Page 5 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

“Are there more of you?”

“I don’t know. There could be, yes. I have partial data that suggests—”

The door shuts.

I look at the mop. The mop does not have answers either.

The door opens a third time. She doesn’t say anything at first. Just looks at me. Her eyes travel from my face to the panel on my ribs to the smooth skin where a belly button should be and back up again. I hold still because she told me to and because moving feels like it might break whatever calculation she’s running.

“You’re really not going to hurt me,” she says. It’s not a question this time.

“No. I am not going to hurt you.”

She watches me for a long moment. Her heart rate is decreasing. Her jaw is loosening. Whatever decision she’s making, she’s making it in real time, and I can see it happening, and I want very badly for the outcome to be the one where she doesn’t close the door again.

“Come on,” she says.

She leads me into the kitchen, points at the lost and found bin under the counter. “Clothes. Put them on.” She turns around and faces the wall with her arms crossed while I find a pair of gray sweatpants and a T-shirt and put them on. The pants are too short by approximately three inches. The shirt pulls across my chest in a way that might be the wrong size, but I don’t have a frame of reference for how clothing is supposed to fit.

“Okay,” I say.

She turns around, looks me over. Her expression does several things at once that I can’t fully decode, but one of them might be relief.

“Follow me. And don’t—just don’t touch anything.”

She leads me through a door and up a narrow staircase to an apartment above the bakery. It’s small. Warm. There are books stacked on surfaces and a blanket on the couch and a refrigerator that hums at a different frequency than the one in the bakery below, and the whole space carries a trace of her—her soap, her coffee, the lotion on the counter by the sink. I catalog all of it in 0.6 seconds, and then I stand very still in the middle of her living room because she told me not to touch anything, and standing still seems like the safest way to comply.

She goes directly to the kitchen. Opens a cabinet, pulls out a bottle of wine, and pours some of it into a mug. Not a glass. A mug that says World’s Okayest Baker with a chip on the rim. She drinks half of it in one continuous motion, sets it down, refills it, and picks up her phone.

“Sit,” she says, pointing at the couch. “Sit down. On the couch. And stay sitting.”

I sit. She watches me do it like she’s supervising a controlled experiment.

Then she dials.

“Gemma.” She’s pacing, one hand in her hair, eyes on me the entire time. “Are you busy?”

I can hear the voice on the other end. Female. Measured. Slightly irritated at the hour.

“It’s eleven at night, Ruby, so yes, I’m—”

“I need you to not freak out.”

There’s a pause. “That sentence has never once preceded good news.”

“Remember a few years ago, it was all over the news—that scientist guy who was building, uh, human companions in his lab. Artificial humans. The synthetic ones people were calling—”

“Zombies. Synths. Yes. Elysium Labs. They were decommissioned. The whole program was shut down, and the units were destroyed. It was a massive ethics—why are you asking me this at eleven o’clock at night?”

Ruby takes another drink of wine. She looks at me. I look back at her because looking at her is what I’ve been doing since I first saw her face in the utility room doorway, and I haven’t found a reason to stop.

“Well,” she says. “There’s one in my living room.”

The silence on the other end lasts four full seconds. I count them.

“What?”

“I’m going to put you on speaker.”