her.
“Are you alright, miss?”
He was a fatherly-looking man named Gustav who had worked there for as long as she’d lived there. The genuine concern in his eyes made her vision blur with tears, but she smiled, nodding.
“Just… getting my steps in,” she said.
Gustav looked wholly unconvinced. “Of course, miss. You look tired now. May I escort you in?”
She hesitated, her eyes darting toward the door, dreading the conversation that Logan would undoubtedly bring up again.
With a wavering breath, she nodded. He offered his elbow to her, and she took it, smothering the part of herself that questioned what kind of germs his suit coat might have been exposed to standing by the street all day.
He walked her all the way to the elevator, and when the doors closed, she finally broke and reached for the sanitizer.
The more distressed she was, the more acute her anxieties. She would go from managing to live almost normally to washing her hands until they bled, afraid to even leave her bed some days lest she encounter all the contamination of the world beyond it.
A ping roused her from her misery, and she stepped out into the hall. Numbly, she walked over to her door, noting the way her little palm by it had begun to wilt with neglect. She held her key fob up to the door, and it beeped an acknowledgment. The lock clunked as it retracted.
She pushed the door open, and the familiar smell of home washed over her, soothing some of her anxieties despite everything.
Loamy soil from her many house plants, her favorite dryer sheets, and the apple-cinnamon air freshener she used year-round despite Logan’s insistence it was meant to be seasonal.
She eased the door shut behind herself, spotting Logan’s shoes by the door.
He was home early.
Dread coiled in her gut as she removed her coat and put her shoes in the sanitizer as quietly as possible. He wasn’t in the common spaces, and it wasn’t like him to nap during the day. If she was lucky, he was taking a shower and she’d have another half hour to avoid him.
Tentatively, she opened the door to their bedroom. She couldn’t relax in her outside clothes; unless she changed, some corner of her mind would keep churning over the lack of hygiene, refusing to let her rest.
To her dismay, Logan was sitting on the edge of the bed, fiddling with something on his holopad. He looked up as she entered, a beaming smile spreading over his face. “You’re home early!”
“Ah… yeah. So are you.”
“I have a surprise.” He leaned forward, his expression turning conspiratorial. “You know how I asked you to keep an open mind?”
Her shoulders sagged. “Logan, I can’t—”
He chucked the holopad onto the bed, leaping to his feet with his hands held up to stay her. “Just hear me out. Please.”
She sighed, grabbing her elbows as she reluctantly waited for him to continue.
“I know you’re… loyal, Effie. You have such a good heart. I’ve thought about it hard this week, and I understand why the idea of having someone else in bed with you doesn’t click.”
Relief welled within her. He understood? Then he’d changed his mind about pursuing his fantasies?
“So… No other people,” he said, gently grasping her upper arms. “Just you, me… and a toy.”
Her curiosity piqued. “A toy?”
She had no problem with that. Before Logan, her compulsions had made it difficult to enjoy casual sex. She’d had an entire shoebox filled to the brim with sex toys during those days. The OCD didn’t affect her—very high—sex drive, just her ability to enjoy it.
Something shifted off to her right, and she jumped, shrieking before she clamped a hand over her mouth. The man sitting in the small chair in the corner regarded her steadily, canting his head in curiosity at her reaction.
No, not a man. An android, wearing the freshly starched uniform that declared him to be Pleasure Unit 0031.
He was handsome—of course he was. Eyes as black as ink, skin with a golden undertone, wild, curling dark hair.
There was a spattering of freckles over his nose and a small mole beneath his left eye, probably meant to keep him from being too uncannily perfect.
It didn’t work. They only added to his inhuman beauty.
Even with the stiff uniform on, his build was obvious: broad shoulders, narrow waist, probably rippling with muscle.
His hands, resting on his knees, were broad and long-fingered.
She could imagine why he’d been designed that way.
“Say hello, Thirty-One,” Logan commanded.
The android met her eyes and offered a devastating smile that dimpled his cheeks. “Hello, Ophelia.”
His voice was a deep, pleasant rumble. Everything about him had been carefully curated for sex appeal, and she felt like a sucker for being so prone to it. She shuddered, gaping at the android.
“Where… did you get him?” she asked, looking over at Logan in astonishment. “He’s one of the new models, isn’t he? He probably costs as much as the building.”
Logan grinned. “Actually, his model isn’t even on the market yet. I’ve been working on his coding, trying to get it perfect before the demo next month. I told the higher-ups I was taking him home to… run some organic testing.”
On me.
Her throat was tight. She had no idea what to say.
“So?” he asked, looking hopeful. “Will you try this for me?”
“Try what?” she croaked, glancing back at the robot.
He was still studying her, as if she were the most interesting thing in the room.
“Let him pleasure you,” Logan said, voice dropping as his pupils expanded. “While I watch.”
She took a step back, the overwhelming impossibility of it all crashing down on her. Her stomach turned over. “I don’t—why would you want to watch someone else sleep with me?”
She couldn’t think of anything worse than watching Logan having sex with someone else. It was supposed to be theirs. Something just for them. That was how she liked it.
Was that so wrong of her?
“It’s hot, babe.” He chuckled, lightening the tone of the conversation. “Come on, have you seen yourself? You’re beautiful. Who wouldn’t want to watch you?”
“I don’t like this,” she said in a small voice. “Logan, I—I’m not trying to judge. I know everyone is into their own thing, but this… this isn’t for me.”
His face hardened into an unfamiliar mask of annoyance. “You’re not even trying.”
“I can’t.”
He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. “I need to think.”
Panic gripped her by the throat.
“I think you should sleep on the couch tonight,” he said.
“Logan…”
“Just… give me some space, okay?”
She nodded reluctantly. With wooden limbs, she gathered up a change of clothes and left the room, closing the door softly behind her.