Author: Katz, Meredith
Date: 2019-07-30
Publisher: Soft Cryptid

A F/F retro-future sci-fi asexual romance. A story about artificial intelligence and real kindness, about love, and the feeling of watching steam rising softly from a teacup on a bright and quiet morning.

***

Clara Gutierrez is an AI repair technician and a wanderer. Her childhood with her migrant worker family has left her uncomfortable with lingering for too long, so she moves from place to place across retro-futuristic America.

Sal is a fully autonomous robot. Older than the law declaring her kind illegal due to ethical concerns, she is at best out of place in society and at worst vilified. She continues to run the tea shop previously owned by her long-dead master, lost in memories of the past, struggling to fulfill her master's dream for the shop while slowly breaking down.

They meet by chance, but as they begin to spend time together, they both start to wrestle with the concept of moving on...

The Cybernetic Tea Shop

By Meredith Katz

Published by Soft Cryptid

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews. Purchase only authorized editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Thank you for supporting the author’s rights.

Edited by Keith Kaczmarek

Cover designed by Aisha Akeju

This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

Second edition July 2019

First edition March 2016 by Less Than Three Press

Copyright © 2016, 2019 by Meredith Katz

Printed in the United States of America

Print ISBN 978-1-989646-14-4

Digital ISBN 978-1-989646-15-1

To my lovely wife Aveline,
without whom this wouldn't be half the story it is
and I wouldn't be half as happy as I am.

The Cybernetic

Tea Shop

Meredith Katz

Clara woke to the rapid puffs of air and noisy chatter that meant that she'd slept in. She'd ignored Joanie's first few complaints, which meant that the hummingbird had gone from dutifully waking her to chiding and flapping around her face.

"Honestly! You tell me to get you up at seven-thirty, but you don't even start to open your eyes until eight? Don't pretend to sleep now! I saw you shifting! I saw you turn your face away!" Joanie was huffing wildly, her throat puffed out in offense, wings a blur through Clara's slitted eyes. Clara tried to turn her head away as Joanie jabbed her tiny beak against her nose. "I can't believe you make me do this. If you wanted a Raise that could wake you up every morning, you... you should have gotten a woodpecker!"

It was Joanie's usual type of complaint. Clara let out a sleepy, fond laugh, finally opening her eyes all the way and reaching up to try to catch her. Joanie dodged as usual, a rapid batting of her thin wings brushing the edge of Clara's hand. "I don't want a woodpecker," Clara said, indulgent.

"Hmph." Joanie hovered overhead, all buzzing wings and glittering synthetic feathers and disapproving judgment. "Well, you're awake now, anyway."

"I'm awake," Clara agreed. Joking about wanting to go back to bed would probably make Joanie screech at her—not bad when she needed that level of morning alarm, but not really necessary now.  She shook her head to herself as she forced herself upright and swung her legs out of bed. It wasn't like it was the weekend; delaying too long would make her late for work.

As soon as her legs were out from the covers, the cold air seemed to rush over her. She shivered, letting out a loud whine of complaint through gritted teeth.  "I'm awake, I'm awake," she muttered again, the chill having more or less guaranteed she wasn't going back to sleep even if she'd wanted to. "Jeez..."

"Quit complaining," Joanie said, high-pitched voice firm. "Go make breakfast, or you'll go to work hungry."

"I'm on it," Clara said, beginning to sort through her clothes on the floor. She'd worn her jeans and bra four times that week already, but they could probably go another day as long as her underwear and shirt were clean. Her shirt—not so much. A sniff test had her tossing it in the laundry bin, and she rooted around in her apartment's dresser for a new shirt. They all looked pretty much the same, colors aside; long-sleeved coarse shirts, protective and seamless. They were practical and kept sparks and scrapes from reaching her skin, but somehow always picked up oil stains despite her best efforts.

She grabbed her hairbrush and pulled the tie off the handle onto her wrist as she headed into the kitchenette of her studio apartment, dragging the brush through her thick black hair. "Get the toast on, Joanie?"

"Sure, give me the easy job," Joanie said, exasperated, and wrestled with the plastic bread packaging. As usual, Clara had forgotten to set things up the night before, or she would have had breakfast with the push of a button.

Clara finished braiding her hair back neatly and cracked an egg into the pan. Behind her, Joanie somehow managed to get the bread into the grill slot of the oven. She was always pleased when Joanie agreed to do things like that despite them being monumental tasks for a bird, artificial or not. Joanie was a Raise; it stood in for the rather unwieldy term, 'Robotic Artificially Intelligent Synthetic Entity'. Ultimately, it had become more or less the generic term for mechanical personal assistants so people could reserve 'robot' for those human-shaped automatons that had been the object of so much ethical debate. Robots had wills of their own, after all. In order to avoid similar debates, Raises were given emotional types and personalities to interact with, but but had no developmental AI built in, no real will. Without it, they didn't grow or change or become more 'human' over time.  As such, they were considered sentient, but not sapient, not like some of the older robots were.

But that was the reason that Raises were still being produced and robots weren't.

In Clara's opinion, Joanie showed more than enough personality even without the ability to gain true emotional understanding. Although there was no changing Joanie's base programming, Clara had tinkered a little inside Joanie's systems and broken her emotional lock. In order to mass-produce Raises efficiently, they all had the same AIs, but their coding just commented out whatever sections weren't to be used for that personality profile. A 'put-upon' hummingbird like Joanie, when purchased, still had all the code for helpful, affectionate and so on inside, just flagged as inaccessible.

Clara had removed those flags and added lines to call to reactions in various situations, and it resulted in a Raise with a lot more emotional range and a greater ability to make its own decisions than most of them had. Joanie still wasn't a person, of course, and that was probably for the best—there were absolutely huge ethical issues with creating actual sapient people who were registered internally as belonging to others. But Joanie was considerably more enjoyable a personality to hang around with than most Raises, and was able to refuse requests, disagree, and give her own opinions—although she lacked impulse, which a true developmental AI would have.

And she was more than opinionated enough as a result.

"Hey, are you cooking that egg or watching it?" Joanie complained, landing on her braid and nesting where it began at the base of Clara's skull. "Your toast's gonna pop out any minute."

"I've got it," Clara huffed back. "Jeez."

She ate breakfast quickly, running just far enough behind schedule that she couldn't afford to dawdle. Finally ready, she pulled her coat and hat on, dislodging Joanie, who had settled in firmly. With fond admonitions, Joanie took to the air, joining Clara for her walk to work.

When she stepped outside, she stiffened against the rush of cold air. It had a different feeling than it had the day before: Biting, sharp. It almost smelled cold, and when she exhaled, a cloud of steam rose up in front of her, dragon-like.

"Hey, Joanie. What's the weather supposed to be like tonight?" she asked, sticking her hands in her pockets.

"Cold. Obviously," Joanie said. "It's forty-five degrees right now. Going to warm up in the afternoon, but drop toward evening tonight. Small chance of snow."

"Snow, huh..." Clara looked upward at the sky. It was clear so far, but that didn't mean much this early in the day other than to make the cold air feel colder.  She heard her voice come out wistful. "Have we been here a whole year?"

Joanie flitted around her head, darting forward and then back.  "A little more than," she said. "Thinking of moving on?"

Clara exhaled steam again, watching it puff up and vanish as she walked forward into it. "Yeah, probably," she said, distracted by the thought. "I don't really feel like seeing winter in the same city two years in a row."

It was their usual pattern. There was no meaning behind it; she'd just picked it up as a child from her parents. They'd been migrant workers, stopping when an employer had their signs out, living in the ramshackle housing that was offered, moving on when the season was done. It was awful work in awful conditions, and she'd never made many friends, going to a different school every few months, smelling like whatever they were working with at the time. Her back and hips still hurt off and on. Her aptitude with machinery and mind for programming had nearly been wasted; she'd gotten lucky more than anything else. One of the schools happened to offer a program, and she happened to be selected, and having been selected, she happened to be sponsored.

She hadn't even expected to go to high school.

But once she was done with that, the ability to move ended up being the inverse of what it had been before. Rather than going wherever there were jobs, there were jobs wherever she wanted to go. The tech field was always hiring; she could go to any city, rent a fully-furnished apartment, and get work pretty much immediately. It paid well, and she didn't live extravagantly.

Clara arrived at her current workplace—a small repair shop called Raise the Roof—with only minutes to spare, and clattered in waving her hands. "I'm here, I'm here," she called out, noticing that Terry, the owner, was in the back.

"Morning, Clara," Terry called. He came out a moment later, wiping his hands off on a cloth. "Joanie too, good morning."

"Yeah, morning!" Joanie chirped, and fluttered over to her usual perch near Clara's station.

His expansive forehead was creased, bushy white brows drawn down with some kind of anxiety and wrinkles around his eyes standing out sharply. "I'm so glad you're here," he said, fretful. "I thought you might end up calling in or something—we've got this Pomeranian in for errors he's been tossing out, and he's such a sweet little thing. You know how I am with programming. I didn't want to end up poring over books and maybe mucking him up."

"Rush order?" Clara asked, stripping her jacket off and hanging it up by the door.

"Well, no," Terry sighed. "But I didn't want to leave the poor thing waiting..."

There he went, treating it like a pet store rather than a repair shop again.  He always put it down to a sense of wonder over the existence of Raises, just old enough to remember when they really started kicking off to replace the previous robotic assistants. Despite his worries, he could program if he needed to, but much more slowly than Clara and with a lot more screens pulled up to help.

He was probably going to make it hard to say goodbye to him, Clara thought a little sadly. After a year together, it would probably come as a shock. She'd miss him, but not enough to stay, and from experience, she expected they'd lose contact after she left.

Better to tell him when it was time to go home; give him the night to deal with it instead of listening to whatever feelings he had on it throughout the day. Clara settled into her station, sorting through the jobs in front of her. Mostly viruses, some cases of a low-quality brand throwing up errors due to bloatware they'd put in out-of-the-box, and a couple of broken parts that needed looking at.

"Hey, Clara, I'm going to sleep," Joanie said. "Wake me if you need anything."

"Uh-huh. I'll flick my fingers in your face and yell at you. That's how you like it, judging from how you woke me up."

"Jerk," Joanie said affectionately, and shut down.

The work day went by fairly quickly; she hooked up her headphones and just tinkered away to upbeat, energetic music, mostly noticing time passing by the growing ache in her wrists. She tended to put the mechanical issues first; the mechanical was less interesting, and she was always slow to wake up fully. That she could do without having to have her brain on point.

At lunch, she went to a nearby cafe to eat and to catch up on her personal messages. One had come in from her parents, as she'd expected; it was around that time, after all.

Little Clara, it said, thank you as always for the help. As good as the money is to have, it is mostly reassuring that you are doing well enough for yourself to be able to spare a thought or two for your parents. We are going on a trip soon to visit your aunties further south, but we miss you dearly. When are you going to visit?

Love always, Mama and Papa

She wrinkled her nose and fired off a quick response: Mama and Papa, I'll visit you when you're not going to be out of town! Say hello to the others for me, of course. When will you be back? I'll hold onto next month's money if it will be a while. Love always!

Clara never really sent longer messages than that—which her Mama chided her for plenty, not that they ever wrote longer ones themselves. She thought privately that the money should at least stand in for half the filial duty that long letters would otherwise provide, but she knew that ultimately what they wanted was to see her home with them, as weird as it was to think of anywhere as 'home.' It wasn't her home, but her parents'; once she started sending money, they went back to New Mexico to live among their extended family. She couldn't personally imagine wanting to settle down, but that was the difference between them. Even if she'd had to work as a child, they'd been the ones to manage the necessity of it. She'd just moved when they did and did what she had to. The ability to stop moving, to have a community and a home, was a privilege to them.

Her lunch break halfway over, she got up to stretch her legs for a walk around the area, knowing she'd go right back to hunching over and squinting at her work once she was back at Raise the Roof. Doing so drove home how long she'd been here—the shops were so familiar she couldn't pay attention to any of them, nothing like the new and exciting explorations when she'd first arrived here. Joanie's chatter distracted her, but that, as much as the chill, made her make up her mind definitively.

It was time to move on.

When she got back, she got out the little Pomeranian that Terry had become so fond of already and pulled up her music and its BIOS at the same time. The number of system errors there decided her on a video game soundtrack—games designed their music to let people settle in for the long haul, to focus on the technical without getting distracted but still push them forward. She'd played a lot of games when she'd attended tech school, stuck in one place but able to explore rolling vistas, cliff faces, rivers and oceans and ice fields.  She could spend hours ignoring the plot to walk through whatever locations had just unlocked for her on her digital travels.

Easy to get lost again in that, feeling like she was getting somewhere again while she waded through registry problems.

Clara worked a little overtime to make sure the Pom was dealt with properly, then carefully detached her cords from the side panel. She looked up finally, sliding her headphones off to see Terry closing up shop.

"You done?" he called. "I'll set the alarm if you're heading out."

"Yep, done!" She pet the sleeping dog briefly, sliding fingers through its soft fur almost in apology for the work she'd had to do in its code, then gently placed it to the side to test the next day. "You in a hurry? There's something I want to talk about."

