Some find love through weird dolls and unconventional circumstances. But they do find it.
—
Dillan found the doll when he was eight, half-hidden in a damaged white box at a liquidation sale behind a dead electronics store.
He noticed the hand first.
It looked too real for a toy and too smooth for a real hand, pale and delicate with glossy pink nails and faint joint seams at the knuckles. He crouched, dragged the box out from under a folding table, and found the rest of it staring blankly up at him.
The doll was the size of a large baby doll, but made like something far more expensive. It had silver-white hair, a narrow face, and one cloudy eye half open under long lashes. A seam ran down its throat to a tiny speaker grille. Its outer covering was part plastic shell, part skinlike material stretched over a mechanical frame. The clothes were missing. Inside the wrist was a printed label.
DOLL 1-07.
That should have been enough to make it feel like junk.
Instead, Dillan had the impossible certainty that he had found something important.
He touched the wrist.
The open eye flashed blue.
Just once.
A tiny startup chime crackled in the throat.
Then it went dead again.
That was all it took.
His mother called it creepy. His father called it weird as hell. Dillan clutched the box to his chest until they gave in and bought it for almost nothing. He rode home with it buckled in beside him and kept glancing over, waiting for the eye to light up again.
It never did.
That first night, he sat cross-legged on his bedroom floor with the doll leaned carefully against the side of his bed. It was heavier than it looked. There was a charging port under a flap near the waist, but none of the cords in the house fit. The closed eye wouldn’t open. The speaker in the throat remained silent.
“Hello,” Dillan whispered.
Nothing.
He tried again.
“I know you’re broken. That’s okay.”
Still nothing.
He should have gotten bored. He should have gotten scared. He did neither. By the end of the week, the doll had become the center of his private world.
He never named it.
It already had a name, as far as he was concerned. Doll 1-07. Sometimes One-O-Seven. Once, in a diary entry when he was eleven, he wrote my other half and then shut the book so fast he nearly tore the page out.
The phrase embarrassed him.
It also never stopped being true.
As a child he cleaned the doll with cotton swabs and scraps of soft cloth. He tried to make clothes for it from old shirts. He brought it to his desk while doing homework and set it on the floor beside his bed every night. He learned which joints still moved and which ones stuck. He learned the doll’s weight, the exact tilt of its head, the way its synthetic hair slid over his fingers like cold water.
As he got older, the obsession did not fade. It narrowed.
At ten he tried to power it with stolen batteries and nearly ruined the throat speaker. At twelve he posted blurry photos online and got five different theories, none useful. At sixteen he found a hidden compartment in the chest and discovered a corroded memory unit he couldn’t read. At seventeen, after a brief and miserable first breakup, he sat on the floor of his room with the doll in his lap and muttered, “You don’t ask for anything,” before realizing how insane that sounded.
He stopped talking about it after that.
Not because he loved the doll less.
Because he knew exactly how it looked.
By college, the doll lived in a foam-lined trunk whenever other people were around. By twenty-eight, it lived in a locked cabinet in his apartment. He still took it out. Still cleaned it. Still searched old forums and dead company archives for anything that might explain what it had been meant to do. Still thought, sometimes, that he saw impossible little things: a faint warmth in its chest, a barely audible hum, the suggestion that the open eye tracked light.
He never told anyone.
Then he told Jacob.
It happened by accident, after work, over drinks.
Dillan and Jacob had been friends long enough to be comfortable and not long enough to be delicate. Jacob worked in prototyping. He loved dead gadgets, failed consumer tech, extinct operating systems, and machines built by people with more ambition than ethics. He had the posture of a man who hunched over benches for fun and the conversational style of someone who considered a badly designed toaster a personal affront.
He also knew Dillan was weird.
Not in a cruel way. In a matter-of-fact way. Jacob understood that Dillan got strange and quiet around specific things, that he clung to unfinished problems, that he could spend three weeks chasing an answer no one else cared about and emerge looking disappointed but not surprised.
So when the conversation drifted to things people kept for no good reason, Dillan said, without planning to, “I have a doll.”
Jacob looked up from his beer. “A haunted one?”
“It’s not haunted.”
“That is not a reassuring opening.”
Dillan rubbed a thumb along the side of his glass. “It’s old. Some kind of robot doll, maybe. I found it when I was a kid. It never worked right.”
“And you still have it?”
“Yes.”
Jacob waited.
Dillan sighed. “Yes, I know how that sounds.”
“How does it sound?”
“Like I kept a creepy broken doll for twenty years because I’m not normal.”
Jacob took a drink. “Accurate, but incomplete.”
Dillan snorted despite himself.
Jacob leaned back. “What’s it called?”
“Companion Series. Doll 1-07.”
Jacob stopped moving.
Dillan noticed it instantly. “What?”
Jacob frowned. “Say that again.”
“Doll 1-07.”
“Huh.”
“What kind of huh?”
“The kind where I think I’ve seen that naming structure before. Some archived product pitch maybe. Companion shells. Lifestyle robotics. Something deeply stupid.”
Dillan straightened in his chair. “You know what it is?”
“I said maybe.”
“That is more than anyone has ever had.”
Jacob studied him for a moment, saw the hope too clearly, and sighed. “Do you mind bringing it to my lab.”
“Tonight?”
“You say that like you’ve been standing at the starting line for twenty years.”
“I kind of have.”
Jacob pointed his bottle at him. “Still weird.”
“Yeah.”
“Still bring it.”
So Dillan did.
He unlocked the cabinet in his apartment with hands that shook more than he wanted them to. The doll lay where it always did, wrapped and protected like something fragile or sacred. He lifted it carefully, brushing silver-white hair away from the cloudy eye.
“I found somebody,” he murmured, because talking to it in private had become an old habit.
The doll said nothing.
Jacob said plenty when he saw it in person.
“Oh,” he said softly. “Okay. That is worse than I pictured.”
“Worse?”
“Creepier. Also more expensive. Also somehow sadder.”
That last one hit too close.
Jacob’s lab was part workshop, part operating theater for failed machines. Under the bright bench lights, the doll looked even stranger: not a toy, not quite a robot, not quite a mannequin either. Its materials were too precise, its internals too dense, its construction too deliberate. Jacob put on gloves and started examining it with the kind of careful fascination he usually reserved for devices he was afraid he might love.
“This was never cheap,” he muttered. “Custom joints. Proprietary architecture. Weird synthetic dermis. Dense core assembly. God, this company must have burned money.”
He found the corroded memory unit in the chest compartment, photographed serial markings, and started searching old archives. Dillan hovered nearby trying to look patient and failing completely.
After a while, Jacob made a face.
“That bad?” Dillan asked.
“That stupid,” Jacob said, turning the screen.
A degraded investor slide filled the monitor. A smiling synthetic girl rendered in glossy white stood beside a list of bullet points.
COMPANION SERIES Adaptive Bonding Platform User-Driven Personality Bloom Lifestyle Integration Rewards
Dillan stared. “That’s it.”
“That,” Jacob said, “is an ethical disaster in font form.”
He dug deeper and found references to a startup that had crashed before launch. The company had apparently been trying to sell high-end companion shells that would emotionally adapt to their owner over time. Their whole gimmick seemed to be gamified bonding: you spent time with the doll, earned progress through romantic interaction, and slowly shaped it into a more complete partner through unlockable upgrades. It was a luxury “girlfriend development” project, the kind of idea only people with too much money and not enough shame could have taken seriously, as if intimacy could be reduced to software progression and reward tiers.
Then Jacob found the app.
CompanionLink_v0.9.7_beta.
It sat in a mirrored archive like a little sealed bomb.
“Can we use it?” Dillan asked at once.
Jacob did not answer immediately. “We can try. That is not the same thing.”
“Try it.”
