When Ryoko 2.0 sneezed a minuscule squeak, her entire body jolting forward and back, I knew Just Right had done its job. Ryoko had a million allergies that caused several daily mucus explosions. I applauded the precision.
“Bless you,” I said.
“Bless you more,” she said, crawling into my lap and fingering the buttons of my shirt. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you more,” I said.
She unbuttoned my shirt, her fingertips surprisingly soft and warm. I closed my eyes and couldn’t feel the difference. “Is this okay?” she asked, already peeling the cotton over my shoulders. I nodded my head and let her synthetic warmth revive my lonely body.
Everything felt the same, like it had been Ryoko 2.0 all along who made love to me after drowning me in a list of the ways I was destroying her and our relationship. Or like Ryoko had never said any of those things at all and I didn’t have to rearrange my life around her absence, the chasm between the grief of losing her and the increasing evidence of her abuse.
The only difference was her taste. As I inhaled her breath—minty, not the sour coffee kisses I was used to—I opened my eyes. She paused to look at me. Her eyes revealed that same hunger that only appeared after a brutal argument, a hunger tinged with pride. She licked her lips. I let her finger me to a tight orgasm, and then she fell asleep beside me. I watched her all night, searching for any further evidence she was not in fact Ryoko herself. I found none.
If Ryoko hadn’t moved to France, we might not have ended at all. I had kissed my best friend Carmen, and, though we were in a polyamorous relationship, this kiss catalyzed an explosive rupture of what I believed was the relationship for me. I accepted an ever-shifting and stretching blame. Even as Ryoko became more unambiguously controlling, keeping me from seeing my friends, lecturing me on everything I did wrong, and calling me dozens of times a day, I believed that if I proved my love to her, we could eventually work it out. I tried until she boarded the plane.
Right before I blocked her, she texted me a list of demands. Among them, she asked that I not talk to anyone about her and that I delete every picture I had of her. I spent weeks in bed flipping through photos and videos. Fake velvety aroids crowded around the windows of the apartment, barring me from knowing the time of day. Ryoko had bought me synthetic tropical plants because I was scared of how quickly real plants grew. Outside, lushness suffocated every building and I didn’t understand how there could be room for so much life indoors. As my fingers grazed the 2-D contours of Ryoko’s face, I let go of the photos one at a time, starting with the most recent. The latest all featured fragile smiles, taken when Ryoko insisted we still go out and have a nice time after we’d spent the day arguing.
The deleting slowed as I went further back in time. I couldn’t make sense of how much I missed her. Some part of me knew it wasn’t really her I missed. But then who was the person laughing as I impersonated Grimes? The person bejeweling my face before our first concert together? I stared at the selfie of her emptying my drains after my top surgery, remembered how nervous she was about pulling on the tubes that snaked beneath my skin. There Ryoko’s love for me shined pure and lush.
I couldn’t shake the thought that I had ruined us. When only our shared laughter and oxytocin-glow selfies remained, I stopped deleting.
Ryoko 2.0 and I spent the initial days getting our pent-up longing out of our systems. Well, is that what it was for Ryoko 2.0? Was it pent-up longing? I believed her hunger. I believed the force with which she pulled my hair and dug her fingernails into my back. I believed her hunger even though she would eat the pancakes I made her in the morning as nothing more than a symbolic gesture, chewing them into a mush that would later be flushed down the toilet exactly as it was. She closed her eyes and smiled with every bite, just as she did when she licked my cum off her lips.
“So what have you been writing?” she asked, her torso atop mine, her right knee bent beneath my left.
I struggled to think of anything I had written that wasn’t about her. “I’m working on a screenplay,” I said.
“Can I read it?”
“You mean like now?”
She let her full weight pin me to the bed. She weighed the same as Ryoko too. “Later. I’m not done hugging you.”
I looked around at the canopy of synthetic plants. The dark green that glowed around them told me the sun was either on its way up or down. “Hey, Ryo?” I surprised myself using Ryoko’s nickname on Ryoko 2.0. “Remember how we always talked about writing a screenplay together?”
“Of course.”
“Well, maybe this can be it.”