Terry chuckled. "Always have time for my girl Clara," he said, and she sighed, smiling. "What is it?"

"Mm." Hard not to feel bad after a comment like that, but she had experience in leaving all kinds of jobs by now. She nudged Joanie to wake her up. "I've had a really great time working here, Terry. I want you to know that."

The smile slid off Terry's face, his brows furrowing. "Well, I've had a good time working with you, but what's that supposed to mean? You leaving?"

"Yeah, consider this my two weeks," she said, not unapologetic. "The work's been great, but I'm afraid I'll be leaving the city soon."

"Leaving? Why? Where to?"

She'd had enough practice with this to know better than to act like it was for no reason—even if it was. Her wanderlust was hard to explain to anyone who didn't feel likewise. Too many people were rooted to a concept of home, wanted to have the same place to return to every day, to walk the same paths between home and work and back, to see the same faces every day. Nobody would just nod to the idea that she could decide to leave before she'd picked somewhere to go. "Ah, West Coast," she said. Then, jokingly, "It's a bit far to commute."

"Just a bit," he said, brows furrowed. "Did another place give you a better offer? I can up your pay, if that's the problem—"

Clara waved a hand as if trying to physically push that idea away. "No, no. Actually, I don't have a job lined up out there yet. If you're willing to be my reference, I'd be grateful."

Terry sighed, ducking his head and running a hand over thinning hair. "Well, if you have to go, of course I'll be your reference," he said. "But what's pulling you out there, if not work? A boy?"

"Never that," she said, a little dryly.

"A girl, then?"

She laughed, giving him a friendly jab to the shoulder as she passed. "Do you honestly think I'm the sort to let anyone, guy or girl, seduce me away from work?"

"It can happen," he said with the air of long experience.

"I'm not that type," she said, snorting. A moment later, at Joanie's hiss, she realized how rude that had sounded, but it was hard to feel truly apologetic. "Anyway, sorry. It's just personal reasons, that's all."

Another sigh at that, and Terry finally dredged up a smile again. "Personal reasons, huh," he repeated. "No faulting that. Well, two weeks it is, then. I don't know how I'll be able to replace you, Clara. You're a wonder."

"You'll manage," she said, heading for the door with Joanie flitting alongside her. "See you tomorrow, Terry."

The sound of the door shutting behind her filled her with a sense of relief. The work itself was enjoyable—finishing out her two weeks would hardly be any kind of trial—but cutting ties was practically a head rush. The wind rushed over her as she headed down the street, and Joanie dove into her jacket's collar.

"That went well," Joanie said.

"Not badly, anyway," Clara agreed, raising a hand to pull her collar up higher around Joanie.

Next up would be ending the term on her apartment. That could be done online, which was always thankfully a lot easier than having to deal with someone face to face. She dealt with it pretty much as soon as she was inside, taking her jacket off and letting Joanie flit away. She kicked her shoes off, flopping into a chair as she pulled up a screen to send the landlord an email.

Clara watched the icon—an archaic envelope, electronic mimicry of folded paper—flit across the screen and vanish with a check-mark appearing in its place before the screen quit back to her messages received menu. She let out a breath, distractedly filing away the earlier message from her Mama so she'd have a clean inbox.

"Don't know why you sound like that," Joanie said. "Nobody's going to say 'no.' "

"I know, I know," Clara said, knowing already it was too impulsive for Joanie to properly understand. "It's a transition, Joanie. A change of state."

"There's nothing about it that's a change of state! That doesn't make any sense!" Joanie said and perched on the back of a chair. "It's getting colder. Warm the place up, jeez. It's already five degrees below how you like it."

There was no point arguing with Joanie when she got that tone in her tinny voice. Clara just shook her head, dialing up the heat and heading into the kitchenette to turn the kettle on. She sorted through her teas to pick one for herself. Nothing too caffeinated, she reminded herself, not with work again in the morning; she settled on a plum cinnamon rooibos. It had a little bit of spice, a taste she could pretend would wake her up, a warmth to keep off the chill.

Once it was ready, she curled up in a chair by the window with a blanket wrapped around her, the mug warm in her hand. Joanie curled up against the curve of her neck, the two of them looking out the window as it started to snow. She stayed up for a while just watching it, then got ready for bed. There was still a lot to do before she could move, but she could only take one day at a time.

As it was, the following days seemed to pass both in a blur and agonizingly slowly. When she stopped paying attention to time passing she was fine, looking up from work to find another six hours had flown by. Other times, she'd watch the clock as the minutes ticked on endlessly. She'd find herself leaning back on the couch, kicking her feet, irritated by the lack of things to do. Joanie helped during those times:

"Hey, quit sitting around! We have to decide a destination, at least!"

"I already did, didn't I? West Coast."

"That's a bit vague, even for you," Joanie said, disgusted. "Name a city! C'mon!"

A shrug. "Oh, I don't know. Seattle, then." It would be easy enough to travel from there if she wasn't satisfied, and it had always had a strong tech industry. "I guess we can trade this chill for a wet, warm winter."

"Seattle it is. I'll register you for temporary housing."

"Joanie—"

"It'll last the first few weeks, at least, before you find a proper place to stay."

"Joanie, aren't you rushing?"

"You're the one not rushing at all!"

It went like that until the time came to go. Packing was a non-issue; she never had much. Her clothes went into a suitcase with the few belongings she didn't use up, give away, or sell off. Everything else—pretty much just toiletries and her computer box—went into a carry bag. There was nothing left to do. Joanie on her shoulder, she set off for the train station.

Walking into the building triggered an immediate sense of anticipation. It would be a nearly three-day trip, but she was used enough to sleeping in train seats, to the hustle and bustle of other people. The train itself, fully electric, was pretty much silent, but the interior wouldn't be. It would be full with the sounds of everyone trying to sleep around her, walking around, coughing, all the rest. The general noises of human life. If she were lucky, she would have a seat companion who had an interesting Raise that she could take a look at. If not, she had her computer and Joanie to fulfill the rest of her needs. There was entertainment outside too, plenty to watch. Moving that far meant seeing the environment change around them as hours passed, watch them speed past and through cities and fields, forests and country and plains and mountains.

She double-checked the ticket on her screens, then settled on a bench to wait for her train.

***

The first thing Sal did when she activated for the day was check the online reservation list. It was empty again. She felt a vague sense of what she had come to classify as unease, a hard-to-label emotion which fell somewhere in the range between anxiety and sadness. There would be walk-ins, of course. There were usually walk-ins. But she still anticipated a lower-than-necessary income for the day.

It seemed like it was going to be a long day as a result. She didn't always mind the long days, the ones where it was busy and she didn't have a moment to stop. But the other kind were a problem—the drawn-out, slow meaninglessness of a day where there was too little to do. Perhaps there were some reservations that had been made through means other than the online system? She had forgotten some before, after all. She checked the spreadsheet she had started to keep recently, but that too showed nothing.

There was no point in letting it get to her. Instead, she went about her daily tasks mechanically, preparing the soup and getting it on the stove for a slow simmer, defrosting some of the previously-prepared treats, marking the specials on a chalkboard in neat, regular strokes of chalk. It left a residue on her fingertips that she looked down at for a few moments, at how it showed her finger pads smooth and unmarked. There was a sense that if she allowed herself to linger on it too long, she would develop some kind of unpleasant feeling about it. Businesslike, she brushed it off on her apron. She had baking to do and other chores left before the day began, however busy or slow it was to be.

And so she did them, rolling up her sleeves and burying her fingers in dough that she knew better in texture and pressure than anything else in the world by now except tea leaves. As she worked, she listened for the door. At the end of the day she would, as always, donate the uneaten food to the homeless. If nobody came, it was their fortune for the day, not hers. Still, she baked as if she would have customers; the lack of them these days didn't make the work easier for her. Rather, it made it harder. She had always been able to manage all her tasks, and it was simply slower and less absorbing now that fewer customers came.

Rolls were put in the oven. The soup was ready; the defrosted items too. She managed to force fifteen minutes to pass quickly by cleaning up after herself, rinsing bowls and putting them in the sanitizer, running a wet cloth over her work area. And then there was nothing to do for a short time.

While she waited, she leaned against a wall and recharged, eyes half-closed. Her system opened to the network, drawing power in a small and steady trickle, made larger by not having to divert energy to any other tasks. She slowly took other things offline: breathing, movement, dialing thought down to the background processes only.

When the bell over the door signaled customer entry, the sound started her back up at once. She drew a sharp breath and did a quick check of her surroundings. The baked goods were just about ready to come out from the oven; it was coincidentally ideal timing. It was the sort of thing she usually considered fortuitous, a stroke of significance. She thought: I couldn't have planned it any better.

"Told you that we didn't need to make reservations. Just look at the place—"

"Well, it's nice, though..."

Sal headed out from the back to the tea shop proper. It was a delicate affair with white lace-edged linen on the tables, plates on the walls showing royalty from various cultures and times, along with paintings of ships and gardens. It had been a quaint, deeply old-fashioned place even when it had first opened. Originally, the tea cups on each table matched each other and their plates; over many years of service, broken cups and plates had meant that by now almost none of them matched.

The first time a cup had broken, she had frozen up, unsure how to react. There were none to replace it. Karinne had laughed and told her not to worry about it, and later went out and bought a replacement from an antique store. Already worn, it had stuck out like a sore thumb. But everyone wanted to get it, like it was lucky. More broke as time passed, and the fewer matched, the less each individual cup kept anyone's interest, the same as when they all matched. Now, they matched only in that they didn't match. Nobody paid any of them any more attention than the others because of it.

She smiled at the couple as they looked up at her. "Good morning," she said. It was 11:21 a.m.; it was still on that side of things.  "Table for two?"

"Yeah, thanks."

The couple was a man and a woman—the man with red hair and a flushed face, tall and round, the woman with short, tightly-curled black hair and brown skin. The man was the one who had spoken, giving Sal a once-over and a somewhat condescending smile. The woman behind him was looking at her dubiously, assessing her. It was something Sal was used to, that uncertain look. She was being measured up against 'human being' and 'womanhood' while being recognized as something totally unfamiliar.

"I've been here before, you remember?" The man grinned and made a gesture around the room.

Even her failing memory recalled it to the day, to the minute. He'd come with a different woman. It would not have been polite to mention as much. "Yes, sir. Three years ago, wasn't it?"

"Hah," he said, and then, as an aside to the woman, "told you they don't forget."

She sat the two of them at a table by the window. When this had been a trendy place, both for quality and curiosity, it had been the most popular seat, the tea house's best view of the hill leading down toward Pike Place. The market itself had been heavily changed after the earthquake, but a new one had been remade at the bottom of the long slope down Pike. "Welcome back, sir. Mr. Wharton, as I recall it. What can I get for you and your lady friend today?"

"We'll get an afternoon tea for two," the man said.  "Get me a black tea, and your best fruity herbal for Nadie." The woman nodded; it seemed it was acceptable that he speak for both of them. Sal nodded in return, resettling in her arms the menus which she hadn't yet put down.

"The baking is fresh out of the oven," she told them instead. "Nice and warm."

"Wow," Nadie said. "You sure sound human."

A faint twinge stirred inside Sal; she didn't bother to identify or express it. She simply nodded again. "Yes," she said.

"Is it true you've been running this restaurant for hundreds of years?" Nadie was wide-eyed and breathily fascinated. There was a performative femininity to it, so Sal could only assume she was showing off for the man—he had obviously brought her here to try to impress her. Sal thought, To them, I am like the single out-of-place cup. Something new and different. Wharton's experience with the tea house, his ability to find a place not run by humans but by some exotic other, was proof of his own erudition.

People hardly changed.

She smiled regardless. It was business, after all. "Two hundred and seventy-eight," she said. "I'm hoping to see three hundred before it closes." It was true that she hoped that, though some days it didn't seem likely to happen. It didn't get much income, and her savings were running thin. Besides that, her memory... she wasn't sure she would last until then. It was strange, she thought. Back then, Artiface Industries had a guarantee that the human-seeming robots they made would last 'indefinitely'. The only part of the word's meaning which seemed to be true was that it was unspecified, not that it was unlimited.

She had outlived Artiface by one hundred and forty-seven years.

"Amazing," Nadie said, turning back to the man. "Taking me to a place that lasts forever—you're romantic, Wallace."

Sal went into the back and let them talk as she arranged baked goods on a tiered silver tray. The smell of the soup must be filling the air, judging by the way steam was rolling off it, but soup didn't come with the afternoon tea. It would continue to simmer quietly until someone came in and ordered it. She lifted the tray and carried it back out. The couple was holding hands across the table, so she had to be careful to find room without jostling them as she put the tray down next to their knotted fists.

After describing each of the items on the trays, she straightened, smoothing out her uniform skirt—a habitual gesture she'd developed, making sure there was no flour or crumbs on herself, buying time. There was a ring on Nadie's finger with no scratch lines at all on the gold surface. "Is it a special occasion?" she asked. People preferred if it was asked that way, generally, even though it was clear that it was, and what the occasion was.

It seemed to go over well. Wallace's smile broadened into something more genuine, and Nadie's face lit up. She began to speak of her engagement energetically, enjoying the chance to shine, but truthfully, it didn't matter to Sal.