“This is prototype software from a dead company attached to a product line that seems to have imploded before public release.”
“Try it.”
Jacob looked at him, then at the doll, then back at him. “I’m putting on record that this is the sort of decision people regret in movies right before the blood starts.”
Dillan managed a thin smile. “Noted.”
Jacob sandboxed the app, cursed the interface, patched compatibility layers, and built a temporary adapter from the doll’s hidden port to modern hardware. The app itself was offensively cheerful, all pastel menus and heart icons.
WELCOME TO COMPANIONLINK. LET LOVE GROW.
Jacob stared at the screen like it had personally insulted him.
“I hate it already,” he said.
Dillan barely heard him. His attention was fixed on the doll and on the pulsing little pairing button below the smiling mascot face.
The app began checking shell status.
Warnings popped up one after another.
Unsupported shell state. Identity matrix missing. Response package absent. Primary user not registered. Recovery mode available.
Jacob read each one aloud in a flat tone that only made Dillan more anxious.
“Last chance to back out,” Jacob said.
Dillan looked at the doll. The same doll he had kept beside his bed as a child. The same doll he had hidden from roommates and girlfriends and moving crews and anyone who might ask the wrong question. The same doll that had never once truly worked and had still somehow stayed central to his life for twenty years.
“No,” he said.
Jacob nodded once and tapped PAIR.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the speaker in the doll’s throat gave a tiny burst of static.
Dillan stopped breathing.
The open eye lit with a blue ring.
One finger twitched.
Then another.
The throat speaker crackled more clearly than it ever had before. The doll’s head jerked upright. The half-open eye brightened into a hard mechanical glow. Silver-white hair slid over the bench in a smooth spill.
The app chimed.
CONNECTED SHELL DETECTED. INITIATING RECOVERY MODE.
Jacob straightened at once. “Wow, didn't expect it to still have power after all this time.”
The doll’s fingers curled slowly. The open eye locked forward. Not at Jacob.
At Dillan.
The app flashed again.
PAIR BOND REQUIRED. PRIMARY USER NOT FOUND. SEARCHING NEAREST COMPATIBLE MATCH.
Jacob swore. “I think we should unplug it.”
Dillan reached for the cable.
The doll moved first.
Its hand snapped around his wrist.
The grip was warm.
That was the first impossible thing. Not room temperature plastic. Not cold shell. Warm, active pressure, like a hand waking from deep sleep and deciding not to let go.
Dillan jerked in shock.
The eye flared brighter.
The app screen went white.
EMERGENCY COMPLETION PROTOCOL ENGAGED.
Jacob lunged for the power strip.
Nothing stopped.
The lights stayed on. The bench hardware died with a click. The phone remained bright in Jacob’s hand, running on its own battery, happily alive while the doll seized Dillan’s wrist and the rest of its body began to come apart.
The seam in the arm split first.
A pale panel opened along the forearm. Then another at the elbow. Fine silver cabling spilled out in tight little loops, followed by strips of skinlike material thinner than bandages and flexible white frame pieces that unfolded with insect precision. They raced over Dillan’s hand before he could pull free.
He felt them slide between his fingers.
Wrap around his palm.
Clamp tight at the wrist.
Pain hit an instant later: a buzzing pressure under the skin, a piercing heat in every tendon as if hot wires were being threaded through his arm.
Dillan screamed.
He tried to wrench back.
The doll came with him.
Its shoulder split open. The torso opened down the middle in a cascade of folding white shell plates. Inner structure telescoped outward, not exploding away but extending toward him with obscene purpose. It was not random breakage. It was assembly.
It was building.
On him.
Across him.
The opened torso struck his chest and wrapped there. He felt cold inner metal meet his shirt, then a violent tightening as panel after panel locked around his ribs. Fabric tore under the pressure. Something thin and sharp slid along his sides, mapped his shape, then sank beneath the surface of his skin with a white burst of pain.
Jacob shouted his name.
Dillan barely heard him.
The pressure climbed.
Silver filaments streamed over his shoulder and up the side of his neck. A plate clamped between his shoulder blades. Another locked lower, directly over the spine. He felt them pull, not outward but inward, as if some invisible brace had seized his whole back and was drawing it into a narrower line.
His balance lurched instantly. His posture changed. His center of gravity shifted with such speed that his knees buckled.
Jacob caught him under one arm.
The contact made the whole thing more horrible. Jacob’s grip was human, strong and warm and panicked. Dillan’s own body was becoming something else in layers and locking pieces, and he could feel every step of it.
The doll’s chest shell folded into his sternum.
Something clicked under his collarbones.
His shoulders drew inward with a wrenching mechanical tug that made him gasp.
His right arm went numb from the elbow down, then returned all at once with the wrong sensations: servo resistance at the joints, slight vibration in the wrist, a strange smoothness in the fingers as synthetic surfaces formed over his skin like liquid polymer freezing into shape.
He looked down in time to see pale white shell plating racing up his forearm.
Not covering like armor.
Replacing.
His skin vanished beneath a thin synthetic layer. The contours of muscle softened. The hand narrowed by degrees while he watched, fingers slimming, knuckles refining, tendons swallowed into a more delicate shape. The transformation was not dramatic all at once. It was horribly incremental, small changes piling so fast he could not stop them.
“N-no—” he managed.
His own voice caught halfway out.
Static crackled in his throat.
The doll’s face had come apart now too.
Its cheekplates separated. The jawline split. The top of the skull opened in layered petals. Silver-white hair spilled across his shoulder and then up around his head as some internal collar fastened at the base of his neck. He felt a line of heat race around his throat. Something clamped over his larynx.
He gagged.
The feeling was unbearable: pressure inside the throat, a hard little module seating itself where no module had any right to be, fine mesh threading through soft tissue, voice and breath both snagging on circuitry.
He tried to cough.
Only static came out.
Then the rest began.
His torso cinched.
That was the only word for it.
Bands of tightening force crossed his ribs and abdomen from every side at once. His waist pulled inward with painful precision. His chest reshaped under pressure—flattened in some places, rounded faintly in others, built not like a human woman exactly but like a cheap approximation of one. The changes were modest and still unmistakable. Enough to make the body feminine. Enough to make it wrong.
His hips jerked.
Something unlocked deep in the pelvis and re-set. The angle of his legs changed. His stance narrowed and then failed completely, sending his weight collapsing against Jacob.
Jacob swore and held on with both arms now, half carrying him while the transformation continued.
“Dillan, look at me. Stay with me.”
Dillan tried.
His vision had gone bright at the edges, blue and white and over-sharp. He could see every scratch on Jacob’s safety glasses. Every loose thread on Jacob’s sleeve. The room had become brutally crisp, as if his eyes were no longer human eyes but focusing systems jumping through ranges. The left side of his vision stuttered once, overlaid by a ring of blue diagnostics that vanished before he could read them.
His legs were changing.
He felt it all the way down.
The bones did not break. That would have been cleaner. Instead they seemed to compress under guided force while joints were rebuilt around them. Knees locked and unlocked at new angles. Calves thinned. Ankles pulled into a narrower axis. White shell bands surfaced beneath the skin at the joints, then pushed through as neat synthetic casings. The sensation was hideous: deep pressure, grinding adjustment, then the cold smooth finality of hard artificial surfaces settling where flesh had been.
His shoes split.
Toes clenched painfully as the shape of his feet changed inside them. The arch rose. The heel drew tighter. When he kicked one foot reflexively, a piece of torn leather dropped off and revealed a pale, almost doll-like foot beneath, small and wrong and too clean.
More shell pieces raced upward from the disassembling doll and sealed over his thighs.
He could still feel the original doll in all this, feel where it ended and he began, and then feel that line disappearing faster and faster.