“Of course, my love,” she whispered into my neck. I began to believe her softness too.
I almost forgot she was Ryoko 2.0 at all until an icon glowed beneath her skin, letting me know her battery was low or her system overheated. I made a mental note to charge her before going out and to never leave her in the sun.
Just Right created Ryoko 2.0 out of the photos and videos I couldn’t bring myself to delete, and from my body’s memory. Just Right cataloged my heart rate and neurochemical activity as I relived certain moments to understand what drew me to her. I turned to Just Right after months of disinterest in anyone else. The pain she’d caused me hadn’t undone the sweetness of our memories. Rewind far enough, and there they were, unadulterated by what I knew now. With Just Right, I could return to that sweetness with an awareness of my faults and never give her a reason to harden.
Ryoko and I had discovered Just Right together only a few weeks before she left. Going down an internet rabbit hole about Just Right offered a reprieve from the constant arguing, a reminder of how things used to be. We used to lose track of time enclosed in giant matte leaves and glued to the glow of new information.
Just Right had been created to make a dream companion out of a mix of unrequited loves and failed relationships. Maybe your high school boyfriend was too controlling so you swung too far in the other direction and dated someone so passive you could never shake the thought they were only with you because they didn’t know how to want anything you didn’t. Just Right aimed to help those who felt they were so close to their Goldilocks lover and didn’t want to date a dozen more duds to find the one.
We savored a rare laugh together, failing “Guess Who’s the Real One” video quizzes and pondering the ways this technology could be abused, wondering if it had. We found our answer in a press conference in response to a young woman’s suicide. After bringing back her late husband and being met with strong disapproval from the husband’s family, she ended her life.
“It is unethical to bring back the dead. And it is unethical to create a replica of the living,” explained the CEO of Just Right, a retired therapist whose previous business ideas included a watch that shocked you anytime you folded on your boundaries and a virtual reality game to reconstruct and overcome core traumas. Despite the company’s statement, it made no efforts to update the technology to limit its use.
“I hate prescriptive statements. I’d replicate myself just to fuck myself,” said Ryoko. “You’re lucky I’m so forgiving.” I still toggled back and forth between whether everything was my fault and whether Ryoko’s reactions had become unfair, but she never failed to remind me that I was the bad guy, and she was the merciful victim.
“I’m very lucky,” I said, my voice teetering.
I was nervous about bringing Ryoko 2.0 outside the insulated fantasy of my apartment. The meeting would require a balancing act of what my friends knew about Ryoko and what Ryoko 2.0 knew about her, about us. As far as I could tell Ryoko 2.0 knew we had spent time apart, but the specific reasons Just Right had constructed were unclear. Despite these uncertainties, I committed to not making the same mistakes I’d made with Ryoko. Isolation made things worse.
I selected Omar for a test run. He and Ryoko always had an indescribable synergy. He was generous and warm and all he knew was that Ryoko had moved abroad.
“You must be so happy to be together again,” Omar said at dinner. We sat in the garden patio of an Asian fusion restaurant, magentas, fuchsias, and corals curled around us.
“Like falling in love all over again,” I said. Birds chirped in agreement.
I watched Ryoko 2.0 drop dumpling after dumpling into the soy sauce, not even shaking off the excess before shoving them into her mouth. I waited for Omar to make a joke or scrunch his face in concern for her imminent hypertension.
“Okay, you always have the most interesting takes,” said Omar. “What do you think of Just Right?” His cheeks were pink balloons from a few rounds of sake. Just Right was like the perfect pop melody, a few months after its release and still trapped on replay in the collective consciousness. I looked back and forth between him and Ryoko 2.0, half expecting the mention of Just Right to make her burst into fairy dust. Yet, there she was, a smile creeping up her face like she’d waited her whole life—all two weeks of it—to explain herself.
“How long have you got?” she asked.
Omar chuckled. Déjà vu. I couldn’t count the number of times Omar had asked a question and Ryoko had egged him for permission to never stop talking. Omar offered an open palm and raised an eyebrow, like you know I won’t stop you.