The look on Nadie's face had brought up an old memory, strange and visceral, of Karinne's smile. It had always been like that, though—she'd never needed an engagement to shine so brightly and had never married. Karinne had smiled like that over every positive change, every new opportunity. Karinne had smiled like that when she'd purchased Sal. She'd been bought because Karinne couldn't manage the restaurant all on her own, but Karinne had purchased her, brought her here, and told her, "Welcome home." Karinne, with her sparkling blue eyes and long brown hair, with her hands strong from kneading dough.  Those hands had grown weak eventually. Sal had held them to the end.

"—ever so happy," Nadie was saying. "It's the start of the rest of our lives, you know? We'll spend forever together."

It was easy enough to keep the smile on her face. Her expressions, though minute, were involuntary; she learned naturally through exposure, and expression of emotion was part of that. But she'd learned when to completely hide her emotions as well, and it was only right she kept it light and happy for them. Polite. "Congratulations," she said. "I'll let you two celebrate."

Sal went into the back again. The monitors would tell her if they needed more hot water for their tea, if they were looking around for her, anything. Her battery was bothering her again. It really didn't hold much of a charge these days—she needed to get it replaced soon, but there was no guarantee that any she could purchase would be any good. It had been so long since other human-types were made that everything on the market was out of date and poor quality. She could use the batteries meant for larger Raises, but not very efficiently. Still, it wasn't much of a choice. Short charges were what they were; she couldn't spend all her time charging.

She would put in an order for a new one after work.

She waited, watching the monitors, diverting her energy to her eyes and deliberately shutting down her access to her distant memory. It was only for a little while. Having been reminded, she would start to think more about Karinne if she let herself, and there was nothing to be gained from doing so. So she waited, and when the customers finished their food and tea, she reactivated all the parts she had shut down, removed herself from her strong connection to the network, and went back out with a smile and the check.

They transferred funds and left. The tea house was silent again in their absence. It seemed emptied out, and that felt strange even though it was the normal state of things. She stood a few moments, absorbing the lack of sound, then gathered up their dishes and took them to the back, slid them into the sanitizer. Charged herself some more.

Two hours later, the bell rang again. It startled her—she'd started to sink into something like depression. As she rose, she shook her head as if to clear it. No good would come of that.

The man who had entered was shaking his head too, spraying water droplets from his hair. "Afternoon, Sal," he said. It had begun to rain while she was in the back, she noted, quite a downpour. Unusual for Seattle, which favored a more constant light rain. It smeared water over her windows, made the view of the city blurry and indistinct, unreal.

"Good evening, Detective Hyeon," she said, smiling. "Take a seat. Something to warm you up?"

"Darjeeling," he said firmly, shaking out his jacket from where water had caught on folds, sending an arc of water droplets across the floor. She'd mop those up, but it would be rude while he was right there. Even knowing that, her eyes tracked the movement, their several concentric lenses dilating. He didn't seem to have noticed. "Some of that nice soup of yours, too."

"Of course," she said, snapping her gaze back to his face. Good. Someone would enjoy it after all.

She headed to the back and filled his tray, almost distracted as she put a teal one-person teapot on it, spooned tea into the bag, filled it with hot water, and went to ladle out the soup. She'd known him a long time, but he didn't really have a regular order for her to surprise him with. He hated the cold, though, and did tend to get hot items on days like this one. The detective had been coming around now and again for seventeen years. At first, it was just part of his work, but since then, he had seemed to become fond of the place.

When she came out again, he'd taken off his heavy hydrophobic uniform jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. His hair had dripped slightly on the table, leaving a few droplets on its smooth surface. This, at least, she rubbed down with a cloth before shifting the tray to both hands and unloading the soup and tea. "For you," she said. "The tea has only just started to steep, so please give it a few moments. Please let me know if you'd like anything else, Detective."

"Nothing for now," he said. "You know, every time I come, I'm surprised to see this place still operating. Any more trouble?"

'Trouble' referred to the occasional incidents, she supposed. Protesters and violence—many people viewed robots as a potential threat, a conceptual terror to avoid entirely. Those protesters strove to destroy them, to destroy her and any other surviving robots like her. The current legal view was that with no new true AIs allowed to be created, eventually the oldest of them would run down and society would be entirely human again. She and those like her were a problem that would solve itself, but to a lot of people, that was just too slow. Technically, she was offered protection—although not human under the law and thus lacking many legal rights, it was still illegal to destroy robots, given that they were sapient, had emotional existence. But it wasn't a situation the police would normally get involved with, at least not until after the fact.

When she had first met Hyeon, it was because protesters had bombed her shop. It was, likely, the incident which had saved her from their further attempts on her life afterward and given her relative peace for these seventeen years. The destruction was dangerous to the stores around hers, to the persons on the street, and so the police were called by passersby. Hyeon had been the detective on the case and had taken a personal interest in it. She had repaired herself and her store and continued as she always had, though police kept watch some time after, thanks to Hyeon's influence.

"No," she said, her tone light. "Nothing like before, Detective. Eggs and feces at the worst." It wasn't entirely honest. People kicked in her window sometimes, and there was always the graffiti. But it wasn't anything like before, regardless. Sometimes she wondered when that next escalation would be, now that there wasn't a watch kept on her, now that the incident of seventeen years ago was distant memory to most. There was no way to anticipate it. But people would do something again—she'd seen similar incidents in the news off and on. It would be her turn again eventually.

"Ah," the detective said with a resigned understanding. He slurped his soup. "Delicious as always, Sal. I don't know how you do it. You can't taste food yourself, right?" It was a subject change, but a genuine one, as was his curiosity.

"I was taught by someone with excellent taste," she said. She kept smiling as that old ache, already sensitive, was stirred up inside her again. "As long as I remember how she did it, the soup will hopefully remain delicious. I imagine people will tell me if it does not."

Of course, there was the possibility her memory would deteriorate that much. She had written it down in her log, just in case, written all the recipes down, but she wondered if they would taste the same over the mere application of ingredients in the correct amounts, without the memory of Karinne explaining how to do it. The way Karinne's hair would fall over her shoulder as she bent over sheets of baking, the way she looked with flour up her arms. The sharp rap of her knife as she chopped vegetables. The calming rise and fall of her voice—the tone, not simply the details of the recipe, drove her forward to this day. She would cook and remember that sing-song way Karinne would read things out.

Logically, she knew it should taste the same regardless. Food was a matter of practical application. But to those who ate, it was full of memories, the significance of 'delicious as always.' It seemed impossible that it could taste the same if it was not made with equally tactile memories going into the cooking.

Musing over his spoon, expression lost in thought and memory, Detective Hyeon asked, "How many years has it been now? That you've been open, I mean."

"Two hundred and seventy-eight," she said. Repeating it again so soon felt strange, like she'd lost time somehow. She really needed to get her battery replaced, she reminded herself.

"Nearly three hundred," Hyeon said, in a tone that resembled pride as much as amazement. "I remember, you said before, that's your goal."

"Yes," she said, quiet.

Hyeon rubbed his spoon against the side of his bowl to keep a drop from dribbling over the edge, the sound of metal on ceramic a loud discordant scrape to her ears.  "Why three hundred, anyway? All numbers are as significant as any other to you, aren't they? You don't have the whole... human tendency to think in round numbers and treat 'em as more meaningful than the others. It's all arbitrary, right?"

She watched the drop roll down the side despite Hyeon's attempts at intervention, leaving a grainy trail behind until it hit the table and spread around the bowl's base, slow and thin. "She suggested it once," she said. "Arbitrarily. She had said she hoped with my help it would last forever. I had told her that it was impossible for anything to last forever. I had been a little less developed at the time. So, she named that number arbitrarily; 'if not forever, then let's say three hundred years.'"

"The original owner?" Hyeon asked.

"Yes," she said.  "The original owner."

He waited to see if she'd say more, then shrugged, stirring his spoon in the soup. "Well, good luck with it. Only twenty-two more years left to go. If I'm still around then, I'll come by on the anniversary and check out your specials."

Hyeon made a little more small talk, and then, his food and drink done, he put his dry coat on and headed out into the rain again with a friendly farewell that she answered in kind. As the door jingled shut, she let out a breath she had been holding entirely unnecessarily. She found herself staring out after him, delayed, not knowing what to do with herself. Pushing through it, she cleaned up his bowl and teacup, wiped away the curl of soup under where the bowl had sat, mopped where his coat had dripped water, and went again into the back to recharge.

The bell did not ring again that day, and half an hour after the normal closing time—she stayed open out of a strange impulsive desire to see if anyone came at the last minute—she closed. She turned over the teacups on the tables, put away the clean dishes in the back, sent out the remaining food to be donated, and turned off the lights. Slowly, she sat down in the kitchen. To save her remaining battery life, it was best to turn off entirely, and schedule her automatic re-activation for two hours before work the next day, when she would begin baking.

She ordered a new battery to be delivered, and shut down for the night.

***

"You're sure it's this way?" Clara asked, as Joanie hmm'd and flitted left and right, peering at the narrow roads.

"I'm saying I've checked the maps, but these little roads are a bit weird, that's all!" Joanie let out an audible huff. She settled on Clara's shoulder finally, obviously disgruntled.

The tea shop had come highly recommended from Amber, Clara's new boss. When she'd seen the tea collection starting to accumulate on Clara's desk, Amber's eyes had lit up with some kind of glee.

"So, have you heard of the Cybernetic Tea Shop?"

"With that kind of name, you've caught my interest," Clara had replied, leaning back in her chair to grin up at the taller woman. "Is it some kind of netcafe?"

"You'll see," Amber had said, tapping her nose. "You won't believe what you see there, though."

Regardless of Clara's wheedling attempts to coax it out of her, Amber wouldn't say any more than that, just laughed and reiterated that she needed to go and see. Clara had no objection. It wasn't like she knew anyone else here, and she'd wanted to go around exploring the city regardless—this just gave her more reason to do so. Even if she and Joanie did get lost in the network of weird side-alleys leading down to Pike Place, she'd have a good time.

"There! Found it, right over there!"

The front of the shop was unremarkable enough. It had large glass windows showing a rather archaic interior for a tea house, with old-fashioned decorations and lace all over the place. The name of the shop was written in a small peeling design on the front door, and she had to wonder what exactly was cybernetic about this. The shop itself was clearly not terribly up-to-date and didn't have any of the usual hallmarks of a netcafe. A glance at the brightness of Joanie's feathers confirmed no additional servers besides the usual network either.

She shrugged to herself and went in. Worst case scenario, food and drink; best case, Amber's implications actually meant something.

The bell rang, signaling her entrance, but there didn't seem to be anyone in the front. She drew breath in case she'd need to call out, but the server, summoned by the sound, emerged from the back. Clara let her breath out in a startled rush instead.

It—she—was a robot. A real one, Clara was fairly sure—although she was largely human-seeming, the illusion wasn't anywhere near complete. Her neck was too thin and even, her arms too regular and lacking the bulge of muscle, and her smooth synthetic skin showed the lines of paneling under it. Her hair was a pale artificial white, cut short and falling in loose pointed wisps to her cheekbones, curling at the base of her head in front of that slender neck. As Clara's eyes met the robot's unlidded ones, the multiple concentric circles of lenses contracted, the robot looking her over in return.

"Welcome," the robot said, thin lips curling up in a smile. "Please, sit wherever you like. What can I get for you today?"

For a moment, Clara couldn't bring herself to move. She could hardly bring herself to breathe. She'd studied the proper robots, of course, the remains of them and cases involving them, but she hadn't actually met one still active.

"Clara," Joanie hissed. "You're being rude."

Clara blinked rapidly, snapping herself out of it, and felt her cheeks heat. She blessed, briefly, her darker complexion and how it helped disguise that kind of flush. "Sorry," she said to the server. "I didn't mean to stare."

"It's fine. I'm aware that I'm a novelty," the robot said, sounding a little embarrassed herself.

Hearing it said so bluntly made Clara's insides clench. She shook her head, rubbing her neck under her braid as she picked a seat near the window and sat. "That's not—I mean, I guess that is it. Sorry. Uh, I'm Clara Gutierrez," she said. "And this is Joanie."

Joanie fluttered from her shoulder to the table and hopped around to face the robot. "Pleased," Joanie chirped. "It's my first time meeting an older sister!"

"Oh!" The robot seemed to relax; her body position barely changed, but her shoulders shifted slightly. "You brought a Raise in. It's nice to meet you Clara, Joanie. My name is Sal."

"Short for Sally?" Clara asked.

"Ah..." Sal hesitated, apparently a little uncomfortable. "Technically, yes. Those from my line were all called 'Sarah' in development, but my original owner shortened it to Sally, and then to Sal. I haven't had any other name for hundreds of years. It doesn't feel short for anything."

"Hundreds of years?!" Joanie said, tone shifting from alarm to a horrified sympathy almost immediately. "Then you've outlived your owner? That's shitty."

Sal's shoulders jerked upward a little, a subtle change in angle, the lenses in her eyes shifting as she glanced away from them both. "Yes. Now, would you like to see a menu?"

Clara flicked Joanie with a fingertip, a silent admonition for the obvious discomfort she'd made Sal feel. And Joanie had chided her for being rude. "Sorry about that. She's a baby, as these things go. She's got sympathy, but subtlety about it is still hard for her."