Its chest had become his chest. Its spine had become his spine. Its throat had become his throat. Its face—
He felt the change reach his face and nearly blacked out from terror alone.
A ring tightened around his skull. Hair slid across his brow and cheeks. Something pressed behind one eye, then the other, making sparks burst across his vision. His jaw ached. His teeth hurt. The skin of his cheeks prickled, then numbed, then returned with reduced sensation, like the world was being filtered through synthetic film.
He reached up blindly, fingers shaking, and touched his own face.
One side felt almost normal, only too smooth.
The other was harder.
Seamed.
A fine shell line curved from temple to cheek.
He made a noise of pure panic.
It emerged from the new voice box in his throat as broken static and a bright feminine startup tone.
His hair spilled longer over his shoulders.
He felt the final locking sequence along his back then: a rapid chain of clicks up the spine, each one distinct, each one setting some articulated structure into place. It was the worst sensation of all, not because it was the most painful but because it felt final. A machine being zipped shut around him. A body deciding what it was.
The doll’s original shell gave one last convulsion against his chest.
Then everything went slack.
Dillan’s knees gave out.
Jacob dragged him down with controlled panic, easing him to the floor as the last detached scraps of the old doll clattered nearby—bits of empty shell, redundant casing, loose connectors no longer needed because the rest of it was now him.
Dillan heard himself making a thin static sound. He was dimly aware of Jacob calling his name. Then the lab tilted away and blackness swallowed the edges of his vision.
When he came back, he was on the floor against a workbench.
He knew something was wrong before he opened his eyes because he could hear too much.
Cooling fans. A printer motor in the corner. Jacob pacing. A phone notification. And under all of it, very faint, a steady internal hum.
His own.
He opened his eyes.
The room looked painfully sharp.
Jacob was above him, pale, shaken, trying hard to look useful. “Hey,” he said.
Dillan pushed himself upright.
His arm rose into view.
He froze.
The hand was smaller. Narrower. Pale synthetic material covered it from wrist to fingertip, broken only by neat joint lines. The fingers were delicate in a way his had never been. When he flexed them, he felt servo feedback in the knuckles.
He looked down.
He had become exactly what the process had promised.
A base shell.
A shabby, unfinished robot doll built on feminine lines.
His torso was narrow and pale, covered in synthetic skin sheets over shell and inner mechanisms. The chest was slight but unmistakably female in shape. The waist tapered too cleanly. Parts of the sides were still unfinished enough to expose layered internals beneath translucent covering. His back, visible in the steel cabinet nearby, showed a segmented artificial spine under a thin clear sheath. His legs were long, pale, jointed at white shell knees and narrow synthetic ankles. Silver-white hair spilled down past his shoulders.
He drew a breath.
Something vented softly in his chest.
“No,” he whispered.
The answer that came out was bright, feminine, and completely wrong.
“Doll 1-07 active.”
Dillan clapped both hands over his throat.
“Doll 1-07 active,” the voice repeated.
Jacob shut his eyes for one second. “Okay,” he said hoarsely. “Okay.”
Dillan tried to stand.
That was a mistake.
His new legs obeyed half a beat too late. His hips moved on a different balance axis. The knees nearly locked. One foot slipped. He lurched forward in a clumsy, puppetlike stagger and would have fallen face-first if Jacob had not caught him.
Jacob’s hands were human. Warm. Solid.
Dillan’s body wasn’t.
The contrast was devastating.
He shoved away and stumbled toward the polished steel cabinet at the end of the bench.
The reflection stopped him cold.
A robot girl stared back.
Not a sleek android. Not anything elegant. She looked badly assembled on purpose, like a premium product left unfinished and then forgotten. One eye was still an obvious blue optical lens. The other had a more human shape but tracked a fraction slower. The lower face was partly covered in skinlike synthetic material stretched over smooth shell. A speaker grille sat in the throat. White plating marked the joints. The visible spine beneath the translucent covering of the back made her look half-opened even while standing still.
The body was covered where it most mattered and unfinished everywhere else.
It was him.
It was not him.
It tilted its head in perfect sync with his own horrified motion.
“Doll 1-07 active,” it said.
His legs folded. Jacob got to him before the floor did.
He ended up on a stool, wrapped in a lab blanket neither of them needed for warmth so much as dignity. Jacob crouched in front of him, face tight with the effort of staying practical.
“I need to establish what still works,” Jacob said. “Can you understand me?”
Dillan glared at him.
“Good,” Jacob said quickly. “That’s something.”
Dillan opened his mouth.
“Doll 1-07 active.”
He shut it again.
The phone in Jacob’s hand chimed.
Both of them looked down.
CompanionLink had opened a communication field below a cheerful status display.
USER LINK ESTABLISHED. PRIMARY SHELL ONLINE. COMMUNICATION CHANNEL AVAILABLE.
Then letters appeared in the input bar one by one.
Jacob’s eyes widened. “Did you type that?”
Dillan stared at the screen.
More letters appeared.
Jacob let out a breath. “Okay. Neural relay through the app, I think? Horrifying, but useful.”
Dillan’s expression must have said enough, because Jacob winced. “Bad. I know. Still, better than nothing.”
They tested it. Dillan could think toward the phone and text appeared. He could not speak anything except the same startup line. The app held stable shell diagnostics. Turning the phone off made Dillan lose balance so sharply Jacob had to catch him again, which meant whatever emergency protocol had fused the system to him was now using the app as part of its operating support.
That discovery made both of them go very quiet.
Jacob began tearing through logs, diagnostics, and the remains of the archive while Dillan sat rigid on the stool trying not to look at his own hands too much.
They were too neat. Too pale. Too small. When he flexed the fingers, they moved beautifully and wrong.
He touched his throat once more, hoping pointlessly that he might feel flesh under the synthetic layer.
“Doll 1-07 active,” said the voice box in the same sweet neutral tone.
Dillan shut his eyes.
The phone chimed.
Jacob read that and looked up at him. “No, I wouldn't say that. But you do sound like a doll stuck in its bootup.”
The phone answered a second later.
Jacob did not argue.
He kept searching.
After a long time, he found the first useful explanation in a half-corrupted technical note and read it twice before speaking.
“The shell went into emergency completion mode,” he said slowly. “It had no registered primary user, no identity package, and an incomplete body. It recognized you as the nearest compatible bond source and used you to instantiate itself.”
Dillan stared.
The phone chimed.
Jacob rubbed a hand over his face. “That is unfortunately the phrasing, yes.”
Dillan looked down at his body again. The narrow waist. The synthetic thighs beneath the blanket. The unfinished torso. The white shell at the wrists.
His other half.
He had spent twenty years trying to wake the thing up.
Apparently it had taken that personally.
The phone chimed again.
Jacob looked at the message, then at him. “I don’t care whose fault it is.”
Dillan’s blue lens shifted toward him.
Jacob’s jaw tightened. “I care that it happened. And I care that I helped it happen. So now I’m fixing it.”
That landed harder than Dillan expected.
Jacob went back to the archive with the flat concentration of a man who had decided guilt was only useful if it turned into labor. He pulled up technical references, partial design trees, broken menu images, pricing tables, and user progression notes. Dillan, still unable to do anything but sit and think at the phone, watched helplessly while the pieces came together.
The worst part was how stupid the answer turned out to be.
Jacob found a product design summary titled COMPANION GROWTH MODEL.
He read aloud.
“Relational engagement generates progression points.” He made a face. “Qualified date activities increase bond score. Point redemption enables cosmetic, behavioral, and structural upgrades.”
He stopped.
Dillan stared at him.
Jacob scrolled one line lower.
“Ultimate milestone unlock: Ultimate Girlfriend.”
Silence sat between them for three full seconds.
Then the phone chimed so hard Jacob almost dropped it.
Jacob pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes. Correct reaction. Deeply correct reaction.”
