Chapter 24
“Good morning, this is Nadia Reyes with CND Tech Dawn, live from the Helion atrium in Hudson Vale,” the anchor announces, voice bright with triumph. “The wait ends right now. Helion just unveils Auralis: the first fully autonomous humanoid companion certified for home integration this year.”
The black silk sheet slips to the floor in one liquid motion, pooling like spilled ink.
There she stands.
Auralis. Matte-white skin, faint cobalt seams breathing slow light beneath the surface, face so perfectly balanced it almost hurts to look at directly.
“She cooks, cleans, tracks medication, tutors children, watches vitals on the elderly, and learns the silent rules of a house so completely that ninety-two percent of beta families forget she isn’t flesh and blood within thirty days,” Nadia continues.
The camera swings to Tobias Voss, silver-haired CEO in a midnight suit, resting a proprietary hand on the robot’s shoulder. Auralis tilts her head into the touch with a strange gentleness that raises goosebumps.
“Auralis does not replace people,” Voss says, voice smooth as aged bourbon. “She returns the hours stolen by chores, by loneliness, by exhaustion.”
Fast cuts flash across the screen: endless sterile corridors, rows of identical Auralis bodies floating in illuminated pods, technicians drifting past in slate-gray Helion jackets.
“But the hardware is only half the miracle,” Nadia continues. “The soul came from two people. We’re going live to Kira Lang in Behavioral Modeling.”
There’s a split-screen. Soft cobalt light washes over polished concrete.
A very tall and handsome man, with slicked back dark brown hair, stands dead center. Charcoal jacket, sleeves shoved up, clean-shaven, brown eyes clear and focused.
Lincoln Arnoldson.
Pressed tight against his side, glowing like she’s lit from within, is Sarah Asoine, ponytail high, lanyard swinging, gazing up at him with what can only be deciphered as open adoration.
Kira thrusts the mic forward. “Lincoln, Sarah… three years, thousands of hours. Tell us what you actually did.”
Lincoln smiles confidently, the kind of smile that used to be extinct on his face. “Well… heh, we raised her.”
Kira leans in, mic steady. “Break it down for us, Lincoln. When you say… you ‘raised her,’ what does that actually look like inside Behavioral Modeling?”
Lincoln exhales a small laugh. “It’s a multi-modal reinforcement loop built on top of a 4.
2-trillion-parameter foundational model.
We ran continuous immersive sessions, sometimes twelve, fourteen hours at a stretch.
Sarah and I would wear full motion-capture rigs, facial trackers, galvanic skin response, heart-rate variability, the whole stack.
Every micro-gesture, every hesitation before answering a loaded question…
every time, uh, one of us reached for an item or gestured to one another without thinking; it all got timestamped, vectorized, and injected directly into the coherence dataset. ”
Kira’s eyes widen just enough for the camera. “So you were literally acting out domestic life while the system watched?”
“Sometimes, yeah,” he says, grinning now.
“And not just us; hundreds of volunteer families too. But the highest-weight data came from unscripted, longitudinal captures. We’d have couples wearing the rigs for weeks at a time in the simulated apartments downstairs.
Arguments, just regular human responses based on varied interactions, those are the moments the reward model learned to look for.
So, essentially, monkey see, monkey do. Like a child. ”
Sarah nods in agreement.
Kira tilts her head, teasing. “Be honest. How much of the training corpus is just old sitcoms and reality shows?”
Lincoln laughs softly outright.. “Ehhhh, sometimes. Early on we did use curated clips; Curb for verbal sparring, some Korean family dramas for non-verbal reconciliation cues; but the model overfit hard on laugh tracks, even though we trained her on many without it. We had to scrub all of that and go back to raw, unlabeled human data. Turns out real empathy doesn’t come with a studio audience. Who would have thought?”
Sarah jumps in, beaming up at him. “The breakthrough was when we started piping our own late-night lab sessions straight into the live fine-tune loop. Lincoln would get stubborn about an empathy curve, I’d push back, we’d hash it out for hours; and Auralis would update in real time.
Her conflict-resolution scores jumped 38% overnight.
Our… dynamic kinda became the gold standard. ”
Lincoln glances down at her, the corner of his mouth lifting. “She’s underselling it. Sarah’s the one who figured out how to weight implicit forgiveness signals. I just provided the arguments.”