"You gonna tweak that?" Joanie asked, curious.

"I might later." Clara redirected her attention back to Sal. "Can I see your tea list? I'm a big tea fan, and my boss recommended this place highly."

"Certainly." Sal inclined her head, hair drifting with an unnatural weightlessness to her cheeks and back again as she lifted her head. She put down the tea menu, a food menu underneath it. "I'll rejoin you shortly."

"Sorry, but... if you're not busy, mind if I ask you about some of these?" She put a fingertip on the tea menu.

Sal paused in the act of straightening, then relaxed again to lean over the table. "Of course, Clara. What do you have questions about?"

Clara glanced down at the menu, then back up at Sal. "This Dorian Gray. That's an Earl Grey variant, right? It mentions caramel, but is there anything else in it?"

"As well as the caramel, it has an addition of apple and lavender. As I understand it, it has a smokier taste than the usual Earl Grey, with a hint of sweetness behind that." Sal touched one smooth fingertip to another menu item. "If you like Earl Greys, you might also like the Monochrome. It is an Earl Grey variant mixed with a Lapsang Souchong and some honey. I have heard it has a very smoky flavor."

"Well, I'm intrigued," Clara said, looking at Sal's unblinking eyes, watching how they focused on her own fingertip. "I'll go with that recommendation, then."

"The Monochrome?"

"Yeah. Uh, this says you have a pear-flavored scone, right? I'll have one of those, and a cup of the tomato bisque."

Sal straightened and gave her another thin-lipped smile as she took the menus again. "Of course. I'll return with it presently."

As she turned and left through the kitchen doors, Clara watched her back thoughtfully. It was hard to read Sal's expressions, and she had to guess at Sal's reactions through her emotive voice. Her face, though nearly-human, had enough uncanny features to make it impossible to base any understanding off expression alone. Her lips weren't full enough to tell if they were tense or loose, her eyes didn't need to narrow or widen with her emotions, and her eyebrows didn't lift or lower while she was talking. But even so, Clara was sure that the emotions in her voice were real. A robot of her type, with a true AI that included behavioral learning, and given how long she'd been active... she would almost certainly have a range of emotion similar to humans. It was expression that was lacking at most.

That all considered, she didn't think she'd offended Sal, though it was hard to pin down why she had that impression. It was something about the way Sal had leaned over her to touch the menu, something about how open her body language had been. Still, Clara thought, she'd made a fool of herself, stammering, asking personal questions. She hated to think she'd given Sal a bad impression.

There was an obvious way to address that, at least.

Sal came back carrying a silver tray with practiced ease. Clara leaned back in her chair, watching as Sal started to put things down. "Hey," Clara began, soft and a bit apologetic, "can I ask you something?"

Sal picked up the small teapot on her tray and put it beside Clara's food, then turned over the teacup on the table so it was facing upright. "Of course."

"Did I, or we, upset you? I imagine you're often treated as a bit of an oddity, huh."

"I am a bit of an oddity," Sal said. Her face was turned away from Clara, making it even harder to read her.

"Nobody told me in advance, so I was a bit surprised to see you," Clara said. Then, a bit more quietly, she repeated, "And did we upset you?"

Sal made a noise in her throat, an uncomfortable wordless verbalization. "Only at first," she said. "I gathered from your words to your Joanie that you are some sort of robotic technician?"

"Yeah. I mostly work on Raises."

"Then it's only natural that you'd be curious about me," Sal said.

That was a 'yes,' then—if only at first, as she'd said. But Clara suspected that it wasn't that she'd reassured Sal at all—she'd done nothing to make up for it but ask about tea. Rather, Sal was probably accustomed to personal questions out of nowhere. She bit her lower lip, considering Sal. "Mm. Thing is, as an AI specialist, I know what degree of a sense of self you have. I mean—I know that you're not a 'novelty'. You're a person. So... sorry about that."

Sal's face jerked toward her, a startled, sudden movement, and all the lenses in her eyes seemed to contract at once. "I'm not."

"Huh?"

"A person. I'm not."

Clara let out a huff of air. "You're not human, but I'd think—"

"Under law—"

"Law though," she said, with an audible eye roll. "I just mean... I won't push it, but I wanted to say sorry. Seeing you got me excited. It's my first time interacting with an actual robot rather than a Raise. But it's no excuse. I was rude."

"Oh," Sal said. She straightened, fidgeted with her tray, holding it to her chest. "It's all right."

"Also, I really like tea, and I both live and work in the area. So I'd like to come back, but I won't if I bothered you...?" She turned the statement into a question, lilting up at the end, in the hopes it would get her an answer.

"No, please," Sal said. "You'd be welcome." Her thin lips curled in a smile again, and she added, "If you like the tea, anyway."

Clara did, in fact, like both the tea and the food, and by the time she had paid up her bill, she was already planning on coming back. Though, if she were honest with herself, it was more the company than the food alone.

Part of it was, she had to admit, how unusual Sal was. Given her specialty, a robot like Sal was a creation she had a constant background interest in. She'd read probably hundreds of articles, studied so much code, came up against all kinds of historical cases, but never met one. She knew she had been rude, and felt a bit guilty for that, but she could still step back and see where her desire to get to know Sal better came from.

But at the same time, as she had said to Sal, knowing more than the average person also made her more aware of the things Sal might face. Knowing how genuine even a limited AI's emotions could be made her realize that Sal must, at this point, be used to constantly being treated as a thing. Clara was sure it went even deeper than that. Sal was made hundreds of years earlier. That alone would be alienating. The world around her was constantly changing, the social landscape along with it. People would come and go—even if losing others was part of living, Sal would lose everyone, sooner or later. Even the laws which determined her own legal standing had changed back and forth over time. And throughout it all, she'd be considered an aberration, a belonging, an oddity.

A novelty.

It made Clara want to offer something more. Maybe everybody Sal would meet would move on, but without any connection, what was the point?

The next time she went was three days later, and that long only to avoid seeming too overeager. She went on her lunch break, bringing along some of her work—a small ermine Raise, white with a black tail-tip.

It was a calculated move but not, she hoped, a manipulative one. Rather, she was trying to present a sort of honesty as to who she was and what she did, to put it out there immediately. It was the type of honesty that Sal couldn't ever avoid offering—everyone else knew that as soon as they saw her.

There was always the chance that Sal would be put off by seeing Clara working on fellow machines, searching out errors and problems in an AI's personality. It wasn't something Clara would change, so if Sal disliked it, it would be better to find that out while it was still early. But if it was something that would interest Sal, would make her want to know more—if she might want to understand Clara's interests and abilities—better to offer that early as well.

Clara always preferred to be upfront about herself; it just had higher stakes here. Doing her work in the tea shop would absolutely be the best way to advertise to Sal 'this is who I am, this is what I do' about her career and what it meant for how Clara had reacted to her.

The shop was empty of customers again when she entered, but Sal was in the main room, clearing used dishes from a table. Clara lifted a hand in greeting as she entered and jumped right into things. "Hey, do you mind if I work at one of your tables? I've got a lot of orders to deal with today, but if you'd rather I not, I can eat somewhere else today."

"Oh..." Sal seemed to hesitate, looking between her and Joanie and the ermine in the small carry bag she had, at the screen hovering projected from her hand-held case. "No, I don't mind. Are the tables big enough?"

"Should be fine. I've worked on smaller," Clara said. She sat her things down, feeling bolstered. "I'm feeling like having a soup today."

"No menu?"

"It's fine. I saw the special on the board. It looks good to me." She tilted her head back, smiling up at Sal, who was hovering over her with her tray full of dirty plates and a noticeably antsy air. "And I'll try that Dorian Gray this time."

"Certainly. I'll have them right out for you."

As Sal returned to the back room, Clara hooked the ermine back up to her computer and projected out the keyboard, quickly finding where she was in the registry. She didn't have to pretend absorption; she quickly got caught up in sorting through keys and confirming their legitimacy, and almost didn't notice when Sal approached again and set the bowl and teapot down, turned the teacup over on the table.

"Ah..." Sal hesitated. "What happened to it? Is it okay?"

"Pretty sure it's a virus," Clara said. "It looks like the usual sort of thing. Sometimes their owners use them to mass-download porn, and along the way, they pick up something."

Sal glanced at Joanie, who fluffed up her wings. "Don't look at me," Joanie protested. "Clara wouldn't make me sort through her porn! If she even looks at that stuff, it sure isn't through me. I'm obviously not going to ask about it—Clara, where do you get it? Your computer? Your computer, right?"

"That's too much sharing," Clara said, and flicked Joanie with a fingertip. "Anyway, the virus interferes with their daily functioning, and they start to act kind of weird. It can get pretty deep into their systems by the time the owners really get around to having them fixed. I haven't narrowed down the virus yet, but depending what unusual keys I find in here, I can probably figure it out and get it cleaned out of the poor thing. Don't want it slipping through the cracks and infecting any other Raises when I get it started back up in the shop."

Sal, who had been starting to reach to touch the ermine's side, jerked her hand back abruptly. Clara couldn't quite keep herself from laughing. "I'm sorry," Sal said, voice quiet.

"It's fine, don't worry about it. It shouldn't be tap-transfer, though, so you should be safe. It's probably not even compatible with your system. And anyway, I've got its networking turned off for now. It's no good if my computer picks up a virus while I'm trying to fix it either." She tapped the palm-sized box, which at this point seemed to be taking up much more space than it physically was—the wires were minuscule, but between the projected keyboard and the number of screens it had popped up, she did look a little like she was overcrowding the table.

It didn't seem likely that Sal was even capable of blushing, but she lowered her chin, gaze dropping to the floor in a way that made Clara think she was embarrassed despite her mild tone. "Yes. Of course. Excuse me."

"I don't mind you asking questions. Talking about a problem out loud can help sometimes. You can watch if you want."

It was a bit of a gamble—Sal was working here, after all, and even if the shop was empty now, that didn't mean it was going to stay that way. Besides, she probably had work to do even without customers, and it might seem a little forward to offer like that.

"Can I?" Sal asked.

Clara smiled, actually startled by the depth of her own relief. She hadn't thought she was that invested in a positive answer. "Sure. I enjoy having company, and I'm used to this stuff! I doubt you'd distract me."

"I see. Please let me know if the situation changes," Sal said, and pulled out the table's other chair, sitting quietly with her hands on her knees.

Clara pulled her gaze away after a moment, turning back to the ermine's registry, but she felt as if she could feel Sal's eyes on her back regardless. Despite her words, it did take her a few moments to get her focus back on the registry, but at least she had her soup and tea to cover for the lag.

Once she was absorbed, though, she was absorbed, barely remembering to move her hands from the projected keyboard for her drink, eyes fixed on her screens. She did speak aloud sometimes, musing over a problem here or there, but even doing so she almost forgot Sal was there until Sal cleared her throat. The distracted thought of how unnecessary that must be snapped her out of the zone.

"I'm sorry to interrupt," Sal said, sounding genuinely apologetic. "But I was wondering how long your lunch break was?"

Clara's eyes snapped to the time. "Crap." She grabbed her teacup, downing the lukewarm remnants in a gulp. "You're right, I have to be taking this little guy back to the office—Joanie, why didn't you say anything?"

"Whatever, you're working over lunch anyway. You'll be claiming overtime, so—"

"It's a new job," Clara said, exasperated. "I should at least be in the office—sorry, Sal. I'll just pack up and get out of your hair."

"No, I—I mean, of course. It is important to get back to work," Sal agreed, and released her narrow fingers from where they were twined together around her crossed knees. "But please feel free to do this any time. It was very interesting to watch."

"Was it? I thought you might get bored, just watching me stare at a screen for that long—"

Sal shook her head. "No. I don't—understand anything about this sort of thing." She lifted a hand to her own chest, over where her heart would be if she were human.  "I don't know anything technical. But it was interesting, seeing what was going on inside, how you could fix it up—will you bring it over when it's fixed so I can see how it acts?"

"I'd love to," Clara said apologetically, putting the ermine back into the bag and rising. Joanie flitted to her shoulder and settled there. "But it's not mine, it's a client's. When it's fixed, I have to get it back to him as soon as possible. He's probably already missing it."

"Oh... of course."

"I could show you some of Joanie's programming sometime, if it's something that interests you," Clara offered instead, a bit hesitant.

The lenses in Sal's eyes tightened and loosened in a rapid pulse, and her gaze flicked to the hummingbird. "If Joanie wouldn't mind...?"

"Of course I wouldn't mind," Joanie said, almost offended. "Clara's offering. Anyway, she's the one who made me be me, so it's not like there's anything to worry about."

"Is that so..."

Clara wished she had some more time—could explain more, follow up, talk about Joanie's personality profile—but it would have to wait. A bit frazzled, she said, "Anyway, I'll come back again, and if you've got the time to listen, I'm happy to talk. We could meet sometime after work too, if you want."

"After work?" Sal echoed, almost alarmed. "I don't—I haven't met anyone after work for—I don't know."

What an idiotic offer to have made, Clara thought, horrified. "It's fine, no pressure. I'll see you again. Thanks for the meal—" and she was off at a jog out of the tea house, down the narrow alley, up the hill.