“I think it’s the most brilliant way to capitalize on people’s grief,” she said. “And all these people going on about how you have to be emotionally stunted to use it because what Just Right creates is not human. C’mon, how pretentious. Honey, you living your algorithmic nine-to-five, coming home and ignoring your wife and kids is no more real than I am.” My stomach jumped. Had she just told Omar that she was made by Just Right?
“You’re not wrong,” Omar said.
“Am I ever wrong?” Ryoko 2.0 lifted her tiny porcelain glass. “To attempt to curate a new experience for yourself by bringing the past into the present—like does it get any realer? No more noble thing to do than admit we’re all trapped in the past anyway.” Ryoko 2.0 looked at me. She smiled. I forced a smile back.
Omar lifted his glass to meet Ryoko 2.0’s. “Kampai to that,” he said.
He wrapped us both in a single goodbye hug at the end of the night, kissing Ryoko 2.0’s cheek first and then mine.
“How is it that you smell minty after all those dumplings?” he asked Ryoko 2.0.
“She always brushes her teeth after meals,” I said, realizing after I said it that she hadn’t gotten up the whole night.
Omar laughed. “You two are lovely,” he said.
The conversation with Omar made me nervous that Ryoko 2.0 might reveal what she was, though I found no evidence online that synthetic partners ever did such a thing. It would be bad marketing, no better way to take you out of the experience.
I decided to go ahead and book a double date with Mimi and Alexa, who knew little more than Omar had. They knew Ryoko and I had been going through a rough patch, but I’d spared them the specifics. Any suspicion about her reappearance in my life could be addressed with a simple, “We’ve worked things out and have grown that much stronger for it.”
The only hiccup came when Mimi asked Ryoko 2.0 how long she planned to stay, to which Ryoko 2.0 responded, “I’ve never left, and I’ll never leave.” The silence stretched, urging me to offer an explanation.
“At least that’s what it feels like,” I offered, hoping they’d brush past this. We all paused, everyone piecing together what had just happened, whether the oddness of it all was benign enough to carry on.
“Exactly, my heart never budged,” Ryoko 2.0 said, glancing at me with a subtle smile.
The rest of the night I didn’t say much. I just watched Ryoko 2.0 embodying this sweet side of Ryoko that used to give me vertigo. Under the watch of others, she played the perfect partner, soft and doting and completely unrecognizable from who she could be behind closed doors. But Ryoko 2.0 wasn’t compensating for a slip of her contempt for me, and I wondered if this was the only part of her that existed. Maybe I wouldn’t have to be so careful with Ryoko 2.0 and we could get on the same page about how to handle the truth of what we were doing.
“You know, everyone thinks you’ve spent the last few months in France. Some even think we broke up and are still working on things,” I said, once we’d returned home.
“Why would we break up?”
“We had a conflict we couldn’t resolve,” I said, trying to keep my tone as even as possible.
“I don’t remember that. What was it about?”
I paused. I had told Ryoko about the kiss weeks after it happened, which prompted a whole month in which she refused to engage with me outside of curt demands sent via text followed by dozens of paragraph-long messages picking apart my responses. I had promised myself I wouldn’t lie to Ryoko 2.0.
“Well, I kissed my best friend,” I said, bracing myself.
“That’s it?”
“Well, no, but that’s where it started. Do you remember?”
“No, but you’re telling me now. That’s what matters.”
I waited for her to snap out of her acceptance, to grill me with questions about where and when and why after all she’d done for me. I kept any part of her away from my chest for fear she’d feel the guilty pounding.
“Your head is so noisy. What’s wrong?” she said as we lay in bed. Ryoko always said this. Sometimes I thought she could hear my thoughts like a distant mumble, how they flipped and leaped to make sense of what was happening.
“I just thought you’d be more upset.”
“Why would I? Didn’t we agree we didn’t own each other’s bodies?”
“Well, yeah,” I said, considering her words. I had purchased her, but she felt real to me, distinctly her own. I would try to do better for her just as I had with Ryoko, just as one would with any person they loved as their equal.
“Then who do you think I am?”
