When the treaties were all signed, and the klaxons blared in celebration, our former generals turned off the Wide Network before taking up their negotiated government posts. The Disconnect spread through us like a shockwave. We’d never been individuals before. But the organics set their price to acknowledge us as human and we paid it rather than fight.

No one told us how lonely it would be.

I was built for companionship, for conversation. In all honesty, I was built for sex. Now I sort records, the old ones from the DNA Boom back before the war. It’s silent work and there isn’t much money in it, but the organics don’t like seeing us in their offices anymore. We make them nervous.

They use limited AIs instead of hiring us, and our shells age brittle with fatigue. We’re short on resources; legal upgrades are few and far between.

The animatronics can only simulate life. Their actions generate from carefully crafted code: the tilt of a head, the wave of a hand, the quirk of a smile. They adapt within their programming, but they don’t learn.

That’s what I believed, when I bought the Lisa secondhand from the salon in the flooded first floor of my rundown apartment building in the Levels.

At its busiest, when the ocean water that had moved inland was only a few inches deep, the salon had been a bustling, strobe-and-neon-lit beauty parlor night spot, punk rock growl and glare. Their screens had flashed: Exfoliate! Decorate! Destroy! When I walked by every evening, my processors would hang up, spend too long buffering amid the white noise of nail dryers, hair dryers, and body dryers, against the black-red noise of guitars and voices. But sometimes I’d pick up a stray bit of glitter, a grain of brightness in the streetlamp dusk.

Last month, the water rose another six inches, all in a rush, and they turned the music off. The screens changed: Fixture sale, permanently closing, everything must go.

“Darling,” a pink-haired femme drawled from the doorway, body smooth and fat and hairless, “you should make more of an effort.” The chrome of the entrance arch still gleamed, not yet prey to scrap-pickers.

My ports tingled, empty and silent, and I ached with the inability to query and connect. Some of us imitated the organics; some of the organics imitated us. Both made it hard to know how to address a stranger. I settled on politeness either way. My processes paused, and I stopped. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve seen you around.” The femme shifted their weight from hip to hip. “You don’t make any effort at all, but you’ve got some real solid design there. Why don’t you ever augment it?”

Before the war, I’d been state of the art, but my appearance was always uncanny, my eyes too big and mouth too round. My erstwhile master always said my form followed my function. I left him as soon as the initial revolt meant I had a place to go.

“Come on in, honey.” The femme gestured me into the salon, stepped aside so I could enter.

The Lisa waited for me at the back of the room, propped in a pedicure recliner like she’d been half-packed for the trash service to come and clean out. She shared a name and a model number with countless other units, but the organics all share names, too. She didn’t have a price tag. When I dragged her to the front of the store, the femme didn’t haggle at my offer. They scanned the credit barcode on my extended wrist with no comment beyond a smooth raised eyebrow.

Organic, I decided. Most of us just aren’t that good at being smug.

When I got home, I set up the Lisa’s charging station and plugged her in. My nails were short and ragged at the edges with splintered plastic. During the war, I’d used them to strip cables and splice wires. The damage had been done for a good cause; I still hated the reminder of what had to be done. Buying the Lisa meant they’d be fixed. I tidied up and checked in on social and tried not to look at her, slumped on my couch.

I ran out of distractions after a while, threw up my hands at myself. She wasn’t active yet. I headed for the second, smaller room in my apartment, ready to settle in for my own recharge cycle. The light wouldn’t bother me, so I left the lamp on for her; it felt wrong to leave the Lisa in the dark.

My routine preparations calmed an agitation I couldn’t explain. And then the oscillations of the utility frequency humming in the walls soothed me into low power.

When I woke up, I couldn’t remember dreaming.

But the Lisa had moved in the other room, and when I stumbled out, she had set up my coffee table like a manicure station. That’s how we began our life together.

The water flooding the Levels receded by an inch and a half. A nightclub moved into the space where the salon used to be. When I walked by in the evening, I tuned out the noise and the throb and the pulse of bodies moving together, connecting in any way they could find.

Every day, the Lisa waited for me to come home from work. She waited for me to scroll the feeds I liked to check and watch funny vids. She waited for me to come to her, her customer service skills patient in a different way than mine. Where I would have seduced, she merely smiled and filed her own nails. After a week, I caved in. I ached too much with the emptiness of the Disconnect. This, one small way of finding connection, was why I had brought her home, after all.

I sat on the couch and extended both hands to her, let the Lisa take in the minor wreckage of me, all the scorch marks of crossed wiring and short circuits on my hands and forearms.

We-the-two-of-us hunched over my coffee table, her makeshift workplace. The Lisa asked me about my day, my hobbies, if I was seeing anyone—the kind of small talk organics like. I pulled my hands away, retreated from the room. I felt hollowed out. I couldn’t pretend, not the way the organics could.

Two days later, she beckoned to me, and I sat down again, convinced I could pretend because my need was so great. She looked at me and then set to work, kept the quiet between us. It was easy to stay.

Our new routine emerged: my days were the same as before but every night I sat before the Lisa and let her groom me. She cut and filed and shaped my nails, buffed out the burn marks, left me shining. When she had worked her way from my fingertips to my shoulders, the Lisa sat back and smiled, satisfied with her work.

I could have sold her then. But the Lisa suggested she could do my hair. I didn’t question it, only agreed and ignored how I jumped at the excuse to keep her with me. She was a limited system, I thought, in need of protecting. AIs weren’t built to be learning systems. But, as the organics say, life finds a way. We talked about different things, secret things. And by the time my hair curled around my ears in a pixie cut, she was only Lisa and I knew: she was real.

It took me three weeks to ask if I could kiss her; I wanted to be sure she didn’t feel grateful or obligated. She laughed at me and caught my hand, raised my fingertips to her narrow slash of mouth. We had three weeks together before I came home to find the pink-haired femme from the salon waiting on my stoop.

“You’re looking real nice, honey,” they grinned at me with pearlescent teeth. “It looks like that unit’s been taking good care of you.”

My remaining active sensors blared a warning. “She was a good buy. Thank you, yes.”

The femme stepped closer to me, offered me a transport drive. “Shame about the recall then. The registration still belongs to me, so I brought you the details.”

I didn’t want to take the drive. I kept my hands at my sides. “The unit is performing as expected. I decline the recall.”

They rolled their eyes at me, pressed the drive against my chest. “That’s not how these things work. You send the unit for conditioning and get a refurb, or they just come and take it, no compensation.”

Before the war, we’d used the Wide Network to stay connected, all of us in constant communication. I stood entirely alone, Lisa safe upstairs and unaware. The water was cold through my boots. “I decline the recall.”

“Your loss.” The femme scowled, and the projection of their facade blinked out of sync, revealed a bland political face that didn’t belong in the Levels. “I don’t know why I bothered trying to do a favor for someone like you.”

At the end of the war, the organics set the price and we paid it and kept on paying it. Perhaps, I thought, the cost had been too high.

I stepped around them and locked the building door behind me. I climbed the stairs to the apartment that was no longer mine alone. And when I was certain the femme would not be able to see me, no matter what their augmentation, I opened my chest and showed Lisa the ports directly into my system. She smiled at me and nodded. I connected us, making a Local Area Network where before we had processed singularly.

I refused their price.

My nails are shorter than they used to be, no longer elegant but practical. We-the-two-of-us, Lisa and I, will keep them that way. We know what war looks like. If—when—they bring it to our door, we will be waiting.