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  In point of fact, Carly had hoped, desperately, that finding out what she could about Devlin would end in the discovery that he wasn’t the man she was looking for. Instead, to her dismay, the more she learned about him, the more certain she was that her sim Daniel was Devlin.

  It wasn’t supposed to be that way! She should have discovered that she felt no more toward him than she had the other two supposed contributors that she’d met in person. She shouldn’t have felt anything at all, certainly no chemistry, when she couldn’t even meet him.

  She did, though, and the more she learned the more certain she was that he wasn’t just the major contributor. He was the only contributor!

  * * * *

  In her more lucid moments, Carly knew she needed help. It had been bad enough to be obsessed over her lover sim when no rational person would get ‘attached’ to a lover sim at all! Because that was the point in taking sim lovers—fulfilling the need without the emotional drama, and disappointment, of an actual relationship!

  However, to take that obsession a step further to ‘stalk’ a dead man ….

  She couldn’t seem to stop herself, though. She justified her behavior with the fact that he was dead and a person couldn’t actually stalk someone that wasn’t among the living. She tried to convince herself that she was just trying to appease her curiosity and that, once she had, she’d move on.

  Moving on was the problem. She didn’t think it was healthy to continue requesting sim Daniel under the circumstances. She told Trude that she was getting bored with sim Daniel and to select a new lover for her. After going through a half a dozen, however, she’d had to accept that it just didn’t seem likely that she was going to find one that was going to help her forget Devlin.

  She wanted Devlin!

  She didn’t want just the sim, though! It wasn’t enough anymore. It had ceased to be enough long before she’d acknowledged that she was obsessed with her lover.

  That realization led her to a decision that she was afraid she would deeply regret, but she’d passed beyond the ability to make ‘healthy’ choices.

  * * * *

  Carly felt weak and faint when the crate had been delivered and the delivery droid had left. After staring at the crate for several moments, she simply collapsed on a chair. Covering her face with her shaking hands, she muttered, “Oh my god! What have I done?”

  “Your blood pressure, respiration, and heart rate denote agitation.”

  Carly dropped her hands abruptly and looked up at the camera lens above her in the ceiling, searching her mind for a response. “I’m excited,” she said a little stiffly. “My companion cyborg arrived.”

  “You have not opened the crate,” Trude pointed out.

  Carly narrowed her eyes at the lens. “I’m enjoying the anticipation.”

  She wasn’t, though. She actually felt a little ill. To say that she had mixed feelings would be an understatement. She wasn’t certain what had compelled her to make the purchase.

  Well, she did know that! She’d thought long and hard before she’d invested most of her savings in the companion—most because she’d ordered a custom designed cyborg.

  The mixed feelings were entirely due to the fact that she’d used vids of Brenda’s brother as her template.

  And had the factory install the Daniel sim.

  Because she was as crazy as a loon!

  She desperately wanted to open the crate and at the same time she wasn’t certain she could face what she’d done.

  Brenda would never forgive her if she discovered what she’d done, or—heaven forbid—saw the cyborg!

  Well, she thought, getting up abruptly, she’d just have to make sure that Brenda never found out what she’d done!

  It had felt ‘wrong’ when she’d done it, but she’d tracked down the other contributors to her Daniel and she was absolutely convinced that Devlin Bear was the main contributor if not the sole contributor! She’d been obsessed with him. There was no whitewashing it.

  Shaking off her discomfort, she moved to the crate decisively and opened it. Her heart seemed to stammer to a halt in her chest when she’d removed all of the packing materials and revealed the cyborg. He took her breath.

  She’d ignored the customer rep that had tried to convince her that what she really wanted was a perfect physical specimen, that she’d never be happy with a more ‘natural’ cyborg. But she hadn’t felt that he needed any sort of enhancement. He’d looked wonderful just as he was.

  Devlin had, she reminded herself.

  And this wasn’t Devlin.

  But he looked just like him.

  And, if she was right, he was Devlin, not just a physical reproduction but right down to his personality.

  Except he wasn’t really Devlin, she reminded herself.

  Devlin Bear had been killed a year ago in his lab when there’d been an explosion that had reduced the lab to rubble.

  Lifting a trembling hand, she lightly skated it downward along his arm. He opened his eyes and stared at her without recognition and her heart clutched painfully in her chest. She didn’t know if it was because there was no recognition or if it was simply because it was impossible to think of him as a machine once he opened his eyes.

  But, of course, that was the point, she reminded herself.

  “Carly?”

  Carly swallowed with an effort, discovering he’d tilted his head and focused on her and the blank look had shifted to a look of recognition. She smiled with an effort. “Devlin.”