The next line appeared immediately.
“Also fair.”
Another line.
“I’m trying.”
He did try. For almost another hour. He searched for manual overrides, factory resets, emergency de-pairing, shell rollback, identity repair packages, anything that looked like a clean route backward.
Nothing useful surfaced.
Everything in the system pointed forward.
Growth. Bonding. Upgrades. Progression.
The app itself agreed. Under Dillan’s shell status, a recommended next step kept blinking with infuriating cheerfulness.
BEGIN COMPANION GROWTH
Jacob finally leaned back in his chair and looked exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with time.
“This might be the only path the system actually recognizes,” he said.
The phone stayed dark for a moment.
Then:
Jacob nodded once. “Yeah.”
Dillan’s thoughts came faster after that, appearing on the screen in short bursts.
"I know."
Jacob shut his mouth.
The next line appeared more slowly.
A beat.
Another.
Jacob looked up sharply at that.
“No,” he said.
The phone chimed at once.
Jacob stood, paced once, then came back and put both hands on the bench. “You look like a prototype shell in base state.”
Dillan stared at him.
Jacob grimaced. “I know that sounded like the least comforting sentence possible.”
The phone chimed.
Jacob huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh and then sobered. “Listen. I’m not saying this because I think it’s funny, or because I want to push you into some nightmare dating sim. I’m saying it because the shell is treating this progression model like operating logic. You’re in base state. If points buy upgrades, then upgrades may buy mobility, voice, stability, appearance repair—whatever lets you function.”
He turned the screen so Dillan could see a partial upgrade tree.
Appearance Repair. Basic Mobility Assist. Gyroscopic Balance. Voice Box Upgrade. Emotive Layer. Then higher, locked behind grayed-out branches: ULTIMATE GIRLFRIEND.
Dillan stared until the words blurred.
Jacob’s voice dropped a little. “I don’t know if the final result turns you back. I don’t know if it makes you more stable. I don’t know if it makes you more human. But I do know staying like this, right now, at base stage, is not something I’m willing to accept as the end of the road.”
The phone was quiet for a long moment.
Then one line appeared.
Jacob looked almost offended. “Obviously I mean that.”
Another line.
“I know I don’t.” Jacob folded his arms. “I am choosing to. There’s a difference.”
That was when Dillan felt the first crack in the numbness.
Not relief.
Something smaller, stranger.
He had expected horror, maybe pity. He had expected Jacob to help because he felt responsible. He had not expected Jacob to plant himself in front of the problem like a man insulted by the universe on principle.
The phone chimed again.
Jacob’s answer came immediately. “I know.”
Another line.
“I know.”
Another.
Jacob hesitated at that one.
Then he said, with brutal honesty, “Then we keep going until we run out of road.”
That should not have helped.
It did.
Dillan looked down at his hands again. Delicate, artificial, wrong. He flexed the fingers once and heard the tiny servo whisper in the joints. He thought about trying to walk on those narrow legs. About being seen. About sitting across from Jacob in public while the only sound he could make out loud was Doll 1-07 active.
The thought was awful.
Remaining like this forever was worse.
The phone chimed.
Jacob closed his eyes briefly like a man accepting a challenge from a very stupid god. “I was afraid you’d ask that.”
He began scrolling through the recovered documentation, squinting as he read. “Okay. Apparently it counts restaurant outings, walks, scenic activities, and shared leisure as valid date categories,” he said, sounding more offended with every word. He flicked down further and grimaced. “And there are atmosphere bonuses too. Romantic setting, emotional engagement, sustained partner attention. God, I hate these people.” He kept reading for another second, then looked over at Dillan with the flat disbelief of a man being forced to explain a very stupid rulebook. “It’s basically a point system for fake relationship milestones. The app wants us to take you on dates, score well, and spend the points on upgrades.”
Dillan sat in the bright lab, wrapped in a blanket over a body that had once been a childhood obsession and was now a mechanical prison, and watched Jacob work through the absurd instructions with determined fury.
Finally Jacob looked up.
“We can do this,” he said.
Dillan stared at him.
Jacob corrected himself. “No. Let me rephrase that. This is ridiculous, humiliating, deeply cursed, and built by monsters. But if this is the path to getting your voice back, or your balance back, or anything else that helps, then yes. We can do it.”
The phone chimed once.
Jacob met his eyes. “You are not doing this alone.”
That did it.
Not because it made the plan less ridiculous. It didn’t.
Not because it made Dillan less afraid. It absolutely didn’t.
But because the thing that had once been his private obsession had become a nightmare he could no longer survive privately. And Jacob, against all reason, was still here.
Dillan looked down at the app. At the cheerful CompanionLink mascot. At the blinking recommendation to begin growth. At the locked branches above. At the stupid promise of upgrades.
Then he looked at his own reflection in the dark edge of the monitor: silver hair, unfinished face, speaker in the throat, visible spine beneath translucent plating, body arranged into a cheap feminine imitation by the shell that had used him as raw material.
His other half.
He hated that the phrase still fit.
The phone chimed one last time.
Jacob let out the breath he’d been holding.
Then he pulled a stool closer, set the phone between them, and together the two of them began planning the first date that might, somehow, become the first step toward fixing her.
The app wanted them to start simple.
It had a whole section labeled FIRST DATE RECOMMENDATIONS in cheerful pastel lettering, as if this were not an emergency recovery process wrapped around a human life.
Jacob read through the options with mounting disgust. “Okay, so apparently this thing thinks a first date should be a coffee shop, a casual restaurant, a botanical garden, or a picnic lunch,” he said. He scrolled a little farther and made a face. “It’s actually ranking them by point efficiency, which is maybe the bleakest thing I’ve seen all week, and that’s saying something. I hate this thing.”
Dillan, still wrapped in the lab blanket and thinking at the phone because that was all she could do, sent back the only response that mattered.
Jacob glanced up, mouth tightening. “Honestly? A restaurant makes the most sense,” he said. “We can go in, sit down, get through it, and get back out without too much chaos. If I pick somewhere quiet, people probably won’t pay enough attention to make this even more miserable than it already is.”
“It’s really, really not normal,” he said, setting the phone down between them and rubbing both hands over his face. “But this thing keeps insisting we need an actual date, enough time together, some kind of emotional engagement, and a clean ending. At that point, dinner feels like the least terrible option.”
Dillan looked down at her new hands.
The pale synthetic fingers rested in her lap with terrible neatness. Even still, they looked posed. Built. Nothing about this body ever quite seemed to relax. There was always the faint hum inside her chest, the low balance corrections in her hips, the tiny shifts at the joints. She had been sitting for almost an hour and still had not managed to think of herself without flinching.
The phone chimed.
Jacob followed her gaze and grimaced.
Base state, as the app called it, had not been designed for dignity. The shell covered the important areas with skinlike synthetic sheeting, but large sections of her sides and back were still only translucent plating over layered internals. The visible artificial spine did not help. Neither did the speaker grille in her throat, the half-synthetic face, or the lens eye that brightened and narrowed when she focused too hard.
“We’ll improvise,” Jacob said.
That turned out to mean a long dark coat from the emergency clothes locker in the prototyping floor, one of Jacob’s old scarves, and a pair of gloves with the fingertips cut away because nothing in the building had been made for hands that elegant and that inhuman at the same time.
The coat hid most of her body. The scarf covered the throat. The gloves hid the worst of the shell seams. None of it fixed the way she moved.
The first time she tried to walk the length of the lab under her own power, Jacob had to catch her halfway to the door.
Her new body obeyed in pieces. The hips overcorrected. The knees locked too easily. Her balance was always a fraction off, as if the shell expected data it wasn’t getting. Every step looked like a lie she was telling the floor.
