Page 76 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

I’m not most people.

It’s a performance. A careful, kind, well-constructed performance, and she’s aiming it at me, and it is the worst thing I have ever experienced. Worse than the storage facility. Worse than the dark. Because in the dark, there was nothing to lose. Now there is everything to lose, and I can feel it happening, and I don’t know how to stop it.

The bell chimes. Another customer. A man in his mid-forties orders a black coffee and a ham and cheese croissant. I make the coffee, bag the croissant, and ring him up. He pays, says thank you, and leaves. The transaction takes ninety seconds. During those ninety seconds, I smile and make eye contact and say, “Have a good one,” and execute every social behavior Ruby and her friends taught me, and the man sees nothing unusual.

I can pass as human in a bakery. I can pass at a wedding, at a rehearsal dinner, at a cocktail hour full of strangers. I can shake hands and hold a champagne glass and tell someone’s aunt her necklace is structurally impressive, and nobody blinks.

But I can’t pass with Ruby. Not anymore. Because Ruby has seen the panel and the missing navel and the cables under my skin, and she’s felt the hum against her cheek, and she knows what I am in a way that no customer ever will. And what I am is the thing she’s pulling back from.

I understand her fear.

She’s afraid that what I feel is programming. That my devotion is a product feature, not a choice. That she’s fallen in love with a machine executing the most convincing companion protocol ever built.

I want to tell her she’s wrong.

But I can’t prove it. That’s the problem. I can’t open my chest and point to the place where love lives and say, “See, this is real, this is mine, no one put it here.” How do I prove that the thing I feel when she laughs—the thing that stops every process I have—wasn’t written into my code by a scientist in a lab?

I can’t.

Another customer. Two women who want iced lattes and a recommendation. I suggest the cinnamon rolls because they’re Ruby’s best work and because I’ve noticed they sell fastest on cool days when people want something indulgent. The women take my suggestion. They tell me I’m sweet. They leave.

Ruby comes out of the kitchen, phone call finished. She looks at me behind the register, and there it is—the new smile. Warm. Convincing. Wrong.

“How’s it going out here?” she asks.

“Good. We sold four cinnamon rolls in the last hour.”

“Nice.” She straightens the pastry case, moves a muffin from one tray to another. Busywork. The kind she does when she’s avoiding something. “Did Mrs. Pollack’s dog come in?”

“Yes. He ate two biscuits and tried to get behind the counter.”

“You let him behind the counter, didn’t you?”

“He was very persuasive.”

She almost smiles. A real one—I see it start, the corners of her eyes crinkling—and then it pulls back, replaced by the safe one, the careful one, and the switch happens so fast that if I were human I might have missed it.

I’m not human. I don’t miss it.

She goes back into the kitchen. I stand behind the register and watch the door close behind her.

Josh didn’t know the difference between Ruby’s real smile and her performed one. He never learned. He sat across from her at dinner and checked his phone and didn’t notice she’d stopped expecting him to pay attention.

I notice. I always notice. I will always notice.

And right now, noticing is the thing that hurts the most.

The bell chimes. A regular with a terrier. I reach for the biscuit jar.

“Hey, Aiden,” the regular says. “How’s your day?”

“Good,” I say. And I smile—my smile, the one I’ve been practicing, the one Ruby told me to stop adjusting in the mirror and just let happen.

The regular doesn’t notice anything wrong.

Nobody ever does.

I know what I am. I just don’t know what I am to her. And the not knowing is the only thing that has ever frightened me.