  Something flickered in his eyes and for a moment she feared it might be a malfunction, especially when he looked confused. He frowned, looking around her apartment. “I don’t live here.”

  Carly stiffened, resisting the urge to glance up at the camera. “Of course you do … now. You’re my companion.”

  He fixed her with his gaze again, his frown deepening. “I don’t remember.”

  “Oh damn!” Carly muttered.

  “The programming of your companion cyborg appears faulty. Would you like for me to run a diagnostic?”

  She would like for Trude to mind her own damned business, she thought angrily! “No, Trude. Thank you. I imagine it’s just orientation.” She discovered when she returned her attention to Devlin that he was examining his hands. “Why don’t I show you around?” she said soothingly, smiling at him coaxingly.

  Relief flooded her when he stepped from the crate. He paused, turning to examine it and then sent her a strange look. Carly’s uneasiness intensified. Despite every effort to dismiss her dismay, the feeling was growing that the companion she’d been waiting so anxiously for was defective.

  She didn’t want to send him back! He looked just like she’d imagined he would—just like he had in the videos she’d gotten from archives! He sounded like Devlin.

  And she knew with absolute certainty that his was the only contributor of sim Daniel that had ever mattered to her.

  A replacement would never be as close to the real Devlin as this was! She was convinced of it.

  It flickered through her mind that she’d ordered a replacement for the real Devlin, put she shoved that back to the nether regions of her mind as quickly as it presented itself.

  He was fine! The disorientation was merely his programming trying to catch up to his new environment.

  She offered her hand. Relieved when he clasped it, she led him around her apartment, slowly familiarizing him with everything. She saved the bathroom for last, but it was on her mind the entire time she was showing him everything else. Partly that was because she could speak completely freely there without worrying that Trude would record it. And partly it was because the moment she thought about the bath it leapt into her mind that she could make love to him in the shower.

  The conflicting desires added to her anxiety had her so jittery by the time they reached the bathroom that reluctance had begun to war with desire, the fear that this was where she was going to discover the colossal mistake she’d made. She paused briefly at the door a
nd looked up at him. There was nothing but curiosity in his eyes and it flickered through her mind that she’d never noticed how very, very human-like cyborgs were.

  Of course, that was the entire point of spending such outrageous sums of money on one. The droids were more like dolls, their exteriors of synthetic materials that mimicked human muscle and tissue—to a degree—but still fell short of actually feeling like humans. They could be made to look and behave like someone specific or just ‘attractive’ using the customer’s preferences in body type, height, and personality, but only the cyborgs were so carefully constructed with a combination biological materials and robotics that they could pass for human. Even their programming was far superior to the droids.

  “This is the bathroom,” she told him with a flickering, nervous smile and an attempt at humor. “It’s tiny, but I think we can both fit.”

  He looked at her curiously. “If it’s too small for both of us, I can examine it by myself.”

  Carly’s smile tightened. Deciding to ignore the comment, she entered and tugged commandingly at the hand she was still holding. Fortunately, he didn’t resist.

  When the door had closed behind them, a modicum of relief swept through her. “This is the only room in the apartment where I have privacy—complete privacy,” she said significantly.

  Something flickered in his eyes. It was uncanny the way he mimicked human thought!

  He lifted his head and scanned the ceiling and walls. “Your home system has no censors here?”

  “Quiet!” Carly commanded, turning the dryer on and then moving a little closer to him. “I’m not sure it’s sensors can’t still probe the room from the hall. You can talk freely but only in a low tone.”

  Devlin frowned. The sense that he would remember something, possibly something important, flickered through his mind but remained frustratingly elusive. “If I’m your companion, why does nothing seem familiar?”

  Carly gaped at him in dismay, trying to decide what she should tell him. She didn’t recall that the sales rep had said anything about the cyborg being ‘confused’. She had assumed he would have been programmed to ‘know’ what he needed to the moment she activated him by touch. Would it mess things up—the illusion she’d been trying to create of a real relationship—if she explained it? Or would there be more problems if she didn’t?

  “You’re a companion cyborg,” she said finally.

  He sent her a startled look and then looked down at himself and then looked at her again. This time she saw emotions in his eyes that rattled her. His entire face transformed to a look of dismay and then to one of anger. “I’m not!” he said flatly. “I’m Devlin ….” He paused, as if searching for something. “I’m Devlin Bear.”

  “Uh oh,” Carly said, visions of making love to him in the shower vanishing like mist and real alarm taking the place of the slight uneasiness she’d felt before.

  * * * *

  Despite the anger that had arisen from his fear and frustration, and his confusion from the time he’d awoken, Devlin knew he couldn’t afford to display any of the emotions roiling inside of him. He was being watched. He was always being watched.