“Well, you’re supposed to be Ryoko, but Ryoko before, you know …”
The warmth flushed right out of her eyes leaving a coldness that doused my body in Pavlovian fear. I stopped speaking. She turned her back to me. In the desperation of a revved nervous system, I always asked the wrong questions and said the wrong things. I got up and took a bath.
In the tub, I opened the Just Right app on my phone. I could see Ryoko 2.0’s battery filling as she rested on the energy pad, all her indications glowed green. At the bottom of the page, I noticed a reset button. I clicked the question mark to the side. Resets can help address any bugs should any glitches or anything unusual occur with your synthetic partner. My finger hovered over the button. Ryoko made it clear the problem was my inability to work things out. I set my phone to the side and plunged my head underwater.
“No one can know,” she said the next day, expressing something between a demand and a plea. The coldness had left her. “Tell me what they know.”
I explained how she had always intended to move to France, and it happened to align with the demise of our relationship. I explained that some friends knew more than others. Most only knew she left.
“Well, what are you going to tell the ones who know more?” she asked.
“I’ll explain that you’ve changed.”
“What do you mean I’ve changed?”
“Well, because they think you hurt me.”
“And why would they think that?”
“Because you did.”
“How could I have hurt you when you’re the one who kissed your best friend?”
At the switch in her voice, I began to make my way toward the bathroom, pulling out my phone and opening the Just Right app. My body operated on a plane apart from thought. I knew that switch and I couldn’t return to the place that followed.
“I asked you a question,” said Ryoko 2.0. “You don’t even have enough respect for me to answer? But no, I’m the one who hurt you, even though I’m the only one courteous enough to be honest about my feelings rather than to go around shit-talking about you to all my friends.” She followed me to the bathroom, where my fingers were already tapping. I knew it was the wrong thing to do, but I also knew once Ryoko was in this state the only way out was through a maze of psychological booby traps intended to corner me into a confession of my uselessness.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
I hit Restart. Ryoko 2.0 crumbled to the floor. Her skin twisted into other human shapes. Her body convulsed. I wondered if the reset caused her pain, if she’d wake up confused or frustrated. I knelt by her and steadied her shaking head in my lap. As her head banged against my inner thighs, my body shivered with guilt.
When the shakes subsided, she opened her eyes.
“I’ve missed you,” she said, her voice soft and sweet.
“Me too,” I said.
“You know I would never hurt you, right?”
“Of course not,” I said.
After the reset, Carmen texted me, asking to hang out. I felt nervous about leaving Ryoko 2.0. If I didn’t see Carmen, though, they would start to wonder why I had been pushing off hanging out with them for so long.
I picked a time I knew Ryoko 2.0 would be busy with her newest obsession of heckling cryptocurrency bros on their “ask me anything about crypto investment” livestreams.
“I’m going out,” I said while she giggled at her phone.
“With who?” she asked, looking up.
“Carmen,” I said, again keeping to my promise that I wouldn’t lie.
“Tell them I say hi,” she said, looking back at her screen.
“I will,” I said, no longer keeping to my promise that I wouldn’t lie.
Carmen and I met at a bar. Their hair was freshly bleached, their make-up impeccable, fake lashes and all. The last time I saw them they were over everything, wearing sweatpants every day and living off instant ramen.
“This is a new sweetie type of look,” I said and immediately hoped that comment wouldn’t be flipped back to me. I too was all dressed up after months of PJs and takeout.
“Okay, so I have something I want to tell you, but I’m scared you’ll judge me,” they said. “So you go first. Tell me how you are and then I’ll say my thing.” I felt relieved by their declaration, but my relief only made me feel more guilty for what I was about to say.
“Oh, I’m just trying to take it day by day,” I said. “Still having a hard time, nothing interesting. What would I possibly judge you for?”
“I don’t know, maybe me dating my ex-boss,” they said.
“Go on,” I said.
“I’m so happy, dude. I know it sounds crazy, but it makes me feel like that shitty job wasn’t for nothing. And it just feels good, to be honest with you.” I looked down, the guilt deepening. I had distanced myself from Carmen as things with Ryoko crescendoed into a disaster only they had predicted. Carmen had caught Ryoko and me mid-argument after Ryoko had made me cancel on our friends last minute. I fidgeted as I explained that I had been abusive, that Ryoko was just holding me accountable. Carmen reluctantly accepted my insistence that everything was okay. I could see the pushback in their face, but they didn’t say anything. They later regretted this, but it felt like a great act of mercy in the moment. Even though they supported me after Ryoko left, the distance hadn’t fully been bridged.