For a moment, there was silence, just the sound of her feet on the ground and her breath in her ears, and then Joanie let out a little titter.

"What?"

"You like her!"

"I don't even know her," Clara said with exaggerated patience and warm cheeks. "I'd like to like her, but I'll probably have to talk to her more for that."

That earned her another laugh from Joanie. "Uh, I'm monitoring your body, and your heart's sure pounding."

"I'm jogging."

"Uh-huh," Joanie said.

Clara couldn't help but laugh at Joanie's exaggeratedly patient disbelief. It seemed a little silly to pretend; Joanie understood her better than any living person. "So I like her," Clara drawled. "She's interesting, and, yes, I don't know her, but I'd like to. Problem?"

She felt Joanie bump into the curve between neck and collar, an old fond gesture of hers. "Like I'd have a problem! What do you even think of me? Jeez."

"Mm..."

"It's a good feeling, isn't it?" Joanie asked shrewdly. "You don't always get a chance to connect to people with all your coming and going. So I'm glad."

Clara sighed. "It's a good feeling," she agreed, letting the rest go without remark.

***

Sal woke earlier than intended, her systems firing her up as the front door alarm started to blare. She could hear sounds from the main room—a crash, broken glass, shattering porcelain, loud whooping and yelling.

Part of her wanted to fling herself up, dash out there and try to fight or scare off whoever was there. This was her shop, her life, her memory of Karinne. Karinne's three hundred year dream existed only as long as this place survived.

But the rest of her kept her in place, curled tight in her seated position behind the island in the kitchen. If she survived, she could fix or replace the things they broke. This was the first time since the bombing that the harassment had come into the shop, but everything inside was replaceable.  If she didn't survive, then there was no way to see the dream through.

Instead of charging out, she grabbed the police's number on the network and sent them an alert to an in-progress break-in with her name and the shop's address. After a moment's hesitation, she sent a second alert citing Detective Hyeon's name and the previous case number that he'd worked on with her. It was one thing to be slow responding to a case like hers, and another to do so if it could get them into any trouble with a colleague.  Besides, he'd always said he'd help if something came up again.

Another crash came, this one closer to the kitchen—the sharp ring of the register drawer popping open made her guess it had been flung to the ground to be robbed. The register was nearly empty, mostly just a set piece she owned to help create the atmosphere. She only kept a small amount of cash in it for the rare cases of tourists who might somehow not be using credit transfer. It was its proximity to the kitchen and so to her that alarmed her, not the thought of the money being stolen.

Huddling there was going to do her no good. Careful, moving as quietly as she could, she opened up one of the cupboard doors. Hoping the sounds of vandalism in the room outside would cover it, she pushed a stack of mixing bowls as far to the side as possible and crawled into the cupboard, folding her knees and arms carefully, bending herself so her chest lay flat against her thighs and her head rested on her knees. Then she pulled the door shut behind herself.

It was dark. With the door shut, the sounds were a bit more muffled, making it hard to pick up the details of the noises outside. Was that crash still in the main room, or was it already in the kitchen? She could hear voices as well—not enough to pick up words, but there were two indistinct tones. At least two people outside, then. Both voices somewhat deep, one a little higher than the other.

At least she didn't need to breathe when she wasn't speaking, she thought to herself with a sort of grim humor. There was no tell to give her away. As long as they didn't start opening cupboards, she might not be found.

There was no way to guarantee they wouldn't open cupboards.

She kept herself completely still as she heard boots in the kitchen stomping around the island. Impulsively, she turned off power to her eyes. There was nothing to see in this darkness anyway, and somehow it made her feel a little better. Smaller than before.

A sudden siren outside made something inside her shake. The police had come—she had gotten lucky. There must have been a car nearby and people who cared enough about the details of her messages to get it dispatched immediately.  Someone in the kitchen yelled—"Get out of here!"—and then the loud stomping again as the vandals took off.  She let her eyes come back online.

Still she didn't move—waited until she heard what she hoped was the back door before she unfolded her limbs, starting to slink out of the cupboard. Broken plates crunched between the hard sole of her foot and the floor, making a sharp grinding sound, and she winced.

A woman in police uniform was dashing through the kitchen, but spun when she saw movement; Sal threw her hands up in the air immediately. "I'm the shop owner," she said hurriedly. "I called for help. Detective Hyeon took my case in the past."

The policewoman relaxed, giving her a nod. "Stay here," she said, and continued on to the back door.

Sal waited helplessly, looking around to assess the situation. The fridge door was open and casting a strange light across the kitchen, making the shadows of the room deep and distorted. The damage seemed to be mostly surface stuff, at least in here. Broken plates, cups, teapots—the intruders had likely just been shoving things off counters and, it seemed, pulling them out of some of the high cupboards. There was also fluid on the floor; she adjusted her lenses to get a better look. Stock, she identified after a moment, for soup.

The officer came back in a moment later through the rear door. "The suspects left on foot and are being pursued," she told Sal. "Are you hurt?" And then, more dubiously, "Can you be hurt?"

"I'm fine," Sal said. "I hid. They didn't find me."

"Right," she said, still doubtful. "We've called Detective Hyeon, but he's probably not up at this time. I'll take your statement."

Sal wanted to start cleaning up, but nodded. Going through official channels meant official red tape. Obligingly, she explained what she had experienced as the policewoman jotted down notes and occasionally asked questions for clarification. It seemed to take forever. Sal knew that the suspects were already under pursuit and this woman was just doing her job, but even so, it was hard not to feel like every minute that ticked past with questions and answers was somehow delaying justice being done.

"Right, well," the officer said finally, tapping her tablet. "Looks to me like a simple case of vandalism, but—"

Detective Hyeon came in through the door from the main area, wearing his coat over a set of pajamas and looking as if he hadn't had enough sleep. "Officer Lewis," he said, with a nod. "Sal. You okay?"

"I'm fine," Sal repeated. Then, a bit hesitantly: "A little shaken up."

"Let's get this taken care of," he said, not unkindly. "Lewis, catch me up. Sal, did you see what was written in the main room?"

"I did not," she said hesitantly, and stepped toward it.

It was easy enough to see what he was referring to once she'd stepped out; they'd written it large enough in spray paint. "ROBOT = THING." and "GET READY TO BREAK."

Whether it was a threat or an insult, she wasn't sure. Perhaps it didn't matter which.

Although the next twenty minutes were spent answering questions and repeating the same information to Hyeon which Officer Lewis had already written down, she found she felt a little better with him present. Officer Lewis had done her job, but it had been clear to Sal she wasn't seeing her as a person. Hyeon would be different. By the time it was all taken and confirmed, they hadn't caught the suspects, and she doubted they would. But most likely the vandals wouldn't come back. The police had arrived quickly enough to put a scare into them, and they'd probably got what they'd wanted anyway: damage and fear.

As the police had finally left, Hyeon had reassured her that he'd let her know if anything developed, and told her to call again if anything else happened. She was left facing the upcoming day alone. Certainly, she couldn't open up shop in these conditions. The sign would stay on closed, and the reservation list...

She checked the list: there were two people on it. She'd have to send cancellation messages to both, with some indistinct summary of the event and promises to list online when they were open again.

The first message went with no distractions from her goal. The second name, however, was Clara's, and she stared at it for a while before sending the message, rewritten a little more personally, giving a few more details. Regret flooded her, a cool sensation through her core—she'd hoped to see Clara again, to continue their now-biweekly lunch meetings, but there was no helping it. The situation was what it was.

So at eleven, with broken shards swept off the floor but everything else still in progress, she was startled to hear a knock on the door, to look up and see Clara waiting there, Joanie on her shoulder.

Her immediate reaction was confusion—a mixed tangle of hope and concern. Had Clara missed the notice? Had she come anyway? She answered the door still wondering, ducked her head. "I'm sorry. We're not open today."

"I noticed. I, uh," Clara looked around and spread her hands. "I thought you might want some help cleaning up. It's kind of clear you work entirely alone here and, I mean, it's my day off, so..."

The sensation that rushed through Sal felt like it was going to knock her off her feet, a confusing mess of mixed feelings that she couldn't even put a name to. Grateful as well, she stepped back, holding the door open. "If you don't mind, I could use the help," she admitted. "But please, don't feel obliged. Stop whenever you want to..."

"Sure, sure. It's fine, don't worry."

Sal tried to push down on the sense of relief. The situation hadn't changed just because Clara was here—but at least getting things cleaned up would go more quickly.  Sal managed to dig up some leftover paint from the back room, grateful that the walls were painted and not papered; Clara took down the paintings on the wall that had been spray-painted over and helped tape up the edges to keep the fresh paint from dripping into other areas.

"Do you want to open a window?" Sal asked, as she started to pry the lid off the old tub, hoping there was enough left to work with. "This will probably smell, and I don't want you to have any distress..."

"I'll get it, yeah." Clara, sleeves rolled up, pushed her dark bangs back from her face. Sal noticed that they'd fallen out of her braid already. Clara glanced back at Sal as she headed to the window, and Sal looked down at the paint tub to make sure it didn't flick drops anywhere as she got the lid up. "It must be pretty depressing," Clara added.

"What? Oh..." Sal put the lid carefully to one side, dipped the edge of the stiff brush in. "A little."

"Just a little?"

Sal pressed her lips tightly together for a moment. It was hard to find the words to express these feelings fully. They churned around and were only peripherally focused on the words she was here to paint over.

"It's not... as if I'm unaware that I am a thing," she said slowly. "And that I'll eventually break. It hurts to read because they intended it to hurt. The same thing is less painful when it's just self-awareness. I am already to the stage that I should probably seek out repairs soon, although I don't want to. But the shop is also a thing."

"I think it's a little different..."

"Yes. But what they came in and trashed was the shop. They did it to hurt me, but they hurt it too. Unlike me, it doesn't have any feelings. But I have feelings for it," Sal said. "I was—everything in me is meant to take care of it. I was registered to Karinne, and she tasked me with taking care of it."

Clara let out a soft whistle, righting a chair and checking over the kicked-in leg to see if it could be reattached securely. "So it's not just personal attachment, it's your programming?"

"Yes. Of course, I'm emotionally attached to it too," Sal said. "I've been here for hundreds of years. I've managed this business for nearly that long, I've spent every day in it, I've replaced broken things and done everything I can to keep it going." Now that the words had started to come out, she could hardly stop them. "Karinne wanted it to last three hundred years if it couldn't last forever. We're so close to that time now. And yes, I'm scared for myself. I'm scared of breaking down. I'm scared people like that will track me down successfully sometime and break me beyond recovery, and I won't see that dream through.  Even without their actions, I'm slowly breaking down. If it's up to them, it won't be a slow process." Her brush laid out regular, steady strokes on the wall, but she could hear her voice starting to tremble. "But even if they don't get me, this place being ruined will ruin me. If they come in and break it to the point that my low profits can't sustain repairs. If they do damage I can't repair. If—anything like that."

Clara had stopped working, was watching her, and she found herself avoiding eye contact.

"I'm terrified," she said finally. "It's so easy to see Karinne's dream fail. Karinne's already gone. If I lose this shop... I might as well have broken back then, because all this would be pointless. There's nothing left for me besides it."

"Sal..." Joanie said from a nearby tabletop, her tone sympathetic. "Yeah. It's kind of your master, isn't it? The shop is."

"But... does it have to be?" Clara asked after a moment. There was no denying the heavy concern in her voice. "You don't have to have a registration to a person any more. That could be removed. Then—I mean, seeing a dream through to the end is admirable. It is. And doing what you want is important. But I'm sure Karinne wouldn't like to see you without any choice about it."

"That's—" She cut herself off, biting her lower lip briefly in a strange impulse to shut herself up, to stop her automatic protest. Clara was right. She had always been a person to Karinne—or, if not always, at least since fairly shortly after Karinne had acquired her.  She could remember the pressure of Karinne's hand in hers in those precious last few moments.

Karinne had said, "I want you to live out our dream," our dream, always ours, never just Karinne's, because she knew how deeply she'd shared it with Sal. "But Sal, I want you to be happy. I want you to grow and change and become everything you've wanted to be..."

But there was the problem, wasn't it? What she wanted to be. She knew what she was, she knew what she did, she knew how she lived—as much as the term applied—day in and day out. But everything else was a void. Everything inside her centered around her purpose, her programming, bound tight around the knot that was property of Karinne Anders carved onto her heart. She was a satellite orbiting Karinne's wishes, Karinne's hope, Karinne's love. Even with thoughts and feelings of her own, they found their expression through that center. She wanted to abandon it as much as a sea captain would want to abandon his compass, his maps. Without any guide, the ocean would become a directionless mass. She understood the thought behind Clara's words—that with a heart and mind of her own she could learn to use the stars to navigate instead—but the idea was terrifying.

"It's what I'm used to," she said finally.

The two of them worked in silence for a few moments. Sal didn't quite look at Clara, focused on her brush, the steady shhk-shhk-shkk of it as she dragged the paint over the wall.

"You said you were slowly breaking down?" Clara said softly, as the moment began to drag on.