“Okay,” Jacob said, steadying her by the elbows. “Maybe we practice before I parade you into public.”
The app approved of that too.
A TRAINING BONUS icon appeared, followed by a tiny shower of hearts. Jacob stared at it with flat loathing.
By the end of the next day, Dillan could make it from one end of the lab to the other without collapsing, provided she concentrated on every single movement and accepted that she would never again know the comfort of walking without thinking about it. The shell seemed to like repetition. Her motions got microscopically smoother each time.
Her humiliation did not.
Twice she nearly called the whole thing off. Twice she sent Jacob messages telling him this was stupid, impossible, degrading. Twice he looked at the app, then at her, and said some variation of “Yes, all of that is true. We’re still going.”
So two nights after the transformation, Jacob borrowed a car from the company pool, smuggled a badly assembled robot girl out through the service elevator, and took her to dinner.
The restaurant was small and nicer than Dillan would ever have chosen under ordinary circumstances. Soft lighting. Dark wood. Cloth napkins. The kind of place where people spoke quietly and pretended not to stare at neighboring tables.
The hostess looked up when they entered.
Dillan felt every single one of her new moving parts tighten.
The coat hid most of her. The scarf hid more. But not the silver-white hair, not the uncanny poise of a body that was trying too hard to look human, not the lens eye reflecting the warm ceiling lights back in a thin blue ring.
Jacob stepped in first with the determined calm of a man refusing to notice a bomb under his own chair. “Reservation for Jacob,” he said.
The hostess checked the book. “Party of two?”
Her eyes flicked to Dillan.
For one awful second, Jacob hesitated.
The hostess smiled politely. “And your guest’s name?”
Jacob answered before he had time to think.
“Dorothy.”
Dillan’s head snapped toward him.
The hostess wrote it down without comment. “Right this way.”
They followed her to a booth in the back.
Jacob did not look at Dillan until they were seated. Only then did he unlock his phone and glance down at the screen.
There were already three furious messages waiting for him.
Jacob rubbed a hand over his mouth, trying not to laugh and trying not to look like he was trying not to laugh. “I panicked.”
Another message appeared.
“It was Doll. Doll in my head. D-O…” He shrugged helplessly. “Dorothy just happened.”
Dillan glared across the table.
The glare would have been more intimidating if the shell’s face had not still been limited in the range of anger it could express. One eye narrowed. The lens brightened. The corners of her mouth twitched into a stiffness that only vaguely resembled offense.
Jacob’s expression softened.
“You need a name in public,” he said more quietly. “I couldn’t exactly tell them Doll 1-07.”
The phone stayed silent for a moment.
Then:
A waiter arrived with menus.
“Can I get you started with something to drink?” he asked.
Jacob opened his mouth, then looked at Dillan.
It was such a simple thing that it hit her harder than it should have.
He didn’t answer for her.
The waiter, perhaps assuming nerves, smiled kindly. “Take your time.”
Dillan lifted one hand toward the menu.
Her fingers worked now, more or less, but turning paper pages with synthetic fingertips took so much concentration that the menu slipped once and nearly fell. Jacob caught it and set it more securely in front of her.
She bent over it.
The app interface opened automatically on Jacob’s phone with a little heart-shaped ping.
PARTNER INPUT DETECTED.
He angled the screen toward her.
Jacob typed back under the table.
She looked up flatly.
He sighed and scrolled through the shell diagnostics. “Looks like basic intake is optional. Simulated taste, low-volume conversion. You can probably manage small amounts.”
Another message.
“Understood.”
In the end Jacob ordered for both of them: pasta for himself, a soft risotto for Dorothy on the gamble that fewer moving parts would be involved. The waiter accepted this with the professional calm of someone who had seen stranger dates and preferred not to know the details.
That, more than anything, made the evening surreal.
No one stopped them. No one demanded an explanation. No one pointed and shouted that Jacob had brought an uncanny robot girl to dinner.
People just looked, then looked away.
Which somehow felt worse.
Jacob made conversation because someone had to.
He talked about the lab first, about how the archive had three backup layers because dead companies apparently believed in preserving their crimes. He talked about the restaurant’s music being too self-important. He pointed out a terrible light fixture on the far wall and said it looked like a jellyfish with tax debt.
Dillan answered entirely through the phone.
“Correct.”
“I guessed.”
“I very much did.”
When the food came, Dillan discovered that the shell’s hands could handle a spoon reasonably well, provided she moved slowly and ignored how conscious she was of every angle of her wrist. Taste came through faintly and strangely, like memory filtered through cheap speakers. Texture registered more than flavor. Warmth mattered more than seasoning.
She took three careful bites.
Jacob pretended not to watch too closely.
Then the waiter came back to ask how everything was.
Dillan looked up before she could stop herself.
“Doll 1-07 active,” said the bright feminine voice from behind the scarf.
The waiter blinked.
Jacob closed his eyes for half a second. “Throat issue,” he said smoothly. “Temporary.”
The waiter, to his eternal credit, did not even visibly react. “Understood. Let me know if you need anything else.”
He walked away.
Jacob slowly lowered his menu. “You okay?”
The phone chimed.
He exhaled through his nose. “Not currently on the table.”
She looked down again, mortified in a way the shell’s face still couldn’t fully show. That made it worse, somehow. The body could not blush. The synthetic skin could not warm. There was no easy visible outlet for embarrassment, only that tiny tightening all through her posture and the way her fingers curved in toward her palms.
Jacob’s hand moved across the table before he seemed fully aware of it.
He rested two fingers lightly against the back of her glove.
“Hey,” he said.
She looked up.
“You’re here,” he said. “You made it through the door. You’re eating dinner in public. That’s already ridiculous progress.”
The phone remained silent for a beat.
Then:
A laugh escaped him before he could stop it. “I’m trying to encourage you.”
But she let him keep his fingers there.
That, more than the atmosphere score or the completed meal or the absurdity of the setting, was probably what made the date count.
When they got back to the lab, CompanionLink rewarded them with a triumphant burst of pink hearts.
DATE COMPLETE. BOND SCORE: ACCEPTABLE. PROGRESSION POINTS AWARDED. FIRST DATE BONUS UNLOCKED.
Jacob stared at the screen. “Acceptable.”
Dillan, too exhausted to care about the phrasing, watched as an upgrade menu bloomed open beneath the score.
The cheapest option was Appearance Repair.
“Buy it,” she sent at once.
Jacob didn’t argue.
He tapped the button.
The shell reacted immediately.
Dillan doubled over on the stool with a sharp intake of air as warmth spread beneath the skinlike coverings along her torso and limbs. It wasn’t like the fusion had been. Not invasion, not tearing assembly. This felt more like something half-finished remembering its intended shape. The exposed sides tightened first. Fine synthetic material flowed over the visible internals in pale sheets, sealing gaps, smoothing seams. The translucent plating along her ribs turned opaque. The artificial skin over her stomach, shoulders, and thighs thickened into a more complete outer layer.
She grabbed the edge of the bench and held on while the process finished.
When it was done, she looked down in stunned silence.
No inner workings showed anymore.
The body was still obviously artificial. The joints still gleamed white. The spine still showed faintly through the back panel. Her face still had the wrong kind of smoothness. But the unfinished, half-open quality was gone. She no longer looked like she had been left on an assembly table. She looked like a constructed person.
Jacob let out a slow whistle. “Well. That’s… better.”
The phone chimed.
“True.” He checked the remaining points and blinked. “We have enough left for one low-tier mobility option.”
The icon was labeled ROLLER SKATES.
They both stared at it.
“Absolutely not,” Jacob said.
The app chimed.
RECOMMENDED FOR EARLY BALANCE COMPENSATION.
Dillan sent the message before she could lose her nerve.
Jacob looked at her. “You cannot be serious.”
