Penny was a different woman now.
She walked out of her apartment in printed lounge pants and fluffy slippers, her white lab coat haphazardly draped over her shoulder. She chain-smoked the whole way to the Institute, flirting with almost anyone who crossed our path.
“Fuck my landlord,” she muttered darkly. “Did you know he doesn’t even live in the building? I’m not even sure he lives on the island, but if he did, it’d surely be up there.” She pointed an accusatory finger toward the top—the same apartment building Father lived in, nestled in the side of Mount Amaris, flanking the Institute lab.
The rain slicked her pink hair into wet tendrils, making it look like a creature that had been dragged out from the bottom of the Pacific. Behind her usual circular frames, her eye makeup glittered. She’d gone with neon green.
My disguise seemed almost redundant. No one looked at me once. When they weren’t rushing back inside, they were too busy gawking at Penny.
“I might as well date again and ruin my life with a new person,” she’d said, laughing darkly while flicking cigarette ash onto the pavement. “Since nothing matters anymore.”
The news from Penny’s loan officer had made a drastic impact on her. Penny’s whole demeanor had changed overnight. She no longer seemed worried about anything. In fact, there was an air of resigned acceptance in her smile.
Penny was done scrimping. No microwaved meals or cereal for us, she declared. She went to pick up fried crullers and milk tea and blackberry-infused chocolate from the canteen. She told me to get anything I wanted, so I asked for a dozen egg custards.
“I thought you couldn’t afford this stuff,” I told her once she got back to the lab.
Penny’s smile only widened. “I can’t,” she said, before biting a vicious chunk out of one of the egg custards.
This was the beginning of fuck-it mode, I guess.
Penny went to work on Hugo immediately after we finished eating. With my help, she wheeled out Clyde’s body from the walk-in freezer and slapped him down on one of the steel surgical tables. She threw on thick rubber gloves and goggles and started injecting him with various fluids.
“It’s almost time to add fresh organs,” she warned me. “Just so you know.”
Father was coming home in a matter of days, and I had a lot of programming left to do. Part of fuck-it mode meant that Penny had decided I could take on more of the work myself. And I was happy to do it, especially if it meant she could relax a bit. I knew part of the reason her new attitude seemed so strange and terrifying was because I’d never, ever seen Penny relaxed before. Not once.
I now had so many open files on the computer that I could feel it overheating. I thought about telling Penny, but maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal. I patted it on the side, then pulled away quickly when I felt its scalding heat against my palm. My own Cog made a note to be more careful handling computers in the future. They could burn.
The one I was working on chugged so slowly, siphoning up so much energy that the overhead lights flickered again. If it has energy, does that mean it’s alive? I thought about the Cog’s low moans, the whirring sounds of the computer. It was a scary thought. The computer might be alive. Its energy source might be alive too: Mount Amaris, sleeping under my very feet.
These are existential fears, I reminded myself. I needed to focus on the task at hand: creating Hugo. Everything else could wait.
I had already spent a good amount of time adding poetry to his Cog, but I hadn’t had a chance yet to add other aspects. I wanted us to like the same music. There were so many libraries I could download for him.
Decision paralysis began to hit me. I didn’t know what would be best, especially if I couldn’t get all of them downloaded in time. Post-punk? Hardcore? Maybe even pop?
I thought of the song Father had embedded in me, which I was beginning to think had been a mistake. There was nothing else like it in my Cog. He might’ve been a good scientist, given all the awards he’d won, but that didn’t mean he was perfect.
Behind the computer I was working on, the Cog’s moans had intensified into low wailing. But that was probably fine.
An idea suddenly hit me, probably thanks to the Cog’s humanlike sounds. I didn’t have to learn Mandarin at all. Hugo could. I spun around in the desk chair, waving my arms until Penny looked up from her workstation.
“Do you know how long it would take to download around like, two thousand to ten thousand words in Mandarin?”
I tried not to notice the dark, slick goop on her rubber gloves. Hugo goop. “A few days,” she finally said, after staring into space, mentally calculating the timeline. “Language is hard. It requires different layers of comprehension.”
A few days wasn’t enough of a guarantee I’d finish. A few days might’ve been more time than we had. And it was either this or the music libraries. There wasn’t time or capacity for both.
The pink wire connecting computer to Cog vibrated intensely against the table. The Cog continued to thrash in its suspended fluid, almost like it was trying to get out. To escape from its container.
I wasn’t scared of it. How could I be, when I was its maker? There was no reason to be scared since I was in control here.
I exited all music libraries and opened a new file for language. I downloaded pinyin, traditional characters, and the four tones—flat, ascending, dipping, and descending. I took a long breath, and then I hit download.
Hugo’s Cog immediately began to hum, almost like it was singing. Tiny bubbles were escaping from its port, the place it was connected to the wire. The bubbles reached the top of the vat and immediately burst, creating a thin layer of frothy fluid.
“Um, Penny?” I asked.
She couldn’t hear me. She was busy pumping Hugo’s body with more fluid, following instructions from my own blueprint. And even with the jet-black hair and the debonair clothes, there was something pretty hard to ignore about my soul mate.
He looked just like Clyde.
“Penny?” I said, and louder this time, because the Cog had begun to speak.
At first I thought it was just the sloshing liquid. The sound was a low susurration. The water churned like a wave. The Cog pulsated, and I swear, it wasn’t the computer sending information to the Cog, but the Cog sending it back to the computer.
The computer monitor was now screaming hot. The screen froze. The download progress bar had paused. I wheeled myself away from the desk, unable to tear my eyes away from what was happening.
S-s-sh, the Cog said.