Sal finally glanced over at her again, watching as Clara studiously unscrewed the back of an old photograph that the spray paint had crossed over. That was good thinking. It could go into another frame easily enough. "I have been having memory errors lately," she said finally. "That's the main problem. I had charging errors for a while too, but a new battery seems to be doing the job."

"Mm. Do you want me to have a look?"

The thought was almost dizzying. She'd thought before of finding someone who could help her out, replace the parts that were wearing out, fix memory leaks and the rest. But finding someone who could take care of someone like her would be hard at best, and it would cost so much money, and... well, it wasn't like she could trust most people. Even though they'd just approach her as something to fix, she wasn't comfortable with entirely thinking of herself the same way. It had been easy to get upgrades when Karinne was alive. Having a master meant trusting her master's judgment and not letting herself think about the risk. Without one, the idea of letting someone tinker around inside her... It felt safer to just let herself slowly wind down. That was more of a known element. She was used to the errors, the slowness, the blanks where her recall should be.

But, she thought, she could trust Clara.

She almost chided herself at that, forcing herself to look away from Clara and painting a few strokes almost violently. She liked Clara fine, yes. They got along well. She knew that Clara took pride in her work and wanted to promote a sense of personality—Joanie was proof of that. She believed in Clara firmly, but intellectually, she was aware that she didn't yet know Clara well enough to justify that faith.

Karinne had always been big on trusting one's instincts.

Sal sighed. "I... I don't know if I could afford it."

"For free," Clara said. She waved off Sal's immediate protest. "Friends help friends. Don't worry about it. I like you, and... I mean obviously I won't do anything you're not comfortable with, but I don't want you to not get what you need to keep going just because you don't have the money."

It was hard to keep moving the brush, so she dropped it back into the paint bucket, tried to calm herself. "Thank you," she said.

She heard Clara get up from the table she was seated at and come over. "Sal..."

"I'm so scared," Sal said, and maybe there really was something wrong with her, because she hadn't meant to say it at all. It had just slid out of her mouth like something too-oiled, and she shuddered at the sense of pain throbbing through her. It wasn't a physical sensation, but was pain nonetheless.

There was a sense of pressure, and she looked up as Clara slid an arm around her shoulders. It was a firm presence, a solid thing, reliable, and something seemed to crack in her chest.

She hadn't held anyone for so long, but her body remembered it. Her arms slid around Clara, and she pressed her face into the soft curve between shoulder and neck, into that taut warm skin, and shuddered. She couldn't cry, but Clara didn't seem to expect her to; she soothed Sal as if she were spilling tears anyway, one hand rubbing in circles on her back, rocking her lightly, holding her close.

***

It took about a month to get in all the supplies that Clara thought she might need. It was better to have too much than too little with something like this, replacements and a variety of chips and a number of other things. Without knowing what exactly would fit properly and securely, it was hard to guess what might be necessary, and she didn't want to leave Sal waiting. Opening her up multiple times to figure it out also felt invasive. It wasn't like it hurt to have more supplies on hand—worst case scenario, she could give Amber anything she couldn't take with her when she inevitably moved on.

It was a nice month—a busy month, but a nice one. She alternated between work and the Tea Shop as if it were home more than the apartment she was renting. She'd finish with work and go over to help Sal set up, to help sort through the new plates and cups as they arrived in boxes, to hang pictures, to generally keep things going so that Sal could run the shop properly. Sal apologized constantly for not being able to pay her for the help, let alone for the planned technical aid, but Clara brushed it aside. Sal no longer charged her for food or tea, but gave her them whenever she wanted it, and that was as good as getting paid, she said.

Besides, she liked the company.

Winter had fully set in to Seattle, a wet affair with a constant blowing drizzle that occasionally dropped into temperatures low enough for thin damp flakes to fall, hit the pavement, and melt. Snow didn't really stick much there. The constant wetness wasn't bad and was what she'd come here for, but she thought that after it, she might like something new again. Dryness and heat for a while. In this part of the world, fall meant rain, winter meant rain, spring meant rain. Summer had its bright days, but also rain. A rainy winter was what she had wanted—a rainy spring, probably less so.

Normally, the itch to move on wasn't a problem. She had complained to Joanie as much once, foolishly.

"Never had anything you couldn't take with you, huh?" Joanie asked impishly, which wasn't true, exactly. She'd left her family behind, after all. But it was still mostly true. As with her family, knowing Sal was going to stay in one place meant she could always come back for visits. But she was fine with putting off seeing her family again, dismissing her parents' emailed complaints until it felt like time to wander back that way again. In uncomfortable contrast, she wanted to see Sal more and more, a desire almost as strong as her desire to see the world. She felt that probably wouldn't change by the time winter was over. Even if she pushed against herself and stayed put through spring, it probably wouldn't change.

Clara didn't like the thought that she might leave, lose contact, lose interest in Sal as distance made their interactions less frequent. She didn't want to think it possible, but she'd lost touch with enough good friends over time. The idea of starting out messaging her, then those messages getting put aside as they both had work to do, just never picking back up...

But there was no helping it. She'd keep moving, and Sal would stay here. Sal belonged to the shop in her old owner's place—what was her name, Karen? No, Karinne—and even inviting Sal over to Clara's apartment had made Sal nervous. How long had it been since Sal had even left the premises?

But once the supplies were in, Sal agreed to come over, and Clara spent a few fruitless hours tidying in some strange impulse to impress Sal. Sal liked her place pristine, after all, the picture of some charming quaintness. Clara, who never owned enough to worry much about where everything was, had difficulty even remembering to do the dishes regularly, especially now that she ate out at the Tea Shop so often. But she more or less got everything done and put away by the time a light knock came on her door.

Right on time; 6:00 p.m. on the dot.

Despite expecting it, Clara jumped a little, found her breath stuttering in her throat, and squeezed her fingers into fists to force herself to calm down. It felt different somehow with Sal coming to visit her in her own home instead of the strangely proper way their spaces were defined when she was at the Shop, even if she'd moved more to assistant than customer. But it was just Sal, she reminded herself; they were friends now, they were close enough for this, and having shaky hands would absolutely be a bad idea.

She wiped her hands off on her jeans and opened the door.

"There she is, the guest of honor," Joanie said, sly, and Clara felt herself relax, letting out a laugh she didn't mean to voice.

"Come on in," Clara said.

Sal was standing on her doorstep, wearing, surprisingly, something other than the usual uniform-like dress she wore every day at the tea shop. It was certainly out of fashion, a loose frock in a creamy pink color that came to her knees. A carousel horse design circled near the hem of the dress, and small ruffles sat at her throat and wrists. It had been clearly bought some decades ago, but there was no way it was old enough to have been purchased for her by her previous owner. It wasn't decayed, showed little sign of damage.  Her expression was as undefined as always, but Clara had found it easier to read of late. The lenses of her eyes had tightened to pinpricks, some kind of hyper-focus, and her fingers were wound together. Probably nervous, Clara thought.

"Hello," Sal said. "Sorry to intrude..."

"Not at all. You're invited." Clara stepped aside, holding the door for her. "That's a really pretty dress."

"Thank you," Sal said. "I... I purchased it for the two-hundred and fiftieth anniversary. I threw a little celebration. I don't have any other. I don't go out much."

"Do you go out at all?"

The lenses of her eyes widened and tightened again—and then she dropped her head and let out a soft, musical laugh. "No. I don't go out at all."

"Getting here must have been hard."

"People stared. It was fine. Nobody stopped me." Sal stepped in finally, looking around. "Oh, your place is—oh."

"Is?" Clara felt her stomach knot again. "Sorry, I tried to clean up. I can be a little messy. I guess I've been spending all my cleaning energy on your place—"

Sal shook her head, the wisps of her hair drifting around the strong lines of her cheeks. "No, it's fine. It's just... you don't seem to own very much."

True; with all her focus on cleaning to make it tidy enough, Clara might have overlooked the bigger discrepancy between their homes. The shop was filled with items, with photographs and curios and china and lace everywhere, with antiques that had been purchased to give the place its atmosphere. Even after the recent damage to it, it was still full of them, with more available to be brought out from the back—items that had been put away due to tarnish, or replaced with newer and more interesting ones. In comparison, Clara still had little more than what she could travel with.

"I move around a lot," Clara said. "I'm kind of... I like seeing the world."

"You move—?"

Sal's gaze flicked to her face, and there was some kind of disappointment there, a shock. Clara felt her own stomach clench in return, and fought the sudden urge to make some kind of excuse. It wouldn't be true. "I like seeing different cities," she said. "I mean, I'm not planning to move right away! I just got here."

"I see..." Sal said.

"And... I can always come back to a place I like!"

"Yes," Sal said, quiet. She knotted her hands together. "Shall we begin?"

Clara swallowed; she couldn't overcome the sense that she had hurt Sal somehow, but it was just how she was. There was no changing her own nature, and she'd never been one to stifle herself. She tried to push forward, to get past this awkward start. "That quickly? Sure you don't want me to get you anything first?"

"No, I mean—" Sal's thin lips turned up in a smile, finally relenting, as if she was pushing away whatever mood had overcome her. "We might as well get this over with. We can always do other things after. Isn't that right?"

Joanie opened her beak to make some kind of commentary and, without looking, Clara reached out to bop her with a fingertip. It wasn't the time for jokes, and she was sure that was what Joanie was about to do. Joanie's personality contrasted her own; that's how she'd made her.

"Yeah," Clara said. She drew a deep breath and let it out, trying to calm her nerves. She'd worked on hundreds of AIs before, she'd studied the old robotics—she could do this. There was no need to be nervous, and letting herself feel intimidated might make things harder. "Please lie down on the bed. Can you enter some kind of administrative mode?"

Sal spread her skirts around her, lying down, then rolled on her front to show the nape of her neck. With it exposed like that, Clara could make out the outline of her main access panel. "I can," Sal said, and then seemed to hesitate. "Clara...?"

"Yes?"

"If you see me in that mode, you won't think any differently of me?"

A warm sympathy flooded her chest, and she came over, put a hand gently on Sal's upper back as she sat beside her. "I won't," she said. "I understand. You're inside this. Showing another mode doesn't make you less you. Okay?"

"Mm." Sal closed her eyes.

The reboot, when it happened, was obvious; a sensation under her palm of relaxation as Sal's mouth opened. "Sarah Unit is in Administrative mode. Commands?"

It did feel odd. Most of the Raises she worked with didn't report verbally unless set to that mode, precisely because it was distracting. The line's name, too, was something Sal had told her before, but it still struck her as strange, knowing Sal only as Sal. "I'll be accessing your systems. Please pull up diagnostics for visual transfer and open the panel at the rear of the neck."

The panel at the back of Sal's neck popped free; Clara picked it up carefully and set it to the side. There was probably some manual method of opening it as well, for the case where Sal's systems were too damaged to open this way, but an internal eject would be safer and less damaging.

Under the panel was a variety of cable ports, as she'd expected; only one of them seemed still compatible with current cable design, a simple visual output. She attached her screens to that one and powered them up as a test—a successful one, as data began to spill across her screen, describing Sal's BIOS. To actually work with it, she'd need to attach her computer somehow; she'd prepared for that, and had stocked up on converters of various kinds. Carefully, she slotted one into the wide flat opening and attached her own box's hookup into the other end of it.

Clara spent the first two hours not adjusting anything, just reading through the data and getting used to the code that made up "Sal". It was extremely similar in structure and content to the case studies she'd worked on at school, but relying on that felt dangerous. Sal wasn't a case study; she wasn't some example of old-fashioned and unethical robotics. She was an actual person lying in Clara's bed, if not an organic one; one whose AI was leaps and bounds more complicated than any Raise that she'd worked with. Even though she was programmed to be primed for domestic work, there was no limit on her behavior because she was designed to take and learn and adjust her own behavioral trees, her own priority structure, based on her interactions with humans.

The basic code structure's similarity was almost a trap; without spending time getting familiar with all the places it allowed for free will and autonomy, she could very easily do irrevocable harm to Sal. Even without intending to adjust anything, even intending to only clean up areas where leaks or conflicts were occurring and to find what internal parts needed replacement, there was risk.

Sal trusted her not to mess this up, Sal trusted her with not just her life but her identity, her sense of self. All those fears that Sal had mentioned before were being placed, too, in Clara's hands. If she changed Sal's values, then the things she hoped for, the things she feared—none of those would matter.

There was no point where Clara felt 'ready', not exactly.  She simply reached a point where she felt she had all the information she could get without working with it directly, and had to hesitate, staring down from her screens to Sal lying prone on her bed. There was something so intimate about this that she almost felt embarrassed, a strange sensation in conjunction with the fear of doing something wrong, of hurting her.

And then she started.

Sal had been running constantly, but the repair nanites in her system had done a fine job in terms of keeping joints lubricated and her mechanics working. Instead, the problem seemed to be a combination of code bloating, memory that needed to be stored more efficiently, excesses in her registry that were interfering with her processing and, simply enough, various chips that had worn down despite the nanites' work on the broader mechanical systems. Those, at least, could be replaced at the same time as she worked on the software side and keep Sal from having to wait too long. Clara had managed to get hold of spares for everything that seemed urgent, if not everything that could be done. She connected old chips to new, setting a data transfer between them, and turned her attention back to the code.