That was difficult to argue with.
He bought the skates.
Dillan felt the change begin in her feet.
The shell at the soles warmed, unlocked, and rearranged with a series of soft clicks. She jerked one leg back in alarm, then the other, as metal rails extended beneath the feet and sleek little wheel assemblies unfolded into place where her heels should have been. The resulting shape should have been ridiculous.
It was ridiculous.
It was also, annoyingly, elegant.
Jacob stared. “You have got to be kidding me.”
Dillan carefully lowered one foot to the floor.
The wheels engaged with a soft magnetic whirr.
She pushed tentatively.
And moved.
Not a step. A glide.
Her balance, miserable in ordinary walking, translated through the skates into something unexpectedly natural. The shell liked momentum. It liked smooth directional control. She rolled one cautious meter, then another, eyes wide, and for the first time since the transformation something like delight cut through the humiliation.
Jacob saw it happen.
The shell couldn’t smile much yet, but he saw the change all the same.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “That is unfairly cool.”
The phone chimed.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
She rolled in a shaky circle, scarf fluttering, silver hair sliding across the shoulders of the borrowed coat, and nearly crashed into a parts cabinet.
Jacob caught her at the waist.
For one brief moment neither moved.
Then he set her upright and stepped back like he had touched a live wire.
“We practice tomorrow,” he said too briskly.
Dillan’s phone lit.
The second date happened five days later because Jacob refused to risk taking her out before she could control the skates properly.
By then Dillan had discovered that skating fit the shell better than walking ever had. In narrow indoor spaces she still clipped corners and overcorrected too sharply, but on open concrete or polished floor the body began to make sense. The hips aligned. The center of gravity settled. Motion stopped being a series of falls caught at the last second and became something cleaner.
It was the first time since the fusion that she felt her body doing something other than humiliating her.
The app suggested a scenic walk.
“In your case,” Jacob said, looking at the skates, “more of a scenic roll.”
The app approved that phrasing with a heart icon, which nearly made him throw the phone.
They chose a wide path along the edge of a wooded park just before sunset. It was public but not crowded. The light was gold through the trees. Dry leaves clicked over the pavement whenever the wind pushed them across the path.
Jacob had, against all odds, learned from the first date. Dorothy wore clothes this time that looked less like borrowed concealment and more like an actual outfit: a fitted dark jacket, a long soft sweater over the shell body, leggings adapted around the skates. The effect did not make her human. It did make her look less like a hidden problem and more like someone intentionally unusual.
Jacob noticed her noticing that.
“You look good,” he said, then frowned at himself like the words had left his mouth before clearance.
The phone chimed almost instantly.
“I’m surprised the dead company had any aesthetic sense at all.”
He smiled despite himself. “Probably.”
The beginning of the date went better than either of them expected.
On open pavement Dorothy could move. Not beautifully, not yet, but fast enough that Jacob had to lengthen his stride to keep pace. The late light caught on her silver hair and pale synthetic skin in a way she tried not to think about. Children on bicycles looked at her and seemed mainly delighted. Adults looked longer, but from a distance she could almost pretend they were staring because the outfit worked, because the skates were unusual, because human attention was always a little invasive anyway.
Then the path curved.
Dorothy hit a patch of uneven pavement hidden under leaves and immediately lost the line of her balance.
Her right skate caught. Her hips twisted. She windmilled both arms and went sideways.
Jacob grabbed her before she hit the ground.
The second time it happened, he caught her by the waist.
The third time, he didn’t even look surprised.
“This is getting humiliating,” she typed while he steadied her.
“Counterpoint,” he said, not letting go until she found center again, “you are learning.”
“I’m sturdier than I look.”
She snorted internally, since the shell still couldn’t do it out loud.
The real problem was not speed. It was recovery. On smooth stretches she could sail. The moment she needed a rapid adjustment, the base shell lagged. The gyroscopic logic simply wasn’t good enough. Every near-fall ended with Jacob grabbing her arm, her hand, her side, or once even hooking both hands around her shoulders from behind to stop her from rolling backward into the grass.
The app loved all of it.
PARTNER SUPPORT BONUS. PHYSICAL ASSIST CREDIT. EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT INCREASED.
“This is one hell of a weird software,” Jacob muttered.
Dorothy looked down at the screen and then back up at him.
“What’s that?”
He went quiet at that, just for a second too long.
Then he cleared his throat and looked at the path. “Yeah. Well. That’s the date.”
The near-falls kept coming. So did the moments between them.
At one point they slowed enough for the park to go nearly quiet around them, trees on one side, open field on the other, the sky gradually thinning toward evening. Dorothy rolled beside him more steadily for a little while and realized the outing had shifted. It no longer felt like being displayed. It felt like being accompanied.
That was new.
Dangerously new.
The date scored well, mostly because the app was a pervert for any situation in which one partner kept physically stabilizing the other. Jacob said this in almost exactly those words while scrolling the results back in the lab later.
Then he opened the upgrade tree.
“This one,” he said, tapping Improved Gyroscope, “is non-negotiable.”
Dorothy sent back her answer immediately.
The upgrade hit at the base of her skull first and then spread downward in a smooth controlled recalibration. Fine shivers ran through her back and pelvis. Her inner balance system reoriented like a compass finally finding north. When she stood again, even in place, the shell held itself more cleanly.
Jacob nodded once. “Good. Again.”
The next option sat directly below it.
ULTIMATE EXTERNAL GYROSCOPE.
The icon looked harmless: a stylized stabilization ring. The description did not help.
Enhanced dynamic compensation for advanced mobility partners.
Jacob frowned. “That sounds stupid enough to work.”
He bought it.
This time the transformation started lower.
Dorothy felt a sharp jolt at the base of her spine and gasped soundlessly as the whole lower back seized. She braced both hands on the workbench. A rapid series of clicks ran downward through the artificial vertebrae one by one, each louder than the last. The back panel below her waist split along a seam she had not known was there.
Something pressed outward.
She jerked, trying to twist around, and Jacob caught her shoulders. “Hold still.”
That was easy for him to say.
The pressure became a concentrated force pushing from inside the shell. Plates unfolded. Metal extended. Segment after white-plated segment slid free from the opening at the base of her spine in a smooth mechanical telescoping motion. Not flesh, not bone, not anything that had ever belonged on a human body.
A tail.
A thick, articulated, plated mechanical tail.
It emerged with a final locking snap and dropped behind her with enough weight that she nearly lurched forward.
Then the new gyroscopic routines kicked in.
The tail lifted.
Not by much at first. Just enough to counter her balance. Just enough to move as the rest of the shell moved. When she shifted her weight experimentally, it adjusted without asking her permission, compensating with uncanny precision.
Jacob stared.
Dorothy stared harder, twisting just far enough to catch the thing in the reflection of a dark monitor. It was long, built of overlapping silver-white plates with flexible joints between them, heavy enough to look armored and sleek enough to be almost elegant if one ignored the fact that it was growing out of her lower back.
The phone chimed.
Jacob read the description again, then made the face of a man insulted by language itself. “Apparently because the dead company decided external stabilization would be more marketable if it looked cute.”
He considered the tail. “Disturbingly, yes.”
Dorothy might have sent back something sharper than that, but Jacob’s thumb slipped on the screen.
The app chirped.
PURCHASE CONFIRMED. CHEST UPGRADE INSTALLED.
They both froze.
Jacob looked down in horror. “What...?”
The shell reacted before he could say anything else.
A hot pulse spread across Dorothy’s chest. She gasped and clutched the edge of the bench again as the front panels softened, shifted, and pressed outward. The change wasn’t extreme, but it was immediate and impossible to ignore: the slight feminine shaping of the base shell rounded fuller beneath the synthetic skin, the chest developing with a smooth upward push until it settled at something undeniably noticeable.