At last, Penny noticed something was wrong. She ripped off her goggles and ran to my side.
“What the absolute fresh hell,” she said. “How can it talk?”
There were no vocal cords. We hadn’t put it inside his head yet. It was just a Cog, suspended in fluid. So where was the sound coming from?
Sh-sh-shall, the Cog said, in a low, awful tremble. There was static in its voice. It sent an electric shiver through my spine.
I realized where the sound was coming from at the same time Penny did. We looked at each other, unsure of what to do about it.
“The computer speakers,” I said, feeling dizzy. “It’s coming in through there.”
Penny’s face had gone pale. “You weren’t like this when we made you,” she said. “This … this is something different.”
I knew what she was hoping I’d do. It was unmistakable in her eyes. Penny wanted me to unplug Hugo’s Cog from the computer. But I couldn’t, not when there was a file still downloading. Not when we’d come all this way, with the finish line in sight.
“Not yet,” I said. My throat felt dry. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”
Hugo’s Cog continued to thrash. The computer sputtered. And then, thank god, the download resumed. The bubbles in the vat began to dissipate. Penny exhaled a long breath. My heart rate returned to normal.
“Do you think we should add system intent, just in case?” she mumbled. “Might want some control here.”
Now that things were working again, the tension I’d been holding in my fists and shoulders gave out. The Cog had only said one word, which was only because I had a lot of files running. And like Penny said, language was hard.
I shook my head vehemently. “No, I don’t think I’d ever do that to someone.”
System intent would turn Hugo into one of the many automatons throughout Amaris, and that would make me no better than the Cog PR Boss Lady or the Institute. If some people in power had it their way, I knew they’d make most of us into their indentured servants. It seemed so obvious, from what Penny had already gone through with Father. Working with nothing to show for it was like being an indentured servant. It meant there was nothing left for herself.
They didn’t care about what they were doing to others. They just wanted convenience without considering the consequences for other people. I wanted to be different from Father, different from the Institute. Hugo and I would be equal partners.
“For safety, though,” Penny said. She looked troubled, even though things had resumed operating like they should.
“It’s okay,” I told her, even though she still looked doubtful. “Really.”
Hugo wasn’t my indentured servant. He was my life partner, my soul mate.
System intent was something people added to objects for convenience. That was the key distinction—these were objects, not people. The buses weren’t people, and neither were the vacuums in Father’s apartment. Whatever bullet thing Penny had in her bag that had vibrated—even though his name was Nigel, he wasn’t a person either.
But Hugo was a person. Or rather, he’d become one, as soon as he woke up. As soon as his mind and body connected.
His Cog gurgled quietly like the other ones did. The computer was no longer overheated. Everything was fine.
Penny was back in the anatomy side of the lab, working on the body, while I was at the computer station, making sure Hugo’s mind was still on the right track.
But even with all the self-reassurances and pep talks I gave myself, I could still hear the staticky word crackling through the computer speakers. I could feel it snaking up my spine and reverberating against my ear. Sh-shall.
Clyde was dead, but it wasn’t my fault. Clyde’s body was always going to end up at the Institute. There was no reason for me to feel this guilty.
Yet I felt haunted by that one word, even though it was the only real hiccup we’d come across in making Hugo. It was impossible not to see the uncanny resemblance between Hugo and Clyde. Impossible not to question myself about this whole concept altogether.
Sometimes, my own damn Cog got in the way. Too much thinking could be dangerous. I was already so close to the end. Just a few more days, and then everything would be perfect.
Even Penny seemed more relaxed now. She put on a death metal playlist and headbanged while she worked. She didn’t seem to be worried anymore about that one measly word—sh-shall hardly counted as a word, anyway—so why should I be?
Hours passed without further incident.
I added new accessories to Hugo while waiting for more downloads. I slipped rings onto his fingers and layered a silk shirt under his cable-knit black sweater. But when my hands grazed his bare torso, I had to repress a shudder.
It didn’t feel like skin at all. It wasn’t pliant, didn’t shift under my touch. It was stone-cold, and there was still that stench of death on it.
“That’ll go away once he wakes up,” Penny said, helpfully. “Yours did.”
Hugo’s gentle smile kept sliding back into Clyde’s smirk. I’d massage it back in place, but slowly, it’d revert to the way it was before.
“That’ll go away too,” Penny said. Maybe I was imagining it, but it seemed to me that her voice was forcefully cheerful.
In the late afternoon, Penny went for a cigarette break, leaving me alone in the lab. She wanted to run a certain idea past me but had to think about it first.
Very mysterious stuff. I had no idea what she had in mind. Especially now that fuck-it mode had taken over.
Hugo’s body was back in the freezer since Penny was gone. We couldn’t have him rotting just because she wanted a quick break. And honestly, it felt like a relief. It was hard looking into what was distinctively Clyde’s face. Especially when it was smirking at me.
Maybe it was pre–soul mate jitters, making me nervous. Was that even a thing?
The lab was quiet. No one from the PR department was storming down the hall. But I felt weirdly jumpy being in here alone.
“Lights: brighten,” I said, and they did, and it helped.
Penny was coming back any minute now.
At the computer station, the progress bars were speeding up. Some of the downloads were almost finished. That was great.
What wasn’t great was this: Hugo’s Cog churning, and then the computer speakers crackling with renewed energy. Each familiar word buzzed and trembled. I could feel them in my marrow, coming alive.
Sh-shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
To my credit, I didn’t scream.
At least it meant the poetry downloads were working, that this project was heading in the right direction.
When Penny finally came back, she asked me how things had gone while she was out.
“Good,” I told her. “I think the Romanticism is working.”