Hours passed there, and Clara hardly noticed. She broke to use the bathroom when her body's demands wouldn't be ignored, and, having stepped away, realized she was hungry. She made herself toast, then dove back in without letting herself rest further. It felt disrespectful to pull away from Sal at a time like this.

The clean-up and reorganization in her code took less time than the physical transfer of information from one chip to another, and no wonder. Sal had lived so long, experienced so much—all her life was in this. Waiting for it to finish, she looked Sal over one last time, and finally let herself really focus on the one piece of information she absolutely knew she couldn't touch.

Registration: Karinne Anders (deceased).

Looking all around the code that supported it, she confirmed that Sal didn't technically require this registration to function. It was part of ownership, but having and recognizing an owner wasn't a vital part of her system. It had been programmed into her as part of the unit's purpose as a domestic servant, but it could be anything—even blank. Following the threads back, a blank registration would simply place no priority above Sal's own. With Karinne's identification marked deceased, it looked like rather than erase the registration, Sal herself had adjusted her priorities to connect it to her memories of Karinne. She had attached herself, Clara thought, to promises of the past, to the tea shop that—from the way it was constructed—likely still felt to Sal more like Karinne's than her own. Clara had an idea, an impulse that she couldn't shake even though she couldn't be sure how accurate it was, of what Sal's feelings for Karinne were. She wondered if it had been mutual.

"Is this part of mourning her? Did you ever find a way to recover from your grief?" Clara murmured to her.

"Command unclear," Sal—'Sarah'—said.

It wasn't hers to touch regardless. The transfer finished and, careful, Clara fished around up Sal's neck into her head to replace the chips, to click them into place.

Finally finished, she unhooked her cords and closed the panel back up. As soon as she'd disconnected, she started to shake, hands trembling so hard she couldn't force them to steady. It wasn't entirely unexpected—she was exhausted and overwrought and terrified that she'd done it wrong in some way. But she had to push through. She cleared her throat, forced herself to focus. "Please reseal the panel and reboot in personality mode."

"Understood." The panel locked tight against the back of her neck.

A few seconds passed, and Sal stirred, rolling over to look at her properly. For a moment, she seemed to be focusing internally, the lenses in her eyes dilating and contracting. It only made sense. She'd want to see, however well she could, what was done to her.

Then she smiled, the expression wide and actually easy to read, her lenses dilating, her mouth parting a little. "Clara..."

"How do you feel?" Clara asked. She felt, somehow, even more wobbly at the sight of that smile than she had before. She hadn't been sure that was possible.

"I feel... good. Steady," Sal said. She flexed her fingers and lifted her arms, rubbing at her face with those smooth, unmarked palms. "Really refreshed. Maybe not quite like new, but... I don't feel like I'm falling apart."

Without really meaning to, Clara laughed. "Well. Good. I mean, that was the goal."

"My registration—"

Clara blinked rapidly, and suddenly searched her memory over again. She hadn't meant to do anything to that—had she done so in her distraction? No, she was sure she'd done nothing, just left it how it was. "What about it?"

"Nothing," Sal said. "Never mind."

But maybe that alone had been worth noting, Clara thought, suddenly awkward. After all, Sal knew that she thought that Sal should clear her registration and live freely.

Before she could come up with something to say—explanation, denial, whatever—the thought was pushed from her mind. Sal had half sat-up, wrapped her arms around Clara, and started to lean back down again. Clara lost all sense of balance; exhausted, she fell back onto the bed with Sal, curling against that firm exterior, head on her shoulder. "Sal—"

"You must be tired. Nearly six hours have passed."

"A little tired," she admitted, and squirmed a little to get herself comfortable. It had been a long time since she'd cuddled anyone; her cheeks grew hot with an embarrassed happiness.

They lay together in a tangle of skirt and blankets and discarded cords and chips. Clara could feel her heart slowly settling from surprise toward something like an alert contentment.

"Clara?"

"Mm?"

"I like you."

Sal said it in a quiet, almost ashamed way, hesitant. The tone left no doubt as to her meaning, and Clara's heart, finally calming, began to pound again. She swallowed around a dry throat, turning her face more into Sal's shoulder, burying it there.

"I like you too," she said into Sal's dress sleeve.

"Even though...?"

Sal didn't finish her sentence, but maybe she didn't need to. There were a lot of potential 'even though's. Even though she was a robot. Even though she was still attached to, still grieving for, her old love. Even though Clara would want to move on sometime or, at least, not stay here, while Sal would want to stay. Even though they both knew that eventually history would repeat, that Clara would grow old and die and leave Sal with whatever memories she had as Sal lived on.

"Well. Yeah," Clara said weakly.

"Oh," Sal said.

Another few heart-pounding moments passed, and then Sal curled closer, rolling from her back to her side to press more tightly to Clara, hold her close. "I can't—physically," Sal said. "I mean, I'm not designed to be sexual. That's to say, I can act on others, but I don't want—"

"That's okay. Me neither."

"Oh, but—"

"It's not something I need from someone else," Clara said firmly, willing Sal to understand. It wasn't something that needed explanation, but something that too many people had wanted one for. Love, romance; those were things she'd felt before, even if she wasn't often inclined toward them. But she didn't need anything from or with that person, never felt attracted to them even with the addition of love. If her body wanted something, she could spend five minutes with her hand. Another person never needed to factor into that for her.

But she didn't say that, just waited to see if Sal understood.

Whether she did or didn't, Sal accepted it; after a moment, she just let out a soft laugh. "That's good," she said, quietly. "With Karinne, it was always—always a little unbalanced."

"Yeah. That can happen."

"Mm. So I'm glad. This is fine?" Sal arms tightened around Clara a little.

Maybe it was the exhaustion, the rush of relief after the tension of working so long and so hard on something with such high stakes, but Clara found herself shaking, eyes prickling, tears coming to the surface a little. She tried to pretend they weren't there, breathed deeply, face still pressed into Sal's shoulder.

"This is fine," she said.

***

They fell into what Sal found to be a surprisingly comfortable pattern. She wasn't over every night or anything close to it, but she went to visit Clara many nights. Even if she was just recharging, not really sleeping, there was something much nicer about doing so in a bed instead of seated in a kitchen, something much nicer in doing so with company nearby. She didn't make the excuse of thinking it made her feel more human, but it made her feel, at any rate, less like an object.

She still woke early in order to have time to start up the shop for the day. It wasn't a long walk, and the early morning air was pleasant, wet and refreshing. She would get up and slide out of bed silently at first, excruciatingly careful, but she soon learned Clara wasn't so easy to wake. Joanie would complain about it constantly, though Sal privately thought that Joanie liked the effort of waking her just about as much as she liked complaining about it.

Once she got used to those mornings, she tried to make Joanie's job easier. She'd prepare the kettle, set out tea in a strainer, get food ready to start with the timer set to the same time Joanie would be waking Clara. They would chat, just the two of them, in hushed voices as she started this new early morning routine, then Sal would lean over, drop a light kiss on Joanie's small head, and head out.

She began to acquire more things as well through the sheer need for them when going out. Shoes that could be worn outdoors properly, an outfit or two so she wasn't always wearing the same thing—not much, of course. The majority of her earnings always had to go to maintaining the tea shop. But she changed things enough that it was a little bit of excitement. Life felt different somehow, despite still being the same routine for the majority of the day. She wondered, sometimes, how she could have spent so many years, so many decades, not changing anything.

She tried not to get used to it. Clara would most likely move away within a few months—years at the very unlikely outside—and Sal would probably fall back into old habits. Leaving the shop wasn't an option, or at least, not one she wanted to take. It felt too much like letting go, or perhaps like admitting defeat.

It was easier to do what she had always done. She'd always thought that it would take an external force to change that, not an internal one. At least until the three-hundred-year mark, she'd run the shop unless she was stopped from doing so. What she'd do after that, she'd never been sure.

And Clara wasn't enough to break her routine, she was sure. Clara was external, and helped Sal change, but didn't act on her except where she allowed it. That respect was perhaps why she was willing to change her habits for Clara at all, even if just for now.

And then one day, an external force came. She'd stayed over at Clara's that night, and in the morning she got up, prepared food and tea, and jolted as the sound of sirens nearby split the early morning quiet.

"Ugh, what's that nonsense?" Joanie muttered. "It's even gonna wake Clara at that volume!"

Sure enough, Clara muttered, turned over, covered her head with a pillow. The sirens were already fading some, though they sounded like they weren't going far.

"I think she's still asleep," Sal told Joanie and smiled through her uneasiness.

"Nah, she's waking up, I can feel it," Joanie sighed. "She's pretending to still be asleep in the hopes she'll trick herself into it, but she'll be up soon. Man, she didn't get enough sleep to go to work on. No good!"

"No good," Sal agreed, and leaned over to kiss Joanie's head. "Well, take care of her, then. I'm off."

"Have a good day!"

As she walked, her sense of discomfort grew. There was no reason for it, she thought as she went, reassuring herself. It was just impulse, a leftover memory of the earthquake. But she couldn't convince herself, anxiety making her move more and more briskly, hands clenched into fists. It's nothing, she told herself. It has nothing to do with me, but rounding the corner to the narrow side-street her shop was on, she saw the billowing smoke, the parked fire engine, the police car, the flashing red lights. The sense of anxiety turned into fear and shock with the force of a physical blow.

She burst into a run.

Hyeon was there already; he caught her around the shoulders, dragging back on her with all of his weight. "You can't go in there! It's not safe, Sal."

"I'll be fine, I'll be fine," she insisted blindly, struggling. The flames were billowing hotter than ever and she didn't know what she'd do if she got in, how she could stop this, what she would save if she could save anything at all. She just knew she shouldn't be out here watching as it burned.

"It's not worth it," Hyeon said. His feet were being dragged along the pavement, but he held on anyway. "C'mon Sal, we're old friends, aren't we? Don't do this to me. Don't do this to me, Sal. We gotta keep you safe."

She pulled herself forward, caught the edge of the doorway, felt it crumble under her fingertips, and then the firefighter nearest her grabbed her as well, a tall and heavily-muscled woman who threw her strength into pushing her back.

"Sal, you have to let them do their job," Hyeon said. "You don't know, they might be able to save something! But if they're trying to protect you, they'll let the shop go instead—"

"There's no reason to protect me!"

"Shut up with that," Hyeon said sharply, a tone like a blow, and Sal sagged.

She let Hyeon lead her away, let Hyeon sit her on a curb up the street, and watched her shop burn. She listened to Hyeon numbly. It looked like the same people had gone after her shop as before; they'd arrested them this time a few blocks away. It had all gone down just a minute before she showed up.

Understanding what had happened didn't make her feel any better.

She hadn't been there. If she'd been there, she'd have realized when they'd broken in like she had before. She'd have been able to send out an alarm right away, not after they'd spread the fuel, not twenty minutes after the fire had already started burning, not after someone arriving early to work at the bakery nearby had seen the fire, not after it had already started to spread to the next building over.

She mumbled something to that effect, and Hyeon sighed. "You don't know that," he said. "They could have blocked your exit. You could've burned up in there before you could even send the alarm. Could have, should have... in this line of work, they don't mean much."

Her hands felt funny. It was like what she knew to be symptoms of shock, but she wondered if that would even be physically possible. Disassociation, at least, would be. That was something.

"I need to call someone," she told him. Her voice sounded wrong to her own ears.

Waiting felt painful; she was hyper-aware of the seconds passing, churning inside her. It didn't take long—Clara was awake, if somewhat incoherent. Sal explained, made brief by her inability to get words out properly.

"The tea shop is burning," she said. "Please come."

After, she sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, her arms looped around them. She knitted her fingers together loosely and watched as the firefighters got things under control. She was unable to do anything else, didn't have eyelids to lower, didn't want to look away. After shaking her head repeatedly to Hyeon's questions and concerns, he sighed.

"Don't go anywhere," he said. "I have to talk to the other officers, and they might need your statement."

She didn't answer, suspecting he was mostly worried that she'd try to get in the back way. Maybe wander off somewhere.

As if she could leave.  She felt as if she couldn't move her limbs at all.

Clara came, bundled in a coat over her pajamas, Joanie perched in the mess of her hair. "Oh," she said, standing next to Sal, staring at the wreckage.

"Mm."

Clara sat, and Sal couldn't quite bring herself to unwrap her arms from around herself to draw closer to her. Clara, too, just braced her arms on her legs. The two of them sat side by side, not quite touching, gazing at the smoke and char up the street.

"This is the third time it's been destroyed," Sal said, finally finding her voice from somewhere inside herself. Words spilled out in short, choppy sentences, like she couldn't process well enough to make it flow, to make it pleasing to the ear. "The first time was the earthquake. Karinne was alive then. We rebuilt. The second time was only seventeen years ago. A small homemade bomb. It was much the same as it was now. I rebuilt, and ran low on savings. My insurance went up, and I gave up on it. I don't have any now. My patronage has gone down. I can't afford to rebuild it completely again. I don't have the money. I've been barely scraping by on payments, on keeping from going too far in the red, on fixing the smaller messes from harassment. There's nothing left here. I'd have to build from the ground up, and I can't."