  And he was playing a role … different from the one he played before, he realized.

  The realization that being monitored was nothing new set off an almost explosive chain reaction within his brain. Memories rushed back into his mind as he sat quietly staring, not at the view beyond the window, but his own reflection.

  Like the alternate universes he had been studying, his life had become a nightmare that seemed linked to another and another—an endless series of nightmares that changed but remained a nightmare. It had been unnerving enough to find himself disembodied, wandering aimlessly with no clear idea of how he’d gotten there or where he was or even who he was. It had been as if he was drifting on an endless sea of fog and his mind had seemed just as untethered. Memories swirled just beyond his reach, but as hard as he’d struggled to grasp them, they moved away again.

  No longer disembodied, the memories seemed to have found a harbor to rush back to, but as hard as he’d struggled to capture them in the endless time he’d floated unmoored, he was almost sorry that they’d returned.

  And he was still confused.

  This body looked like his own, but it wasn’t.

  It didn’t feel right. Every movement he’d made since he had awakened to find himself in a box within a box had seemed awkward, required a conscious effort to complete when it had never been that way before.

  For a little while after Carly had left he’d wondered if he was insane, if the thoughts and memories were true and real or if they were no more than a figment of his imagination.

  She looked familiar. No. She seemed familiar. He hadn’t recognized her. Somehow, he’d known her name was Carly, but he hadn’t recognized her and nothing she’d said made any sense to him. There was something about her, though, that had seemed familiar. He just wasn’t certain what that something was.

  He dismissed the effort to figure out the newest puzzle, to grasp more missing memories, fairly quickly.

  When she’d left, he’d settled in a chair in her living room to stare at the landscape beyond the window and try to sort his newfound memories. He was looking at the moon colony and for a while that fact distracted him. Why was he on the moon colony? How had he gotten there?

  He shrugged that question off with angry disgust. He knew the answer to that. The crate was still standing in the center of the living room behind him, reflected in the window glass.

  Excitement flared for a moment. His sister, Brenda, lived in the moon colony! For a few seconds thoughts triggered by that memory collided wildly in his mind and then reason reasserted itself.

  Brenda had nothing to do with him being here. He wouldn’t have arrived in a crate if he’d decided to go visit and he wouldn’t be sitting in a stranger’s living room—a companion she’d apparently ordered and paid for.

  He hadn’t wanted to examine that but one thought led to another and he realized why he felt more like he was trapped inside a strange box than within his own body when this … shell, looked like his body. He realized why it didn’t feel right.

  Because it wasn’t. It didn’t feel ‘natural’ or like his own because it wasn’t.

  The only kind of companion that came in a box was cybernetic companions.

  He frowned, too wrapped up in his thoughts to consider that his watchdog might make a note and begin to tabulate possibilities to explain that very human emotion. But then, he’d carefully chosen the chair facing the window to avoid that possibility as much as he was able. The computer might be able to analyze his reflection but the glass distorted his image, which would make analysis difficult.

  He was as safe to explore his mind and emotions as he could be.

  Carly might be right about the bathroom being a safe place, but he couldn’t sit in there for hours contemplating his situation. That would be suspicious in and of itself.

  Were the memories floating in his mind now not memories at all? Or not at least not his memories? If he was a companion as Carly had said, were the memories he thought were his nothing more than programming?

  If that was the case, though, why would he remember being a scientist? As good as artificial intelligence was, it required a great deal of ‘learning’ in order to mimic human behavior and the easiest, and quickest, way to go about that was to give the computer ‘memories’ to learn by.

  Where was the logic in giving him the memories he had, though? There was nothing there to prepare him for interacting as a companion! He’d spent most of his life either studying for his degree or doing his research. He’d been a loner, had had very little time for any kind of relationship. Wouldn’t it be more logical to give a companion cyborg more social memories?

  It occurred to him after a while that there was one way to know for certain whether the memories were real and truly his.

  He could find his sister

  Chapter Four
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  “I think I’m losing my mind!”

  Carly stared at Brenda in dismay, an avalanche of guilty thoughts colliding in her mind. Brenda was more agitated than she’d ever seen her, distressed enough that she’d dragged Carly down to their secret meeting place in the middle of their shift. “Why would you say that?” she asked cautiously.

  White faced, Brenda clutched Carly’s arms. “I thought I saw my brother, Devlin.”

  Carly had feared as much and she still felt a shockwave of horror wash over her, felt the blood leave her own face. She couldn’t seem to collect her thoughts with the guilt that was riding her and come up with a response that would sound the least bit reasonable. “You did? When? Where?”