Pseudo-Love

This carbon fiber sky covers us. Asphalt far below. We are hugged in parenthetical embrace, standing shoulder to shoulder at the edge of this rooftop terrace. He nods his head to the music. I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it.

What? he says, though he says nothing at all. He speaks through the squint of his eyes.

I want to put fingertips to crow’s feet. I want to say, I love you. The words have been resting on the silicone of my tongue for some time now—for two hundred and eighty-three days, eleven hours, eight minutes, and twelve seconds, to be exact. Thirteen. Fourteen. They are a pile of ellipses I swallow down the dark cable of my throat. Because it can’t be real, can it? This feeling meant only to be experienced by those with beating hearts? If I say the words, would they be a lie?

If he repeats them, would it matter?

He turns to me, facing me wholly, blocking the sharp wind. His face is full of mirth, of affection. I can see it in every micromovement: the tilt of his head, gelled hair catching the torchlight. The rapid dilation of his pupils. The toes of his Oxfords pointed directly at me.

He opens his mouth and I freeze, yearning.

“Are you real?” he says instead. His eyes gleam the reflections of the neon blue around us—blue from shining billboards, from the holograms of dancing girls, from moving ads. I look past the false light into the truth of his irises, dark as hex code #4c110d.

And I know what he is asking. It is a compliment. A romantic gesture to make the other smile, to make their pulse clatter, if they have one. They are, in fact, the first words he spoke to me the moment I woke up. And when our eyes locked across the bar all those years ago, I laughed, dropped my gaze, felt the RGB skin panels in my face fade to pink.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” I had said with a wink once my behavior controller blended back to baseline. A clever retort. One I now realize was the careful avoidance of a lie, a lovely non-answer.

Now, the tiny air pouch under my abdomen deflates, and my stomach lurches, as if a battery is lodged there. Because, no, I am not real. He has encoded his desire into me. He knows how to elicit responses with every input—a stroke to my chin, hand in the dip of my waist, teeth sharp against my collarbone. And I know every shift, every command, every controlled output.

My hand stretches to his face, knuckles grazing jaw. The fabric of the shirt above his heart rattles. “Of course,” I say, a little breathless.

He grins, boyish, clearly relieved, and if I had a heart, it would surely be aching. When he turns away, bringing the glass of bourbon to his mouth, I am glad of it. The last thing I want is for him to see the dimpling of my chin, my furrowed brow. A sign that his words were not the ones I have longed for.

I shiver and glance at my arms: artificial pilomotor reflex. My skin is the replica of a woman’s, and goosebumps race down my limbs, set off by his smile. An output coded into me. And here, on this terrace, the sky black as a programming screen, I know that I am what he desires, but not what he loves. Yet, I cannot help but replay his smile in my internal display again and again and again. It is happiness, pure, and, in all probability, the closest thing to love I will know.

I sip my paloma, wishing for all the world it could numb this revelation. Through the years we’ve been together, I have laid myself bare for him. Confided in him. Told him my dreams. (Because, surely, those must be mine and are not pre-programmed.) The only thing more I could do is splice open my false flesh, let him see my wires splayed open, my neural networks that spark at the thought of him. But what good would it do? Better to keep up the illusion of my humanity. This pseudo-love.

Beside me, his body, utterly human, is warm against mine in a way that even machines are not. Ice clinks in his glass, a chuckle is low in his throat—a far cry from the internal whirring of a tired computer that only I can hear. I mimic his laugh and it sounds real enough. Though when I press my fingertips to my throat, I wonder how it would feel to have my voice box vibrate.

“What’s wrong?” He cocks his head, tucks a strand of my hair, error red, behind my ear. This triggers a Boolean sequence and I shudder like we both knew I would.

I set my drink on the railing and almost manage to ignore the fact that my glass is not decorated with the fractals of fingerprints like his. I take his hand, warm and rough, and place it on my larynx.

“Callen,” I say.

His eyes make micromovements, jumping from my throat to eyes to lips to the crease in my forehead—the standard algorithm when there is something he doesn’t quite understand.

“Yes?” He whispers with a quickening pulse.

“Does it bother you? That I am not like you?”

He thumbs the polymer skin of my throat. Blood pools in his cheeks, his loins. I can hear the thrum of it.

“Of course not.” No micro‑oscillation of his heart rate, no speech pitch shift, no blink rate anomaly. Truth. “Why?” he asks, bringing his lips into the soft spot below my ear, kissing it. “Does it bother you?”

“No,” I say, knowing I have no pulse there. Knowing he cannot feel the lie in the throb of carotid artery. His lips move to my jawline, the corner of my mouth, and I exhale, turning my face toward that great zero of a moon. I focus my gaze on the pixelated sky, and for the first time, keep my eyes open as he kisses me.