Clara leaned over finally, wrapped an arm around Sal's shoulders and pulled her closer. It hurts inside, Sal thought. She went quiet and limp, and leaned her head on Clara's shoulder.

They stayed in silence a little while longer. Clara was shivering in the cold. Sal wished she could warm her, but that was impossible.

"I'll stay in town," Clara said abruptly. "I make good money when I'm not blowing it on taking time off and traveling. My parents are doing fine, last I heard—they don't need me sending anything back home right now. It might take some time, and I don't know if you'll be able to reopen in this exact spot, but we can build up a nest egg so you can start again somewhere."

Something threatened to split inside Sal, and she let the lenses in her eyes widen, go loose and blurry, so she wouldn't have to look at anything. "I want to go home," Sal said.

"C'mon, let's go," Clara said, in a tone like she was grasping at anything that might help. "I'll... tell that officer you're leaving. We'll leave your contact info, so I don't see why you'd need to stay here. They'll know where to find you."

That wasn't what she meant, but she didn't try to correct Clara, just watched with blurry vision as Clara pulled away and went to talk to Hyeon. The home she wanted to go to wasn't Clara's. That was a place she was a guest. A welcome guest, but a guest. Home was here, but here was gone, and home was nowhere.

Clara came back, offered her an arm up, and she took it.

"You're gonna be okay, Sal," Joanie said. She fluttered along Clara's arm to Sal's shoulder, tucked her small body in there. "You're strong, okay?"

That hurt too. "I'm not strong," Sal said, frustrated. "I haven't demonstrated any strength."

"That's—"

"Not right now," Clara said, probably to both of them. "That won't help right now."

Sal let Clara lead her back to Clara's small apartment and sat on Clara's bed. She watched Clara move back and forth around the place, taking her coat off, getting a warm drink on. It was tea, something Clara would drink and Sal couldn't even though Clara was making it out of the desire to comfort her. Clara had so many bags of her shop's teas here, all lined up on her counter, and that was something, at least. The last of it could be enjoyed by someone who mattered.

Sal curled and uncurled her fingers, drew a breath in around the destruction churning inside her, and said, "Clara?"

"Yes?"

"I can't fix this." It felt like giving up.

Clara bit her lip, pouring hot water, her face turned away and shoulders hunched. Her tone was almost cautious. "We can—"

Sal didn't let her finish. She'd already heard Clara's plan. "You'd be miserable doing that!"

"I'd be happy to see you be happy." Clara wrapped her hands around a hot cup, steam curling up around her face like gentle fingers as she turned to face Sal, expression soft.

Looking at her, at how much of an offer she was making, at her willingness to change, Sal felt something inside herself straining. She wished she could cry like humans did, could just get it out. "Clara?"

"Yes?"

"I am physically incapable of moving on. Of letting go." Even just saying that much felt like a loss.

Clara let a breath out. It disturbed the steam, sending it dancing in agitation. "I know," she said, calm. Patient.

The tangled mess of emotions churning inside of Sal were like those when Karinne had died. The urge to follow her had only been defeated by overwriting her registration with the shop, by making the shop into a still-existing version of Karinne. When the bombing had happened, she at least had money then, along with the insurance. Now, it felt worse than that time. It had been bad enough then, but there had been something she could still do.

The idea sitting unspoken on her tongue was anathema to her, felt like it would be poisonous to voice. It might destroy her capacity to attach to things at all, she thought. She might wake up on the other side numb and no longer feeling this deep nostalgic love that had sustained her all these years.

But the building would need to be condemned. She wouldn't see three hundred years with it no matter what she did, and perhaps it was better to let go and feel nothing.

"Clara?" she asked hesitantly.

"Yes?"

Giving up. Giving up. "Will you remove my registration?"

The look Clara gave her was long and serious, but she nodded. "Yeah. Of course. If that's what you want." She wasn't showing her reaction. Deliberately, Sal thought. She was trying not to influence her.

It felt like she was trying to justify herself. Guiltily, she pushed on. "I can't leave that place, but there's nothing there."

"I know," Clara said, still careful. "I'll fix it, if that's what you want."

"Do you want to put yourself in her place?" Sal asked, looking down at her own unmarked fingers, flexing and loosening.

A sigh. "No," Clara said firmly. Her calm tone had shifted, leaving no room for doubt. She hated that idea. "I don't. I'll leave it empty if you want, but I won't put myself in there."

Perhaps it was for the best. She wanted something or someone to belong to, but perhaps the only thing she could do was let go—even if it turned out to be letting go to everything after all. Even if she would have nothing left of herself afterward. "Okay."

"Right now?" Clara asked.

"Yes." Sal kept looking at her hands, not at Clara.

A brief pause, and then Clara made a quiet, agreeable sound. "Let me finish my tea. I don't want to make any mistakes."

It was so absurd. Sal didn't care about any mistakes. But she shrugged her shoulders. "Okay," she said, and lay down to wait for Clara to be ready.

She'd been in this bed just an hour earlier, she thought, and it had felt so much nicer then. Everything had seemed to have potential. Why did things have to change? She couldn't stop her memory from replaying, over and over again, the moment when she'd seen the shop burning.

It didn't seem like much time had passed, but she felt the pressure of Clara's hand land on the back of her neck. "Sal, please reboot into administrative mode."

"Yes," she said, grateful for the ability to leave.

She shut down—

—She started back up: a moment of non-existence and then drawing breath and she felt—

She felt different.

Not empty, not lacking love, not lacking grief. Everything was still fresh and everything still hurt, everything was change and loss and confusion and the warmth of being able to trust this person sitting beside her, and rather than feeling less, as she'd thought she might, it was more like she was feeling everything all at once.

Confused, a little alarmed, she thought of the shop, thought, what should I do about it?

And thought, there's nothing I can do about it. I'll have to move on.

And that hurt. It hurt deeply, it hurt terribly, but she could think it. The thought could occur to her as a reality instead of as a conceptual understanding of something she couldn't do.

The shop didn't own her. She owned the shop, and it was gone now, like Karinne was gone. That was just how things were.

"Sal?" Clara asked, quiet.

She couldn't cry, and despite that, she heard herself make the sound, a shaky breath, a sob, and she flung her arms around Clara and just held on as she tried to find her own center, tried to find a way to understand herself that wasn't defined in contrast to anyone else.

Clara held her tightly. Sal knew she had to pull herself together, had to allow herself to reassure Clara; she must be worried. She'd done this to help and it was probably hard for her to be able to tell what Sal was feeling. It was hard for Sal to tell what she was feeling. But she gave herself this moment anyway, this moment to be overwhelmed and relieved and a whole being in and of herself.

Slowly she steadied enough to be able to pull back; she touched Clara's face and smiled at her. "Sorry," she said. "I'm okay."

She didn't really feel okay, not yet. She felt lonely. There was a hole inside her that she'd never had before, an empty spot where a sense of belonging-to had previously been. An empty field was meant to be filled in, and had been left empty for its own sake. She felt a little scared, and very unsure of where things were going to go. But she also felt like she would be okay eventually, perhaps sooner rather than later. She felt like there was potential in front of her, even if she had very little to hold onto right now.

Cathartic. That was the term.

She explained as much once it occurred to her, awkward, stumbling a little over her words, and Clara's face creased into a smile as well, eyes bright. "Good," she said, and her voice trembled. "About the shop—"

"There's no helping it."

"About the shop," Clara continued insistently, "don't make any decisions while you're so worked up. I can stay here. I can help. You can do other things to make money, too. It can reopen." She squeezed Sal's firm hand. "We can do this together."

"I won't make any immediate decisions," Sal promised, though she felt that she knew, already, where this would go.

She kept her promise. Days passed; she became more stable, more comfortable with her realizations and her growth, her possibilities. She stayed home and cooked for Clara, kept the place tidy.

Weeks passed. The hearing for the people who had attacked the shop was scheduled. She had little interest in it—she had already been strongly advised to not attempt a civil suit to sue for damages, as her shaky legal standing would work against her. The prosecutor would instead try the case, to no gain for her but with a much higher chance of the arsonists being brought to justice. She accepted it for what it was, though she disliked that she had to appear in court regardless of any possible return. She'd been through it before; court proceedings meant endless attacks on her personhood. But due process was due process.

She showed up on the date of the hearing and endured what she needed to. They put in a guilty plea.

After that mess was over with, she mostly wanted to occupy herself. She was too used to working, had been created to work—not doing so made her feel directionless, uncomfortable. But it was difficult to get hired. It was one thing to run her own business, but it was bad press for others to hire a robot instead of a human—and enough people had heard about what happened to her shop that they didn't want to risk it.

She continued to place orders for teas, made her own blends as always, but started to sell them online instead of through a store front. It kept her occupied, anyway, and Clara was always willing to taste them.

Months passed, and the rain began to be broken up by sunnier days. The cherry trees began to blossom, lost petals to the ground. One day, Clara came back with them stuck to her shoes and a screen floating next to her with her credit listing on it. "We can probably get out a loan to open up a store front," Clara said lightly. "If you want to."

Sal looked the sum over, then pushed Clara's screens away and looked up at her instead. "You don't want to stay here. It's been months. You want to travel, don't you?"

"It's not just about me," Clara said, voice awkward. "The shop's important to you. I want to do something that's important for us."

Sal shook her head. "I don't want to run a shop anymore," she said. It wasn't entirely true, but it wasn't entirely wrong. She didn't want to run one now; it felt too soon, too painful. Besides, Clara would be gone soon, and she wanted to spend what time she had now enjoying just being around her. Everything else could wait. "Selling my teas online is fine. I don't need a shop for that."

"Then..." Clara hesitated, then took up Sal's hands in her own. Sal looked down at them, at their contrast—her own unlined hands against Clara's lined ones, unnaturally pale and synthetic against Clara's warm brown skin. "Then I do want to keep moving."

It hurt a little. Sal knew it wasn't abandonment, just parting. That would happen eventually for them regardless of what they did. But it still set up a stinging in her chest, sharp sparks of loss. Too soon again. "I understand," she said anyway.

"Will you come with me?"

The earnest tone of Clara's voice shocked her, and she jerked her gaze up to Clara's face again, contracting the lenses in her eyes until she could make out, she thought, every pore. "You'd want that?"

"Of course I want that. I want to keep moving and seeing the world, but why would I want to do it alone?"

"Hey," Joanie protested, from the back of a nearby chair. "You aren't alone. What's that about?!"

Clara cracked a smile. "Yeah. I mean, Joanie's here too, but why would I want to do that without you? I love you. You don't need a shop to sell your teas—you can do that from anywhere, right?"

Slowly, hesitantly, Sal curled her fingers around Clara's, wound them together. She'd never left Seattle before; she'd never even wanted to. But with the suggestion put to her like this, she found the desire already there inside her. Seeing new sights, experiencing things that she hadn't been able to before. She'd been too caught up in an arbitrary deadline to consider living any other way.

"Can we? Where would we go?" she asked. And, almost laggy, embarrassed that she'd been distracted from it, "I love you too."

Clara smiled brightly, squeezing her hands in gentle acknowledgment. "It's been a long time since I've been home," she answered. "I was thinking that we could go to New Mexico. Your whole situation with Karinne... I've had it in my head how my parents won't live forever. You know, I kind of miss them."

It was true—they wouldn't. Clara wouldn't either, Sal thought. Even Sal herself wouldn't, though she'd likely last a lot longer than Clara or her parents, would keep on going as long as her parts kept moving, until her code deteriorated to the point that she was no longer Sal.

"I'd like to introduce you," Clara murmured, eyes downcast.

The sparks in her chest exploded into something else, something she couldn't put a name to. She smiled around the force of that impulsive, giddy feeling.

It was fine. She'd have this as long as she could have this, and after... well, she wasn't registered to anyone or anything anymore. If she found traveling to her fancy, she could keep traveling, keep moving on as long as she lasted. If she didn't, she could settle down. There might be other people in the future; there might not. There might be other shops in the future; there might not. It wasn't an endless future, and it wasn't one with a clearly defined goal, but maybe that was what living actually felt like.

And anyway, Clara was in front of her right now. Everything else could wait.

"I'd like that," Sal said.

Fin

If you liked this book…

How Saeter Robbed The Underworld

By Meredith Katz

The day before his coming-of-age ceremony, Eirik's fathers tell him a bedtime story about of the son of the god of Love and the son of the god of Envy—one beloved by all, who knows no pain; the other who lives in his shadow and feels nothing but.

Still fuming from a fight with a friend, Eirik is not in the mood for stories. However, he quickly becomes engrossed in the strangely relatable tale of love & betrayal and how Saeter and Skault trick the underworld out of a very special prize…

An M/M fantasy romance with bisexual protagonists. Full of found family, daring rescues, shape-shifting tricksters, and Norse-inspired mythology.

About the Author

Meredith Katz's tea collection fills an entire cupboard and has recently started spilling out across the counter, heedless of her wife's sighs.

She lives in Vancouver, BC with her wife, fellow writer Aveline Reynard, and their extremely sensitive cat. She loves tea, monsters, and sweetly uncanny things that go bump in the night.

https://www.softcryptid.com
https://twitter.com/meredithakatz
https://twitter.com/softcryptidbook
http://king-of-katz.tumblr.com