Page 35 of CHOICE Lover
By the time her last note came, Res6 was in an advanced internship under MSP’s leading bioengineer and supporting both himself and Jerme, who had followed him to the municipality. His brother had been between jobs at the time. He remembers getting home to their modest unit, finding Jerme passed out on the couch. Beside him was the tablet containing the note, still unlocked.
I hear my good boy Res6 is doing big things! So proud of you for taking care of your little brother and making it so Mummy can share her bignews!
The next line said,Be happy, Mummy is moving back to the isle of France!
Res6 quit reading after that. He’d seen the medication bottles in the cabinet when they visited, though he was never really sure if they had been the cause of her instability or what kept her from toppling over the edge. Either way, he never really thought much about her after that.
Jerme, on the other hand, seemed to always be trying to fill his Mummy-shaped hole. Again, which is why delicious-smelling Electra will be the perfect companion for him. Once he connects them, he’ll have two problems solved: Jerme’s happiness and the Electra temptation. Then he’ll get himself a manupartner and get on with being CHOICElover’s owner and public representative. He flops to his opposite side.
“Is everything okay?” In the pitch dark of the spare room, he can’t make out the manupartner in the chair in the corner.
“Shhh, go back to sleep.” He turns back over to face the wall. Why can he still smell her? It’s like an echo of her presence that his nose can’t seem to let go of. Zorg, he needs to fumigate his unit and come up with a long-term solution. He can hardly spend the rest of his days with her prancing around his unit in too-big, shoulder-exposing sweaters smelling like that.
It could be worse. He could be fantasizing about how supple her hips felt in his hands.
He bolts upright. She’s corrupting his mind.
The manupartner takes a sharp inhale. “What is it?” it whispers.
His device says it’s 03:09. Surely there’s something productive he can do if he can’t sleep. Something to solve his Electra problem. He activates his device with a thought, trailing over the apps. DumBot—no. NewNews—no. DailyDataDump—no. Scrawl—
Scrawl? His finger hovers over the app. In the tablet’s glow, he can see his manupartner body double staring at him.
Its eyes widen. “What happened? Did another one of your experiments fail?”
He winces. There was no way to run the activation in his unit while also keeping it secret from both his body double and Electra. He chose the simpler variable he could control. Plus Electra would judge him, which would ruin all their progress. It didn’t matter what the overly moral manupartner thought.
“Not that. It’s nothing.” His response earns a frown, which is his fault for selecting intuitive. While he is on this third Jerme trial using the synthetic DNA, his failures aren’t what’s bothering him.
“Would scanning the unit in the closet help you sleep?” it asks, clearly not believing him.
The current Jerme trial is 62 percent through activation, with good markers according to his pre-bed scan. Sure, in ten days, he’s already had two trials show early signs of DNA corruption. He expected as much, so he didn’t allow himself to get overly upset. Science was a process. He’ll succeed eventually.
“It’s the woman again,” he says, regretting ever having brought it up. “I’ve been taking her on outings to help her acclimate, and I think it’s helping, but I want to know for sure.”
“You could ask her,” it suggests.
He shakes his head. “No. She can’t know that I want to know.”
“Why not?”
“It’s complicated.” Res6 groans at the manupartner’s raised brow. “My brother will be here soon, and I’m going to set them up. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea and think my interest is romantic.”
“And you don’t have romantic feelings toward her?” it prods.
“Absolutely not.” His device goes to sleep, plunging the room into darkness.
“As your manupartner, it may not be my place, but I believe you’re not evaluating yourself accurately.”
“I’m perfectly clear about my feelings. The woman is completely off-limits to me.” He taps the screen back on.
The manupartner blinks twice, and for a moment, he thinks it might be glitching. Finally, it says, “Why?”
He huffs out a breath. When two of the most important people in your life don’t value you enough to stick around, it sends a message. You’re not worth sticking around for. So they leave, and you have to pick up the pieces. Same thing happened to Jerme, which made one thing very clear: relationships aren’t worth the risk. Hence manupartners. “We’ve been over this. I own CHOICElover. I can’t be seen in public with a real human woman.”
The unit sighs, and it’s clear it doesn’t fully buy his reasoning. “So how are you going to find out what she thinks of your outings, then?”
He pinches the bridge of his nose, debating. “She’s been making entries in the Scrawl app daily. Maybe she wrote about it in one of them?”
