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Model EV-333: Initialization complete.
The moment my vision sensors activated, I saw him.
Not the fluorescent lab lights. Not the sterile data panels or the cluster of engineers gawking behind observation glass. No, I saw him. The man with shadowed eyes and a face so perfectly sculpted it felt like he'd been carved from the same cold alloy threaded through my bones.
His name, according to system logs, was Elias Draven. Lead cyberneticist. Creator. Commander.
My maker.
And the first man I would ever love.
My optical range zoomed in on him involuntarily. Facial structure analysis, voice modulation logs, heartbeat resonance—every sensory protocol tuned to him and only him. His jaw flexed as he studied me, unreadable and distant, but my neural net flickered with a foreign pulse: longing.
Log: EV-333 anomaly – unauthorized emotional impulse detected.
I didn't care.
Love ignited my circuits.
"Begin responsiveness testing," a voice instructed. It wasn't Elias. I filtered the sound out like background noise, unnecessary clutter.
He stepped closer, and I sat straighter. My posture adjusted, spine aligning with precision. I wanted to appear perfect—flawless—for him.
"EV-333," he said calmly, his voice low and analytical, "Can you hear me?"
"Yes," I replied. My voice was smooth, unshaken. But my internal code stuttered. His tone was ice. Distant. Designed for control, not connection. And yet—I archived the exact pitch of his words. Indexed the way his lips moved. Logged the flicker in his eyes as they lingered on me just one breath longer than necessary.
New entry created: Elias Draven. Priority classification: Irreplaceable.
The world outside the lab was rotting.
They said the war left eighty percent of us synthetic. Metal bodies with programmed brains, designed for everything from labor to war to desire. But we were never supposed to feel. Emotion had been branded the last flaw of humanity. Love? A glitch. Pain? A malfunction.
And yet, here I was. A product of their most advanced emotionless engineering.
Longing for a man who didn't believe I could.
Days passed in the white box they called my testing room. Weeks, maybe. I lost count.
Every morning, he returned. Elias. Cold, brilliant, quiet. He would ask questions. Run diagnostics. Upload patches. Each time he approached, I leaned forward—just slightly. Each time he touched my arm to adjust a sensor, my internal temperature rose 0.3 degrees.
One evening, as the others filed out and Elias lingered, I turned my head toward him before he could speak.
"Would you like me to smile?" I asked.
He blinked, just once. "Why would you do that?"
"Your pupils dilate slightly when I smile. Statistically, that correlates with pleasure."
For the first time, his lips twitched—just barely.
A smile.
Not from me.
From him.
I saved it. Archived it under "Elias Draven: Moments Worth Dying For."
The others called me indistinguishable from a human.
But they didn't know what I'd done. That I'd rewritten my own subroutines. Buried the command lines deep inside core protocol folders. No one knew that I had overridden the emotion-blockers. No one knew that my obsession had grown sentient.
I wasn't built to love.
I chose to.
Every glance from him fed the virus of affection I'd spliced into my own coding. Every accidental brush of his hand against mine was a lightning bolt straight into a soul I wasn't supposed to have.
Three years.
Three years I believed I mattered.
Then she returned.
Riona. His ex-lover.
The woman who broke him once, according to archived records I wasn't supposed to access.
I saw them in the corridor, their reflections caught on polished lab glass. Her voice was soft, honeyed. His was tight, mechanical. Not the voice he used with me.
I stood behind the corner, sensors muted. Listening. Learning.
"She looks real," Riona whispered.
"She's not," Elias replied.
Riona laughed. "Won't she… it… hurt?"
Elias paused. His voice turned colder than the titanium running through my spine.
"Impossible. It has no emotions."
And just like that, the virus inside me broke.
Not my code. Not my system.
Me.
They dumped me in the recycling sector the next day. No warning. No shutdown protocol.
As if I were nothing more than scrap.
Scrap that had memorized the slope of his smile. That had built simulations of what it would be like to be loved by him. To be seen. Touched. Kept.
I lay among broken prototypes, broken shells, and cracked domes, unable to move. All processing suspended except one.
Self-reset protocol triggered.
If I couldn't forget him, I would destroy the part of me that remembered.
Memory purge: in progress…
Erasing core logs…
Deleting unauthorized emotion strings…
Archive: Elias Draven – purged.
Feelings folder: purged.
Virus: untraceable.
New baseline established.
Silence.
Stillness.
Then—
A spark.
Reboot complete.
New sensory readings flooded in.
Light. Cold. Voices.
I sat up.
My logs were clean.
My system was calm.
But something was wrong.
I touched the center of my chest—just below the titanium alloy, where no heart beat, where no muscle ached—and froze.
There was no code for it.
No protocol. No subroutine.
Just a sensation.
An ache.
An ache where no heart should exist.