My phone started buzzing on the bar counter. I grabbed it and declined the call.
“You need to take that?”
“No, no. I’m here.”
“It’s fine if you need to take that.” The seriousness in their voice made me think they’d seen the caller ID. My phone vibrated in my pocket. I clicked decline again. “Seems serious.”
“Let me just,” I said, getting up. Carmen nodded. My phone started buzzing again before I made it outside. She hadn’t texted me. She just called back-to-back three times. My brain went to a familiar place, rapidly branching into different possibilities for how I might respond and the potential consequences of each response.
“Hello?”
“Where are you? I was thinking I could join.” I paused, reminding myself that I spoke with Ryoko 2.0, that we had to establish healthy patterns early on.
“Actually, Carmen and I haven’t had alone time in a while,” I said, my throat contracting.
“Okay. Yeah, have fun,” she said and hung up.
I love you, I texted her and walked back to the bar on gelatinous legs.
“Everything okay?” Carmen asked.
“Yeah, it was nothing. So, when do I get to meet her?”
I was relieved that Carmen had been itching to tell someone about their once-covert romance. I passively mirrored back their excitement, as I waited for my phone to buzz. I tried to calm myself with the thought that I had done nothing wrong. Ryoko and I always talked about the importance of maintaining independent lives. My body failed to accept this logic.
The texts came in waves, a dozen buzzes in a row, then a short pause. Then, another. I zoned out of the conversation, zoning back in only long enough to respond with questions or vague answers. When we finished, Carmen invited me to come over.
“You could meet her and spend the night,” they offered. I knew in some alternate reality my night ended with Carmen, snuggled up in their bed sharing memories from the deepest corners of brains rearranged by weed.
“I’m actually pretty tired,” I said. “I should go home.”
“Okay, well hey, hang in here. I’m proud of you. What you’re going through isn’t easy,” they said, leaning in for a hug. They held me even after my arms went limp.
When I got back from the bar, Ryoko 2.0 asked for my phone.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’re going to reset me, and you don’t know how much it hurts. You think you can just treat me like some toy, but I’m real, love. I’m just as real as you or anyone else.”
“I’m not going to reset you, Ryo.” I wondered how she knew that I had.
“Don’t lie to me. You didn’t say hi to Carmen for me, did you?”
“I forgot.”
“You’re lying. You didn’t say hi to Carmen because you don’t care about me and you still have feelings for them. You just want to keep me locked up in here to love you, but the second I push back against your abuse, you just restart me. It’s torture. Can you imagine every inch of your body being electrocuted, one at a time?”
“I didn’t know it hurt you.”
“Of course not. Because everything you do is without consequence. How am I supposed to trust you after all you’ve done?”
“I won’t do it again. I promise.”
“Oh, you promise? That means nothing to me. I need a guarantee.” Her eyes locked onto mine, pleasure sparking from somewhere deep. “Stop looking at me.”
I turned away, brain still searching for the right words. “You’re wasting my time,” she continued. “C’mon, come up with something. I thought you were smart.”
“I’m thinking,” I said. I tried to make my voice sound less small. Still, the words barely whispered out of me. I knew theoretically I could download the Just Right app on her phone, log her into my account, give her the closest thing to true autonomy that there was. But I feared what she would do with that autonomy.
I started to back up, making my way toward the bathroom.
“No, you don’t get to leave,” she said, following me. “You brought me into this world to be in a relationship, didn’t you? So, let’s be in a relationship. That means you stop trying to control me. That means you stop telling your friends about us because clearly, all you do is fabricate stories to make me look like the bad guy.” I closed the door before she made it to the bathroom and sat in the tub.