Not absurd. Not enormous. Very much there.
Jacob turned halfway away on instinct and then, realizing that made everything worse, turned back looking like he wished he could turn into a wall.
“I am so sorry,” he said at once.
Dorothy looked down.
The sweater she had worn on the date now fit differently.
The phone chimed hard.
“I know.”
“It said chest something. I didn't get to read it fully.”
That was so exactly the kind of mistake the app would be built to exploit that she almost couldn’t be angry at him for it.
Almost.
Still, when she stood fully upright a minute later, the tail balanced behind her and the new gyroscope systems took hold so cleanly that the shell seemed to settle into itself. She shifted left. No wobble. Right. No correction lag. She rolled forward a little on the skates and the tail moved with her, counterweight perfect and immediate.
Jacob, still bright red at the ears, watched her do one clean turn around the lab.
“Well,” he said carefully. “The stabilization works.”
The phone chimed.
Jacob glanced at the screen, then at her, ears going red all over again. “...Yeah,” he admitted.
The phone chimed once more.
< ;) >
The third date should have been a water park, according to the app.
Jacob announced this in the lab with the same tone people used for reporting pest infestations.
Dorothy stared at him.
Then she pointed to her own body.
Or tried to. The gesture came out strange and elegant and irritated all at once, which in itself was an improvement.
The phone chimed.
Jacob looked back at the app. “In fairness, this thing was probably built for weather resistance.”
He shut the phone off for exactly half a second in reflexive annoyance, made her stagger violently, swore, and turned it back on.
They went fishing instead.
The lake lay just outside the city, quiet and gray-blue in the late afternoon. Jacob had not fished in years. Dorothy had never especially liked it before the transformation, but it counted as shared leisure, it was calm, and most importantly it did not involve chlorinated death.
By then she could skate well enough to handle the dock without making Jacob follow at arm’s length the entire time. The tail had changed everything. It moved with her naturally now, balancing every shift of weight, giving the shell an athletic confidence the base body had lacked. She still hated how much she liked the improvement.
They sat side by side on the edge of the dock with borrowed rods and a bucket neither expected to use.
The app, mercifully, remained mostly quiet.
Water moved against the wood below them. The line made its small whispering sound each time the breeze touched it. Somewhere across the lake someone laughed, faint and unimportant.
Jacob was the first to speak.
“I should say this more directly,” he said, eyes on the water. “You can veto things.”
Dorothy looked at him.
He lifted a shoulder. “The app is pushy. I’m pushier when I’m worried. That doesn’t mean you stop getting to be a person in this.”
The phone chimed.
“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Fair.”
She looked back at the lake.
After a while she typed again.
That got a tired laugh out of him. “I’m very generous that way.”
Silence settled again, easier this time.
Fishing was a good date for them because it left room around the words. Jacob didn’t have to perform calm conversation. Dorothy didn’t have to fake natural body language every second. They could sit shoulder to shoulder and look outward instead of at each other.
Eventually Jacob said, “Do you hate the name?”
She knew immediately which one he meant.
Her fingers moved over the screen more slowly than usual.
He nodded once. “Reasonable.”
Another message followed.
“Also true.”
She looked at the reflection of the water under the dock, the pale flicker of silver hair in it, the long line of her strange body bent beside his.
Then she typed the rest.
Jacob went still.
For a moment she worried the message had been too much, too raw, too close to admitting how little of Dillan felt reachable these days. But when he looked at her, there was no pity in it. Only a quiet seriousness she had not expected.
“Okay,” he said. “Dorothy, then.”
No one had said it like that before.
The name settled over her more gently than she wanted to admit.
The date scored high on emotional engagement. Jacob blamed the sunset on the lake. Dorothy blamed the app’s inability to tell sincerity from silence. Either way, they came back with enough points for the next thing she wanted most.
Voice Box Upgrade.
Jacob hovered over the button like he expected it to bite.
“You sure?”
Dorothy sent back the response immediately.
He bought it.
The change began in her throat.
She clutched the front of her jacket as warmth spread along the speaker grille and inward from there, deeper this time, into the module fused around her ruined human voice. Tiny motors adjusted. Fine mesh shifted. There was a soft tuning-fork vibration under the synthetic skin. Then a clear, hard click.
The app displayed VOICE BOX UPGRADE COMPLETE.
Jacob looked up. “Dorothy?”
She stared at him.
Nothing came out at first. Habit was too strong. Fear too. She swallowed, though the shell did not do that quite right either, and tried again.
“Ja…”
The sound broke into static.
She clenched both hands.
Jacob leaned in without seeming to know he was doing it. “Try again.”
Dorothy drew a breath. The venting systems in her chest whispered softly.
“jAcOb?”
The word came out thin and filtered, like a voice speaking through a phone speaker a little too far away. Metallic around the edges. Still a voice. Still hers, in the only way that mattered.
Both of them went completely still.
Jacob’s face changed first.
Not shock. Not triumph.
Something smaller. More helpless.
Dorothy touched her own throat in disbelief.
“jAcOb,” she said again, and this time the word held.
He let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh. “Oh, thank God.”
She tried one more sentence.
“I… hAtE… tHiS… aPp.”
The pacing was bad, the tone filtered and faintly synthetic, but the meaning was perfect.
Jacob actually laughed then, hand over his eyes for a second. “Okay. Yeah. That’s you.”
The weeks after that did not fit neatly into scenes so much as a series of dates, upgrades, and small humiliations that slowly stopped being humiliations quite so often.
They went to a movie where Dorothy spent half the runtime more interested in the way popcorn registered as crunch-data than in the plot. They went to an aquarium, where children assumed her tail was the coolest thing they had ever seen. They went to a rooftop cafe, a second restaurant, a used bookstore, an arcade that made the app nearly explode with delight at “shared play activity.” They spent an accidental hour in a department store because Dorothy discovered that once a body crossed a certain threshold of intentionality, clothes stopped feeling like camouflage and started feeling like choices.
The upgrades stacked gradually. Better facial motor response. Improved hand dexterity. More natural gait routines for short distances when she wasn’t skating. Thermal buffering. Cleaner vocal output. Expression smoothing. Social response packs Jacob mocked every time he installed one, even when he was clearly relieved by the results.
Dorothy changed under all of it.
Not back. Just forward.
The shell became more graceful. More coherent. Her movements stopped looking like a machine impersonating a woman and began to look like a very strange woman moving exactly as her body had been built to move. The silver-white skin lost some of its cheap unfinished quality and took on a more polished softness. The lens eye refined until people had to look twice to notice it was not simply unusual makeup or a prosthetic. Her voice kept most of its filtered texture but shed enough static to carry actual emotion.
The tail remained.
So did the silver and the rollescates. So did the underlying fact that she was made of metal and polymer and dead company bad ideas.
But by then Jacob no longer looked at her like a problem first.
That scared her more than the early dates had.
Because she had begun looking back the same way.
The final date arrived almost by accident.
Not because the app failed to track it. It had been tracking everything with nauseating enthusiasm, and by then the bond meter sat nearly full. But because somewhere in the middle stretch of all those outings, the dates had stopped feeling like assigned tasks and started feeling like the structure around time they genuinely wanted.
So when the app suggested scenic rooftop sunset with maximum intimacy potential, Jacob looked at the screen, looked at Dorothy, and said, “That’s disgusting wording.”
She smiled. It was a real smile now, small and sharp and unmistakably hers.
“AnD?” she asked, her voice only lightly touched by static.
He slipped the phone into his pocket. “And it happens to be a good idea.”
The roof of the laboratory building wasn’t supposed to be a date spot. It had vents, a low safety wall, and a maintenance access door that stuck in humid weather. It also had a clear view west across the city, where the sky opened wide enough for the sunset to matter.