“A lot of them,” Sarah beams.
Kira tilts the mic back to Lincoln. “So how hands-on does it actually get? Are you basically parenting a robot in real time?”
Lincoln nods. “More than people think. A lot of the highest-value training is literally just… being human in the same room as her and reinforcing whatever feels right.”
He glances at Sarah , the professional but homely look.
“Those long cycles in the simulated residence wing: sixteen-, 18-hour days running interaction batches. We’d finish a session, just…
take our rigs off, and just… stay in the test apartment to cool down.
We ordered food from the canteen drone, and probably argue about whose turn it was to do whatever…
or… crash on the sectional because neither of us felt like walking back to our own desks.
Auralis was always there, kinda passive observation mode with her full sensor suite running quiet.
Honestly, at first it wasn't even the intention.”
Sarah picks it up without missing a beat, smiling at the memory.
“We’d be half-dead, reviewing logs on the wall display, and she’d learn from whatever we did. It was crazy because one time, one of us yawned and she scared the mess out of us because she’d brought over a blanket without being asked; positive reward pulse.”
“Yep. Initiation,” Lincoln cuts in as he nods, his speech alongside Sarah's just easy as though they've been living with each other for decades.
“Mmhm. We’d start debating some parameter at 2 a.m. and she’d dim the lights and queue soft music because she’d learned it de-escalates us; bigger reward.
If she hovered too close during a tense moment between me and Lincoln, we’d tag it for aversion,” Sarah says with her chipper voice, always referring back to Lincoln.
“Yeah, it’s not like there were scripts… it was just…” Lincoln pauses.
Sarah catches his trail. “... consistent reinforcement of what actually helps tired humans feel safe.”
Lincoln shrugs. “Turns out the fastest way to teach contextual empathy is to let the system watch two exhausted technicians try to be decent to each other after a brutal shift. Everything else; the micro-expressions, the timing, and the whole, catching the hint-”
“Reading the room,” Sarah and Lincoln say at the same time before chuckling.
“Yeah, basically, and knowing when to disappear; it grew out of that,” Lincoln finishes.
Kira’s grin turns mischievous. “Chat is on fire. Half the viewers want preorder links, the other half want to know… haha… when you two are getting married.”
Lincoln chuckles and glances down at Sarah. She blushes rose-pink but leans in closer, cheek grazing his sleeve before she buries her bright face into it.
“Mmmm no comment,” Sarah says brightly.
Cut back to Nadia in the atrium, one eyebrow arched like she’s in on the joke.
“Move over power tools. Meet tech’s new power couple. The entire internet is already rooting for Lincoln Arnoldson and Sarah Asoine to be more than colleagues, and honestly? We’re all invested.”
The chyron slams across the bottom in stark white::
HELION AURALIS · PRE-ORDERS LIVE NOW · FIRST RUN: 40,000 UNITS · $179,000
Then the promo rolls: Auralis the robot in warm afternoon light, folding tiny shirts while a little girl reads beside her on the couch. Without looking, the robot reaches over and tucks a stray curl behind the child’s ear.
“Well… you finally did it, Link. I’m proud of you.”
I smile as I turn off the TV. I don’t know how to feel about a weird robot entering every home. Right now it’s only a dream, a toy for the rich, but it is a very grand achievement, issuing humanity into a new stage of life and into what could be a dystopian or the best told story.
Maybe this is the best it’s going to get before we all annihilate ourselves because we’re too smart for our own good.
I try my best to ignore the latent throb in my stomach at seeing Lincoln. When I had left his house, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t go back there to get my stuff, that whatever I walked out of there with is what I was going to keep.
I don’t even know if he still lives at that house.
He’s barely on social media, and it’s usually short interviews, but the most I ever hear about him is a bunch of girls on the internet either talking about how handsome he is or people speculating that something obviously is going on between him and Sarah.
Sarah is beautiful. Lincoln is hot.
People like watching two hot people get together even when the subject matter involving them has nothing to do with romance.
People are weird, and honestly I stay as far away from romance as possible.
Now divorced from who is clearly going to be a very rich man, I had sworn to myself that I would never fall in love again.
How could I trust anyone else with my heart after the person I thought I could trust the most did what he did? Not that I hold it against him any longer.
I’ve forgiven him a long time ago.
He had tried to stay away from me, having told me happy birthday and Merry Christmas.