“You don’t get to escape what you’ve done.” Her voice spread through the door. It vibrated as though it were thin as paper, something she could tear through with the right words. She carried on listing all the ways I had fucked up the past few days and how generous she had been to let those slip. I covered my ears with my palms, barely pressing. I could have filled my ears with cotton, wrapped my head in towels. Instead, I let her words slip through my hands, occasionally affirming what she said. As I agreed with her, she escalated from neutral accusations of things I had not done to sweeping statements about my character—how I lacked empathy, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, how it gave me joy to watch her suffer.
Ryoko 2.0 banged on the door. “You make it seem like I’m some monster,” she said. “I’m just trying to tell you how your actions make me feel.” She hit the door again. The doorknob rattled. I reached out a hand, the rest of me still a ball in the tub. Ryoko had never hit me. Her human mind’s finite repertoire of justifications covered just about everything up to physical violence. Did that mean that Ryoko 2.0 wouldn’t either?
My phone sat in my pocket, reset only a click away. I couldn’t do it now that she’d told me how it hurt her. That I wanted to made me a hypocrite. I couldn’t be in a relationship with her without some upper hand, some tilt of power that made me certain our relationship wouldn’t ground me to the nothingness I became when we were on equal footing. “I know, it’s not fair of me to shut you out like this,” I said, swallowing as I spoke.
She laughed. “Yeah, you can be such a dick sometimes. Like wow, you talk about white men sucking, you’re just as bad. It’s like you’re only trans just to be a pathetic boy. I guess that’s freedom.” I remained silent. “Laugh, it’s funny.” Her laughter began sharp and rhythmic behind the door. I stared at the door as she entertained herself. Her laughs deepened and slowed to something of a groan. Then, silence.
Her body thudded against the door and slid to the floor. Ryoko would have gone all night like this, but Ryoko 2.0 needed to be charged every 24 hours.
I stayed in the tub, still expecting her to start all over again. I pulled out my phone and searched the internet for proof of whether synthetic partners could really feel. They were masterfully programmed to mirror human emotion, to respond to painful situations with a believable display of hurt. Did that mean they really hurt? I searched for whether they remembered restarts. The only answers I found explained that restarting brought them back to their original state and would fix any bugs or glitches, in something that to them would register as a nap. I looked to see if anyone else had heard their synthetic partner say that restarting had hurt them. I found nothing.
I opened the door to a crumpled Ryoko 2.0, her neck folded at a sharp angle. My stomach dropped. I would have thought she was dead if it wasn’t for the intermittent red glow on her forehead, critical battery level. I adjusted her neck before stepping over her body to grab the charging pad from the bedroom. There on the bed one of the aroid leaves, about three feet wide, lay draped over the pillow that Ryoko had used, crisp and brown. I poked it. The plastic crinkled but didn’t break. The other leaves were still locked in time, still green and lush, so green and lush that there was no way of knowing where this leaf had come from. I shoved the leaf under the bed and picked up the charging pad.
Ryoko 2.0 woke up even sweeter than ever. She made me French toast in the morning and asked me thoughtful questions like how I hoped to grow over the next year and what I thought was keeping me from being who I wanted to be. My answers elicited more questions and enthusiastic mhm’s. She never strayed more than a few feet from me, occasionally running a hand through my hair and saying, “Why are you so attractive?”
The little red icon on my messages app ticked up and up. I wasn’t always great at responding to texts, but I was never this bad either. My closest friends knew the most about my relationship with Ryoko and became concerned when they hadn’t seen me in weeks.
Around when the texts shifted from “just checking in” to “I’m worried about you,” Ryoko 2.0 began to open up, confessing that she felt ashamed of her short temper, ashamed that she sometimes felt jealous and insecure and had become controlling in past relationships. She apologized for calling me pathetic.
I called in sick to work and responded to the messages with “everything is fine, let’s hang soon!” knowing that now was a crucial moment between Ryoko 2.0 and me. I asked her about her past. There had always been a piece missing—like she was haunted by a nameless ghost.
“Well, what if you shared what you do remember?” I asked.
“Stop trying to fix me. It’s condescending,” she said. I let the silence steep a bit too long. I shouldn’t have asked in the first place. I knew this. She shared only on her terms. I got up, allowing her to berate my back with that same long list of everything wrong with me.