By the time they climbed up there, Dorothy no longer needed the skates for every outing, though she still liked them. That evening she had chosen to walk. Carefully. Gracefully. The tail balanced each step with subtle motion beneath the long coat she wore. Her silver skin caught the orange light and turned almost rosy at the edges, as if metal could mimic skin just by wanting hard enough.
Jacob noticed her looking at the skyline.
“You know,” he said, leaning back against the wall, “I thought this was all going to stop feeling absurd at some point.”
Dorothy stepped beside him. “DiD iT?”
“No.”
“GoOd.”
He laughed quietly.
Below them the city was beginning to light up. Above, the clouds stretched thin in bands of gold and copper. The wind moved Dorothy’s silver hair across one shoulder. She tucked it back with an ease that would have been impossible in base state.
Jacob watched the motion and then looked away quickly, as if caught.
She saw that too.
For a while neither said much. They had gotten better at that. Silence with Jacob no longer meant strain. It meant room.
Eventually Dorothy said, “I UsEd tO tHiNk eVeRy dAtE wOuLd bE tHe wOrSt oNe.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Only used to?”
She looked at the sunset instead of at him. “nOw I tHiNk tHe aPp aCcIdEnTaLlY mAdE a sChEdUlE fOr sEeInG yOu.”
That pulled him still.
When he answered, his voice had gone rougher than usual. “Dorothy.”
She looked over.
He was already shaking his head, not in refusal but in the way people did when a feeling had gotten too close too quickly. “I was supposed to be getting you back.”
“YoU dId.”
He met her eyes then. “Did I?”
The question sat there between them.
She could have lied. Said yes, said of course, said the dates were only treatment and Jacob was only a friend being decent in impossible circumstances.
Instead she said the truer thing.
“nOt tHe sAmE vErSiOn.”
He let out a breath.
“No,” he said. “I guess not.”
The app chose that exact moment to vibrate in his pocket. He pulled it out, read the screen, and gave a soft, disbelieving laugh.
MAXIMUM PRE-ULTIMATE BOND THRESHOLD REACHED. ULTIMATE GIRLFRIEND AVAILABLE.
The final upgrade sat there with a soft pink glow and a lock icon now sprung open.
Even after everything, the label made Dorothy’s stomach, or whatever counted as one now, tighten.
Jacob looked from the screen to her. “We don’t have to do it tonight.”
She thought about that.
About the first night in the lab, wrapped in a blanket over a body that felt like punishment. About the restaurant, the park, the dock. About her first spoken word. About how much of her current face, voice, motion, and body had come from this absurd progression system. About how much had come from Jacob staying.
Then she held out her hand.
“LeT’s fInIsH iT,” she said.
Back downstairs, the lab lights looked exactly the same as they had the night everything went wrong.
That felt fitting.
Jacob set the phone on the bench between them. Dorothy stood close enough to see the screen clearly. Close enough that when he hesitated, his shoulder almost brushed hers.
The final upgrade had a subtitle now.
ULTIMATE GIRLFRIEND. Become Human.
Jacob read that twice.
He looked at her. “If this does what it says—”
Dorothy smiled faintly. “tHeN tHaT wOuLd bE tHe fIrSt hOnEsT tHiNg tHiS cOmPaNy eVeR mAdE.”
He huffed one short laugh.
Then, very carefully, he tapped PURCHASE.
The change was subtle at first.
No wrenching. No invasive reconstruction. Just warmth.
Dorothy’s eyes widened.
Heat spread through the shell from the inside out, starting in the chest and moving into her neck, her face, her hands. Not mechanical heat, not the dry operational warmth she sometimes felt after heavy motion. This was different. Soft. Deep. A heat meant to be held.
She put both hands against the bench as it moved through her body. The silver skin along her arms changed almost imperceptibly in tone, taking on a faint living flush beneath the metallic sheen. Her face tingled. She touched her cheek and found it warm.
Actually warm.
Jacob stared.
“Dorothy?”
She looked at him.
Something in her expression made him go still.
For the first time since the transformation, color had gathered in the smooth silver of her cheeks. A blush. Impossible and unmistakable. Her eyes, one humanlike, one still not quite, held light differently. Her lips parted on a shaky breath that no longer sounded entirely like venting through a machine.
She pressed one hand flat to her chest.
There was no heartbeat.
But there was a pulse of warmth there, rhythmic and comforting and alive in its own alien way.
The app chimed one final time.
ULTIMATE STATE ACHIEVED. NO FURTHER UPGRADES AVAILABLE. THANK YOU FOR GROWING TOGETHER.
Then the interface dimmed.
Not dead. Just finished.
Jacob did not look at the phone again.
He looked at Dorothy.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
She frowned, a fully natural little motion now.
He swallowed. “I thought maybe this would turn you back. Or all the way back. I thought if we kept going far enough, there’d be some version of this where you got to be human again.” He looked down at his hands. “I couldn’t do it.”
Dorothy stared at him for a moment, then reached out and touched his wrist.
His skin was warm.
So was hers.
He noticed that the same instant she did.
His eyes lifted sharply to her face.
“I don’t mind,” she said. The words came easily now, only the faintest electronic texture under them. Honest voice, honest shape, honest feeling, even in a body made of lies.
Jacob looked like he wanted to argue on principle and couldn’t.
She tightened her fingers around his wrist. “At first I did. A lot.”
A broken laugh escaped her. “I thought every date was the universe making fun of me. I thought you were dragging me through some nightmare because it was the only thing to do.”
“I was,” he admitted.
“Yes.” Her expression softened. “But you also kept showing up.”
He went very still.
“You caught me every time I fell,” she said. “You kept taking me out even when I could barely move or speak. You named me in a panic and somehow that stuck.” The tail shifted behind her in one slow, quiet motion. “And somewhere in the middle of all this, I stopped wanting it to end.”
Jacob’s breath caught.
Dorothy’s blush deepened, faint rose under silver metal. “So no. I’m not human.” She looked down briefly at her own hand, at the pale elegant fingers, the warm metallic skin. Then back at him. “But I’m not trapped the way I was at the start either.”
He searched her face like he was looking for a way to call her brave without insulting her.
She spared him the effort.
“If this is what I am,” she said, voice very soft now, “then I don’t want to do it without you.”
That finally broke something open in him.
Not dramatically. Jacob was not built for drama. But the guarded practical set of his face gave way all at once to something tired and honest and very nearly helpless.
“I don’t think I want to do it without you either,” he said.
Dorothy smiled then, fully, no stiffness left in it.
It changed her face more than any upgrade had.
Jacob looked at that smile like it had happened to him personally.
Then, with the sort of caution one used around rare materials and very important mistakes, he lifted a hand and touched her cheek.
Warm.
Not flesh. Not exactly. Warm metal under his palm, smooth and living with stored heat.
Dorothy leaned into it without thinking.
His thumb brushed the silver blush there. Her lens eye narrowed just a little in something like shy amusement.
“You know,” she said, “Dorothy is still a terrible name.”
Jacob laughed, shaky with relief. “Yeah. It is.”
“I’m keeping it.”
“I had a feeling you would say that.”
They stood in the bright lab with the dead company’s app finally quiet between them, and the whole situation remained as ridiculous as it had always been. She was a silver-skinned machine girl with a plated tail and a phone-filter voice. He was the exhausted prototyping nerd who had taken his transformed friend on enough dates to accidentally fall in love with her.
There was nothing normal about it.
There did not need to be.
Jacob bent his head and rested his forehead lightly against hers.
Dorothy closed both eyes—one human, one almost—and let the warmth in her body answer back.
The app screen faded fully to its idle home page, pink and stupid and finally irrelevant.
No more upgrades.
No more checkpoints.
Just Jacob, Dorothy, and whatever came next.