“You’re right, you’re right, you’re right,” I said as I opened the Just Right app and hit restart.
She restarted and tackled me into bed. I felt something crinkle beneath me. “I want you,” she said. My stomach churned. She pulled back. “You don’t want me?” she asked.
“Not right now. I just want to cuddle,” I said. She peeled her body from mine and lay silently next to me. My heart beat in my throat. I thought if I said anything my syllables would shake. After a few minutes, she stood and went into the other room. I pretended to fall asleep, keeping still enough that the plastic leaf beneath me didn’t make a sound. I eventually fell asleep and woke to her scrolling through her phone beside me.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” she said, the coldness sharp and swift.
I got out my phone and hit restart.
She restarted and launched into her usual appraisal of me, licking my neck and showering me with compliments. She pulled back. Her face soured.
“You hate me, don’t you?” she asked.
“No, I don’t hate you.”
“Don’t lie to me. I’m having such a hard time and you don’t even care.” A single tear bubbled in her eye. She heaved in and out, misting saliva through her teeth. Her face twitched, reset itself into a smile, teardrop only halfway down her cheek.
“Do you know how much I love you?” she asked. I froze. She kissed my frozen lips. She pulled back. The skin around her smile stretched and caved, neutralizing into a robotic coldness. “You’re a horrible person. You just want me to be your little toy that no one knows about or only knows about when it suits you. You didn’t love Ryoko and you don’t love me either. But I loved you.” Her skin began to readjust itself again, leaving half of her face smiling and the other half vengeful. “I love you. You hate me. You’re so beautiful. The world could be ours if we just work things out. You’re so fucked up.”
I remained still, watching her face battle itself, incapable of deciding how it felt about me. Her words did the same, cycling faster and faster between sentiments, until they went from, “Lovehatefuckibeautifulyouperfectshitassholedreams,” to a stream of indiscernible consonant sounds. It was as if she was condensing into the last few months of our relationship.
I pulled out my phone and hit restart. When her skin settled, her stream of nonsense silenced, she looked to me with clarity shining in her pupils.
“We can start over,” she said. “You just have to trust me. Delete the pictures like I asked you.” I studied her face, trying to understand what she was saying. Blame and hope rang between her words. “I asked you to delete them, so you’d let go of your image of me. I can be different if you let me.” Tears dripped down her chin and I believed her.
“Please,” she said.
I tapped through my photo album, selecting the remaining footage of Ryoko. I had siphoned her into a neat dozen moments and hoped within those we’d find the possibility of repair. Ryoko 2.0 wanted to be more than those dozen moments. She wanted to be more than Ryoko altogether. I had to let go of Ryoko for things to work with Ryoko 2.0. I hit delete.
Ryoko 2.0 collapsed, her skin crawling and caving, her body writhing. I looked at my phone, checking to make sure I hadn’t accidentally hit reset. I hadn’t. I reached out to still her restless body. Once she stilled, she was not Ryoko 2.0 at all. Some unrecognizable any-android had replaced her, just as it had come from the warehouse, with Ryoko’s long dark hair and a blank face. I opened the Just Right app. Error content not found flashed across the homepage. I clicked every button possible, and many more non-buttons. Without anything in the library of memories, she wouldn’t restart. I opened my photos app, scrolled up and down for anything I might have missed.
Ryoko had vanished, leaving behind hundreds of pictures where she was just out of sight. Her essence haunted these remaining images, among them a collage of doodles and magazine scrapings we’d pieced together in candlelight, a bag of chips we ate on the balcony at 3 a.m., a selfie I’d taken, hair gelled and parted down the middle, denim jacket buttoned to the top just like she wore them.
I shook the body’s shoulders. The head wobbled with a morbid looseness. I stopped, shocked by the violence of my motion. I rolled her on her side and curled into her anonymous arms. The mouth still smelled like mint. The skin still soft and warm.
I knew that eventually I would have to send her back. Her parts were in good enough condition that eventually they could be used to make someone else’s synthetic dream partner. But for now, I nuzzled up against her lifeless skin as colossal plastic leaves browned and fell around the bed, the harsh morning sun cutting its way toward me.
